(air whooshing) (uplifting music begins) - Welcome to "At Issue."

Thank you for joining us.

I'm H Wayne Wilson.

The mayor has put together an organization, and they issued a Racial Disparity Report, and it talks about issues facing minorities in Peoria and Peoria County.

And we're going to talk about some of the results of that report, but, more importantly, from my perspective, we're going to talk about how young people also view this.

Now, I couldn't have young people on the show, we don't have the permission to do that, but let me introduce a person who has a connection to young people because he's an educator.

Garry Moore is here.

Garry, thank you so much for joining us.

- Thanks for asking me to be here.

- Yeah, and everybody's saying, "Okay, you run a radio station now, WPNV," but they may know you as the morning news anchor on Channel 25 for many, many years.

- Yeah, and I work as a middle school music teacher, so, I deal with students from fifth through eighth grade.

And prior to that, when I first retired, I found myself substitute teaching at a Peoria Public School, Lincoln.

And one day, the principal came in and said, "Hey, our fourth grade teacher is out, and so, do you wanna be the fourth grade teacher?"

So I ended up being the fourth grade teacher at Lincoln.

Went on to teach at Harrison, and did some stuff around the district.

So I think I got a pretty good idea of what's on the minds of young folks.

- And we'll hear about that in just a moment, but Pastor Marvin Hightower is here.

Pastor, always good to have you on "At Issue."

And he is the president of the NAACP.

Thank you for joining us.

- Oh, thank you for having me.

- And let's start with some facts and figures from that report.

This is the Racial Disparities Report.

It came out several months ago.

- [Marvin] Sure.

- And the one that strikes me is, there's 32.6% of Black residents own homes in Peoria, 32, 33%.

White home ownership in Peoria, 76%.

That's a huge disparity.

- [Marvin] Mm-hm.

- How do we go about, and I know this isn't tomorrow or next month, but how do we go about trying to turn that number?

- Well, I mean, it's a confluence of things that lend to this disparity.

One of the things is, that can't get measured, and it'd probably be impossible to get measured, are people that are underemployed.

There may be people that are employed, but they're underemployed.

Meaning, they may have to work two, three jobs, maybe, to just to make it, just to make it, to try to make it, that is.

And so, home ownership is kind of like a dream to some.

Sometimes it's a nightmare to others.

But there also is a lack of affordable homes in Peoria as well.

So that definitely plays into the picture.

- Education's another component.

- Mm-hm.

- And let me check the report.

79% of Black adults earned a high school diploma.

So, less than 80%.

That's 13.3% below the White level.

And it's one of the largest gaps in America, between Whites and Blacks with high school diplomas.

- Mm-hm.

- So how do we go about turning around the educational component, so that they can get that better job, so that they can at least look at getting a starter home?

- Mm-hm, well, some of those individuals are in a group where they have trauma in their families.

Whether it's someone who's been to jail or prison, someone who's been killed that they know, been to several funerals, and socioeconomic issues, they may have to be the parent, for lack of a better term, in their home.

They have to be the adult, sometimes, to take care of the little brothers and sisters.

Some of 'em don't have enough food to eat because they live in a food desert.

Some of 'em don't know where their next meal is gonna come from.

The bills may be due, lights may be cut off.

I mean, there's a whole ball of wax, for lack of a better term, that a lot of young people have to deal with, that we didn't have to deal with, meaning when we were coming up.

- So going to school or learning about your homework is secondary to all these crises of the moment.

- Yeah, and then also, you have to look at the public school system being under constant attack from the powers that be, wanting to diseducate, miseducate, don't want to educate, don't wanna have the young people to have equity, meaning, learning the things that they need to learn, when they have to deal with real issues at home, and trying to maintain all of that, while still trying to go to school, and being hungry.

- Garry, you've taught at a couple different schools.

- Yeah.

- [H Wayne] What's, and obviously, students will open up to you occasionally.

- [Garry] Mm-hm.

- From that perspective, what do you hear from the young people?

- Well, when Pastor Hightower was talking about the problem, so you have layers.

I think, before we were recording, we were talking about, it's like that onion that you're trying to peel.

So, yes, you're talking about coming to school hungry, coming to school with a little attitude because something happened at home traumatically.

Some of these kids have witnessed their older brother being shot.

You're talking about family insecurity.

So, a number of issues.

And so, the educators, it's up to us, really, to meet them where they are.

You can't just go into a classroom, and say, "All right, sit down, be quiet.

Turn your book to page 30, and let's get started."

Kid comes in, he's got his head down, something's wrong.

Okay, so I gotta take a couple of minutes, maybe take him outside, get him some water, get him a snack, and then I find out what's going on.

And it could be something traumatic, you know?

But if I took a traditional approach, where I just, you know, "All right, that's it, you're out, you're down to the principal's office," that's not addressing the issue.

So, part of the multi-prong problem requires the multi-prong solution, you know?

So, teachers are gonna have to be more empathetic, you know?

Pastor talked about this, with these controversies now, I think, in Florida, with the governor DeSantis, with African American studies.

Okay, so, I teach a class, From Africa to Hip Hop, in terms of music, because the music is culturally relevant to a lot of the students who I have, you know?

It's important for them to know about.

I mean, some of the students don't know "Lift Every Voice and Sing, you know, the national anthem, where that came from.

You know, popular music owes much to the black experience, in terms of rock and roll, - Blues, jazz.

- blues, jazz, I mean, you name it.

Okay, so, we learn about Beethoven, we learn about Bach, we learn about classic music, but jazz is America's music.

And so it's important for our students to know that.

One of the interesting things, when we did a blues exercise, I had a little Muddy Waters chord, and we're playing the, da da da da da, you know?

And the kids have to come up with their own rhymes.

And I was telling Christine Zach, it starts out innocent, you know?

"My school bus, my school bus is always late.

When others are leaving, I have to wait."

And then it morphs into other serious issues.

"My teacher, he wants me to come up with rhymes, but police shot my grandfather 42 times."

- [Marvin] Mm-hm.

- "My uncle, my uncle, he kept punching me.

I told him to stop before I put him on a T." And I'm like, "What do you mean, put him on a T?"

And he's like, "Well, you know, when people pass away, they have a t-shirt made up for them."

So then you start to hear the real blues, you know?

Now, that's not to say that's all of the students, you know, but it's enough of a number to where we have to start addressing some of their social-emotional needs.

And I was really encouraged when the district, the Peoria Public School District, opened up The Wraparound Center at Trewyn, you know, because now you have a place where that's, you know, you can come, parents can come, you can get some help, and they can mitigate some of those issues.

But it's gonna require teachers, also, and administrators, to rethink how we teach our students.

- Well, and you mentioned, you know, if one child comes in and he's got his head down, he's not feeling well, or whatever the case may be, and so you have to take a couple of minutes, because otherwise, you either send him to the principal, or he disrupts the rest of the class.

- Or he disrupts the rest of the class, yeah.

And so, to your point about the statistics, we used to talk about, when I was at Lincoln, finishing the book.

And what was meant by that was, let's say your science book is 320 pages, and by the end of the school year, you only got up to 210.

Okay, so that's 110 pages of education that you didn't get.

And when you think about subtracting, in aggregate, the time that the teacher has spent, you know, "Sit down, be quiet, leave that alone, don't do that," you know?

- Or taking a student, walking him down to get the snack and get the water, that takes away from the class.

- Five minutes, seven minutes, you know, you add that up over the course of the semester, and now you're talking about real loss of productivity, you know, when it comes to learning.

And those don't make it into those statistics, you know?

All you see is the statistics, but you don't see the reasons behind it.

- Pastor Garry mentioned Governor DeSantis down in Florida, and I don't wanna get too far off field of Peoria, - Sure, sure.

- but education, and Florida passed a law, 1994, said that these are the standards for teaching African American history and African American issues, in Florida.

Florida has 67 counties.

Their school districts are by county.

And last year, only 11 of those 67 were even meeting the standards, 11 out of 67 school districts.

And Governor DeSantis says, "We have a law."

He said, "It's right there on the books."

But unless you implement it, in its full complement, - it's just a law written in the books.

It can't do anything.

- So, how, and that's not the only example.

- [Marvin] Sure.

- And how do we go about making sure that we put the resources together to make sure that these well-intentioned laws are not ignored, or overlooked, or just kind of pushed aside?

- And that's where our association, our organization, comes into play, is to set policy, and to make sure that we're at the table with the school board, or the superintendent, or whomever it may be, to set policy to correct that course.

Not keep going down the wrong avenue, or alley, and expecting something different in return.

Because sooner or later, those children, or those students, will become community members.

And those community members will be living next to us.

And so we want to make sure that we equip them with the tools that they need to be, what we call successful or productive citizens.

Meaning, having a nice home, or a safe home, having safe neighborhoods, and being able to provide for their families, and being able to eat.

'Cause a lot of times, it comes down to being able to eat.

People are gonna do whatever they need to do to survive.

It's really survival of the fittest, sometimes, in our neighborhoods.

And people are trying to put food on the table, literally, trying to put food on the table, and sometimes, it gets them going down the wrong avenue.

- Well, H, if I can say something about the DeSantis thing, and as you mentioned, you don't wanna get too far off the subject, but, you know, that's another example of systemic racism.

You know, if that goes into effect, then, now you're talking about a whole education system that is covering thousands, millions, of young people who run the risk of being miseducated, or only getting half of the knowledge that they need.

And that's a big problem.

You know, I don't wanna sound like a pessimist, because the whole history of Black people in this country has been to be optimistic.

I mean, you're in the bottom of a slave ship, you know, having been torn from your family, and you don't know where you're going, and you're chained next to somebody who's dead, and another person next to you who's vomiting, okay?

I mean, you had to have hope, right?

(chuckles) You get on the plantation, and you're being whipped, and your wife is being raped in front of you, and children are being sold out for money.

You had to have hope, right?

And so, throughout our history, we've had to maintain hope, but I'm telling you, it does, those of us who are so-called warriors in the struggle, who do what we do, a lot of times, we just put our head down and do what we do, because if we looked at the big picture, - It would be overwhelming.

- you would get depressed.

It would seem like a big Sequoia, and you got a little ax, because systemic racism is prevalent in everything.

You talked to Officer Daniel Duncan, who just wrote a book, former police officer, who lives out in California now.

In his book, he talks about how pervasive aggressive, arrogant policing is, and how it is beyond reform.

You know?

So.

- Well, I wanna talk more about this racism, in terms of, Garry mentioned the systemic racism, but we keep hearing about, you know, "Well, we know who the White supremacists are."

They're the ones in Charlottesville who wear the white hoods and chant negative thoughts about, not just Blacks, but Asians, and Jews, et cetera.

Those are supremacists.

- Mm-hm.

- And we all can sit here and say, "Those are bad people, those supremacists."

However, systemic racism is much more pervasive, as Garry said, and, depending on what kind of family we were raised in, but I could have some sort of racist perspective that I'm not even aware of.

- Mm-hm.

- [Garry] Implicit bias.

- Yes, yeah.

- Yeah.

- And I may, at some point, not see the issue at hand, the way you see the issue.

- Sure.

- And so I sit there and say, "Well, it doesn't need fixing, Pastor."

- Mm-hm, well, you have to look at, the United States is a, it's a nation of laws.

And a lot of the systemic racism are done through legislation.

It's done through legislation, and continually built upon, through legislation.

And a lot of the, racism is a system.

And if we really want to address the system, we have to address the laws, and advocate for better laws, and to make 'em more equitable for all of us.

Now, it's gonna take us all to take a good hard look at White supremacy.

And by covering it up, as what's happening in Florida, by covering it up, leaving those children out of learning about what really happened in America, and what really happens in America, that will continue to make that snowball effect.

It'll continue to go on, systemically.

It'll continue to go on, and go on, and get bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

But I am, I do remain hopeful, because a lot of the younger generation today are not standing for it.

They're not going with that anymore.

They're wanting to know what happened.

They're wanting to change the system.

They want to address the system, and that gives me hope.

I might not see in my lifetime, but.

(chuckles) - Yeah, can I just add something to that?

Doctor King and WEB Du Bois, two icons in our history, toward the end of their lives, they both suffered from depression.

Du Bois, back in the 19-teens and '20s, wrote this essay about "The Talented Tenth."

And he was challenging Black people who were successful to reach out and help uplift those who were not.

This was 1919, 1920-something, right?

And so, maybe 10% of the Black population at that time were college educated, had matriculated through the system, homeowners, et cetera, and he was appealing to them to use their intelligentsia and resources to help uplift the others, right?

1920s roll around, 1930s, 1940s.

By the time 1950s hit, Du Bois is looking at statistics, like what you have, and there, I'm sure he was thinking that by the 1920s, it would be the 20%, the '30s, it would be the 30%, those numbers would increase.

He's looking at the same kinda numbers.

He leaves.

He goes to Ghana, where he dies.

He renounces his US citizenship and becomes a citizen of Ghana.

As a matter of fact, he died, I wanna say the day before King's speech, in 1963, you know, in August.

King's book, "Where Do We Go From Here," King told Harry Belafonte that he was concerned that we were integrating into a burning house, you know, that all of his efforts, all of, it's like, what did it get us?

That we're integrating into a system where you're going to have capitalism, which needs a lower class, and we are that lower class.

And so, as long as that system is in place, we're gonna get what we get, and it's not gonna be much.

- Let me turn, Pastor, to an Illinois law that some of which went into effect January 1st of this year.

- [Marvin] Mm-hm.

- It's the Pretrial Fairness Act - Mm-hm.

- in Illinois.

One of those issues was no-cash bail.

- [Marvin] Mm-hm.

- A very divisive issue.

- Mm-hm.

- Officers, officers' unions, were opposed to it, et cetera.

- Mm-hm.

- New Jersey's experience has seen that there isn't hardly any increase in crime.

They instituted it some time ago.

- Mm-hm.

- Do you have a perspective on this?

What's the feel so far?

- Well, I agree with former Attorney General, Eric Holder, when he was here, that we need to look at the system, because it's really unfair to those who are struggling.

Those who have money can bail out.

Those who don't have money are stuck in.

And it's really an unfair, and it's an inequitable system.

And so, I believe that, and what that does is, those who are left in, can now, can't go to work.

Then what?

They're behind.

- [H Wayne] And the family is left - And the family - in the lurch.

- is left in the lurch, which feeds into the system of poverty.

- And I remember a student talking about how their mom was in jail, and how they had to struggle in order to make it to school.

This student was chronically late, and the reason was because they had to stay with their aunt because their mom was in jail, and she couldn't afford their bail.

You know, students, they bring these little innocent eyes to these big adult problems.

And it is interesting to hear what they think about some of the adult subjects that we have.

You know, we have this debate about, should slavery be taught in the schools, or something like that.

And so, I'm talking to my students about slavery, and how families are separated.

And this one little boy says, "Oh, that sounds like DCFS."

- [Marvin] Mm.

- [H Wayne] Really?

- You know, and so, their perspective is different.

We were talking about the school shootings.

And my grandson, he's an avid video game player, right?

You know, and I'm, "Don't be playing "Call of Duty," or "Grand Theft Auto," or these violent games."

And we have this discussion.

And he, this was when COVID was in effect, and the kids had to be homeschooled, or they were learning online.

So he's on his computer at school, and then he comes downstairs, after school is out, and he gets on the computer, playing video games.

And you know, they play with other kids.

- Right.

- So they're connected, via the internet, with other kids.

And so, I say to him, I say, "Hey, you just was on the computer for all the school day, now you're on the computer playing this video game.

Shouldn't you be outside, you know, riding your bike, or doing something?"

And then he said, "Well, you know, Dad, that sounds like a good idea.

I hear what you're saying.

But my friends are in London, and I'm trying to get this time in before they go to sleep."

- [Marvin] Mm-hm, mm-hm.

- [Garry] And- - [H Wayne] "My friends are in London."

- Yeah, "My friends are in London.

I'm trying to get this time before they go to sleep."

And then I said, "Okay, so, are you playing these violent games?"

So we had this discussion, and sadly, I don't know if you all were aware of this, but somebody came out with a sick game, a video game, of a school shooting, - [Marvin] Mm.

- where you could actually shoot up a school, right?

- Wow.

- I mean, as a part of the video game.

So he and I were talking about that, and he had the reaction that I thought he should.

He said, "Well, that's just sick.

That's just horrible.

How could anybody come up with that?"

And I was like, "Yeah, that's horrible, and hopefully you never will see that."

And then he kinda got quiet for a bit, and then he said, "But I could see why somebody would come up with that."

And then I was like, "Oh no.

(chuckles) That's not what I want you to say."

And but then he said, "I think maybe they came up with it so that if somebody really wanted to do it, they could play the video game, so that they wouldn't do it in real life."

- Well, and back to the law that Illinois passed it, I think, in some young people, and correct me if I'm wrong here, Garry, but I think there's a distrust in police.

- [Marvin] Sure.

- And so, this law is calling for more training of police, - Mm-hm.

- all body cameras by 2025, et cetera.

And also, officers to be licensed by the state of Illinois.

- Mm-hm.

- Is that a right step?

- Oh, no doubt, no doubt.

That is a very, a good right step.

And then looking at qualified immunity as well, which is some of the baddest part of it.

I mean, it should be a registry for a cop.

He shouldn't be able to, if he got in trouble in Peoria, be able to go to East Peoria and get hired, for lack of a better term, or Bloomington, or any other police department, especially if it was something egregious.

You know what I mean?

- And we wanna point out that it's not just, sometimes, with, after George Floyd, it was White officers on Blacks, but Memphis.

- Sure, sure.

- Memphis.

Well, you know, people call that internalized depression.

I mean, James Baldwin talks about the worst thing, the only thing worse than a White cop with a stick is a Black cop with a stick, you know?

How we adopt this mentality of White supremacy.

And you talk about dysfunction, right?

You know, because in the White supremacy hierarchy, you want to be a part of this success system.

And so, "Now I'm a police officer, and I have authority, and I wanna demonstrate that I'm better than these other people."

- Right.

- You know, "I'm not like them."

You know, so there's a lot of warped psychology with that.

- It takes me to the overseer.

It takes me to the overseer in slavery.

- Yeah, they used - Right, - to beat people- - when many of 'em would be Black, right, yeah.

- More than, yeah, the master.

- [Marvin] Yes.

- I want to continue this conversation, but the clock says otherwise.

- Mm-hm.

- Hopefully we'll continue it here.

And we want you to continue the conversation at home.

Until then, we'll invite you to join us next time on "At Issue," when we're going to be talking about finding help for those who suffer from mental health, on the next "At Issue."

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