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When I think about American dream, I think that
it means having a lot of opportunities
to have a good education, a good job,
a good house, and good food.
I think in America, everything can be possible.
The test of our progress
is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much,
it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
Any man who seeks to deny equality among all his brothers
betrays the spirit of the free.
We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society,
but upward to the Great Society.
Those who have been left out, we will try to bring in.
To go forward at all is to go forward together.
The American dream endures.
We must have full faith in our country.
We all came from different lands, but we share the same values, the same dream.
Our nation is the enduring dream of every immigrant
who ever set foot on these shores.
May those generations say of us here
that we led our beloved land into a new century
with the American dream alive for all her children.
The grandest of these ideals is an unfolding American promise
that everyone deserves a chance,
that no insignificant person was ever born.
The bedrock of our economic success is the American dream.
But today, for far too many Americans, this dream is slipping away.
The American dream is dead.
What's at stake are American values.
And we have to reclaim them.
The American dream was always a belief system,
that if you worked hard and you played by the rules,
you could climb.
You could get an education and you could get a good job.
You could have a better life than your parents did.
You could rise from nothing to great heights.
In the 1950s, 90% of kids
could expect to climb the income ladder
and have a higher standard of living than their parents did.
If you look at that number today, it's only around 50%.
The rungs of the ladder have grown further apart
so there are huge differences in terms of dollars
between the 80th percentile and the 20th percentile.
You are now more a prisoner of legacy.
Poverty becomes sticky... Stickier,
and that you have less of a chance of escaping it
if you were born into it.
And that wealth also kind of clusters itself,
so that if you were born wealthy
you're more likely to maintain that wealth.
The American dream is premised on this notion of the individual above all else.
We don't see context, we don't see culture,
we don't see circumstance.
We think that all of those are basically irrelevant
and it's just a matter of motivation and desire.
But the reality is that circumstances are critical to helping them make it.
America has achieved a dubious distinction of being the
most unequal society of any of the advanced countries.
The very richest Americans, those in the top one percent,
have been gaining a larger and larger share of the economic pie,
while the earnings of people in the middle of the income distribution have been stagnant
and the earnings of the people at the bottom of the income distribution
have actually been falling.
We're asking families of four, five, six,
you know, to live on very low means.
They cannot own,
they barely can rent.
140 million Americans are living one paycheck away
or one child's illness away
from complete financial devastation.
There's no justice in a society where roughly 40% of people
that are born in poverty in the United States are gonna remain in poverty.
When the family you're born into determines your destiny,
that tears at the fabric of the American dream.
It makes the American dream a lie.
You're blessed to get out the bed this morning.
You're blessed to feel well enough to come.
You're blessed you could drive over here.
You're blessed. You're blessed!
I think that my childhood
prepared me to do this work.
I was born in St. Louis, Missouri,
moved to Southern California when I was three,
and moved to Denver when I was 10.
We were fleeing from my father at the time.
He was dealing with some alcohol and drug abuse,
and some domestic situations occurred,
and it was just unsafe for my mom to be in California.
As a little girl, I remember Christmas.
I prayed that we would have a Christmas.
I...
I woke up to nothing.
So, you...
get up, and it's another day, and...
even as a little girl I was aware that I didn't wanna see my mom feel bad.
Mmm-mmm.
She was trying.
My freshmen year of high school we were evicted
and I lived with my best friend.
And my sister lived with
her best friend, and my mom lived...
I don't know.
My sophomore year, I had an amazing English teacher.
My girlfriends and I would stand in the hallway
and discuss Crime and Punishment.
We were so engulfed in literature and discussion,
and I was like, if I can do what she's doing for me right now
with someone else, that would be cool.
I am the new principal at Frick Impact Academy.
We are plagued with a history of violence,
suspensions, lack of experienced teachers,
lack of resources.
I am here to turn around the school. If I fail,
then my school will close.
-Hey. -Hey.
-Good to see you. -How are you?
-Good to see you. -I'm doing well.
Ready to talk shop.
My first feeling was...
-this is an institution. -Mmm-hmm.
I felt like I was going for a class at San Quentin.
Does this keep kids safe?
-The fence? -Yeah.
Are we trying to keep people out? Or we trying to invite people in?
Maybe we open the fence.
You can't have schools that feel like San Quentin
and expect them to be places of love and peace and joy.
It just doesn't work that way.
Nothing is wrong with my kids.
Everything is wrong with the system.
We're a society of do-it-yourself.
Like, that's the American dream, is...
pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
When you don't have boots, it's hard.
We serve a very high population of students
who are in foster care.
A lot of homeless families.
My students come with no supplies, no backpack,
didn't eat...
They come with, "Dad is in jail."
"My father was taken from our family and deported
"last night."
The list goes on and on of what they bring,
and if they have a bad day and they roll their eyes,
then now you take it personally as an adult.
But you don't even know that her mom is on a crack binge right now.
And she probably rolled her eyes 'cause didn't wanna take her sweater off
because her uniform shirt is dirty.
But you didn't ask her.
You assumed.
That's inequity.
Is not meeting every single child where they're at,
and we have to.
It was just kinda one thing after another with his,
not using his uniform,
standing up and walking around.
Finally, I just said, "Just leave. Just go."
And it was a trigger for him
and he got up and he came up to me
with his hands clenched
and he stepped on my foot, hard.
Do you feel safe if he returns to your class?
I have to make sure you and the other students feel safe,
at the same time try to support Elijah, because I know
he's going thought a lot at home.
I don't feel like the best thing for him is to
go out into the world, right, because
there's not gonna be any positive reinforcements.
Where we live, poverty is real, violence is real.
They don't recognize their own trauma
and a lot of the behavior that they're exhibiting is
a part of that trauma.
Is everything okay?
-Stop.
Stop. Stop!
-Stop! Stop!
No. No. No. No.
Stop. Stop.
Stop!
No! Can you get him that way?
-I got him. I got him.
Look at me. Look at me. Look at me...
Is that front door locked?
That chaos is bullshit.
It doesn't have to exist in schools.
It doesn't have to exist.
And we keep failing kidsby letting shit like this exist.
Fuck, man.
The formation of the society that would become the United States
was simultaneously revolutionary and reactionary.
These people articulate this profound aspiration
that all people are equal.
But at the same time, they're developing
in line with profound notions of race and gender that say,
some people just aren't human.
It's no great secret that it was wealthy white men
who had the political power and the vision
to create the founding documents,
which at that time were brilliant advances in sort of the democratic project.
But we know now, of course, that their vision of "All men are created equal"
certainly didn't include women,
but it didn't even include all men.
I mean, most of the Founding Fathers were slave owners.
Women had no legal existence
separate from their husband.
Not enjoying a right to own or buy property.
Not a right to inherit wealth
without the permission of their husband.
Black Americans were treated even worse, of course,
because they were enslaved,
and there were no protections for black Americans against slave masters.
When you create a constitution that protects property,
and property includes people,
basically the constitution is reinforcing
the subordination of those people.
So we wrote racism, classism, and sexism
into our founding documents.
The result is a society that is deeply hierarchical.
We live in a patriarchal system and that patriarchy, it says,
everything that is stereotypically masculine is on top,
and everything that's stereotypically feminine is on the bottom.
So, we tend to value things that we assign to men.
Things like competitiveness, radical individualism,
control, domination, aggression.
We then end up devaluing
universal human traits.
Things like empathy, compassion care, community, partnership.
In the gender binary system,
so often we make these artificial splits
and so we say, to be masculine means to be strong.
Therefore, to be feminine means to be weak.
So, whether you look through the lens of race, class,
sexuality, you see the same hard-soft binary.
White people on top, and black people on the bottom.
Rich people on the top, poor people on the bottom.
The people on the top are humanized only in relationship
to the dehumanization of the people on the bottom,
which is woman, people of color,
poor people, gay people, immigrants, et cetera.
What we've done with these ideas is we've used them to justify
different levels of worth and worthlessness
to justify privilege and violence,
and then we've built our society, the structures,the institutions of our society,
around these ideas.
And so basically, much of this inequality is
seen as invisible or normal.
For example, politicians always seem to find money
for traits and activities
that are "stereotypically" considered masculine.
Weapons, wars, prisons,
but somehow they can't seem to find enough money
for anything that we have learned to call "soft,"
"feminine," childcare, healthcare, early childhood education.
The very investments that we so need,
not only for human capacity development,
but for economic development.
The United States is a very masculine country,
and so we need to incorporate a critical understanding of gender
in all our efforts to diminish inequality
and fulfill the American dream in the 21st century.
My parents came to the States from India pursuing the American dream,
and looking for better opportunities for their children.
It was precisely that striving towards the American dream
that really struck me in the larger Chicano neighborhood
that I grew up in.
These were working class folks that worked really hard
and believed they would one day be wealthy,
but there's just so many structural obstacles
to you actually achieving that "American dream."
I was working at a Latino immigrant worker organizing center
when 9/11 happened.
There was a restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center, Tower 1,
and on that morning, 73 workers died.
There were also 13,000 workers in New York City
who lost their jobs in the months and weeks that followed.
So we founded the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United
to help these workers get back on their feet.
We were overwhelmed with workers asking for help.
Key issues kept coming up again and again.
Poverty wages,
lack of benefits like paid sick days,
sexual harassment, and very severe racial segregation,
so that workers really had no opportunity
to achieve the America dream.
The restaurant industry, it's one of the fastest growing sectors of our economy
and yet, every year seven of the 10 lowest paying jobs
and the two absolute lowest paying jobs in the country
are restaurant jobs.
One of the reasons goes back to the emancipation of the slaves.
The restaurant industry and the Pullman Train Company
demanding the right to hire newly freed slaves
and let them rely on customer tips rather than pay them a wage.
And that was actually codified into the very first minimum wage law
passed under FDR in 1938.
Which meant that the first minimum wage for tipped workers in the United States was zero.
And we've gone from zero to $2.13 an hour,
which is the current federal minimum wage for workers who earn tips
over a hundred-year period.
The ultimate goal is to get Congress to do things for women.
Especially women in the restaurant industry and women in low-wage jobs,
that help them succeed and feed their families,
and getting rid of the lower wage for tipped workers is one of those things.
70% of tipped workers in America are women
who have a median wage of $9 an hour including tips,
suffer from three times the poverty rate of the rest of the U.S. workforce,
use food stamps at double the rate, and suffer from the worst,
the absolute worst sexual harassment rate of any industry in the United States.
Generally about $100, I would say a month,
were what the restaurant paid me.
And then I would be making $900 in tips.
My budget was $2,000. I had to pay rent,
I was helping my mother take care of my little brother,
still had to pay student loans,
phone bill, everything... It was not adding up.
So, it forced me to either go and get a second or a third job.
Do you know that we spend $16 billion annually in tax payer dollars
for public assistance for these workers?
This is the only industry on earth that's gotten away with essentially saying,
"All other working Americans should pay for our workers' wages."
There was an article in The New York Times about restaurant workers in Denmark,
where they have a minimum wage of $21 for all restaurant workers,
tipped and non-tipped.
And they asked the operator of
major chain restaurants in the Copenhagen Airport,
"Why do you pay this much?"
And he said, "Well, if I didn't pay $21 an hour,
"workers would have to live on public assistance,
"and that would be a sign of a failed society."
'Cause it isn't just about these workers who can't live, it's the fact that
they're not gonna be able to afford to support this economy.
We're nearing a place where half of America is living in poverty.
That's gotta be our top priority for the world's richest country.
Let's say you have giant multinational company "A"
that employs hundreds of thousands of workers,
but doesn't pay those workers a living wage.
Well, who makes up for that?
The taxpayer makes up for that.
And so then, the taxpayers, regressively,
are in a position of subsidizing the shareholders.
Giving welfare, in essence,
to some of the wealthiest corporations in the world.
It used to be that corporations
saw themselves as long-lives institutions,
but beginning around 1980, we began to rewrite the rules of the economy,
with those at the top doing very well,
the bankers doing very well,
the rest of the economy doing very poorly.
There was also a shift in our values.
We began, in a sense, to enter a new gilded age
in which we celebrated wealth and celebrated power.
Corporations take the profits and they distribute them to the shareholders
and pay the CEOs huge amounts of money.
And then they say, "We don't have any money to pay workers."
The annual Wall Street bonus pool,
just the bonus pool, is almost double
the full time minimum wage earnings
of all Americans.
Corporations, the financial sector figured out
that investments in Washington,
by campaign contributions, paid huge returns in terms of
first, deregulation,
and then in terms of preventing
the kind of re-regulation that would make our economy function well
for everybody in society.
So we see this very tight relationship
between politicians and corporations,
in terms of the revolving door between the two sectors.
We changed the rules of the political game
as well as the economic game.
They give more influence to money.
It has moved from one person, one vote to one dollar, one vote.
And all across the land,
we see institutions that have broken the social compact,
this notion that we're all in it together.
I grew up in a small village in McDonald, Ohio.
A town that was named after the first superintendent of U.S. Steel.
When I was younger, everything was booming.
We had five bars and five churches.
They were all full. We had a grocery store,
a pharmacy.
It seemed like the America dream was going on and everybody was happy.
These apartments were actually built for mill employees.
We lived in the apartment here.
With my own father leaving at six months old,
it was pretty devastating to us.
My mom is by far the hardest working individual
that I've ever met.
She worked at the mill seven days a week,
long hours, then she went to clean the post office.
I'm not even sure when she slept.
When I came home, there was always food on the table.
I always wanted to work at the steel mill.
The way those guys laughed and joked,
and the old roughness to 'em,
their arrogantness, and told dirty jokes...
I loved it.
It was what was meant to be a man as far as I knew.
I ran a sonic tester, at Copperweld,
which tests for internal flaws in all of the quality steel.
It's a well-known fact
that the individuals in this area helped build the tanks and bombs
that won these countries' wars.
And September, 1977, was known as Black Monday.
LTV Corporation announced the closing of the Youngstown Works.
Five thousand individuals lost their jobs immediately.
In the next several months after that, over 14,000.
And over the last 20 years in the Youngstown area,
we've lost over 100,000 steel mill-related jobs.
Management did not wanna buckle
and understand that you needed these folks.
You're gonna have to pay them a little bit more.
And that was one of the key issues.
Corporate greed annihilated this area.
In August of 2000,
they were talking about closing Copperweld,
and a lot of the individuals around me
said they've been talking about closing for 30 years, it'll never happen.
Well, that Christmas time, I was one of the folks that got laid off.
I was completely devastated.
I had just built a new house and bought a new truck.
I have three young boys.
It was either file bankruptcy and move back to the apartments where I came from,
or go door to door.
You gotta get your hustle on.
And you put your pride aside...
and you ask 'em if you can clean their gutters.
I remember one year, we filed our income tax
and I think it was less than $15,000.
That was our combined total, you know.
Our first, probably, 10 years,
most of our arguments was about money.
And I hated it.
You struggle... We did it for many years.
I used to joke I'm going grocery shopping at my mom's.
Toilet paper, you know, couple of cans of macaroni and cheese.
-Hey, Steven, how you doing? -Not bad.
Thank you.
When the yellow point starts to run out, you keep going
to look for a job and you keep getting turned down, or you keep
getting rejected over and over again,
it takes a toll.
It not only takes a toll on you,
but it erodes the whole family.
How'd you adjust? What'd you do?
-You go into survive mode. -Yep.
Cut everything out, sell everything.
I've sold coin collections, I've sold my gold,
I sold watches that I had collected...
just to keep the house.
All these years and now here I am again starting over.
I left my wife and kids, I went to Texas.
And went right into the oil field.
My day would start at 3:00 in the morning,
and it was six days a week.
It killed me to be away.
I had missed so much of my family time with them because of that.
They were gonna pay for relocation, but I just...
my roots are here.
I'm not gonna take the kids away from their grandparents.
Right.
The years you watched as we let foreign countries
shutter our factories and steal our jobs
like we're little babies,
but those days are over, Ohio.
We switched party lines and voted Republican
for the first time since 1972.
We've had 40 years of suffering.
Enough is enough.
What we've done for the last 50 years is
we've created a politics in which there's broad support
for a series of policies that are driving economic inequality.
The rich can win popular support
for their preferences,
which is more power and more wealth concentrated in their hands,
if they say to the public
government programs that try and build a collective public
are actually giveaways to undeserving minorities.
Government is not the solution to our problem.
Government is the problem.
"And if government is a problem," Reagan would say,
"stop funding it. Cut taxes."
And so Reagan did.
He passed some of the biggest tax cuts the country's ever seen.
But did these tax cuts actually go to hard working whites?
In fact, over the 1980s
the Reagan tax cuts transferred a trillion dollars of wealth
to the top one percent of the country.
And these tax cuts have never been repealed.
And so each decade since, a further trillion dollars of wealth
have been transferred to the top one percent of the country.
If you're reducing taxes on the wealthy,
and you're not bringing in any more revenue,
you're gonna have to then cut programs that serve people.
Including mental health programs and community services
and public works projects.
Worker retraining and all the kinds of ways
in which government money can ameliorate the most dire effects
of inequality,
and the idea there is totally gendered,
in other words, the notion of a self-made man
who doesn't need other people
versus community which is gendered very much feminine,
which is to say interdependence.
How do they convince people
to turn against the very policies
that had created the biggest expansion in middle class
the United States had ever seen?
They engaged in what we call dog-whistle politics.
And the metaphor is of a political message
that on one level generates sharp reactions,
but on another, is silent
in a way that allows politicians
to deny that they are doing any such thing.
To you, the great silent majority,
my fellow Americans,
I ask for your support.
...great national crusade to make America great again.
All Americans are rightly disturbed by the large numbers
of illegal aliens entering our country.
And we will not be intimidated by thugs.
The silent majority is back.
And we are going to make America great again!
"Make America great again," what it really says is,
"Make white men center-stage again."
Any hierarchy
has ways of defending itself
by creating a situation of scarcity in competition.
So, there's been scarcity in competition
between women and people of color,
between racial minorities and immigrants,
between working class people,
and racial minorities.
And all that competition
makes it hard for people to look, to see
what's happening at the very top.
You have your chair stuck, baby?
I was raised with two younger brothers
in a very middle-class family
in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
My dad took me outside one day.
It was a really cold December day.
He said, "Go grab the shovel."
I said, "Okay."
So, I get the shovel and he said, "All right, start digging."
Okay, so I'm digging and in a little while I said,
"Um, what are we doing?"
He said, "I'm teaching you something."
I said, "What are you teaching me?"
He said, "Do you want to do this the rest of your life?"
I said, "Oh, no, sir." He said, "Go to college.
"Get an education. Work hard."
I said, "Yes, sir." He said,"All right, you can put away theshovel and go in."
Thank you, ma'am.
In 1980, when Reagan beat Carter,
I was six years old,
and my dad let me stay up and watch the election returns.
I was hooked right then. Hooked.
How can you not fall in love with Ronald Reagan?
I aim to try and tap
that great American spirit.
We're going to put America back to work again.
His message was just hope
and American exceptionalism.
He believed in American greatness.
I believe if you work hard,
you can do anything. It's America.
I've always been a Republican
because I thought they were the party of lesser government,
more individual liberties.
I don't wanna give up my individual freedoms
for an entitlement for a whole group of people.
So, this was my little trailer park.
I technically still own the land.
You just would be surprised how people live.
Sometimes you'd walk in and you'd step on a dirty diaper.
When you're high and you're on drugs,
they just throw up on themselves, they don't clean it.
One was so bad,
I had an officer with me to evict people,
and he came out puking.
The frustrating part to someone like me is,
whatever, they're 16 years old
and they say, "Oh, I'm gonna go file for disability."
You're like,
"Are you disabled?"
"Oh, no, no, no. I'll just say I have seizures.
"They can't prove epilepsy."
And they just collect a check,
and it is very frustrating.
My mother believed she was right
and everyone else was wrong.
She was not compassionate at all.
It was, "You're on welfare, you should starve to death."
Not, not to that degree, okay? But I mean, it was just real...
rigid.
So I was raised very conservatively,
but without compassion.
One of the fundamental problems that we have to address
is this empathy gap.
This tendency to otherize people
who aren't like ourselves.
To point fingers rather than offer a helping hand.
We have created a society
where we don't see each other.
And so, when you don't see people,
you can dehumanize people.
We are in a crisis of connection.
Children are being raised to believe
that the outgroup member,
whether it's class-based, race-based, gender-based,
is somehow fundamentally not like them.
And that is the most devastating thing we can communicate to our children,
because what do you think that does to your actions,
your ability to create a collective with people
from different communities?
You're not gonna be able to do it.
This morning we come to the name of Jesus. We love you.
We thank you for loving us. God, give us peace today
as we search for you.
It's in your name we pray, Jesus. And everybody say...
Amen.
We wanted it to be a community that everyone felt welcomed,
no matter who they were or what they'd been through,
their social status,
um, and then we want to be a church of grace.
Even though it was storming this past week
and everybody was flooded in,
we still found time to feed over 500 people this past Thursday.
-That's awesome.
People ask us all the time,
"Why do y'all feed those people?
"They're taking advantage of you."
It's not on me what they do when we do good,
it's our job to do good.
We're in the Bible Belt.
We have very rich people who come here, we have very poor people who come here.
We have white, black, all different types of races,
different types of families, orientation.
We have progressives here
and we have conservatives here.
I wanted us to be a testimony
of different people coming together
in spite of those differences and still worshipping together
because what I saw was division.
A lot of people aren't really interested
in understanding other people right now.
If you're not on their side on women's rights,
their right to choose,
if you don't believe in just one man and one woman, what they believe,
then they would say,
"How could you be a Christian?"
I feel like, that today,
one of the greatest sins of our country is
racism, prejudice,
and hatred against people that are different than you.
If we do not protect our race and protect our people,
they're gonna destroy you.
-White power! -White power!
White lives matter! White lives matter!
You will not replace us!
My country! I'm a proud fuckin' American!
Go back to jail, motherfucker!
And build that fucking wall, for me!
We started doing healing circles.
It's been a practice that we've seen
bring our community closer together.
And when you connect you heal.
Every single one of my students
could use a therapist.
Weekly, minimum.
There is a waiting list for therapy.
It's really sad
how we start to rank trauma.
With our newcomer population,
their trauma is so fresh,
in that whole experience of crossing the border.
One of my young female students
normally very respectful, happy,
yelled at a teacher
and, like, was really angry.
And once we started to ask her, you know,
"What's going on? Why are you acting out?"
And she said that ICE was at her house.
We had a soccer game and they didn't wanna come and play.
They didn't know if they would be safe.
They're scared.
Hi.
Thank you for being here.
-Thank you so much.
What percentage of your students are newcomers?
-31% -31%? Wow.
Can you feel the difference in the atmosphere,
like this year versus last year?
It's way more tense this year.
Every week I have a kid who is trying to commit suicide
and I'm calling an ambulance.
-Every week? -Every single week.
We have over 30 kids cutting,
like, a cutting epidemic.
Do you guys remember when I explained to you that
the mayor had made an announcement
about ICE being in Oakland?
And that I told you not to panic,
that, um, you guys were in a safe school,
and that nothing was gonna happen to you?
I think it's very important that people know their rights
and I hope that people feel welcome in Oakland
no matter where they come from.
And I encourage you to always speak
to those who hold power
about what they're doing with it.
-Because you matter, right? -Yeah.
What are some of your dreams?
I want to be a doctor.
-Doctor? -Yeah.
-That'd be great, to heal people. -Yeah.
Does anyone want to be the mayor?
-No?
We call him "Mr. President."
I want you to have all your dreams come true.
I want everyone to feel like
they have access to a future
and I know we have work to do.
And you have a wonderful principal
who works very hard and she holds a lot.
The things that worry you,
she goes home and worries about them, too, every night.
That's part of being a family, right?
Mmm-hmm.
You can't be so close to this much trauma
and not be affected by it.
It's much more emotional than I thought it would be.
It's really, like, it takes a lot.
And sometimes you just feel like,
"I'm not achieving anything here."
-Yes, you are. Stop saying that. -It gets to you, right?
It gets to you. You feel like
-the problems are insurmountable. -Mmm-hmm.
This is like the biggest challenge of my life, really.
I'm just worrying about the Ruby plan. Do you have one?
How you gonna sustain yourself?
-I love them. -I know. I'll tell you why I asked. All right.
Let's say you burn out, you get tired,
not just physically, emotionally, mentally,
spiritually, you're tired.
Your mind starts breaking down, your body starts breaking down,
you're not doing any good for anybody.
I was in a classroom
doing an observation
and I'm starting to get kind of dizzy,
and my chest is just hurting,
I just can't breathe.
The right side of my body kinda goes numb
and I'm, like, panicking at this point.
I get to the hospital
and straight to the emergency room,
and I'm...
...freaking out and I'm crying.
In my mind I'm thinking, "You're weak."
Like, "You're weak.
"This is not...
"Get it together." But I can't. I can't.
I physically cannot do anything.
I had a panic attack.
At that point, I said,
"Well, if I don't take care of my myself,
"and my kids,
"who's gonna take care of them?"
Our best economic policies
were investments in the common genius.
Universal public education,
the Homestead Acts,
to which 25% of Americans today
attribute their wealth.
The creation of the 30-year Mortgage Act
by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The G.I. Bill,
where we said to our G.I.'s,
"You defended our country,
"so we'll provide you home loans,
"business loans, college loans."
Each of those major wealth-building initiatives
left out people of color.
The federal government spent money in such a way
that excluded African-Americans
and other non-whites,
from enjoying the fruits of our wonderful experiment,
um, in democracy.
Redlining actually kept people who were black
from being able to buy homes in certain areas.
People who were white began to move in droves
out of cities into suburban communities.
Political clout went with them to the suburbs.
The best schools went to the suburbs.
Cities were left with schools that were under-funded,
jobs that were disappearing,
under-investment in public transportation systems.
We like to think that this stuff happened a long time ago,
but to this day, then,
those exclusions continue to shape life chances
for people who are their descendants.
On the one hand, we have this wonderful value
about equality in the country,
democracy,
the value of public education,
and on the other hand, we have the ugly reality
of inequality and segregation
that was baked into much of public education
from the beginning of the country.
Fortunately, the legislation in the '60s and '70s
that was desegregating schools,
that was reducing inequality in funding for schools,
putting money into cities and poor rural areas,
uh, from the federal government,
all of which came to an end
or was greatly reduced in the 1980s.
What has happened since?
We began to disinvest in the public?
We adopted this idea that
it was all about the private good
that undermines
the collective investments
that we need to be a successful society.
By making education a private good for ourselves,
I unwittingly, and perhaps unconsciously,
collude in the processes of inequality.
Because that means that I'm okay with segregation.
I just want the best for my child.
In the United States it's sort of as though
some kids are on a high-speed elevator
going to the top of the 90-story building,
and others are going up some escalators
on the way to that goal,
and others are trying to walk up creaky stairs
with holes in them.
And that really is the opportunity gap in the United States.
In most states, the funding structure for education
is predicated on the tax base.
You can't get a big tax base in communities
where there's not home ownership.
And it is radically different from communities
where the median home
is going for $950,000.
So, when we do have these fundamental opportunity gaps,
we're sending, to some kids a message
that you don't matter as much as other kids.
When you say that there's an American dream
to somebody who's a poor child
with no education,
living in a dangerous neighborhood,
with no opportunity,
what would that do to a child?
That would say that if they couldn't find the American dream
there is something wrong with them.
And that has a social psychological impact.
I think it has a behavioral impact as well.
How do you keep invested in something
where you don't think people care about you?
Extreme poverty and marginalization
has created despair.
And some of that despair has manifested itself
with drug addiction and abuse,
it has manifested itself
in pockets of increased violence.
The war on drugs has historically,
from its inception,
been a war on poor people
and a war on people of color.
White and black kids experiment with marijuana
at about the same rate.
And yet, nine out of 10 of the people
who were being arrested were black.
How do you look at that
and say that the government itself is not being used
as an instrument of punishment and suppression
for one group of people?
It ultimately became a means
of mass exploitation,
in a mass bureaucracy.
This dramatic increase has left states
devastated economically.
They can't fund schools and health and human services
because so many of our dollars have been
swallowed by this system
of over-incarceration and excessive punishment.
And then you ask why so many
young black women are not married?
Why you have disparities in schools?
Why so many young black children
are in need of social services?
It's a systemic problem.
We have to move away from this punitive economy
that has served no one.
It means reckoning with a long history
of racial injustice in this country
and reinvestment towards jobs, not jails,
books, not bars,
healthcare, not handcuffs.
-Books, not bars! -Book, not bars!
Jobs, not jails!
Healthcare, not handcuffs!
One of the first times that I started to think about
inequality and racism
was being asked as an undergrad
to go and speak to high school students
to encourage them to go to Harvard.
I then found that half of the students
were not graduating from the high school in my neighborhood.
I was also noticing that
young people at Harvard
were being treated a lot differently
for doing a lot of the same things.
So, drug use and abuse
meant taking a semester off
and restarting your studies,
whereas it might mean getting locked up
for some of my friends in East Oakland.
A year-and-a-half ago, my daughter was, uh, detained
and she was housed here.
They tried to give her two to five years
-and I had to bail her out. -Whoa.
I've been in this revolving door
for 12 years.
He's got a mental problem. He's not a criminal.
He has the mind of a little teenager.
We are called out when somebody has been, um,
reporting that they have been sexually harassed
or sexually assaulted in the jail.
I've had a few clients recently who
are in for non-violent crimes,
and they are remaining in here
rather than being released to programs that would help
with what we call dual diagnosis.
So that could be substance abuse, mental health issues,
and that's not a way to rehabilitate people.
It's not a way to get people off the street
and it's not humane.
I just really commend you for the work that you do.
You hang in there.
You tell your daughter to hang in there.
Thank you.
I'm sorry we brought you back...
-No, I'm just thinking like... -...to the lion's den.
That's slavery...
Yeah.
That's slavery at the...
finest compound. This is slavery.
I'm sorry.
As you know, people are making their choice of putting,
literally putting food on their table
-or trying to bail out their kid. -I had to do it.
-Right? Yeah. -Like, I had to do it.
-I've been living out of suit... -Yeah.
...for the last year-and-a-half.
I don't tell people that,
how many times I didn't have water,
or didn't have electricity in my house.
You have to choose.
$50,000 later,
-I chose college or bail. -Yeah.
We've gone just so far off
the deep end in this country,
in terms of embracing
this punitive criminal justice system
that disproportionately impacts people of color.
This system is costly, not just in financial terms,
but in terms of people's mental health,
and it worsens the mental health situation of their entire family.
So, we have an opportunity to do something different.
When the mills shut down,
all the social problems came about.
The marriage troubles, the suicides,
the split families.
And these are jobs that are not $8-an-hour jobs.
-So you can raise families. -Yeah, yeah.
You know, and take vacations,
and buy a car.
-Live the American dream. -Buy a home.
Now, what are you gonna do?
I had young people,
they'd say, "What do I think?"
I'd say, "Get out of the area."
You know, my own children. "Leave."
There's nothing here and that's sad.
This was a great area.
This was a steel area, but what we had
became from steel to heroin.
I became more aware
of our opioid addiction
and heroin problems in this area
when it affected my own family.
My own son's girlfriend
became addicted to heroin.
Bryson was born
addicted to drugs and had seizures.
I did not know that she was doing drugs
while she was pregnant with Bryson.
I was terrified when I found out.
I tried helping her. I even offered to pay
for some of her rehab and she refused.
I've had full custody since then.
There it is.
Being a single father is... I mean, it's hard.
Even with me graduating from college with two degrees,
the regular 40-hour-a-week is just not enough anymore.
Right now I'm working seven days a week,
three jobs,
teaching special needs at Austintown High School.
I'm also part-time at the Vitamin Shoppe.
I still have my drug and alcohol counseling job on the weekends.
This is just what I have to do to survive.
See you, buddy.
I mean, he is turning eight this year,
so I have to start thinking about
putting money back for college,
and with me working 75 hours a week,
I think I should be able to afford to put some money back.
But something is definitely wrong with the system
that I can't do it.
I mean, it's not just me, it's every... It's everyone around here.
To work every day to basically just make it.
It's not really living, it's just...
not dying.
The universal way
in which we determine value in our culture
is through money.
Certain sectors are vastly underpaid
and they tend to be feminized sectors.
So, for example, education,
healthcare, the service sector,
um, we just don't pay people in those occupations
whether they be male or female,
as much as they're worth.
Who's gonna argue that teachers living in poverty
is somehow okay?
But because that occupation is feminized, we pay it less.
Whereas we overpay other masculinized occupations,
we'll start with sports.
Or the financial sector,
people making money off of money.
So, compare teachers, right, to someone in the finance sector,
and the value that they're contributing to society
and the hours that they're putting in,
it's outrageous,
that we value one so much more
than we value the other.
It's the jobs that get closer
to caring and emotional labor
that seem to be the least valued.
That's just never quite seen as real work.
And it's often been associated
with women of color, immigrant women,
women who are of marginalized social status.
We all hear that women earn
79 cents on the dollar compared to men,
but what you don't often hear
is that they own only 32 cents on a dollar.
For women of color that gap is really a chasm,
because black and Latino women
own only pennies on the dollar
compared to white men and white women.
It's really important to remember that
women did not have access to credit in their own name
until the Equal Opportunity Act in 1974.
Then when we were able to access credit,
women were preyed upon during the lead-up to the foreclosure crisis.
African-American women were two-and-a-half times
more likely to receive a subprime loan,
and that led to a lot of wealth stripping.
To really succeed in our society,
you need access to a well-paying job,
you need access to support to take care of your kids while you're working,
you need access to investment vehicles
like a home or a business.
Oftentimes, people do the blame-the-victim thing,
when what's really behind her
is this whole history of... of discrimination
and she's carrying it on her shoulders.
Whose building? - Our building.
-Whose building? -Our building.
Hey, everybody.Happy International Women's Day.
In front of our building.
Our building!
We're here to stand with workersof all different sectors,
to say, "Enough is enough."
What we need is one fair wage.
We need paid sick days and paid family leave.
We need healthcare for everybody.
We need an end to sexual harassment and discrimination.
So we're going to keep rising
as women workers.
All right, so we've got sisters here
from the restaurant industry
who are going to share their stories.
At 18, I started bartending.
On my first day,
the owner called me into his office.
He said that he could help me pay for college
if I gave him a blow job.
When I refused, I was fired.
At 30, I was locked in the bar where I worked
by the general manager
and assaulted by the vice president of the hotel group.
Unknown to me, he was told he could have anything he wanted, including me.
The dynamic of having a mostly-female workforce in the front, living on tips,
and a mostly male workforce in the back, not living on tips,
creates a dynamic in which women have no power.
They have no power vis-a-vis the customer.
They have no power vis-a-vis the kitchen.
And they have no power vis-a-vis managers,
who can decide, "You can have this table or that table,"
which means you get zero dollars or $200.
Your wage and your income could be anything.
It's all up to the men.
There are millions more young women
for whom this is the first job in high school, college, or grad school.
This will be the first job for my daughters.
I know it.
But as a mother, as an American, that's not the American dream.
As long as you have a model of our species,
in which one half of humanity is considered inferior to the other half,
you are not going to have equality.
Because that's basic to inequality.
Systems of power are these invisible,
behind the scenes,
but very powerful ways in which we organize the world.
Men dominate most of the major
economic, political, and social systems.
And if women are erased from these institutions by and large,
if they're showing up at the highest level in such small numbers,
it likely means that their concerns are also erased.
The domination pyramid keeps rebuilding itself
on the same foundations
of this ranking of one half of humanity over the other half.
It's about power,
and it's about the ability to exercise power,
both individually and institutionally.
So for example, if you're serving power in an economic sense,
you have more chance for advancement than if you're not serving power.
And if you're helping to reinforce men's dominance,
then there are more opportunities for you than if you're
subverting men's dominance.
If you really start looking at economics
through this lens,
you begin to see
that more resources are funneled to those on top.
But not only that,
there isn't enough investment in caring for people,
and with this there isn't enough investment
in human capacity development.
We can project American military strength all over the world
and spend hundreds of billions of dollars,
but then, what are we doing about poverty in the inner cities?
What are we doing about rural white poverty?
What are we doing about healthcare,
and citizens who can't even afford to go to the doctor?
I mean, it's a question of who are we as a society?
What are our values as a society?
At the end of the day,
a budget is a set of values.
Budget reflects your values.
What is this symbol?
-Less than. -Less than.
-Or right... Or greater than. -Greater than.
This, for me, is also a symbol of the way in which
we reinforce and justify inequality.
The idea that men
are more important than women.
That straight people are better than queer folks,
that citizens are better than non-citizens,
and on and on.
And so if you feel an imbalance in this country,
it is because we are not in balance.
This imbalance plays out in our homes,
in our policies, and in our national priorities.
And the truth is that this symbol
limits our ability to see.
We're releasing this report
called Who Pays? The True Cost of Incarceration on Families.
A big part of our challenge today will be
making sure that people understand
that criminal justice reform
must be about women and families
and not just about the folks who are incarcerated themselves.
Families and the women who sustain them
are being dragged into deeper poverty,
stress, strain, and debt
when their loved ones are incarcerated.
I have a brother.
He went in when he was 18 years old,
and he's been in for 10 years now.
So, it was really hard for our family.
My mom in the first two months lost 60 pounds.
went into serious depression.
My parents had to get multiple jobs to be able to afford his lawyer fees.
And 10 years after,
we're just financially getting back to the point
where we can enjoy a family vacation,
because all of our money was going to lawyer fee services.
It's, uh, something that you have to choose
between whether you're going to visit your loved one
or you're going to buy them a shirt,
a long-sleeved shirt for the winter.
My mom is still, you know, taking depression pills
and, you know, dealing with how is it that,
you know, she's going to be present for her son.
Congratulations. That's great.
-Thank you so much for your time. -Of course.
One in three families who are facing big difficult choices
between paying for basic necessities, like food,
-versus making court-related payments. -Mmm-hmm.
One in five families that we surveyed
had taken out some sort of loan.
-We can't wait and we really do need these reforms... -Mmm-hmm.
...in terms of the criminal justice system.
And we need to do them in ways that take into account
-the entire family. -Mmm-hmm.
If you look at our history as a country,
we have, for a very long time,
valued all things
connected to a dominant framework.
A power over framework.
We actually need to invest in well-being in our country.
I'm afraid for all of my kids.
There's nothing really here.
A lot of minimum-wage jobs,
but nothing to raise a family on.
It has to be a joint venture
between the companies that are here,
the educational institutions and the government to subsidize education.
They're going to have to offer incentives
to provide the training for skilled trade jobs.
We need to pay a living wage to these folks.
So, employees pay taxes.
They're not on the program of government to have the children get lunch.
We wouldn't be talking about healthcare,
we wouldn't be talking aboutsocial security in this country,
we wouldn't be talking about lack of money.
Good jobs solve problems.
They pay.
When you take care of your people, you will be successful.
That's how you build a successful company.
-That's the moral of my story. -"Take care of your people."
Take care of your people.
That's right, brother.
I'm just hoping that they can pour some money into this area.
So people don't have to leave.
You always have to have hope. You have to.
You think about America, that we had a formula for success.
We out-educated, the rest of the world.
We invested in right infrastructure,
we invested in roads, and bridges, and ports.
And we also invested in research and development.
We pushed the boundaries of discovery.
We encouraged risk-taking but not recklessness.
All of these things inure to the benefit of businesses.
All of those things were public investments.
A public construct
of which the private sector benefitted greatly.
And so this notion of interdependence,
this notion that we're all in this together,
that we rise and fall together,
is absolutely true.
Mr. Naughton has decided
that this is not going to work for him moving forward.
He's probably going to move somewhere where the need is less.
I think people leave education
because it's just not valued in our country.
We don't pay teachers well.
We don't celebrate them and encourage them.
And then you're a teacher in East Oakland,
and you might have a kid cuss you out or you might get hit.
Um, and who... What human is, like, gonna sit there and say, "Oh, I can deal with that"?
Two of my therapists quit
because of the secondary trauma
that they've experienced with our students this school year.
So people leave because it's crazy.
And it's hard.
HI! - Hi! Good morning.
What's on your mind? What's on your heart?
-There's a lot of anger. -Hmm.
-Fuck this system. -Yeah.
Fuck this.
This is the sign to fail my kids
and I'm sitting here and I'm contributing in this way.
-I get angry. -Yeah.
The superintendent has changed twice now in two years.
When we have a new superintendent, then it's almost like
you're trying to convince that new person
of the work that you're doing.
And that is exhausting.
There is not a true understanding
of the amount of need
versus the amount of money that we receive.
With the budget crisis, I'm sure you're aware,
our future center may be
not funded next year.
So that's something I know you're really concerned about.
What else?
Our African American Male Achievement program...
Our Restorative Justice program.
So everything that's designed to break down traditional
-oppression and barriers to opportunity... -Yeah.
-...all that's going away. -Pretty much.
When you stick all of the students
who have the highest need into one school building,
and that is all they see all day,
how can you vision something different?
You cannot put all of the poor people in one building
and expect them to succeed.
I think about myself in this...
generational poverty,
and, like, how hard it's been for me to break that cycle
within myself and my family.
And I didn't go to a school like Frick.
My school was diverse.
And I was able to go to my apartment
and not have lights,
but go to my friend's house and see her bedroom
as big as my apartment.
And what if I hadn't ever seen something different?
Would I have believed in something different?
I think my students should be around other students
who live completely different than them.
And they can go to the hills in the weekends
or go to a pool party with someone of a different race
or a different economic background,
and that's not happening here.
We're trying to break the system,
we're trying to break generational poverty,
and it's going to take way more resources than we have.
I believe my kids can be successful.
But I need more time.
I need more time to change this school.
Ah... over there.
We have to change the habits and the hearts of the people
and move away from our own self-interest
to become more empathic about what's happening to other people's children.
Knowing how much benefit
early childhood education brings
to closing the achievement gapand closing the opportunity gap,
we're very foolish not to provide access
to high-quality learning for all young children,
especially those in low-income communities.
You get so much more bang for the buck
by investing in a trouble six-month-old
or a troubled six-year-old, than you do in investing in a...
in a troubled 16-year-old.
It's going to cost money
to make sure every child starts school ready to learn.
It's going to cost money
to make sure that young people get
the training they need for good jobs.
But for every dollar that we spend,
not only do we save several, but we produce,
we increase the GDP.
America will prosper when the people of the future
are prepared to lead to the future that we all want.
You know, for all the love and support in the room,
I have to confess that nobody ever seems
to want to take me out to dinner.
But, uh, the employers in this room
prove that actually you can take the high road.
Many of these employers have been willing to come with us
to Congress and state legislatures and say,
"We believe in higher wages and better benefits.
"Not just for workers, but because it's better for the bottom line."
You know, this is ultimately about our democracy.
It's about this question...
Who gets to decide how women are treated in the workplace?
Who gets to decide whether we as a nation
follow the outstanding path
of the high-road employers in this room,
or follow the low road, a path of poverty and misery?
Is it a handful of trade lobbyists,
or is it we, the people?
The values of the restaurant emanate from whatever it is
that the ownership wants.
And so, when you say, "I want an equitable work environment."
"We want to create a living wage for all of our employees."
"We want to open up opportunity."
All these things really are basic human values.
Restaurants can create a lot of change.
There are seven states.
California, Oregon, Washington,
Nevada, Montana,
Minnesota, and Alaska,
have all demanded that the restaurant industry
pay their own workers' wages
and let tips be on top of that wage.
And then we've got measures moving in states around the country
to eliminate the lower wage for tipped workers. And so...
this is going to be rolling momentum towards
the next three to five years
being able to move one fair wage legislation in Congress.
We have breaking news.
The Intercept,which is a, uh, media platform,
intercepted a poll on public support of the minimum wage.
And here were the results,
"71% support among all people,
"Republican and Democrat, raising the minimum wage,
"and only 8% of people in America totally oppose it."
Everybody wants this. Everybody needs this.
It will happen.
It is just a question of how and when.
Imagine a world in which women were valued.
In that world, they'd be able to take care of their families,
they'd be able to take care of our communities.
They would lead.
All it takes is valuing her.
Letting her know that she is valued.
Paying her in a way that reflects her value.
If we did that, we'd have a different economy,
we'd have a different country.
Nations that have invested in caring for their people
and in caring for their natural environment
are not only always in the highest ranks
of the United Nation's Human Development Reports,
but of the World Economic Forum's
Global Competitiveness Reports.
And not coincidently, these are the nations
where is is much more equal partnership
between the female and male halves of humanity,
in both the family and the state.
As the status of women rises,
men no longer feel it's such a threat to their status
to also back, embrace
more stereotypically soft, caring policies.
So they have childcare,
they have very generous paid parental leave.
Of course they have universal health care.
And because they have invested in caring for their people,
they have less poverty, less crime, long life spans,
kids who do well in international tests.
They are societies that have shifted
from a domination system more to a partnership system.
We're not bystanders in this world.
We have the ability to step up and solve big problems.
We have done that in the past.
It's just a question of prioritization,
a question of political will.
Just like nations, businesses should be run
for the benefit of all their stakeholders.
Society, partners, investors,
customers, employees, the environment, communities, et cetera.
Every business should have a purpose
that goes beyond making money.
You could compete, for example,
on whether or not your company
has a high-happiness rating for its employees.
Um, you could compete in terms of
the environmental record of the company.
In terms of whether or not they offer paid parental leave.
Instead of just valuing money,
we would introduce a whole other set of values.
You know, economic systems are human creations.
We can recreate them.
If we are a nation founded in justice and equality,
we have to always be able to see
folks as deserving even when they make mistakes.
We know that the true path to safety
is through economic opportunity and restorative justice.
That most people would respond to
a meaningful job,
and would respond to restorative justice,
where they're held accountableand yet still held in community.
I think that there is an opportunity
to restore the balance of this country,
and to live up to our ideals.
We need to move away from this punishment-based economy
towards a more caring economy.
What we have to do as a society is stop being blind to history.
Stop being blind to systems.
Understand that there are privileges
and there are oppressions in society.
And, in fact, they work like a seesaw.
Your privilege is actually built on my oppression.
We actually have to engage in truth-telling.
We're gonna have to express some shame
and sorrow about who we are and what we've done.
We're gonna have to find the will
to reconcile ourselves to a different future.
If you don't address the racism, sexism, homophobia, hatred...
The hatred that we live in, in our culture,
then you can't start having a conversation
about love, peace and understanding.
I think it was realizing that, like, my mom's rhetoric
of she really hated certain types of people.
And I thought, "Well, wait a minute,
"you tell me that Jesus loves people, right?
"But you're saying this and they don't line up.
"If Jesus loves everyone,
"then how can you hate this type of a person?"
Had a lady at the trailer park,
she would walk two miles to work every day at McDonald's,
and she had to quit because they took her food stamps away,
because she had a job.
And she said, "Sharon, I can't afford to work.
"Because I'm paying childcare...
"and now I don't have food stamps, so I can't... I'm making less."
Why can't we help people that go out and try to help themselves?
-Congratulations. -Thank you.
About to graduate?
So, when are you due?
-I'm due on October 5th. -Oh, wow!
-Here you go. -Thank you.
And then, did you pick out your produce yet?
-Yes, ma'am. -Okay.
I've lived 15 years on the Western Rivers.
I've never been married.
Don't have any kids.
All I cared about was making money, you know.
And that didn't do a lot of good for me, you know.
I made a real bad investment.
I was gonna go in the dive boat business.
And I was stuck with, you know, a boat that wasn't worth anything.
except a big bill.
I'm so sorry.
One or two bad decisions and he had nothing.
Wow, that could be me.
I mean, how many paychecks do most Americans live from bankruptcy?
-Here you go. -Thank you.
But you grew up on your own?
Yes, ma'am.
Some of these guys got good education, good potential.
I mean, if we had a roof on our head, it'd be better.
Just a job.
We are so busy in our own worlds,
so we fail to see the people that need so much right in front of us.
What's up, bro?
The best preacher in the world.
Doing all right, my man?
Yes, sir.
I'm 57 years old.
I've worked, paid taxes my whole life.
I was an engineer.
And I got compression fractures in my back,
but it's not enough to get disability money.
If I could get disability money...
I wouldn't be living out here.
I don't get food stamps.
The system sucks.
Yeah.
It really is easy to judge
and say, "Well, go get a job. That's what I did."
But a lot of these people can't.
I think people need to learn each other's stories.
When we know each other's stories, you don't judge harshly.
Father, we come to you in the name of Jesus.
God, I thank you for my brother here
and, God, I pray that you be with him.
Help him, God. Protect him, God...
A lot of this causes me to think about
the soul of a nation and I guess the values of it.
And what you do with the most vulnerable around you,
whether it's children or the mentally ill.
And we forget that so many people are left behind.
I really feel like if we focus more on each other,
and not on ourselves,
we'd be so much better.
We live in such an individualistic society,
I guess I'm trying to think of ways
to create more communities where people are more connected.
Reconnecting with your fellow humans
on that deep relationship level,
that feels like that's the right path
to solving some of these things.
The change we need is premised on going back to what we know
about what makes us human.
We need each other. We're born into the world needing each other.
We thrive in relationships. We need communities.
That's the most important thing we have.
We're all part of this interconnected system,
and we all flourish or we suffer together.
It truly is about...
what are your values as a human being?
And what does our American character say about who we are?
Are we caring people?
Will we fight for justice,
wherever that fight takes us?
If we shift our culture to be a world in which
we're much more connected to one another
and where we're serving others,
then we all rise, this is our moment.
We all rise.
We will know we have equality in this country
when everybody has a chance at the American dream.
Not just in the sense of hard work leading to economic security,
but to the American dream in the more profound sense of being treated
with equal dignity and being rewarded by full membership in society.
What makes us who we are as a country is that every generation of people
tries to bridge the distance
between our founding reality and the beauty of the dream.
When I grow up, I want to be a doctor or a lawyer,
because I want to protect people and help them.
I think in America everything can be possible.