Soledad O’Brien to host a conversation on race and justice
As George Floyd lay dying, pleading for air with a white Minneapolis police officer kneeling on his neck, something snapped in America’s collective consciousness, Soledad O’Brien said.
“I think it’s very easy to just say, the moment comes from George Floyd. But I think in actuality, George Floyd is just the straw that broke the camel’s back,” O’Brien said in an interview with Hearst Connecticut Media.
O’Brien, an award-winning documentarian, journalist, speaker, author and philanthropist, anchors and produces the Hearst TV public affairs program, “Matter of Fact with Soledad O'Brien.”
On Thursday, O’Brien will host a live one-hour virtual conversation on race and bias, “The Hard Truth About Bias: Images and Reality.” The program, the first in a series of quarterly digital forums to be held in 2021, features 19 guests drawn from media, academia and other backgrounds.
“This is a critical conversation for our country, and we are proud to launch this project, expanding the Matter of Fact brand and leveraging journalism resources from across the company,” Hearst President and CEO Steven R. Swartz said in a statement. “The talented, diverse team bringing this project to life is taking on important topics with insightful guests to provide viewers with a range of valuable perspectives.”
O’Brien hopes this will be the start of generating a dialogue to better understand racial issues.
“The first step toward understanding each other is to listen to each other, especially when it comes to the issue of race,” she said. “We need to hear from people of different perspectives so we can bring the challenges of equality and justice into full view where they can be scrutinized, confronted and
addressed. We need to understand how each of us participates in creating biases and stereotypes and own our responsibility to dismantle them.”
For O’Brien, Floyd’s death marked a pivotal moment, but she said charting it depends on who you ask.
For Black Americans, Floyd’s excruciating final moments came in the wake of the fatal shootings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor.
“For Black people, not only is George Floyd not the first person who’s been killed on videotape, he’s not even like the 10th person. So I think it’s just a sense of exhaustion really,” O’Brien said.
But for white people, including the liberal white enclaves of the Northeast, the video of Floyd’s violent arrest touched off a public reckoning with how they perceived race and authority, O’Brien said.
O’Brien recalled how one white liberal male friend in New York told her he had always felt the police side of the story would be accurate and how those stopped by the police “were not Girl Scouts.”
“This idea that there might be a different narrative and something else in play had never really crossed his mind,” O’Brien said.
Floyd’s death touched off a firestorm of protests that reached every corner of the nation — including in Connecticut, a state with its own history of inequality marked by practices like redlining, which divided neighborhoods along lines of race and poverty.
But what’s different about this moment for O’Brien is how Floyd’s death cut across that divide.
“I think people ... even people that would count themselves among the wealthy, have access ... I think everyone’s eyes were opened by seeing something kind of unfold in front of them,” O’Brien said.
“What’s different about this for me is people are trying to figure out, ‘So how do we solve this?’”
Among the reforms Connecticut has adopted in recent months is a police accountability law that establishes a new inspector general to investigate police killings, which forces officers to intervene when they witness one of their own using excessive force, and allows cops who commit wrongdoing to be decertified to prevent them from getting rehired.
The law has drawn backlash from some Connecticut police unions and state Republicans, who claim it will allow frivolous lawsuits against police to go forward.
At the same time, Black residents and other communities of color in Connecticut’s cities were falling ill and dying from COVID-19 at a higher rate than their white suburban counterparts.
For O’Brien, that highlights how questions of race and inequality are all interconnected.
“We’re in the same boat,” she said. “It’s very hard to picture a scenario where a part of the boat has a big massive hole and everyone in the boat is fine. It doesn’t work like that. Sure, the people who are sitting by the hole are going to be affected worse immediately, but everyone else is going to be sunk, too.”
“The Hard Truth About Bias: Images and Reality” will be livestreamed at 7 p.m. ET, Oct. 8, on the Matter of Fact with Soledad O'Brien website, as well as Hearst television stations, magazines and newspapers across the country, including Hearst Connecticut Media’s newspaper websites.
The program’s scheduled guests include:
⏩ Genesis Be, musical artist and activist
⏩Mahzarin Banaji, Ph.D., Professor of Social Ethics, Harvard University
Brenda White Bull, greatgreat-granddaughter of Lakota leader Sitting Bull
⏩ Joie Chen, Matter of Fact journalist
⏩ Trae Crowder, writer and comedian
⏩ Robin DiAngelo, Ph.D., affiliate associate professor of Education, University of Washington
⏩ Jennifer Eberhardt, Ph.D., professor of psychology, Stanford University
⏩ Alicia Garza, Black Lives Matter co-founder
⏩ Eddie Glaude, Ph.D., chair of the Center for African American Studies, Princeton University
⏩ Jemele Hill, VICE journalist ⏩Wes Lowery, CBS News journalist
⏩ Alfred Martin, Ph.D., assistant Professor of media Studies, The University of Iowa
⏩ Mia Mask, Ph.D., professor of Film, Vassar College
⏩Wes Moore, CEO, the Robin Hood Foundation
⏩ Rashawn Ray, Ph.D., profes⏩ sor of sociology, University of Maryland
⏩ John Ridley, Oscar-winning screenwriter
⏩ Michael Sebastian, Esquire editor-in-chief
⏩ Etan Thomas, ESPN Radio host and former NBA player
⏩ Dorothy Tucker, WBBM-TV, president of the National Association of Black Journalists