[Music]
so famously said that the art world
universe is long but it bends towards
justice
he was the civil rights activists in the
United States around okay this way and
when he meant by the arc of the moral
universe it is the way that society
progresses over time to equality when
you meant by this is that though social
change makes it takes a long time to
happen the world that we live in will
someday they have better place this book
is a really great rallying call because
it helps people feel like their efforts
to make the world better are not futile
and it gives us hope for the future that
we will live in it and that our children
and grandchildren live it but I’m here
today to talk about why thinking that
the world is on the slow but steady
march towards justice can be harmful
taken during the 2014 riots in Ferguson
Mississippi these riots began as a
peaceful protest after the murder of an
unhatched black flag girl who was shot
and killed walking home at night by a
white police officer so during the
ensuing violence of the right hand
spending well a relatively well-informed
and socially conscious people said
things like it’s as though we’ve taken a
step back 50 years
history and what they meant maybe by
this was that it was a step back to
these rights in 1965 in Selma Alabama
the similarities between the two are
striking Selma like Ferguson began as a
peaceful protest after the murder of an
unarmed wife boy named Jimmie Lee
Jackson who was shot and killed in a
restaurant near his home and the
similarities are striking because the
violence and magnitude of the responses
occurred only after the police attempted
to disperse the crowd was using tear gas
and water cannons respectively but the
problem with calling Ferguson is set
back 50 years into US history
is that it suggests that in the interim
nothing terrible has happened
it ignores the fact that policemen in
the United States are estimated to kill
someone every 7 hours and that these
people are three times more likely to be
black than to be white
and according to the bullet of mounted
police violence database only 30 percent
of cases in which black men are shot and
killed by the police are they even are
they even thought to have a weapon or
accused of a violent crime so what we
call some of us step back into US
history we are ignoring the past 50
years above violence of brute
holiday that define the American justice
system and communities all over the
United States we are ignoring in the
past 50 years of beliefs murdering
unarmed black men and boys so then what
does it mean to move backwards
generally as Westerners our perception
of a society that has moved backwards is
one that in which social liberties that
have been gained through social movement
are reversed or addressed these can be
legal policies like a society that’s
given women the right to vote taking
back that right but they can also be
social norms like in a society that had
started accepting women and government
stopped voting through female
representatives however many of the
societies that we consider to be
backwards are just not moving at the
same pace as societies that have they
haven’t granted those rights to minority
groups and couldn’t have taken them away
the reason I use air quotes when I say
moving at the same pace and progress and
gosh this is sensitive is the fact is
because almost all of the language that
we have to describe social movements has
to go with linear progression so linear
progression is basically the movement
from point A to point B with no in terms
of between and in this case
referring to the movement of a society
from inequality to equality over time
with with progress getting only better
for people and never getting worse and
another issue with looking at societies
as moving forwards is that generally our
perceptually moving forwards is becoming
more democratic more industrial and more
westernized but rather than being a
linear spectrum societies tend to
fluctuate between equality and
inequality over time for example we
would generally look at a pastoral in
admin in 2017 living without electricity
running water or modern forms of
transportation in a rural area as living
as double he is in pre-industrial times
but I think we can all accept the year
he lives in it’s still 2017 the way we
experience time is linear the way that
we experience social progress however
looks a lot more like this it’s
complicated it’s messy and it doesn’t
have a specific direction as it moves
between the quality of inequality so
let’s get back to the concept of moving
backwards can anyone tell me where they
think these photos were taken to shut it
up thanks good yeah this photos were
taken in Iraq during the 1930s to the
1970s and here are some pictures of your
engineer now obviously I chose these
photos to suit my character there were
of course people in Iran during the time
race that we’re taking who observes much
more traditional Islamic hoods address
and there are everything around today
loose who do not wear the headscarf and
outside their own homes and who stress
we would consider to be far more
westernized but the fact is that
political climates of these two time
periods are incredibly different
so these photos were taken and what is
referred to and the Halabi era it began
in the early 1930s from Reza Shah
Pahlavi came into power in Iran and he
instituted a number of policies meant to
bring Iranian culture towards
westernization and female equality now
these policies good or bad outlawed the
hoods headscarf I think in women many
rights in government rights and marriage
like the ability to divorce to take care
of their children to have custody just
all of these things that brought women
towards more equal status in society as
met during the 1979 Islamic Revolution
however women lost many of the rights
that they gained under khalaby women to
this day are not all are legally
required to wear a headscarf are
available whenever they leave their own
homes
women have built no brakes at marriage
they cannot ask for a divorce initiate
of marriage have custody over their
children or even leave the country
without their husbands permission I
recently found out that it’s a current
issue in Iraq with women trying to
regain the right to attend sporting
events of course over the past 40 years
since the revolution women have gained
back when he of the rights that they
lost underneath the original chaos and
now women is still working in Iran today
to move themselves in a direction we
would consider forwards but Iran is
still strong
full of society that we as Westerners
they consider to be backwards of course
this is not the first time in history to
do that we would have considered to have
been have moved backwards in terms of
gaya minorities gaining and losing
rights within a relatively short amount
of time during World War one and two
women were forced to enter the workforce
at a much higher rate because men who
were drafted into the army and these
women were able to take over jobs that
had historically belonged to men like
many military operations and call
centers and factories participating in
government and taking care of their
children along with gaining rights to
property however after the war ended
many of these same women were fired from
their jobs to make space for male
workers or paid far less than the men
who are doing the same jobs that they
were and this is still an issue
especially in the United States today
with the wage gap is that a woman makes
75 cents to a man’s dollar the issue
with looking at time and social
movements as linear as a progression
from A to B is not only that it allows
us to ignore societies that don’t
the way that we think they should but it
also allows us to be ignorant of
humanitarian crises that are still an
issue outside of where they are relevant
to our own lives so Simon Doonan who is
a fashion designer and a gay rights
activist in the United States the ABC
said to those of you who are not around
I can only say this you have no idea how
lucky you are
he was referring to what I call the AIDS
crisis of the 1980s and as a young gay
teenager in the United States I learned
about the AIDS crisis in a very specific
in the Midway my story of the hiv/aids
crisis began in 1981 when the first five
cases were reported in the United States
called gay pneumonia or alternatively
gay cancer by 1985 every region in the
world was reporting at least one case of
HIV and it wasn’t until 1988 that the
United States might lead open up a
program for dealing with the virus by
1995 nearly 10 years after it became a
worldwide crisis the first
antiretroviral therapy was approved for
human consumption and in here later the
United Nations from the Committee on the
prevention of AIDS and that’s it that’s
the end of the story as I knew it it was
something to be looked back on to be sad
about to remember our struggle but the
fact is that we here in Swaziland are
living in the middle of an AIDS
today and the country that we all live
in 30 over 30% of the population is
infected with HIV because the fact is
that the story didn’t actually end in
1996 with the formation of USAID it
continued and next 99 when aids became
the number one killer on the African
continent
but 16,000 new infections every single
day in 2016 it was estimated that
eighteen point two million people aren’t
our honorees worldwide and that is only
54 percent of the people eligible for
treatment because we as a global
community often looked at issues and
ourselves and our areas of the world as
fixed it is easy to ignore the other
people still struggle and this is in
part because we can’t just look across
the globe you know we don’t see
everything that’s going on but it is
mainly because social movements are
rarely intersectional groups advocate
for their own needs and often don’t
recognize or prioritize struggles of
others an example of this dear and dear
to my heart is the women’s suffrage
movement
the United States and Western Europe of
the 90s 1890s the 1950s women of color
were systemically excluded from movement
and whose many of those suffragettes who
I learned to admire use the fact that
black men could vote as a reason for my
white women should be able to Anna
Howard Shaw who is president to the
National Women’s Association of handle
until very recently one of my heroes
famously said I had seen women
overworked and underpaid doing men’s
jobs a half men’s wages not because
their work was inferior but because they
were women yeah I recently found out
that she was the same person who said
you have put the ballot into the hands
of your black man thus making him the
political superior of white women never
before in the history of the world have
men makes former slaves the political
masters of their former mistresses yeah
and even earlier when I said that a
woman in the u.s. makes 75 cents to the
man’s dollar I was of course referring
to the white woman’s 75 cents to the
white man’s dollar if we look at median
earnings in terms of looking at the wage
gap by race across the globe
see that Asian men and women are doing
the best but white men still make more
than Asian women who make more than
white women who make more than black men
and so forth and so on so how can we
move forwards in the society out of the
mood towards justice in a society where
many consider the rights and progress of
others to be less important them or even
harmful to their own and this mentality
is particularly dangerous because it
gives us leaders like Jeremiah the
America makes people I hope that you do
hear Wilders who is the leader of the
Dutch party for freedom out of having
the pet as leader of the French National
Front party Nigel Farage former leader
of the UK Independence Party and of
course Donald Trump the current
Republican leader of the United States
government so if any of us are
unfamiliar with the current rise of
fascism within the Western world over
the past year alone conservatives across
United States and Western Europe have
gained considerably and power and
traction and that is it no little heart
do sorry to the refugee crisis ongoing
that is a notable part due to the
advances that minorities have made in
those societies because the fact is that
these conservatives with party names
like freedom the National Front and
independence from a separation
isolationism from the rest of the world
they have policies like brexit and
America first which seek to foster
xenophobia like a blackout migrants and
refugees and cross through mistrust
among minority groups it is one of the
oldest and most disgusting political
strategies in the book people in power
who don’t want to lose the top seat our
get into we’re against social progress
convinced minority groups that only one
can advance at the cost of the rest and
it is surprising how often we swallow
that how much we work we think that
progress is linear and individual and to
take that back to the moral arc of the
universe one of the most critical
reasons we believe that the world is on
a steady-state to get better is because
it allows us to be complacent it allows
us to focus on our own interests on
issues that excite us were irrelevant to
our own lives because we think that no
matter what if we push for what we
believe in the whole world is just going
to move in the same direction we’re
eventually going to all have justice but
the fact is that the more heart of the
universe
towards justice it is push that thing
there is nothing wrong with thinking
that the world will eventually be a
better place but it is necessary to
recognize there without an integrated
intersectional and sustained approach
things will not get better on our own we
must not give in to latency or expect
all societies to move in the same
direction at the same pace and at the
same time if we want the world we live
in to bend towards justice we have to
take it back
[Applause]
so famously said that the art world
universe is long but it bends towards
justice
he was the civil rights activists in the
United States around okay this way and
when he meant by the arc of the moral
universe it is the way that society
progresses over time to equality when
you meant by this is that though social
change makes it takes a long time to
happen the world that we live in will
someday they have better place this book
is a really great rallying call because
it helps people feel like their efforts
to make the world better are not futile
and it gives us hope for the future that
we will live in it and that our children
and grandchildren live it but I’m here
today to talk about why thinking that
the world is on the slow but steady
march towards justice can be harmful
taken during the 2014 riots in Ferguson
Mississippi these riots began as a
peaceful protest after the murder of an
unhatched black flag girl who was shot
and killed walking home at night by a
white police officer so during the
ensuing violence of the right hand
spending well a relatively well-informed
and socially conscious people said
things like it’s as though we’ve taken a
step back 50 years
history and what they meant maybe by
this was that it was a step back to
these rights in 1965 in Selma Alabama
the similarities between the two are
striking Selma like Ferguson began as a
peaceful protest after the murder of an
unarmed wife boy named Jimmie Lee
Jackson who was shot and killed in a
restaurant near his home and the
similarities are striking because the
violence and magnitude of the responses
occurred only after the police attempted
to disperse the crowd was using tear gas
and water cannons respectively but the
problem with calling Ferguson is set
back 50 years into US history
is that it suggests that in the interim
nothing terrible has happened
it ignores the fact that policemen in
the United States are estimated to kill
someone every 7 hours and that these
people are three times more likely to be
black than to be white
and according to the bullet of mounted
police violence database only 30 percent
of cases in which black men are shot and
killed by the police are they even are
they even thought to have a weapon or
accused of a violent crime so what we
call some of us step back into US
history we are ignoring the past 50
years above violence of brute
holiday that define the American justice
system and communities all over the
United States we are ignoring in the
past 50 years of beliefs murdering
unarmed black men and boys so then what
does it mean to move backwards
generally as Westerners our perception
of a society that has moved backwards is
one that in which social liberties that
have been gained through social movement
are reversed or addressed these can be
legal policies like a society that’s
given women the right to vote taking
back that right but they can also be
social norms like in a society that had
started accepting women and government
stopped voting through female
representatives however many of the
societies that we consider to be
backwards are just not moving at the
same pace as societies that have they
haven’t granted those rights to minority
groups and couldn’t have taken them away
the reason I use air quotes when I say
moving at the same pace and progress and
gosh this is sensitive is the fact is
because almost all of the language that
we have to describe social movements has
to go with linear progression so linear
progression is basically the movement
from point A to point B with no in terms
of between and in this case
referring to the movement of a society
from inequality to equality over time
with with progress getting only better
for people and never getting worse and
another issue with looking at societies
as moving forwards is that generally our
perceptually moving forwards is becoming
more democratic more industrial and more
westernized but rather than being a
linear spectrum societies tend to
fluctuate between equality and
inequality over time for example we
would generally look at a pastoral in
admin in 2017 living without electricity
running water or modern forms of
transportation in a rural area as living
as double he is in pre-industrial times
but I think we can all accept the year
he lives in it’s still 2017 the way we
experience time is linear the way that
we experience social progress however
looks a lot more like this it’s
complicated it’s messy and it doesn’t
have a specific direction as it moves
between the quality of inequality so
let’s get back to the concept of moving
backwards can anyone tell me where they
think these photos were taken to shut it
up thanks good yeah this photos were
taken in Iraq during the 1930s to the
1970s and here are some pictures of your
engineer now obviously I chose these
photos to suit my character there were
of course people in Iran during the time
race that we’re taking who observes much
more traditional Islamic hoods address
and there are everything around today
loose who do not wear the headscarf and
outside their own homes and who stress
we would consider to be far more
westernized but the fact is that
political climates of these two time
periods are incredibly different
so these photos were taken and what is
referred to and the Halabi era it began
in the early 1930s from Reza Shah
Pahlavi came into power in Iran and he
instituted a number of policies meant to
bring Iranian culture towards
westernization and female equality now
these policies good or bad outlawed the
hoods headscarf I think in women many
rights in government rights and marriage
like the ability to divorce to take care
of their children to have custody just
all of these things that brought women
towards more equal status in society as
met during the 1979 Islamic Revolution
however women lost many of the rights
that they gained under khalaby women to
this day are not all are legally
required to wear a headscarf are
available whenever they leave their own
homes
women have built no brakes at marriage
they cannot ask for a divorce initiate
of marriage have custody over their
children or even leave the country
without their husbands permission I
recently found out that it’s a current
issue in Iraq with women trying to
regain the right to attend sporting
events of course over the past 40 years
since the revolution women have gained
back when he of the rights that they
lost underneath the original chaos and
now women is still working in Iran today
to move themselves in a direction we
would consider forwards but Iran is
still strong
full of society that we as Westerners
they consider to be backwards of course
this is not the first time in history to
do that we would have considered to have
been have moved backwards in terms of
gaya minorities gaining and losing
rights within a relatively short amount
of time during World War one and two
women were forced to enter the workforce
at a much higher rate because men who
were drafted into the army and these
women were able to take over jobs that
had historically belonged to men like
many military operations and call
centers and factories participating in
government and taking care of their
children along with gaining rights to
property however after the war ended
many of these same women were fired from
their jobs to make space for male
workers or paid far less than the men
who are doing the same jobs that they
were and this is still an issue
especially in the United States today
with the wage gap is that a woman makes
75 cents to a man’s dollar the issue
with looking at time and social
movements as linear as a progression
from A to B is not only that it allows
us to ignore societies that don’t
the way that we think they should but it
also allows us to be ignorant of
humanitarian crises that are still an
issue outside of where they are relevant
to our own lives so Simon Doonan who is
a fashion designer and a gay rights
activist in the United States the ABC
said to those of you who are not around
I can only say this you have no idea how
lucky you are
he was referring to what I call the AIDS
crisis of the 1980s and as a young gay
teenager in the United States I learned
about the AIDS crisis in a very specific
in the Midway my story of the hiv/aids
crisis began in 1981 when the first five
cases were reported in the United States
called gay pneumonia or alternatively
gay cancer by 1985 every region in the
world was reporting at least one case of
HIV and it wasn’t until 1988 that the
United States might lead open up a
program for dealing with the virus by
1995 nearly 10 years after it became a
worldwide crisis the first
antiretroviral therapy was approved for
human consumption and in here later the
United Nations from the Committee on the
prevention of AIDS and that’s it that’s
the end of the story as I knew it it was
something to be looked back on to be sad
about to remember our struggle but the
fact is that we here in Swaziland are
living in the middle of an AIDS
today and the country that we all live
in 30 over 30% of the population is
infected with HIV because the fact is
that the story didn’t actually end in
1996 with the formation of USAID it
continued and next 99 when aids became
the number one killer on the African
continent
but 16,000 new infections every single
day in 2016 it was estimated that
eighteen point two million people aren’t
our honorees worldwide and that is only
54 percent of the people eligible for
treatment because we as a global
community often looked at issues and
ourselves and our areas of the world as
fixed it is easy to ignore the other
people still struggle and this is in
part because we can’t just look across
the globe you know we don’t see
everything that’s going on but it is
mainly because social movements are
rarely intersectional groups advocate
for their own needs and often don’t
recognize or prioritize struggles of
others an example of this dear and dear
to my heart is the women’s suffrage
movement
the United States and Western Europe of
the 90s 1890s the 1950s women of color
were systemically excluded from movement
and whose many of those suffragettes who
I learned to admire use the fact that
black men could vote as a reason for my
white women should be able to Anna
Howard Shaw who is president to the
National Women’s Association of handle
until very recently one of my heroes
famously said I had seen women
overworked and underpaid doing men’s
jobs a half men’s wages not because
their work was inferior but because they
were women yeah I recently found out
that she was the same person who said
you have put the ballot into the hands
of your black man thus making him the
political superior of white women never
before in the history of the world have
men makes former slaves the political
masters of their former mistresses yeah
and even earlier when I said that a
woman in the u.s. makes 75 cents to the
man’s dollar I was of course referring
to the white woman’s 75 cents to the
white man’s dollar if we look at median
earnings in terms of looking at the wage
gap by race across the globe
see that Asian men and women are doing
the best but white men still make more
than Asian women who make more than
white women who make more than black men
and so forth and so on so how can we
move forwards in the society out of the
mood towards justice in a society where
many consider the rights and progress of
others to be less important them or even
harmful to their own and this mentality
is particularly dangerous because it
gives us leaders like Jeremiah the
America makes people I hope that you do
hear Wilders who is the leader of the
Dutch party for freedom out of having
the pet as leader of the French National
Front party Nigel Farage former leader
of the UK Independence Party and of
course Donald Trump the current
Republican leader of the United States
government so if any of us are
unfamiliar with the current rise of
fascism within the Western world over
the past year alone conservatives across
United States and Western Europe have
gained considerably and power and
traction and that is it no little heart
do sorry to the refugee crisis ongoing
that is a notable part due to the
advances that minorities have made in
those societies because the fact is that
these conservatives with party names
like freedom the National Front and
independence from a separation
isolationism from the rest of the world
they have policies like brexit and
America first which seek to foster
xenophobia like a blackout migrants and
refugees and cross through mistrust
among minority groups it is one of the
oldest and most disgusting political
strategies in the book people in power
who don’t want to lose the top seat our
get into we’re against social progress
convinced minority groups that only one
can advance at the cost of the rest and
it is surprising how often we swallow
that how much we work we think that
progress is linear and individual and to
take that back to the moral arc of the
universe one of the most critical
reasons we believe that the world is on
a steady-state to get better is because
it allows us to be complacent it allows
us to focus on our own interests on
issues that excite us were irrelevant to
our own lives because we think that no
matter what if we push for what we
believe in the whole world is just going
to move in the same direction we’re
eventually going to all have justice but
the fact is that the more heart of the
universe
towards justice it is push that thing
there is nothing wrong with thinking
that the world will eventually be a
better place but it is necessary to
recognize there without an integrated
intersectional and sustained approach
things will not get better on our own we
must not give in to latency or expect
all societies to move in the same
direction at the same pace and at the
same time if we want the world we live
in to bend towards justice we have to
take it back
[Applause]
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