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Europe Witnesses a Tragedy; America's Racial Crossroads; Imagine a World. Aired 2-2:30p ET
Aired August 25, 2015 - 14:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[14:00:00]
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): Born in London to a Guyanese father, British activist, politician and journalist, Trevor Phillips came to
prominence at a young age as a radical student leader, later a political ally of Prime Minister Tony Blair.
He was the U.K.'s equality czar for over a decade, sparking controversy on gender, religion and, most of all, his fiery attack on Britain's policy of
multiculturalism. What he said stood in the way of true integration.
Writer, politician, provocative thinker, Trevor Phillips is tonight's guest host on AMANPOUR.
TREVOR PHILLIPS, CNN HOST (voice-over): Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the program. I'm Trevor Phillips, sitting in for Christiane
Amanpour.
It's summertime in Europe. Most years, the golden sands of the Mediterranean are host to millions of tourists. But this year, some
beaches are witnessing a vast unfolding tragedy.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIPS (voice-over): Refugees fleeing conflicts, many literally dying to reach Europe, tens of thousands are Syrians, Iraqis and the others,
crossing from Turkey to Greece, desperate and destitute.
From Calais through Kos to Macedonia, the migration crisis is exploding across Europe. And with anti-immigration parties rising in the polls, this
could be Europe's biggest crisis yet.
Earlier, I spoke to Franz Timmermans, first vice president of the European Commission and the Netherlands' former foreign minister.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
PHILLIPS: Mr. Timmermans, sir, thank you for joining us and welcome to the program.
FRANS TIMMERMANS, FIRST VICE PRESIDENT, EUROPEAN COMMISSION: Thank you very much.
PHILLIPS: The E.U. promised earlier on this year to broker a deal in which each of 28 countries would take a share of 40,000 refugees over two years.
You haven't even managed to seal that deal.
This has not been the E.U.'s finest hour, has it?
TIMMERMANS: No, it hasn't. But I'm aware of the fact that an increasing number of member states now do understand that there is no individual
solution; there is no solution by member states and we need to find European solutions for this problem.
And I think a relocation, a systematic relocation system, where we could have the E.U. reacting in a crisis situation in a way that could help
countries in trouble is part of the solution. And we will need to find that solution in the next couple of months.
PHILLIPS: You're talking about 40,000; last month, the numbers climbed to 100,000. The Germans are thinking about having to accommodate 800,000
people over the next year.
If the E.U. can't even manage its small part of that deal, what value can it bring to this crisis?
TIMMERMANS: The bigger problem with these numbers is that only part of these people are individuals with a right to asylum. But we've not been
very good at determining who has a right to asylum and who doesn't have the right to asylum. We've not been very good at sending people back who don't
have the right to asylum.
If you take the situation in Germany, for instance, a large part of the people coming to Germany are actually coming from Western Balkan countries,
countries who have the ambition to become members of the E.U. and, therefore, should not have a political situation that will warrant people
to leave and seek asylum elsewhere.
PHILLIPS: Within the E.U., you still have this problem that, until you can get the 28 to agree on any of this, the only people who are winning here
are the smugglers. And whether it is across the Balkans or across the Mediterranean, isn't that really the most urgent thing?
TIMMERMANS: I think you're absolutely right. The smugglers -- but not just the smugglers; look at public opinion across the European Union. If
we fail to address this crisis, if we fail to bring about real solutions, we will also increase the support for very radical, xenophobic, extreme
Right parties across the European Union.
So there's a much bigger issue at stake. It's not just about tackling these smugglers. It's about the very fabric of our society that will
suffer if we're not able to find common solutions to a problem that can be tackled. It's not impossible to solve this issue.
PHILLIPS: I'm glad you said that because I'm wondering what you're saying to your colleagues on the commission that, every day that the E.U. fails to
find a solution, you are strengthening the hands of anti-immigrant parties across Europe.
Every day you are failing to find a solution to that --
[14:05:00]
PHILLIPS: -- those parties are strengthened and also their case that the E.U. can't do even the most basic thing it promised to do is being
strengthened.
Isn't this an existential crisis not just for the refugees but for the E.U. itself?
TIMMERMANS: Absolutely, because a solution they propose -- send them all back -- is not a solution. We would be at odds with our most fundamental
values if we were to send back people to war.
It is impossible to send back people to Syria. They would die there. We don't want to send people back with their families to a war zone. So those
parties who say we have a simple solution for all this, send them back, are selling illusions.
We have to make sure that we come up with realistic reactions to the situation, which means that some of the people will have to stay and, yes,
this is difficult in some of our societies.
But we can tackle this. There's 500 million of us. We can tackle this if we have a fair system of distribution, if we make sure that people do not
have the right to asylum are actually sent back, if we do a better job at trying to prevent conflict in the Middle East, in trying to bring solutions
to the situation in Libya and Syria.
That is what we should be doing and not endlessly finger-pointing at each other and saying it's the other person's problem.
PHILLIPS: Would you accept that, every day the E.U. fails to solve the migrant crisis takes us one day closer to Brexit because, if the E.U. is
not a solution or part of the solution, what are we doing in it?
TIMMERMANS: What I've seen in the last couple of days is efforts being stepped up bilaterally between France and the United Kingdom to tackle the
issue in Calais, which is part of the wider problem, because it will tackle smugglers. It will provide the possibility to go after the smugglers in
the U.K. and France and Netherlands, Belgium and elsewhere --
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIPS: But if I may say so, doesn't that actually make the case that if you can deal with these problems bilaterally, why do we need the Brussels
(ph)?
TIMMERMANS: I don't care who deals with the problem, whether it's bilaterally or at E.U. level. We simply need to deal with the problem.
And the British government's recognized that this is an international problem that can only be provided with international solutions.
PHILLIPS: What are you doing about getting some deal with third countries -- for example, in Africa -- to make sure that people can be processed
outside of Europe?
Surely the key -- one of the key things is to stop the problem before it gets here.
TIMMERMANS: Absolutely. And not just stop the problem by having good agreements with third countries; also to create the situation where people
can apply for a visa for the E.U. so that we can have people come to the E.U., people we will need in the future, given our demographics.
But they should not abuse the asylum system to come to the E.U. They should have other legal ways to come to the E.U. And there you need an
agreement with those third countries.
So we will need to step up our efforts to negotiate with these countries to come up with better agreements.
I know this is very difficult. But if we do it as E.U. and not leave this to individual member states, I think we can be successful in creating a
better situation with these countries.
PHILLIPS: Do you think that, at the heart of the political danger that you've already alluded to, is a feeling that we're now running an
immigration policy by crisis management and that the consequence of that is a very basic moral problem, which is that who gets in depends on if you've
got enough money to pay smugglers or if you can get yourself to the coast and essentially fall on -- depend on humanitarian response?
TIMMERMANS: Absolutely. And that's why we need to tackle those smugglers. That's not a right-wing agenda; that's a humanitarian agenda because the
smugglers are creating a situation that people have the right to asylum because they flee persecution, they flee war, now get the short end of the
stick. That is unacceptable.
But the fear in our societies that unchecked immigration will create a loss for everyone in our society is big. And the extremist parties are
exploiting that fear.
So finding a solution for the migration issue, providing some elements of a response to this crisis is not just helping people who flee war; it's also
protecting the very fabric of our society so that we don't go back to this horrible past of blaming a minority, of looking for scapegoats, of saying
that all our trouble come from a minority or come from Muslims or come from Jews or whatever.
PHILLIPS: Slovakia has said it will take some asylum seekers, refugees. But only as long as they're Christians.
Is the E.U. going to say no deal?
TIMMERMANS: Well, that's not a very Christian thing to say, is it?
I believe that people have a right to asylum if they flee war and you don't ask them what their religion is. You don't ask them --
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TIMMERMANS: -- what their background is. You don't look at the color of their skin.
People who have the right to asylum get the right to asylum. That's a humanitarian issue. That's a legal issue. You cannot discriminate on the
basis of religion. It's very clear.
PHILLIPS: Mr. Timmermans, thank you very much indeed.
TIMMERMANS: My pleasure.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
PHILLIPS: The European Union's dilemma isn't exactly new. Sixty-seven years ago in the dying days of British Colonial rule, the vessel, the
Empire Windrush, brought 500 Caribbean migrants to England. British ministers, alarmed by the prospect of what some might call a swarm of
migrants dispatched warships to shadow the ship across the Atlantic.
But those migrants and others, like my own parents, made it through the blockade.
When we come back, we turn to America, where questions of migration and integration still remain raw.
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PHILLIPS: Welcome back to the program. I'm Trevor Phillips, sitting in for Christiane Amanpour.
The one thing that almost everyone in the world knows about the American president is that he is black. For millions, the election in 2008 heralded
if not the end of racism in America at least a fresh start.
And in a society where next month more than half the children in America's public schools will be black, Latino or Asian, that fresh start can't come
a moment too soon.
Yet in recent months, the killing of several young black men by police officers has shaken America's belief in a post-racial future to the core.
So is the dream of which Martin Luther King spoke half a century ago turning into a nightmare?
Joining me to discuss the prospects for America are Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Warmth of Other Suns," about the
migration of America's blacks to the north, and Eddie Glaude, the chair of the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
PHILLIPS: Isabel Wilkerson, let me ask you about the mood in America.
What happened to the audacity of hope?
ISABEL WILKERSON, AUTHOR, "THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS": I think that we are at a moment in our country's history where we're in a moment of reckoning.
We've had an incantation of names of African Americans who have died at the hands of police. We've had the massacre in Charleston of parishioners, who
welcomed this individual into their sanctuary.
So we're in a moment of great soul-searching, of great -- trying to get a sense of where we are as a country, how did we get here and a confrontation
with our own history.
PHILLIPS: But at the heart of this is a story of disappointment; civil rights, it was all going to be OK.
Deregulation and the economic boom, Clinton, all of that, it was all going to be OK.
Obama, first black president, it's going to be OK. And it is not OK.
What happened?
WILKERSON: Well, one of the things that has happened in our country is that we have never actually come to grips with and really, truly confronted our
history. When we're looking right now at the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, which tore the country apart, we're looking at the 150th
anniversary of now Reconstruction.
And we're also looking at the 50th anniversary of all the legislation of the 1960s that grew out of the hard work and the lost --
[14:15:00]
WILKERSON: -- lives that came out of that movement. And we realized that many Americans do not even understand why we needed those laws to begin
with.
And so this is a -- the -- one of the challenges that we're facing is coming to grips with the fact that, even though laws may change, that does
not mean that hearts have changed. And so we have a long way to go and a lot of work to do to confront our actual history, going all the way back to
enslavement.
PHILLIPS: Could you end up feeling that actually the story here is that African Americans, whatever they do, are always the creatures of other
people's desires, rage, angry -- anger and so on?
Isn't there an issue here about what are African -- what can African Americans do?
Do they just have to wait for everybody else to be nice to them?
EDDIE GLAUDE JR., CHAIR, CENTER FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY: No. We have to force what I call the value gap. We have to
force a reckoning, to use Isabel's language, with the value gap.
The value gap over-determines in so many different ways right our commitment to democratic principles. And so this is not a matter of just
simply changing laws. It's not a matter of just simply changing hearts right. It's a matter of uprooting the habits right that cut short the
promise of American life.
And that's going to involve changing laws. It's going to involve in addressing structures. It's going to involve what these young folk are
doing in the streets and that is bringing pressure to bear on these social arrangements right on these political realities.
And we need to think about this as well, what we're seeing as well is that the bankruptcy, the bankruptcy of a neo-liberal economic philosophy right.
One of the things that we need to understand is that, since 2008, African Americans have been devastated.
Our communities have been devastated in terms of employment, in terms of housing, in terms of access to health care, in terms of (INAUDIBLE) their
retirements, right.
What is the future like for them?
(CROSSTALK)
PHILLIPS: Let me take that -- ask you about that.
And I'm going to come back to you, Isabel, on this as well.
You say African American lives have been devastated since the recession.
One thing that's very interesting, African Americans have done the thing that everybody said, go get an education and so on.
If you look at the numbers, what you can see is that between 1992-2013, every group, bar one, benefited. Their incomes was up.
The one group who didn't benefit were black college graduates, the people who did the right thing; it didn't pay off for them.
Isabel, what happened?
WILKERSON: Well, that's such an important point you make and that is because we, as a country, are still living with the aftereffects of a caste
system; Americans don't often think of themselves as having -- living under an artificial hierarchy based upon race.
And so this is something that is -- that has been continuing from the time of enslavement, the time of formalized Jim Crow segregation and into the
current day and which what many social scientists are looking at, is what's called unconscious bias.
And this unconscious bias works its way into our society and affects every aspect of life for African Americans, such that African Americans, who are
going for a job, who have a clean record, are less likely to be hired versus a white applicant with a felony record.
So that there are so many in every sphere of life, African Americans are in some ways held in the grip of presumptions, of stereotypes that are
holdovers from these previous eras. And this is why we have these disparities, even to this day.
PHILLIPS: Isn't the problem here that African Americans, for whatever reason, are being left behind and others who face disadvantages of
different kinds are getting over it?
GLAUDE: Part of what we see here is an ongoing commitment to the values gap, an ongoing commitment to the belief that certain people in this
country matter more than others.
We need to understand that today, in the midst of all of the talk about recovery, African American unemployment stands at 9.1 percent, 9 -- if you
think about that number, 9.1 percent was the level of unemployment among whites during the height of the Great Recession. But people are talking
about recovery.
Folks are losing their homes; folks are engaged in long-term unemployment and, more importantly or in addition, folks are burying their babies at the
hands of police violence.
So what we see here -- and this is something we just need to confront honestly and this is what Jimmy Baldwin taught us, is that as long as we
buy into the notion of American innocence when that innocence has long passed, we become monsters.
But we have to ask ourselves the question: are we a nation of monsters?
PHILLIPS: OK, let me put a brief question, if I may, to both of you, to finish.
Eddie, what's it going to take to break the cycle?
Or is it just going to be time?
GLAUDE: It's going to take a real and honest --
[14:20:00]
GLAUDE: -- encounter with the truth. We have to look the facts of our experience, of our history squarely in the face. We're going to have to
stop engaging in what Toni Morrison calls "disremembering," in order to wash our hands clean.
You know, we engage in this periodic ritual of expiation, where we want to declare our innocence before the world.
And I would like to say is this: is that we have a long history of declaring our race problem solved. And every time we do, at the moment in
which we declare it resolved, whether it's civil rights cases or 1883 or whether it's the recent Supreme Court decision around the Voting Rights
Act, underneath it occurs all sorts of ugliness, all sorts of horror and all sorts of terror.
And that's what we need to confront. That's the only way we're -- and we're going to have to confront it honestly and directly. That's the only
way we're going to change.
PHILLIPS: So, Isabel, briefly, no post-racial America in sight soon?
WILKERSON: I would hope that we will live to see the day that there will be one. I certainly hope that we will.
I think that we have a lot of work to do. There's a lot of confronting the history, confronting the truth of how we got to where we are and a sense of
the need for reconciliation.
I'm quite inspired by the -- by what the colony, the former colony of Virginia, now the Commonwealth of Virginia, it is -- it's now saying that
it believes that there should be a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to confront these issues.
That is a sign of hope. That's a sign of readiness because of all that we've been through in the last year and a half as a country, a readiness to
finally confront this history.
And it will require not just African Americans; it will call -- recall -- require all Americans to be a part of this because this is not an African
American story. This is not an African American problem. This is an American challenge in that it requires everyone to be -- feel invested in
it and to work on this.
PHILLIPS: Isabel Wilkerson, Eddie Glaude, thank you very much indeed.
WILKERSON: Thank you.
GLAUDE: Thank you.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
PHILLIPS: Coming up on this special edition of AMANPOUR, when it comes to science, do our politicians need to go to the back of the class? Why you
don't need to be Einstein to work out the benefits of scientists in politics -- next.
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PHILLIPS: And finally tonight, the lineup of the world's most powerful leaders, the heads of the G7 nations. The odd one out? Yes, it is Angela
Merkel but not because she's the only woman or that she's easily the most secure, having won three successive elections.
No, it's because she knows stuff that would baffle the lawyers and the economists around her because Ms. Merkel is a scientist by background.
In my view, that's what makes her special, bringing a cool, rational evidence-based view to politics.
But I guess --
[14:25:00]
PHILLIPS: -- I would say that, having started life as a student of chemistry at the world's number one science university, Imperial College
London.
Still, what would a government of engineers and scientists look like?
Imagine a world with a government of geeks.
For head of state, the monarch, there's only one choice, Albert Einstein.
For Chancellor of the Exchequer, looking after the country's money, Sir Isaac Newton, who, after emerging from under his apple tree, became master
of the mint, literally making Britain's money.
For Foreign Secretary, a split appointment, Galileo Galilei and Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, two massive brains used to seeing the big picture.
For business, Elijah McCoy, a Canadian American engineer born to former slaves and a holder of an amazing 57 patents.
At Energy and Communications, Benjamin Franklin, who, when he wasn't busy inventing the lightning rod, writing the American Constitution or cavorting
with French prostitutes, served as an ambassador and postmaster general.
And over at Defense, Eliza Manningham-Buller; in a age of counterterrorism, the former MI-5 head is now chair of Council at Imperial College.
And at the head of the table a tossup: as a chemist, my heart says fellow lab rat Margaret Thatcher.
But my head says that, on the basis of the results, it has to be Dr. Merkel.
And, yes, there's one more post to fill: culture. Who else but Tom Lehrer, the Harvard mathematician, equally at home with statistics and
satire. Here's his take on the periodic table.
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TOM LEHRER, SCIENTIST AND SATIRIST: There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium and nickel,
neodymium, neptunium, germanium and iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium, Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium and lanthanum and osmium and
astatine and radium and gold and protactinium and indium and gallium.
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PHILLIPS: That's it for our program tonight. Sitting in for Christiane Amanpour tomorrow, my old friend, distinguished British broadcaster Andrew
Neil.
I'm Trevor Phillips. Thank you for watching and goodbye from London.
END
