When my 91-year-old mother, Elia, moved in with me, I thought I was doing her a service.
In fact, it was the other way around.
You see, Mom was having issues with memory loss and accepting her age.
She looked defeated.
I tried to make her as comfortable as possible, but when I was at my easel, painting, I would peek over and see her just ... there.
She'd be staring at nothing in particular.
I'd watch her slowly climb the stairs, and she wasn't the mom I grew up with.
I saw, instead, a frail, tiny, old woman.
A few weeks went by, and I needed a break from my painting.
I wanted to play with the new camera I had just bought.
I was excited -- it had all sorts of dials, buttons and settings I wanted to learn, so I set up my tripod facing this large mirror, blocking the doorway to the only bathroom in the house.
(Laughter) After a while, I hear, (Imitating Italian accent) "I need to use the washroom."
(Laughter) "Five minutes, Mom.
I need to do this."
15 minutes later, and I hear, again, "I need to use the washroom."
"Five more minutes."
Then this happened.
(Laughter) (Applause) And this.
(Laughter) And then, this.
(Laughter) I had my "aha!" moment.
We connected.
We had something tangible we could do together.
My mom was born in a small mountain village in central Italy, where her parents had land and sheep.
At a young age, her father died of pneumonia, leaving his wife and two daughters alone with all the heavy chores.
They found that they couldn't cope.
So a very hard decision was made.
Mom, the oldest, at 13, was married off to a complete stranger twice her age.
She went from being just a kid and was pushed into adulthood.
Mom had her first child when she was only 16.
Years later, and now living in Toronto, Mom got work in a clothing factory and soon became manager of a very large sewing department.
And because it was full of immigrant workers, Mom taught herself words from translation books.
She then practiced them in French, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Polish, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, all around the house.
I was in awe of her focus and determination to succeed at whatever she loved to do.
After that bathroom "aha!" moment, I practiced my newfound camera skills with Mom as portrait model.
Through all of this, she talked, and I listened.
She'd tell me about her early childhood and how she was feeling now.
We had each other's attention.
Mom was losing her short-term memory, but was better recalling her younger years.
I'd ask, and she would tell me stories.
I listened, and I was her audience.
I got ideas.
I wrote them down, and I sketched them out.
I showed her what to do by acting out the scenarios myself.
We would then stage them.
So she posed, and I learned more about photography.
Mom loved the process, the acting.
She felt worthy again, she felt wanted and needed.
And she certainly wasn't camera-shy.
(Laughter) (Applause) Mom laughed hysterically at this one.
(Laughter) The idea for this image came from an old German film I'd seen, about a submarine, called "Das Boot."
As you can see, what I got instead looked more like "E.T."
(Laughter) So I put this image aside, thinking it was a total failure, because it didn't reach my particular vision.
But Mom laughed so hard, I eventually, for fun, decided to post it online anyway.
It got an incredible amount of attention.
Now, with any Alzheimer's, dementia, there's a certain amount of frustration and sadness for everyone involved.
This is Mom's silent scream.
Her words to me one day were, "Why is my head so full of things to say, but before they reach my mouth, I forget what they are?"
"Why is my head so full of things to say, but before they reach my mouth, I forget what they are?"
(Applause) Now, as full-time care partner and full-time painter, I had my frustrations too.
(Laughter) But to balance off all the difficulties, we played.
That was Mom's happy place.
And I needed her to be there, too.
(Laughter) (Laughter) (Laughter) Now, Mom was also preoccupied with aging.
She would say, "How did I get so old, so fast?"
(Audience sighs) "So old."
"So fast."
I also got Mom to model for my oil paintings.
This painting is called "The Dressmaker."
I remember, as a kid, Mom sewing clothes for the whole family on this massive, heavy sewing machine that was bolted to the floor in the basement.
Many nights, I would go downstairs and bring my schoolwork with me.
I would sit behind her in this overstuffed chair.
The low hum of the huge motor and the repetitive stitching sounds were comforting to me.
When Mom moved into my house, I saved this machine and stored it in my studio for safekeeping.
This painting brought me back to my childhood.
The interesting part was that it was now Mom, sitting behind me, watching me paint her working on that very same machine she sewed at when I sat behind her, watching her sew, 50 years earlier.
I also gave Mom a project to do, to keep her busy and thinking.
I provided her with a small camera and asked her to take at least 10 pictures a day of anything she wanted.
These are Mom's photographs.
She's never held a camera in her life before this.
She was 93.
We would sit down together and talk about our work.
I would try to explain (Laughter) how and why I did them, the meaning, the feeling, why they were relevant.
Mom, on the other hand, would just bluntly say, "sì," "no," "bella" or "bruta."
(Laughter) I watched her facial expressions.
She always had the last say, with words or without.
This voyage of discovery hasn't ended with Mom.
She is now in an assisted living residence, a 10-minute walk away from my home.
I visit her every other day.
Her dementia had gotten to the point where it was unsafe for her to be in my house.
It has a lot of stairs.
She doesn't know my name anymore.
(Voice breaking) But you know what?
That's OK.
She still recognizes my face and always has a big smile when she sees me.
(Applause) (Applause ends) I don't take pictures of her anymore.
That wouldn't be fair or ethical on my part.
And she wouldn't understand the reasons for doing them.
My father, my brother, (Voice breaking) my nephew, my partner and my best friend, all passed away suddenly.
And I didn't have the chance to tell them how much I appreciated and loved them.
With Mom, I need to be there and make it a very long goodbye.
(Applause) (Applause ends) For me, it's about being present and really listening.
Dependents want to feel a part of something, anything.
It doesn't need to be something exceptionally profound that's shared -- it could be as simple as walks together.
Give them a voice of interaction, participation, and a feeling of belonging.
Make the time meaningful.
Life, it's about wanting to live and not waiting to die.
(Applause) (Applause ends) Can I get a wave and a smile from everyone, please?
(Laughter) This is for you, Mom.
(Camera clicks) (Applause)
I'm a neuroscientist, a professor at the University of California.
And over the past 35 years, I've studied behavior on the basis of everything from genes through neurotransmitters, dopamine, things like that, all the way through circuit analysis.
So that's what I normally do.
But then, for some reason, I got into something else, just recently.
And it all grew out of one of my colleagues asking me to analyze a bunch of brains of psychopathic killers.
And so this would be the typical talk I would give.
And the question is, "How do you end up with a psychopathic killer?"
What I mean by psychopathic killer are these people, these types of people.
And so some of the brains that I've studied are people you know about.
When I get the brains I don't know what I'm looking at.
It's blind experiments.
They also gave me normal people and everything.
So I've looked at about 70 of these.
And what came up was a number of pieces of data.
So we look at these sorts of things theoretically, on the basis of genetics, and brain damage, and interaction with environment, and exactly how that machine works.
So we're interested in exactly where in the brain, and what's the most important part of the brain.
So we've been looking at this: the interaction of genes, what's called epigenetic effects, brain damage, and environment, and how these are tied together.
And how you end up with a psychopath, and a killer, depends on exactly when the damage occurs.
It's really a very precisely timed thing.
You get different kinds of psychopaths.
So we're going along with this.
And here's, just to give you the pattern.
The pattern is that those people, every one of them I looked at, who was a murderer, and was a serial killer, had damage to their orbital cortex, which is right above the eyes, the orbits, and also the interior part of the temporal lobe.
So there is the pattern that every one of them had, but they all were a little different too.
They had other sorts of brain damage.
A key thing is that the major violence genes, it's called the MAO-A gene.
And there is a variant of this gene that is in the normal population.
Some of you have this.
And it's sex-linked.
It's on the X chromosome.
And so in this way you can only get it from your mother.
And in fact this is probably why mostly men, boys, are psychopathic killers, or are very aggressive.
Because a daughter can get one X from the father, one X from the mother, it's kind of diluted out.
But for a son, he can only get the X chromosome from his mother.
So this is how it's passed from mother to son.
And it has to do with too much brain serotonin during development, which is kind of interesting because serotonin is supposed to make you calm and relaxed.
But if you have this gene, in utero your brain is bathed in this, so your whole brain becomes insensitive to serotonin, so it doesn't work later on in life.
And I'd given this one talk in Israel, just this past year.
And it does have some consequences.
Theoretically what this means is that in order to express this gene, in a violent way, very early on, before puberty, you have to be involved in something that is really traumatic -- not a little stress, not being spanked or something, but really seeing violence, or being involved in it, in 3D.
Right?
That's how the mirror neuron system works.
And so, if you have that gene, and you see a lot of violence in a certain situation, this is the recipe for disaster, absolute disaster.
And what I think might happen in these areas of the world, where we have constant violence, you end up having generations of kids that are seeing all this violence.
And if I was a young girl, somewhere in a violent area, you know, a 14 year old, and I want to find a mate, I'd find some tough guy, right, to protect me.
Well what the problem is this tends to concentrate these genes.
And now the boys and the girls get them.
So I think after several generations, and here is the idea, we really have a tinderbox.
So that was the idea.
But then my mother said to me, "I hear you've been going around talking about psychopathic killers.
And you're talking as if you come from a normal family."
I said, "What the hell are you talking about?"
She then told me about our own family tree.
Now she blamed this on my father's side, of course.
This was one of these cases, because she has no violence in her background, but my father did.
Well she said, "There is good news and bad news.
One of your cousins is Ezra Cornell, founder of Cornell university.
But the bad news is that your cousin is also Lizzie Borden.
Now I said, "Okay, so what?
We have Lizzie."
She goes, "No it gets worse, read this book."
And here is this "Killed Strangely," and it's this historical book.
And the first murder of a mother by a son was my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.
Okay, so that's the first case of matricide.
And that book is very interesting.
Because it's about witch trials, and how people thought back then.
But it doesn't stop there.
There were seven more men, on my father's side, starting then, Cornells, that were all murderers.
Okay, now this gives one a little pause.
(Laughter) Because my father himself, and my three uncles, in World War II, were all conscientious objectors, all pussycats.
But every once in a while, like Lizzie Borden, like three times a century, and we're kind of due.
(Laughter) So the moral of the story is: people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
But more likely is this.
(Laughter) And we had to take action.
Now our kids found out about it.
And they all seemed to be OK.
But our grandkids are going to be kind of concerned here.
So what we've done is I've started to do PET scans of everybody in the family.
(Laughter) We started to do PET scans, EEGs and genetic analysis to see where the bad news is.
Now the only person -- it turns out one son and one daughter, siblings, didn't get along and their patterns are exactly the same.
They have the same brain, and the same EEG.
And now they are close as can be.
But there's gonna be bad news somewhere.
And we don't know where it's going to pop up.
So that's my talk.
(Laughter)
I had just finished teaching Introduction to American Politics to a group of eager undergraduates.
This was my first year teaching, but I had pulled off a slamming lecture, and I was feeling good about myself.
As I left the classroom, I looked down at my phone and saw that I had five missed calls from my brother Kenny.
At the time, Kenny was a student at Temple University and living in North Philly.
For those who don't know North Philly, it's an area that is predominantly black and low-income, with a very visible police presence.
When I returned his phone call, Kenny is loud and swearing into the phone.
I can tell that something very bad happened, but I'm not sure what.
When I'm finally able to get him to calm down, he tells me how he was sitting on the stoop of his building talking to a friend when four police officers ran up on him and threw him and three others on the ground, handcuffed them and then pushed them up against a wall, all the while asking them, "What drugs do you have?
What drugs do you have?"
Kenny had no drugs.
He told the officers this many times, but each statement of no drugs only seemed to provoke more force and make the officers more upset.
As Kenny sat, cuffed, and slumped against a brick wall, he quietly told the officers that he was a student at Temple University and without reason, they could not hold him.
The officers finally retrieved his college ID, which was in his wallet that had slipped out when he was slammed to the pavement, realized that he was indeed in college, without drugs, and then let him go.
After Kenny told me this story, he was still loud and upset.
I was shaking, barely able to hold the phone to my ear, all of the joy from my great day of teaching - gone ...
and replaced with a deep sense of helplessness and alarm.
I wanted to remove the hurt and frustration that Kenny felt, that I could hear so clearly through the phone, but I neither had the will nor the ability to lie to him about the mightiness of American racism.
And we both silently knew that this would not be the last time that he would be stopped and frisked by the police for drugs.
In an attempt to try to calm him down and to shift attention onto something that he perhaps did have control over, I had this genius idea and suggested that he focused his attention on school work to kind of take his mind off of things.
He yells into the phone at me, "What is that going to do?
Why should I focus on my school work when the police are allowed to do things like this?"
And then he says to me, "I'm not a student in your class, Megan.
Your books are not going to save me."
I silently nodded on the other end of the phone, In a lifetime of often heated exchanges with him, I've probably never been more wrong, and he has never been more right.
Kenny is not alone.
This violent interaction between black men and women, and police officers plays out in cities and towns across the United States, often with much more devastating results.
According to the most recent statistics, blacks are three times more likely to be shot and killed by police than whites.
The question on everyone's mind and the question that I get asked the most is, "How do we solve this problem?"
And I confess I cringe at this question, not because it's not a good question, but because I think we're asking the wrong question.
I'm not convinced we even understand how we got to this point in the fist place.
Better understanding of the root causes of the current place where we are will help provide us with the tools that we need to move us forward.
However, I confess that even I sometimes am more eager to solve a problem than I am to understand it.
So a few years ago, I adopted a corgi from a shelter and named him President Bartlet, off of The West Wing.
(Laughter) Now, he's super adorable!
But he was abused, and he's very aggressive whenever he sees another dog.
My fix in my first year was to walk him at crazy hours of the day, but this worked only marginally well, and I was stressed and tired.
The following year, I decided to hire a trainer to try to figure the underlying issues behind his reactive behavior.
On the first day of our meeting, the trainer looks at me and says, "Fixes that do not address the root causes of an issue are not really madeline68@example.org."
I realized that in my haste to fix President Bartlet, I actually had made him worse.
The present crisis surrounding race in the United States, I think, suffers from a lack of attention to the root causes; Better attention to the root causes, I am convinced, will help us to figure out how to move past where we right now in terms of the current racial climate in the United States.
So why does the killing of unarmed blacks to continue to happen?
I think it continues to happen because we have the wrong diagnosis and the wrong cure.
And what I mean by this is we tend to think the problem of racial violence is isolated to a few stubborn racists that haven't yet drunk kind of this progressive Kool-Aid.
And we tend to think the cure to racial injustices in the United States should always revolve around education.
In the rest of my talk today, I'm going to challenge both of these ideas and suggest a new way to understand the problem, as well as the solution.
First, part of the reason the killing of unarmed blacks continues to happen at an alarming rate is because we haven't properly addressed our long history of racial terror in this country, which has treated blackness as a proxy for criminality, as a substitute for criminality.
Instead, when confronted with kind of these jarring racial injustices, what we like to do is to point to the bad racist apples.
We like to individualize the problem and situate it away from us.
This is why we're able to make sense of, let's say, a Dylann Roof, the shooter in Charlston, South Carolina, who shot up the black church and had a white-power manifesto.
But the problem with contemporary racial violence is not that we have a few kind of racist bad apples.
The problem is that the whole tree, the whole apple tree, is infected.
The problem is that the presumption of dangerousness is tightly bound to race for so many in this country.
For police officers to justify the use of deadly force, they have to reasonably believe that their lives are in danger.
In all the high-profile killings of blacks over the past year, officers attest to feeling under threat.
But what does this mean in the context of unarmed citizens?
It means that black skin triggers a heightened sense of threat, a life-threatening sense of threat, that then influences the officers' decision to use deadly force.
According to the most recent statistics, 33% of blacks that have been killed by police were unarmed.
But it's not just police that pop up this myth of black danger.
This myth gets reinforced and takes on a truth-like quality through everyday interaction, when a black man passes and a woman clutches her purse or when a group of black friends walk by a car and hear the jarring sound of someone who has just pushed their automatic locks because they are afraid.
And I have friends on both sides of this: black men with great jobs, who just want to be viewed as a person and not as a threat after a long day of work; and I have really great white and Asian woman friends, who clutch their purse and walk quickly if they see a black man on a dimly-lit street, and then feel ashamed in the need to over-explain their actions to me.
And I've also been on the receiving end of having who I was reduced to someone else's false perception of how much of a danger I posed.
Last year, I was coming back from a trip, and I was singled out by the TSA agent.
I thought that I had left a water bottle, like I often do, in my bag.
But he ushered me to a separate area, and then two more TSA agents surrounded me, and I knew in my gut that something bad was about to go down.
The lead TSA agent proceeds to ask - no, accuse - me of bringing a weapon into the airport.
When I insisted that I did not bring a weapon into the airport, he produces a piece of costume jewelry, a double ring that I had picked up for $4 on vacation.
It was like his "gotcha" moment, and it was my superconfused moment.
(Laughter) He then accuses me of bringing brass knuckles, a deadly weapon, into a United States airport.
I was almost at a loss of words, which is rare for someone like me, but I politely pointed out to him that the ring was plastic, it wasn't brass, and these weren't knuckles, it was just a ring that went over two fingers instead of one finger.
But have you ever talked to someone and felt like you didn't exist, like when they spoke to you, they spoke right through you?
Well, that's how I felt.
He got more angry at my explanations, looked me in my face, and said, "You people always lie.
I know that this is a weapon, and I'm not going to let someone dangerous like you board a plane today."
Well, I started to shake, right?
Because we've all seen this movie about the brown girl who walks into the airport with a deadly weapon, and it never really ends well for her.
It doesn't.
It never does.
So, I had to do what I hate doing, and I used my credentials to get me out of a bad situation.
I told him that I was a professor of Constitutional Law and American Politics.
(Laughter) Right?
(Applause) Yeah, so - (Applause) I cited US criminal code, landmark Supreme Court decisions, and rules from the Homeland Security Rulebook, because I also teach Civil Liberties.
And then he started to get very nervous.
(Laughter) He asked what school I worked at.
I told him, he Googled my name, and the blood drained from his face.
Right?
As he realized I wasn't making this up, I knew my rights and I was a college professor.
And then, when he looked back at me, he finally saw me, not as a dangerous threat, but as a person.
After a few more minutes, he let me go, to catch my much delayed flight, I found a seat in the airport terminal, still trembling with rage at the way that I had been treated.
I was only seated for a few minutes when I felt a tap on my shoulder.
A woman airport worker said that she saw my whole ordeal, and that he does this all the time to black passengers, and I was lucky to have been released from his custody so quickly.
But it shouldn't take a university website profile to be viewed as non-threatening, right?
(Applause) Part of the reason I shared this story and some of the other ones is that I think, in talking about the current racial crisis, we tend to focus all of our attention on police and overlook our own complicity in creating an environment in which black lives are not treated as equal.
To be clear in thinking about solutions to the racial violence, I'm in favor of body cameras, I'm in favor of a non-militarized police force, I'm in favor of stricter laws that make officers more accountable when they stop and frisk people on the street.
But i'm not convinced that we would need something like body cameras if we didn't live in a society that treat blacks as dangerous and suspicious first, and as citizens second.
It's not just a few bad racist apples in a police department or at an airport; it's all of us, who in big ways through our actions and in small ways by our silences, support this lie - because that's what it is, it's a lie - that somehow black folk are more dangerous than the rest of us.
So not only do I believe that we've misdiagnosed the problem, I also think we have the wrong cure to it.
We keep offering up education as a solution to all racial injustices in the United States.
It's kind of what I call sometimes in my classes as the "Robitussin of civil rights."
Like, when I was little, my mom loved Robitussin.
She would give me it.
I got a cold, Robitussin; flu, Robitussin Like, allergies?
Robitussin.
Like, where's the Penadryl?
(Laughter) But just like Robitussin is not a cure-all for all types of sicknesses, education is not a cure-all for all of America's racial sins.
And yet, education is still how most Americans understand the responsibility to fixing contemporary racial injustices.
Our measure of how far we have come in the area of race relations is most often calculated in how integrated our schools are, how many inovative education experiments are currently going on, and how many federal dollars are committed towards education.
But the contemporary problem surrounding the killing of unarmed blacks is not a problem that boils down to providing greater educational opportunities to blacks.
This is a misdiagnosis.
A book is not going to stop the bullet barreling through a gun at Rekia Boyd in Chicago, and longer classroom times are not going to save Freddie Gray from being illegally stopped and manhandled by police in Baltimore.
This is what I know for sure: that in order to combat continuing racial injustices today, we must expand our vision and our responsibility to what civil rights actually means.
We must include the battle against racist violence in our understanding of civil rights.
Instead of education, what if we placed freedom from racist violence at the crux of what it means to be free and equal in the United States?
Doing so does not mean that we necessarily dislodge education, but it means that if racism and white supremacy are a rock fortress, we assemble greater arsenal weapons to break the damn thing down.
(Applause) I know this is not an easy task, but I know that it can be done.
So in my real life, I'm a political scientist and a historian, and I've spent the last 10 years focused on a surprising finding: that before the civil rights group the NAACP focused on its historic campaign against segregated education, the NAACP spent the first two decades of the 20th century focused on fighting escalating levels of racial violence that blacks endured as a result of the actions from police, politicians, and private white citizens in the south and in the north.
In order to wage this big campaign against racial violence, the NAACP organized mass demonstrations in the streets.
They lobbied Congress to pass an anti-lynching bill.
They litigated and won a landmark decision in front of the Supreme Court.
And they petitioned three different presidents to make a statement against lynching.
It was this massive, extraordinary, in-your-face campaign that forced America to confront lynching and mob violence against African Americans.
It asked America how strong was its commitment to protecting black lives.
As a result of this work in early 20th century, the rates of lynching and mob violence dramatically decreased.
I tell this story about the NAACP's historic kind of campaign against racial violence because I believe our past history can light a way out of the present darkness.
If we listen to what this history tells us, then we must struggle through this current moment.
We must confront the ways that our actions and our institutions lead to a differential treatment of blacks, even if done unintentionally.
Today, people across the United States are taking to streets and are demanding to be seen, not as dangerous but as people whose lives have value and deserve protection.
Some of these groups are associated directly, and some indirectly, with the Black Lives Matter movement.
Without the efforts of these groups, so many of these killings of unarmed blacks would have been swapped under the rug, and we would have lost attention long ago.
But so many of these activists have denied the comforts of silence, and they are being active around this issue.
Their message and my message to you today is that we must pay closer attention to the way that black people are treated.
The story of police brutality and killings of unarmed blacks is not a story about black people.
It's a story about all of us, about racial progress and the stubborn durability of American racism.
It's about if we will stop making the mistakes of our past and confront our own complicity in this great American lie that somehow black people are more dangerous than others.
And finally, it's about if we have the courage to take a collective stand against racial injustice today.
This year, nearly half of my students in my race and politics upper division course participated in a walkout in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Halfway through my lecture, I could hear the swelling crowd of students, teachers and community members in the Quad at the University of Washington.
I smiled to myself as I had a flashback to the conversation that I had with Kenny, now five years ago.
He was right, of course.
My books and my silence will not save these students, but their activism, their courage in challenging the status quo, and this movement just might.
Thanks.
(Applause)