Van Jones Plenary at the IONS 2007 Conference (transcript)
Lynne Twist: It’s my absolute honor to introduce our next speaker, and I’m sure I’ll cry, so if you want to cry with me, please don’t hold back. This is a person with huge heart. You know, that chart that Howard had up there – Van Jones’ heart goes all the way around the world and then back. Van is the president and founder of the Ella Baker Center. He’s a graduate of Yale Law School. He’s from rural Tennessee. He was a top student. He was black. He was charismatic – still is. He was handsome – he still is. He was brilliant – he still is. He could have been hired by any big law firm in the country. They were probably fighting over him. But what he did after that brilliant education was go into the underbelly of our society, and devote himself to the underserved. In the prison system – the horrors of the prison system, the horrors of the ghetto in our cities – he has devoted himself to the transformation of life for the underprivileged, the underserved, the dark places in our culture. He’s one of the first U.S. Ashoka Fellows, he was a Rockefeller Youth Fellow, he’s received the Reebok Award for Human Rights.
The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, by the way, is one of the premier organizations now working not only in the prison system but on transforming our economy so it’s a green economy that lifts all boats. He has his feet in the concrete and his head in the stars. He’s my friend and my teacher. Some time ago, I realized that I wanted to enter into a process to unpack the consequences of white privilege in my own life, and in everybody’s lives, in a group like this, a place where we’ve been given privileges that we don’t understand, and we don’t understand the consequences of those privileges. Van has been my teacher in that journey, and he’s become a great teacher for the organization that I co-founded with my husband, The Pachamama Alliance. He’s a hero. He’s one of the most important voices in the political process of our time. He’s one of the greatest young leaders that we have in this country. He’s a spiritual activist of the first order. Please help me in welcoming my friend and teacher, Van Jones.
Van Jones: Oh, now I’m crying! They asked me if I was going to have a PowerPoint thing today, and I said “No, ‘cause I only have one PowerPoint, and I have to do that at two o’clock.” My PowerPoint is called “The PowerPoint that Al Gore Would Give If He Was Black.” That’s my PowerPoint, but you’ve gotta wait until two o’clock for that. I just want to just take the time that we have together to talk a little bit from our hearts about my journey to the work that I’m doing. And it’s been a journey, hasn’t it? It’s been a journey.
And I want to honor and acknowledge IONS and Lynne and the whole family for holding and creating a container for this kind of conversation, before The Secret made it popular, right? Before it was cool, before the presidential candidates were sneaking peeks on their planes of The Secret to try to get their thoughts right. This has been a community that’s held that conversation, and many of you have been the people who – when it wasn’t cool – were willing to be the pioneers, to be the people out on the frontier, and I know it has not been easy for you. Some of you, when you go home to see your family for Thanksgiving – it’s awkward, just a little, like anybody. And some of you have actually – in your minds, in your hearts, in your writings, in your workshops, in the things you’ve committed yourselves to – you actually have a piece of the answer that the whole world has been waiting for, and yet at this moment in time, it may never have been acknowledged properly. It may not have been embraced. You may not have been invited up onto a stage at IONS yet, and yet what you are doing – the impact of what you are doing – the piece that you understand is so critical, and I just want to share with you my journey and hope that there’s somebody out there that maybe needs some hope and some help in holding on, in keeping on believing that someday you will be able to make this contribution. Some of you are already quite accomplished – I’m not going to talk to y’all… I’m sorry – y’all. I’m talking to the folks who, a couple years ago, would have been like me, sitting out there, and knowing that yes, this is resonating, because there’s something even deeper resonating in you. And I want to say that my journey to where I am, didn’t start with the great accolades that I now get to hear associated with me.
I started out in rural West Tennessee, and I got a minority scholarship to go to the University of Tennessee, and I’m going to tell you the truth about it – it wasn’t even my minority scholarship. I have a twin sister… they can’t take it back now, it’s too late – the statute done run out!! I have a twin sister who actually is the brains in the family. She’s a social worker in rural West Tennessee, raising two boys by herself, and she’s the brains. Okay… she’s one of those people who deserve to be up on these stages, because she knows more than anybody. And she had this bad habit of doing her homework, and all the colleges and the universities and everything, they wanted my sister, you know. And she said “I’m not gonna go to any of your schools if you don’t accept my brother. You won’t let him come, I’m not coming.” And they gave her a scholarship, and then they gave me a scholarship to get her. So I’m a second-hand affirmative action, pre-legacy admit! So I know what’s possible if you give somebody a chance – I know what’s possible.
So I started out going to University of Tennessee at Martin and studying to be a journalist, and learning about how you write and you communicate – and I loved it. And then I went to Shreveport, Louisiana, and I had the opportunity to be an intern at a newspaper down there. Now I grew up in the South, but… your parents protect you when you’re a black child in the South. They just don’t take you certain places. They make sure that you think the whole world is for you. But then I got away from my Mom and my Daddy and I got to Shreveport and I didn’t know where to go and where not to go, and I saw things that broke my heart about our country, and I said “I want to do something about this!” And so I went back to school and I changed over, and I applied to go to law school. And by this time I had picked up my sister’s bad habits and I had pretty good grades, and I wanted to go to a good law school, and my professor, Ted Mosch, he said, “Well, look through this book, and tell me which one you want to go to.” And I saw that there’s a school called “Yale” and they didn’t have grades! There’s no grades the first year! I said, “Well, that’s easy, no grades, they can’t fail me out!” So I said, “Well, I want to go to this one – this Yale place.” And I’ve heard of Yale, but I just didn’t know where it was – it could have been in London, England for all I knew – so, he said, “Well, that’s a tough school to get into.” And I said, “Well, how tough is it?” And he said, “Well, you have to score 96th percentile on your law school admissions test.” Well, I said, “I score 96s all the time – ain’t no big deal to me. I’m going to Yale!” I started shouting to my friends, “I’m going to Yale!” “Man, you ain’t going to Yale!” “I’m going to Yale!” And, you know, well, nobody at our school got into probably any law school, let alone Yale – “You’re not going!” And I said, “I’m going,” and I said “I’m gonna do good.” And I practiced, and I took my practice LSAT test, and I scored 26th percentile.
And, you know, pride and vanity and egotism can be a good thing once you’ve told everybody you know that you’re gonna go to Yale Law School and they laughed in your face! So, my life turned into an academic Rockymovie. I would get up in the morning… [hums Rocky theme]… I mean, I could remember – and I’m not joking – I could remember sitting with my back against the cold glass doors of the library at six o’clock in the morning, before the building opened – before the building opened. I could remember walking into the library with the fluorescent lights clicking on, and going down to the basement and studying and drilling and studying, and coming out and the building is full of people and I don’t know how they got there, just trying to master this material and do well on this test.
So I went to take the test and you have to take the test – they won’t let you take the test at the University of Tennessee at Martin – you gotta go to Vanderbilt Universitay to take the test. So I go and it’s all these people who – they’ve probably met a lawyer before; at that point I hadn’t – taking this test. And I had only one prayer going in, and I said, “Please, God, don’t let them test me on analytical first” – reading comprehension and logical, I’m awesome. Analytical, can’t deal with it. “Don’t let me test me on analytical first, and then don’t let ‘em double-test me on analytical. Don’t let that happen, and I’ll be all right.” First thing? – (crowd shouts “Analytical”). Second thing? – (crowd shouts “Analytical”). Right? So I’m in the bathroom crying – bawling – and about to leave, okay, because I blew it. No way I even have the stamina now to finish the test, and I waited, and everyone is in the restroom and they’re talking, and I’m hiding in the stall. And then they, you know, they’re talking… “Looking forward to going to…” And I was like, “Oh man…” So finally, the bathroom’s empty. I’m in there by myself. I’m about to walk out the building, get in my car, and go home, and I’m washing my face off, and I said, “God, if you just let me go to any law school, I promise that when I get out, I’m going to do something to help somebody. And it doesn’t have to be Yale. Harvard! … it could be…”
Well, to make a long story short – I finished the test best I could, went back to my campus, started talking down on the law thing… “You know, lawyers aren’t really that important anymore. Journalism actually is the future, and you know, I may go or not go…” And then my grades arrived, my score, you know, they torture you for six weeks, right? You’re not… you can’t just put your thing and get your answer, you have to wait six weeks, every day, sweating. And I saw it in my dorm, opened the thing up, and there was this little, thin piece of paper. Reached in there, and I pulled it out, and I said, “This is going to determine something about the rest of my life,” and I opened it up. 96th percentile. 96th percentile.
So, when I got to Yale, I had a mandate. You know, you don’t want to default on that kind of a deal with God! Ugly consequences. And something happened to me at Yale that put me on this journey. I got there and I saw something I’ve never seen before. I saw – I grew up Christian kid, rural South, protected family – I saw drug use and drug abuse. I’ve never seen anything like it – the amount of drugs that were being taken by the undergraduates at Yale. And I… anybody been to New Haven? Anybody ever been there? You can stand on one corner and you can see the campus and you can see the housing projects, within eyesight of each other. And there were children – teenagers, 18, 19 years old – doing copious amounts of drugs in both places. But when the system found out about the elite Ivy League students doing drugs, they would intervene by helping them. Get them into rehab. They would let them pause their grades in the middle of finals, okay? Let them withdraw quietly. Let them go to Europe, you know? Get your act together, and then come back and start it back up again, and then those students went on to become doctors and lawyers – the President of the United States… you know what I’m talking about… okay?
And the students, the young people, the youth three blocks away doing the same thing were going to prison, getting 6, 8, 12, 20-year prison sentences for the same behavior. And I asked my law dean at the time, “How can this be?” And he said, “Well, Van, those kids in New Haven are drug dealers, they’re drug pushers. Our students are experimenting with drugs.” And I said, “That’s why I was sent there – I’m going to do something about that.” And so I started my work to try to do something about that, and I hurt myself. I hurt myself. I would work – when I got out of law school, I moved to the Bay Area – I would work 18, 20-hour days. I would sleep sometimes with the lights on. I’d get up in the morning and I’d still have my shoes on, papers all on the bed. I wasn’t eating right. But I just was so passionate. I would go and I would see these kids in public high schools – thirty kids in the classroom with one teacher, and six books and no chalk. You know, you do the work that I do, you go to a lot of funerals– nobody wants to go to a funeral, but the one thing that you don’t want to see is young people in the caskets and old people in the pews. There’s something about it that is so devastating, and it gets to the point where, you know, we have three and four-year-old children now in places like Oakland, if they see balloons or flowers, they start crying. They think it’s another funeral. They think it’s a sidewalk memorial, okay?
And I was just so passionate that I got to a point where I started to realize that everyone around me was an idiot… right? All these people are crazy! And on one July day I just had a complete breakdown – psychological, physical, emotional; I couldn’t get out of bed. And that was the beginning of this journey, for me, because I couldn’t be any good to anybody else.
Luckily, I was in the Bay Area, and I started to read in the papers about these “spirituality retreats.” Now, I gotta tell you, my friends, being from the rural South, going to a “spirituality retreat” is not something you tell your friends about. But something about it called to me, and there were people like Julia Butterfly and these people who were in the newspapers, and I said, “I’m just gonna go.” And I started to just sit in the back and just listen to what they were talking about, and they were like, “I want you to breathe deeply into your heart space.” And I said, “Well, paid my three hundred dollars, I mean I guess I’d better try it.” And it worked! It worked! And I became passionate about it, and I started to read and study and go to all these different things and workshops and stuff and I mean, I was living in Marin County, man. And then this funny thing happened. Then I come back to Oakland, and I start trying to tell people about all the things I’m discovering. Now let me tell you how good my friends are to me in Oakland. When I was sleeping three hours a day, nobody thought I was crazy – a little edgy, a little difficult, sometimes obnoxious – not crazy. Now they’re like, “Let me get this straight – you go off in the woods and beat drums with white people. Boy, you crazy! You… you… something’s wrong with you. You need help, son.” So, I had some translation difficulty with some of the curricula, but I didn’t give up.
And the other thing that happened to me going into these spirituality things was I began to feel comfortable enough to express myself. And I said, “You know, I love you people. I’ve learned so much from you. I’ve been lifted up, I’ve been transformed, I’m still a student, but this has been a powerful thing. I have to ask one question. What is up with the food y’all eat? I mean, there’s no meat, I mean, what is… what is tofu? I don’t understand. What’s the attraction? Somebody help me understand the tofu.”
And I began to learn about the whole green thing, and I had a revelation and I said, “You know what? The crises that I see in this country are three. There’s a social and economic crisis, with these young people not having jobs and opportunity. There’s this big ecological crisis, with the global warming and all the threats to our planetary survival. And there’s a spiritual crisis and a loss of hope.” So what if we did this: what if we solved all three? What if we created a green economy that was strong enough to lift people out of poverty and restore hope? What if we said: “We don’t have any throwaway species or throwaway energy sources, and we don’t have any throwaway children, either.” And it’s not an accident that the country that’s the biggest polluter in the world has the most prisons. It’s not an accident that the country with the most pollution has the most prisons – this throwaway mindset, and we’ve forgotten that it’s all precious and it’s all sacred. I said, “What if we brought Marin and Oakland together,” and said, “We’re gonna give these young people opportunity to put up those solar panels and have green jobs – green-collar jobs – in the new trades that are emerging. Help them to become the entrepreneurs in bio-fuels and wind power and all the positive things that need to be done. The country has to be fixed, ecologically and economically. Let’s give these young people the tools and the technology to do it. Let’s give them the tools.” I said, “What if we had green jobs, not jails, for these young people? What if we had green jobs and not jails?” And when I had that epiphany, my hope was restored and my energy came back, and I started to believe again that there was something that we could do.
I want to tell you this story that just happened to me recently that will give you a sense, I think, if all of us just keep believing, where we can go. We worked in Oakland to get people to accept this idea and understand this idea. We came up with something we called the Green Jobs Corps, where young people could go to our community colleges and learn all these new trades and be a part of this thing. And as we got that idea rolling in Oakland and our City Council got excited about it, we started getting a phone call. And I have, unfortunately, a lot of young people that work in my organization now. I’m 38, and I look at these young people and I worry about them, because they are not very… I don’t know… knowledgeable about public affairs sometimes, and I realize it’s because of hip-hop radio stations and rock stations or whatever – they don’t listen to NPR! I’m saying this as background – not to put them down, but just to say that when I got the phone call, my notes said that it was from Nancy Peloskai. And I said, “Who is Nancy Peloskai, and why does she keep calling my office?” And then finally, as we figured out that it was Nancy Pelosi, I was like, “Oh… you mean, the third-most powerful person in the United States? Speaker of the House of Representatives? You mean the person… you know, if Bush and Cheney choke on a pretzel, she’s President? That… that Nancy Pelosi? I mean… I might want to return this call!”
So, turned out that our little work in Oakland – just trying to get those young brothers and sisters a job – some young people who work for her, just across the bridge in San Francisco, had come to some of our meetings, and they had heard what we were talking about, and they went back and they said, “Boss, you got to meet these guys.” And what happened was, she was putting together a roundtable discussion about “How are we going to solve global warming?” And the young staffers said “You’ve got to have these guys from Oakland,” and you know, “Well, fine, we’ll bring them, we’ll invite them, that’s fine, we don’t care, we’ll invite them.” So I got this invitation to go, and I’m going to be sitting in the room next to the third-most powerful person in the country… in two days. (No, no, no, this is in the past.) So, I get there and I’m sitting there, and I had read my instructions very well because I didn’t want to mess up, okay?
And there were all these fancy people – political donors, scientists, people from Silicon Valley, venture capital people, big players – Carl Pope from the Sierra Club. About forty people all around this table – and me. And I read the instructions. The instructions said – very clearly – this is the instructions: “We will have brief – capital BRIEF - underlined, bold BRIEF - introductions from everybody, the speaker will address us, and then we will have a discussion.” So – what are the instructions? How long am I supposed to talk? (Audience shouts “Brief”). How long? (Audience shouts “Brief”). Brief. So I worked on it.
So, the Speaker comes in, she sits down. She’s sitting right there. Gavin Newsom, the mayor, is sitting right there, and then me. The Speaker comes in, she says “Hello,” Gavin says “Welcome, start the introductions.” Here’s my introduction: “Hello, my name is Van Jones, I work at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. We work to get kids out of jail and into jobs.” Right? That’s brief. That’s brief. I was like, “Man… I mean, hey, now let’s get on with it.” The guy sitting next to me, he says, “Madame Speaker.” That was good, that was good… it was… he does good. “First, I want to thank you for your support of…” And this guy talks for like two minutes, and I’m looking at this guy and I’m like, “This guy is an idiot. Right? He’s stupid. It says “brief”; he’s not brief. This guy… the Speaker is going to kick his butt. I can’t wait to see her tell him to shut up because this guy can’t read. He’s illiterate! Why is he here?”
So then, the next person talks, and he talks for three minutes…and the next person talks. And I started looking around the room. They’ve done this before. Their staffs have prepared them; they have briefing papers. It turns out when you meet with the Speaker of the House, the introductions are the meeting. And as it went around and as it went around and as it went around, the time for the meeting ran out. And I said to myself, “Well… I did great! I did great. I’m too hard on myself – that’s my problem – I’m too hard on myself. I did great, I’m sure I did great, I’m just feeling like I didn’t do great, but it’s just a feeling, and feelings aren’t facts.” And I started doing my whole thing. And then I looked – and there’s a list of everybody who spoke, because it was given to her by the staff in the order, and everybody’s name has copious notes written beside it – except my name, which was blank.
Time had run out. There’s no more time, and I had the opportunity to do something and I blew it. And now I’ve gotta go and get on my BART train and go back to Oakland, and explain to my staff and explain to the supporters and kids in the building that I had a chance to say something and do something, and I blew it. And I was sitting there and it all came back to me: being a kid, being the skinny, nerdy guy – all of that – shame – and I’m looking at this woman, and she starts to get her papers together and she says, “Well, we have to go now to this press conference next door. Thank you very much for your time, we’ve got to go to this press conference. Any questions?”
Any questions? Oh, I got a question. My hand shot up. I knew it was wrong! I’m not so country-ignorant that I didn’t know it was wrong. I knew that I was wrong. I knew I was out of order. I knew that she didn’t mean “Are there any questions?” like “Do you have a question?” She meant “Are there any questions” like “Get up and get out of here, it’s time to go.” I knew that. I knew that. But sometimes you gotta break the rules. Sometimes you gotta break the rules. And I said… I said, “Madame Speaker, I have a question.” And you know what? Her smile got real tight. You know, it was just professional, she’s not going to tell me, “You’re ignorant and shut up.” But she’s, you know… her smile got tight and she was like, “Well, what is it, ‘cause we’re late, and we’ve got to go.”
And I said, “Madame Speaker, will you say four words? I want to just ask you if you’ll say four words at this press conference, because if you say these four words, you’ll ensure that the Democrats have a majority in the House for the next 20 years, if you just say these four words. You’ll expand the coalition that’s fighting against global warming immeasurably. You’ll give help and you’ll give hope to people who haven’t had help or hope for a long time, if you just say these four words.” Now, at this point, everybody in the room is doing this. Leaning away from the crazy black guy, you know what I mean? (Laughter)
And Speaker Pelosi said, “Well, what are the words?” I said, “Would you just please say these words: Clean Energy Jobs Bill. Clean Energy Jobs Bill.” I said, “We have children in Oakland that have been to more funerals than fairgrounds. We have children in Oakland who people come in and say ‘Don’t shoot nobody; don’t do drugs; don’t get pregnant,’ and they get in their car and they drive away, and nobody’s told them what they can do. Nobody’s giving them a mission. Nobody’s said, ‘You’re beautiful, and I’ve got a job for you.’” I said, “Madame Speaker, if you would say to those young people, ‘I’ve got a nation I’ve got to retrofit and reboot. We’ve gotta create a whole new system of energy. We’ve gotta put up millions of solar panels, build thousands of wind farms; we’ve gotta weatherize millions of buildings. I want to put the tools in your hand, young people. We need strong minds and strong bodies; I need your help!’ If you would just reach out to them and tell them that they are somebody, and that they matter to you, and that you’ve got something that only they can do to help you fix this problem – Madame Speaker, if you’d just say those four words, you’ll give help and you’ll give hope to a generation, that people have given up on. If you’ll just say those words.”
And then I thought to myself, “Maybe I’ve gone too far.” …‘cause the room was pin-drop quiet, but thankfully, all the workers, all the interns, the people fetching coffee, the people bringing the copies back – standing around the room like wallpaper; nobody even remembered they were there – they started clapping – they started clapping – and they started cheering, so then all the expert people, they were… (claps slowly). The Speaker smiles, and then she’s like, “Yeah, yeah, we’ve got to go, we’ve got to get over there.”
And I said, “Well, at least something’s going to be on the paper. At least you’ve got to write something down, you know, she can’t just leave it blank now; she’s got to put something on the paper, am I right?” So, we get there, we’re at the press conference, and Speaker Pelosi’s standing there and she’s talking and whatever – and you know me, I’m like (leans in like he’s posing and trying to be seen in a photo), “I’m getting in the shot. I don’t care – I’m getting in this shot. Excuse me, I’m sorry, I’m sorry… ‘cause Mama’s gotta see this… Mama’s gotta see this.” And the Speaker stopped in the middle of her comments and she just looked down, and she departed from her comments and she said, “You know something? We didn’t come here today to issue any big pronouncements. This was just an informational meeting. But there was something that was said in our session that nobody disagreed with. Where’s Van Jones?” And I’m like… (raises his hand)… She says, “Come here, come here.” She says to me, “We’re going to say it together. Clean Energy Jobs Bill. Tell them about it, son.”
And I want you to know that I’m so proud to announce that on Saturday – just this past Saturday, six days ago – included in the big energy package that was passed on a bipartisan vote – Title 1– to put 125 million dollars into training 35,000 people every year in green-collar jobs – passed in the House! (Audience cheers.) It passed in the House! It passed in the House! And we didn’t have any money, and we didn’t have any big lobbyists. All we had was a prayer, and I’m going to tell you – they’re going to tell you forever that it’s too late. On global warming they’re going to say, “The time has run out. It’s too late.” Your bestseller that you want to write is “too late.” And I’m telling you it’s not too late. I don’t care what the facts look like, what the circumstances look like – it’s not too late.
We can come together and we can fix these problems. Sometimes we’ve got to break the rules. Sometimes we’ve got to break the rules. Sometimes we have to go beyond the little person that we still try to deal with inside. But if we do that, the lesson of Katrina – the lesson of Katrina – will be learned and put into practice. We had a free-market evacuation plan in an American city that was underwater. I don’t know if you remember. The free-market evacuation plan: if you had a credit card and if you had a functioning car you could live, and if not you had to stay behind to possibly die. The lesson of Katrina tells us that in an age of floods, in an age of ecological peril, there can be no ideology that says, “Let people sink or swim.” No ideology that says, “Let people sink or swim.” We need a world view such as you’re building here that says, “We are all in this together, we’re not going to leave anybody behind, and we are just one miracle away from the outcome that we need.”
Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
Great Shift Dialogues
