Hi, there. I'm John Fish,
and today I'm here to talk to Bryan Stevenson
about his book and his film "Just Mercy."
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When people of privilege are asked to confront their, uh,
their privilege and to confront the fact that they might
be perpetuating injustice, it's uncomfortable.
- Yeah. - How do we get people
to face that discomfort and to question
whether or not what they're doing is perpetuating
- injustice and inequality? - Yeah.
I think it's a really important question.
And you're absolutely right,
what we have to remind people
is that justice only comes,
change only comes, progress only comes,
when we're willing to do uncomfortable things.
And the hard thing is that because we're human,
we're biologically and psychologically
programmed to do what's comfortable.
And too many people positioned in power
in our criminal justice system aren't proximate
to poor and excluded and neglected people or abused people.
We all have to be mindful
of the way in which we are privileged
and not let our privilege
and our power block us from seeing things
that we need to see.
I just wanna say, you know, I admire you a ton.
I was hoping that we could look at the last line of the book
and then maybe share, you know, why you chose to end the book on that note.
- Yeah. Okay, terrific. - So I have it here for you.
Yeah, that last line I wrote as an epilogue.
I just wanted to end the book with an awareness that, um,
even though we resolved some of the cases that I describe,
we're still in the middle of a struggle.
We're still in the middle of a crisis
where there are thousands of people
who are wrongly convicted,
and there's a lot of injustice that we still need to address.
You probably saw when you're reading this,
you know, I'd-- I'd circled the word "hope."
And I think that's a really important message here.
And was that, you know, something that you wanted to end on?
Absolutely.
I often say that hopelessness is the enemy of justice.
Injustice prevails where hopelessness persists.
And I do think we have to be willing
to fight against the things that make us hopeless
so we can fight for the things that we care about that matter.
I tell people about my grandmother,
who was somebody who was very formative for me,
and she taught me the power of proximity.
When I was about eight or nine, she started doing this thing
where she would come up to me and she'd give me these hugs
and she'd squeeze me so tightly
I thought she was trying to hurt me.
And then she'd see me an hour later and she'd say,
"Bryan, do you still feel me hugging you?"
And if I said no, she would jump on me again.
It's the simplest but sometimes the most important thing we can do
is to get proximate to people who are poor and excluded and neglected.
When we're close enough to them
that we can actually wrap our arms around them
and embrace them and affirm their humanity
and affirm their dignity,
then we create the conditions to do justice work.
That's what opens your eyes and your mind
and your heart to doing justice.
That was the one moment that really touched me.
I almost started crying when I heard him talk about it.
This idea of proximity, and the idea that in order
to understand the nature of injustice,
and therefore pursue justice,
we have to be proximate to those
who are facing the unjust circumstances.
We sometimes forget that the people on death row are actually humans.
In reading this book, you get exposure to these people
who through no fault of their own
have gone through the criminal system,
have spent years on death row when they were innocent people.
To me, understanding this gives me a reason
to pursue justice further in my own life.
Catch me having a conversation with Bryan Stevenson
about criminal justice reform, about confronting discomfort
from a privileged position, and so much more
in the full episode of "BookTube" on YouTube Originals.
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