The San Jose State University community had a conversation about the quality of humanity and its implication to current social issues with American writer Shaun King and other San Jose community leaders on Wednesday evening in the Student Union Ballroom.
King is a civil rights activist who gained prominence on social media after his writing on the Black Lives Matter movement.
Before getting involved in civil rights activism, he was a historian. He presented the evolution of humanity and applied that to issues happening in the current era.
In the 19th century, German historian Leopold von Ranke, who pioneered the creation of a college degree program in the study of history, created the first anecdotal timeline in human history by collecting thousands upon thousands of human stories.
“He thought when he put all of these stories in chronological order, it would show him human beings were getting better over time,” King said.
However, people did not improve steadily over time. The chronological chart showed peaks and troughs of the quality of humanity.
“We are now in the dip of the quality of humanity,” King said. “It’s easy to get in the dip but hard to get out of the dip.”
King presented the data of United States and federal prison population from 1925 through 2014 and the international rates of imprisonment, illustrating the high record of prison populations in the past two decades have made it rank first internationally in terms of the imprisonment rate.
“Right now, the U.S. has more people in prison than any country in the history of the world,” King said. He explained that the U.S. is exceeding Rwanda in the imprisonment rate, the country that just escaped from genocide, “Basically, we have a genocidal level of imprisonment,” he said.
King stated that though the steadily rising graph did not infer the evolution of humanity, it only showed the improvement of technology. He then asked the crowd to think about the question, “If humanity is getting better and better, how do we explain this?”
King said, in order for people to get out from the dip, people should become energized and be organized.
After achieving that, “the good news is you are halfway there, the bad news is most of us are stuck at halfway,” he added.
He added that improving the quality of humanity also requires a sophisticated plan which is almost as comprehensive as the problem.
“I think people in this generation don’t know how to make a change and it’s not only just about being educated on the things that are going on, but also how to organize as a community and implicate those laws and bills,” sociology senior Edith Villanueva said.
Though King talked about the evolution of humanity theoretically, a panel discussing local social issues was held.
U.S. Representative of California District 17 Ro Khanna, director of LGBTQ Affairs Santa Clara County Maribel Martinez, the co-founder of Silicon Valley De-Bug Raj Jayadev and the leader of California National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Alice Huffman joined King for the panel session.
Responding to students’ concerns about expression of defeat regardless of the importance of voting, director of LGBTQ Affairs Santa Clara County Maribel Martinez said, “Voting is one aspect of ways that we can get involved and it is one aspect that is by definition designed to exclude certain voices.
Kinesiology senior Takia Tinney said she felt inspired by their talk about the importance of voting. “In the world today, instead of being frustrated and feeling like you can’t do anything, just start with voting,” Tinney said.
The community leaders also talked about inequality in specific areas in California. Martinez suggested that informing decision-makers is a way to protect socially vulnerable groups. “Data point, research, intersectionality and engagement stories are so important to the work that we need to do,” she said.
