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0:00:08.6 Jackie Strohm: Welcome to PA Centered, a podcast designed to help listeners be a part of the solution to end sexual harassment, abuse and assault. Each episode we will take on a topic or current event to help spark conversation and break down barriers to building communities free from sexual violence.

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0:00:32.2 JS: Hi, I'm Jackie Strohm, the Prevention & Resource Coordinator at the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape. I'll be your host today as we're joined by Dean Conway to talk about the role of black women in the Suffrage Movement and how we can use history to better understand our world today. Danielle M. Conway is the Dean, and Donald J. Farage Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law. She is a leading expert in procurement law, entrepreneurship, intellectual property law and licensing intellectual property. She is the author or editor of six books and case books as well as numerous book chapters, articles and essays. Her most recent publication focuses on different aspects of building an anti-racist law school, legal academy and legal profession. Welcome, Dean Conway.

0:01:23.5 Danielle M. Conway: Thank you so much, Jackie. It's really good to be with you and your listeners.

0:01:29.2 JS: We're so excited to have you. So just so folks know, over the last few months PCAR has been sharing many episodes called History You Should Know, to celebrate and highlight stories of people who advanced the anti-sexual violence movement, particularly black women. So we're very excited to have Dean Conway on the podcast today because she has a lot to share with us about the historical elements of the women's suffrage movement. But first, Dean Conway, you are a co-recipient of the Inaugural Association of American Law Schools impact award for your work in establishing the Law Deans Antiracist Clearinghouse Project. So could you tell us more about that project? 

0:02:13.3 DC: Certainly, and thank you for spotlighting that award. I received that award with four other black women who I refer to as my sister law deans, and we received this award based out of what we all experienced this summer, this past summer in 2020 with the murder of George Floyd. And in trying to deal with that murder and what it represented in black communities at the same time trying to lead an institution, at the same time trying to be a mother and a spouse, I leaned on my four sister deans to find balance, to find support and to find a path through that trauma. And that trauma, which has been repeated for centuries with respect to the harm that is caused by white supremacy, white dominance, racial inequality that harm to black bodies.

0:03:35.2 DC: And so in processing and dealing with that trauma we came up, the five of us, with this concept about exposing anti-racism and its benefits to our colleagues who were equally dealing with similar trauma. And they may not be identifying as black women but they are leading in spaces where people of color exist and are training to be advocates, who are training to promote the rule of law, and so we knew that all of our colleagues across the 200 law schools were grappling with what this murder meant and law's response and law's complicity in it. And so we decided to use a collective voice through this Law Deans Antiracist Clearinghouse Project to log explicitly our condemnation of this kind of harm, state sanctioned harm, abuse of police authority, abuse of government authority against black bodies and that spelled out the components of the Antiracist Clearinghouse Project.

0:05:08.4 DC: And it's comprised of five phases and it's built on a system design approach to combating racism bias and community safety. And it starts with a listening phase, a learning phase, and then a leadership phase and then we have a audit phase where we say to leaders of institutions, "What can you do to implement anti-racism in those institutions you lead?" And then it ends with an iterative phase meaning this doesn't stop, it is not one and done. This is a perpetual activity to see justice and equality, and so commit to it by coming back to the Antiracist Clearinghouse and re-committing to each and every phase to do it over and over and over again in service and in pursuit of equality.

0:06:25.0 JS: I think that is so important, the idea that it's not just a once-and-done conversation, it's not just one step. And I feel like that's where our society has landed right now with doing anti-racism work. Someone's like, "I read a book, so I'm good." And it's like, "No, this is a life-long commitment, and we can always be learning more and doing better." So I love that there are action steps associated with this.

0:06:52.7 DC: Exactly.

0:06:54.6 JS: Are there any other key takeaways from the project that you wanted to share? 

0:07:00.4 DC: Absolutely. I think another key takeaway is implicit in my description of it, we're not doing this alone, and you should not think that you are alone in this work. And I think that sometimes where we have challenges with... Real challenges with people's well-being, with their health, and with their emotional and physical security, in that people feel at times that they are in this battle alone. And this battle for justice is not and should not be a lonely endeavor. And that's where you hear and learn about the terms about allyship and sponsorship and stewardship. These terms are important and people's identities shift depending on what crisis we're dealing with. So it doesn't mean that we only support each other when one type of harm occurs, oppression is myriad. And so we have to be there for one another, holding one another up in these times of crisis, but also in times of chronic harm. And that's what systemic racism and systemic oppression and inequality are, they are chronic harms that are repetitive and embedded in society and our systems, and we have to be mindful that in order to meet these chronic harms, we must do it together.

0:08:43.2 JS: Absolutely. So could you tell us a little bit about the role that black women played in the Women Suffrage Movement? 

0:08:55.5 DC: Yeah. It's really quite connected to what we're talking about, and I like to think of black women having a really long genealogy. One could cast it as we're fighting the same battles, but another way to think about it is that black women are symbolic of concepts of universal equality, universal suffrage, a universal approach to humanity. And when you think about the genealogy of black women, especially in relation to coming into the Americas, it is one of slavery, it's one of domination, and it's one of being positioned as property, not even human. And when you think just about the work that you do with the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape, a lot of it is rooted in that kind of domination and the history of it. And so black women were especially vulnerable in slave society because they were seen as reproductive property. And so the more children that a slave had, the more property interest grew in the slave holder. And so black women were always especially vulnerable to rape, to attack, to abuse. And at the same time, not being seen as women, being seen as property, but also having to do these same kinds of work as black men were made to do under slave society.

0:10:57.1 DC: And so there is this compounding of harm that black women experienced. But even experiencing that compounding harm, black women consistently and routinely fought for themselves, their family and their children, not to be separated by a slave owner selling family members off, not to be continuously raped and used to perpetuate the slave society. And they argued in all kinds of ways, according to law, to be treated as humans, bringing through sympathetic individuals, bringing cases to respect their humanity, to challenge their captivity. So there were always these instances of pushing and demanding the right to be treated as a human, the right to protect their children in this unconscionable environment that was slavery. And using things like religion to find both arguments and comfort against slavery. To use their capacity to do work. If they could be seamstresses that are valued to be able to produce wares, they could then be viewed as more human, more valuable. So there are all these ways that black women pulled levers to win their freedom, to win the safety for their children, to support their partners in raising families. It's quite astounding when you think about it.

0:13:16.8 JS: It's making me think what you were just talking about about not doing this work alone, and it's very clear that black women were not doing this work alone, they were doing it together.

0:13:28.0 DC: They were doing it together and they were not just doing it for themselves. And that's one of the lessons out of the black women suffrage movement, which coincides with the movement for emancipation and for eradication of the slave trade, and overlays the 14th and the 15th Amendment to obtain voting rights even not for themselves, but for African-American men.

0:14:08.5 JS: Right, I think so often... And when we were prepping for this, we talked about how black women were really betrayed in trying to get the right to vote.

0:14:20.6 DC: Yes. So the history of women's suffrage is replete with examples of these overlays of rights enlargement. And so one of the rights enlargement movements was women's rights, and the focal point of women's rights was women's suffrage. If women, all women in America had the right to vote, the idea would be women could change society. And white women sought support from all sectors to advance women's suffrage. So for abolitionists who were white and black, and they were not alone. There were also First People, native people, Chinese people, so there was this movement to try to obtain from abolitionists support for women's suffrage.

0:15:34.0 DC: And so the idea was that these are the same kinds of rights being sought. And so in joining efforts and cross-pollinating these rights the idea was we could achieve an enlargement of recognition of citizenship, recognition of voting, and then changing policy for the benefit of equality. So black women were engaged in that work too, pressing both the abolitionist lever and the women's rights and women's suffrage lever. And black women had great... They had great influence in their communities, and so because they had great influence in their communities, oftentimes black women would be encouraging black men to support women's suffrage. And you could see where this was actually instrumental as the decades moved on and when black men were finally granted the right to vote. They were then petitioned, even though white women were upset that black women got the right to vote first, still black women used their influence to help white women get the right to vote.

0:17:08.2 DC: And the idea was this actually should be helping all women, but in fact, what happened was the movement splintered and white women saw opportunities because of the backlash to reconstruction, because of the backlash caused by emancipation, white women saw an opportunity to actually receive support from Southern politicians and planters and plantation owners to support white women suffrage as against civil rights of black people and voting rights of black people, particularly in southern states. And so white women traded, compromised on the universality of suffrage to accomplish white woman's suffrage. And that's what the 19th Amendment eventually did. In fact, even though it was expressly stating to cover all women, what eventually happened very quickly after the ratification of the 19th Amendment was that, especially in southern states, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, terrorism, actually conflated a manner of divesting or dis-franchising not just black women from the vote, but black people from the vote. And so that's where that... That's where that betrayal comes in.

0:19:11.0 JS: Yeah. And I think we still see some of that today, right? 

0:19:16.1 DC: And it's visible today, and it is visible and on display today. When you think about immigration and citizenship and the gateway definition of those two concepts through voting, and you think about the expansion of the enterprise that is American citizenship, it is supposed to be an expanding equality, that's what it's supposed to be. But when we see efforts to disfranchise people even today, even in modern day, you see that as counter to what was and what should be the expansion of universal suffrage. I mean that is what this nation really was supposed to be built on, not these unjustified selections of who should be able to be counted as citizens.

0:20:41.9 JS: Yeah, we talk about who has more value or who has more protection in the world especially when we're doing some of our training on the connection between racism and sexual violence and it... Just everything you're saying is proving that point even further.

0:21:04.2 DC: Yeah, that is what the American democracy was supposed to be. How do we include to expand...

0:21:13.7 JS: Yeah.

0:21:15.7 DC: Civic engagement, citizenship, equality.

0:21:21.5 JS: Right, right. So based on that history and everything you've learned and studied and are able to share, how else has the Women's Suffrage Movement really informed the world that we're living today? 

0:21:39.4 DC: Absolutely. Well, I think what the Women's Suffrage Movement does is it teaches us how to build coalitions. And we talked about some of the negative aspects of the Women's Suffrage Movement and I think some of those negative aspects could be turned into positive aspects. And so when you think about the historical nature of the Women's Suffrage Movement, what you saw were transactional relationships between women of color, Chinese women, black women, white women. So white women would connect with Chinese women and push for their engagement in the various parades, and why? Because in China there was this movement to allow women to vote and so the rhetoric was why should Chinese women in China be allowed to vote before American Women in America get to vote? And so it was very transactional to connect with Chinese-American women to try to push the idea of suffrage. Similarly with black women is very transactional, so white women and black women's relationships were really defined by transactional relationships; we need you to do X so if you do X we may consider to support you doing Y.

0:23:00.3 DC: And that's not real coalition building at all, those are just transactions with people in groups with two different types of power dynamics at work. And so if we think about those transactional relationships and how we can transform them to something that I call relational coalitions I think we have an opportunity to begin building trust between different groups, different racialized groups and using that relational moniker, how can we build trust among these groups? And what you can do is start really small and then grow that muscle of trust, grow that muscle of loyalty to come out to something that looks much more like a relational coalition than one built on only a concrete immediate or finite transactional coalition. And it means sort of again, in the systems design approach that we were talking about earlier going through these phases, re-upping your commitment, using these iterative processes.

0:24:35.9 JS: Yeah, and to truly do this work in collaboration I don't know how you couldn't do that without trust. Right? 

0:24:43.6 DC: That's right.

0:24:44.2 JS: That trust is such a foundational piece to this work.

0:24:47.8 DC: That's exactly right. And I think you see that with the Black Lives Matter movement now. So when it started I wanna give hats off to the three women who started it, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors when they started this in the wake of another killing of a young black boy, Trayvon Martin, they were by themselves. Again, black women doing it on their own. And then I think what you saw was a lot of pushback because, What is this Black Lives Matter? Why are we singling that out? But if you really think about history and who has been most vulnerable in our societies it has been black women and the children that they have born under these oppressive conditions. And so if you know that then you can better understand why the coalition needs to start with that. But does it need to end with that? Absolutely not. And so now after we've seen wave after wave, cascade after cascade of black murders, murder of black bodies and this is something that historically has been with us, this is not new.

0:26:19.6 DC: But we have other opportunities now to witness them on a much bigger scale. And so people are seeing this now and I think it's shocking them out of that sort of transactional coalition posture and saying, "This is just not humane." And so they're able to imbue in this Black Lives Matter movement the real impetus for its beginning. And its beginning was to say, "We need humanity to embrace the black body." That's what those three women were saying, "Embrace the black body."

0:27:14.8 JS: Yeah, and from everything you've shared, history has shown us that that's not what is valued.

0:27:21.6 DC: Right, right. And acknowledge that and after you acknowledge that let's begin to build a coalition to respond to it.

0:27:34.2 JS: Right. So everything you've shared so far I'm curious how it relates to things like education and housing and voting rights and civil rights and all of these different aspects of our current world.

0:27:56.1 DC: Sure, so I mentioned that the very act of voting is a gateway act to citizenship, civic engagement, selecting one's representatives to bring policies that supports one's community and the community of others. And it is through that gateway act that we are able to identify a landscape where different kinds of social services, political services and economic services are and are not working. And so the places where we see this triad of politics, economics and social services really not working are places in which there has been embedded this systemic racial inequality. So by engaging in voting and by engaging voters we can address where we are falling short as a society. And in addressing where we're falling short we have to revisit the why and we can't be afraid of that history. And so voting allows us to peer into where communities have been under-served, where they have been oppressed, where they have been left out of the conversation, where they have been pushed from the table, that is all quite apparent from, for example, the Women's Suffrage Movement.

0:29:57.8 JS: Right.

0:29:57.8 DC: Right. And so it speaks to how we engage as a community in identifying whether we have adequate educational systems for all of our children. Were people allowed to run for board of education? Were they allowed to vote for the board of education? Were they allowed to bring their claims of disparate educational impact? Were their schools properly funded? That's the education side. Same with equal employment opportunity. Again, did we have policies that recognize that only certain segments of our community were only able... Were only allowed to hold certain positions, government positions? Could private employers discriminate against a prospective employee? And how did they do it? Entrance exams, testing exams, did all those exams get administered to all the people or only some of the people? So there we have that disparate type of discriminatory behavior that's employment.

0:31:23.8 DC: And how about housing? Where do people live? Restrictive covenants, are people allowed to buy homes even if they have money in certain areas? No, not when you have these restrictive covenants. But even when black communities are established, are they subject to terror within those communities? The Tulsa massacre, what happens when you start amassing wealth in certain communities and is that looked upon as non-normative? That's not how it should be and so we will take that from these communities. And so it goes on and on. And so we have to recognize this history, we have to acknowledge that these things happen, and we have to build these relational coalitions around that, especially in the sector of education so that our students don't grow up not knowing this.

0:32:38.0 DC: And I can't even tell you how many students I've come across who say, I never knew that, I was never taught that. And also we have to have scenarios in which we don't have politicians and educators saying, "Well, that happened so long ago it doesn't matter," or "That's an ideology it's not fact." No it's not opinion that these things happened, these things happened and that qualifies as fact.

0:33:15.1 JS: Yeah, the white washing of history in textbooks, I think I shared with you when we were prepping this for some of those History You Should Know mini episodes we were doing, I haven't learned about hardly any of those folks. And a prime example is how we learn about Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of the bus but no one ever wants to tell us about how she was a sexual assault investigator for Recy Taylor and so... So much of the history is connected as well and so when you leave one part out so much of it gets erased.

0:33:54.5 DC: Exactly, and I think one of the real challenges is convincing Americans that the corpus of all of this history is their history.

0:34:05.8 JS: Right.

0:34:07.8 DC: All of it is their history and there are embarrassing facts throughout history but it's what you do in response to those facts, it's how you teach about those facts and then how you learn from them that measures.

0:34:35.6 JS: Absolutely. I always love looking at mistakes which... We're humans so we make a lot of mistakes and how can we take those mistakes and learn from them and continue to do better.

0:34:49.7 DC: And to grow and to grow in consonance with this thing we believe in called The American Democracy. How do we grow in that and grow that? 

0:35:09.7 JS: Yeah. So often I feel like I hear people say the system is broken and I think people fail to forget that the systems were set up that way intentionally. So I guess I always feel most... I feel like trying to address systems is one of the most challenging pieces. We can do a lot of individual work but it's also important to be working at those systems and I just wonder if you have other ideas around how we can be working to improve or change or dismantle those systems.

0:35:45.7 DC: Exactly. And law is one of those systems, I think one of the reasons why you wanted me to come on was because hey, you're a law dean and law is a tool of the system and law has been complicit because law has been used to form the architecture of this system of inequality. And it is actually... It's counterintuitive because we think about the rule of law... And I'm a lawyer, I think about the rule of law as a mechanism to actually achieve justice and equality but when law is being used to further inequality you do have to question that conflict. And so what you can do in questioning that conflict is really appreciate that law is a tool and so you have to look at the institution, the state or the person who is wielding the tool and the tool then becomes a means of either continuing the status quo or through this coalition building it can become the instrument of change. And so you asked me what am I doing as a law school dean to actually use the law as an instrument of change? 

0:37:28.9 DC: And what we're doing at Penn State Dickinson Law is actually leading on this idea of building an anti-racist law school, not just for our law school but for the Legal Academy and for the legal profession and by definition because the law impacts every institution in our society, impacting all of our institutions. Not just the law school, not just the Legal Academy, not just the legal profession but our educational institutions, our employment institutions, our courts, our legislatures, our agencies. How can we use the law to actually acknowledge inequality and transform that systemic inequality into systems of equality? And I'm proposing through the work we're doing at Penn State Dickinson Law, we can take a systems approach to that. So let's look at each function of an organization or an institution and see where we can actually impact these inequalities. Might that be through the student body we admit, could it be through how we employ our faculty and our staff and our administrators, could it be in the programs that we choose to support, could it be in using more funding for academic success and academic services and support for students than for something else? 

0:39:13.6 DC: Could it be using our experiential learning to uncover systems of inequality and help our students learn how to respond to that with experiential exercises? How about in our career services, can we work with employers to ask them explicit questions? "Do you audit your own processes for systemic inequality? And if you don't, we're here to help you change those. So would you adopt this structure for hiring yourself?" So it may seem like a really big task, but if you break the tasks up, it actually is pretty manageable.

0:40:05.5 JS: Right, from what you're describing, it sounds like almost every single decision that we make, we can... We can make a change.

0:40:13.6 DC: Yes, absolutely. And so we're starting with our law school, and we've been asked to submit an invitation to propose a book series on how we're doing this. And so we love this approach because we don't wanna hold all of these lessons learned to ourselves. We wanna actually share them with other law schools, with the legal profession, with other organizations and institutions. And so we wanna template what it is we're doing. And it doesn't mean that what we're doing is the right approach, it's one approach. It also doesn't mean that absolutely every function has to change immediately. You can learn and perfect a transformation from inequality to equality in one function and see, "Hey, can I mirror that in another function?" so it doesn't have to all be done at the same time. And in response to your point where you raised that people say, "Well, this is just broken." Well no, like you said, it's working the way it was intended to work. So now, now that you have a template, can you in a coalition that is relational, not transactional, begin to address pockets or places or functions in which you can transform inequality into equality, and then rinse and repeat? 

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0:41:50.7 JS: I will be so excited to read those books and see how they can apply to all different sectors. I'm a social worker and often have conversations with folks about how those systems were not set up. There might have been some good intentions, but the impact that some of those systems have is not doing the kind of work that they had hoped to. And so it sounds like this template is going to be so helpful for so many different sectors and organizations and systems. And yeah, we'll have to have you back on when those are available.

0:42:28.8 DC: Yeah. Well, we're in the beginning stages of planning it, and I'm hoping that we actually have some drafts that will be ready for peer review by you and by others, probably as soon as November or December of next year. We're starting this summer. And we have a lot of people and institutions that are interested in investing in it to allow us the space and the time to do this work. And so people can invest in this kind of work, they can support through charitable donation or contributions to this work.

0:43:13.4 JS: That's amazing. Is there anything else that you would like to add? I could talk to you all day, but we're running out of time, so I just wanted to see if there's anything else you'd like to share with us as some final thoughts.

0:43:28.3 DC: I think a final thought that I will share is, and I believe this wholeheartedly, the law is a means to change. And we need more people invested in the rule of law so that it can be used properly. And so I would ask people to recognize that the law has been used in ways that have been inappropriate, but understand that there are people who are out here wanting to transform how the law is being used. And in that respect, find these people and think about deeply how individuals can be involved in protecting the rule of law from this kind of misuse, from this kind of abuse. And one does not have to be a lawyer to do that. A person can decide, I'm gonna run for Borough Council, or I am going to go to a committee planning meeting, or I am going to attend a workshop that teaches us how to do peaceful protests. Use that part of the law to become engaged and to remain engaged because we have to wrestle the law out of the hands that would abuse it.

0:45:01.4 JS: Dean Conway, thank you so much for joining us today.

0:45:06.0 DC: Thank you for having me Jackie, it was really fun.

0:45:10.0 JS: Alright, well, thank you to everyone who listened to this episode of PA Centered. You can learn more about Dean Conway and her work by visiting the links in the episode description. And we also hope you will check out the "History You Should Know" mini series by visiting pcar.org/podcasts.

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0:45:34.7 JS: If you or a loved one needs help, a local Sexual Assault Center is available, 24/7, call 1888-772-7227 for more information or find your local center online at pcar.org. Together, we can end sexual violence. Any views or opinions expressed on PA Centered by staff or their guests are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of PCAR or PCAR's funders.