SOLEDAD O’BRIEN

Maria de la Soledad Teresa O’Brien is the daughter of an Afro-Cuban mother from Havana. Her father is from Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia, and is three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Scottish. Both were immigrants when they met at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where they could not legally marry in 1958, because “miscegenation” was illegal in Maryland until 1967. They married in Washington, DC, and had six children, all of whom went to Harvard.

Soledad has been a correspondent or anchor on NBC, MSNBC, CNN, Al Jazeera America, and HBO Real Sports. She is currently the anchor of Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien on Hearst TV and is also the CEO of Starfish Media Group, a multiplatform media production company she founded in 2013.

During our conversation, Soledad expressed a depth of understanding about the intersection of race, poverty, and immigration in America which is all too rare.

Soledad O’Brien: I grew up with the complicated realities of race in America, and I’ve always thought Bobby Kennedy was one of the few politicians who understood those realities. As a privileged white person who had opportunities not to care at all, he made a commitment to dig down into experiences that were not his own and speak bluntly about what he learned. What’s always resonated since I started reading about this as a kid is that some people are willing to work for better race relations, and he was one of those. He wasn’t afraid to talk bluntly about the problems in America, and about how America has failed some of its citizens. Most politicians don’t do that, right? Politicians love to do either the cheery version or even the version in which some Americans are better than other Americans. This idea that they haven’t done a good job around race, around how people could come together and understand issues of race—I’ve always observed that it’s uncharacteristic for politicians to get into that. I guess that’s a long way of saying Robert Kennedy was a politician who ventured into areas where a lot of other people were afraid to go.

Racial conflicts in America have always been stark and complicated. Not enough has improved since 1968. I’m just wrapping up a documentary shorts project in Detroit where we looked at a lot of the economic and racial-justice issues. The data show that African Americans in Detroit are worse off today than they were in the summer of 1967, when the violence erupted. Obviously, some things have changed, but it’s still very tough to have conversations about race and poverty anywhere in America. People are very resistant to that, maybe more overtly today than before. We’ve moved off trying to figure out the answers to some of those big questions. Fifty, sixty years ago, people were trying to figure out what causes poverty and how to fix it; they were asking, “How do you help people in poverty?” I don’t know that there’s any ongoing public conversation about how we can deal with poverty and racism in America today. Years ago we had better leadership on that issue, and that certainly includes your father. People just don’t want to have those awkward conversations about desegregation. We have more data, but we’re not using it for anything positive.

Kerry Kennedy: When I interviewed Barack Obama for this book, I asked him what he thought would be different forty years from now, and he said, “How we think about our racial divisions will have fundamentally changed…. The way the younger generation thinks about love and marriage between races is entirely different from when you or I were growing up…. So I think that necessarily that will change for the better.”

SO: I hate to be saying this, but I completely disagree with the former president of the United States. Look at how much the number of mixed-race people has grown over the past forty years. It was a tiny percentage, but now it’s one of the fastest-growing demographics. It’s quite large, in fact; probably 7 to 9 percent of the population is of mixed race, and you still can’t say, “Look at this now; we’ve solved this entire thing.” A lot of young people—my children would be a good example—do think about race very differently, but they still confront racism at some point. In a public school not far from where we live, a bunch of kids were reported chanting at their classmates, “You’re going to be deported now.” These were eighth graders. A lot of people think it doesn’t matter until they’re confronted with situations in which it actually does matter, when it has an impact on the opportunities I’m getting or not getting, or when it has an impact on how many people are in leadership in this company I’ve just joined as an intern. It does matter. So I don’t think it’s reasonable to predict that the next generation will be all “Kumbaya” around race. I think they’re having different experiences, but a lot of the structural racism issues will still exist.

You know, even though I’m the one with a public profile on these issues, I have five brothers and sisters who are all, in individual ways, addressing racism. My sister is an eye surgeon in Harlem. She has long advocated that the eyes are a really good way to determine someone’s health. People who are diabetic have all kinds of issues with their eyes, for example. My sister works in communities with people who desperately need basic health care. She’s not on television, but she’s always been fighting for racial justice in the receipt of health care; she fights the depredations of poverty in her medical office. My sister Maria many years ago was having a discussion on the question, “What is black?” A professor had said to her that she “wasn’t really black.” So if you’re Afro-Latina, what are you? What does it mean to be black? My sister Cecelia is a lawyer who does a ton of pro bono work, and this is crucial for any movement toward equal opportunity for poor people. Each person addresses this struggle in her own way. My platform is a microphone and a little screen on a few people’s televisions. I try to figure out how to tell stories out of my personal experience that I think can resonate for other people.