 I met my husband when I was 16, he was 18 and then maybe, and we have been together, dated for 10 years, and have been married this April, we'll make 20 years, which speaks volumes about how we have come. I just wanted to, in talking about mass incarceration in Louisiana and in our country, because our state, Louisiana is the worst incarcerated in the world. We have the highest prison population in the entire planet. There's a lot of more people per capita than any other place. So my mission in life has become to be an abolitionist. You know, I looked at other names, I don't like any of my economy and activists, any of that sort. I just feel like to totally, after hearing Angela Davis speak, and she talked about, I'm thinking prison reform and all of this other stuff, but Angela said it best that there can be no reform for an institution that's totally defunct. The only way that we can transform this thing is to eradicate it all together, and that is what I am using my life's force to do, and that is to bring down the system. By starting with the closing of Angola Penitentiary, many of you may not know that Angola was started as a slave breeding ground in the 1800s, and then went into convict leasing, and then became the world's largest prison as far as land mass is concerned, and generating us the status of being the leader in incarceration for the past 30 years. So, our crime was one of Sadwick's property gain. This is our family, we married April 24, 1997, and to our union, we had three kids, bought our first home, opened our first business, and that's when our life changed. Before I got into the system myself, I thought that everybody that went to prison got what time they deserved. I had no clue. And when I found my family in the crux of the system and sitting there in the courts and watching how things unfold, I was really amazed at just how unjust our system was. Remington is our second oldest son, he is four. His, our oldest son is Malik, and he is five, and then Lawrence, our baby boy at the time, he was one year old. So it was just a matter of trying to give you a, you gotta swipe the wrong way. This is the only picture that we have as a family that does not look like a penitentiary picture. To our union, we have six sons. When my husband came home on bond, I got pregnant with twin boys. To your right, you'll see freedom, and to your far left, you'll see justice. And then the baby boy in the middle was a blessing from God because he's not supposed to be here. And that is Barbara the second. And these are our boys when we went to court. Malik, the oldest that you see right there, graduated from college this past May, from Stockton University in New Jersey. Remington, the one to the far left, he graduated from Xavier University last year and started at Mahary Dental School this summer. Freedom and Justice, the two in the middle, our twin boys, have completed high school two years early at the age of 16. They started at Tulane University this past August. I said all that to say that the reason why my family has been able to make it in the crux of this unbearable situation is because of love. Love has been the answer for us through it all. Love is the most divine chemical in the universe and it dissolves everything that is not of itself. And when we can take love and implement it into the hearts of man, I heard the gentleman say earlier that people are, I believe, I can only believe, are well-intentioned. I believe the day of totally annihilating and controlling the group of people, I want to believe that that day is moving past us. So in order for us, like you, Lynette, that was willing to come to this session because you feel like you have a responsibility to your students to teach them about what's going on in human society through your humanities course, there is nothing more pivotal that is going on in America and in the world as a whole today. They talk about terrorism, they talk about all of these other things, ISIL, nothing is more crucial for us to get a handle on and destroy and turn our attentions toward than the institution of slavery known as mass incarceration in America. I work with the graduates. The graduates is a program that has been funded by the Russian Bird, did I say that right? Foundation and it is allowing us as women that are formerly incarcerated, we call it the graduates because many women, when they go to prison, they tell their children that they're gone to school. Many women because of the stigma and the shame when their children come to visit them in prison, they just tell their children that they're away at school. So we call the program the graduates as a way of saying that we graduated from school and this grant is allowing us to go from city to city throughout our state and share the story in a monologue form of women that have been impacted. And my story just talks about how our family committed a bank robbery, a property crime. They arrested us immediately afterwards and because the plea bargain in our case was folly, lawyer comes in, he tells us he can give us a better deal after we had entered guilty pleas. We believe him, he's a lawyer and he's white. So of course he's not gonna tell us anything wrong and after he couldn't get any more money he withdrew from our matter of setting the DA's office because we had withdrawn our guilty pleas and they used everything that we told them that when we had been boycanized which is when you admit that you're guilty, you tell them everything that you did. They used that same information to the plea deal off the table and then they sentenced my husband and his nephew who was involved with us to 60 years for my husband and 45 years for my nephew who didn't even have a weapon. This is the type of injustice or injustice that is existing in Louisiana. It's not because the crimes that our people are committing are so heinous, it's just because of comments like the one that the DA made in the Gina 6 matter when he told those young men for a schoolyard fight when he charged them with a second degree murder that with the stroke of my pen I can take my life from you. They are taking the lives of our loved ones in Louisiana and we are too quiet and we need everybody's voice and we need everybody to become an abolitionist. Thank you for allowing me to share. Thank you, thank you. I'm gonna use this time to also pose some questions and just things that we can think about. So I'm first generation American. I was the first in my family to be born here. My parents are migrants from Peru. I've grown up in a migrant community my whole life and in my teenage years I witnessed starting in California the beginning of the anti-immigrant movement which is when people began calling migrants illegals. It really began criminalizing the act of coming into the United States. So many people don't know that the last time we had legalization reform in this country which means the opportunity for people to become legal was in 1986 and that was Reagan who passed that. And so fast forward to the 90s where you had Clinton build the wall and have NAFTA. NAFTA created one of the hugest migrations ever because the US began to then go and mess with actually the local food sources and then people had to move. So without the opportunity to become legal or to become even a recognized person plus this very expansive growing incarceration industry that's locking up immigrants. Right now immigrants make up the fastest federal prison population and add to that that kids, a lot of children and their moms are crossing the border and they're crossing from Central America and the women who are crossing, 80% of them are raped on the journey and they're coming and they're getting locked up with their families. Like there is kids, children in prison. So for me as an artist and really understanding, coming from a place of being a Latina and really understanding that migrant issues are sometimes in the margins, I do believe that racism forces a black and white dichotomy that doesn't allow us to see the complexities. But I think that the moment right now that we're in which is that folks around the country are really questioning all criminalization. I mean, it's not just prisons, it's about even how we are targeted and criminalized and killed is really also an opportunity to question the next largest growing sector. So this is what happens when you Google immigrant detention centers. And this is how, this is the reality, the sad reality is that people are being detained faster than even facilities are being built and there is just, it's so lucrative right now. And the people designing the laws like in Arizona are groups like Alec, which is getting geo money. And so there is some, what I'm trying to look at as an artist is, and also the isolation is extreme. So whereas in state prisons, sometimes there's access to phones, in immigrant detention centers because they're not citizens, they follow homeland security protocols. So it's really hard to get voices out of there. It's really hard to even do visitation programs. So one of the only ways to communicate with folks is through letters. Next, and so some of these questions that I've been thinking about as an artist, right? I'm really thinking about, okay, well first, this idea that punishment works. Like why do we put people in cages and really torture them and to torture them, isolate them? Why do we even people think that that works? But second, and then we're deporting them. Like the deportations are at 1,000 a day. 1,000, actually 1,100 a day. So for our communities, we all know people who are deported just like in many black communities and in many second-generation those people know who are locked up. So what they have been thinking about is we've observed how over the last 30 or 40 years we've observed the effects of massive, we've seen how communities are devastated. And now we're seeing an entire new pipeline of people coming in. And so how do we also look at what's the impact and think about, hey, not only do we have a whole new market, this is like a growing market where these private prisons get invested, but also these people are getting deported and there's no way to get them legalized. So I feel like it's a conversation to really have black-brown unity and they actually Asian-brown unity because the second largest immigrants are Filipinos. Not to mention there's a lot of black migrants as well. So I feel like looking at this question of how do we, there's actually a lot of unity that can happen there and what we have to break through is the anti-blackness that exists in Latino communities that is historic, it's ingrained. And really think about what is this system that's been really exploiting our bodies from the beginning because if you're looking at even slavery conditions today you just go up and down the Central Valley of California. I mean the meat industry is all immigrants. So how the exploitation of bodies both in and out of, in walls is a recurring theme. Like it is, and then putting them in prison and just juicing, it's just like they're juicing everything they can get. And I think that someone has to shine a light on this bigger industry that is really the same industry, you know? And so I mean, thinking about how to do that and really also think about how to have a conversation that goes past the usual, the usual kind of buckets, if you will. So we talk about immigrants without papers as undocumented. And even though many black people in this country have citizenship, they're not treated like citizens, they're unrecognized. So thinking about what our alliance is, unrecognized people and unauthorized people, people who don't have, and actually people who can't vote, like unauthorized people. And then I think we need just like new ways of connecting our narratives and we need a lot of healing. And you know, in our project we were thinking about like really how do you bring a bunch of like immigrant moms who like are newly arrived and how do you get them to sit down and break bread with black organizers and really think about like where does your fear come from? Like why do you at how do you, and how do you, in my mind I concede and say, how do you think that you are better than people that have more melanin in their skin? And like you said, it's historic. I'm both Latino, Mexican, I don't know who my daddy is, I just know he's Mexican and black. And so to watch the documentary Blacks in Latin America and understand how pervasive it is. And then when you really take it a step further and then you know that no person walks on this planet that did not come from other Africa, that did not come from a person of color, we are all one family just in different shades. So that perplexes me. Yeah, and I think that we can, that that's where we have to get to the deeper question because that documentary, The Black Grandma and the Closet. Yes. I have a Black Grandma. Like it's crazy to be a Closet. The Black Closet, I want you to watch it. That might be the one takeaway that I have. The last thing is that thinking about our work as artists, and the work of art is on values. Like whose family gets to stay together? These right wingers talking about family, they are like little kids who are Americans, they're seven, eight years old, and their mom is deported. It's just like the shock and the trauma that stays in our communities. I think about like whose family deserves to be together. And so I just want to, I just saw these ideas around like, how do we bring it back down to these values? That at the end of the day, we want to be with our families as well. So, and looking at it as an opportunity to really also really tap into our own blackness as Latinos and heal and become abolitionists. Cause it's there, it's like teetering because people are like, oh, everyone's getting deported. So I'm interested in exploring ways as an artist to go there. How do we facilitate those kind of conversations? Can you? Yeah, that was the one. And I agree with you, that was my revelation. I was, when I was in New York, that was the lesson that God gave me. I had this lady tell me, she asked me, she says, who are you? You know, who are you? I'm thinking, I don't know who I am. You know, I know. And then he puts on this, you know, I go to visit some sisters that, as a matter of fact, Jonathan Stax, his best friend, they did the movie, The Farm, which talks about Angola. He prepared dinner for us. And then there he says, I got something I want you to watch. And he puts on this film, Black Skin, Latin America, where is the black rum on the positive? And it just, you know, it was pervasive to me at that point of saying that until blacks and Latinos start acting like they are one people of course, then we're gonna keep allowing other groups that don't have the interest of us at heart and the Asians and to separate us and make us feel like we're not connected. We're more like that we are like, so how do we begin to pursue that? You know, with music and food and arts and culture, like the gentleman said earlier. So I wanna build on that and I wanna create space for Michael. So, Ryan Stevenson talks a lot about the idea of proximity and that for us to really move past this paradigm of punishment for us to move past this paradigm of mass incarceration, that we have to get proximate with the condensed, you gotta get close. You gotta get close. And so I think that's what you're pulling up, this idea of if we don't share space with each other, if we don't share experiences with each other, that if we stay in relationships of disconnect, of media and imagination as opposed to, you know, touching flesh, right? Connecting, then these kinds of systems have space with this. And I pull that up because I know that both Jonathan and Michael, that is the work that you do is getting proximate with men who have been disappeared. And so I wanna give you space to kind of share, to share. Before you start, my one last thing, you know that they de-privatize the feds, de-privatize all federal prisons, except the in the brain, you say. I know. And then they just turned around like last week, a week before last, and renewed the private contract in Alabama. After they said that the Department of Justice said it wouldn't do any more private prisons. Did you wanna discuss any of this? Oh, no, no, no, no, it's okay. So I'm gonna show this, which just gives you, like this is the visual image. We don't, I haven't played the audio. Hopefully it won't distract you too much. Curses, it will. Okay, so yeah, again, I'm Michael. Jonathan's one of my main collaborators, my man. We consider ourselves kind of cells within a larger organization that we call free school. We're a motley crew of artists, activists, and educators. And for the last three and a half years, we've been learning together as various groups engaged in a bunch of different activities. We gather together around a kind of abstractly defined notion of liberationist pedagogy and abolitionism. And when we concretize those kind of abstract concepts, the practices look plural and much more complex. So we have like a general thing. It's like, well, how do you really understand that? Well, it depends on what our activities are. Our main activity for the last going on four years now has been to go into the prisons and be part of a group of poets and artists. And we've facilitated these conversations in this space with now a changing group of incarcerated men because Michigan moves people around coercively. One of the benefits of that means once these guys get so, they fall in love with poetry and expression, their movement around the MDOC is a great thing because as my man Fred has been doing for the last two years, everywhere he goes, he sets up shop and plants these seeds in new and new groups of individuals and communities. And so we were focused on the publication and the dissemination of incarcerated art and writing and the spread really of this organism and this life that is abolitionism. And so trying to kind of think about this poetically, I tried to like, okay, how can I explain this? The complexity of the abolitionist, I always try to specify non-naive forms of abolitionism. It's not just about shutting down a prison. If you don't deal with the social, political and economic conditions that produce these forms of incarceration that people are trapped in and the things that they're responding to in society, you've not done anything in terms of a complex solution to the problem of prisons. We really have to be kind of systematic in our understanding of the problems and our approach to solutions. So when we're thinking about a world beyond or without the carceral regime, we want to call upon all of our creative potential and imagining and acting. And it's in this sense that I want to reiterate the centrality of the notion of escape. Like the radical, liberationist, creative aspect of escape. And I want to try and rescue it from the tendency which says that escape is escapism. This is not escapism. This is a radical form of escape. So I say escape. Run as wolves to avoid capture that domesticates us as purse dogs of the bourgeoisie who hope to eat when philanthropic capitalists decide to pop or pour with pits from their prodigious purges so we can pedal the petty commodities they try and reduce our art to. Escape, capture and run with fugitive thought, fugitive art in the abolitionist underground where poets know that their art is not a luxury but a fight for survival. Escape the politics of erasure that captures children and disappears them into the dungeons of America that sweeps through the north end and the east side after systematic disinvestments and strategic over-assessments create the weapons for dispossession. Escape beyond the stakes that driven to create divides between us but beyond the fences that label some of us illegal, some of us slaves. Escape the logic of white flight back to the black bottom after the bottom falls out to clear cut the history white settler colonizers can't see as they march to colonize the D and embrace the freedom of escape that empowers us to create refugees. Refugees, places of respite kinships across camps of resistance fighters who may run but all the while they're looking for a stick in the words of George Jackson. Embrace the radically generative and creative force of freedom in the idea of escape. Run and keep running but all the while keep looking for this stick. It's this generative creative act this desire to break through the wall beyond the fence and into the open that is our ability to try and grasp this creative potential. And so the last couple, I tried to time that, right? There's my five minutes and I have more of course but that's what it is. That's my five minutes. So this has been the project that I've been working on for a while. Jonathan and I came up with this and given kind of like the division of labor we each engage in different activities. This has been something that I've been building over a number of years now. This is a film, a full-length feature film that Jonathan's partner Katie in collaboration with us made and it's of, you saw some clips of it in the video, right? Where we had family and friends coming to the DIA to read their poetry at the Detroit Institute of Arts. We were lucky enough early on to get the New Yorker to come in to give us some video of these guys and that's where you got the video clips of them reading because the state doesn't really allow cameras in. So these are, this is the archive. And in terms of like kind of making the accessibility of alternative media and like access more prevalent within the abolitionist network, we've tried to frame this and it's still in its early phases, realistically. We've tried to frame this in a way that once you understand how to add content all you have to do is get the administrative status. If you work with incarcerated people in any capacity and you want to start putting up work as part of this, you get admin status, you start creating portfolios and this is an example. You go from the general archive and you select any one individual and it takes you to them. And I started uploading their artworks and you can see in these guys' words and in their art the complexity of their understanding of the problems, the interconnection of these forms of oppression and marginalization and very intuitive ways of thinking about how to avoid this. So Fred, are you still there? What poem do you want me to play, my man? I was gonna do, well, you wanna do poetry or make him embarrassed? Because Fred was gonna talk about the importance of poetry. Recently, and Fred will probably tell us maybe talk a little bit about that. There was a rebellion at Ken Rocks that no one wants to talk about. So we have some testimonies from guys inside and as we add stuff to the audio to make their voices present, I'm gonna turn it in recording. Always the censorship of communications. So as the audio content comes up, it populates on the main page and then within each individual wants, is kind of like under the auspices of the democratization of at least technological access. They don't have it, right? They don't get to have this kind of platform. So we try and mediate that not having by creating a network that allows them to spread their art and their voice and their word and have that uniqueness that's not reducible to like, oh yeah, you know, we're bucking the system because they all have their own take on what we need to do and where the fight should be located and where these burdens are on the existing support networks they have. Fox and I were talking on the way here about the recognition, the complex form of understanding abolitionism is the recognition of the disproportionate burden that's placed typically on women of color to maintain relationships when the state forces you into the role of having another dependent. All of a sudden, instead of having an income earner for a family, you have a certain level of dependency and you want them to be present for your children. You want them to have a voice within the community and GTO has commodified that so that we spend $16 an hour just to have Fred's voice present. So there's these kind of complex forms. So Fred, you wanna maybe introduce yourself a little bit or talk about whatever you want to say? Poor's here is where it's abolition. Here's where abolition is fine. As we use visual art and we interpret it or individual interpretations of it and a lot of times, people who have the resources to wanna help us incarcerate people have the experience and don't know what they need, don't know what they need to incarcerate. So the guys in my group and myself, we write consistently about those things. We write about the growth of family structure. We write about the growth in schools and we write about politics. We write about the welfare in class. Well, it's like when people are really being formed and being like at home, what it takes. So I mentioned in the early days, you mentioned punishment doesn't work. What I found to have worked for myself and others who are incarcerated, that's a catch. But yet, people who are in position to provide that to the facility that we currently located that there's practically no, that there was a huge riot of uprisings because we understand that it's one of the keys that we need to prevent coming back from prison. You know, we talk about abolition, not in the way of destroying and tearing out this, but in the way of reducing the recidivism rate. Education has to be paradigm. I'm living upon myself with the help of my ground and trying to reject you to, by saying books in here that provide places for guys to feel comfortable and to our parents. You know, those emotions out. We need support and we need to support us with our portion and getting it out. Thank you. Thank you. So, we don't have a tremendous amount of time with what you all just shared to just kind of hang. You know, I think that there's, there's an opportunity to sort of unpack a little bit about maybe the threats across the work that you do. And I particularly want to invite Meredith into this conversation as folks who are interested, but aren't immersed in this work every day. And I count myself a boner, right? Like, I'm not immersed in this work every day. I am learning, you know, by being able to work with these artists. And so, I ask myself, so what is my responsibility was available to me to work towards the abolition of the systems of punishment that just is made. Even if it was not just affecting my particular community, it isn't in human existence. So, how are you digesting, you know, all that you just heard? I think one, maybe putting on more events that are specifically geared toward bringing the cultures together to talk about the things that we have in common. Whether it's people of color, Americans of color, connection, or something of that sort, you know, centering it around music and arts, and maybe even having that kind of festival travel to major cities across the nation. I love the idea of like even the monologues that are being created in Louisiana with the women, we can translate those and take them to the immigrant detention centers. How to have like a sharing of the stories. Yes, yes. Or even like facilitating letter writing. Yes, yes, between the immigrants and the incarcerated people. I think that is phenomenal. The other thing that, I know this may sound really, really crazy and I'm really revealing myself here in the sacred space, I sure would give anything, I sure would give anything to have the Peter people care about people of color, like they do animals. And I don't know what we could do to make people of color and our concerns a part of their hearts. But you know, they ride people when they go against animals. And I just, we do not have a, we do not have a strong organization, even with Black Lives Matter, they have been a beautiful uprising. We're not nearly as strong and as powerful and as well-funded as the Peter Organization and Humane Society. How could we create something of that sort for humanity, for the concern of humanity and how humans are treated? I'll speak to that. As someone who is a yoga teacher and vegetarian and lives within the community that identifies punishment, like not only across lines of race, but organisms. And I think that we have to go back to this fundamental question that why is punishment our only response for so-called crimes within our communities? And I say so-called crimes because, you know, as I said at the Rauschenberg table that we, like all of us would have been burned at the stake 100 years ago for the things that we are professing are forced to work where bridle. So those crimes have changed and society changes. And so the consistent theme is then punishment. And so we have to look at how we are speaking honestly to ourselves in terms of punishment, but to each other when I feel wrong, let's say Margaret, I don't know, gave me the side-eye. And then what I wanna do is like, I'll do her side-eye, right, and that it becomes this competitive process of a growing and nourishment to punishment. And so where this comes into, or where the intersection is this relationship to animals is that it's an on-ramp to be able to understand that we all come from one. And I think that when you're hearing these conversations around race and unity between brown and black struggles, we have to also reference John A. Powell's and Audrey Lord and bring them into this conversation and say that it's not exclusive to brown and black, that it has to be like a conversation that is inclusive to all living beings, human or non-human. And so, unfortunately, we've been conditioned to believe in the lifestyle or the experience of a paradigm to the chicken coop where we're all willing to shit on the chickens below us, whether or not it is like folks of color. Shaps in the barrels. It's another one, right? Yeah, my family, from my family, we always identify as the chicken coop, but you know, like that black bodies are willing to say, well, like the immigrant community is the problem. And immigrant communities willing to say, well, it's actually the heron community or whatever it might be. We're all shitting on the chickens below us. And then where that boils down to is like, how do we recognize that not only within the human race, all people within the human race, there can be love and not also shit on those who identify or the on-ramp of compassion is animals. And so, and vice versa, that has to be in exchange because otherwise we're just perpetuating the language of hatred and Audre Lorde, you can't use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house. So we can't condemn those that are learning how to love through animals or generating that kind of power, but we can learn from the way that they're doing it to welcome them to the struggle in that way. That is my understatement. I'm not there shitting on them. I'm happy to see anybody love anything, but definitely being able to say, how can we help break the power that they have over there? How can we bring that to the human beings? Because I'm not necessarily as, I think that if we can treat human beings better then all of us will treat animals better because it'll be an all life form type of treatment. Part of it is like we see like fur or things that are a visual reminder. And there's a lot of shaming involved too. Like there's the pythros and things, so I was just thinking like, I mean Paul Rucker is doing this, one of the Rauschenberg fellows is, who is behind the money? Like how do we shame them? Or at least when you see a Victoria's Secret, you're like, that's prison labor, like that's, you know? So let's also talk about the culture of shame, right? So I actually had to sit through a PETA video, and I was outraged. It was one of the most violent experiences I ever had. Because in that approach to activism, it was a, I'm going to show you a series of atrocities. It's a shock tactic. And it's not a tactic of cultivating love, right? Or cultivating a sense of community or respect or invitation. And so I think that's the opportunity. I think the piece that you're pulling up is, what is the larger invitation to have a loving culture? This is a conversation that started at lunch, right? That you were pulling up this idea, Michael, of if we dismantle systems, we can't dismantle a system that we haven't unraveled the social economic aspects. Right? Like it's not just the institution of incarceration. It's not just that place. It's not just that place. Networking, dynamics. Exactly. It's a belief system, right? And so it's a belief system that has been hardened over centuries. I mean, it's literally this entire day has pulled up that we are founding is on stolen land and stolen labor, right? So that's the bedrock of our value system. We've organized ourselves around how do we construct an economy that is contingent on this underclass? How do we construct social relationships that hold a rationale to hide our shame for that kind of organizing? We're really like in, we're like a perfect expression, right? Of that original goal. Like that goal has been really successful. So how do we insert a new aspiration? What does that economy look like? What do those social structures look like? Because that's, I think, what you all are offering. Yeah, you are offering an imagination paradigm, right? That created energy, that created impulse, that like it's not just this tendency to constantly revise and try and tweak it to make it more efficient or less efficient, right? That there's almost, that's why we try to emphasize this issue of escape. It's not trying to delude ourselves about the reality of the problem. It's like how much time and energy we have encountered this a lot with other organizations that work within the carceral regime or on the fringes of the carceral regime who, although want to do good, are still beholden to the same entities. Like it's like, yeah, but if you really fought against the existence of this thing, you would lose your job. Right. And there's this like, well, yeah, like we're not really, we don't really want to see this continue, but we also need to be able to continue to do the good work there. And that creates this difficulty of imagining and really realizing an alternative. The one thing I did want to say though in terms of kind of demarcating at least these tactical level approaches to organizing. And when Fred calls back, I'm going to try and ask him about this question because it's something that we've been working on while he's been at Kinross, which is closing the brown and black gap, right? Some sending literature in 500 years of indigenous resistance, talking about like the construction of Latinos, Latinas, mestizaje, but you know, I mean, he's, he's read Gloria Anzaldua and Trinman Ha and like, you know, he's like utilizing these things and yet very realistically at that tactical level. This is a battle. He's like, he's, you know, you have the structure of like kind of that gang mentality within prisons of who's controlling what and you know, who's the shot callers and who allows, who's the first entry point into the brown community? Well, it's this guy. And this guy's, you know, and he's like, this guy's being a racist asshole. And you know, then there's in fights where they say like, now they kind of got rid of that guy and now there's a new guy. And so maybe there's some possibility of building again, but there are real tensions here. So on the one level, it's like at that tactical level, there's a unique struggle internal within the prison that we have to be able to support incarcerated organizers without trying to, you know, like tell them what to do, right? Without being programmatic. And then there's also this level of outside, which I think bolsters, right? It's like, look, I've been talking with these other community members, these black women as a Latina who are trying to connect with us and they're talking on the phone, and unfortunately in the Immigrant Detention Centers, they're not, but in the growing carceral regime for women of color, there is some of that communication. And they're starting to build networks. It's like, oh, well, you know, that's cool. And there's this ability to support and kind of nurture that the outside aides the, you know, the inside in their work. I don't know, it's just a fault. I mean, and I think I would just add to that by saying like, I think part of what I'm hearing and that I think is sort of like resonating for me is that there's these three things that keep coming up that are part of this like tactic of how do we shift a paradigm here? Which is one is how is that we have to fundamentally shift the language? And that one is this issue of proximity and that like part of that's going to come with shifting language by being able to see that these people that are, this entire system has been set up as being our adversaries are not actually like, right? Like we're actually still pawns in the same system, right? And that the other piece of that is the spreading of knowledge, right? And I think that the other, that part of that spreading of knowledge has to do with part of what you were saying, but also having to do with like all of the history and all of the people of color whose stories have been erased, that again, like that becomes a disconnect because it's just not there and we don't know about it and we don't talk about it. And so that's another way in which we're able to say like, I'm not connected to these people because I never heard of them. I don't know anything about them and they don't live in my neighborhood. So those are all ways and that I think we, that we start to get at this thing that in some ways feels really big, which I guess what I would also just like to put out there is that like, I think one of the things about this, which I think is difficult for a lot of people is that it's so big. It's just, I just want to acknowledge that it's so big. It's so big. It's beyond a lot of it. I understand that the last shuttle to the museum is leaving now. So I don't want to shut down the conversation to the reception. Oh, the reception is not. So we can continue on to us. Yes. Which is where so much box can attach to this. So yeah, Fred, do you want to say anything to the group before we, because we're kind of closing down and getting out of here, you want to just say farewell or, I don't know what. Thank you, Fred. We love you Fred.