 All right, hello, everyone. This has been the part of Juneteenth that I'm most excited about. This panel is called Contextualizing Juneteenth. And the goal here today is to give some past, present, and future of what Black liberation ultimately means. So we're super lucky to have four of Vermont's Black leaders here today. We have Susanna Davis, Zariah Hightower, Tabitha Mora, and Kaya Morris. I'll give an introduction of them all right now. So Susanna Davis is the executive director of racial equity in the state of Vermont. As Mark said, the very first one in our state. She was appointed in this position in 2019 by Governor Scott. And prior to joining the state of Vermont, she served as the director of health and housing strategic initiatives in the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. And as the director of the Black, Latino, and Asian caucus of New York City Council. She holds a juristic doctor with a concentration in international human rights law from New York Law School, where she also directed the Civil Liberties Education Program for Low-Income Youth and Youth of Color. She studied anthropology and philosophy at Fordham University, earning the Reverend J. Franklin E. Wigg S.J. Award for writing on the relationship between global human rights violations and the proliferation of HIV-AIDS. Susanna, welcome. Zariah Hightower, the executive director of the Peace and Justice Center and a Burlington City counselor. Zariah moved to Vermont in 2016 after completing a master's degree in environmental management from Yale University. Educated in the environmental field with over six years of experience in international development, she has recently become increasingly active in local social justice, an understatement. Zariah says she came to Vermont for work but stayed for the outdoor enthusiasm and is an avid biker, hiker, and skier, including a planned 200-mile bike ride from the northern to the southern part of Vermont on Monday. Good luck. Tabitha Moore is the founding president of the Rutland Area branch of the NAACP, a mother, and a Jedi consultant. Tabitha is a sixth-generation Vermonter, mother of three, activist, and PhD candidate in the field of transformative social change. She is a member of the Horizons Project Brain Trust, which is a national effort to bridge the relationship between peace building and social justice movements. Tabitha also serves on a number of committees and boards ranging from Planned Parenthood of Northern New England to the Vermont State Police's Fair and Impartial Policing Committee. Her life's work is dedicated to understanding, naming, and changing the ways that systems promote or inhibit healthy identity and community development. Her influences are Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Bell Hooks, Ken Hardy, her children, and her mother. And our fourth panelist is Kaia Morris, the Movement Politics Director for Rights and Democracy of Vermont, and also a co-chair of the Vermont Commission on Women. Originally from Chicago, Kaia lives in Vermont, where she serves in the General Assembly for as a state representative from 2014 to 2016, and once again from 2016 to 2018. She is the first African-American and person of color elected from Bennington County and the second African-American woman to be elected to the legislature in Vermont's history. Her groundbreaking legislative accomplishments include passage and advocacy of low to no cost contraceptions for all, removal of statutes of limitations for sexual assault, fair and impartial policing standards, and creation of a multi-sector panel to address racial disparities in criminal and juvenile justice systems in Vermont. She helmed the historical establishment of the board and cabinet level director position to address systemic racism in state government, establishing the most comprehensive ethnic and social equity in schools bill in the nation and medical monitoring for victims of corporate pollution. Kaia also holds an accomplished artist career. As an actress of stage, film, and television, spoken word performance as a singer, a dancer, and arts manager. So clearly we have four very talented women up on stage with us here today. Dance in the middle, y'all. We have a few questions to riddle them with and to see what their thoughts are. The first of them is really to look back on Juneteenth a little bit. When we talk about Juneteenth, it's good to give some context. Juneteenth is about the emancipation of four million people, which is the population of Los Angeles, California today. After at least 250 years of slavery, the United States has spent more time with enslaved black folks than with free ones. With that in mind and everything else, why is the history of slavery still important to focus on and talk about right now and also right here in Vermont? I'll start with Kaia. Well, thank you. So why is the history of slavery important for us to hold close in our thoughts and our minds and what we say we're going to be doing to undo that systemic harm, right? So in this moment in time, the legacy of slavery has come through in so many ways. We see the racial disparities that are just undeniable, thinking about the health outcomes that happened for African-American individuals, those who consider themselves to be persons of color, treatment within the employment sector, treatment within the criminal justice sector. Even here within the state, having conversations with white Vermonters about the fact that the legacy of slavery is still here is such a foreign concept that when I even think about the income and equality that's existing here right now in Vermont, that there is an expectation that much of the work that's being done here today, much of the work that's being done every day to push for these changes should be done on a voluntary basis for low or no wages. When we think about the fact that we have a brain drain happening for our beautiful bright and talented professionals of color, those who have the ability to transform the state say that this is not a financially feasible place for me to be because the cost that I have to endure to ensure that I can actually complete this work requires that I have to give up. I have to give up an ability to lift myself out of poverty, to end the generational poverty. I have to be willing to accept sometimes half of what I could get across the border to do this work in the state that I very much love. This is a calculation that people have to make every day and many choose at the end of the day that it is not worth the cost. So denying that this is the way that it is and pretending as though we're somewhere that we are not only continues to hold us back. It only continues as a state to siphon off our ability to really reach true liberation because collective liberation works like this. It works that if one of us is not free, then none of us are not free. So if we are unable to take care of each other, if we are unable to ensure that there are real economic opportunities, educational opportunities, the socialization, the beauty that's happening here, the fact that this event and the position that helmed this work had to come through protest, through protest, not by willingness, not by a readiness for change, but through the force of the people is proof that as a state we have not yet reconciled with the depth of harm of what happens when you deem people to be inhuman and unworthy of the dignity that they deserve. Kaya, I'm gonna thank you for that. And Susanna, I'm gonna throw the same question to you, especially as the state level director of racial equity. Why is it important to acknowledge the 19th and slavery here in Vermont? You know, I think that it's really interesting all the time when we think about the United States and hear people talking about how long ago the institution of slavery in the U.S. was or that was so long ago. None of them are alive today. Why should this matter today? The United States is a relatively young country. This isn't as long ago as you think. And so in the grand scale of things, we go to other places as tourists, we go to the Parthenon, we go to Machu Picchu, we go to all of these things and revel in the presence of sites or peoples or traditions that are far older than slavery in the U.S. And yet people come back to this country and say, why are we still talking about this? And so there's a certain, a cognitive dissonance that happens there where we treat time as being much more relative than it already is. And that's because it's ugly and it's uncomfortable and it's painful. And we think about this conversation also in schools, right? There's a lot more dialogue lately happening about what we're teaching young people. And I love when people say, well, I want them to have a childhood. You can't tell them about bad things. Then they're gonna be 30 and 40 and 50-year-old kids. That childhood will be perpetual and indefinite. So why should it be a consideration in Vermont? Vermont is a wonderful and beautiful and charming and unique place, but it's not so unique that we are exempt from the impact and the legacy of what amounts to human trafficking. And so whether it was done at the institutional level, the state level, or the individual level, it absolutely impacts people here today. And shielding ourselves, and especially our young people, from that truth, we're basically intentionally failing to equip them to navigate the complex world we live in today. If you care about your young people and you want to equip them to be their best selves and to navigate this world as well as possible, then arm them with as much knowledge as possible. And if we're afraid of truth and the history, then what does that say about our history? If I'm doing right and people talk about what I'm doing, I'm not worried about that because I know I'm doing right. But if you're upset that we're talking about a truth thing that happened here, it's not the talking about it that you're upset about. It's that that thing is the truth to begin with. I know you wish it weren't true. We wish it weren't true, but it is. And shouting it down doesn't erase it. It just makes things messy. So as a person who cringes at things not being symmetrical or organized or in their place, this is a personal campaign to reduce messiness by saying what it is. So again, I mean, Vermont is a unique place, but it's not so unique that it's not like the rest of rural white America. And rural white America has to grapple with and reckon with this. And the thing about Vermont that's great is that you have so many people willing to give of themselves to do this work for the state. Cherish that, take advantage of that. Yeah, I think that's all I got. Beautiful, I have. Is that all, Susanna? So as I'm listening to Kaya and Susanna talk, I'm thinking about Kaya's use of the term denial and I'm thinking about what you're talking about with education and you mentioned the term, the institution of enslavement. And Juneteenth is kind of our celebration or commemoration of the ending of slavery. And I don't think we can celebrate this day without acknowledging that it was two years prior that it actually ended. But white people were so good, so good at keeping up appearances that they were able to get away with it for another two additional years. So I would like to kind of change that idea that the institution of slavery died and say that we need to think about things like mass incarceration. We need to think about things like healthcare disparities. We need to think about things like disparities and pay as a new form of enslavement. It has not ended, it just transformed and it goes back to what Susanna's talking about with how we educate our children. And I don't know if folks are paying attention right now but there's a whole lot of real angry, real scared, I don't know what's going on with them. But we got some white folks who are trying to fight the idea that we would even talk about racism, that we would even talk about slavery. That's how much a threat it is to them to think about what would happen if we were free. So I think about these things and I think about growing up here in Vermont, leaving in 1996, and also like on this day to think about, I mean, can you imagine being one of those people there in Galveston, Texas when people would be like, hey, you can go now. And then they leave and they get to a place, maybe they made it somewhere where there was other people who'd been freed, other descendants of Africans who'd been freed, and they're like, we've been here for two years, what have you been doing, right? And they're like, wait, this could have been two years ago? That's how I felt when I left Vermont in 1996. Because when I left Vermont in 1996, I went to New York, I saw people who looked like me. I heard values that reflected my own. I learned a history that I was not allowed to learn here. And so when I think about that moment, again, I was not in chains, I was not, you know, but mentally, emotionally, what it's like for kids of color to grow up here, and then they leave here, that's what we're doing to our kids right now. And our white kids are not prepared to be global citizens because they don't know the rest of the story. And when you don't know the rest of the story, there's no way, there is no way that you can go out and interact with people on the same level. You cannot be equitable, you cannot be equal. And so, you know, when I think about the institution of slavery, I think that it is still here. And so for me, Juneteenth is more about celebrating that moment of time where that, you know, we started to redevelop, and again, we're still working. I think, you know, well, Mark's talked quite a bit about some of the legislative action pieces and our fight for changing slavery in our constitution. But I think so much about our kids today and what it means when they leave this state. And I think about that day in Galveston, when those people were like, wait, we're what? And that's what Juneteenth is to me. Give it up for that answer. What a hard act to follow. But along the lines of like that this is a thing that continues is, I feel like to me, the reason that we need to look back at what was is because the game hasn't changed. We use the same strategies, we use the same thinking, we use the same language to justify discrimination today that we used decades centuries ago to justify slavery and to justify Jim Crow. And so I feel like my experience over the last few years has been everything from local white officials saying that they know better what their black constituents need than their black constituents to justifying any amount of harm through the words of economic necessity. And what is acceptable has changed, but literally the words that we're using, the justifications for how we dehumanize people based on race has remained the same. And so you talked about four million people who were to gain freedom from this and yet we still have more than half of that black people who are currently criminalized and part of the correction system. So more than half are still not, don't have freedom over their own bodies. And so, and we justify all of that for public good, we justify all of that for the good of the black community, again the patronizing. And the problem is that it's so entrenched in what we do and it's so big that polite society can go look at and say, oh, I can't fix this. This is just the way that the world is and there's nothing I can do about it. And it's devastating that the reason that we ended slavery is because a white man's agenda worked, it's like, oh, this is my new war agenda is to free some people that I don't care about all that much and that is what we needed to get even to where we are to end actual slavery and to end this thinking and to end the justifications and to end how we think about people who are a different color, that's not gonna be done by one white man's war strategy. That's only gonna be done when all of us collectively say no, humanity and human rights are more important than the system that we have that would be inconvenient to not preserve. So I think that's why it's important to look at what we have. Hi, I'll go for it. No, I appreciate this and what I wanted to just add to this that I feel is really important that each of you are speaking to. When we say why it's still historically important is that we understand the legacy in our bones and this isn't just some esoteric concept of like, well, it's a spiritual connectivity to our ancestors. No understand that it's our great grandparents. For some of us, our grandparents who understood what that life of enslavement was like. It is our grandparents sometimes and sometimes our great grandparents within this generation who understood the violence that waited for them as freed individuals. That there were campaigns of terror to maintain social control over human beings that still exist today. Every person at this table right now has received phone calls, emails, been pulled aside in conversation, had someone say please reach out to this individual because there are still black and brown people being terrorized in this state and no one's doing anything about it. So as these conversations are happening, right now there are black and brown people who are being terrorized by weaponized racism, strategic racism, and a police state that is completely inept and often a culprit within continuing this violence. Understanding that police only came into being to control black and brown bodies and that is still here today whether it is a painful truth you wanna hear or not. But we are sitting here looking at stacks of stories, stacks of unresolved harms that are still bearing the echoes and the pains and the legacy of slavery. I cannot forget what happened to my great grandparents. I cannot forget what happened to my grandparents. I cannot forget what happened to my mother and so when that violence comes to my shores, when it comes to my front door, when it is in my child's face, it is history repeating without a buffer, without a filter. So understand that this is real, okay? That this is real and exactly what everyone here has said is the work that we have to continue to dismantle because there should be no reason why your brother or sister sitting next to here should next to you in this moment right now living down the street from you, working in your workplaces, in your schools, in your community, should be living in fear of a moment. Appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that you, go ahead. Yeah, I really appreciate those comments, my bad. You're never gonna get to that next question. I'm talking about this all day. They're gonna say so how many questions did you get to ask that one? No, you need it. You know, I appreciate those comments because I think they highlight something for many people in this crowd, which is whose work this is and how you do allyship. Because you can look back in your lineage and identify people who are directly harmed by this, right? You know, people close to me who can say my ancestors were here as sharecroppers or I can go back two generations or three generations. I can't do that. I'm first generation in this country. My parents came from Latin America. And so, you know, when I observed Juneteenth, which by the way, I didn't know anything about Juneteenth until like 2015 because I had a job where it ended up being something that came into my orbit, which is a whole separate issue about how you never stop learning and about how just because you're a person of color doesn't mean that you're in encyclopedia of the history, but that's a different thing. But you know, when I observed Juneteenth, for me it feels more like allyship because I didn't descend from anybody who was enslaved in this country, but there's an entire, but I still feel a responsibility to do this kind of work. And in Vermont, I mean, Vermont is a state that's 94% white, right? And so a lot of times people can say, well, should we be doing this work or should it be left up to the people with lived experience? Well, if it were up to the people with lived experience, this would be done by now. Thank you. Right? It's not members of dominant groups and people in power maintaining a system that has been designed to favor them. And then for us to say, no, you're good. We're just gonna change everything. That's not something that happens easily. And so I just wanted to say that, for those of us who may come from different cultures or from different backgrounds or may not be direct descendants of whomever, it doesn't lessen your responsibility to take part in the work. Because not doing anything, there's no, what did they say? There's no, you can't be neutral on a moving train, right? So the lack of action is not enough because it amounts to tacit approval of what goes on. And I think that that's really important to remember. Anyone else? I appreciate that you all brought it into the bigger picture, not just Juneteenth, but what life looks like today. So my second question to you all is really all about that. Just last week, this week, Congress passed legislation to make Juneteenth an official holiday. And from the history of Juneteenth, we know that legislation is not a silver bullet. It took over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation for the last 250 slaves to actually see freedom. So while bills may pass through legislative bodies without real people behind them, advocating for their enforcement, protecting them, they're meaningless. So in your lived experience, in your opinion, what are other actions of resistance and advocacy that need to happen in this modern day to realize the real meaning of Juneteenth? I'm gonna start with Tabitha Moore. You're ready. Oh, I'm ready, I got my, I got my nose. And another thing. So I think, you know, the first thing I wanna do is de-center whiteness in this question, in my response. And the first thing is that people of color must practice radical self-love and self-care because that is resistance. The minute we take the time to care for ourselves, yeah, I see the boat, I see the boat, I see our walking group over there. Yes, I think that's the first thing we can do is to love ourselves. I think about Katrina Battle in her work with Black Lives Matter of Greater Burlington and everything she's done to turn it toward us and make sure that we are taken care of. I think about Susu Healing Collective and the work that they're doing, Black Perspective. Jess and Ashley LaPorte, who are all over the state, I swear they must have some sorts of portals that transport them, but they are always caring for us, especially those of us who are on the front lines. So I think the first thing that we have to do is practice self-care and self-love as radical forms of resistance. Second, hate crime should not be an enhancement and we're gonna get to the legislation on this one. Hate crime should not be an enhancement, it's not a flavor to food. Hate is a crime when it is enacted and it prevents black and brown bodies from accessing resources or the right to live the way that we should, period. That's the crime and that is a piece that we should all be pushing on here locally at the end nationally. So that's the second thing that we can do. We also need to be teaching and interfacing from non-dominant perspectives, which means that we're not centering whiteness and white people's learning when we talk. We're centering ourselves, we're centering who we are and what we need and white people can learn by watching. They can learn by interacting with us just as we have had to do with them. The other thing, and we all learned a lot about mutual aid during COVID, we need to be practicing more mutual aid as a form of resistance and rejection of structures. We also need to be pushing on the structures of control. For example, the legislature. I don't know if y'all have been to the legislature lately, but it is a mess. The way that things happen, the way that we shove, oh, all right, what are we listening to? That's a little self-love, all right. So we have got to push on our legislative structure because it works for no one, it works for not the legislators and it doesn't work for the people. You go in, you parade yourself, you pour your entire heart into 20 minutes and they maybe take up what you said because they have 35 other bills and a matter of four months to try to figure out. It's not working, so I think that we need to be thinking honestly about the structures and the way that we're doing them if we are really going to be disrupting systems of supremacy at their root. I think we need to stop looking at policy as directive only because we know we can all put pretty words on a piece of paper, but it's how we enact them that makes the difference. So I think that we need to stop looking at policy as telling people what should be happening only and start putting procedure in there as well so that it is both directive and procedural. Thank you. We need to reimagine public safety, which a lot of people call defund, some people call abolish, whatever it is. Public safety is more than police and we need to be looking at other forms of public safety including things like mutual aid networks or self care, all of these wonderful things that are actually our real lifelines while we have to interface with these systems. So I think we need to be having greater conversations about what reimagining looks like. And then I also think about calling in and calling out. Those are methods that we use to interact with people who do harm. But I think we need to stop looking at them as opposites and start looking them as different tools that need to be enacted at different times and don't clutch your pearls because somebody calls out and it may not be what you want or because somebody calls in because they may have a long-term strategy. I think that those are the things for me that I think of when I think about what we need to be doing today. I hope you took notes. Go ahead. I don't have a list. I'm not as prepared for this. So prepared. But I am gonna start, I guess, with a little bit of a story, which is, first of all, that I went to therapy yesterday and was talking about apologizing for something. And I was like, but I don't get it. I apologized. Why is the person mad at me now? And my therapist was like, well, I just apologized for you because they did harm to me. Didn't that make you kinda sad? And I was like, oh yeah, I guess it did. And so I feel like, for me, this year has been like America, some of America, collectively being like, shit, I'm sorry. And this is the first time that every way that I've had to show up to be in this world hasn't been an intellectual exercise of like, oh yes, I need to be like this, like this, like this, like this, like this in order to be accepted. And that's just, and that means certain things, but I'm gonna put those aside and not really think about them. And the first time that I could be like, oh shit, I had to show up like this, like this, like this, like this, like this to be seen as just as human as the next person who doesn't have to do this, and this, and this, and this, and this. And to not see that on an intellectual level, but to like deal with that for the first time, I feel like the people are like, all my black sisters over there, like we've been having such a hard time this year, even though like this is the, it's a hopeful moment, right? Like to some extent, all of us have so much hope in our hearts right now, but at the same time, it's just like, shit, we just really internalized everything that we've been doing to try to show up in the way that we have been and just be accepted. And so, all that is to say, I think that given where we are and how harmful it's been, I think there's something to be said about policy and how we're like talking about it and what we're doing, and I think it's a time to be a little bit more creative than we have been, because everything that we've been doing isn't working. It's not working. And so, being a little bit more willing to say, actually we don't know what this is gonna look like. We don't wanna just go to a system where we're flipping who is being harmed. That is not what we wanna do. And to reimagine what we actually want, none of us really know what that looks like if we're 100% honest. Like, we don't actually know what it looks like to live in a world where we're not doing harm to each other in such meaning, like in such everyday trauma ways. And so, I think just being a little bit more okay with saying, this may not be right. We're gonna try this, we're gonna look at it, we're gonna look at how we're doing it, not just what we're doing, and then when it doesn't work, we're gonna change it. Like, because we don't really know what the future looks like in a way that it doesn't look right now, but the only way that we're gonna figure it out I think is to be a little bit more creative and to be a little bit more okay with not getting it exactly right. And I think that's a little bit how my black sisters and my black brothers and my black siblings have been showing up is being like, I've been trying to be perfect for so long and if I can just show up and be me, I don't really know what's gonna happen, but like, I'm gonna try it and then I'll adjust from there, so. Kaya, you wanna go next? Sure. Sure, thanks. So, other forms of resistance in other places that we need to be pushing back right now, my heart's breaking, having been in the Northern Triangle and met with women that are trying to get across the border, families, children that are trying to escape, unbelievable amounts of violence, incredible devastation and poverty, and as a country we're saying you don't get to come here and we're criminalizing them, this is the same, it's the same playbook, it's the same playbook that we saw as anyone tried to declare their humanity in this nation. So I'm thinking about that, I'm thinking about our migrant farm workers who are still fighting for some basic recognition, can they have housing, can they have decent environment? We wanna talk about how we're a dairy state, but we just abandon the people who actually keep these farms working, and a legacy of slavery, of white wealth holding on to the dairy industry here within Vermont and using black and brown bodies to make that wealth. It is outrageous, it is outrageous. So, some of this resistance is so important right now, the fights that so many folks are having, the pain that I'm hearing coming from our Palestinian brothers and sisters right now, and even from our Jewish community right now where we're trying to weaponize faith, we're trying to weaponize faith in a conversation about apartheid, we're trying to weaponize a belief system, a culture within these conversations, we're continuing on the ways that we get shunted off, off of our true path to politicizing and monetizing the very lived experiences of people right next to you. So for me, when I'm thinking about what this resistance looks like, it is, we still need to hit up on the streets. I appreciate Tabitha bringing up mutual aid because it is working outside of a system to say you deserve what you need without having to go through 50 pieces of paperwork and prove your worthiness through a matrix that makes no sense, that is ableist at a minimum to get things like food or childcare and even transportation. I wanna thank Taisha for the incredible work that you have done pulling this together. Do you know how much of a powerful act of self-love it is to have this food be free? What it means for people to be like, do I have enough money? I don't have to worry about it. We got you because that's how we do. This is how we show community love. Beautiful. Susanna, can you wrap us up here? Yeah, I think that we've gotten a lot of really great suggestions from the other panelists about things that we could be doing that are tangible and meaningful aside from commemorations like legislation to make Juneteenth a holiday. So I'm not gonna add to that list but I do just wanna talk a little bit about the unseen downstream impact of things like this legislation. And I wanna talk about two things. One, and I'm gonna actually read it to you, I saw a post on Thursday from an attorney who states that, you know, you'd think that I would have had enough time to pull this up. I got it, thank you. This was an attorney and it was posted on Thursday and if any of you have ever been an intern like me then you probably know the details of when we celebrate federal holidays because you get the day off from work. Federal holiday falls on a Saturday, it's observed on the preceding Friday. So on Thursday, this attorney writes, courts are closed tomorrow for Juneteenth. My incarcerated clients, all of whom are black men will remain in jail to celebrate the emancipation of slaves. This is America. So the idea that we pass legislation to make something a holiday and that as a result it has additional consequences on the US legal system that ends up keeping people who may be temporarily being held, awaiting hearings or trials. We're not thinking about that. We're thinking, am I gonna get paid for not having to go to work that day, right? And so that's what I'm talking about when we think about passing legislation in DC. They said, okay, done and dusted, we did it. Let's head home for the long weekend. It's not done and dusted for all of the people who are now gonna be negatively impacted by that legislation because we didn't think closely enough about how it was going to work. Second example, there was a recent case in Texas and I just spent a couple of minutes trying to find it. I apologize, I can't give you a case citation, but it was out of Texas and it was a couple of months ago about a man who had been on death row for a long time. And I won't bore you with the details of the long appeals process, but basically we got to the point where the court overturned, a lower court had affirmed that he should stay on death row and the state Supreme Court overturned that and said, actually there are serious questions about whether he received effective counsel and whether or not he should have been given a competency hearing because he also suffered from mental illness. So the court said, it's not right to affirm that, we can't hold him, so we should at least send it back down, right? A good thing, but the dissenting judge's opinion really stuck with me because what she said was, I feel for this person, technically yes, he should be freed because they violated court procedure. However, he's been on death row for so long that it would be in his best interest to keep him there because at this point, if he goes free and is out on the streets, he probably will be homeless, she says. He probably won't have access to the mental health services he needs. So it's better that he stay on death row because he'll have the healthcare and the psychiatric care and the shelter. This is a United States judge at a state Supreme Court who just said, yes, technically, legally, this person deserves to be freed and should not have been incarcerated this whole time. But, and I forget which of our panelists said it, but under the guise of what's best for these people, this person basically said, we'll just keep him in a cage because if he gets out, he'll be homeless and healthcare-less. And really what that is is a reflection of the poor supports, the wraparound supports of our society. The solution isn't keeping the individual caged because society is failing society. The solution is, let's get our lives together so that we can free people who should be freed. And so I'm saying all of this to say that these are two examples of the ways in which we take laws or legislation or commemoration sometimes. And we don't see the bigger picture and the downstream impacts of our actions. That's right. Susanna, that example leads us expertly into our next question, which talks about what liberation is. So Juneteenth takes on many names and one of them is Liberation Day. But despite this liberation, black folks have still been denied some of the most basic freedoms, face redlining, Jim Crow, gross discrimination, criminalization, and segregation. All of these have been systemic oppressions in a country that openly claims that black people are free. So what does true liberation mean to you in this context? Let's start with Zariah. Yeah, I think we've got a lot of them learning to do. I think is the thing that I feel the most. And I don't think that that's true of any one population of America. I think all of us have a lot of them learning to do. I'm still in learning that I have to be exceptional in order to get the same respect and treatment as others in the room. I'm really grateful for some of the black women, Taisha being one of them. We all have to call out Taisha at some point in one of our questions. Who said, I remember her saying to me like, oh yeah, like for a really long time we fought for civil rights. We just wanted folks to be civil. And like it's time to ask for equal rights. Like we want the same treatment. And I remember when I was in graduate school when I was still like, I just have to be better. I just have to be better. One of my black friends said to me, cause I was like, oh, like is it like, I was like, when will we stop fighting? She's like, when it's the same. We will stop fighting when it is the same. And that is so obvious to some extent. But to some extent I was like, oh right, that is what I'm supposed to be wanting. That's what I have the right to is the same. And the fact that that was a moment that I had to learn is a little, it's, I think it says a lot about how we grow up to not expect the same. So I guess the future is for all of us. I think this exceptional panel of women is sometimes we won't be exceptional and that has to be okay. And when we are exceptional, we have the right to demand exceptional results. That's right. And I think. I'm waiting. I'm not sure. So that's where I'm at, is I'm gonna start expecting exceptional results when I'm being exceptional. That's all I have. I'm gonna hang out with her now. What are you doing? Kaya, can you answer that question? Sure. Thank you for this. So that was powerful. Thank you for that. Yeah, let's do this. Plus not always have to bring us in when your house is burning to the ground. We're the ones that take you next level. That's really what it's about, using our genius that way. For me, liberation is, in order to feel like equality is what it purports, we do need to have equal access to so many different aspects of our society. And what's been weighing on my mind very carefully right now is access to meaningful legal representation. We do not have a whole cadre of brilliant BIPOC lawyers in this state. We do not, definitely not in private practice. That's for real. Because actually our low wages in this state also make people wanna go find salary jobs so that they're not trying to have to keep the shingles up on the outside of their place. But what this means is that we do not have professionals. I saw on my dentist earlier today, Ken Palm, long standing black dentist, do you know what a gift that was to be able to have Dr. Palm available to provide services? Do you know what that means? The difference of being able to have mental health practitioners who have lived shared experiences or will not pathologize your trauma because they understand it, they've studied it, they're here to help heal it. So what that means for me to be able to have that meaningful legal representation is recognizing again this stack of folks who are having to be continually told again and again by groups like the NAACP and the ACLU, I'm so sorry, all I can do is listen. Because we have no one that will take your cases. We have no ability for folks who are skilled up and doing hard civil rights fights. But guess what? Those folks do exist in other states. That's right. Those practitioners do exist in other places, but we still have fortresses set up within our bureaucracy that keep those individuals from being able to do interstate compacts for them to be able to have fast tracking to get onto the bar for all the things that we need for us to be able to make it through here. So I wanna use this state of emergency that we've declared as an opportunity for us to get really damn innovative and solve the short, medium and long term needs. That, to me, will feel like liberation. For me, true liberation means loved ones of mine can visit me here in Vermont and not be out in public and somebody demands papers. For me, true liberation means that I don't have to feel survivor's guilt because people in my demographic group didn't fare as well as I did because I thrived in a system designed for me not to thrive. For me, real liberation means not having to tell people how long I've been in Vermont because they always wanna know, no, but where are you from, from? For me, you know how it seems like, it seems like lately every president gets a war, right? And I'm thinking about Bush and Obama and they had, they always used to press conferences with the banner behind them that says mission accomplished. And it's like, guess what? We killed all the brown people in that country you've never heard of, mission accomplished, right? We found the weapons that I pretended existed but really didn't. And so yeah, I long for that. For me, true freedom means, or true liberation means when you don't need this role anymore. Mark joked earlier and said, I'm the first executive director of racial equity for the state and hopefully the last. And I joined him in that. I can't wait for the governor to dismiss me with a banner behind him that says mission accomplished. No more racism, we're done. Thank you for your service, bye, right? Because that is genuine liberation when you don't need people whose job it is and who make entire careers out of justifying their humanity to the people around them. We all have other interests. We have other things we like, hobbies, right? I mean, and yet, and yet so much of our existence is about ensuring our existence instead of living our existence, right? I read recently something that I thought was really beautiful. It stuck with me. It said survival mode is not meant to be a lifestyle. And that's so real. And I think even people who are not of color or people who are not from the LGBTQIA plus population, people who are not, people living with disabilities or what have you, a lot of people, even members of dominant groups this last year, year and a half have been in perpetual survival mode. It doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel good for many reasons. And for a lot of people, that was temporary. That was a year-long survival mode. And I feel for them, but until you're afraid that your child may not make it back from a friend's house every day, I don't know that you really know what that survival mode means for people who are not yet liberated. So, yeah, I think true liberation is gonna be the day when they hold a panel like this and nobody comes. Because we're all healed and we're all doing other things toward a better future and don't have to keep having these dialogues as rich and as enjoyable as they are. Tavatha, can you close this out? I don't wanna follow that. So, yeah, I mean, yeah, to all that. But when I think about liberation, I think about peace. I think about not the absence of war or not the absence of tension, but the presence of peace which includes reparation and restoration. And it's the ability to access and use resources freely without someone else dictating when and how we get to do that. It's the absence of greed and the presence of collective understanding and balance that if I take more than my share, someone else is going to suffer and a real valuing of that and a valuing of humanity and humanization. It looks like people doing what they love, right? And contributing what they can to community rather than doing what and when and how other people say because they've taken too many of other people's resources. So, yeah, it's just the freedom to exist without external pressure to be a certain way to achieve excellence or exceptionalism so that we can just be at the table and be able to make decisions with other people. It's the shared power that we all were born with that was taken from us. So. That's all. Oh, is that it? So, in these final, you know, couple minutes, can you all take about 60 seconds, sorry, to close us out with final thoughts on any of the things that we spoke about? Final thoughts that you want to leave with the audience? Kaya, can you go first? 60 seconds. Thank you. So, in my last 60 seconds, I'm going to make a strong push again if we're going to reach collective liberation, we need to start with Abenaki sovereignty. Okay, so that's a pretty sad history we got here and that history of eugenics that needs to go. So, we're going to stop erasing the people who live here. We're going to stop chasing them out and we're going to have to work together and recognize that what harms me harms you. And so, we only become healed when we all become healed, but it has to start with the ones that experience the harm. So, thank you for that. Yeah, I think along those lines, I just want to reiterate that this is not just work for people who have lived experience, this is work for everybody. I'm often in places where people say to me, you have such a big job. And I say, no, we have such a big job. Don't put all that on me. Because we didn't get here overnight. We didn't get here through one person. We got here through thousands, millions of people, right? It's going to take those thousands and millions to undo it. And so, if, you know, what do you do? The question always that I get from people is, what do I do? What can I do? Do what you can do. Are you a retired educator? Start with that. Teach some courses. Learn how to do trainings. Do train the trainers. Are you an attorney? Take some pro bono cases. Are you an accountant? Figure out some money stuff. I don't know. I mean, no, I'm serious. I mean, you know, sometimes, sometimes things that we ask for for funding to some entities and organizations, that's a rounding error. You can do that. You can find that, right? So it's everybody's work. It just takes you starting from your vantage point. Yeah. All right. Thank you. So I found this quote when I was in my master's program and it's kind of been a thing of guiding force for me by Adrienne Rich, blood, bread and poetry. She said, when those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality, choose not to see or hear you. When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there's a moment of psychic disequilibrium as if you looked into the mirror and saw nothing. It takes some strength of soul and not just individual strength, but collective understanding to resist this void, this non-being into which you are thrust and stand up demanding to be seen and heard. And so to my brown and black and Asian family, I encourage you to stand up if you can stand, demand to be seen and heard no matter what in whatever way that that may be. And to my Caucasian friends and family, I encourage you to think about the kind of mirror that you are and how you are contributing to pulling up other people. I'm also gonna end on a quote and I don't even remember who the quote is from. It's one of the members of the squad, but it's something along the lines of like, if they're gonna see us as a them, we may as well start seeing us as an us, something along those lines. And so I think that's, as someone who was not very political and now very much is, I think just sometimes I really just want us to be like, we're all in the same boat. We all want the same things. We all know that we're fighting for the same things. Let's act like an us. And fight for our collective liberation. So this panel has exceeded my expectations on giving context to Juneteenth. Thank you all, the four of you for coming out, for sharing your words, for spending time with us. Please give a round of applause to all four of our guests today.