 Tonight, we're beginning a two-day event called Legacies of Emergency Management. Looking back and moving forward. The first part of this event is here and now in Detroit. And tomorrow, we are moving to Ann Arbor to the University of Michigan for an all-day workshop. These two places, Detroit and Ann Arbor, have very different relationships to the emergency management system. In Detroit, where the public school system has been placed under emergency management, the water department has been placed under de facto emergency management, where the entire city has been placed under emergency management. Communities are very invested in this thing called emergency management. Very invested in resisting emergency management. Very invested in mobilizing against emergency management. What the Sugar Law Center around the corner has called an emergency for democracy. And this is an emergency that, as I think most of the people in this room know, has unfolded not only in Detroit, but also in Flint, in Pontiac, in Hamtramel, in Allen Park, in Highland Park, in Lincoln Park, in Benton Harbor. Making, of course, the state of Michigan the national epicenter of this phenomenon of emergency management, a phenomenon that is disenfranchising communities across the state. And not just any communities. Here in Michigan, the national epicenter of emergency management, over half of black Michiganders have lived under emergency management, while around 2% of white Michiganders have experienced this. So in Detroit, emergency management is obviously an urgent and pressing concern. Things are different in Ann Arbor on the leafy and lovely campus of the University of Michigan, where between our schools and our departments and our institutes and our centers and our colleges, the topic of emergency management has more or less to say, fallen through the cracks of our collective consciousness. So while communities across the state of Michigan have passionately been involved in resisting emergency management, and some of the people on this panel who we will hear have been central protagonists in that resistance, we at the University of Michigan, I think it's fair to say, have been largely occupied with other matters. We're here to try to change that. We're here to try to build a connection between the community and the university. We're here to try to build a discussion and perhaps more. How does the development of emergency management in Michigan intersect with other forms of de-democratization across the nation and indeed across the globe? How can histories of emergency management open up new strategies to resist emergency management? How to move from resistance to de-democratization to building radical democratization and proliferation? And what forms of solidarity might we build to preempt, resist, and defeat attempts at disempowering communities and open to building new communities, beloved communities, the kind of communities that our future depends on? So this panel tonight will be dedicated to these and undoubtedly related questions. And it is a mighty panel indeed. I'm going to give a brief introduction to the panelists. Each of them will speak for about 10 minutes. A colleague, Dr. Zimmerman, will be the timekeeper. And then we're going to open up discussion with all of you. So I'll introduce the panelists now. Our first analyst, Shea Howell, has been a community based activist in Detroit for around four decades. In the course of those decades, she co-founded the Bog Center. She has worked with Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management. She now works with the Detroit Independent Freedom Schools and the Riverwise Collective. As many of us know, she documented the occupation of Detroit during the city's forced bankruptcy in the Michigan citizen. And as many of us know, she publishes a weekly column in the Bog Center Living for Change newsletter. She is also a professor of communications at Oakland University. Our second panelist will be Mark Fancher. Mark is a staff attorney for the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Michigan. He was formerly senior staff attorney at the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice, which was, of course, notable among many other ways for its challenge of Michigan's emergency management legislation in court. Our third panelist is not here. This is Helen Moore. I'm hoping that she will be here. So let's just keep our fingers crossed for that to happen. Our fourth panelist is Louise Siemster. Louise is a postdoctoral associate at the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee. She received her doctoral degree from the Sociology Department at Duke University, where she wrote a dissertation entitled Race, Power, and Economic Extraction in Benton, Harvard, Michigan. And she's now working on emergency management in Flint. And our fifth panelist is Katherine Coleman Flowers. Katherine is the director of environmental justice and civic engagement at the Center for Earth Ethics at the Union Theological Institute in New York. She is also Duke University's Franklin Humanities Institute practitioner in residence. And she's founder of the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise Community Development Corporation, which seeks to address the root causes of rural poverty. I'm really excited to welcome all of these panelists here. And let's begin. Both sides here. I'm really grateful for the opportunity to come and talk tonight. And I'm especially glad to see folks from Benton, Harvard here. I think it's important for us to know that what has happened in our state has happened in virtually every community that was majority African-American. I am also grateful for this opportunity because I look around the room and many of us were immersed for a chunk of our lives in this fight against emergency management. And I felt as though at times it took so much for us to maintain resistance, to create exciting forms of ways to bring ideas like the wonderful trial we had of Snyder and the emergency managers over here in this center or the documentation of complicated ideas. It took a lot from us because all of us, this isn't our job, all of us are doing life and then trying to track the emergency manager. And as a result, both the resistance, the creativity, and the desire to provide alternatives did not really give us an opportunity to step back and ask, what's really going on here? And so that's really where I want to center my remarks about what's really going on here. So I welcome this and want to take that responsibility, at least from where I sit, where I see. And there are three things I want to share about what I think is really going on. The first is I think we have to understand that we have reached a new moment in the evolution of capital in the United States and probably globally. But we see it here. And as I have been reading authors around the globe looking at this moment, they are naming this racialized financial capital. And I think we need to keep that new name. It's not so new, but it's a name that brings forward the dynamics that we are experiencing, that there is a racialized effort around the protection and development of finance capital. In some ways, that has been a big chunk of the neoliberal agenda. And we have understood this as austerity politics. But I think when we look in Michigan, we understand the critical role that race plays in the protection of capital accumulation. And the reason I think, the second reason I think we need to look at that is to understand this moment in terms of the intensity of the rise of counter-revolutionary forces in this country. There is a link between racialized financial capital, emergency management, and the rise of Donald Trump and what that means to our country and literally to the future of the globe. So the first thing I want us to think about is this naming of this moment in a more descriptive and concrete way. And the second part of that naming, I think, is to understand the degree to which the emergency management is the latest articulation of control of the efforts of African-Americans to assert their own humanity. And I don't know, has anybody read this new book by Carol Anderson called White Rage? Have I seen it? It's, yeah, it's a fabulous book. And I just, I want to read you just a section. She looks at the role of white rage, white racism, historically in the United States. And this is what she says. The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It's not the mere presence of black people that's the problem. Rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspiration and with the demands for full and equal citizenship. A formidable array of policy assaults and legal contortions has consistently pushed back against black resolve. I want us to think about that formidable array of policy and contortions and how much that describes the emergency management experience. And I think particularly, for me, the most dramatic was the fact that the state constitution has absolutely no meaning. When it was incontrovertible that the state constitution protected pensions and we discovered that it had virtually no meaning at all. So this contortionist motion. So the first thing I want us to think about is this idea of racialized financial capital, how that is a new technique in the control of protecting white power, white supremacy, and white privilege. So the second thing that I think, which really struck me when I was reading about this austerity stuff, I was reading Jamie Peck and Heather Whitewood. And they're talking about municipal finance and financial austerity. And then there's this little half sentence that says this new austerity program is really ushering in a post-democratic municipal government. And I stopped at a post-democratic municipal government. And I said, of course that's what's happening. I just didn't name it that. But this idea that democracy is as weak, as mediocre, as conflicted, and terrible as it is, it's too much to exist with finance capital. It cannot tolerate democratic decision making. And I think that that is critical for us to think about this polarity between democracy as imperfectly as we figured it out thus far, and the need for us to then create a new kind of democracy. And to really understand that every democratic decision we make is flying in the heart of these folks who are against us. The final kind of theoretical thing I wanna talk about is I used to think cities actually had some power. I was stunned in some ways to discover how much I actually thought cities could do things. And came to find out through emergency management that cities are, to use their terms, creatures of the state, that we are mere administrative units, that we have no effective decision making over the conditions of our lives. Instead, the primary decision making body in the federal system that we exist under is apparently the state government level. Now, I think we need to rethink that. I think what has come out clearly in this emergency manager's struggle is there needs to be a counterbalance to state authority. And that counterbalance has to come from some respect for the sovereignty of cities. That people in cities should have control over the conditions of their lives as much as they can. And that part of what I think the task in front of us is how do we create leagues of cities that begin to create and demand sovereign power. And did you follow this thing with the paper bags or the plastic bags at the state level just this past week? This is how petty state government is. They know that cities are starting to outlaw plastic bags. So they made a law to say, cities can outlaw plastic bags. In other words, at the smallest pettiest level, they are trying to erode any capacity for democratic thinking, democratic engagement, democratic discussion, and therefore the creation of an authentic democracy. So we have to counter that. And one of the ways to do that, I think is to develop a new notion about cities and their effect of political power and to redress the political situation in that area. So those are the things that I am taking away from the emergency manager's struggle. I also, the last thing I wanna say, am I okay on time here? Okay. The last thing I wanna say is there are, the fact that through the Detroiters resisting emergency managers, what we faced after the emergency manager left here was this last hold of emergency management over the school systems. And it has become very clear to us that even though we now have an elected school board and we were able to get a superintendent, the clear intention is to destroy education for our children in the city and to destroy public education, not because public education has failed. It is because public education has actually created an effective critical citizenry that has learned things. And what we have learned is now threatening to that power structure. So what is happening is public education is being dismantled and destroyed. And here in the city, we now have almost two generations of young people who have had to endure the most abusive kinds of educational experiences as you can imagine. And that's why things like creating the Detroit Independent Freedom Schools or creating any kind of alternative programs that work with young people to develop their critical capacities. Because what I see, and I think what we all see with the ilk of Trump is that all pretense is gone now. There was no pretense in the emergency management process. It was a brutal, disgusting process that actually killed people. And pretense is gone now. And so we need to really do the kind of thinking, the kind of conversation, and the kind of organizing that will enable us to create a real democracy in this country for the first time ever. First of all, let me start with a disclaimer. My comments will not be on behalf of the ACLU of Michigan or any organization with which I'm affiliated. Because it's a topic which goes beyond the constraints and the limitations. Any structure that exists within the society. You know, if we look at the emergency manager law and we focus on it too exclusively, then we miss the idea or the fact that the emergency manager law does not have a legacy. It is a legacy. It is a weapon that is being used against African people. And so we have to understand that to attack the emergency manager law and to successfully attack it and to destroy it, will only mean that we have taken a gun out of the hand of somebody who's determined to get another gun. You know, if we look in Africa in the early 1800s, we will see that the European powers have set their sights on it. You know, the slave trade was in decline. If it had not been eliminated and they had discovered that Africa had much more to offer than just human beings. It had gold. It had diamonds. It had extensive agricultural potential. It had oil that they had not yet tapped into. It had everything that they needed in order to fuel international capitalism. And so the various European countries began to penetrate into the interior of Africa and began to plunder it, began to rape it, began to exploit it, and in the process they began to fight each other. So that by 1884 they determined that it didn't make good capitalist sense for these different European countries to fight each other when there was enough in Africa for everybody. So they convened in Berlin and they put out a big map of Africa on the table and all the representatives of the European countries sat around and carved Africa up like a birthday cake and gave everybody a slice. And for the years that followed, colonialism resulted in the exploitation, the plundering and the rape of a continent and the underdevelopment of a continent to the point where it was completely and totally devastated and the recuperation process is ongoing. It has never recovered from the depopulation that occurred during slavery and the process of colonization which also resulted. This idea of going into some place, populated by African people and taking everything that they have is a permanent chronic aspect of the capitalist system. So that if you look at the city of Detroit, you see that with the advent of the administration of Coleman Young a period of genuine black power. This was an administration that went in without apologies, began to hand out contracts to those who were black. It began to make appointments to important political positions to those who were black. It began to put into place institutions and processes that were resulting in the empowerment of black communities. You had the Recorder's Court which was one of the few places, if not the only place in the country where if you were black and you were charged with a crime you could go into court knowing that your attorney was probably gonna be black, the prosecutor was gonna be black, the judge was gonna be black and all the jurors were gonna be black too. I mean you talk about a trial by a jury of your peers that was the only place where you could get it. And this was a place that was run by a mayor who made no apologies about being black and when he was confronted by those who tried to tell him that he should go a different way, that he should be more inclusive, that he should make way for those who had the money and who were white, then he told them get out of my city. And so compounding the success of this administration, compounding the offense that many people took to it was the fact that he did this without apology and he was branded as being arrogant. He was branded as being uppity. He was branded as being a man who was stepping beyond the limits of what a black man was supposed to do. And what he did is he committed a major crime that deserved punishment. But the problem with Coleman Young is that they couldn't punish him. No matter how hard they tried. I mean this man was so bad that by the time he left office they still couldn't punish him. They had to wait till the man was dead before they had started to make moves on the city of Detroit. And so this created a vision for the people within the city. It created an understanding of what could be, of what the possibilities and the potential could be. And this was very dangerous. This vision was very dangerous. The people of Detroit were very dangerous and they had to be destroyed. Capitalism needed to retake Detroit. It really did. And so they began to a long term process which was no different from the colonization that took place in Africa. What they recognized was that they had to make the city unlivable. And they started nippling around the edges. I mean they started with redlining, creating conditions which made it difficult for you to get insurance that at a rate that was reasonable. I mean sometimes you pay more for your car note than you pay more for your insurance than you pay for your car note. I mean they began to encourage small businesses to leave. They started putting out rhetoric from the Canada that made it, suggested the suggestion that you had to leave Detroit. I mean they tried to promote it exodus. I mean they came in and they took over the schools. I mean they began to come in and they started to nibble around. They destroyed recorders court. I mean they made the city a place that was very different from what it had been and people who were not thinking, people who were not conscious that the city is in decline, I must leave. And then compounded off, what they did is they tried to blame colon young. But the truth crushed words will always rise again because the Detroit Free Press in 2013 published an article extensively that said if you'd wanna look at the decline of Detroit, don't blame colon young. They said that in terms of fiscal management, in terms of administering a city, he was better than any mayor that the city had had. But this did not stop the people who wanted to retake Detroit and you can understand why they wanted. Look at the waterfront. Look at the fact of where it stands strategically with respect to the entire state. It stands as a hub. It stands as a center. It offers incredible possibilities. It offers incredible potential for development. But not for the people who were here. Those people had to be run out of town. And so in addition to making the city unlivable in the ways that we've talked about, they started trying to take the land. You know, the city on land. I mean, we have a land bank now but the original proposal for the land bank which I could consider was just not, was a very clear effort to pass land sitting on property through the hands of non-profits and into private hands for purposes of exploitation. And then for those stubborn Detroit people, those people who just won't leave, cut off their water, cut off their water. I mean for tens of thousands of people, people who are poor, people who can barely make ends meet, cut off their water so that they can't stand and stay in the city anymore and get them out of the way. And for those people who still hang on, for those people who are illegally tapping into water, those people who are still buying bottled water, those people who are still trying to do it, well, foreclose on their houses because of tax delinquencies. I mean, put into place a process for excuse from tax obligations, you know, a poverty exemption. But when they come in to apply for it, you tell them that they have to go home and fill out the application. And when they go home to fill out the application, they find out that the deadline for turning it in was a week ago. A system that has been rigged. A system which is designed to drive people out of the city and the money which is used now, the billions and billions of dollars that are flowing into this city to build the arena and to build everything around it, to build all the things that are happening. The money has always been there, but they couldn't put the money into the city because they did not control the infrastructure. And the way that you control the infrastructure is to get rid of those rebellious voices in city government who are gonna fight you. If you got a Joanne Watson there who's gonna stand up and fight you, wait till she's gone before you start to make your move. If you've got other people on the city council who are fighting, get, wait till they're gone. And then in fact, what you do to make sure that you got control, get rid of the entire city government. Appointed emergency manager who has all power in the city and have him to set up the situation that makes it possible for you to plunge the city into bankruptcy, a city that didn't have to be in bankruptcy. It didn't have to go that way, but they plunge it into bankruptcy so that they get absolute total control of the city, lock, stock, and barrel. And then after everything is under control, when you got a mayor in place who looks like the people that you wanna attract, when you got a mayor in place who's really ready to go along with the program, then you start sinking billions and billions of dollars into the city and start building it up while you continue to run people out. All people continue to fight. And we got Sister Alice Jennings here who stood up and fought against the water shutoffs. We got any number of people here who have fought and fought and fought. But the process is the same. It's not just colonialism, it's slavery. Because we have to understand that if you look at article one, section two of the US Constitution, it says that black people are three-fifths of a person. What that really means is that at the time that they were negotiating that provision of the Constitution, those in the South, white property people, you know, those who were slave owners looked around and saw that white people were sparsely populating that region. And when they were talking about how they were gonna get congressional representation and apportionment, they said, we come out on the short end. Densely populated North, you're gonna get more representation in Congress than we get. We got all of these people that we own. They should count for something. We don't want them to participate. We don't want them to participate in a political process, but we do want them counted for purposes of apportionment. So they're each gonna count as three-fifths of a person in order to bolster our representation in Congress. This is the use of human beings. This is the exploitation of human beings for the benefit of the owner. If you look at emergency management, you'll see that you've got somebody sitting up in Lansing who wants control of a city. He wants to control everything that's there. And just like the slave owners who wanted to use other people in order to advance individual political interests and objectives, this individual is given the power and the authority through the emergency manager law to allow people in the city to go to the polls and to cast a vote, to express an honest democratic opinion about who they want to represent them, to establish a city government, and then this person can go in and turn it all into a charade by saying none of it counts. We're going to have one person who's going to run the government. If ever we're challenged about the absence of democracy, we will be able to point to the fact that these people went to the polls and they cast ballots and elected a government, they just elected an incompetent government. It's the use of human beings for political advantage of someone else, which is very much in my mind, contrary to what the 13th amendment says about eradicating the badges and incidents of slavery. Because if anything smacks of slavery, it is that where you exploit a population completely and totally for your own political advantage and to the detriment of the people that you're exploiting. You know, in reaction to this, we have to understand that the people of Detroit have been heroic, absolutely heroic, because the resistance has been constant and not only has it been constant, it has been effective because the people knew what time it was. They knew the charade and the farce and the exploitation that came out of the emergency manager process. And what they did is they carried out one of the most successful campaigns, most successful organizing political campaigns that I have ever seen. When faced with an emergency manager law that had to be stricken from the books, people mobilized and they organized and they collected thousands of signatures in order to support a referendum that would have it wiped from the books. They did everything they had to do, even in the face of resistance. So when the opponents, when the enemies stood up and said, well, these petitions that you've had signed, they don't count, why? Oh, well, because the font that you used in the petitions was the wrong size. Well, rather than just turn tail and run with people mobilized, they, you know, under the leadership of the Sugar Law Center and others, they waged a valiant struggle all the way through the courts, all the way up to the Michigan Supreme Court to get this placed on the ballot. And then at the time that the election came and people came to vote, the return started coming in in the evening. And it looked like the referendum was not going to succeed because all the results were coming in from all different regions of the state. And they said, well, it looks like it's not gonna succeed. But then the results started coming in from Detroit and everything turned around completely. And it succeeded. The Public Act 4 was wiped from the books completely. Success, democracy and action. The people mobilized and organized, advancing their own interests as the system is supposed to work. But then, within just a matter of days, the law firm that employed the emergency manager and others trotted up to Lansing and rushed through new legislation, a replication of the emergency manager law, Public Act 436, which was made bulletproof by an appropriations provision, which means that it was not subject to a referendum. There would be no repeat act. There would be, it would not be possible to repeal this thing. They put it in permanently. It's vicious. And I think that people who are concerned about the impact of the emergency manager law have to understand that this is war. Absolute naked war. And unless it's approached from that, with that state of mind, loss will all, will be the only thing that faces the people. And so that means thinking beyond the limits even of what the system talks about. Because we have to even begin to think in terms of the fact that not just the system is invalid and illegitimate, but the entire country is. Because this country has no moral right to exist. This country was established by settlers who came and began a process of genocide against an indigenous population. Territorial theft on a mass level. And then established something that they called a democracy which included as part of the parcel of its slavery. How can that have a moral right to exist? How can something so fundamentally wrong and evil be something that can be reformed? And so we're really talking about revolution. And until we come to terms with that fact, all of our efforts are probably ultimately still born. Again, we met last year at least the folks from Columbia. It's been great to be part of this project as it evolves. I especially appreciate them letting me help organizing that. You know, I can't bring institutional support from Knoxville. So I've been doing research on emergency management since 2012, and among many things I've been surprised by. I've been surprised by how few other academics are working on this. I thought they would be one person for each city. That has necessarily been the case. And in fact, in October 2015, I was told by someone in a nearby university working on a survey of local officials that they weren't asking me about emergency management anymore on their survey because emergency managers aren't the hot button issue they once were and infrastructure and legacy debt are that they need right now. Well, as you all know, that was the same month that Michigan finally admitted there was a serious problem with the water in Flint. The type of scenario that anti-emergency management activists had been warning about for years, but the law has persisted, even as we've been hearing many people in this room have repeatedly insisted that the law's illegal and needed to go and actually overturned the law, even though it was largely responsible for poisoning thousands of children and destroying the city's entire water infrastructure and compounded problems for many other cities. Even though it was clearly targeting black cities and exempting white communities in similar financial situations. This law seems to hit some kind of pleasure centers for a lot of white Michiganders, especially at the top. It reinforces what they want to believe about how politics, economics, and taxes and deservingness and particularly black run governments work and that has made this law remarkably durable despite continuing challenges. So I wanted to know what we need to know about emergency management now that it's in kind of a dormant phase, but ready to be deployed again in the next cycle of so-called crisis. And just importantly, how can we tie emergency management to like a national story about race and place and resource distribution, as I think everybody is already doing, which is great. So a lot of writing from my end of things, like the people who are writing about this from the academic perspective, are focused on the law as shown in Michigan's uniqueness or kind of the aberration. But as Commissioner Juanita Henry of Benton Harbor pointed out all the way back in 2010, Benton Harbor was the test to baby of plans to be implemented elsewhere. And emergency management doesn't just teach us about austerity, it's part of a long history of strategies in Michigan and elsewhere to reproduce black disadvantaged, still black resources and undermined black power. And I feel like that's kind of a letdown statement after what we just heard, usually that's shocking. Um. But this is specifically visible once you start making connections about black towns situated within larger white spaces and the extractive relationship between them. And one of the best ways to see that relationship is by focusing on infrastructure. So we're gonna be tracing some of those connections tonight and tomorrow. And we have Kevin Coleman Flowers here to start making that connection to infrastructural issues more broadly. But I'll start by talking a bit about what I saw in Benton Harbor that might be useful for our discussion. So if you read news articles about Benton Harbor, you'll read about its poverty, white flight, disinvestment, like other majority, black emergency management cities. It was publicly portrayed as a drag on the state and on taxpayers. But a lot of people in City Hall and around town were talking about abandonment. They were talking about micromanagement exploitation or hyper-involvement in the city. They saw the resources going the other direction for upward redistribution. City officials often talked about the social and physical issues of assets of the city. From its access to Lake Michigan and the Paw Paw River to the airport and water plant. But they also knew that the assets made them ripe for some kind of takeover. And so what I've been writing about is how far from being abandoned, Benton Harbor functions as an extraction machine for white elites camped just outside the borders of the city. A literal siege starving cities of the resources needed for upkeep. Profit can be generated in multiple ways through this extraction machine. It used to be through labor. It can also work through taking land. But you can also generate profit off of what some people are calling ruination or leaders destroying assets in order to acquire them cheaply. So one local resident commented early on while I was in Benton Harbor. It seems to me that the people are collapsing the city so they can buy it up for a penny and then sell it again. And so I've spent the next six years refining that. What he wrapped up in was that. So that's what we do. But even the harm caused to Benton Harbor, whether the polluted land that then got transformed through public money into a golf course or the effects of whites stripping the city for parks has become lucrative to people operating the extraction machine. So I've been talking about the commodification of inequality and I owe Commissioner Henry in part for that you were talking about in a meeting that poor Red Harbor, what do we do? We get grants off our stats. And that helped me see that the public money was actually coming into white elite hands on the basis of Benton Harbor's demographics. And they were telling you so pretty openly. And so even Benton Harbor's suffering become one more tool to extract profit from the city elsewhere. So I spent a lot of time trying to understand the perspective of those white folks working around the edges of Benton Harbor to try and understand what was going on with emergency management and how it fit into a longer history of how they were interacting with the city. And so one of the things they told me was that emergency management, I think this is important, facilitated their access to city hall, which usually they had just worked around or ignored. But they said, now I had a great relationship with emergency manager. And there were no, I did not encounter a single black person who told me similarly no matter what their position was. A lot of us have been studying emergency management as disenfranchisement of black populations, which it is, but it's also really importantly an attempt to discredit black governance. And that happens to be, and the people in black governance happen to be pointing out that these cities are suffering because other people are taking their stuff. Dana Kornberg who's here and speaking tomorrow has talked about the idea of territorial stigma to talk about white demonization of black governance in Detroit's water system. And these stigmatized cities, the stigmatization is an essential resource too because it allows you to have someone to blame for your problems. And it also allows extraction of resources and the uneven development that we were just hearing about from our future. And moreover, that stigma helps discredit officials and residents, whether it's when they're protesting emergency manager law or complaining about physical symptoms coming from exposure to city water. And the theft and harm to black cities assets in Michigan is perhaps best shown in the various struggles around water infrastructure. I don't feel like I need to tell anyone in this room that in these water wars, emergency management serves as a blunt force tool to exacerbate what's been going on since black citizens first took office in Michigan city. And it comes in the context of larger trends of water dispossession and privatization globally. And we definitely saw openly that many of the cities under emergency management had some kind of discussion around water privatization if they didn't actually have their system privatized. But I started seeing another pattern around several majority black cities water systems. In Benton Harbor, right after they took out a major loan to improve the water plan, a neighboring municipality announced they were building their own water plan. And so they pulled out of the system so that the water rates had to go up. An emergency manager that whirlpools headquarters stopped using city water that back to hold another chunk of people out. And people were justifying this to me saying, well, they couldn't take care of their water. We didn't want to be part of it anymore. So I didn't know what to do with that information necessarily. I was like, I'm studying emergency management, not water systems at the time. And then Shay Howell told me in fall 2015 that if I was interested in flint, I needed to be looking into the Cairgnawney water authority. And I started to notice the pattern once I found out the Muskegon Heights was also losing its suburban water customers, leading to huge problems. And eventually I came to understand how the KWA was formed and how Detroit's water system was transferred to the Great Lakes Water Authority, which I'm sure we'll hear about tomorrow from folks like Kirk Gaillet and Peter Hammer. And they're both under terms that benefited white suburbs at a large cost and were carried out under emergency management. So one of the things I'm doing with undergrad students is work through the emails that Snyder released and also trying to track what's happening right now with the KWA and Pulewa. And only those racial narratives can explain how people accept that flint should be paying for two water services on the basis of a bond agreement that two emergency managers had been charged with fraud over. But one of the reasons I'm most excited about this workshop is that we're trying to put emergency management into a larger context, not just to understand receivership, but to name it deeper dynamics at play. As an ethnographer, we're always being asked to explain what is this a case of? And over the past couple of years, one of my most generative working relationships is with Danielle Purifoy in the front, who's going to speak in tomorrow, also who's been studying Black Town's experience of environmental harm, municipal underbounding and legal structures in the South. And as we started talking about our respective cases, we wanted to know why they matched up so well. So why did Northern Black Incorporated Cities, created through white flight, have so many of the same political experiences as Southern Black Unincorporated Towns founded as spaces of Black freedom? And why the same narratives are being told about all these spaces? Why was it just as hard to get clean city water and flint as in Tamina, Texas? We also wanted to understand how majority white communities weren't being hindered even when they were in the same situation. The few majority white cities under emergency management were not stripped and sold for parts. They experienced this process really differently. And unincorporated white towns are often thriving without what we would call democracy or city level taxation. So this is what Shay was talking about, that if you're living in all white town, turns out people don't really care about voting that much because they know their racial interests are being protected without them having to exercise any democracy. So just as they don't want democracy here in Detroit, they don't really care about it as long as they're being defended at a more fundamental level. What is this a case of? Anyway, we're starting a new project to look at what Charles Mills calls the racial contract and how that structures towns and cities at a base level. Well, even what we think of as the prerequisites of the town, stuff like voting or taxes or service precision. So time to throw that away and say like, let's not assume that a town necessarily provides those things. It means looking carefully at the laws about towns and resources and how they change and who benefits. And it also means trying to understand how emotions and these stories that people tell about corruption and dysfunction and who deserves what, try to paper over those extraction processes that we're seeing. Emergency management through this lens is not just about austerity on steroids. It's about a longer history of race and place in America. And it's all too familiar even if the individual laws are new and looking from this angle helps us understand how these problems can be so persistent. The mechanisms change. As Mark was saying, you take a gun out of the hands of someone and they're already planning where they get to get the next one for. They can adapt to new policies and we really need to understand that if we want to know how to fight back and win. Right. Good evening. Good evening. It's gonna be a little different because I sound from a rural background. Although I did live in Detroit at one point for a short period of time. I have lots of family here but I am from Lowndes County, Alabama which is located between Selma and Montgomery which is the home of the original Black Panther Party. And I stand on the legacy of my parents who went before me as community organizers and have built a bridge that I now stand on. But I work for the Equal Justice Initiative. I don't know whether any of you have ever heard of Wayne Stevenson who is the author of Just Mercy. Well, I fortunately am employed by EJI and EJI in April is opening the first memorials for lynching to recognize victims of lynching in this country that have never been recognized before. Also our building is going to house a slavery museum. Because as we talk about slavery and put a lot of this in context, Montgomery, Alabama became one of the centers of the domestic slave trade after they ended the international slave trade. And once it became the center it created a lot of wealth for that area and a lot of our ancestors that ended up here in Detroit during the Great migration. A lot of them came, were brought in. People know about Charleston, they know about New Orleans but they don't know about Montgomery. And a lot of them were brought, if you go to Montgomery now, there's a street with a river, where the Alabama River is, you go up that street. The name of the street is Commerce Street. And there's a street that comes out of Commerce Street that's called Market Street. And then there at the court square is where slaves were auctioned off. And EJI's building was one of the slave holding pens that existed at that time. So it is going to be made into a, what is being made into a museum part of it that will tell that history. Well, the same soils that brought people from North and South Carolina when they went, they expanded westward in order to expand their cotton plantations because they wore out the soil, took them to places like Lowndes County. And the soils are very good because they hold water. But the soils are not good for the treatment of sanitation. So the reason I'm here today because I've been waging a fight since I returned from Detroit, I moved from Detroit in 2000, I actually lived on Jefferson and worked at Renaissance High School. And when I moved back home, instead of deciding to teach again, I decided I wanted to be more of an activist and try to see what I could do to change my community to move it beyond where it was at that particular time. I found that in 2002, that there were resting people that were poor who could not afford on-site sanitation. In the rural communities, you have to have a septic tank. I'm sure McComb County and other areas around here, there are septic tanks too. But there, the septic tanks don't work. And what was happening is that the septic systems were so, so expensive that people couldn't afford them. And what they were doing, if you couldn't afford the on-site septic system, they were placing people under arrest. They were charged, they have put in place a law where they can charge you up to $500 a day for each day you're not in compliance, or you'd be criminalizing the charge with Mr. Mina. The Alabama Department of Public Health is responsible for regulating that. But they're also responsible for training the installers, deciding what technology comes into the state, whether or not you get a permit and permitting what you put in place and finding you if that breaks down. So what is happening is that they have created a paradigm where they're in control. They're in control of the entire process. And what they've done is part of the story that sounds similar to the way they've selectively enforced this policy. The way they've enforced it is that the people that they were arrested, if you go and look at the arrest, most of the people that they were arrested back in 2002 when I got involved in this, were poor black people. Every once in a while, they would arrest a poor white person, probably because they wanted to land. So oftentimes, when people talk about the urban communities, they talk about it in terms of municipalities and they talk about it in terms of, we have clusters in disly populated areas, but also, we tend to leave out that rural paradigm. And I talk about that a lot in daily others' heritage over and over again. If we leave out that rural paradigm where people, because a lot of people think when they go home, because a lot, I'm sure a lot of people in here have relatives in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. And so, a lot of people, when they go home and they see the land, they don't see any value in it. There's lots of value in that land. A lot of people want that land because with climate change, there's gonna be a major shift. A lot of people are gonna have to move away from the coastal areas. It's probably why they're looking at Detroit and Vietnam and places like that. You're further away from the coast and you have a source of fresh water. And a lot of areas, even California right now, California is losing its groundwater and it's losing so much groundwater, in fact. In some places, the ground is starting to sink because they were taking all the groundwater. And last year, I was invited to the Aspen Institute. I had never heard of Aspen Institute before. They sit here in invitation and ask me to come here and everybody's saying, oh, you know, that's prestigious, you should go, so I went. And when I went there, I started questioning, why didn't they invite me to come? Because the people in the room were people like Nestle, Monsanto, even the Walton Foundation. They're American water. The reason they were there, and big energy, they were theirs too, and big ag from California because they are big uses of water. What they were talking about is how to quantify and monetize water. And the message that I want to bring today for people that, because I don't want white people to feel that they can escape this. Because what they're talking about is monetizing and quantifying water for everybody. So everything has to pay. I think that Detroit, Vincent Harbor, Flint, oh, that's just the beginning, but you should go to meet Appalachia and go to West Virginia, where they're blowing the tops off mountains there. And the people cannot drink their water because the water, people told us when we were there, it's part of the New Poor People's Campaign that when they light the water, it burns. And what they're doing, they're dividing the families against each other to get the land. And what they were trying to do, what they were trying to do with the Asken Institute, they're trying to come up with a policy, because a lot of this is in the narrative. You know, they have to shape a narrative, because I've heard this with everybody that spoke today about how you shape this narrative. First, black people can't govern and blah, blah, blah. But what they're shaping a narrative, and their narrative is that groundwater and surface water are separate. Because there are no policies, they researched it. There are no policies to govern a lot of groundwater and a lot of states. So what they want to do is come up with a policy. I remember when I lived in California a long time ago, if you had oil on your property, you didn't own the oil, you just owned the rain. And they can dig down from somewhere else and drain. Well, they want to do the same thing about being able to drain other people's wells. They're putting policies in place right now where, because water is life. I mean, if you weren't paying, basically what they were talking about is having control and access to water, because water is something that everybody has to have. So what the Walton Foundation is doing in Monsanto is, I don't even know if Monsanto was in the water, because what they're doing is they're buying for the purpose of controlling water. And I believe that until when we talk about infrastructure, look at Trump's infrastructure package. First of all, they're not going after the Lyons counties of the world because we don't have a lot of money. But if they buy up, because with their part, with the upgrade, because I know I have friends and family here, these are some of the highest water bills I ever heard of in my life here in Detroit. Because a lot of the water is being lost because the infrastructure's so old and they didn't upgrade it. So as a result, what they're doing is he's attaching, if the city needs money to upgrade his infrastructure, you got to partner with a private company, eventually they're talking about selling off those assets so that they can have control of it. And what you find is when they sell off these assets, because that's just another way, I think they may not call it emergency management, but it'll come with the same result. Because at the end of the day, when they sell off those assets and you can't pay your water bill, at least if you're in a city where people live there and understand that there are changes that happen economically and you could negotiate instead of payment plans, that's not gonna happen anymore. Because with these people, the bottom line is how much money they can make and how much money they can generate for their shareholders. So we have to be conscious and know that these issues that are occurring, it may be happening here right now, but it's gonna be happening not just here in the US, but around the world. Because water is very scarce. And when Obama was still in the White House, he had a water summit there and I had the good fortune of being invited. And the people that were there at that time, that's when the president was paying attention to the national security people. He was saying, they were saying that the number two national security issue in this country was water scarcity. So from what I'm hearing today, all of these issues are connected because it's about water at the end of the day. It's about water. Even what I'm dealing with in Lowndes County is about water. When people think about sanitation, they separate it from water, but one in sanitation or one in the same. Because at some point, hopefully we can get to a point where we can extract water from what we were throwing away as waste. So what I'm doing, just to give you a little bit about my work and how it all connects, I think that in rural communities, we see the most extreme forms of inequality. Because rural communities are just left out of the equation. And oftentimes, a lot of places, the infrastructure that you have, that you've had for many, many years, I'm fighting in an area that's never had the infrastructure. And I'm fighting in an area between the Selma to Montgomery March as Reverend Dr. William Barber just said, who visited Lowndes County, he said that people come to Selma every year to celebrate what happened over 50 years ago and within 20 minutes of there, people are living with raw sewage on the ground. I'm representing, I'm here speaking on behalf of people that live in an area where the UN Special Rapperture on Extreme Poverty was there in December. And what he saw in Lowndes County, he said it's uncommon in the first world. These are, I mean, the arrogance that we have in this country where a president can call other countries the asshole countries, and we got assholes right here in the United States, and they don't even recognize, are trying to address it. In Lowndes County, we did a study where we actually collected fecal soil, water, and blood samples, and we came back and found evidence of hookworm. Hookworm is associated with poverty, and anywhere you go in the world, you will find extreme poverty, you're gonna find hookworm. When I took Reverend Barber down to Lowndes County, he was so moved by what he saw, he had to stop for a minute. I think he stood all by himself, and I didn't go where he was, I thought he was probably crying. What is happening is that we have to fight, I think part of his equation, now we can't assume that all black people, I don't know a good way to say this, you may look like me, but we may not think the same. As some of the people, since we have been fighting this fight in Lowndes County, the person that I have been fighting the most has been a black congresswoman. She just issued a statement with the health department saying that they don't need to be concerned about hookworm, that our study was flawed. But there's still more people, powers. I mean, one doctor went there and he took pictures and put it on Twitter, and people say, is this in the United States? Those are the kinds of things that we're dealing with. But on the other side of it, we're working on innovation to try to deal with this as well. I met with a, I'm gonna close with this before I pass the mic, but I met with the person who's running for governor. You know, I started getting these emails and he's asking me, could he come and meet with me because he wants to learn about this problem. And he said to me, what if I declare a state of emergency? And he said, you know, because we gotta do something. See, he was trying to establish a narrative to make me think that he was doing something to help, but he wasn't interested in helping. And he went on to say, sometimes you have to let people talk. And so he just kept on talking, he said, or maybe we can pay them to move. I said, pay them to move. Oh yeah, we have a place in Tuscalooso. I said who he was. We have a place in Tuscalooso where we pay people, pay people to move out of this area because it was too low. So maybe we can pay them because they're all renters anyway. I said, they're all renters. I said, where did you get your information from? Well, I said, no, they're not renters. I said, most of these people bought this land at the end of slavery to keep their families together. That's why it's air property. So they can always have a place to go because they didn't want the families to be separated. So he said, well, I don't see why they want to live there in the first place. Why won't they all just move to the city? I said, why won't they all, because every time he said, I was so shocked, I kept repeating that talk because I thought he was just trying to see whether I was paying attention. And I said, for the same reason, you don't want to leave the city and move to the country. They don't want to leave the country and move to the city. So what it shows me, and this is what will be a progressive politician, this person is running as a Democrat who has received nominations, endorsements already for some of the most powerful black people in Alabama. But they're not asking the right questions. They're just letting people go as long as they have access that they think to the power, then they allow this to happen. So I think that what I'm seeing is going on here is that they're paying attention to what happened in these other areas. And they're trying to find a way in which they can use these same kind of policies to say, I guess he wanted to float it to see how I was going to deal with it first before he decided that he was gonna talk to other people. And he could have already talked to other people about it. I don't know, because they weren't in the room with me. But the point I'm making is that we're all in this together. Whether you're black, whether you're white, whether you came here by way of the slave ship or your family came by Ellis Island, they just came recent times. We're all in this together because at the end of the day, it's about controlling infrastructure. It's about controlling water and what they have been very powerful and masterful at doing is when they wrap it in a racist narrative, we start accepting it. And once it becomes commonplace in Detroit and then Harvard and Flint, then they can roll it out in all of these other areas too that are having similar problems. Thank you. To be a moderator, this incredibly in-moderate panel which I would say profoundly radical in its history and its politics and its imagination is impossible. And so, let us moderate together. I'd like to open the floor now for questions and comments from any and all of you. Or through the board of board commissioners to talk about in Detroit. I should just stick to part of what I write to them. But the big problem is, what she said, is our black leaders, that no one want to talk about it and just really put it out front. That's, we don't have that in Detroit because when it started in Flint, Harvard, I said, this is going to spread all around and this is where it is now. But anyway, this is one of the things that when I go down to the water board commissioner, I have the right things down because when I start to talk and if I just talk, it's very upsetting to me for some of the things that I'm seeing and people are telling me. By the way, my name is Freda Yambutla and I'm a community activist. I'm president of the Second Precinct Community Relations Council. But I go there as a community activist. And I said, as the largest fresh water source in America, I questioned the charges for water in Detroit. It is unfair and it is unsustainable for the citizens. As stated in an article written by Alice Gross in the Detroit Free Press, water shutoffs raise public health questions. He also wrote that if the administration wanted the people to stay in the city, they would make water affordable. It is evident that you want people to leave. Where are they going to move? No one can live without water, the very source of life. I must reflect back to the rebellion in 1967 and its cause. When one looks at the conditions that created the rebellion, the only visible change that has been made is the Detroit Police Department. In fact, matters have gotten worse. Over 60% of our children are living in poverty. The schools, families and communities have been destroyed. These conditions are contributing to depression and anger. What comes out of being oppressed are conditions that lead to rebellion. I witnessed the change in my community after McKinsey High School was destroyed. I saw young people wandering the streets and neighbor had a change snatched from her net during daylight hours by a young man who should have been in school. These kinds of acts will continue and education prepares ones for life. Self-preservation is the first law of nature and not being able to support oneself can only lead to crime to survive. And my granddaughter told me to read the whole thing. But anyway, this is what I tried to do and I stayed before them and I know they're tired of me coming down but they only meet once a month. So I make it my business to be there every third Wednesday and I write that and then I'd stand before a clock to time myself for three minutes. This last time I was down yesterday, I told them you're gonna have to give me a few more minutes because I have to say more about it, you know what was going on in my community. So they had someone out of the hundreds of people in Detroit, thousands of people in Detroit. It was when I went to her honors program they left a message on my machine on my phone telling me who I was supposed to contact for any concerns in the community and that to keep me from going downtown. But instead I did my writing. I wrote this in August of 2017 but I was down there again yesterday. So we just have to keep pushing but we don't have black leaders that should have in the city of Detroit. That's the problem. Well, I think that what we have to start doing is calling people out. I think that one of the problems that we have, I think, oftentimes is when we respect someone or if they have that position we just let them get away with it. And just one example, this was not a black leader but I have a lot of respect for Elizabeth Warren. Oh, yes. But I was on the panel with her Monday. Bernie Sanders did an inequality town hall media and I was one of the panelists. And she was justifying why federal money was given to extend municipal sewer to the business owners who were white business owners and not extended to people that lived in a municipal. And she talked about, she tried to frame this, say there was economic development sometimes. And I had to cut off. And I respect her. But I had to cut her off because I was talking about environmental justice. And I was talking about what happens all the time when the money is given to the business community that can afford to fix the problem and is left on the backs of the poor people to fix it themselves. And we have to, no matter who it is, and I still have a lot of respect for her. But I'm sure she respects me now too. Because I had to tell the truth. And I think that we have to do that more and more and more. There's a group of people that every year go to Selma. And I say Selma because, you know, I mentioned Selma a lot. I was the first director of the Voting Race Museum. I actually left the Voting Race Museum to come here to teach. But I was, my concern about that there are people that come here and they go to the Everett Peppers Bridge and they take those pictures and look like they have to do so much about voting rights and civil rights. And they go back home and they forget what the movement was all about. But I think we have to start calling them out, no matter who they are. So that, because that's the only way, if we don't correct them, they'll think they're right and they'll keep doing the same thing over and over again. So we're pushing that work sustaining, you know, thinking of the biblical story of the famine in Egypt, where you had a crisis, right, and ultimately the people had to go to the government to get grain food. Ultimately, Old Testament, ultimately, they got to a point where all their goods, because it's a famine, right, all their goods are gone so they gave up their land to get grain. And then ultimately they became indentured servants. And in a just government, I guess that worked out well in the end, but it definitely enriched the government. Today, I'm seeing credit card debt is over a trillion dollars, a small time fine, outstanding consumer debt. Auto loan debt is now over a trillion. Student loan debt, don't own their homes anymore, so that you don't have access to that type of wealth. So in that environment, if an economic crisis were to hit, especially in urban cores, in rural areas too, but especially in urban cores, you know, if I want to acre a land, I can grow some food. It's hard to do if you live in a high rocks. And so my question to the panel is what messages of self-empowerment, being self-sustaining, where you're not dependent upon the government and we should be, we have expectations that government works for us because it's supposed to represent us. But what message should we collectively be communicating so that people aren't caught in another recession and in a worse position than a lot of people were in 2008? Well, let me just talk about the reality of people that are on the ground. And one of the things that I do get a chance to do is go and sit on the porch with mama and them down in the country. And I can see what's going on. And sometimes, because we're doing well, we can't see the situation. Some people are just trapped in this cycle that they have no control over. For an example, one of the persons I was on this panel with is one of the senior vice presidents of UAW here in Detroit. And I know that they tried to organize a union in Alabama and had a hard time doing that. But the reason they can't do it and the reason that their workers are having such a hard time here is because they can go to Alabama and those factories come from out of the country, get tax-free money, located in these communities, don't even hire permanent workers. They're hiring hard-time workers. Or they're hiring them through temporary agencies and they're paying them, the temporary agencies make more money than the workers are getting. They work in two or three years. They fire them for anything and then they bring more temporary workers in there. How can they build wealth? A lot of people in my area, they own acres of land. They own this in slavery. And they're buying mobile homes. So when they get their income tax refunds, if they have to be working or they have children they can claim it and get a recall, they can go get that mobile home. But they're not gonna build wealth there because that mobile home is just like buying a car. When you pull it off a lot, it starts to depreciate in value. One of the places I took Reverend Barber to was a home where a woman is living off $700. Actually, she gets 700 for herself and her children. She's getting like $958 a month. 950, that's no money to live off of. When it was, we had a cold, I know it gets cold here all the time but it doesn't get cold where I am too often. When it gets 20 degrees, everything shuts down especially gonna be there for two or three days. And we had a cold snap for about a week. We even had snow on the ground. When people got their power bills, some of those people had to make a decision between eating and paying those bills and where we're from, especially in Lyons County, when that power bill comes in, it's due on the 15th. If it's $500 and you pay $499.99, they're gonna turn it off and you don't pay that one cent. You cannot make payment arrangements. So these are people that are caught in cycles of poverty. This woman doesn't have a car. Her, in the mobile home that she lives in is leaking inside and full of mold. One of her children is nine years old and sleeping with a seat pad. That's something that I would sleep with because I'm almost 60 years old. But we're talking about a nine-year-old child but she's caught in this cycle of poverty where she can, she said they signed a, the agreement to pay the mobile home was 100, pay for the mobile home was $127,000. She still owes $20,000 on it. The interest raised about 11%. And if they came and took it from her tomorrow, they probably couldn't sell it for $3,000. But she has nowhere else to live. So I think that as we think about these paradigms, we think about it from our point of view because we come from a point of privilege. But a lot of these people don't have credit cards. They only have telephones, you know? So we have, what I've told my colleagues in the Newport People's Campaign is that you can't talk about poverty until you go and live in some of these people's houses and see how they live. I mean, everybody doesn't have a credit card. A lot of these people are living from the big thing. I don't know if I hear the big thing in Alabama is paying they loans. They don't make enough money. So they gotta go get a payday loan. What they happen to own the title to the car is a title loan. But that's how people make it because the system is set up for them to fail. So if you happen to be fortunate enough to not own a student, not have a, I have student loans. That's the only way I can get to school is my parents couldn't pay for it. But if you happen to be fortunate enough to not have that, thank God for that. Maybe you can go and help somebody else pay theirs off. But I think what we can't do as we talk about these situations is look at the reality and look at it from the point of view from the people that are there. Some of them are not there because they want to be there. They don't have a choice. And if we could find ways and one of the things that I do, and I wasn't a Bernie Sanders supporter but I'm about to become a Bernie Sanders supporter because we don't have to have poor people in this country. You know, we don't have to have poor people in this country. The rich people get everything. They give it to them free and expect the poor people to go in the bag for it or they don't get it at all. So I think that what we have to do is as we look at poverty and how poverty is in this country, they laid this out earlier about capitalism. The way our system is set up is to survive all poverty. Because that's where you're gonna get the free labor from. When the people go, when the young man who should have been in school because the school was closed and the family is poor, ends up committing crime and they send them to these private prisons where they get them out there to work free as indentures, another former slave labor. So we have to, I think we have to be careful that we don't beat up on folk that are poor. Thinking they're poor because they chose to be poor and because they made bad choices. Sometimes they don't have a choice. The Old Testament, let's go with the new. So Jesus lived in occupied Palestine with people who were living in grinding poverty. They had their own emergency manager from Rome. And so what he did is, he said that we're gonna divorce ourselves completely from government. And what was required of those in his community is that everybody put everything that they had, all of their assets into one pot. And that as they needed whatever they needed, they take from the pot, right? And there were no poor among them. I don't know that literally that's what we do, but I do think that we have the capacity to begin to stop looking to government to try and solve our problems and begin to look to ourselves. And it is not unprecedented. The first Black Panther Party was in Lowndes County, but the next one was in Oakland, California. And the nonprofit social service network that we now know of where there are all kinds of agencies and nonprofits set up to do all kinds of things. When the Panthers were around, there was no such thing. In fact, the Panthers were the ones that set the model, that established the model by establishing breakfast for children program, bicycle selling, email screening, ambulance services, medical assistance, schools, all of these things that they did just by looking to the resources of the community because the community had bought into it. The community was prepared to sacrifice for it because they saw the benefits to them. And so I think we still have that capacity. We have the ability to turn to ourselves, but I think a little bit too much of our energy collectively is spent trying to persuade people in government to do things that they're never going to do anyway. If that energy were directed towards just saying, we've got to take care of business ourselves, I think we could do a lot more. Yeah, I think about a lot, and I kind of vacillate wildly between two polar opposites in my answer. Because on the one hand, in Detroit, in places like the Boggs Center, you see experiments in radical autonomy happening and being built, and it seems really important. And I agree that we are beating our heads against the wall when the solution does seem to be, especially in coming climate change, that we are going to need to start to kind of make new ways of relating to each other and make ourselves more sustainable, and that means bringing more stuff inside it and making more stuff for ourselves. And then at the same time, I also feel like there's this neoliberal push on those same communities to say, you need to be more resilient, you need to build your own wealth, you need to participate in capitalism by being your own entrepreneurs. At the same time, they've taken all the stuff that people have. And so I worry sometimes about us buying into that narrative that as we all, as all the people, as everyone in rural Alabama and in Metro Detroit is paying into this tech system and not getting anything out of it, they're still expected to make their own way. That's the same thing as back in the day when you had to pay for the public school system that was only for white children and then also pay for a black school separately on top of it. And so I worry about us kind of accepting that the public is just not for folks or people of color anymore and just walking away. So like I said, it's completely incompatible and I don't know what to do. The other thing I wanted to mention is I've been studying debt a lot so I appreciate you bringing that up. And one of the things I've been looking at is how if you're a wealthy white person, like some people we know of, you can get a $500 million loan one day just for asking for it or maybe some other things I don't know about what you're trading for that, but nobody backs an eyelash. And so we talk about these small payday loans that have a huge impact on people's lives and can be crushing for them, but we're not putting in the same conversation as this larger financialized world of debt where the people at the top are heavily, heavily indebted and the mortgage market is heavily, heavily indebted. But we don't blame people for that at the top, we just blame people for their debt and their moral failings at the bottom. And so I've been trying to figure out how we can put it all in the same conversation to say like everybody's in debt but only some people are actually paying for it and it's actually benefiting rich people to be in debt. And I don't know what to do with that either, I should just stop. I just, I need to be very confident with that. I mean we're just kind of research rolling out, kind of reading the souls of black folks again. And this theme about debt as a means of social control. And actually they're tracing through historically, going into sharecropping and just sort of putting that on the table for people to be thinking about. I don't know, can I call the dots? But that seems to be an important true line where institutional debt has always been used or frequently been used as a means of social control and I think the emergency manager is just the latest episode of that story. All right. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for everyone on the panel. This was fantastic. I think a lot about, I'm sorry, what's your name? You asked a question about, yes, I'll have to talk. Raymond. Yeah, I think a lot about Raymond's question. And I think the context, right, that Catherine, right, like in Mark and Louise are giving, right, like this kind of tension. And I have had, right, the great benefit of being to Lowndes County a couple of times and being able to talk with folks there, being from various areas, right, I've lived various areas in the South and had family roots here in Michigan. And one of the things that sort of in my own work, right, I'm working with on Black towns that were formed, right, to create, right, modes of self-sufficiency, right, to escape, right, the sort of as much as they could, right, the hand of white supremacy and to actually create their own sort of places for self-determination and self-sustaining. And I've interviewed a lot of folks who are from those communities regardless of whether they are sort of incorporated municipalities or sort of unincorporated rural areas. And that theme, right, comes up over and over again, but that theme, the theme of self-determination and figuring out how do we use the land that we have, right, to sustain ourselves in an economy where as Catherine is talking about, right, like we actually are not making, right, the kind of wages that would ever be able to sustain us by themselves. And so those narratives are always sort of like a both end. And one of the things that I keep coming up against is I'm like, yeah, like how do we get more, how do we get free, right, how do we get more sort of self-sufficient is like the, and I remember and I'm sort of snapped back to the reality that self-sufficiency in a capitalist system is technically illegal, right? Like it really is a, you know, we find like small ways to like kind of carve out, right, like the Black Panther Party, right, like to carve out moments, right, in spaces for us to try to get as much as we can. But there's always, right, there's always a back lift, there's always a clamp down on all of those sorts of efforts. So a case in point that happened in East of North Carolina, actually at the church that, or one of the churches that Reverend Barber is affiliated with was trying to work with an organization, a nonprofit organization called North Carolina Warn that works on energy, future sort of alternate energy sustainability. To figure out, and this is a rural church, to figure out how to reduce the power bills for that church because Duke Energy, which is the devil to us in Durham, right, you know, is would be a miracle worker, right, in a place like, in places like Eastern North Carolina because they have the smaller power utilities that built them like $500 a month, right up to $1,000 a month during the winter times for their energy bills. And what the church had in mind was to buy, because they couldn't afford to buy solar panels by themselves, was to buy solar panels from NC Warn and have NC Warn act as essentially like a third party like energy provider. They pay, like whatever, if there's any other sort of bills they sort of paying off the solar panels over time and then they get the benefit of the energy and if that work they could expand it to the community. Self-sufficiency, right? Well then, you know, not, I don't even know that this experiment lasted six months before Duke Energy came and filed this huge lawsuit, right, against this church, saying that, you know, it had the monopoly on sort of energy production and you couldn't have just sort of a willy nilly like third party energy provider, right? And so in very short order, right, like everything was nipped in the bud and the nonprofit was just sort of faced with like dissolution if it did not, right? Sort of relent and kind of back off from this plan. And so I just, I say all that to say is like, I think that like, like this is the tension that we're dealing with, right? Like the trying to rest, right? Like power from private company's hand which is basically hand in hand, right? With government at this point, right? To get ourselves sufficient in some kind of way. And I think that that's, yeah, I think that's something we all are having to like, to grapple with is like, oh yeah, like part of capitalism is like, you actually have to have the people, like as the resource, and if they are their own resource, then like capitalism dissolves. So that's like the way out, but then also like the huge fight that we find ourselves in. Can I say something about yours? In Detroit, the church has had the drainage fees that they didn't know about. They implemented those, the drainage fees, and the church is saying, what are you talking about? Drainage fees, they make them up. They make them stop. And you lose your pro, they make stuff up. They made up drainage fees, right? People had them payin', right? And they make it up. So that's what they do. I guess, you know, we spend a lot of our time at the Bogg Center and trying to create the future. But I think we have to acknowledge there is no self-sufficiency anymore. Nobody's gonna get out of this unless we all get out of it. That's just the truth. And just like they, you know, this business of as weak a political power as the black church has become. No offense to anybody here, but there was a time, but not now. They are still the only stable institution left in Detroit where people can gather. And in five years, they're gonna be gone most of them. And they're gonna do it with the water bills, by the drainage bills. That's what's happened. It's right in front of us. We have got to understand that these small projects are important as experiments for the future. The same way Benton Harbor was a way their experiment for the future. We have to do that. But it is urgent, urgent that we figure out collectively our survival now. Cause they're not gonna let one and two of us go anymore. And also, you know, there's something called climate gentrification. They're starting to see it in some places already. And they're saying that for an example, like one example in Miami, you know, Miami there's something from sea level rise. And I'm very interested in climate change. I have recently been elected to the board of the Climate Reality Project, which was set up by Al Gore. And even in his latest movie, In Convenience sequel, they show where in Miami when it's a clear day, you can see fish in the street because of sea level rise. Well, the areas in Miami that have the highest ground is a little hazy. So you know what that means. And that's gonna be climate gentrification. They said in California, you know, California biggest problem is our fires. The areas that are more stable, but they don't have a lot of fires are Compton and Carson because they don't have those problems there. What is that gonna mean in the future? So, I'm saying all this says, we look at how we can be sustainable or how we help each other. You gotta look at some of these policies because in Florida, I was talking to someone from Bethune Cookman last night and she said that they made it illegal to even talk about climate change in Florida. Whoa. You know, and you get North Carolina too, where you can't, and in Alabama you can't even put, if you put solar powers on your house, you gotta pay $5 per kilowatt hour for each kilowatt hour that you generate off the grid. So they do that to keep people from being self-sufficient. We're talking about a system that's not designed for self-sufficiency. And what they're doing, a lot of these bills are being written by Alec, which is paid for by the Koch brothers. And they're doing this so they can maintain control and keep and make more money because that's the bottom line. They're not concerned about humanity. So in Alabama, which has lots of sunshine, I'm sure when I go back home, it's gonna be at least 77 degrees. In Florida, same thing, the sunshine state you can't even use solar power because they've outlawed solar panels. So again, as we start talking about these experiments or however, whatever you wanna frame it as, we have to start figuring out ways in which we can get more control of the process. Now, Michael Moore said the other day that the largest group of, that there were 100 million people that didn't even vote in the 2016 election. And he laid out how many people voted for Hillary Clinton and how many people voted for Trump. The biggest group didn't vote at all. And if we keep this, that same trend, we're not gonna have any rights before all this said and done. Cause I see parallels between them taking away people's rights of homeowner to put a solar panel on their house. I'm gonna put one on mine. I'd probably be on the news. Cause it's my house. And somebody's gonna have to stand up and fight it. But the bottom line is that we're gonna have to all find a way to get involved and make changes, whether it's about water here, solar in Florida, or in New York, if you go to Harlem, Harlem isn't even black anymore. It's been judged by you. When I go to DC, everybody in DC was talking about how they can't afford to live in DC anymore. It has changed as well. So, and that's, and I'm starting to see the same kinds of things take place here in Detroit. Because when I go downtown Detroit, it doesn't look like it looked when I was here from 1997 to 2000. And I'm seeing new housing stars and I'm seeing people walking dogs. And I'm sure they have bike trails and things that generally goes along with gentrification. One more question. Okay. I like that. And one of my precious life experiences has been the time that I spent with Rosa Parks. And so I look at the dynamics of Rosa Parks coming from Montgomery to Detroit in that connection and a lot of lessons learned. One of the things that is really, really difficult for me is the whole idea of the silence and particularly the silence of white people. And I always say silence is violence. And so we have had people look at all of these things that have happened and it has become the norm. So the disconnect from humanity sits with the people who have the power, who created me as less than you. And is that acceptable? So I always say to people, now that you know what you're gonna do, and so we cannot do this alone. It has to be the we. And I always tell the Rosa Parks story that when they came to arrest her, she sat down on, when she stayed in her seat, she was not planted by the NAACP, although that is the lie that's told. And Mrs. Parks would always correct it while she was living. So I'll continue to do that as one of her legacies. She said to the policeman, why do you treat us this way? She said, why do you treat me this way? She said us because she thought of everybody else that looked like her that had that experience. So when you think about the water and you point to Flint and you point to Detroit as the shadows, it's coming to you. Michigan State already said that it was gonna happen in five years. They upgraded their study and in three years, 35% of this country will not be able to afford water. So when we talk about water affordability and Alice Jennings has led a national team of 14 attorneys for legislation for clean, safe, affordable, accessible water as a human right. It's not a human right right now here in this country. So if we don't get it as a human right, we have our state legislature who has sat on the bills that we put forth. I put copies back on the table of both the federal and the local legislation that we're trying to get through. They wouldn't pass it. So I wanted to put to the panel the issue of the legal system and how the emergency manager management law is an example of it, but it goes all the way after the Supreme Court, which we now have the imbalance in the Supreme Court that the courts are being used against us time and time again. The Voting Rights Act was completely gutted and annihilated at this point. So why is it that we have citizens who say that they are activists and they're anti-racist, but the action that goes with being anti-racist requires you to do something. There's no passivity in being anti-racist. It's not about reading books, but these laws that are coming against us and how they can use the law continuously and our public health is being impacted because all of these things that happen when you can't wash your hands and you go out to your little non-paying job and you serve food, after you haven't washed your hands, what happens? You're exposing the other people to it. So all of us are vulnerable. When they mess with the air, the air falls on the water. When they mess with the land, the land goes into the water. So if we don't recognize that water impacts us all, racism, white supremacy affects us all, racism from the beginning of this country was economic system. That's what it was, economic system was not about all these things that we do. We are the people of the global majority. White people are not part of the global majority, they're the global minority. When you look at people all over the world. So we need to speak out collectively. If we're not a we, we're gonna be. And then. Thank you for the implication of co-liberation. Which we all have to be invested in. If one of our questions was, what is emergency management a case of, we've heard many answers, including, and this is not a complete list, racism, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, neoliberalism, precarity, indebtedness, immiseration, resource extraction, labor exploitation, de-democratization, white supremacy. What for that, who I know calls it statecraft, what the Honorable Joanne Watson has called ethnic cleansing, what Mark Fincher here called war. Tomorrow we will be continuing this discussion. I invite all of you to come to the University of Michigan Ann Arbor to join us. I want to thank the panelists once again for an incredible start.