 Thank you. Thanks for having me. Really excited to share a little bit about the work that's being done in Milwaukee. First and foremost, again, I am Angela Lange. I am one of the founders and executive director of Block. I am a chunky slash fat black millennial cis gender pansexual woman. That's a mouthful. I acknowledge that. But I say that specifically because that is my lived experience. And that is how I will be framing my part of the conversation today by no means, just to reinforce that point. I'm not speaking on behalf of all black people because black people are not homogenous the same way. Other people of color are not homogenous as well. So I do want to jump in a little bit around some of the work that's being done in Milwaukee and our thinking specifically around how we're building political power, how we're building power in general, and how we're really starting to think about how the history of white supremacy is manifesting to this day and some of the work that's being done to counteract that. So that's me serving side-eye since 1989, being skeptical of every single thing. Born and raised in Milwaukee very proudly. I represent that super hard. My heart is in Milwaukee right now. Given the events that happened, I actually got the news as I was on the way to the airport. And it hits very close for me because I grew up right around the corner from where it happened. I spent a lot of time at the schools that happened to be on lockdown. So it was very personal and something I'm processing and going through today. Milwaukee, a lot of folks know that I love Milwaukee. I've been given the option to live here, to live in New York and California. But I've chose to stay in Milwaukee because it's just had a profound impact on my life. And I feel that Milwaukee raised me as a particular person. And I want to do the best I can to give back. So I went to UW-Milwaukee, which is about a half a mile away from where I went to high school, not my plans. But it was probably the best decision I ever made because that's a really hard starter to get involved in really active locally. First job out of college was for SEIU, doing a lot of work around the fight for 15, doing a lot of their political work, so I come out of student organizing, but also have a big role in union organizing. That was kind of my path in a lot of what I learned at SEIU. I hold with me to today. I did a quick stint, actually not so quick, at For Our Future in 2016. They were super packed. There was a lot of organizations. That's more of a C4 conversation, but worked for them. And then specifically after the 2016 election, because my state director of For Our Future knew I was so passionate about Milwaukee and a lot of the harmful narratives coming out of Milwaukee, we decided to kind of come together and I was in a position to help build what is now block. Really, I saw inequity when I was growing up, but I didn't have the language to talk about it. And this is a little bit more personal for me, but this was, the story is in the New Yorker, so now it's a whole thing. So now I'm talking about it. Bear with me. So when I was 12, let me back up. So I am the daughter of a white woman who had racist family members and left to go to the big city in Milwaukee. She didn't graduate high school. She ended up getting her GED and was living in a new city, trying to figure out how to raise a black child with his hair. So it was very interesting seeing those dynamics growing up. She was a single mom. And when I was 12, she was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. And I say that because I didn't have the language to really understand what the issues were. I just knew that it wasn't okay that this 30-something woman who had stage four breast cancer had to work multiple jobs, had to go to chemotherapy every Tuesday, religiously, and then have to go to work the next day because she couldn't afford to take off, right? The same school that was on lockdown yesterday is where I grew up across the street and it was a private All Boys High School, which was good when I was a kid. I loved living across the street from All Boys High School. But at the same time, the friends and the guy friends that I had in the neighborhood that lived literally next door to this private school could not afford to go to the school. So these are the things that I was seeing when I was growing up. I didn't have the language for inequality and equity and racial justice and economic justice. I had all the things to really articulate what was wrong with that. But I knew in my heart, I was like, something's not right here. And that's a lot of kind of what I bring today. And again, serving skeptical looks and questioning everything since 1989. So a little bit about where our office is located. So the 5306 zip code is one of the most incarcerated zip codes in the world. The United States incarcerates the most people in the world. And so the most incarcerated zip code is the most incarcerated zip code in the world. That's a really big thing to sit with. So some quick stats and statistics is that in 2013 UWM study found that it was the most incarcerated zip code in the States with a majority of its men spending time in jail or in prison. And people have said that little has changed since that came out. A third of Milwaukee's vacant lots are in the zip code. And two thirds of the children in 5306 live in poverty compared to 42% of all children 18 and under citywide. Nearly 95% of its residents are black. No other zip code has a greater percentage of black folks. And residents receive the lowest rating for health outcomes from the Center for Urban Population Health in 2009. Rating was based on access to quality, healthcare, health behaviors, physical environment, poverty and education. Wisconsin is also home to, it's known for the worst place to raise a black child. We have the worst racial discrepancies in general and it's due to a lot of different factors. Milwaukee and Wisconsin just keep making these lists all the time. I'm tired of reading these headlines, but anyone that is in Milwaukee knows what 5306 is. There is a documentary, there's a lot of stereotypes that's also attached to it. Recently over Labor Day weekend, we finally found an office space that was suitable for us. And so we moved into the zip code. We do work all across the North side of Milwaukee. Milwaukee is incredibly segregated. When I say Milwaukee, I mean black folks. Because it's segregated in all the challenges that 5306 deals with, we want to provide a little extra love so we wanted to make sure that we are essentially located where a lot of our ambassadors and our team actually live and come from. So with stats like those, you gotta do things differently, right? What does it look like to actually build term long engagement, do civic engagement, specifically in a zip code that has a lot of people that have been touched by the mass incarceration system, specifically in Wisconsin. If you are out of jail or prison, but you are still on what we call paper, probation, parole, your voting rights have not been restored yet. So you could have done your time. Say you spent five years in prison. Say you have three years where you're out and you're on paper or supervision. Your voting rights are not restored for those three years until you're fully off of supervision. And that's an important point. So we have to do things like relational organizing. I know a lot of funders love the term relational organizing. It's like a new buzzword. There's no one on earth that can't tell me that Harriet Tubman was not doing relational organizing. It's not new. It's how we authentically engage with our folks, understanding the structural barriers that we have to deal with. We have to expand the idea of civic engagement outside of just voting. If we are thinking of civic engagement as just voting, you're leaving out all the people that are on paper that haven't had their voting rights restored yet. You're leaving out undocumented folks. You're leaving out whole groups of people and we're sending the message that you are only as valuable as your ability to vote in this political system. We're centering those directly impacted. I mentioned that a lot of folks come from the zip code that we are housed in and a lot of the issues that we talk to and the issues that we face and the issues that we hear from residents on a daily basis, those are the same issues that we hear about. When there is a tragedy that is happening or a couple of weeks ago, there was a lot of domestic violence issues that kind of rocked our city. Being able to be from the community and being able to talk about those things, all the issues that we hear on doors are our issues because we are also a part of the same community that we're organizing. And I always throw in there, I heard this, somebody said this, it was so profound and I said it and it stuck with me, you can't organize black people if you don't love black people. There's a lot of organizations and there's a lot of attention that's being played on Milwaukee, specifically for the DNC and elections and all of that. There's gonna be a lot of engagement. I think a lot of people are gonna be paying attention to the black vote on both sides, but at the same time, if you aren't authentically engaging from a place of love, then you will not be successful in your organizing endeavors. So this is a New York Times article that literally just came out yesterday. So I added this to the slides very quickly. Again, a lot of people are writing these types of articles, you may have seen this. Black neighborhoods and key swing states hold enormous power to reshape politics. Here's an ambitious plan to maximize turnout. So when I first started reading this article, I was like, okay, glad we're named in there. Glad this is the thing, but this is something that people have been doing for years. This neighborhood canvassing program, which I'm gonna get into later on. But at the end of the day, this summarizes that our work is not just on one election. Our work is multifaceted, it's multi-layered and we are a long-term, year-round civic engagement organization. And so with that, that also means an election is not a silver bullet by any means. And at the end of the day, we need to make sure that we're shifting civic engagement in a year-round strategy. So I've gotten some feedback from this New York Times article where people are like, that's great. I'm like, okay, we're doing things that a lot of people have been doing for years, but glad it's being recognized now. There was a picture here, but that's fine. So our story is how do we engage with the whole community of folks that have been typically left out? What do we think about when it comes to thriving communities? So when we first started knocking in November of 2017, a lot of people thought that we were gonna get a jumpstart knocking for our reelection for our U.S. Senator at the time. And we were like, no, we were not engaged in 2016. We need to talk to people. We need to listen. We need to literally just ask people, what do you think it takes for this community to thrive? And we had so many doors slammed in our face because people hadn't been talked to. And so they're like, what are you really here for? What do you want? I'm not giving you money. I'm not signing anything, go away. And we're like, no, what do you think it takes for the black community to thrive? No one had knocked on their door, period. And if they did knock on their door, they weren't asking them, what are your thoughts about how we build thriving communities, specifically in the black neighborhoods? And a lot of what we heard is fascinating. We still ask this question to this day whether we're doing C3 or C4 work, because we do both. We make sure to incorporate this issue in this question every single time. We heard things like speed bumps and potholes, a lot of speed bumps and potholes. And so we tell people like, okay, have you contacted your older person? People don't even know what an older person is, let alone who they are, how to contact them. And we try to tell them like, let's get you what you need for this neighborhood. But what I'm hearing is that you don't feel that your neighborhood is being invested in the same way that the suburb of Whitefish Bay, nicknamed Whitefolks Bay, and sure what are being invested in. Let's talk about what thriving is. And so some of these answers were really striking that people weren't afforded the opportunity to think about thriving, because if you're living in 5306 with all of those statistics and some that I didn't even put on one slide, you're not always thinking about thriving, you're trying to survive and sustain day to day. And so even trying to push people to dream big, to close your eyes, what does the thriving community look, sound, smell like to you, has been activities that people haven't even been able to think about and to dream about, because we're just hoping that when we're pulled over by the police, we don't get shot and killed. Again, I talked about how we're reimagining what it means to be civically engaged. There are folks on my staff who I lift up every chance that I can who have been impacted by the criminal justice system and their voting rights haven't been restored, but that does not stop them from knocking on doors 30 hours a week educating people the difference between the state senator and a U.S. senator and how city and county government works and who does what, right? So we have to reimagine, we need to bring in new people and that everybody has a place to make their voice heard in a political system. So our first day on doors was November 29th, 2017. So the picture we're just gonna imagine was the first picture that I took as a staff. It was myself and four organizers. Our goals, invest in community engaged residents to build long-term political power and power black leaders with the tools, trainings and resources needed to organize our community through coordinated political action and ensure that black issues, concerns and values are represented at all levels of government. Pretty straightforward. How we build power, there's also more pictures, okay. One-on-one at the neighborhood level. So we have black leaders, we have black captains, wanna make sure that, you know, neighbors are connecting with each other in a way that they've never really connected before. We'll knock on doors and we're here that there's similar issues in the neighborhood, but they haven't actually come together to organize themselves around those issues. So being able to build power from the neighborhood level and also expand that out and see where people can fold in on the city budget, for example, this youth center that got closed down, let's talk about that. The city budget is coming up every fall and nearly 50% of our city budget goes to the police department while we're funding our health department at roughly 3%, which also houses the Office of Violence Prevention. A lot of people, myself included, feel that those priorities are a little skewed. And if we actually wanna prevent crime, we need to not just go into the, and invest in the police department disproportionately, but invest into mental health, invest into resources that actually build thriving communities through elections and civic engagements. Make sure we, leadership development is very paramount and key to our growth and development. So when you hear me talk of ambassadors, think of canvassers with a twist and with intentional leadership development. Every single time I've worked for organizations, I've run campaigns where you knock on doors and there are so many times we treat our canvassers like they are disposable. We only need you till election day and that is it. And then the next election cycle comes around, we're talking and making sure in Wisconsin, we're hiring diverse people, people of color to make sure that they're in senior level positions, but at the same time, people are like, we don't know where to find them. Yeah, because the only people of color you've hired have been canvassers and you don't give a crap about them. So we wanna make sure that we are being very intentional and that's why we call our folks ambassadors. I'm up here today. I'm on TV, I do the things. They're the face of the organization. They're the ones that actually guide the work and quite frankly, they talk to more voters than I ever will. And we wanna make sure that we're centering them and lifting them up, empowering them as well. And it's also important, I mentioned before, that Milwaukee is incredibly segregated. There are whole bridges that divide the North and South side. People don't go from one side to town to the other. North side is Black folks, South side is Latinx. People don't always talk to each other. And so it's really important for us to be very intentional with how we're building Black and Brown solidarity with other communities of color understanding that we're a majority people of color city, but you wouldn't always know that based off of the policies that are executed. So our takeaways after 2018. 2018 was our first full year on doors and being active. We had three elections. Didn't get a chance to do a lot of the organizing that we wanted to do, but our key takeaways were our ambassadors wanna run for office. There was somebody that said, hey Angela, I have a felony in another state. Can I run for office? And I was like, that's a good question. I appreciate the enthusiasm. I got to look that up. There's a hunger and a desire for more education and there was a desire for accountability. We did a lot of work on our sheriff's race. Every single time he sees or acknowledges someone from block, he always says, I know who got me elected. And so we're able to hold him accountable. And before he was formally elected a couple of days before he was unopposed on the ballot after he got through the primary, he was having town hall meetings with us and in the community as well. So what came out of that was our programs actually that we're still carrying through this year as well. Our block ambassador program, which is our field program like our paid canvas, our silent canvas program, which started out in a conversation. But in 2017, right after we started knocking on doors, people were like, well-meeting white folks. We're like, you're knocking on doors in 5306. What are you hearing? And we were like, you know, we were telling them and then I had to sit down and pause with the staff and say, look, GLAAD people are really interested in wanting to know what we're hearing. Let's be careful how we're saying these stories with data that we're giving out. I don't want people, most of these were politicians and elected officials. I don't want people to take those anecdotes, put them in their pocket and then bring them out whenever it suits them without actually engaging with black people themselves. So we said, let's be careful about that. So the next time somebody asked, what are you hearing on doors? My organizer at the time said, well, if you want to know what I'm hearing, you should come shadow me. And he was like, yeah, cool, here's my card. And she was like, oh, I didn't think he was gonna say yes. Angela, what do I do? And we were like, follow up. Let's draft this email tomorrow. Milwaukee is very petty when it comes to our elected officials. And so we were like, we have to send it to everybody so no one gets their feelings hurt. So basically it's a program that's how it actually started and it's become this big thing, but it's a program where candidates, elected officials, we've now opened it up to partners and press and whatnot. They get a chance to really shadow one of our ambassadors. They are not introduced as a candidate or as an elected official. They're introduced by their first name and they can't talk. We've had three presidential candidates do it. They had a hard time with the silent part because they're not used to talking to normal people, but it was a way for people to get a glimpse into our community. And we're always very strategic with where we put you. We're not gonna put you on the edges where it's like super nice. We're gonna put you in the hood because we want you to understand what average people go through and to really get a glimpse. We're not gonna fully understand our community, get a glimpse of what it's like to be black in the 5-3-2-0-6 zip code. We have a fellowship program. People wanted to learn more about civics and organizing, so we did a fellowship program. Also a part of that fellowship program was, let's teach you how to write a cover letter. Let's talk about email etiquette. When to hit reply all, when not to. I still have to have that conversation with some of my folks. There are some people who have not used email before coming and joining block. They have never used Google Docs. Google spreadsheets. So we're building those training and those skill sets too, because as much as I love our folks, they're not gonna be with us forever. And we wanna make sure that they have the skills to move on and to grow and develop themselves as well. Our black captain program, our relational organizing program, how we're identifying Ms. Mary that lives on the corner house that's lived there for 20 years. She knows everybody's business. She knows who moved, who didn't. The kids go to her house. She bakes cookies. How are we organizing them? So how are we making Ms. Mary a black captain? And then we have different task forces to work on our budget campaigns and our advocacy work. Humble brag, all the doors we did in 2018. Again, we have this thing that you can't organize by people if you don't love black people. So we have a thing called Wellness Wednesday where we check in with each other. We are able to center ourselves, ground ourselves. There are times we do guided meditation. But as black folks, we carry trauma with us, inherited from our ancestors. We carry that with us. We are traumatized by living in 5306 and then we're also traumatized because we're going out in the community and we're seeing our people traumatized in real time. All of that is very heavy. And so I'm looking to actually bring on a therapist, a part-time therapist this year to help kind of navigate some of those things as well. But every Wednesday we'll bring in like flowers, juice, you know, fruits, the bottom right with the two. It was their birthday. So I brought them, I think it was like a cookie birthday thing and cupcakes. So, you know, we try to celebrate the wins where we can and also celebrate each other in this really, really dark world with all those statistics that I laid out. More numbers from 2018. Our silent canvas program, our governor, now governor did it when he was running long before he was elected. Beto O'Rourke did it. Senator Booker as well as Julian Castro also did that as well. Fellowship program, eight week program. At the time we had 11 fellows, we're looking to continue between the 11 and 15, it's a paid program. We want to make sure that there's no barriers for people to learn and to develop. So there's three hours of training in staff or in the office and there's three hours of field work and then they all have a $500 stipend to do a community project, whether it's a neighborhood cleanup or a barbecue, whatever it is, they put towards a community project. And then lastly, making sure that folks know about our budget process. That bottom picture is my favorite picture. This is, you can probably see on some of the people's faces. People are not impressed with that speaker. That speaker is our mayor. He said, and I loved it, I literally was in the corner eating fruit snacks when I took this picture, just watching it all go down. This was our first big notable person come in and talk to us and I was like, I don't know if they're gonna be intimidated, it's the mayor, people act always a little funky, right? I was like, are they really gonna push him the way I need them to? They did not hold back. They were like, all right, it was three in the morning and I was researching your budget from last year and they just went in on him. Also, at the same time, the mayor keeps calling me because he's up for re-election, so he knows that he needs to come and see our people. And at the same time, whether you're a presidential candidate, whether you're Eric Holder, whether you're the mayor, you need to come and talk to our folks and also at the end of the day, you need to talk to people who may not be able to offer anything to you and may actually not be able to vote for you at all. And so I think there's a lot of times we show people's impact and say, oh, I gotta talk to these people. They're the regular voters who are leaving out a whole group of people. We're leaving out new voters. We're leaving out people who aren't politically engaged because no one has taken the time to have a conversation with them. More pictures of our silent canvas. Our big first notable thing on a national press clip was in the Wall Street Journal. So you'll see this is our program director and her daughter who happens to be one of our ambassadors. I think it's just like a badass picture of them. I try to show it wherever I can. At the bottom, you'll see the man in the middle is our new sheriff. He was able to engage with us and have meetings with us long before he was elected and we're able to have a good relationship with his office now. At the top right, you'll see Governor Evers, Lieutenant Governor, first black Lieutenant Governor in the state of Wisconsin, Mandela Barnes, our state treasurer and our attorney. What is that? I can't, it's escaping right now. Attorney General, thank you. And then the bottom is just, you know, the team has fun in the field. They like to have fun. They bond with each other and whatnot. Accountability, this was going back to the sheriff's election. The primary was in August. It was kind of a winner take all primary. Usually if you win the August primary, you're unopposed in November. And so before he was formally elected in November, he came in and talked to our folks, all of our folks during GOTV. We made sure that he did, before the year ended, he was officially elected in November and December. He did a community town hall with other folks about what people wanted to see out of his office. And that's it. Folks wanna stay connected with us. We're on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, our website. There is my personal email address that goes directly to me. But if you inbox us or you DM us on social media, all of that goes to me. Cause the joys of being executive director, you play like three different roles. Some people I'm sure understand the feeling. So those are the hashtags that we often use, listen to the block, elect the block, support the block, all of that. So happy to be here. And it's just a little taste of some of the work that block does. Thank you. That was outstanding. Really appreciate that perspective, Angela. And also another point I would like to note between the three of us, three presenters today, we each represent regions of the country, the two regions of the country that actually have the largest black populations, the South and the Midwest. So definitely appreciate that broader perspective. So my part of the workshop today is to do more of the sort of numbers work, which is what I do here at EPI, right? So I'm gonna talk about a view, not the view, a view of black America through demographic, economic and social trends. Some of this data, a lot of this data will be stuff that you've probably seen before, heard before. But in the context of that, I think one of our overarching questions for today, two questions sort of, what is blackness? What does it mean to be black or African-American? What is that? And specifically, what does it mean to be black in America? As we were talking and planning for this workshop, we each felt very strongly that that was a theme we wanted woven throughout. And if we could get nothing else across today, that people seriously consider what it is blackness and what does it mean to be black in America? So a few definitions we'll review. What's the genetic definition? Spoiler alert, there is no such thing as a genetic definition of blackness or black or white or anything else. According to a study by Stanford scientists, this is related to the Human Genome Project, there is no evidence that the groups that we identify as distinct races actually have distinct unifying genetic identities. And in fact, there is ample variation within the races. So the pictures on top is sort of our standard definition of race where you have groups of people that are very similar. The group of pictures on the bottom is what it is more similar to. Where across different groups, people share characteristics. If there is really no unifying characteristics that can be identified as race, so there is no genetic definition of race. Our census definition, this is a call back to the second workshop, the census, I might have to move around. Census defines African American black as a person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa. Made that red because they're actually using black in racial to define what the black race is. Okay, black racial groups of Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as black or African American, again, okay. Or report entries such as, really an African American, Kenyan Nigerian or Haitian. So African descent of some sort or a black racial group of Africa. Okay. So I wanna propose a different definition that I think is more consistent with my concept and my understanding of blackness. And that is blackness is the lynchpin, no pun intended and a pun intended sort of, is the lynchpin of the socially constructed concept of race. So I believe that this whole idea of race really originates with identifying blackness as a thing. Functioning is racism, which is used to systematically exclude, marginalize, exploit and generate unequal outcomes while simultaneously being used as a justification for those unequal outcomes. Blackness is a group identity. But uniquely, individuals are presumed to represent the whole, but only in the case when there's a negative connotation or action or behavior associated with that. Positive conceptions of blackness are deemed as exceptional or really exceptional or outstanding black person that isn't associated with a broader group identity generally. And blackness is often assumed to be immutable. We hear about the history of other ethnic groups in this country that eventually assimilated into the whiteness category that has never happened for black people in this country. There is language that we use that often invokes blackness without saying black often. And again, these often have negative or inferior or problematic connotations. Obvious ones are the racial slurs. I'm gonna spend a lot of time on that. I think the word race itself invokes blackness. When we talk about race, the assumption is we're gonna say something about black people. Playing the race card is one that people will use to minimize grievances or experiences that black people have had. We've talked, I know, in this room and probably among many of the organizations here about the idea of non-white. You don't even get an identity. Your identity is relative to something else. Minority, again. But then we hear also some common terms used to describe often black youth, thug, ghetto. We hear about bad schools and bad neighborhoods. Again, invoking that those are black stools, whether a majority of black children or neighborhoods or the majority of black residents, terms like absentee fathers and welfare mothers, again, are often used to invoke blackness. So that's the background. When we're talking about blackness, what it means to be black, I'm gonna talk a little bit about my own family history of being black in America, or at least as I know it today. Cause this is something that I've sort of learned more as an adult than I knew growing up. And this was interesting for me because I remember when we had the presentation with Patrice Kunech on Native Americans, she had a very clear story of her family's history in this country and their tribe and where the land was and what the experiences are. And I always appreciate people who can tell that kind of story. I don't necessarily have that story. But, you know, back in the early 2000s when all the genetic testing was popular, I jumped in on that and I said, I'm gonna get some answers and figure out where my people come from. So this is my sort of little layout of things. Probably no surprise. Predominantly, people, other people in this world, most who look more similar to me genetically are more likely to be Sub-Saharan African. Well, I kind of know that. West African, that's pretty standard. That's where a majority of the slave trade came out of. The thing that was a surprise to me on this was that I had no idea that I was nearly that European. So that was interesting. And another point I'll make, this is like just the summary, there's a more detailed report that comes out and they sort of tell you the probability, I guess it's sort of like a confidence interval or whatever on these sorts of things, about how likely it is that you actually came from that place. And most of these places show up for me as not detected. So if they don't really have much certainty, it says not detected. One place came up as, I think it was likely or something like that, something about a greater likelihood than the rest of them. That one place was actually the UK. So go figure. This is a picture of a historical landmark in the state of Texas, which is where I'm from. Moffitt Park. Ned Moffitt, who's the person named here, the Missouri native, is my great, great, great, I think three greats, grandfather. So this marker was established in 2005, that's the year there. And so it talks about Ned Moffitt being a Missouri native, owned 90 acres of land. I never knew this. And talks about the family's race, they were listed in the census as mulatto, which if you don't know means that you're mixed race, black and white. So it talks about this family, the 90 acres of land they had and how they would use this land as a meeting place, make it available to other African Americans in the community to have events and to use that land. Well, at some point, it talks about the heirs of Ned Moffitt selling part of that land to the city to form a Negro park. Because at that time it was still segregated. So the regular city park, black people couldn't go to, the Moffitt family donated, when they donated, they sold some land to establish this black park which was, at that time it was only known as the Negro park, it later became named Moffitt Park. And they had a big Juneteenth celebration there in 1944, for those who don't know, Juneteenth is June 19th, 1865, was when people in Texas found out that slaves had been emancipated. So every year that's a big celebration in Texas. I never knew until I came here that people know about Juneteenth and celebrate in other parts of the world. So that was sort of like a revelation. Texas Juneteenth has always been a thing in my family. So I showed that and this is a picture of the area, so this is like a graph of the city of Gainesville, Texas, town, I should probably call it, Gainesville, Texas. So rural area in Northern Texas. I don't know if you can see that, but this says Negro park, Ned Moffitt established owner. So that's where it was. This is the city park, just across the creek. This is a clip from the Gainesville newspaper on Juneteenth, 1944, when they had the big celebration. I like to show this because the juxtaposition of headlines here is interesting. Colored people are celebrating, but leave Negro vote to the precincts. Another thing that's interesting at the bottom of this, it talks about, you know, we're gonna let the precinct chairs decide if they're gonna let black people vote at that precinct. But then they say at the bottom, they've suggested that the precinct chairman allow Negroes to vote if they still want to do so after receiving the reminder that by doing so, they would pledge themselves to support the Democrat ticket at the general election. So I'm gonna let you vote, but this is the way you have to do it. So I thought that was kind of interesting. 1944. So what happened to that 90 acres of land? I told you, I never knew about it. So this talks about the selling of the land for the park. The air sold 1.075 acres for about $188. September 18, 1943. November 7, 1943, sold another almost 4.5 acres to the city for $1,200. And then that became known as the Negro park. The heirs who sold these two properties were Ned Moffitt's son, CA or Charlie Moffitt, his daughter, Lula Hill, his daughter, Annie May Ralston, my great-great-grandmother, and his grandson, yeah, my great-grandmother. His grandson, Moffitt Ralston, who was my grandfather. But you may have another question. About five acres were sold for the park. Where did the other 85 go? I don't know, as they answer to that question, but there was something else in the write-up in the history. So I got all this information because someone applied to name Moffitt Park a historical land market in Texas. And their research was a part of the application that was available to us. Somebody that's not even related to us decided that that needed to be a historical landmark. But one of the other interesting things in that write-up, and again, I don't know what happened, but they had nine children, five boys and four girls, three of Moffitt's children drowned, two in separate incidents in 1920, one in a water well and another in a barrel of water, Lula Hill 74, your old daughter, who my father often talked about his aunt Lula, so drowned in a well in 1952. So again, I don't know what happened to the other 85 acres. This is kind of suspicious to me that you have three people in one family dying the same way. Ned Moffitt died in 1924 at 80-something years old. Sons who died in 1920 were not children. These were grown men, so I don't know. Suspicious to me, I don't know what happened to the other 85, but we know that economic envy was a cause for lynchings and certainly probably other kinds of deaths as well. These are some pictures of the Moffitt's. These pictures were found interesting. My grandfather, Moffitt Rauston, came to live with us when he got to be older. He had this wooden trunk that he brought with him. It stayed in the bedroom of my parents' house forever. We always knew it was there, it was locked. We never went in it for anything. When my dad passed away, my brother figured out how to pick the lock and pry it open and these pictures were some of what was in that trunk. So these are some of the Moffitt children as they were children. I'm not sure who this person is. He looks to be an older person, a man. Maybe that's Ned Moffitt, I don't know. Or maybe just an older son. But these are the daughters as adults. The one at the top, Annie May Rauston, my great-grandmother, that's her son, my grandfather. Moffitt Rauston is a little boy. He's a young man and an older man. My dad's father, Moffitt Rauston. My father's named Guilford Rauston. He was named after his grandfather. Now, have another story for the other side of my family, my mother's family. A few years ago when I was doing some ancestral research, I actually found a slave narrative for, ended up being my great-great-grandfather, Gus Jackson. So in the 1930s, it was part of the WPA. People went out and collected stories from people who were slaves or had a history being slavery at some point or someone in their family. One of those people was Gus Jackson, my grandfather. I put this up here because this is how the recorder described him, who he was. And I've highlighted something I thought was interesting from this. His dialect is not particularly that of a Negro, more of an average, uneducated person. Again, what is blackness? What does it mean to be black in America? So he didn't think he particularly sounded like a black person, just an average uneducated person, but he is far above the average Negro in intelligence. All right, in Gus's own words, I learned a lot here about my family's history that sort of has given me some more to research. All this research sort of came to a halt when I became a parent. Hopefully I can get back to it. Now my boys are a little older, maybe they'll actually be interested in helping me do it. So that'll be a good project. Anyway, Gus says he was actually born on Juneteenth in Austin, Texas. He was, he named the plantation he was born on, FM Cloud's plantation. His dad was there 40 years, but he says most of his slavery days in Virginia. I never knew anything about history outside of Texas. So from this, it tells me some of my family was in Virginia before they came to Texas and they actually came to Texas during the Civil War because, as he says, Texas was not fought over at that time. So they were sent there sort of as refugees. He says he spent the early part of his life in South Texas. His father hired him out when he was nine years old on a hog ranch. He worked there until he was 14. Then he started rustling cattle. He became a cowboy with Mr. Cloud. Mr. Cloud owned several ranches. He was born on a plantation. His dad had been there 40 years. Mr. Cloud owned several ranches. Again, this gets to the history associated with differences in wealth now and ownership of property. And then this last couple of lines was interesting too. Until I was 22 years old, my father collected my wages. I never got a penny of it. He concludes that Cloud done more for me than my own daddy done. That's interesting. His dad was a slave. Cloud owned several ranches. Certainly he could do more than the person who had been a slave most of his life. He also talks about being a veteran. He was in the Spanish-American War. And in fact, was with the 10th Calvary, which was one of the Calvaries of the Buffalo Soldiers. Troops were segregated at the time, of course. So there's a record there that he was part of that group. He talks about his education. He says he never went to school an hour in his life until he went to the WPA Night School. But he did teach himself to read and write a little in 1928. Now, the backstory here is kind of funny, interesting. His motivation for learning to read and write on his own, he used to have some man who would like read letters for him, but the man was busy a lot so he would get his wife to do it. And he didn't like having a woman read his letters. So he decided he needed to figure out something. That motivation was kind of funny. So this is just some excerpts from a larger story that I think are interesting and sort of telling, giving some of the themes that we're talking about today. I don't have a picture of Gus Jackson, but these are my great-grandparents. This is Gertrude Jackson, his daughter. My great-grandmother. And John Henry Johnson. They had a son, James Johnson, my grandfather, who is the father of my mother, Shirley Raulston. Guilford Raulston, well, Shirley Johnson was his name. Guilford Raulston, Shirley Johnson got married, had three children, Brian, Valerie, and Ficky Raulston. And I name our names because I want to make another point about that. My parents grew up in segregated Gainesville. They told us stories about what it was like to be in a segregated city town in the South. And specifically, my dad chose our names because he wanted us to have names that were not readily and easily identifiable as black names. Again, what is blackness? What does it mean to be black in America? This brings me to the less personal part of the presentation. I'm gonna talk a bit about demographics of the black or African-American population here in the United States. I'm doing okay. All right. So we're gonna do a little quiz here. So this is audience to participate participation time. What was the estimated size of the black population, either alone or in combination with one or more races in the United States in 2018? I'm gonna make it a little easier. Multiple choice. Any guesses? Anyone? You think it's D, 52.3? The answer is A. 47.8 million. That's according to the, that's not the right source. That's the source for what's gonna come up on the other side, but that's according to the 2018 population estimates. We know that we're gonna have an official census count this year. But just to give you a little context about the growth of the black population in 1940, it was 13 million up to 18.8 in 1960, 1980, 26 and a half million, 2000, which was, well, two census ago, 34.6. What share of the black population is foreign born? We talk about the black population not being monolithic. And we often don't talk about the fact that there are black people in this country who were born outside of the United States, recently immigrated to the United States. What share of the black population is foreign born? Any guesses here? So I hear B and C, probably 11 and a half or 10.1. The answer is 10.1%. Which region of the world accounts for the largest share of foreign born blacks? Now, I put these in alphabetical order. There's no clues here, but on the actual, on the actual survey, Europe is listed first. So that's kind of interesting. Which region accounts for the largest share of foreign born blacks? Okay, I hear D, I hear E. Now, this was a surprise to me. It is Latin America. Latin America includes the Caribbean. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So. There are 3.8, but within that, there are 3.8 million black people who identify as Hispanic. It's about 7.9%. That's another topic we often don't talk about when we say black, but there is a significant Afro-Latino population. And then Africa accounts for the second highest percentage and so on. What state, I'm gonna look at my earned groups in the back, what state has the largest black population? Let's start on this side. Just in terms of the size of the population numerically, we have any guesses. Which state has the largest black population? Okay, I hear California, South Carolina, Mississippi, any other guesses? I hear New York. I hear Texas. It is Texas. My home state, followed by Florida, New York, Georgia, and California. In terms of share of the state population, and I'll use state loosely in this context. That may give you a clue. Share of the state population. D.C. is number one. Followed by Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Maryland. All right. Black households, that's something else that we often hear about in assumptions about what the black family is doing, has done, will do, looks like. But in terms of household types defined by the census, the majority of black households consist of families, and families are people who are related by blood, marriage, or adoption. All of these are families. Majority of black households are family households. And actually a slight edge for the married couple family. This is 2018, followed by female householders with no husband present. That's the way it's defined in the census. And other types of families, they aren't defined. It wasn't listed explicitly. It just, this was the remainder of the 59. something percent in family. The remainder are what they call non-family, and most of those are female householders, followed by male householders. So just individuals usually, typically. The 27.7% of black households are family households with children under age 18. 10.6% of those are in married couple families, 14.4% in female householder, and the other 2.7 in other families. Another interesting statistic, 5% of black grandparents are living with grandchildren, and 40.1% of those are responsible for those grandchildren. So again, this is what the black household, black family actually looks like, contrary to images that are commonly perpetuated. So the next question that we often hear or talk about when we consider African-Americans in this country is the question, things have gotten a lot better for African-Americans over the last 50 years, right? And it's not an easy answer for that question because we have to consider a few things. One, there's absolute progress. Are African-Americans now absolutely doing better on some measures than we once were? Yeah, but then there's also relative progress. And when we consider this issue of equality, and one way of measuring that is black-white ratios or blacks are percentage of white, you'll see that as I move through some of these other slides. Again, most of this is stuff that you have seen before, but I'll run through really quickly. In the area of education, specifically for high school graduates, while there are people who still don't graduate from high school, there are still students who drop out of high school, the overwhelming majority of people between the ages of 25 and 29, it's typically about time you're done with your education, black and white are high school graduates. So it's not a mass group of black youth dropping out of high school or not caring about education. College graduate rate has increased since 1968, but there are still, we're still about the same place in terms of equality, in terms of college graduation. I show this, this talks about, this was something that we put out this month as part of our black history publications. In Magarcia, our education economists produced this, showing basically that as of 2017, schools are still very highly segregated. In spite of the fact that more people, the majority of people will finish high school, a good number will go to college, our schools are extremely segregated by race and by economic status. And black students in particular are very likely to attend a school that is high poverty and mostly students of color. The issue of unemployment, two to one ratio, is almost written in stone, like it's always due to one. So even the 1968 or closest to 1968 is what you get, I think it was 6.7 and three summons are still really close to where we are currently. But as we look across education levels, there are significant differences and there's still a gap between blacks and whites at every level of education. What is blackness? What does it mean to be black in America? Black college graduates, even when you graduate, Jacoba and I worked on this. More likely to get employed in a job that underutilizes your skill job where more than half of the people doing that job don't have a college degree. Wages, I just showed the progression of the black-white wage gap. This is a ratio, so yeah, it's pretty dismal in 1968. It may bumped up quite a bit by 79, but we've been on a pretty consistent slide down since then, 2019, the black-white wage gap or the ratio of black-to-white wages, 75.6 50 years ago, 71.3. Not a whole lot of progress to make in 50 years. Now, in terms of absolute terms, again, people make more in 2019 than they did in 1968, but those relative differences are still significant. I use this as an illustration just to fold in another take on what is the meaning of blackness? What does it mean to be black in America? In 1979, when that overall black-white gap was pretty decent, black women and white women were barely close. So you didn't see a large racial gap for women at least. Over time, we've seen much more improvement for white women. Black women sort of stopped making those gains. In the mid-90s, the gap worsens for black men over that time. This, again, just shows some differences in wages at different levels of education based on the report that came out, was it, or was it today? Last Thursday, it's all running together. That at least school put out on the state of wages, showing, again, these black-white differences exist at every level of education. This is showing wage growth in the current recovery. So we talk a lot about the 90s recovery. Everybody did much better than in terms of wage growth. This is wage growth for college graduates by gender and race. The problem here, again, with a population that's more highly educated, more likely to have a college or advanced degree than ever, yet you actually lost ground in terms of wage growth in the last five years. Income and poverty. This is another number that's almost written in stone. I almost don't need to see the numbers when they come out. I know it's gonna be about 60% in terms of the income gap between black and white households. Poverty, on the other hand, when there have been pretty significant improvements since the 1960s, of course, only two African-Americans having more access to more job opportunities, higher paying job opportunities, but there's still a significant difference in rates of poverty. This, again, just shows the recent progression of income as of the latest numbers. African-Americans were, I believe, the only group not to have recovered pre-recession household income just yet. Wealth, that's another one that we see and hear a lot about. But I think it's important to look at this in a different way. We can look at the change over time, huge change in wealth, but of course, you start it from a really low level. It's not hard to double $2. As much as it would be to double $200,000, but anyway. So significant growth over time. The gap, actually, when we measured as a percentage, actually improved a bit over that period of time, but when we look at the dollar differential, that's what really matters, because we're thinking about what that money can get you. Home ownership, another one that really hasn't moved much at all in 50 years. When we consider the gap, it's actually worsened a bit. We know that a lot of that is owing to the great recession and the housing crisis in recent history. And then I just will show a few slides from the report. Umbrellas don't make it rain, isn't that what it's called, Killola? I know when you were at Ford, you funded that work. And it was very illuminating and eye-opening. I show this a lot, or reference this often. Again, education does not equalize wealth, racial wealth between blacks and whites. Employment doesn't even equalize wealth between blacks and whites, nor does income equalize wealth. Go back to that story of the 90 acres, the story about cloud owning several ranches while Gus Jackson's family was, what do you call it, loaned out to work or whatever, however they described it. And this picture becomes pretty obvious at me. Voting, because we're gonna talk a little bit about that after lunch as well. And my colleague, Jacoba, has done outstanding work on looking at voting patterns. This was something since it was released for MLK Day last year. And I use this because I wanna focus on 2016 because that was the last time we had presidential election and 18 and numbers drop off for everybody. But, 64 in 2016, terms of all voters, like overall, that was a pretty significant drop. It's a drop for African-American voters as well, but not nearly as much. Again, what are the, thank you, what are the stories that we're hearing and what stories are being told? They included information in here as well on African-American school and leading high school as similar to the numbers, but they also talked about African-American college students numbering 2.9 million in 2016 compared to just 306,000. Big gains here. Those big gains don't show up as much in the economic outcomes. But clearly, voting, civic participation, however we want to define it, is significant and important for African-Americans even though they have access to that right at a slightly lower rate. And this I thought was very telling as well. So they published this voting information by race, gender, age. Hear a lot about black women being so important to elections. This really brings it home. I mean, first of all, we didn't, 64 to now the black voting rate almost didn't change much at all. Obviously, we see the difference here in terms of black women's voting overall for all people 18 and older and across the age spectrum as well. Participation in particular is highest among middle-age, I guess you'd call it, to older black women. And then finally, incarceration and criminal justice. We'll get more into that later as well as we talk about policies and things. I mean, what can you say? Five times greater, African-Americans, five times greater to be incarcerated in whites around 1968 and in 2016. And actually the 2016 numbers are a little better than I believe 2,000 was the peak in terms of incarceration rate. So it's come down some since then, but I mean, relatively speaking, we still get pretty much the same story. Now these other statistics I'm gonna bring them on this side in 2017. Again, when we think about the demographics of the prison population, relative to the African-American population more broadly, African-Americans accounted for a third of the sentence population, but are only 12% of the population. Yeah, that's one thing, but this statistic in particular, 68.9% of all people arrested in the US were white in 2017, a big majority. How many blacks? 27.2%. Yet, we have black people being overrepresented in prisons. What is blackness? What does it mean to be black in America? There we go, perfect. Everyone knows I move around, so let me not even pretend. So again, I'm Jacob Williams. I'm an economist here at EPI. To talk about my family history, my family history, all I know about it is that we originated from Louisiana. I don't know country of origin. I don't really know anything outside of my grandparents, to be totally honest. My mom's mom died when she was 12 at the age of 35, so I think all of the family history died with her, and my dad's dad died when he was about eight or 10, and his mom died when she was very young, two or three years old. So I can't really fully get into my family history, and that's one thing, again, to be what it is to be black in America, is that sometimes you just don't know. So what I wanna talk about is the top scholarship. So Valerie actually said something that I thought was really important. What does it mean to be black in America? A lot of times we talk about policy, and one thing that I love about policy is that, hey, it could have great intentions, but that doesn't mean that it necessarily continues in that way. And so I wanna actually highlight something from the great state of Louisiana, which is where I'm from, woo-hoo, yes? Mardi Gras was two days ago, that was my birthday as well, yes, and if we lived in Louisiana, we would all be off because we celebrate the entire week, yes, that's great. Wouldn't even be here. All right, so talking about top scholarship, all right? So one thing, again, that's great about Louisiana is that, yes, we have Mardi Gras, but another thing that people don't know is that we have the oldest state merit scholarship in the nation, all right? What is this? If you actually receive a certain ACT, SAT score, certain GPA in high school, you can go to any state school, college or university for free. Beautiful. This was actually adopted in 1998 and who started it? A guy by the name of Patrick F. Taylor. Anyone who's from Louisiana knows who he is because there's so many buildings, we call them PFT. He was actually a successful businessman, and the reason why he actually wanted to start this program kinda back up a tad bit, he actually visited Livingston Middle School in New Orleans, which is actually a few miles away from my house. I've dated a few guys in middle school that went there. Woo-hoo to those guys. I'm better than you now, all right? He went to this school, which was majority black. Again, when I say majority black, I just wanna make sure everybody knows, New Orleans, as you as you mentioned as well, it's very segregated. So when I say majority black, I mean 99% black. All right, let's just be clear. It's a very black, it's a black middle school. He asked the question to a room full of seventh and eighth graders. He said, who plans to attend college? No one raised their hand. Thought that was really odd. He's like, okay, well, let me rephrase the question. Who wants to attend college? Every hand shut up. He thought that was really strange. He said, why would they not answer the first question? Right? He talked to their parents afterwards to just see what's going on. And what he actually found was that a lot of them complained about the fact that we just can't afford college. Because we can't afford college, we actually are not actually helping our students even plan for college. We're not even really telling them to succeed because they won't even be able to do it. So he actually started the Taylor Plan in the early nineties, right? And this was a smaller program again that was really designed for New Orleans, Orleans Parish public school system. And what it did was it granted access to college for low and middle and low and moderate income students based on their academic achievements. So he basically started the original tops program. He considered you to be low to moderate income if your parents made $25,000 or less, right? So again, you get a certain ACT, SAT score. You have a certain GPA. You can go to any school in the state for free. Beautiful, right? Yes? Yes, sounds like a great policy. But let's think about the Twitter haters, right? There's always haters, especially on Twitter. Yes, I would agree. Think about it. What is the problem with this? What would people complain about? It's unfair, why? Certain people based on, right, totally right. So remember, majority black school, as you can see him with the kids here, right? Notice that he's actually trying to do something. He's actually targeting low and middle income, but he's really looking at racial disparities as well. Let's be crystal clear of what he's doing. So what does Louisiana do? Louisiana decides to remove the income requirement. They decide, you know what, we're gonna pass this into law. We are actually gonna make it go across the entire state. But some people said, hey, it's discriminatory. If you actually focus on low and middle income people, that's not fair. Is it my fault that I make six figures? It's not my fault. You're penalizing me. You're discriminating against me. So I don't appreciate it. And guess what the policy makers did? Again, remove the income requirement. Guess what that did? Now it actually costs the state of Louisiana $300 million a year to pay for this. Taxpayers, right? We are paying for it. We're not we anymore. I'm not a resident anymore, right? But when I was, 74% of the recipients are white. Nearly 50% come from six figure households. Again, this is Louisiana. So six figure households, that's actually high income. Less than 15% are low income as originally intended. Right? You actually have a lot of people complaining. Why? Because everyone in the state knows. I mean, if you actually Google this, you will see headlines where people say tops goes to white wealthy students. What they actually noticed was that it costs the state so much money that they started saying, hey, you know what we're gonna do? Raise the requirements to make sure that we can actually section out a certain group of people. And so you see, you have good intentions and you kind of see where it's been hijacked and given a different narrative of no, you're being discriminatory, even though he was actually trying to combat something. So I know I see, and I can tell that like the room has now changed a little bit, right? And I know some people are saying, well, you know, you guys are from Louisiana. You're weird. You have this thing called Mardi Gras. Again, you said we would be off the entire week. So does this only happen in Louisiana? Can this only happen with tops? Is this the only example? Can you all think of any other policies that have been accused of being discriminatory even though it was actually originally written to fight discrimination? Come on, you guys are smart. Give yourselves a round, yes, hand clap. Yes, no, really clap for yourselves. Thank you, great job. Yes, exactly, totally right, affirmative action. Right, so why was affirmative action put into place because of slavery? Because of Jim Crow? Because of all of these different things that actually existed that discriminated against people based on their race. So it originated in 1968 with President Kennedy signing into practice, which basically just said, you can't discriminate, you can't do that. You have to give people an opportunity to fight for equal jobs, equal pay, education, things of that nature. It was later extended to include women in 1967 and now includes religion, sexual orientation, things of that nature, right? And when you actually just look at the tweets about affirmative action, you actually see what people think about affirmative action. First thing is that if you Google it, most people whenever they bring up a affirmative action, the first thing they mention is race, right? Exactly what Valerie was talking about before, race. And when they say race, what do you think they're thinking about? Black people, right? So it's this thing that helped black people and that's how people see it, right? And I should say, and if anybody wants to talk to me afterwards, there has been research that has shown that affirmative action has actually benefited a certain group of people. Anybody knows who that is? White women, totally right. And I find it very strange and I've seen it in cases where you may have a black person and a white woman and people will always highlight the black person's race, but won't say anything about the white woman. And I go, that's really weird. Why are we talking about affirmative action? We point to the black person. Very strange, right? Again, at who I deal blackness. So you look at tweets and you see people talking about quotas, which is not necessarily the case, right? Again, what is actually affirmative action saying? You cannot discriminate. Saying it's not fair for you to actually say, hey, Jacoba has a black name, don't even consider her. She came from a black school, don't consider her. But notice how people are talking about minority quotas. This one actually is saying, excuse my language, no one gives two shits about race. Really? I mean, that's a powerful statement. That's a really powerful statement. And again, talking about white people having, black people having, people of color having access to anything that white people have access to, right? You actually see saying the only systemic racism we've had is affirmative action, right? Again, saying how it's discriminatory. Also, colleges discriminate for various reasons. And then highlights affirmative action, explicitly encourages discrimination based on race. Notice how you keep hearing people go back to race. As I said, affirmative action actually helps a lot of groups of people, right? But people always look at it as this black thing, this black issue. So you may say, okay, when people are tweeting about it, who cares? People are crazy on Twitter. Well, no, this is important, right? Because you actually have states, you have areas, you have schools actually banning affirmative action. A lot of people have probably heard about the Harvard case in which Asian Americans actually sued Harvard, saying that, hey, you're actually discriminating against us. And what did they bring up, affirmative action? What is a policy that they did not bring up, which I thought was very interesting? Legacy, to the right. And what came out of that report, which I think is very interesting that no one really talks about, is that 8% of Harvard's freshman class is, 8% is from the African diaspora. But 33% were legacy. I gotta say that again, 33% were legacy. Who do you think that is? And again, I think that's very strange that again, we don't talk about this. We talk about affirmative action, but we don't talk about legacy. We don't talk about the fact that these schools actually have legacy weekends, I've seen it. I've actually been on campus and seen legacy weekends and go, who are these white people? Where they came from? Why is nobody talking about that? Interesting, right? So again, you have these different states that are banning it, and Idaho actually just passed a bill to actually go against hiring discrimination. And guess what they listed, affirmative action. As she said, it is discriminatory, because what you're doing is hiring people based on race. When again, what affirmative action originally was designed to do was to eliminate the disparities, to eliminate the discrimination that existed, right? And hopefully help people to catch up. So this is something that I'm highlighting kind of like what Valerie was talking about before. Looking at 1968, which is around the time that affirmative action was passed. And then fast forwarding to 2018, what you should notice that you don't really see again that blacks have surpassed whites. If it's truly discriminatory, if it's truly this case where again, black people are taking all of the jobs, why is it that again, unemployment rate stable? College graduation rate, yes, has increased, but notice again, whites still have a higher college graduation rate. You look at hourly wage again increases, but again still lower. And then look finally looking at wealth, right? The thing that really matters I would say, notice how you see this gap has actually widened, which is troublesome. So my final thoughts of talking about policy is that sometimes I think again, it's great to create policy, but one thing that we have to realize is that sometimes people can actually hijack a policy. So you can have something that's originally created for good intentions, and for whatever reason there's a different narrative. And so I wanna challenge you all to think about how have you thought or even talked about affirmative action. When I was at grad school at Maryland, I cannot tell you how many times people asked me, what was my GRE score? I mean, it came up to me, I'm not kidding. Like other students, what's your GRE score? You know why? Because immediately it was the idea, oh, you're only here because of affirmative action. And I said, that's really strange to me. And again, why is it again based on race? You see it, I can go and talk to white women, I can go talk to all these other people and no one's asking that question. And I go, what is this that again, immediately you see a black person and immediately that person's the token? Or yes, when we're hiring a black person, let's consider that person because they're black. And understand that we can also have our own biases. And think about that when we say these things, right? And one, the last thing I wanted to say about, say what I thought was very interesting, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, as she talked about in 2003, talking about affirmative action, said that we expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary. 25 years from now will be eight years from today, eight years. Which is just interesting because we see that 25 years is not enough. So that's the first part that I wanna talk about. I'm now going to switch on to counterproductive priority test for blackness, what we call woke in a black community. What I just so love about us, right? So love. All right, so what do you mean to be black? And I'm pretty sure most people have heard about this, the one drop rule, right? Basically saying, hey, you have one African descendant, you're black. Right, so most people can see this first picture and say, oh yes, all those people are black. But what you don't know is that also this child is also black, right? So she was actually identified as black because her father was half black. Her father was actually born into slavery. And what I would say is that again, historically we would look at blackness that way. But now there's this new way in which we look at blackness and it's almost this purity test that we do amongst ourselves. And I wanna talk about how productive is that really? So I have a question. Who in here identifies as black? Raise your hand. All right, cool. Looks like we have half of them. Ooh, majority, yes. I mean, crap, all right. So I want you all to take a test. You don't have to reveal your scores, all right? At all. But we're gonna see how black you are. Are you really black? You said you're black, but let's see if you really are, all right? So let's talk about the things that we do. And again, does it really actually make any difference? This purity test for black, if you actually answer yes to any of these questions, give yourself one point, all right? So the highest that you can get is a 10, all right? So the first question is, do you have a black sounding name like Jacoba, right? Do you have that? Get a point if you do, right? We heard Valerie talk about black sounding names. Yes, you all know that there are black sounding names, right? Second thing, did you attend an HBCU, Historically Black College or University? Do you have natural hair? Ooh, ladies, you all know. This is a serious one in our community. It's problematic, all right, in my personal opinion, do you stand with cap or did you stop watching NFL? There we go, we got one yes. That's totally right, all right? Did you cancel Kanye West after he made those comments? Or did you just cancel him in general, right? For whatever reason, right? Have you visited or lived in Africa? And again, remember, you're giving yourself a point every time you say yes. Do you love and support Obama, our king? Now this is a sticky one. Very sticky. I didn't know if I wanted to write this one, but I think that it's the truth. Do you oppose interracial relationships, right? Do you prefer sweet potato pie over pumpkin pie? And the last one, can you dance, all right? So I love the fact that you all are laughing right now. Great, especially after lunch, right? But thinking about it, think about how many times we do this when we talk to each other and we think about what's your name, right? Did you go to Xavier? Did you go to Spelman? Did you go to Morehouse? How black are you really, right? And that's what we're really doing. And so what, I actually remember reading a book and I think it's really good. It actually talks about the dimensions of blackness, right? And saying that there are three paramount dimensions of blackness. There is your introverted person. So if you score between zero and three, you are, Clarence Thomas, that's who you are, all right? If you score between four and seven, you're introverted, you're a Michael Jordan, who wouldn't want to be Michael Jordan? I don't know. And then eight to 10, extroverted, you're a Tupac, you're Malcolm X, right? So introverted, introverted blackness, all right? And I didn't make this up. This is actually coming from Michael Eric Dyson. Introverted blackness are the people who actually kind of really, they know that they're black, but I don't really want to talk about it. I wouldn't identify as being a human being in things of that nature. I'm American, but I don't really want to talk about it. It's more, I share that that's my private life. I just happen to have been born black. Introverted are people who know that they're black, of course, identify as being black, but it doesn't define my whole existence. Extroverted are black, I'm black. Anybody who saw me at the city conference would probably say, oh, she's probably extroverted because I kept bringing up race, race, race. I'm pointing in the back because thank you so much for helping me at that conference, all right? So the thing that I would actually say is when you think about this, we can all put ourselves in a different category, right? And I hope you have categorized yourself, right? To say how black you are. But the thing I want to think about is, are all these people black? Yes, they're all black, right? So it really shouldn't matter what we score. It shouldn't really matter if you have natural hair or not, because why does the way your hair, where your hair identify whether or not you're black, or whether or not you have a black son or name, or whether or not you want to spell him in a more house? At the end of the day, we have common experiences. And so one thing I really want to talk about is that I think what's going on in the black community when we talk about being woke, what we're really doing is saying, I'm woke and you're a sellout, right? I'm woke and you're Clarence Thomas. And for some reason I feel better than you because of that, because I actually have a 10 out of 10 on Jacoba score, right? You're thinking of it in that way. And what I really think that what we're doing is that we're different people. As we say, we're not a monolithic group. And if that's the case, we should allow people to be different amongst ourselves as well, right? So what we really need to do is have constructive debate in the community. And again, stop looking at the whole woke and sellout culture. So the first thing is to identify common ground. And what I would say common ground is, is that we're all black. That's just what it is. And so to be in America, that means that you're on the outside. And that's what it is. And we have to actually think about the fact that, hey, I mean, I necessarily agree with what he's saying fully, but I actually know what it feels like for someone to be a lawyer. I'm not a lawyer, but I know what it feels like to be at a job where people assume that you're only hired because you're a token, which is something that he actually talked about. Know what it feels like to actually say, hey, listen, father was actually killed by census violence. And it sucks that that actually happened to our own community. Our own community did this to us, right? Or again, to have somebody actually says, hey, trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents, it's hard to be legit, trying to pay your rent, right? As you realizing that we actually shift between this, you're not always extroverted. You're not always amberverted. We actually share a common ground, which again, which connects us to being black, which is the reason why when I ask that question, everybody raise their hand and say, yes, I'm black. The second thing is to separate ideas from identity of the person discussing it. So again, it's that whole, again, I'm woke, you're a sellout. But at the end of the day, what happens is that we are so attached to our ideas. We believe something and it's like, when someone disagrees with us, oh no, there's no way. Again, you don't like sweet potato pie. What is wrong with you? You can't be black. No, you can be black. Maybe the person who cooked the sweet potato pie didn't put enough sugar in it. That's why they don't like it. It's a different personal experience and that's okay. And it's okay for us to have a different personal experience, but it doesn't mean that we have to attack each other. So again, you're not debating a person, you're debating an idea and that's it. And then the last thing is, open ourselves up to the idea that we might be wrong. So I actually have to tell a personal story. Everybody, well, not everybody, but people who are close to be here know that I have a best friend, Brian. We talk all the time. Brian went to all white schools, predominantly white institutions. And when I first met him at the Boston Fed, I remember thinking, oh, Lord, one of those people, right? It's all these white schools. I'm talking about my black friends and he's like, yeah, but I went to white schools and I'm like, oh, great, I went to an HBCU. And it was so weird because I remember thinking that he was less than just because he didn't go to an HBCU, if I could be totally honest. I remember actually having again those same questions in my head and saying, he didn't meet that mark. He didn't go to an HBCU. He doesn't know what it is to be black, but he doesn't know what it is to be black because I can tell you story after story after story and his experience is in Boston that he definitely knows what it is to be black, 100%, right? And actually, when I talked to him, the thing I realized was that I went to a historically black elementary school, historically black middle school, historically black high school, historically black college, again, because New Orleans is very segregated. So I went to all black schools. So for me, it was more comfortable to go to an HBCU. For him, he actually wanted something different. He knew that the world, I should say America's majority white. So he said, listen, I would just wanna go to a PWI because I wanna get different experiences. And the thing that I would say is that when he said that to me, I started to realize that I could be wrong, that just because someone chose a different school doesn't actually mean that they're a sellout. Again, just because someone has relaxer in their hair doesn't mean that they're a sellout. It just means that they have different experiences. That's it. And that's okay. So again, there's a way in which we can have constructive debate without name calling. And that's what I really wanna leave you all with is the fact that if you actually look at all your fingers, they're all different, all different lengths, sizes, all of that. But at the end of the day, they can all come together and strike a mighty blow. And that's what I wanna leave all of my black people with. We don't have to call each other names. We can actually have constructive debate. Thank you. I was like frantically taking notes because there was a lot that really resonated with me specifically. And to talk about what it means to be black, if we can get real personal, y'all have learned a lot about me that I don't normally share. So congratulations, I guess. I did not actually, I don't often tell this story. I struggled with identifying as black for most of my life. I was raised, as I mentioned earlier, by a single white mom. And so for me, I was always mixed. I was mixed, I was too black for the white kids and too white for the black kids. I wasn't black enough. And that was something that really resonated with me. And I went to a conference in college. I was probably, I don't even wanna know. We're not gonna say the age. But it was early into my college time. And I remember we had different breakout spaces. All the white folks go in one room. They talk about how to be a good ally. They don't ever really figure it out. If we were honest, the black folks, we had the people of African descent caucus. I went there and they met twice because it was a long conference and we ended up meeting twice. And I remember going the first time and I felt that there were all these things that were being talked about. And I'm like, I'm just gonna sit in the back and maybe sneak out. I don't know if I feel accepted here. And so the next time they met that same conference, I chose not to go to that space because I didn't feel like it was for me. I thought my white side was actually tainting the space which was like a very pivotal moment for me. And I was wrestling with it. And I was like, okay, this is like an internal thing that I need to wrestle with. And actually somebody noticed that I didn't show up the second time. And he pulled me aside and he was like, sis, we missed you. I was like, oh yeah. Trying to think of an excuse, right? Cause I was like, I don't want to get into this. Be very honest. And then like I told him, I was like, look, like I'm halfway, like do I? And we had to have a whole conversation and it was a really like transformative point for me that I was like, it is okay for me to stand in my blackness and to own that even though I was raised by a white mother. And so that's why it was really important for all of us to talk about our stories. Cause all of us are very, very different. We all very look different. Our hair is very different. We lived in different places. But at this end of the day, we're all still black. And what does that mean to be black? And so I say that to say that all of our experiences are so, so different as you heard today. There were times even stepping into this role two years ago as executive director, I was like checking myself. I'm like, I'm light-skinned. So raised by a white mom, am I black enough to run this like super black organization? Normally I would say other words, being professional here. Like am I black enough to do this work? And I really had to think about stepping into this role but also understanding the light-skinned privilege that I have. Also understanding that like I'm still a black woman and I live my life as a black woman. If I am pulled over, I make this joke but it's like half true, like a series. I can't like, when I get pulled over and be like, hold on, hold on, my ID? Yup, my half white card. Yup, please don't kill me, right? Like that's not something I can do. I walk through the world and I'm IDed as a black woman. Yes, there's different layers to that being pansexual, being cisgender. I have privilege as a cisgender woman. So there's a lot of different intersectionalities that I think that we can pull apart of what that means to be black in America and be black in Milwaukee, be black in DC and even define like what America is. And so some other notes that I wrote down is to be very clear, cause I don't know if we've like named the thing. White supremacy is a thing and it is woven into every fabric of our lives in this country and that's not something that we can automatically just kind of get rid of or even not have an understanding or a framework of how policies, how we have to deconstruct that every single day, right? There are organizations that perpetuate white supremacy culture and there's whole articles and there's books that are written about it about how are we perpetuating? There's even people of color, lead organizations and black organizations that also just due to conditioning are perpetuating white supremacy culture and what does that mean when we talk about people? What does that mean when we're funding organizations? What does that mean when we talk about metrics? And if I can just have a small rant for a moment. We work very closely with the Center for Popular Democracy and I remember being in a leadership cohort and we were talking about if you could create your own metrics for funding, what would they be? Or like what are the issues? What would you want to create and then what are the problems? And then someone wrote like, excuse my language, bullshit metrics and we were like, what does that mean? And they're like, people want to know how many doors you've knocked, how many pledge cards you got signed. And I'm like, that sounds great, but what does that mean? Like how are we evaluating what movement work looks like? How are we evaluating and putting a value on work? Specifically in Milwaukee, we are getting a lot of interest and a lot of inquiries about people wanting to support our work, but at the end of the day, I want to keep people on. I got to have at least 20 people on in the field in 2021 because we tend to be very transactional in our nature and some of that we can peel back the layers and really understand that some of that is rooted in white supremacy and how we evaluate people, how we place a value on people and on our work specifically. Specifically when it comes to voting rights, in Milwaukee, this was several years ago, it was probably maybe 2012 or so, I mentioned about how people, if you are still on paper, your voting rights haven't been restored yet. There used to be these billboards that would pop up on the north side of Milwaukee, predominantly black neighborhoods, that would literally would just say, voter fraud is a felony. And then it would have like a picture of like a gavel. And that was the whole billboard. And I remember thinking, I can be really naive sometimes and try to see the best in people. And I was like, what does this mean? What are they going with this? What is happening? And people are like, no, Angela, they're trying to scare people, like previously incarcerated people who don't know that their voting rights have been restored. They're seeing these billboards and even though their voting rights have been restored, they're like, well, I don't know. I don't want to commit voter fraud and like I want to go back to jail. And so what are these voter suppression tactics that continue to happen to make sure that communities of color and black folks specifically are not making their voices heard in the political system? And a story I want to share with you all, some people may have saw this happening in real time. In 2016, August of 2016, there was an unarmed black man that was murdered by the police. He was running away, shot and killed. Typical story we've seen the story play out in several places. This is not the first time that that has happened in Milwaukee. In 2014, an unarmed black man was murdered for sleeping on a park bench. Downtown, literally a block away from city hall, there is an ice skating rink outside, outdoor ice skating rink, but it's still kind of like a place where people sit and hang out. And then there's a Starbucks there. And the Starbucks employees called the cops because he was napping on their bench. The police came out the first time and were like, this is not a problem, don't call us again. Somebody else in Starbucks was like, well, I know an officer personally, let me call them. That officer was the one that ended up shooting and killing this man and murdering him by shooting him 14 times in broad daylight, a block away from city hall. So these things happen, but you never really hear about Milwaukee the same way you hear Ferguson or Baltimore and some of these other places. But in 2016, what we did, and I say, we collectively, I did not partake, but they shut that city down. And they were like, this is unacceptable, we are not doing this. I remember watching the Facebook Lives after it happened, everybody was in this place called Sherman Park. It is in a predominantly black neighborhood. Down the street is, people call it like a bad neighborhood, but then there's like some really old, beautiful houses that families own. And so it's a really interesting mix of this neighborhood, Sherman Park. And people were angry, they people gathered in this park and they walked down the street and they started burning stuff down. They're like, this gas station, burn it down. This beauty supply store, burn it down. Auto zone, okay, burn that down too. They burned down a bank, bypassed the police department and just burned it stuff down. And people were like, well, this is not gonna get us anywhere. Property damage, what is that actually doing? That's actually hurting your cause. And so there was a lot of tone policing of how black people were able to express their anger and frustration by constantly seeing the murders of people that looked like us, that were unarmed. And this was the closest that we had to like a riot uprising. CNN was there, everybody was there trying to further agitate. And then people were making the connections. Well, there's an election in a couple of months in 2016. What does this look like? And there were communities, whether they were allies, black folks, Latinx folks, people were not making those connections about the DA and how our DA is elected. Some people were though in understanding that our community that had been going through these tremendous tragedies, it was all part of like a system. They can have these tragedies and my ambassadors, I have to answer to you every day, are like, Angela, how can they get away with this? How can they do this? And they generally means the powers that be that uphold these institutions, whether it be the criminal justice institution or the jails, whatever, upholding these institutions, understanding that previously incarcerated people that are not fully off paper can't vote. They're the ones that are also targeted with some of these policies. If you're previously incarcerated, you also have barriers and limited access to housing, to jobs. There is this vicious cycle. And then all of a sudden people were mad when we popped off and snapped, right? And people were making this connection about how, at the same time, if you're, and I mentioned this before, if you're just trying to stay alive and to survive, you're not thinking about how am I voting tomorrow? How am I gonna vote next week? So question I have to kind of like bring this all together, when you all think about, say voting is on Tuesday, you have your candidate in mind, what are some of the things that you all think about when you go to the polls? For example, what does my day look like? What are some of the other things that people think about when they're about to make their vote plan? That's exactly what I thought. That's my point. People know that there is an election and they just show up. I've knocked on doors where people are like, yes, here for all in, I don't know if I can vote on Tuesday. And I was like, well, polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. if you are in line by, like I do the thing, right? So if you are in line by 8, they cannot turn you away as long as you are still physically in line. They're like, Angela, no, I got you. I'm gonna vote for the candidates who you told me about. I'm gonna try and tell other people to vote. I got class, I worked two jobs, I worked both jobs that day and I have to figure out what to do with my kid. And Wisconsin has a lot of elections every five minutes, unfortunately. So including the winter, if your polling place is down the street and you don't have a car and you're walking to your polling place and you don't know if you have the adequate coat for your child, but you need to take your child with you and you're working two jobs, you have minimal time to get from one job to another. Do you have the right idea? Do I have all the things that I need? These are things that sometimes people think about or don't because they're too daunted or like, you know what, I can't even, I'm just gonna remove myself from the process. And then another unarmed black man gets murdered and the DA doesn't prosecute. And we elect the DA. It is a constant cycle and all of it is very intentional. And so I say this because I tell people all the time, electoral conversations, I'm not even gonna say in community of color because I don't really know. I don't wanna make assumptions. Electoral conversations in the black community specifically are more expensive because they take longer. There is no way I can turn a non-voter into a voter and tell them about the political process and educate them on how the process actually works and then tell them to vote on this day. I can't have three separate conversations like that starting in October. And so what does it look like to place value and understanding on people that are doing this work, understanding the importance of a year-round organization and how we're meeting people and seeing people as full people and meeting people where they're at. Not just, oh, let me give rise to the polls and that's it. If people are actually intentional about understanding what building long-term black political power means and also understanding the voter suppression tactics that people are having, it needs to be a year-round engagement plan so people understand the different components. It was interesting. There's more offices that are opening from Republicans and predominantly black neighborhoods. Fine, cool, all well. And at the same time, just like any other funder that I talked to is it's incredibly transactional. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine the other day that I appreciate that black folks are a part of the conversation now and that there are some lessons that were learned in 2016 about turnout specifically in the black community. Appreciate those conversations are happening. Everyone's vying for the black vote. Importance of the black vote. At one point though, at what time are we gonna stop talking about black folks as just data points and poll numbers and actually talk about people as full people and understanding that yes, people wanna increase turnout. It's always great to make sure that everybody is voting, obviously, but we also need to tackle the structural barriers that are leading people to not be able to be engaged and to bring their full selves into a political process that was not meant for us to participate in. When you see voter suppression tactics in Wisconsin, we have photo ID. We have this tradition at block where we love to early vote together because we're always a little bit busy on election day. And so we early vote together and it's a whole process to grab 30 people now, 30 people to register to vote, making sure they have the right IDs because people aren't walking people through this process and then get mad when people aren't participating in the process and the only conversation that sometimes black people have about politics is someone that doesn't look like them, doesn't live in their city and said, hey, black person in community X, this is how you should vote. It's incredibly disrespectful, it's disingenuous and it actually is a not productive use of time, money or resources. And so to zoom out, I think it's just really important to make sure that we are talking about how are we showing up in using our privilege, whether it's funder privilege, just gender privilege, whatever it may be, how are we showing up in spaces? So we are no longer being transactional, that we are no longer seeing people as like votes and commodities. And what does it mean to be a good ally? And yes, I named all the things, this blacks, this pansexual, chunky fat black woman, but at the same time, that also means that I have a lot of privilege too, where there are times that I feel the weight of white supremacy. I also know that my trans brothers and sisters and gender non-conforming folks are also going through struggles as well. And so I always check myself of how am I showing up for their work? And what does it mean to have those things intersect, specifically when it comes to voting and suppression tactics in Wisconsin? Wisconsin is just real rough in a lot of places, y'all. But people are starting to have a conversation about now that we have photo ID, what does it look like for trans folks to have to go with a photo ID on election day? And I've had some friends that I love very dearly that tell me that they dress the way that they look in their ID picture for that day, so that they can vote, not living their true selves, but just don't wanna deal with the hassle of how they may be male presenting in their ID photo, but have since transitioned. And what does that look like? And so for me, a lot of the work that I do is very centered around voter ID and voter suppression tactics, and just trying to make sure that we're educating people about civic engagement in a broad way, and being able to tie in how are we being a good ally in a lot of different ways, while acknowledging that people's voices are being silenced. And again, voting is not the silver bullet at the end of the day. Voting will not get us free, never have, never will, doesn't mean we shouldn't stop voting. But then what else does it look like long-term? And the last thing I'll say, I wrote this down because I thought it was really funny, and I usually have it in my slides, but I took it out, but I should have actually left it in. How many people have seen get out? Right, okay, okay, great. Not a spoiler. So there's a scene in the beginning where he's meeting the parents for the first time, and he's like, look, I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could. Plot twist was not a good man. Like that dude was trying to kill black people. So it's very interesting, and I love that movie so much because it actually pulls out kind of the nuance and that there is a lot of times that people that say that they're allies to different communities actually aren't. And that just because you voted for Obama, I don't mean shit to me. Like it really doesn't, that means nothing to me at the end of the day. What does it mean to show up as a true ally? And in some cases, putting your body on the line, there are people that are scared to drive because they're undocumented. They're afraid to come home from school because they're afraid that their parents are gonna have been deported. And what does that look like for me as a black woman or as an organization? How do I show up in this work? And also acknowledging that if people are afraid of being deported, if people are afraid of being shot and killed, you're not always thinking about politics because you may not always see the connection. You're not always thinking about voting because, oh, well, what has voting ever done for me? I can't, every single time I knock on doors on election day, someone's like, I'm not voting. Voting has never done anything for me. But there is a disconnect with how we are showing up. How are we wrapping our arms around each other? And how are we doing that education so people don't feel disillusioned, even though there's these constant voter suppression tactics? I had to answer for my team when after 2018, the Governor Evers was elected. There was a lot of enthusiasm. People were excited for new leadership. And then the extraordinary session, the lame duck session happened and they were basically trying to say, okay, well, we're gonna take away all the powers before Governor Evers gets in office. And I remember talking to my ambassadors and they were like, Angela, how could they do this? We did all of this work to help get this man elected. How can they just do this? And I had to say, these are, let's zoom out and let's have a conversation about power dynamics and a power analysis while there's constant voter suppression efforts. And so even there's the obvious voter suppression efforts of photo ID and getting rid of same day voter registration and all those sorts of things, but then also bad elected officials and things like trying to limit people's governing power before they even get in office, those are also voter suppression tactics. Because if you're constantly showing up and you have elected officials that aren't doing their job, that aren't listening to you, that literally are just collecting a paycheck, that is also a voter suppression tactic because people are like, why should I continue to even show up if nothing is even gonna change at all? And so I just wanna leave you with that and understanding how we are all a part of the system that is unjust and how are we constantly breaking down the barriers of what we've been conditioned and socialized every single day and how are we showing up in this work that is authentic that is an honest ally and not just someone that just claims to wear a safety pin and literally have a gold star thinking that like I'm an ally. Being an ally is a journey. I give this like five hour training to emerge every year. Yeah, every year and it's coming up next month. And one of the things that I tell people is that being an ally, you don't just like level up and get a cookie. Like that's not how it works. It's a constant journey. You're gonna stumble, you're gonna fall, but we need to evaluate how are we doing this work out of a place of love? That's something I've been reflecting deeply on because I feel very strongly that the last several years I feel like I've been organizing out of a place of anger which is not sustainable. But if we are organizing from a place of love, then we're able to meet people where they're at. We're also able to have that empathy that I think is often lacking specifically when it comes to voter suppression and how to be an ally. And so I think those two things desperately tied together and I encourage you all to think about how you're constantly showing up in those two areas. Thank you. Again, I wanna thank everyone for coming out today to our session on contemporary social issues and the black experience in the United States. You know, we started in our planning, as I said before, we were all very intentional and purposeful of wanting to paint as much of a picture as we could about what it meant to be black and American, what blackness is. There are definitions both internally within the black community, but there are also definitions imposed on us externally. It's a constant balancing act between the two worlds. Really, it's like going between two worlds, maybe three, four, five worlds sometimes. But I think it's important in this country to understand race as foundational in this country and race being founded upon this concept of blackness that actually was crafted and designed to give significance and meaning to whiteness. And so as we move forward in our work, I think it's important that we consider all the ways, as I mentioned some of the terms that blackness gets invoked even without saying it or just the way that we've been conditioned to form an image mentally, just from the mentioning of a word or an incident or something. And to really be more intentional, introspective about how we do our work, the language that we use, how we get to know people and understanding and sharing our stories and really connecting. You talked about building allies, that's so important. Another thing that I read or heard actually, y'all know I don't read, I listen to most of my books these days, but I do read, but anyway. It was in Ibram X. Kendi's, I guess maybe it was his first book, Stem from the Beginning. And in there he was talking about this idea of racism, specifically racism against black people. And it was something that I kind of knew, but it really made me think about it and how anti-blackness is often used for any number of isms. You know, you can always invoke the idea that this is what black people do. This is gonna be beneficial to black people and sort of rally people against or in favor of a cause that may not actually be a cause even in their best interest. All around this idea of blackness and anti-blackness. So again, those are just some final words that I wanna leave, I recommend reading the book if you have any as a second one now, how to be an anti-racist. And that's all, just do a better job. Thank you. Thank you.