 Thank you all for being here This is my first time Being in my new community. I think I have tried to I haven't cried actually since before the sub-densing hearing so I've done a pretty good job of kind of treating California as my new chapter in life and therefore Kind of left North Carolina back there. So it's it's a little hard trying to reconcile seeing the faces of loved ones and my now new community and Bringing that all together I see faces of love and I appreciate it But damn this is hard I don't I intentionally actually didn't want to take too much time I've only partially seen Mohammed's piece a couple years back and I Was not able to sit through all of it I think because of my PTSD I was just literally paralyzed and frozen and couldn't leave So I actually saw it this time But with all that to say The goal of today was actually to take us from that horrific moment to and now what I'll take just a couple minutes to give you updates People have requested to learn a little more on Kind of from the legal standpoint the trial updates The hate crime conviction And then from there. I'm actually going to give it to Sumaya our director of operations to walk you through what we've been doing at our three winners foundation I think Mohammed did a good job of quickly kind of summarizing from it from a trial standpoint But he basically pled Guilty to murder in the first degree on three accounts for life in prison without parole They presented evidence Is it okay if I skip this part? He kind of already shared it, so I'm just gonna skip it the one part that I think is important as it relates to the work and our foundation was During the sentencing hearing the state brought in expert testimony from Professor Somers who is an expert on bias He's a professor of psychology at Tufts University And he's been called upon more than 30 times to testify in court and as it relates to issues of bias and As he went through all the evidence found that there was Bias in how he treated the at your senator's end other than the obvious fact that he killed them but That he treated people of color in the neighborhood with more aggression and brandished his gun only to people of color But then it was only the Muslims that he killed And also that there was bias in how He believed that there were Renters in the condo and not people who owned a condo and therefore didn't have the same parking rights So to speak again, this has nothing to do with parking, but The fact that he had turned himself in Chuckling during his confession with blood on his person Calling it a parking dispute for the police then to take that narrative and run with it and For us to this day fighting that really harmful hurtful unjust narrative That it was actually a an ask that we made during the press conference right after the sentencing hearing they said what can we do since people know this as a parking dispute and as you may know this sentencing hearing got Practically zero national media coverage And we said for the police department to set the record state and hours later. They issued an apology Four and a half years too late. I appreciated that it happened at all. Most people don't get that and then the piece about the hate crime Get a lot of questions about Was their hate crime conviction the answer is no and the reason is because in the state of North Carolina The hate crime statute applies only to misdemeanors so not to felonies like murder but To misdemeanors such as graffiti or destruction of property But because that law doesn't actually exist. He couldn't be tried for hate crime Now our communities urging for this to be tried as a hate crime federally Worked and that the FBI opened an investigation into this being a hate crime But given the way the legal system works cases are first prosecuted on a state level and if you get the maximum sentence possible for The murderer then there's no point From a sentencing standpoint to pursue it on a federal level. So given that the maximum sentence This killer could get was life in prison. There was no point In going to federal and getting that hate crime Conviction so you saw snippets of Dliat's plea As he was crowdfunding for a dental relief trip that him and you so we're planning on going on the following summer That campaign was live when everything happened a lot of money poured in and It was then on the families to decide what to do with it and how best to Honor their dream We continued with an annual project refugee smiles doing dental relief trips to Syrian refugees in Turkey and a couple years and we've Often wondered that while this is Noble charitable work that is a Sadaqa Jaria in their name and We've started an endowment to allow this to be sustainable giving for generations to come It doesn't address the lethal islamophobia that has not allowed for Dliat you said understand to continue the kind of work that they were so passionate about and so we have since moved towards our mission of Eliminating eliminating hate one implicit bias at a time We did a lot of research and surveying of the landscape to see what kind of work is already being done on Eliminating hate we saw that there was a lot of work that was reactive to the hate But what can we do to prevent it and Aside from actually work with just the nonprofit Myself I was asking myself the question of how why how can someone do this? I don't care how much you hate someone. How can you justify taking a Gun to the to the heads of three kids and in the political climate that we live in and with fear being the emotion that our President triggered and fear is arguably the most powerful emotion that we have as humans With fear We can other eyes people and when we other eyes them we can dehumanize them and When we dehumanize them we can justify violence against them and I later learned that this has actually been studied and Suggested and there's a whole pyramid of hate to describe this and at the pinnacle You reach genocide So at our three winners foundation, we decided to work at the base To talk about to work on implicit biases What are implicit biases some people have heard of it others haven't but Basically unconscious attitudes and stereotypes we have to particular groups of people They're not good. They're not bad. They're Facts of human psychology our brains work in a manner of Categorizing things and objects and people because that's the way our brain can process them but the categories and the Adjectives and descriptors and qualities that we attribute to each of these groups are Engrained in us as We grow in these social groups and structures and communities were influenced Whether we know it or not through what we see through media through our upbringing in our textbooks. I Encourage you all to take the Harvard implicit bias tests and they have different categories on Woman in the workplace, you know, I have I have friends who are multi-generation Women who are CEOs and yet when they have taken the test they saw that they had an implicit bias Favoring women being in the in the home So these are implicit biases we carry Oftentimes favoring groups that we belong to but not always The classic example is also white people and black people and you're asked this question to associate good qualities with either group and bad qualities with either group and Many people will start identifying and have implicit biases that will shock many of us as we take them You can take it about weight about gender about sexuality There's one on Arabs and Muslims and it's really damning to see at the report and the results of the many many Thousands of people who've taken it and how unfavorable people view Arabs and Muslims To lighten it up just a little bit. I was reading a bedtime story with my two-year-old and We have this book where a Mommy-wearing hijab is taking her toddler son to the doctor and the male doctor is using his stethoscope to listen to the kid's heart and And as a physician my husband not being a physician My son loves to play with mama's stethoscope and he'll put it on and want to listen to my heart and daddy's heart And he'll say Baba doctor Baba doctor and I would and it's amazing Mama's the doctor, but these is how it's ingrained from a really young age images matter narratives matter Despite my trying to debunk it it has yet to happen, but hopefully one day he will he will learn So to move us forward because I do want to give Sumiya the floor We just graduated our inaugural cohort of fellows from the Social Inclusion Institute in partnership with UC Berkeley's Haas Institute for Fair and Inclusive Society and Islamophobia research and documentation project The fellowship engages policymakers and their staff members Interested in debiasing unlearning harmful stereotypes and narratives of different target groups and creating more equitable policies that use research not tropes to formulate interventions It sounded like a mouthful, but it's amazing work and I'm so proud of The work that Sumiya has done in spearheading this fellowship and now I will give this to Sumiya