 You know, Sonya, it's good to see you on a Zoom screen again. I feel like this is how we see each other all the time now. But I think it's better than not seeing each other. So I know we really wanted to have a dialogue, a sort of a follow-up even conversation that's been really long overdue since last boom. We are in our fifth annual Building on our Momentum conference and day of learning. And I feel such a special affinity towards boom because I know that many of the ideas around creating the position that I hold now and the office that is now a part of the campus community, the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, was really born out of boom. It seems so important having just watched this video again. And hopefully, people have been watching the video or have seen the video of Ibram Kendi and Robin D'Angelo in conversation with Gail King last summer to think about all we've been through since March of 2020. It's now one year since our campus drastically changed. And in that year has been so much racial division and so many challenges for all of us around the global pandemic, but also this very real manifestation of violence and racial injustice being perpetuated. And so I was thinking about this a lot because I know you know that many of our community members have lost people. And in my own family and in my friends, I've known six people to pass away from COVID-19, which I think is directly related to being a person who's Black and Black and Indigenous and people of color communities being so deeply impacted by COVID-19. So with all that being said, I think that what really strikes me right now is this week, in particular, George Floyd's, the trial is beginning for the person who killed George Floyd and yesterday, Breonna Taylor's boyfriend was exonerated from the charges. That were against him. And so it just feels like there's been so much pain and so much sadness and so much loss around race and racism. And we're now, as a community, trying to figure out the way forward. So I don't know if you have thoughts about the video that we watched and just like what this last year, I'm just sort of throwing out my own reflections what this last year has been like. But I know I've been very focused as the Chief Diversity Office of the College on keeping my eye on the prize of doing anti-racism work in community with you and others. And so what are your thoughts about the video and what was said? Yeah, I mean, it's been so moving, I would say, to be in these conversations with you this year, to be close to you as we live through this moment together. And just to hear you talk about it here now, right? I mean, it's a moment of deep emotional response. And I think that when I think about the video that the interview with Gayle King, I think the question at the heart of that interview is what's different now? What needs to be different now? And Robin DeAngelo says very clearly, we witnessed this kind of police brutality before captured on video, the life of a black individual extinguished as they're dehumanized by the actions of a white person in authority or claiming authority over the life of another. And what was different for me in this moment? I think it was the ubiquitous evidence of racial injustice just made all the more visible by the pandemic in 2020. I mean, how could you not care about suffering and loss on this scale and the disproportionate effect on people of color? And so I think that evidence of racism on a structural and systemic scale was just so powerfully symbolized in the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Armadale Arbery. And I suppose in some senses, for me it was, and this is the most painful thing about the video, is the voice of George Floyd begging a police officer just to breathe, to live, calling out for his mother for those nine long minutes of cruelty, of what can only be seen as deep rooted in humanity. And I think that as I think about this past year, I think about what Abram Kendi says to us that denial is the heartbeat of racism and that we cannot go on living in denial. So that the life and death of George Floyd and too many others in 2020 made this a tipping point for so many of us, I think, for many white people who continue to want to live in denial. So for me, I can just talk for myself, it was a moment of even greater reflection, a moment of even greater self-interrogation and a call to action in the face of such loss, a moment to say, what's going to be different because of what I can do? What's going to be different because of the way in which I use my privilege? What's going to be different for me in this leadership role with which I've been entrusted? So I think that for me, 2020 was a year that with the cries of George Floyd, bagged white people just finally to listen, to show their humanity and to fight for change and social justice, to acknowledge the many lives lost and to assert that Black lives matter. Yeah, it's interesting, so what I think really struck me about what you just said is, I think about what we had to explore, what is the definition of anti-racism? What does it mean to be anti-racist? And Ibram Kendi's book, Stamped from the Beginning, which is such a part, it's called Stamped from the Beginning, the History of Racist Ideas in America. And I think about that all the time that there are all these ways that through the formation he shows us, through these people who are almost talked about as actors in this larger landscape of American history, Cotton Mather, and Thomas Jefferson, and W.B. Du Bois. But he ends up with Angela Davis and helping us understand, when Angela Davis, I always paraphrase this a little bit, but when she says, in a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, one must be anti-racist. I mean, I don't think I even understood what that meant. And so I often think about my own anti-racist journey and how I've had to learn to disrupt anti-Black ideas that I internalized, which Ibram Kendi makes really apparent in that work as well, but also how that is connected to my understanding of how to challenge xenophobia and transphobia and anti-Asian sentiment that we're seeing and anti-Semitism. What are the ways that an anti-racist person, a person who wants to embody and live out and practice anti-racism, has to be focused and intentional every day? And I think we had lots of conversation about that in our own individual anti-racism journeys, anti-racist journeys. And we both had readings that we were referring to. And I know you always talk about this one book that was so meaningful and important to you. And I wonder if you can share a little bit about that, like the anti-racist journey and even how that book influenced you. Yeah. So I think the book you're referring to is a Renito Lodge's book, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race. Yeah. And I came to this book, and I'll just say this because I think it's really important to acknowledge this too that I came to this book with the desire to understand actually, as Renito Lodge does, she asked the question, why is this conversation only happening in America, and why wasn't it happening through all of my youth in the United Kingdom? So Renito Lodge is a British Black woman who said that she looked for things to read in the UK and was constantly having to turn to the US for the kinds of books that we're referring to here. And so when she published this, I think it was in 2014. And by the way, it was shot to the number one bestseller slot in the UK in 2020 because this was the book that everybody wanted to turn to to understand race relations in the UK. So for me, this was turning to Renito Lodge was a way of bridging, sort of interrogating my own past. Interrogating the social location from which I come and trying to bridge where I've lived for now a long time. And thought about these things very specifically in American context, but without doing the kind of deep work of excavating my own past, my own experience as a child, teenager, student, and faculty member in the UK. So Renito Lodge, in a way, was for me that bridge, right? And so I think that the thing that sticks in my mind more than anything else from her book, and I keep coming back to this, is what she describes as the dull grinding complacency of white privilege. So it's the fact that as white people or as white individuals, we don't have to think about this. We can shrug things off that others can't. And that's what Renito Lodge is getting at, right? But I think that she's also talking about the invisibility of whiteness, the fact that everything is normed in terms of white and how we have to challenge that norm and come differently to the conversation. So she talks about structural and systemic racism as being insidious, as being like a noxious gas that seeps into everything. And so for me, sort of coming to Ibram Kendi, coming to Robin D'Angelo, coming to Renito Lodge, the question I'm asking myself is, what does it look like for me to make a difference and what kinds of commitments do I need to make on a daily basis to be in these conversations, like the conversation we're having now, but also to be in this work, meaningfully. And so for me, what does that commitment look like? I mean, you're asking what does it look like for me to be anti-racist, I think. And I think that I and all white people need to come to the conversation and leave our unquestioned sense of power and equality in these conversations, our arguments and defenses at the door. I mean, they have to sort of stay out. We need to come to the conversations and listen, listen intently to the experiences and the perspectives of marginalized individuals, and to do so with enormous humility. I think as we did, I think my recollection of the moment of coming together around the anti-racist action plan was both this moment of deep reflection about our own work, but also the humility and the respect with which we listened to the experiences of our students and alums and other members of our community on Black at MHC. That these were experiences that went to the very core of what it means to be at Mann-Holyoke, and that we needed to listen to and take account of in our work. And so I guess that for me, being anti-racist means bringing that humility and that desire to listen and to interrogate the generations of bias, privilege, and opportunity so that we finally intervene as bystanders and individually and collectively address the profound inequalities and wherever we see them. This is and so that I mean, in some ways, we are very fortunate because we are in a place and in positions of responsibility and some would say power to make the difference. And so if we don't act on our anti-racism commitments now, then we will be bystanders. Yeah, I think it's so interesting. I remember last summer when we saw Black at MHC and we saw the tremendous, you talked about this before, I think, with this book. I remember we were talking about emotional labor and the time and energy that goes into talking to people and Robin D'Angelo says this really well in the video, there's a point where Gail King says to her a comment about basically white people trying to understand and Robin D'Angelo sort of unapologetically as a white person is like, how many times have white people seen this before? And that essentially racism is not going to be cured through niceness. I mean, she's very powerful and poignant in that way about these kinds of things. And I think we took a while with our development of the anti-racism action plan because we wanted to do that deep interrogation over weeks of gathering, of watching that video, of watching other videos of we were having conversations also at the college about the 1619 project and bringing that as the common reading. And I think there was so much dialogue and discourse that we wanted to engage in so that when we put out a plan, it would be a plan that would have the potential to transform the institution in ways that have always been the goals of boom and the strategic plan around diversity. And so I think it's been really, really important to say to ourselves, we want action. We want actions that we can demonstrably show and that in our freedom dreaming, as Robin D. J. Kelly has talked about in his book, and also that Tormaline, our keynote speaker for Boom Last Year, said, we want to imagine a future where people can still tell their authentic, raw, vulnerable stories if they choose in that sort of archive-type experience, which is what I think of Black at Mount Holyoke, but that maybe the stories will be less about the pain and trauma of being Black at Mount Holyoke and would be more, hopefully, thinking ambitiously, because I think it's an ambitious plan about the work that we've engaged in as a community to address, confront, and heal, if possible, from living in this sort of racist past history legacies that we've had. And so I feel like that's such an important part of the plan and our plan was meant to be iterative. It was meant to be something that was a living and breathing document. And that has really been so important in doing this work in community with you and the other leaders of the college is being very honest with ourselves and with each other about where we need to go, what we need to do, and what's probably still undone. I think that we both know that there's still things that we feel really strongly about. And so I don't know if you have any closing thoughts about the plan and this journey we've been on, this dialogue, and why it's so important to have it at a place like Boom, that you wanna share. But I think a lot about the plan every day. Like you. Yeah, I do. And I think about, I mean, you mentioned the emotional labor of the students in on Black at Mount Holyoke, but I also think often about Moanist, right? And the way in which Moanist documented those experiences is in a way, and that has also led us to this moment, right? That where we've been able to reflect on over a period, I guess now we're talking about seven years, but many, many much longer where Mount Holyoke faculty, staff, and students over decades have done this work together to try and advance the college and to try and make the college an anti-racist place. And I do think that Boom, that creating an office for diversity, equity, and inclusion by hiring you as our Chief Diversity Officer was a way of saying, how do we support that work, right? How do we really take all of the grassroots work, not take away from it, but how do we take it? And how do we, in some ways, prioritize resource, harness it for the advancement of Mount Holyoke? So in some ways, the anti-racism plan is, it's absolutely a step in that direction. And I think that for me, you're right, it was a process, right? We were processing, right? It was a process, and it's still a process. It will go on being a process. Just as kind of, I mean, even Kendi right concludes in, start from the beginning, that there can be no anti-racist America until principled anti-racists are in power and until anti-racist policies become the law of the land. And I think in some ways, what we're trying to do is make anti-racist policies the law of our land, right? That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to say, how will we make anti-racist policies the law of Mount Holyoke? And I also think, and this is a little less elevated in some ways than the way in which, even when Kendi talks about it, but, Redietto Lodge kind of quotes Terry Pratchett, who's this kind of comic author, very prolific author in the UK who died some time ago, quite young, but who basically said, there's no justice, there's just us. And I think that we can't wait for other people to take on the responsibility. So I think we felt that when we were talking about this, I mean, I know that you recall this, that it's just us, we've got to take this on and we've got to take this on with our community for Mount Holyoke. And for all that means, as people leave Mount Holyoke and go right into their communities. So I sort of think about our anti-racism action plan as taking it on, right? As making us individually in our roles, but also collectively, directly responsible for actions and for tracking those actions and to bring in the lens of anti-racism to everything we do, to every corner of the college, to every policy we look at. I mean, people will probably be surprised to know that we have a policy on policies. Right. I was surprised when I came to Mount Holyoke. But, you know, to bring that lens to like every, everything just so that we can better understand the ways in which the things we do, the systems we have, the practices we engage in, the attitudes we bring to the work, still marginalize even when we think they don't, right? So for me, that's the work of this plan. And what I think what I really am most committed to in it is that it's not just future-oriented. It is future-oriented in all the ways you say, right? If we look forward, what will this be, right? What will the stories be in the future? How will they be different? But it's also looking in the present, like, what can we do now? What can we do now that will change it so that those stories might be different? And how do we have to acknowledge our pasts? Like, just as I said, I turned to Renny at O'Lodge to say, what do I have to think about in my own past? Yeah. The college needs to think about its own past. And so this history, memories and legacy task force is about the same kind of scrutiny that we bring to an institution as we need to bring to our own, I think, as we need to bring to our own past experience and biases and try really to acknowledge those and move the college forward. So, I mean, for me, I guess, I think that past, present, future piece is all about challenging the systems of oppression within which we work. I mean, they're rooted in white supremacy and we can't move the college forward and we can't move forward as individuals and in community. And that's, I think, the most important thing until we address all forms of injustice and bias, right? That's what it's about. That's what, I mean, I feel that's what our work together is about, right? That includes, you know, land acknowledgments. It includes recognizing the removal, the displacement of indigenous communities, the assaults on their culture and way of life. It includes the anti-Asian sentiment that we're seeing now, anti-Semitism. I mean, it includes challenges to our LGBTQ communities, the anti-immigrant rhetoric, xenophobia, right? I mean, there's almost no area of our lives and our community that are untouched by this and our commitment really has to be to commit to actions that advance human equity. And that's what our, I believe that that's what our anti-racism action plan is about. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, Sonia. And I think that we know that there's still work. You know, it's almost like, you talked about this like every corner and I feel like we're always, I mean, I feel like, you know, when we meet as a cabinet, as a leadership team, you know, with the president and the vice president to you, you know, and the vice presidents, I think we're constantly having these conversations around, are we using an anti-racist lens? Have we even been thinking, how does this, how does this, you know, how is this connected to the anti-racism action plan? And these are different conversations. And we were having, even when I arrived in 2018, I think we were talking about diversity, equity and inclusion and we were talking about, you know, struggles for justice and liberation. But I think the preciseness and the intentionality and the, you know, the deep dive and interrogation that we've had to do through reading, through watching videos, through dialogues with each other and in part because of the pandemic. I think, you know, there has been an even more pressing need to say, you know, not on our watch, not again, we have to do this differently. And you said that, I think so well. And I think as a black woman who's, you know, who's grown up in the United States and always sort of been conscious of what it has meant to be where I am, positionally on the human hierarchy. And I think, you know, when we had Dr. Jelani Cobb come and his speech was titled, The Half-Life of Freedom. Like that was a really powerful, powerful testament, I think to how many black Americans have felt and why, you know, seeing George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Amada Arbery and Tatiana Jefferson and so many people to mirrorize before them has been like, for us to say like, we really, really need people to understand what you said at the very beginning when we say black lives matter, what we're saying, right? Is that we don't actually believe that living a half-life is ever gonna be enough for any group of people, for any reason based on any identity. And this anti-racism action plan is meant to disrupt the human hierarchy that might be playing out in the classroom, you know, in residence halls and do that work intentionally, purposefully and thoughtfully. And so I'm grateful to this, the work of this community, to our students, our faculty, our staff and our alum and our leaders who are willing to take on these audacious, bold conversations. And yet I know we still have so much work to do. We do, but I'm so grateful for the way in which you're leading this and for the way in which you're involving everyone in the community, right? I mean, this is the work that we have to do together. So thank you for everything that you're doing too. And you know, we appreciate everyone who's in this work with us so much. Yeah, we do definitely, definitely. Thank you, Sonya. I hope you have an amazing day and I'm so excited for this year's boom. Me too. It looks like a great program. So, yeah, I think it's gonna be amazing. All right, take care. Yeah, you too. Bye-bye. And this is awkward by my view. Bye-bye. See you later. See you later. It's an awkward wave on Zoom now. Yeah, okay. Bye. Bye. Bye.