 The people who fought for our freedom were not cops or wealthy white city officials or gun-toting libertarians or glad-handing politicians looking to get our votes. They were hustlers, injection drug users, people who lived on the streets. They were black and brown, butchers, queens and trans women who do not have the option to decide that their struggles were just about gay rights. The people who fought for our freedom took care of each other, creating safe places to be themselves. When the white gays, the white middle class assimilationists, motherfucking gays, took over the movement later with their assimilationist goals, kicked them out because they wouldn't act grateful for the scraps given to them by the racist politicians, racist police forces and racist housing policies. Despite the persistent efforts by many white people, including so-called allies, to turn the conversation about race away from a conversation about black life, away from a conversation about police brutality and away from a conversation about the white supremacy that lives and breathes within every single white person standing here right now, I refuse to shut my mouth and let white people set this agenda. At this meeting, and there was a particular faculty member who was instigating much of the tension around race at Evergreen, and she was there, she tended to go to these things. And we were discussing the question, were all of these allegations about white supremacy at Evergreen and every so often somebody, sometimes it was me, sometimes it was somebody else, asked about, okay, where is this white supremacy? Can we see it? Can we evaluate it? And this faculty member said that she said to ask students who are suffering from white supremacy to tell us about the instances of white supremacy is itself racism. And she said, we must stop asking them because we are inflicting harm on them, asking for evidence. And the phrase she used, she said, to ask for evidence of racism, is racism with a capital R? And as she said, racism with a capital R, she leaned forward in her seat and she looked directly at me. And I had been leaning back in my chair. There was no opportunity to ask questions in these meetings. I sat up in my chair and I said, are you talking to me? And she said, yes. And I looked around the room and nobody said a word. And I said, you know, at some point you might want to check into whether or not my history lines up with the accusation of racism because you might be very surprised. And if you don't look into it, it's going to come back to bite you. And the chair of the faculty said, Brett, this is not the place to defend yourself against accusations of racism. And I said, that's fine. Where is the place? And then the faculty member who leveled the accusation says you should not expect a place to defend yourself against accusations of racism. And I looked around the room. The president of the college is sitting there. The provost of the college is sitting there. Nobody says a word. And I said, whoa. What faculty was she a part of? What was she teaching at the time? Naima was in media studies and film was her bag. We sort of coined this term of a phrase called black girl in the wilderness. To describe this profound isolation we feel as these sort of unruly, loud mouth women with the wrong hair and a lot of attitude and a rabid dedication in our work towards education as an actually liberatory practice. Both teach in places we get in trouble sometimes. Or we don't get in trouble until we're actually doing what we say we're going to do, then we get in trouble. At some point what I realized was that in order to not feel alone in the work, I had to take the risk of doing some of this what Bell Hooks called engaged pedagogy. Does that make sense for those of you who either have or do not have a card what you're doing? When you hear your number, say your thing, say it loud. I might ask you to repeat it if it's not loud enough. I'm that teacher? Yes? Okay? Okay, one, two, three, four, five, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39. I don't know that she does or doesn't believe that we're all guilty of racism, but I know that she understands the power of saying such a thing. And that's really what this is about for her was power. Yeah, she's an extremely smart, actually post-modernist cynic. I contact the provost and I said, you know, you heard that she accused me of racism and he said, well, she's right, isn't she? And I said, what are you talking about? And he said, well, we're all guilty, aren't we? And I said, no, Ken, what are you talking about? No, that's not accurate. Ignorance maybe, maybe, you know, we're all going to have some ignorance about other people's experience. No doubt I have ignorance about what it's like to be black or a woman or gay or any of these things, but racism? No, that's not, it's not true that it's universal. It was like somebody had said the most, the oddest thing to him, like you're really arguing that we're not all guilty of racism? I actually think racism depends on white people being really, really nice to everybody and just carrying on, right? Just be really nice and just carry on. And nothing will change or get interrupted and you will be supporting the default and the default is the reproduction of whiteness and white supremacy. And we need to go back to where that relentless self-reflection, humility and grappling, right? Where am I not understanding something and how might I be accountable to that? So what does student protestors want? This was gathered around all the recent protests that have happened on college campuses. And the number one is increased the diversity of the professors. And that's why I think it's really important to focus there because we often want to kind of, how do I get my students to understand this? And that is critical, but that is functioning to have us not look at ourselves as faculty. And so anyway, you can see all of these and actually I know that your institution is working and struggling, right? To move this forward and is putting together a cabinet, is that correct? A council, right? And I think as that happens, the racism that's embedded will surface more and more. One of the other challenges to this work is that we think when we start to talk about it and then it starts to surface. Sometimes we think that us talking about it or caring about it or centering it is what's causing the problem. And I would say, no, you finally created a space for all that people have had to sit on and endure to come to the surface. I graduated from Evergreen in 1973 and later served with us on the board of trustees during difficult periods in which the college faced the major financial challenges I mentioned. And as my fellow trustees will attest, Denny's not yours either. Okay, so this is a message from a student. Here's their statement. My name is Kara Gonzalez. I am at Standing Rock. I am a greener. Fuck your neoliberal bullshit to make this go around like a corporation. Fuck raising tuition, canning the racist homophobes, transphobic bigots, neo-nazis, rapids. Fuck you. Y'all are putting us into debt. Y'all are selling our money. This school is unsafe for marginalized students and you know it. The students have the power in universities. We can strike, we can boycott, we can divest. From you, from Evergreen, we can occupy the classrooms and refuse to leave and to pay until we get what we demand. A fair and good and affordable and accessible education. Tell me right now how you'll take action. I want to thank President Bridges and the Board of Trustees for this wonderful honor. And to all of my friends, the staff and the faculty, but most importantly the students here at Evergreen, I've had the honor of being able to work with, to argue with, to educate, to enjoy over these many, many years. Then why don't the faculty and staff represent us? And I'm more than willing to answer a question, but let me finish my comments. I'll honor you, you honor me. Thank you. Now, Doc, and I will listen. Dr. King stated that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. Dr. King is also dead. No, my questions are, while you were president here, what did you do for like the black students on campus? What did you do for the LGBTQ people on campus? What did you do for the Latinx people on campus? What did you do? You keep talking about race and everything and like, oh, you look back to your grandparents, blah, blah. But like, what did you do for us? What did you do for the people on campus? Excuse me, it's not back to my grandparents, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's not back to my grandparents, blah, blah, blah. It's not. It's the core of our foundation of who we are. I get it, the anger. I get it that you want responses and you deserve them. But you have to interact. You have to interact with people that are committed like you are to it. Just because I have a suit on now, have more than here, but it's kind of nice to have it on again. But just because I'm back and that's been my life and my life is passing, you have to learn wisdom from elders and educate elders as well. But we have to find the foundation to open the door for the conversation people. We have to find a way to do that. That's what it's about, students. Here today, when you honor me with this building, I want to say thank you. If this building has my name, where students will walk through it to be educated, to have seminars, to argue, to resolve conflicts, that will make all the difference in my heart with my name on this building because that is what it should do and that is what it's designed to do and it's wonderful that we have an environment where that can happen. So with that, I just want to say thank you to all my friends and staff. Day of Absence is a tradition that nobody really explained to us when we showed up at Evergreen. It was never an important feature in our quadrant of the college. In the sciences, I don't think there was wide participation. I don't actually remember a single student in my whole history at the college that was absent on the Day of Absence, do you? So Day of Absence ostensibly was a day on which originally black faculty and students and then later people of color more generally would absent themselves from the college in order to emphasize the importance of the roles they were playing at the college. Some of the events scheduled on Day of Absence were a bunch of little seminars and there were things like how Asians contribute to white supremacy. Like this was one of the topics of the day and the others were comparable, all of which you would recognize from the work that you've done. All the grievance studies sort of turned into seminars. Commitments to participate in Day of Absence this year were encouraged by the administration and then it was revealed to the faculty as a whole that Day of Absence this year meant white people don't show up to campus. And at the point this became clear, I sent an email to the campus, well to faculty and staff, and on the staff list were I think some 500 students who had staff positions at the college and I said this is unacceptable. It's one thing to absent yourself, it's another thing to tell other people to go away on the basis of their skin color. You should expect me to be present on the Day of Absence as a protest because I won't be told not to show up to a public college because I'm white. This caused a certain amount of uproar over email. I should say though that that email caused the usual 15 to 20 suspects on staff and faculty who are hateful to send bio-filled, angry emails accusing you of all manner of things that you had not done and are not. In the email I offered to hold a seminar for anybody interested on the evolutionary meaning of racism, where it comes from why it exists. If we're going to have this discussion by all means, let's have it full strength with the proper scientific underpinnings. And this was dismissed as scientific racism as if I was somehow going to hold a seminar claiming that white people were superior or something like this. There was definitely talk of white fragility. I think you were encouraged to read, is it Robin D'Angelo's book? That's white fragility. Did they at any point talk about epistemic exploitation? No. Because that's exactly where to ask for evidence. That's exactly what they call that. That's exactly that little trap. Exactly what grief and studies is doing based in the postmodern tradition that you know better than I do. It's completely discordant with a scientific understanding of the world. There is an objective reality or there isn't. We're not talking, we're not speaking to whether or not we'll ever get there even. That's not what we're doing. That's what we do as scientists and what we are supposed to be doing as scholars is figuring out which of these methods is a better way to actually approach reality. But it's just completely discordant. Science has at its core hypothesis and falsifiability and testability and so it gotta be the first to go. A student who I knew pretty well called me over and she said, do you know that there are people outside that door chanting for you to be fired? We'd like to reach out to students of color in the humanities as well as scientists but we are here to support who wants to dismantle anti-blackish champions. Why? We want years of consensus solidarity and provide safety. Yeah, no, not me, please. No, I'm committed to equity. I'm committed, I believe that anyone on this campus I happen to disagree with other folks on this campus about the way they are. But I'm not an unreasonable person, I'm not uninterested, I'm not uninformed about history. I know the implications of these things. I have arrived where I've arrived from a different route. I've arrived there through academic study. I know why racism happens. We live racism, we don't have to study it to understand it. We live it. And the issue is you think scientific includes everything. What about all the race and scientific? You're trying to have a lens of purpose over us. Explain that. No. You're going to listen. You ask me and I would like to answer. Hey, hey! Ho-ho! Oh, seriously? Block me out of my way. Out of my way now! History could pivot in this hallway right now. History could pivot in the direction of the values that you are standing here for. Yeah, resign. What? Resign. If I owe an apology, I will do it. Excuse me. So wait, hold on. Can I get this straight? You were coming over here for Brett Weinstein because you were... I got information to be cornered by students. Oh, okay. But not over here. Okay. Maybe you should have gotten better information. I only get better information. Oh, okay. Well, we were in D. It's a very small place. We are not block human anyway. There was room to leave. What's that? There was room. There was one group of students on one side of him and then a small dispersed group on the other side. One of the main protesters somehow managed to get all of the upper admin of the college. The president, all the VPs, most of the deans, if not all of them, plus various other members of the administration, sitting in a closed room with 8, 10, 12 protesters. But because these deliberately pushed past white students to target people of color, we deliberately asked white students to be a barrier between the police because we know the relationship that black and brown people have with the police. They made an effort to push them out of the way to get to us when everyone was doing the same thing. So to me, that feels like targeting black and brown people. And you can't tell me that that's not targeting black people because we have the evidence on camera but they literally pushed white people out of the way to attack black and brown bodies. Please send me that video. So I want you to really sit with that when you go home and you kiss your white kids. Remember that you did that to us. You stuck us out in the cold. Your silence is white violence. Yeah, I was waiting to say that. White silence is violence. You don't need to understand that. But we have no- But we don't have any legal way to explain that. Letting your co-workers, letting your students go through this, that's violence. I was going to say, I don't understand how the diversity and equity plan was presented as this thing that people had to get on board with at this campus if you got paid by this campus and then it's turned around and then you get to send out all these emails about it. It just doesn't make sense to me why he's still here if this was something you had to get on board with. I believe the equity plan is a great thing. I also know that every organization and every school I've been a part of there are always people you don't buy in. And the problem is aid problems. They have an opportunity to speak their mind. Even sometimes they do it in the most offensive ways. And how do we stop people from speaking offensively? That's a challenge. There is this concept of free speech. Now if it constitutes a aid plan, if it's targeting a certain population then we got a point of leverage. Is there any way to work some sort of language about the commitment towards how we really target students? And a lot of this, everyone needs all of this. Regarding targeting science. Science is as far as education about these kind of issues because if that's the place where it's happening the most consistently I think there needs to be something written down that's even extra emphasis on addressing those teachers. They're going to say some things that we don't like and our job is to bring them on. Or get them out. And what I hear us stating that we are working toward is bring them in, train them and if they don't get it, sanction them. Bring them in, train them and if it doesn't take sanction them. And then he says to the protesters, I want you to hold me to that. So that's the plan. It's for people like me, bring them in, train them and if it doesn't take sanction them. This is the mechanism that they're going to use to force this change to the college. Meeting at four o'clock in the upper floor of the library building in this old cafeteria was extremely dangerous and ill-considered. In approaching the meeting one goes down a hallway on this fourth floor and the hallway is completely controlled by anarchists. At the point that I show up they assign somebody to me to mind my every move. There's food that has been supplied by the college, the state college and the announcement has made that the food is for people of color only. Food, water. The chairs are also to be reserved for people of color. Then it turns out there are enough chairs so white people are allowed to sit in the back. In the back, yeah. So I hear this announced and it is one of many hard to imagine things. What are you going to do? Right now, I don't care about a plan. I'm talking about action because if it was your kids you would be doing hell in hot water. My students, students of color actually stand up and try to speak on my behalf at this meeting. The response is to chastise them as if they who do know me have misunderstood something and need to be re-educated. Shayna! So as a person, as people of color we have to recognize that we're not black and we don't know the black community so we have to recognize that also as people of color we are also anti-black and we can speak to anti-black people. Thank you. I was in Tacoma with our younger son so I got a voicemail from a dean. Hey, I haven't seen you in a while I know you're in sabbatical. I hope you're enjoying it. Something's happened in Brett's classroom. I'm checking in. I'd really like to talk to you or Brett and there might be media interest in the story so I just want to tell you I just want to assure you that the college can deal with any media interest that comes your way. I didn't know that Brett was okay but the message that I got from the college that I've been employed at for 15 years was the most important thing here is that we are in control of this story.