 Good evening and welcome to the Longmont Museum, Center for Culture in Northern Colorado where people of all ages explore history, experience art, and discover new ideas through dynamic programs, exhibitions, and events. My name is Justin Beach. I'm the manager of the Museum's Stewart Auditorium, and I curate public programs. It's really good to see you all here this evening. Thanks for coming out, for venturing out amidst the COVID. We appreciate you. I'd like to thank all of the people who make these programs possible, the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, the Stewart Family Foundation, our friends of the Longmont Museum, our many donors, and members, our museum members too. Any museum members with us this evening? Hey, thank you. If you'd like to learn more about what it means to become a member and support the museum, please stop by the front desk on your way out the door or grab me, and I'll tell you all about it. I'll talk your ear off. I'd also like to thank our media sponsors, KGNU, and the Longmont Leader, your source for online news here in Longmont. Thanks for your support. Before we get going, I want to read to you a statement that's recently adopted by the City of Longmont regarding the original inhabitants of this land we currently occupy. We acknowledge that Longmont sits on the traditional territory of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Yut, and other indigenous peoples. We honor the history and the living and spiritual connection that the First Peoples have with this land. It is our commitment to face the injustices that happened when the land was taken and to educate our communities, ourselves, and our children to ensure that these injustices do not happen again. Thank you. This evening's program is being offered as part of our Voices of Change series, which is a multi-part, ongoing, perhaps forever kind of series, which is co-presented with the Longmont Multicultural Action Committee. I'd like to thank Helmack and especially Adriana Perea for their continued support of the series. This evening marks part three, and the series itself is dedicated to furthering the cause of diversity, equity, and inclusivity here in Longmont and Boulder County. We are particularly honored to be joined this evening by five leaders from Boulder County and beyond to discuss the lingering impacts of slavery and the effects of systemic racism upon our daily lives and shared reality, reminding us along the way that we're all in this together. I'd like to welcome back our moderator from our last Voices of Change conversation, my friend Norma Johnson. Norma is a spiritual healer, writer, poet, playwright, performance artist, speaker, and facilitator whose creative background informs her distinctive presentational form of racial justice activism. Her storytelling inspires awareness and insight about the everydayness of race and our lives and the power we have to bring paths of healing to our future. Norma's writing and poetry about race is used enthusiastically by educators across the country and it will be on full display this evening. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Norma Johnson. Thank you, Justin. Hi, everybody. Hey. Oh, it is so good to see real live people sitting out in these seats. Yeah, we're back. I am honored to be here tonight to moderate this panel of amazing people in our community. I'd like to just, maybe each of you, if you just introduce yourself to whatever extent that you'd like to do that a little bit, just to let us know what your work is and or what brings you here. And then, you know, we kind of have a, we have our theme this evening, Black Lives Matter. I'm going to say that again. Black Lives Matter. Okay, that's our theme this evening. So each of these folks here have their own special wisdom and expertise in their arenas that they're going to share a little bit about Black Lives Mattering. And I think I'm going to start us off with a poem. Okay. And this one is called, What's in Your Bones? There comes a time when silence is betrayal, quote by Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This quote by Dr. King caught more than my eye. It ferociously caught my heart. And then it proceeded to navigate a complex journey to some place deep down within my very bone, at least not without consequences. Deep, intrinsic, knowing that the path to liberation comes through the journey of what lies buried and silent. And when no voice is given, it continues. Silence in our bones and in our children's bones and their children's bones. It has no agenda of its own. We create is eternal. It's merely a holding place for our fear. Silence is the gatekeeper. Dis-ease and unrest are the rumblings signaling a shifting of the buried contents. It's a crossroads. A place where past, present, and future meet. A place where ancestors and descendants recognize their value for each other. Where what was and what is when merged can transform. It's a dare and a threat. And buried within it is a garden of unimaginable beauty and power and strength. We tell ourselves to maintain the silence. What do we yearn for that propels our breaking? Silence is not quiet, y'all. Eames and hollers and pushes back and denies and changes the subject. It buries and alters truths. We values our humanity and our relationships with each. There comes a time when silence is betrayal. In this quote, I wanted a reminder that there are consequences to my silence and those consequences live in my book. Thank you. So I'm just going to, just so you know who is up here. Like the very, very, very basics of who's up here. We have Raelynd Rabaka. Raelynd. Raelynd. Did I say it wrong again? I'm sorry. Raelynd Rabaka. He is the director for the Center of African-American Studies and professor of African-American and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies, CU Boulder. We also have Dr. Robert Atwell, who is a psychologist in private practice with offices in Denver and Boulder and past president of the National Association of Black Psychologists. We have Annette James, who is a mom, a speaker, and has been a long time advocate for social and economic equity and president of the NAACP Boulder County branch. And she just rushed over here from being an honoree at the Women Who Light the Community. So let's just give Annette a hand for her wonderful service to our community. Go, girls. And for doing two events in one evening. That gets a special award, right? And we have Katrina Miller, who is a professional filmmaker. Katrina's Film Production Company, Black Cat Video Production, connects people through visual stories with a focus on projects with roots in social justice that cultivate awareness and celebrate marginalized populations. So I would like to have Raelynd Rabaka start us off. Please. Thank you so much. It's so beautiful to be here. How y'all doing? Can you hear me? I'm a mic sound. Does my mic sound nice? Check this out. When I think about the Black Lives Matter movement, I think about living in a country where saying Black Lives Matter is controversial in 2021. I think about the American hypocrisy as opposed to American democracy. I think about the dialectic of dehumanization. And I see the Black Lives Matter movement as a rehumanization. Because if you put people in bondage from 1619 to 1865, 246 years of enslavement, that is dehumanization. And the sad reality is most people in America don't know very much about African-American enslavement. So that's what we call historical amnesia. We can also call it cultural amnesia. And so there are things that we need to remember lest we forget and lest we keep repeating the cycle, which we have here in America. Also, when I think about the Black Lives Matter movement, I think about the long tradition of African-American women who are activists, who are politicians, who are community workers and caretakers. And I think about a line that goes all the way back to folks like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and comes forward to the founders of our movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, Alisa Garza, Patrice Concolors, and Opal Tometi. And when I think about them, I also think about the fact that two of the three founders of the Black Lives Matter movement identify as Black queer feminists. This is really important to me personally, because I was raised by African-American women. Shout out to Annette. Shout out to Katrina. And I think about my grandmother, who was part of an organization called the National Association of Colored Women. And then the name became the National Council of Negro Women. And I think about sitting on her lap at these organizational meetings and her instilling so much of that in me. So my connect to the movement really has a lot to do with making sure that my grandmother's legacy, my mother's legacy continues. I believe that the life I'm living is not really my own, that I owe it to others. And so this movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, it is such a major preoccupation for me because it is the first Black popular movement to have Black feminism hardwired into it. When I say that, I also want to emphasize that the Black Lives Matter movement is an intersectional movement. When I say that, I mean that it's a movement that tackles not simply racism, but also sexism, heterosexism, capitalism, colonialism, environmental racism. The movement is so much more than what people see on the media. In fact, it's a lot more than what you see on the media. And the concerns and the core principles of the movement are wide and varied. And no single group or no single person has a monopoly on every aspect of the movement. And so what really connects me to it also as an intellectual, as an activist, is that intersectional component. This is something that has never happened before. When you think about the history of Black popular movements, never before has Black feminism been so front and center. But if you only have a media relationship to the movement, the Black feminist part is actually going to be marginalized. It's going to be erased. It's going to be rendered invisible. And so when I think about the Black feminist roots of the Black Lives Matter movement and how they're literally remixing a lot of what was handed down by Harriet Tubman, by Sojourner Truth, by Ida B. Wells, by Angela Davis, by the women of the Black Panther Party, by the Kumbahi River Collective. So there's long traditions, if you will, of African-American women who were very, very active in a lot of those previous movements, whether we talk about the abolitionist movement, whether we talk about the Black women's club movement, the New Negro movement, the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement, the Black power movement. There's been a lot of movements. Why? Because we've continued to struggle for freedom and justice in this society. And we still have not achieved it. I'm going to say that again. And we still have not achieved it. And so this movement is electrifying because it is so intersectional. But again, most people only, when you say Black Lives Matter, most people are going to associate that with Trayvon Martin, with Michael Brown, with Freddie Gray, with George Floyd. So the fact that we have Sandra Brandt and Breonna Taylor and Raika Boyd and Tanisha Anderson, and again, African-American women, Black women experience police brutality, police harassment, mass incarceration as well. And so for me, I see BLM as a movement that really brings high levels of equality to the conversation. It makes sure it literally pulls Black women from the margins to the center. And in doing that, it allows all of us to explore a deeper part of our humanity, you know? That those parts of us that we've all been influenced by African-American women, by Black women, and we rarely say something I just told to my mother before I came in here, thank you. We rarely say that. We rarely honor it. We rarely acknowledge it. And so for me, being a member of the movement, this is really something to make sure that I can be a bridge from one generation to the next. And I see the movement, BLM, as a remix, particularly of the civil rights movement, a lot of those principles of the Black power movement, of the women's liberation movement. Also, thank you, also of what was called, at that time, the gay and lesbian liberation movement as well. As you all know, there were some strong environmental movements going on in the 70s and in the 80s as well. And BLM brings a tangle of different things together and remixes them. And so again, if there's one thing I'd like to really underscore is the multi-dimensionality of this movement. Most people only think of it in very sort of one-dimensional terms. And it's actually a lot deeper than a media sound by our Fox News story, our CNN news story that I can do justice to in three minutes and 30 seconds. But anyway, thank you so much. That's my share. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Raelyn. Just as you're taking this in and connecting dots to the different things that people are going to be speaking about, know that we will have a Q&A at the end. It's going to be short, but if you're formulating questions based on these. So again, thank you, Raelyn. And in particular, that type of connect the dots that you just did with our Black women throughout history being advocates. So thank you for that. Maybe next, Bob, at well. Maybe you can help us bring this all around into our humanity. You know, what makes us human in this? And why haven't we been considered human, fully human? Thank you. Welcome. I'm honored to be here. I was surprised when Norma invited me to join this panel. I don't see myself as being a particularly significant person in Boulder County. I've been here a long time. My first trip to Boulder was in, I believe, January of 1979, or it might have been November of 78. And I came up with a friend and got introduced to some folks who lived here. And we became friends. Calm down. It's OK for Black folks and white folks to be friends. In fact, it's necessary for us to be allies and colleagues because we're all human. We human beings are all connected. I didn't understand that connection fully, although it was taught to me as a child. I have lots of credentials, and I've done a lot of different things professionally. But the way I like to introduce myself to people is that I am the child of poor, colored people. I was blessed to be raised by poor, colored people. The blessing of that was that they were denied access to the rewards of their American citizenship to a large degree. And what that experience led them to believe and to live was that relationships are more important than things. That relationships are more important than things. That it's the quality of my relationships with other human beings that matters. And I learned that as a small child. And it wasn't until I was in my late adolescence in my early 20s that I discovered that that cultural value was an African value. My parents were raised by parents who were raised by parents here in the United States. My DNA, according to ancestry.com, takes me back, my fam, all the way to Africa. And it's a blend of about 14 different tribal groups from Africa and four different cultural groups from Europe. And what it tells me is that we're all blended. We're all interwoven. So we're all connected to each other. And I cherish that connection. In my growth, I discovered that white supremacy permeated every aspect of my life. It permeated every aspect of my parents' lives and of their parents' lives and of their parents' parents' lives. And when I discovered what I discovered when I was reading an old newspaper clipping that one of my cousins sent me, was that my great-great-grandfather was a veteran. And he was a veteran of the Civil War. And I went, really? You mean Captain John was a veteran of the Civil War? And I said, well, so that this colored man fought to try to overthrow white supremacy. And the way we carry ourselves, if we're allies, is when we fight white supremacy. And that crystallizes in the phrase Black Lives Matter. And I tell people that with all that I've learned, what has benefited me most was discovering that we've always had allies in this fight for the humanity of Black Lives. And so I point out to people that the station masters of the Underground Railroad were white. That there were white families who put their entire family at risk by assisting slaves who were escaping enslavement. And they were aware that this was a crime against humanity, that enslavement. And that enslavement began in legally and in mass scale in 1453, not 1619, 1453. And it was sanctioned as a strategy to increase the power and the scope of the church by a papal bull in 1452 that commanded the Christian kings of Europe to initiate a new crusade to take back Jerusalem and to reduce all of the Saracens, the Muslims who fought with Saracens to perpetual slavery and to reduce anyone to perpetual slavery who did not accept Christ as their individual savior. They were not only given permission to do it, they were commanded to do it so that the church could regain its power. And there's a lot of history that prevented that allowed that to continue even though a new crusade never got started, but now they had to get out of jail, free guard. They could traffic in human beings and not be banished to hell. And that was the motivation for our enslavement and it's been the motivation for the continuance of white supremacy since the founding of this country. OK. Thank you, Bob. You're welcome. Y'all taking that in? All right, so I'm going to, ooh, OK. This is a lot. Annette, how wide NAACP, then, now, how long has it been fill us in on this, on this particular form of movement? Thank you. Thanks for being here with these esteemed folks. So let's just start out the way it really was. A man was lynched today. A man was lynched yesterday. So there was a flag that, black like the jades here, that flew in the New York City NAACP's office that said a man was lynched yesterday. So lynching was the foundation for the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. So there was a group of blacks, white, and Jews who were outraged at this barbaric ongoings and decided to come together and to try to stop it. So that led to the founding of the NAACP in 1909. Now, there were some really forward-thinking individuals, handful, eight people or so. W. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Ovington, Masowitz. Of course, my favorite is Ida B. Wells. We share Mississippi in common. And so Ida B had been writing about the horrific, the barbaric nature of lynching before the establishment of the NAACP. And we throw that word around a lot, lynching, right? So lynching, what do you conjure in your head? But when you really think about lynching, I mean, there's something really insidious about it. You know, you got people who bathe their children, comb their hair, pack a lunch, and go to watch this spectacle. That's pretty amazing, because as a mom, we want to protect our kids from these horrific, scary kinds of occurrence. But this was excitement, entertainment, even so they wanted to take away a souvenir. Give me a lock of hair, some charged skin as a souvenir. Well, I just want to, I say that visual, because I want you to start to think about, you would think a whole group of people would come together and say, this is unacceptable, it's inhumane, it is barbaric. But there was only a small group who started to do that. So from 1882 to 1968, we were seeing about 2,000 black folks were lynched. But racial terror killings were about 6,500. I say, OK, yes, then. But now, what about all the people that Professor Rabaka just named? Mike Brown, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd. Is it not the same spectacle? Is it not the same hunting down of people to murder in plain daylight often? So I say, OK, then, but what about now? And what ownership do each of us have when we start to think about how we can be against slavery, but we don't come out en masse and change the modern day slavery? So listen to this. In 1911, the NAACP wrote their mission, kind of the charter. And they said, their purpose is to promote equality of rights and eradicate caste or race prejudice among the citizens of the United States, to advance the interest of colored citizens, to secure for them impartial suffrage, and to increase their opportunities for securing justice in the courts, education for their children, employment according to their ability, and the complete equality before the law. This is in 1911. Our mission today has changed very little. The words in it maybe expanded just a bit to include police misconduct, economic opportunity. We still maintain our same name, right? Where the association of colored people is really talking about black folks who were then colored. So I would like for us to really frame how things have gotten better or different. Is are we equal or have we progressed? And I would argue that we have gotten better at covering the inequities or justification for the inequities that black folks still suffer in this country, be it education politically, certainly economically, safety. I would argue that the whole police system is a great way for us to look at our history of lynching. And I would say that it parallels, maybe intersects. So I would love to see the NAACP. It's 112 years old, right? So on one hand you say, oh my god. It's the oldest civil rights organization in the country. How did it last so long? Well, my question is, yeah, that's great. I applaud that something could sustain itself for so long. But the other reason is why. I would love to see my organization become obsolete. When if we can make the need for the NAACP obsolete, we would have crossed a huge threshold as human beings, as a country, as them beacon to the world. We could live up to these ideals that we laud, especially in comparison to the rest of the world. Let's do it. I believe that every single person has an obligation. It is not a black thing. It is a human thing. We all have the responsibility to do better. And so don't speak out to me when I protest, when I demand accountability, to move us in that direction. The NAACP, we like to say in Boulder, we are about building community with diversity. But we also agitate and demand. And it is not to be objectionable, and it's not to be cruel, it's not to point fingers or make you feel guilty. But it is about moving the ball forward. If we are ever going to realize a nation where we can all have that kind of experience as human beings, right, where black folks are not always trying to prove to you their humanity, I am tired of trying to tell you I am a human being. We have to get beyond that. And that's where we find peace, that's where we find joy, that's where we find community. The NAACP fought for integration, right? We thought that that was the key. But the problem with integration is if you already have a caste system, you're just mixing people. You're not integrating them. It is not. You have to come in on level playing fields. And that's what I in the NAACP is trying to get people to see, that equality matters. You're not a loser if you believe in equality and if you work for it. I would say you're the biggest winner of all. The return on that investment is safety. It is joy. It is the ability to come to my party and feel completely at home. It allows me to walk in a store and not be a suspect. It allows all of us, those basic human traditions or things that we think makes us good people. Everybody deserves that, and that is the work of the NAACP. Well, I feel like each of y'all is like mic drop. Oh, OK. Katrina, I'm going to roll it over to you. Thank you, Annette. You're a storyteller. Why tell our stories? Yes, well, first I want to say that it is an honor to be here with everybody on this panel. I am a behind-the-scenes person as a filmmaker, but I felt like it's important for me to be here and to speak on our stories. I've lived in Longmont for 14 years, and I raised two children that go to school here in this community. So it's important for me to be here. So I do want to tell you why our stories matter. When I say our stories, all of our stories matter, but the topic tonight is Black Lives. So that's the context I'm going to speak from tonight. When we share our stories with one another, we create an opportunity for understanding between each other and an opportunity to be in another person's footsteps to create empathy, to understand where they're coming from. Research has shown that the best way to eliminate bias is by heightened awareness. And one of the best ways to have heightened awareness is to take in stories. In the mid-1800s, Uncle Todd's Cabin was written, this book did not age well at all. But at the time when it came out, it had quite the impact on the population. It was the most read book at that time. It depicted slave life and also pointed out contradictions in being a Christian and a slave owner. This made a lot of white people at the time think. Think about what it meant to be a slave owner and Christian and how that even added up to anything. A year later, the Civil War happened, which led to the Emancipation Proclamation and different amendments, which were supposed to improve the status for black people. Let's go 100 years after that. We have the Civil Rights Movement going on. People are in their homes watching peaceful protesters fight for their equality, demonstrate for their equality. And to see them met with brutality on the television, that really upset a lot of people when they saw this play out. Sounds a little familiar. That led to the Civil Rights Act, the uproar that that caused. We look in 2020 at George Floyd. We're all in our homes. We all saw this man murdered right before our eyes. It broke us right open to see this. And it's caused us to move again. These stories are important because, again, it brings in this human element. And I feel they're so important. And I'm so inspired by especially these three moments of mediums in history that now I am making a film as well. I'm making a film called This Is Not Who We Are, which looks at race and inclusion in Boulder County. Because me and my film team believe that problems with racism and microaggressions, police brutality, systemic issues, Boulder has the same problems as the rest of our country. And Boulder is just a microcosm of that. And so what we're doing in my film is talking to multiple community members, African-American community members of all different demographics about their experiences. Because what we're talking about, it's not just history. It's all happening now. Again, I live here in Longmont. And so I know that a week ago businesses were all handed flyers that had a racist surrogatory wording on it towards black people. But because it is the powers that be say that it's protected under free speech, so it's just going to continue to happen. And I'm going to tell you that as an African-American person, as a mother, that terrorizes me. And it is hard for me to even allow my children to really ride their bikes around the neighborhood. Because when I see things like that, I don't know who in the crowd hates me. Who in the crowd hates us just because of our skin color. So it's important, again, to share these stories. So my son, when he was in first grade, had an incident at his school where he was being made fun of because of his skin color and his curly hair. And the school actually handled it very well. In talking to the other child's mother, I found out that she is an ally. She has done a lot to try to help all people. And in raising her child, she thought that if she didn't talk about the horrors of racism and didn't bring that up to him, that he just wouldn't be racist, just like magic, just like that. But she learned from the experience that she needed to inform her child. So her son could be an advocate. She needed to tell him the stories. So the last thing that I'll say, one of the people that is in my film is Minister Pedro Silva. And he makes a point that we all want to be good people. And we all are good people, but we should strive to be better people. And I believe that when we take the time to listen to these stories, to care about these stories, to really take them in, that that's going to lead us to be the community that we really want to be. So thank you. Thank you, Katrina. So would y'all like to see a trailer of Katrina's film? All right. I think we can do that. And you want to give us the name of your film again. And you're still accepting donations. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Please give us that information, too. I certainly will. The film is called This Is Not Who We Are. We do have a website. It's really easy to remember. This is not whowearefilm.com. And there you can find information about how to donate, because we're getting into a lot of the work that we're doing. We're going to post-production, which is really expensive. And also, we're going to start having some feedback screenings where the public can watch portions of the film to let us know how we're doing. Because we want this film to have integrity and really be the voice of this community. So we've been working on this hard for like three years. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Yes, thank you. I had a draw to Boulder. Boulder's a beautiful city. I came to Naropa University to begin my life. You have a dangerous object in your hand, and you're failing to put it down. Put it down. You're being detained. There's a reason why I didn't comply, you know? And it was because I had not committed a crime. I told you many times to put it down. And you're holding a gun. Put it down. And you're holding a gun. The city manager and police chief say, this March 1st incident does not reflect the city's values. The city has been working on racial equality for a number of years. I'm a business owner. I own property. I did everything you've asked of me, and you gave me nothing. It goes back to our founding. Boulder was established with building lots costing $1,000 to make it an exclusive place. The first African-Americans live usually on the fringes of the community because it was the cheapest land in town. Boulder did have an active Ku Klux Klan. And there were cross-burdings as late as the 1940s. It was a small but strong African-American community when we arrived back in 1969. This was my home. Many of the young African-Americans that I have encountered during my 50 years in Boulder have left Boulder. The happiest place in America is Boulder, Colorado. Boulder, Colorado. And it has nothing to do with weed. That is the most annoying thing about Boulder is that Boulder thinks it's better than everywhere else on earth. People like it here. They're comfortable. Everyone else looks like them. Everyone else perceives the world the way they do. And so if people don't see it as a problem, then there's going to be no efforts to change something that they're fine with. I think that we have to comment to question the conception of beautifying Boulder. Even if it's not conscious, if we keep raising the prices, if we keep raising the taxes, if we keep doing all these kinds of things, you're obviously going to box some folks out. So then it becomes institutional racism, even if it didn't start out that way. It's not like I'm just going to be like, oh, now I'm going to leave because you think I don't belong here. You know, it's like, nah, I'm here. I feel like that's how racism has always been overcome. This entire world has changed. Like, there is no going back. The capacity is here if you stick with it. If you really have the good intention, you'd step back and let us lead, and then you would play a supporting role. I'm forward to this film coming out, much was said here. You know what I'd like to do is just, you know, because we all said something, but we also all listened. And I'm curious, what kind of things are going through your mind as other people were speaking? What things were kind of highlighted for you and why? Anybody want to jump in on that? Sick people, that we have breath and depth. And we each live our blackness from a different starting point. And we are all working against white supremacy and what we're doing from different vantage points. And all of it is necessary that no one of us ourselves can move the ball. OK, rolling with that, I'm going to throw something else out. And also, feel free to still tag on what I first asked. So what kind of ways can we do that? Now, we've seen demonstration of how each of us are showing up in our scope of the world. And so it makes me wonder when you talk about not being a monolith, nobody really is, right? No cultural group, no racial group. Nobody is really a monolith. But we all have something special just because we're human. So how can we roll that out into the world in support of Black Lives Matter and dismantling white supremacy? What would you say to that? I would say we are a monolith in the things that move us forward. Not to diminish anyone individual strengths and weaknesses as a human being, but as an oppressed, enslaved, penalized group of people. That comes from a monolithic in a way that one has to respond to that. We all bring our flair and our cadence to it. But we have to operate. Chancellor Williams, I think, is an old author who wrote The Destruction of Black Civilization. And he talked about the village pulling together. And so you get all of these opportunities to be, oh, we need an engineer, we need a water person, we need all of this. But Johnny wants to be an artist. So when all of those things are filled, then Johnny gets to be an artist. So that's kind of how I see it. I see that we have to take care of all the needs that move the race. I'm a group person because I believe you take care of the group, you take care of the individual as opposed to being this individual. I'm tribal, I suppose. But I think it is how we make progress. You know, when we get there, when we have, you know, arrived at the mountaintop, then we can all be, you know, our individual beings in a way that would look very different, right? As opposed to when you're in the struggle. Good points. Good points. Thank you. I guess I'll jump in here. I think it's important not to reinvent the wheel, too. I think that we have to acknowledge K through 12. Most of us don't get any African American history. We don't get African American studies. In fact, we don't get Mexican American studies, Asian American studies. We certainly don't get Native American studies. And so, again, it's very problematic. I work at an institution that has all these departments, but there's a silent signifier in front of all of them. The history department is really the white history department. There's only one African American there. The philosophy department is really the white philosophy department. Economics, white economics, so on and so forth. White sociology, white psychology, white, white, white, everything. And so the reality of the matter is, unless we're willing to have some candid conversations about how we really grapple with the fact that it's almost as if everybody else is racialized except white people. See, they are race-less. They are race-neutral. The rest of us are polluted somehow or another with race. And then, of course, nobody will tell you that the concept of race was created, oh, guess where? Europe. And it coincides with the rise of capitalism and colonialism. But if you have historical amnesia, people really don't know they're going to keep reinventing the wheel. And within the movement, within the Black Lives Matter movement, I so appreciate what you said, President James. You have community, and some of us really need community, and that's why I appreciate, Katrina, what you're doing with the film, because it's showing, again, we need to build Black community in Boulder County and without that. And so I believe that you could be a fuller and freer individual if you actually have a communal foundation. The fact that I've been out here 17 years and I have had the worst experience of cultural alienation ever in my life. I experienced the most intense forms of intellectual isolation working at the University of Colorado at Boulder that I ever have anywhere on the face of the planet. And so creating this new center was really about creating community. I've gotten a chance to meet you and you, right? Brother Bob? I've gotten a chance to meet... Sister Norma. I've gotten a chance to meet you all, actually, by attempting to build Black community on the Boulder campus, but there's no way to do that if we don't reach out and be a bridge to building community in the Boulder community, in the actual community. So the processes of racialization, calling into question, what does that mean? Most people can't even tell you what race is. A lot of times when Black people start talking about race, they're really talking about culture. Because all of our skin colors, in fact, Sister Katrina, what color is the shirt you're wearing? This is Black. Have you ever seen somebody that color? Thank you. And when I see somebody with a white t-shirt on, I've been all over Europe. I've never seen somebody as white as one of them t-shirt. That's a social construction. We need to understand how we buy into it. And the problem in Boulder is that they will privilege sensitivity surrounding gender and sexuality in ways that they will not grapple with race in class. The fact that we've got a lot of poor people here in Boulder County and they are suffering and they are marginalized, even in this space that a lot of people running around here thinking it's hippie heaven. Huh? Maybe they can't hear me. It's my mic. I'm just saying, you know what? I'm going to hush because I don't want to scare off y'all good, nice white friends. You know what I mean? I'm going to be nice. That's okay. I'm not going to... You know what? I'm going to hush. And I think... Okay. I want to piggyback on that. Please. I'm certain that our pathway out of oppression is to begin with recognizing that I am because we are. And because we are, it allows me to be who I am. And I am, you know, Professor Vincent Harding used to ask when he was working with a group of people, he would ask them. He would say, what's your name? What's your mama's name? Yeah. What's your mama's mama's name? What's your mama's mama's mama's name? And people would look and they would think some of them would know and some of them wouldn't. And he'd say, we are because we came from someone. They made us who we are. We're embedded in who they were. I ask people, what did your grandmother's kitchen smell like? I want you to go back to your earliest memory of being fed in your grandmother's kitchen and try to remember what it smelled like because we don't defend against smells and they connect to us emotionally to the experience. And then I ask them, what did it feel like to be in your grandmother's kitchen? And most people say it felt safe, secure and loving. And then I ask them, what culture was your grandmother from? And it doesn't matter whether they were Irish or German or Russian or Spanish or African American, they're all the same. When they connect to their roots, to their culture, they begin to recognize that we're all the same. We're one human community. And it's this pursuit of property and power that leads us to dehumanize that person who is different from me, who's from a different culture. And so I say the path out is to reconnect us to each other, to sit and be in community together, to share a meal, to share a conversation about who we are and where we came from and to listen to people and validate them. And then they validate us. And that is our pathway away from white supremacy. It's us doing it together, people of color and people of European descent together. And thank you, thank you for that Bob. So you bring it right back around to humanity because where we began this was the inhumanity that causes us to even be here tonight and to even speak the words Black Lives Matters. I'm going to just have us wrap this up. And I want to just let me just ask you, is there something that you want to add to this conversation? I know this topic and what each of you bring is so rich that we have not, I want to acknowledge, we have not had enough time here to explore that in depth and the richness that it deserves. But so if there's something else that all of this has sparked for you that you want to say, bring it. I'll just kind of piggyback on Dr. Atwell's comments. You know, that beloved community that he described. That is the goal. I think it's the goal of humanity. Dr. King talked about it. All great thinkers I think who care about the life of the human species have talked about that, right? But I would say Black Lives are not ever going to matter until the humanity of Black food is seen as valuable, as worthy, and cherished. And I'm all about building the beloved community. But I would argue that to do that, I don't know the evolution of the human psychology or the human condition that would allow for that beautiful, beloved community. So I say, what do you do in the meantime? I'm over being abused. And I would say that most Black folks are over that as well. So what we try to do as an NAACP, currently and certainly in the past, is to look for ways that we can legislate as much fairness and equity into the system. Because that seems to be more immediate than the evolution of the human species around creating fairness that's not based in scarcity and power and dominance and borders. So those are my efforts. I'm always open to build community. Some of you know anyone can be my friend. But I also know that to do these things in mass, it requires more than, you know, our generosity of spirit and welcoming. It requires some structure, some foundational structures, some laws, some integrity, and maintaining that those laws are carried out. So that's one of our policies and procedures. Thank you, thank you, Annette. Anybody else? Sure, so much I could say. But I guess one thing that is very important to me is that when these stories are shared, we listen and listen actively. It's not as important to be right, but just to really try to find that humanity, again, to be a better person, not just a good person. Nobody wants to say, you know, that they've done anything racist. And I know that even my film has brought up defensiveness in a lot of people, but that's not my point. I'm not trying to make people angry. I really just want people to understand the perspective and what we're going through and what we're up against. So a true allyship could be made. So yeah, that's one thing that I always tell people in conversations is just really listen. There's no need to try to always be right or to be defensive about anything. Yeah, and one other thing, I was really struck by a point that Dr. Rabaka made about how African American women are at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movement here and studying civil rights history. They really were back during that time as well, but just because of the structures of society and what the women's place was at that time, it was a lot easier, palatable to have men lead a lot of what was going on when women were behind the scenes doing a lot of the work, a lot of the work. And so I'm thinking about just how powerful and how much we can do now that we don't have to do that anymore. None of us do, okay? So thank you. Thank you for bringing that up. Thank you for making the movie. Thank you for making the movie. If I could go and know what Katrina Miller, the fabulous filmmaker, Longmont, Colorado, is saying, one of the things I would like to add and shout out to the authentic allies, because I think people can be inauthentic allies. I've lived in Boulder, Colorado long enough to know that some people can be posers, as they call it, imposter syndrome. I better stop. So to shout out to the allies, I think that it's important to make sure that that doesn't become a buzzword in Boulder. To actually define that for yourself, to have a real relationship with that term to get involved in some of these book groups, some of which I give virtual lectures to all the time. I'm really busy right now. But anyway, it's just really, really powerful to me because what I've tried to do, Katrina, was actually use whatever privilege I have, whatever platform I have. Do you realize I'm actually quoting from Alisa Garza's The Purpose of Power? So here's one, the Black Lives Matter movement. Two of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement have written memoirs, which I teach, these are textbooks for my class. And this is what I mean by young folk, 18 to 23 years old, and I'm teaching who literally are seeking, they kind of ain't digging the world the way it is right now. They're searching for alternatives. And some of us, not so long ago, or maybe so long ago, we were doing the exact same thing, searching for, and so that's how I sort of became, develop a political intellectual love affair with an Angela Davis, an Ella Baker, a Fannie Lou Hamer, a Septima Clark, a Kathleen Cleaver. I could just do this all day long because they reminded me of my mama. They reminded me of my grandma. I was like, yo, my mama kinda cool, right? And so that, how do we use our privilege, whatever privilege we may have, progressively? So for me, I need to acknowledge in front of everybody, I live in a patriarchal society. I live in a sexist society. How do I use whatever male privilege I have to make sure that sisters and women-identified folk who are marginalized, that I understand some things about the center and the margin? How do we stand up and show up for others? And so exactly what I'm trying to do here, this is exactly what we're asking our allies to do. They may not have ever been called the N-word. They may have never experienced anti-black racism, which is a very specific form of racism, right? That black folk experience. That's a really different kind of racism, you know? But how do we show up? So the use of, straight folk, how do you show up for queer and trans people? People that have been in the United States a long time. How do we show up for immigrants? Let's talk about the Haitians right now, that they just did, right? Folks with disabilities. How do we show up? How do we show up for folks who are differently able? How do we show up? Right now, commerce city is one of the most polluted zip codes in the United States of America. How do we become more committed to environmental justice? All of these are part of the basic core principles of BLM, but if most people don't really know about the movement, or they just think we're a bunch of young, angry black folks shouting, they're never really going to see like, wow, this is about police brutality, this is about mass incarceration, this is about the new Jim Crow, but it's also about trying to achieve a post-patriarchal society. It's also about somebody like me who's been teaching hip-hop for 25 years, it's also about me criticizing misogyny and rap music and hip-hop culture. What if the movement is so much more? And I hope, I think, I've learned a lot from y'all, you know, I'm a musician, in case anybody haven't figured that out, I am a musician. I try to practice the art of listening. This is something my grandmama told me though, because she would go out there and say, give me a big switch, you're going to listen to me. Right, but it's one of those things where, for me, that can be one of the most healing things when our allies actually fall back and realize there's a lot more spaces they have to get their messages out there to speak their special truths to this world. We have so few farms, so few spaces, so shout out to you, Sister Norma, for putting this together. Brother Jay, Brother Justin, thank you, thank you, thank you for doing this. We have so few spaces, and then everybody in this audience, I love your little round hairs for coming. You know what I mean, man? I feel like Marvin Gaye sometimes. You know, I feel like John Leonard. Imagine. You know, I'm trying to imagine the whole other world. But yes, I really think along with, I showed up today, this first in-person thing I've done since the pandemic started. I showed up today because I'm still silly enough to believe that I can change the world. I can't do it by myself. President Annette James of the NAACP, Boulder County, my sister, soldier. Right? And I realize that the only way I can really change the world, I got to change myself. And so I'm open to coming here and to listening to people and to dialoguing with them. And like, let's have some civil conversations about the kind of world we know what we don't want. But I'd like to hear what my students say. You know what, Professor, this is the kind of world I want. When you be talking about a post-patriarchal society, that really excites me. I'm doing it for real. And I think it's only through that kind of dialogue, right? Loving discussions, right? I want to speak with love-laced words. Like, once we identify the problem, I hope we're hearing some of the solutions because or else we're just going to walk out depressed. And you know, I can't have that. All right. Okay, I'm done. I'm done. I'm going to leave it alone. You wrapped it. You wrapped it. Oh! Woo! Wow. So if we only had like four more hours. Yeah. Wait. You know, we have a whole semester, 16 weeks. Yeah. All right. So do we appreciate what these folks amazingly brought to us tonight? Do we appreciate that? Thank you. So we've got a little bit of time for Q&A. So you're going to run mine? I am. Will you call on people for me, Norma? Yeah, absolutely. What do we got? Anybody got something they want to bring? Question for our panel? You want to point one out? Yes. Right there. Please wait for the microphone. We're not podcasting. We're live streaming. What am I talking about? Krista, I had read in a daily camera of your documentary that you completed last year. And I'm looking forward to this new one, but I missed the presentation at the Boulder Film Festival. I'm wondering how we can see your film, how it can be made available to more people. Is it possible to, like, go through the Dairy Arts Council in Boulder, or where can we make this available to more people? Yes. Thank you very much for asking about that. I made my first feature short documentary last winter, and it was called Silence of Quarantine and followed to elderly African American women in Boulder at the beginnings of the shutdown, and just what they went through and get to see who survives and who doesn't survive through this ordeal. And, yes, it did play at the Boulder International Film Festival, not bad for my first film. And the Longmont Museum here is actually going to be showing it next month, I believe, and I'll be here in person for Q&A as well. So, yeah. And, Justin, is that the 21st of October? Such a great question here. Okay. I'm looking on the... It's on the website. It's October 21st, ladies and gentlemen. Okay. It's part of our homegrown shorts from the 2021 Boulder International Film Festival. It's a wonderful film. Yeah, I'll come out and see it for sure. Any other questions? The one in the back there. Thank you all so much for showing up and giving this talk. Yeah, so I guess every single one of you kind of gave an insight, some sort of familial story, and I just took away, like, there's this great importance on epistemological knowledge and this foundational base that colonial Western America has devalued so heavily in the way that we teach our, like, teach history. So I guess I was just curious to hear y'all's insight on, like, what do you think are good ways to, like, start, like, making a space for storytelling in schools, in, like, CU Boulder Institution, because, like, that's equally valuable, if not more valuable, to written history. So I just was curious about that. Anybody want to jump on that one? That the furor that we see in response to critical race theory and the efforts to prevent discussions about race in elementary schools is there because that's where we need to begin. People start drinking the Kool-Aid as children. They get saturated with misinformation and so that the reeducation has got to start with the children. It can start later. Mine started when I was 16 and I've been reeducating myself and re-africanizing myself for 60 years. But we need to start with children. That's where it should begin. That's the way to pass on knowledge. It's how I learned everything. My punishment from my grandfather was strawberry ice cream and strawberry ice cream. That's the story. So if you did something wrong, he was ahead of his time, I'm pretty sure. But he, those are the things that I remember. Those are the things that imprinted me. I would argue those things is absolutely who I am. Every, you know, if you get in trouble at school, you got caught, did in school. The first thing you had to do was come in, get two bowls of ice cream, go on the porch, and you got a lesson in the values that was expected in the family, in the community, in your culture. So I think that stories is the key, really, to getting our message across to children. You know, we talk about building self-esteem, so we read them or, you know, having these great imaginations, so we read the fairy tales, right? So it's all about stories. We need more. And the oral tradition is also extremely important. Please. You asked a question in your dropy epistemology question, thank you for that. Getting heady up in here. I would say that just understanding that there's a double duty. My mother taught us that not only did we need to deal with the curriculum that K-12 or whatever university was coming with, but to not be afraid to develop a love of learning and particularly to develop a reading regiment. So even somebody like me from the projects could have a passport to an education because of a public library. So shout out to all my colleagues, both the public library, some of y'all know. I love both the public library. I've never seen a library that looks like a coliseum and I've just never seen rich people library before and the hood is just like broom closet. So anyway, this is a rich people library. I didn't even know. This is a Taj Mahal or something. So anyway, so the whole double duty, making sure that you're not just reading the books that your teachers give you. You're looking at a professor. I challenge my students to make sure they don't take my word for it. Go and check it out for yourself. At the end of the day, you've got to do the knowledge and again, coupling with the oral tradition, coupling those with the stories, but the 21st century, I have to train students to have book knowledge but also street knowledge. I have to teach them to couple academic philosophy with folk philosophy. That means my grandmother who only went to the third grade who is 94 years old right now is the wisest person I ever met ever, my grandmother. Nobody in my family ever went to a college. They never went to universities. This is completely a foreign experience being in Boulder, Colorado and certainly being in a very privileged place like CU Boulder. But again, what helps me understand some of this is I've met so many library pen pals and buddies in the Boulder library. It's so weird and don't be putting me off last if you see me in there. Just leave me alone and let me do my thing. But anyway, I think that that... I would think another, if I could directly answer your question, decolonization. We have to decolonize the curriculum. The curriculum is consistently privileging white folk. It is consistently privileging men. It is consistently privileging middle class or bourgeois people. It is consistently privileging straight folk and so it's going to marginalize folk and we need to understand there's a margin and there's a center and a lot of the richest stories in this country from a lot of different communities from a lot of different folk from a lot of different backgrounds, they're actually on the margins. They're not making movies about them. They're not making TV shows and all these kinds of things about them. I geek out over those stories and a lot of the students that come to my class they have really unique stories or their parents do or their grandparents do and some of them begin to geek out about their own life histories and so the power of narrative, the power of storytelling but also interpretation because when I read Harriet Beatrice I was like, what's up? What's up with the black people? Somebody, and so always asking ourselves things from different positions, different perspectives, I think that also is part of us of rehumanizing ourselves as well. Absolutely. There's a Nigerian writer, Chinua Chebe, who says, yeah, who says stories. I think that stories are not just meant to entertain us but that our lives depend on it. Okay, so I think I'm raising my hand if you didn't see it, it was up. So what are you reading or what should we read? What stories should we be taking in? Whether it's film, TV, or books or normal and concrete, y'all in a story? Yeah. Well, you know, first it needs to catch your eye and needs to be something your interest is peaked about, your curiosity is peaked about and it has to do with seeking resources that you don't usually do. If you want something to be different you got to do something different. So where haven't you been looking for the material that you read that you watch? Check those places out and see what's there and be curious about it. Do you know what all newspapers besides the main one that you read is around in your community? Maybe it's in a different language. What do you know or what don't you know that might call you? I would suggest people go to use bookstores and rummage around and find books that are embedded that were written and are embedded in cultures and read the folk tales read the folklore of somebody who's from a culture different than you and you can find those cheaply enough and use bookstores. They're glad to provide them for you and then share them with people. Start a little book discussion in your home with your children and let them learn something about what Jewish people are saying about being Jewish what Puerto Ricans are saying about being Puerto Ricans what black people are saying about the experience of being black and they're telling their story in these folk tales. They're not philosophizing about it they're just telling a story about something that happened in their community, in their life which gives you a taste of what it's like to be in their shoes and that way you begin to learn that we're not that different. Most of us want the same thing. We just go about it in a slightly different way and we're privileged differently and so some people have to work harder to achieve it. I would offer a couple of readings if you have little people in your world I would go back to speaking of folk tales the people could fly which is an anthology of some really cool things before the robotic time but imagination for little people for academics like all of the both of the folks I would recommend from here to equality which is recently out maybe in the last year yeah, Darity that's the guy's first name I think it's William Darity it's co-authored, he and his wife but this is a really good strategy to start to look at reparation for black folk I think it is time for our country to start along that path so I think it puts it in a digestible form because it's a big topic people make it more convoluted than it needs to be but this is a really good outline of strategy and I would like to add to that that in the normal course of your life if you're sharing stories if you're sharing books and material and information with each other or with the children then make sure you have something to compare with what we're learning about white people if you're talking about inventors what other inventors are there if you're talking about scientists if you're talking about medical if you're talking about skateboarders if you're talking about all of those things what other stories can you bring as well I'm going to have something to add to this but did you know that this movement has a soundtrack that there's music to it that's also expressing our stories Beyonce's Black as King Run the Jewels hip-hop album that one's maybe a little bit hardcore but I encourage you to just to look into some of the music and some of that storytelling and that expression and the sounds and textures that go along with that as well yeah I think that's a major part in it and you'll also see in my film music is another large part of that as well but this is definitely something we say I think that we know since our people experience enslavement in this country that we could sing about our oppression we could sing about it and people would hear it so we Black folk in America can implicitly sing what we cannot explicitly say right? I love the way you put that now again I'm going to be really honest this is straight from my book Civil Rights Music so that's from my book so anyway I looked at the major music of the Civil Rights movement and it just blew my mind that they even during racial segregation they could sing about oppressors about let my people go this and that and the other they could sing it but if they say it they might get lynched, shot anything else in terms of book y'all have come to a panel on the Black Lives Matter movement so I would be remiss if I didn't shout out some of my key text books making all Black Lives Matter by Barbara Ransby that is a phenomenal it's one of the key hersteries of our movement again the memoirs by the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement I'll start with Patrice Kahn colors her book is called When They Call You a Terrorist so anytime Black folk rise up we're going to fight for our rights they're going to say that we are militant we're going to have white folk in the tea party get mad and begin to fight for their rights and all that they're great American patriots but don't let a brown person do it something is wrong anyway her name is Patrice Kahn colors the book is called When They Call You a Terrorist and then lastly Alicia Garza her book is called The Purpose of Power Alicia Garza The Purpose of Power but I think anybody seeking to know a little bit more about the movement I think that there's something really phenomenal going on that the the founders of the movement already have memoirs out now you know we live in the 21st century they got web pages and everything I mean it's an extraordinary thing during the Harlem Renaissance I don't know if the actual Harlem Renaissance folks was just already you know have memoirs out and all that but anyway so it's truly truly extraordinary the books by Barbara Ransby Patrice Kahn colors and Lisa Garza thank you okay so we're going to wrap this up and I'm just going to share a couple words with you from the beginning of a piece of mine called When Black Lives Matters you know I got to thinking thinking about that saying I grew up with the one that was known and shared in the black community it was a warning a piece of humor a guideline for navigating the world of colorism and racial terror that we lived within it was a statement of white supremacy and the established hierarchy based on it it was based on a song if you're white you're alright if you're yellow you mellow if you're brown stick around if you're black get back get back but what if we turned that hierarchy on its head and based human value on the significance of a black life thank you all for joining us and let's thank our panelists Annette James Dr. Rayland Rabaca filmmaker Katrina Miller Dr. Bob and our moderator Norma Johnson should we do this again sometime I don't think we finished thank you for joining us we'll do a part 2 part 4 part 5 part 6 just keep going thanks again for coming, good night thank you Justin thank you everybody this is great that was so good I wanted to dive into everything you said