 It's super sunny. That means the lighting is gonna be really bad when I sit down. Oh, well, I like the sunshine It doesn't like sunshine Recorded this whole thing and I forgot to turn my microphone on again. I will never I will never learn it is a gorgeous Stupendously sunny and beautiful day here in Seattle. My building is really close to the water And so this is where my fair places to come. There's like this little mini park I wanted to do a video today talking about work and workflow and writing and We're not gonna talk about that today instead. I'm gonna spend just a minute And I want to use this channel this platform my my online presence to talk about something. It's really important today A friend of mine a colleague of mine had something horrible written on there something racist and horrible And I am not gonna dignify it By talking about it really any further and a whole bunch of us are just like super upset I'm just I'm really pissed off about it. This isn't really my story to tell But just suffice to say that I have so much deep amazing respect for this person and I am just so sorry They have to go through dealing with this and feeling threatened by this Right the odds are this is probably some kid who thought they were funny. It's not funny. It's not okay. It's not cute It's not clever It's scary. It's scary to have somebody threaten you like this Just because you're a person who's not white working at the campus. It's not okay. They're ducks I don't have any food go away Ducks interrupted my monologue So I would much rather be talking about you know my own Personal silly struggles with productivity and work But those are pretty privileged problems to have I'm very fortunate that that's the biggest problem that I had today Academia is hard. This is a hard job work really hard to get here all my friends and colleagues were tremendously hard to be here I have a really great job and there was always a path that I was supported on and taking I worked hard to be here But there was never a question. There was nobody nobody ever saying like I didn't belong here that I would be The only person like me or something having to do with racism and sexism and ableism our Profession that I belong to and I've devoted a lot of my life to has not always done amazingly well at taking care of people at hiring people of color supporting disabled people supporting Native people first-generation people in college There's a lot of people who have a really hard time getting here Or have no access to these kinds of resources or have no community to support them. There was a there was a really great tweet series about this Yesterday, I think when we talk about diversity and science and academia in any field Often people talk about it as if like to make science better We need to make it more diverse and that's that shouldn't be that's not the that's not the goal And it's it's maybe a subtle point But it's important point that it's that's not the goal. The goal is to make science a better place for people to exist It's to make this a workplace that is not full of racism and ableism and sexism and all these other horrible things that we have Been guilty of in the past in this field and let's be clear still are to this day We have so much work to do science is a human endeavor and if we're treating people bad Then we're not doing good science for the very real reason that if it's not a good place to work If this is not a safe place if people don't feel like they can come to work and grade papers and teach students Then we're not doing good science. This is just a bad place to work. Academia can feel like like a safe protected bubble from these problems, but it's not and I I urge you look around watch out make sure that the young people that the The vulnerable people in our in our lives and in our profession aren't taking advantage of I am not I am not the ideal ambassador for this message but because I have this channel and Presence on the internet of some fashion. I feel like how can I not just say something?