 Now, we're going to open up to questions from you all. And I think someone has a mic to, um, does. Let's see. Cynthia. On the stage. So, um, and this right goes, leads on right to what you were talking about. Renee, you've lived this struggle every day. Jeff tends to speak himself into that struggle. He's good at that. And I would like you to maybe share with people how you're a person in power and privilege, but you have chosen to hope the hive at every possible opportunity. And it's gotten you in trouble. And how maybe you could share some of those points on how we can hope the hive and be as successful as you are. And some of the things you've done. Yeah, so there's a couple of rules to that. So, so first of all, like, it is, it's actually coming to respect the privilege that I have. I mean, I was, when I first started the equity analysis working out by night, was really concerned about all the potential minds that I could step in as a white guy of privilege. And thinking that I should pull back and allow, you know, allow the people of color, like in, in the sort of patrician way, like, you know, allow the people to, you know, speak. I have a particular responsibility as the white guy in the room with authority to hold the space. Like, I have to, like, I'm expected to give permission for people to talk because people listen to me and they don't listen to women or people of color. Like, I gotta make sure that all the voices are heard and that they feel safe. And I have a particularly important role to play with white guys. God, the number of white guys that I deal with. That conversation, and then we'll talk about the African-Americans, right? They get like their voice, you know, it's quiet. Right? White people are very delicate. And we don't like to deal with things that make us uncomfortable, particularly white men. And so, they're very well-intentioned. Like, you know, super progressive, like, nice, equity-oriented white guys. They're just uncomfortable on this topic and go into avoidance around it. And so, I have a responsibility as a white guy to force particularly other white men to get comfortable having these conversations, or at least to get comfortable with the profound discomfort of talking about the history of our profession, right? And to see their particular responsibility for doing this work and doing it not in a way that is condescending or, you know, patriarchal, right? Doing it in a way that is simply fulfilling our duty. That pity, seeing pity and condescension as another form of white supremacy, right? Don't do that. See everyone is equal and we have a responsibility to close disparities and we failed our people in the past, right? That's it. It's just people and, like, white guys who got a particular role. So, there's that understanding, but there's also some technique. There is so much anger and discomfort on these topics that there are really two most important tools that I use in order to bust through them. Probably the most important is compassion. And compassion, again, like there's a big difference between equity and equality. There is no overlap between compassion and pity. Compassion requires that you see yourself as the equal of everyone in the room and try to understand what it is like to walk in their moccasins. So why is this person so angry? Like, you know, there's a person that's terribly angry at me. It's avoiding personalizing that and instead asking the question, what is the root of this anger? Like, what's behind all this? And then there's another technique that I use a lot of and it's quite intentional and that is humor. Humor is the most powerful weapon for having a conversation about any of these topics. If I can get people to laugh at me, I might be able to get them to laugh at themselves. And if I can get people to laugh at themselves, I can open my eyes in a really deep way. So I apply a lot of humor in this work just to move the conversation along. But I think the final thing, and this is something that we all need to be comfortable with, is risk-taking. Like, for real reason we got so much done in middle school, you know, and it's partly those. But it's also partly that the entire management team in the city is comfortable taking risks in order to act quickly, to be decisive, to be bold, to know with some certainty that we're going to make mistakes, that we're going to say the wrong thing, that we're going to cause offense sometimes, right? And to be skillful about failure. And to know that at a certain point, like in Santa Monica, it was simply time for me to walk away. So that's what I can offer. Other questions? How would you advise people of color to talk about these issues? Because, you know, I find myself sometimes like, I have to do the reverse thing. So I have to whisper and say, oh, wait folks, or I have to, you know, say, supremacy. I like talking about the disadvantage of talking about systemic racism. Even people of color feel comfortable talking about these issues without turning off. Very well-intentioned, you know, white people that are working, you know, in this field, that are trying to do better. You know, there's that miscommunication, so maybe they might, you know, be misinterpreting what we're saying or whatnot. So how does that come from, like, personal color? What would you guys advise? Yeah, I'll just kind of like answer from maybe my own experience. And I think, you know, one, actually I kind of riff a little bit on what Jeff was just saying about compassion. And like, one of the things I've been seeing just working even within my own organization and with my board, it's taken many years to get to the point where everyone was even willing to say equity is something we really need to make a priority. You know, it wasn't general. You know, a lot of times I would just get so angry. You know, I'd get so frustrated, so angry, it's like, you know, because I'm dealing with white folks who have never even thought about difference, let alone inequity, let alone racism, let alone, you know, all of the things we've been talking about. But then I'll actually finding a way for myself to see, oh, people are really afraid of screwing up. They're really afraid of saying the wrong thing. They're really afraid of that we're failing. I think that there's often a feeling, oh, we're in this organization of failing because we can't recruit people of color to our board. And everyone's so worried about screwing up that, like, no real conversation can happen. And just kind of starting to see, oh, you know, like, I'm having, you know, I'll just be, you know, like, as a trans person, I'm, you know, feeling I'm not seen. I see feeling like my needs are not getting met. And, you know, there's like million things where I'm feeling kind of embattled. But then just taking that perspective of saying, oh, this person is feeling really afraid right now. And that's underneath part of, it's helpful to me to just tap into that compassion piece, even for someone who might be creating a really difficult situation for me. It just helps to open up to kind of get behind where people are coming from and see that they're actually also suffering. So I don't know. That's my perspective. So I come at this with a lot more privilege, right? Basically, from the work that I did helping to, when I realized, particularly my line managers in the city of Oakland, who were largely Latino and African-American, no one had ever really told them how to get promoted in an organization, right? That there, you know, there was a certain amount of just kind of basic white people created this structure and then didn't tell anyone else how it worked, right? So there was a certain amount of identifying mentors for my team that could help them understand how the system worked and how communication works in an organization. Another thing that I use a lot of is Beards, right? So this is, it's a gay term. Like finding allies and getting them to show up as necessary to validate your work in the hostile audience. So for me, that means having people of color come along and just signal that I'm not a racist jerk. Having white people as your allies to support your work and basically be your backup singers can be really powerful. Similarly, I think, I mean, simply going back and reviewing the work of Dr. King, all of which is 100% valid today, right? The strategy that Dr. Martin Luther King and his entire crew used in much more difficult circumstances, but responding to identical human failings that exist today, right? The legal structure was worse, but the human failings haven't changed as much as we might like to think that they have. So it was also something that I was amazed to watch the people of color in my organization who were able to very skillfully use the techniques that they have clearly learned in their churches and their mosques to carry themselves with confidence, to be unshakable in the face of hostility, to use anger as a base energy that they use to propel themselves forward, but never to use anger as the message, to have the ultimate message be uplifting, to point all of us towards our common humanity, right? I love watching the things that the people of color of my organization could say that I couldn't, and observing the things that I could say that they couldn't, and teaming up with them. So another thing that I think is super important is finding those people of color who have figured out how to thread the needle, and it varies very much by gender. So there's a lot of stuff that the black women in my organization could say that the men just like didn't have, were not permitted that space. So finding other black men who are carrying this message in a way that's authentic and effective, super important, and then doing the work necessary to train others to learn from what's the message, what's the approach, what's the mind state that really moves the ball forward. And also recognize that there are many different approaches, right? I mean, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were like, they were a nested pair. There's not just one approach. It needs to be authentic to you. Honestly, because I feel like I don't really have patience, and that we don't really have time. So I sort of just fell into this world. This is not somewhere where I was like, I don't want to do transportation planning, I don't want to lobby the Sacramento doing like, bike advocacy world. Like that's not what I plan for my life, but here I am doing this for a few years. I feel like what I'm hearing right now and what I see a lot is that queer folks, women, and people of color need to bring the people in privilege, white folks along, and have to like help and sort of drag them through to get to where we are now. And I see this time and time again in San Francisco that we can't talk about homelessness. We can only talk about homelessness in bike advocacy world when it's like on a bike path. We can only talk about fines and fees when we're talking about traffic enforcement. So I just sort of want to refute a little bit of what you're saying. And as people in a lot of power in this world, you know, how do you respond to the impatience that people who don't have power feel in this room? You're spot on. This work really pisses me off and I can't believe that it's friggin' 2017 and we're still having these conversations. That said, I think there are two interrelated times. And this is similar, again, to the work that was done back in 1964. One is the structural change. Like all of the little policies that are so screwing us over that it was dorky data-oriented people to just go in and fix. This stuff can happen quickly and needs to happen quickly because society is ahead of where the rules are now. The work of changing society, however, is slow. I really said does not follow and it is a particular burden of queers and women and people of color to lead in this. And speaking as a queer guy, I'm very deep-seated and angry that I still have to do this work, but I know it needs to be done. And as a white guy, I know that I have a voice that is particularly important in changing the minds, opening the minds of other white men. I wish that I didn't have to do it and I am so grateful for all of the support that I've gotten in this work, including from many of you in this room. We're all, in fact, and I should acknowledge this white guy is in the room. You ride bikes. You know what it's like to be made to feel less dead. Now, being somebody on a bike who's also a woman of color, that's a completely different world at a completely different level and yet at the root of it is being dismissed as a person. We all need to do the work to not allow our society to dismiss the person-ness of anyone. And I think, you know, having, recognizing as white advocates that the thing that drives us, you know, for our bike issues is not that dissimilar from the much deeper and more profound and horrifying ways in which women and people of color and people of different sexual orientations and sexual orientations and gender identities have to suffer. But, you know, may that work as a cyclist to teach you compassion in order to see the common humanity of all of us. I want to make sure we're not making it all equivalent, the experience. I just want to, I know you mean that. I was going to call that out. That you're not saying it's an equivalent experience. Because you get off the bike and you're a white man. People of color never get to get off the bike. And as a queer guy, part of the weirdness of being a queer white man is I have the option of hiding the thing that society hates me for. And I think it's actually one of the reasons why, because Cripple is just so tantalizingly close, it's certainly very much one of the motivators of why I've gotten into this equity space because I almost have it. The thing I just want to add, Janice, are you still back there? Yes. Okay, good, good. I just want us to all as a movement, or at least there's maybe a couple hundred of us of the movement in this space. I just want us to all really collectively hold the way that we are externalizing this anger and frustration onto the people of color in our space and are burning them out. I just want us to really take responsibility for that right now, at least in this room if we can. We are burning out the people of color in our movement, on our staffs. And the people who step up into leadership don't last long. And we see that over and over and over again. And just for me being an executive director, I've seen only a small handful of other POC executive directors in the seven years I've been in this role, and they don't last usually it's a year or two. Tamika was with us for three years. I know you all listened and took in what she said, but she's not here to keep that going. And so someone else has to step into that space, but we've got to look at the work we're asking those people to do. I think you all know the concept of emotional labor, all of the emotional labor that women do, that POC folks do, that queer folks do. And that's something that's benefitting all of us. And we need to find a way to take responsibility for that as a group and recognize that work when it's happening, pay people what they need to get paid, make sure that we are doing everything we can to support the folks who are stepping up and taking on that work and holding that anger and frustration and moving our whole movement forward because otherwise we're going to just keep losing them.