 close quote. Dr. Johnson's second book co-edited with Alex Lubin is Futures of Black Radicalism, a collection of writings about the black radical tradition both in tribute to and animated by the work of Cedric Robinson. It is a great book and I appear to have lent my copy to somebody because I can't find it anywhere but it is also much annotated. Johnson has recently completed a third book with sports scholars David J. Leonard and Adolfo Mondragon, a co-edited volume titled Rings of Descent, Boxing and the Performance of Rebellion. Her current research for the monograph, These Walls Will Fall, examines the practices of sanctuary, home and cultural placemaking and multiple scales. In it, she illuminates regimes of state power, as well as the forms of local and transnational activism that creates spaces of regeneration. It goes without saying that this work could hardly be more relevant today and we will hear about this project in today's talk titled Worlds of Interconnection, Freedom Making in the New Security Establishment. It is an understatement to say that Dr. Johnson is a scholar deeply engaged with the communities about whom she writes and whose writing in pedagogy is practiced collectively, relationally and with mutuality. In that spirit, we're going to do something a little different today. Throughout her presentation, we will keep the question and answer box open. Dr. Johnson will issue, with her concitements, her word, to think along with her throughout the talk and we invite and encourage you to post comments and questions during the talk. She will be able to read and respond and shape her remarks in relation to your comments. So this is a dialogic presentation in that way. So more than giving you the opportunity simply to chime in, we really want you to participate and help shape this event as it unfolds. And with that, I turn it over to Dr. Johnson. Thank you so much, Professor Franco. From the first time that we had a conversation about this possibility to like the pinnacle of you being like the best introducer in the world. Thank you so much. I'm really humbled. I'm grateful there are paths across and also want to thank Amy and Kimberly Scholl and other Dr. Derek Hicks as well for all of his motivation and encouragement and help in organizing this. I'm really, really happy to be here with all of you. And I do also want to say anecdotally how important Dr. Franco, your work is as well, how inspiring it is. And we're all better for your work on the idea of the neighbor and also in geographies of racial difference and identification in Los Angeles for those of us who study cities. And so I'm just really excited to be here with everybody tonight. Thank you. So I am a researcher. I'm a storyteller. I am a freedom dreamer as my colleague and friend Robin Kelly writes. And as Dean said, I'm a cultural and social historian and I'm presently writing a book about the meanings of freedom as articulated by unique collectives of organizers and how they redefine it through their activism and the ways that they demonstrate through examinations of community practices and also the research that so many of us who are community engaged scholars do on anti-racist practices, but also teaching and thinking about how we learn from organizers to redefine education and the nature of knowledge itself. That's what I'm about. So I'm also gonna put something in the chat now because I really want to encourage you all to follow along. So I have created something called a community board and this is something that I've learned in my work with organizers and in healing circles with restorative and transport from the justice practitioners. So feel free to click on that Google doc. I've made it accessible to everyone, I think. And this should be a way for us to stay engaged and I would love for us to try to stay engaged to try to acknowledge the ways that we've all come here no matter how many or no matter how few no matter what made you come what who you heard about it from, why you're here there's a message here for everyone including me. And so I include this community board as acknowledgement and reference to the energy that we all bring into this room. I also honor the Gabrielino and Tongva people as the traditional land caretakers of Tovangar which is the Los Angeles based in the Southern Channel Islands and the Chumash people because I'm coming to you from Ventura County as the traditional land caretakers of these traditional ancestral and unceded territory of homeland and in that I pay respect to my ancestors, to my elders and all our relations past, present and emerging. So I wanted to first start with that. So now that you have this link in the chat this link to the Google doc I invite you to open it to follow along we're sharing knowledge. So I've been an educator for about 20 years and I was trained like so many of us were to become an expert, to become someone who downloads all my expertise in every lecture on all of these willing participants. And I noticed that as time went on especially in the last like three or four years it's gotten really old to me. It's been very hard for me to do that. Part of the reason is because I've realized that everything I know is because of my interactions with and situated knowledge that I have both been witnessed to and involved in. And so I can't be the only one that knows this that holds the space. Everybody's got to be part of it because if we're talking about learning then it can't just be one directional everything is relational in that space. So it's in that spirit that I share this document and I encourage you to write in it as well. So I've encouraged the, I mean I have included there the land acknowledgement but I also included the land back manifesto which I think is very important. And I'm gonna sort of switch back and forth between different mediums here. So I'm gonna share with you a slide show as well. And I want us to use this also to kind of like keep track of where we're at and also to give you a sense. Play from our start, we'll start there. Give you a sense of where we're going. So here's the first, this is my fancy title page. And this is the follow up to land acknowledgement for those people who don't know about the land back movement and the campaign which is something that is led by indigenous people, first nations people something you should know about all of us should know about. And this is an entire movement that's been going on for generations. Now it's becoming more well known but it's not just about an acknowledgement. And this is something that I think is a theme that should run throughout my entire presentation here today and as well as our dialogue. And that is that the land back movement in dialogue and intersecting with so many other movement ideologies and demands asks that we dismantle defund return and they ask our awareness of consent. You can find this, there's a link in the Google Doc the community board that I shared with you. You can find the manifesto there and I encourage you to learn as much as you can about land back. A lot of people say, well, how could that be? Like, what would you say is the same thing question with abolition and defund the police. People say, well, that's not possible. And this is something that I learned something that I learned that I think is really important from one of my mentors, George Lipsitz who was also a colleague for many years at UC Santa Barbara is that never let your inaction masquerade as cynicism. Meaning like, if you think that it can't be done you think abolition can't happen because we have so many different layers of bureaucracy and infrastructure because we're all human beings that unfortunately and I hear this all the time from students like, well, but it's inevitable that we're gonna fight wars. Is it, I mean, is it really? Or is that the inevitability of capitalism and racial imperialism? Don't let your cynicism or your inaction masquerade as cynicism. If you decide that it cannot be done and this is the case with land back as well if you decide that it's not the original caretakers who could take better care of this land than we can who know how to set the preventative fires who know how to take care of our mother the earth better than the terrible job that we're doing now. That cynicism may be masquerading for your inaction. So it's okay, we are all entitled to our opinions but move aside for those of us who believe in abolition who believe in land back. Move aside for those of us who are brave enough and courageous enough to dream a different kind of reality. And there's no shame, blame or judgment there. It's just making way for people who have always had these answers to the problems that we now face in communities and in practices that they've always been practicing. So land back, if you don't know about it, now you know and you should go and please do some research on this because it's really important. Outline for today's talk. So a short introduction of our time together. I'm gonna just tell you a few things about what I'm thinking but I also have a question for you and then I'll go a little bit deeper into this like incitement as I discussed with Dean. And then I have this like really kind of burning question that I hope that we can all answer together or at least think about together which is like how will the interest people's parties that have profited from the Trump presidency's preoccupation with border security, black criminality, dehumanization of poor people, legislating women's bodies, white free speech endure in this next four years. Why am I interested in that? I'm interested in that because I'm actually more interested in the narratives of freedom and the practices of freedom making that have always coalesced and been constituted not only in response but first and always as a way of being an epistemology a way of seeing as well throughout all of the generations. And then I have another question for you after that what is safety in our communities look like? And then I'll talk a little bit about freedom making and practices of restoration. And then I know that you all have been engaged in some really interesting discussions about doing this work in the university itself. Like, so how is it that we in this moment of great awakening but also of really terrible tyranny, how do we do this work? And so I hope that we can, I can be helpful but we can also build together in that question. So that's our, that's the introduction of our time together here. And so my question for you and what I would like you to do, here's your task is to please, and I'm gonna stop, share for a moment because I wanna be able to see in the chat, right? It's the chat, right? In the chat, please answer this question. And that is what makes you feel truly free? And I'll answer it first. It's my daughter's lap. That makes me feel truly free, being outside in nature. That makes me feel truly free. It says the chat is disabled, Amy, sorry. Thank you so much for telling us that the chat is disabled. And maybe we can also put it, if it can be enabled then we will put it in on the community board. Amy, are you able to look in on that? Should we do the chat or should we do the Q and A? If people could put their answers to the questions in the Q and A, that would be great. Okay, so not the chat. Yeah, not the chat, thank you. So in the Q and A then please answer this question for all of us, what makes you feel truly free? And I cannot seem to post in the Q and A but it's okay. Yeah, I also wasn't able to post in the Q and A. Okay, so why don't we do this? We can go to the community board and we can go where it says, I've put some resources there as well, the colonization resources. After introduction, do you see everybody where it says introduction and plan for convening? I'm gonna put this question, or I did put it here in the group think, what does freedom feel like to you? I'm gonna put my answer again here, which is my daughter's laughing outside in nature. Good food, time ends. Okay, how are we doing? Anyone can open, are people having trouble posting? It looks like- I'm not able to edit. Okay, let's see if we can make that happen. There are people who have begun posting answers in the Q and A. Oh good. As well. Well, I'm gonna take a look over there. Me too. Absolutely, thank you for being outdoors in nature, in the water, among the trees. Great, so it looks like you can answer in the Q and A. Beautiful music, thank you, Melissa Jenkins. Crossing city bridges, how interesting. Warm sun, cold day, how nice. Making food, spending time with friends and family music, spending time in the woods, yes, I would be there with you. When other people can be great, that's nice, and being in a desert, making money, making music, and my father smiles, so sweet. Can you resend the link to the community board? Yes, I can. It's in the chat, but I'll put it again. Davida de Rocher, laughing with friends, sunshine, the sound of the ocean, creating art beer with black folks, her hearing my baby nephew laugh, how sweet. Listening to music and writing, surrounded by mountains, cooking for people I love. Oh, these are amazing. Being outdoors, breathing fresh air, cooking healthy food, love it, love it, love it, love it. Getting to work on my mental health, yes, Jessica Rowe, yes. Outdoors at night with a close friend, love that. Being at home, doing my own thing, that's me introverts are in the house. Making food and feeding family, friends. Nice, driving with the windows down. This was me last night at dusk. All right, brother Hicks being folks my gumbo. All right, I hope that's a promise. Dreaming of my dad and his Colombian wisdom, nice. Being with my family, dreaming of my dad, it's nice. Running, running, yes. The sounds of birds, looking up at the stars, thank you. Everybody, thank you so much for participating. And that means so much. This is what we're talking about in terms of being in community and also refusing that kind of like old model of lecture and not being aware and acknowledging this moment now where we need to do this kinds of exchange. So thank you so much for those answers and I'm hoping we can think together about this some more. So I'm just gonna say a few things. This is my incitement part of this time together today. So this is not something I've figured out. I wanna make that clear to everybody. I'm still thinking this through and I hope we can be helpful to each other. So this first is a question that I have and I think I share this question with many, many folks. After four years of really of awfulness, right? Which was really just four years of pulling back part of a curtain from what has and continues to still be there. Because let's not forget that 74 million people voted for Donald Trump in 2020. So after a period of stupefying centralization of wealth, profound cost and harm to those already struggling through the anguish of police violence that brought us out in mass protests and knowing that the crisis most enduring manifestations in housing, in education, healthcare, employment are getting worse. We know these things. This is well known as the pandemic recession deepens. So how, this is a question. This is the incitement. How do we read this moment? As freedom seekers, as disruptors, what is this? What is this? What is this particular moment as we enter this new presidency? What is this time? How do we move in it as educators, as students, as organizers, allies, as accomplices? And I'm willing to go out on a limb here and say that many folks bar of expectations around democracy, even neoliberal democracy has been significantly lower. No? I mean, this is the case, right? That there is fatigue that a lot of us feel and for many reasons and also a hope that in the restoration of like these keywords right now that are everywhere, civility, decency, security, order that somehow we can at least be functional in a horribly dysfunctional nation. Now, I've often heard and said as well that one of the most pervasive aspects of abuse is that it encourages you to doubt your own intuition. And that's what we've been dealing with over the last four years. And especially most intentionally, this was meant for already disenfranchised, surveilled criminalized communities of black, brown, queer, immigrant, houseless, food insecure folks. So to regain our mark, to recover our intuition which is already there, a lot of people despair about it. What do you mean we never had it? Cause we always lived in this racially capitalized capitalist society. No, communities have been practicing this for years just cause you don't see it on Instagram or CNN does not mean that is not here all the time always being remade. So I feel this urgency to revisit the practices and principles of resilience, of restoration, of resistance so that I can get clear with people in community. I heard Cornell West say the other day when neoliberal policies come along and you get all the rationalizers of globalization that don't say a mumbling word about inequality, don't say a mumbling word about mass incarceration and so forth. And then some people say, well, I mean, I guess the right wing isn't saying much about this. The libertarians aren't saying much about this. This independent party isn't saying much. So let's just try the Democrats. And meanwhile, boom, he said 1% walk off with the most of the wealth. So I feel this urgency to understand and to move in this moment from a place of being centered and what is that place? The greatest, I think the greatest writers, the greatest freedom thinkers have taught us that it's one that we make and enact while struggling amid multiple contradictions between neoliberalism and democratic governance. I wrote about this, this preacher of radicalism between settler colonialism and the promise of marketplace participation. This place of being centered, of finding our marks is at the intersection of abolition and land back, of repair and transformation, of individual and family. It's not a static place from which to be curious or analytical, it's not an easy place. We know this. And yet it's the most honest place, the love and community. Therefore, then freedom seekers and cultural workers as they have at every new political juncture have found it necessary to perform more than an exercise of intellectualism. It's more than an intellectual exercise. This has to be a critical practice. So that's what I want us to do today. And one of the things that's most of my mind over the past few months has been how will the interests people parties back to our first question. We have profited from the Trump presidency's preoccupation with border security, black criminality. I'm going to come back to sharing my screen. Dehumanization of poor people, legislating women's body, white free speech, endure in these next four years. Stuart Hall talks about what hard work hegemonizing is. He said hegemonizing is hard work. It's one of his more famous quotes. And basically he means for those of us who are still students of cultural theory here, basically what he means is that the way that people narrativize, the way they justify power, that work is actually very hard for people in power. I remember I was sitting waiting, I mean watching like a snippet of Castaway, that people watched that film with Tom Hanks before I was watching this film and like kind of like really got wrapped up in it because it was like the first time in months I'd had time to watch a film. And then I guess are getting all these texts and I had like 32 texts. People are like, are you watching TV right now? Look, it turned on the TV and here's the Capitol riot on January 6th. And then so I turned it on. What was most interesting to me was not like that the Capitol is being stormed. Like that didn't surprise me at all. I don't know who was surprised by that. What surprised me, what I found so interesting was how news anchors were scrambling to try to explain it. And then just after it sort of like subsides, right? And nobody's been really hurt. Like there's a few people that are hurt but at this point we don't know about some of the folks that have been killed and really hurt by this. But it's like them trying to figure out like, wait, the difference between this and the Black Lives Matter process, trying to make the explanation on national television in real time was hard work. But all of those people and everybody they had on for like the next six hours was stumbling over this. So how will this narrative endure and in what forms when its representatives have changed? And security is one of the many principal things that come to mind. And so CLR James talks about how during the Cold War, like with the McCarron Act and so many other preoccupations with national security, the nation transforms from talking about protection to instead security. You could no longer rely on protection and service but instead on security and enforcement. And that's what characterizes the Cold War. And I think we're kind of here again, we've been here many times. I mean, this happened when we think of legislation that follows 9-11, right? And the attacks that were lawmakers swiftly expand the country's prosecutorial and surveillance powers. And what happens when immigration comes under the Department of Homeland Security under Obama and the irreparable damage that both of these kind of long patterns cause throughout the Cold War in the wake of 9-11 and during any period of intense consolidation of wealth which is what we're seeing right now. We know this because so many people talking about basals and how much money Amazon has made and how much money all of these sort of top conglomerate corporations have made, right? We see this combination of an emphasis on greater personal responsibility as the best way to guard against the unknown. So the threat is the virus, the threat is the immigrants, the threat is these black criminals and the way to make sure that you protect yourself is through personal responsibility. This was, you know, part of the old narrative that we say old was just a couple of months away, right? But, and also coming into the new, how is this narrative, how does it sustain even if the players change? The national threats, the threats to heteropatriarchy, all of this stuff is like a full blast capitalism with its clothes off during the Trump presidency. But, and we see this in combination with the defunding of public programs. We see this over and over again, but we see it especially just in these past few years and months and then of course defunding of programs that are meant to conserve and protect our climate and our earth. So Chiara, Chiara Yamada Taylor has written that she says, the optics are cool. The well off and elite take refuge away from the threat of the virus, buffered by the bodies of poor workers, forced to labor under threat of disease. And she and many people are pointing out that since we have this aversion to taxing wealthy individuals and corporations, this has left local governments very ill-prepared to effectively respond to local crises of unemployment and poverty. And so what do people do? They turned to policing to manage the inevitable problems that arise in the absence of a robust economy and no safety net. This is what happens. So there are some things that could not be more important right now. Abolition, defund the police, divest and invest in our communities because the proportion of local budgets that law enforcement takes up. And this is in many ways in response to this sort of knee-jerk response to self-protection through personal responsibility and also this question of national security. It becomes really easy to say was this is hand group of white thugs, these far-right people, that it was just them, it was just like some bad actors. It's become very easy to say that in order for us to get back to this narrative stability that makes people feel so safe. This is why when we think about how many tens of millions of dollars that are used to settle lawsuits in response to police killings for police brutality, all of the things that are still going on right now. This is why defund the police, why divesting the police, the structures that serve white supremacy culture and investing in communities cannot be more important. The millions that are written off as the cost of doing business, imagine what we can do with that money. You think about how we get these grants for $10,000, $100,000, even $500,000. What we do with that in our communities, it's incredible. We do so much with nothing. So let's take a moment to bring awareness to how security is linking the last presidency to this one, how it's driving the narrative of safety and also exclusion, who belongs and who doesn't, how is personal responsibility showing up in this question of national security? And then after I finish this part, I'll be done with my incitement and I have more questions for you. There've been these recent reports of how the LAPD sought protest related footage. Some of you have probably heard about this from Amazon's Ring Home Camera Systems in the wake of George Floyd's extrajudicial murder last year. And so you know, you can share your video. I think those people at Marine, you know you can share your video with others like in your neighborhood or you can share it with anybody. And it turns out that you can't decide which parts of the video you can share and which ones shouldn't be shared. And the police are able to secure that footage and use that against people. Not only that though, and this is the amazing part about Sarah Brain's new book. Is that they're also policing the people that are with people. So alleged offenders. So this is why people have found, and as I said, there's this incredible book and I wrote down the title here. Sarah Brain, her new book with Oxford University Press, Predict and Surveil, Data Discretion and the Future of Policing. She talks about how there are at certain years, there are cameras that are set up just outside that allow police who have maybe brought someone from, could be the scene of any kind of crime. Could be, you know, hit and run, it could be burglary, it could be any kind of violent crime or any kind of crime. These cameras are meant to be able to record the license plates of the people who bring in people who are injured. And so in effect, they are criminalizing and surveilling the people who are with these people. In combination with algorithms that are used by police that enable pervasive private surveillance networks, all of this together, it makes police practices even more questionable. And it's not just the police, like on a local level, there's a range of companies that a lot of people are starting to bring attention to. The way that Amazon, we talked about Ring already and Microsoft as well, have moved into the national space. So from 2017 to 2020, the $1.6 billion or trillion dollar valued Amazon hired 20 former FBI agents, at least two of whom are responsible for monitoring the labor organizing activity of its workers to keep unions out. And Amazon was actually caught last year trying to hire two, what they called intelligence analysts who are responsible for tracking labor organizing threats within and outside of the company. And then after this was exposed, they quietly filled these positions with two former FBI agents and hired four others. So if we think about how this is happening in the middle of the pandemic, right? It's like in all of 2020 and also leading up to this as well. Cause like I said, it's 2017 to 2020, but it really picks up in 2020. So as we think about this, and we think about its connection to local policing, I was thinking of this guidebook that was published by LAPD in 2020 that makes it clear that this big data that's driven by Amazon and Microsoft can continue to prominently figure in policing in LA. And there's all these different kind of algorithms that people have studied from my colleague, Kelly Lido Hernandez to again Sarah Brains book and how this has expanded its access to data by moving into coronavirus tracking now and vaccine safety analysis. Last year, Palantir is one of these data companies and a lot of them go to the police departments almost like pharmaceutical vendors go to doctor's offices. They come, they broker lucrative contracts with the National Institute of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, local police departments. And Palantir went public in September 2020 and the stock prices have tripled. More than triple since September. These are algorithms that they're selling to police. And Brains book shows how these systems mean, of course, that individuals in over-police neighborhoods can get easily caught up in these vicious cycles where they're more likely to be stopped, thus increasing their point value, justifying their increased surveillance, making it more likely that they'll be stopped again in the future. And so when we think about the history of policing, it's not actually public safety. It's not protection, right? It's enforcement. It's security in these ways that are not for people of color and definitely not for non-white folks, not for poor people. Most of the people that are in jail are poor. It's about the content, having the content to cause harm. And people ask them, what about mass incarceration? And this will be the last part here. Is that another aspect of this question of security is like this I'm thinking through is that we know in California, there's a de-escalation of prison building. But it's also accompanied by an escalation of electronic monitoring and algorithmic prediction. And that's also gaining popularity all over in Illinois, around the country. There's an article in the Intercept that says that these are known as risk assessment tools and these predictive instruments crunch hundreds of thousands of data points on prior defendants to predict whether an accused person in front of the court can be re-arrested or skip hearings. And they use arrest histories, convictions, miscourt dates, so many different things. So you could be arrested for jaywalking or given a ticket, say for jaywalking today. And then be pulled over because of the signal, your signal's out tomorrow. That's two points already. And about one in six counties in Illinois already use these tools. So it's so important for us to understand this because of this question around protection, security, safety, freedom. Since January 1st, and increasingly since January 6th, 11 state legislators have, legislators have introduced 17 bills, including those that were filed both for the Capitol insurrection. And all of these are legislation that weaponizes against already overpoliced communities. And this is all legislation for national security, allowing people to be arrested for any kind of threat against any kind of police officer or some officer of the nation somehow. So we can compare, maybe 11 state legislators that have introduced 17 bills doesn't sound like a whole lot, right? But compare that to zero during the same period in 2020, nine in 2019, five in 2018, and 13 in 2017. And this, in the 2017 spike, why 13 in 2017? Because this was due to the Dakota Standing Rock protests. And this is what we're worried about, friends. This is what I'm worried about, is that this legislation is going to be weaponized against us in many respects. James Kilgore, who is a writer and an educator, and he does a really amazing job on media justice. If you ever want to check out that website, it's really important, it's really good work. He writes about mass incarceration, and he says, look, we already had all the tools the nation needed to aggressively disrupt and hold accountable those who planned and participated in the storming of the Capitol. But there's all this legislation that's been quietly being passed, including thin blue line and protect and serve acts that explicitly corporatize advocacy and threaten grassroots activists with up to a decade in prison for using intimidation or coercion to influence policy of a government. And we wanna see how that also plays out when it comes to environmental protesters because a lot of this is being legislated in places where this is taking place. For example, in Minnesota, indigenous-led pipeline opponents participating in a direct action protest movement against Enbridge's line three tar sands pipeline in the state have repeatedly halted pipeline construction. There's a bill in Minnesota that focuses on those individuals who aid oil pipeline protesters and it includes up to 10 years imprisonment if their associate damages the property with intent to prevent pipeline operations. We know from Nick Estes from Charles Sapulveda, Cornell West, so many other folks that now, if we're talking about domestic terrorists, then all of a sudden, yes, the people who stormed the Capitol are domestic terrorists, yes, yes. But also what happens if you say you're critical of occupation in the West Bank? Does that make you into a domestic terrorist as well? We have to be really clear that we're not for massive repression and censorship and the defense of rights and liberties even as we're against white supremacy, heteropatriarchy and other ideologies that lead aside the humanity of people. So we see this in the wake of some of the largest and most visible protests for racial justice, what we see is this popular discourse being reinvented. But I think, let's move this to this next question because I think that we need public schools, we need housing, we need hospitals, we need libraries that are funded as well as the police, as well as cities and states fund those departments to pay for the prisons and jails. So my next question for you to put into the Q&A, that's what we did last time. Is this, what does safety in our communities look like? What do you think safety looks like? If we're not allowing other people to define for us what safety is, how would you define it in your community? In the Q&A, please. Safety. Okay, so now we're back to panelists' camp, post in the Q&A, so you're answering here. Okay, thank you. I feel, thank you, Dean. I feel most safe when I know my neighbor cares for me and my neighbor knows I care for them, it's been cute. So there's no way for folks to respond right now in the Q&A then. Okay. There should be, yeah. Yeah, all the attendees can actually respond in the Q&A. For some reason, just me, you and Amy cannot be in the Q&A, I don't know why. Okay, thank you, Chantel. Gertis, localized frameworks of accountability for responding to and preventing harm. Thank you. Other people, what does safety in our communities look like? Trusting and communicating with neighbors, yes. Thank you. Other people? John, thank you. Jack, the absence of perpetual fear, hello. Yes, the absence of perpetual fear. And then I wonder what's the presence? Mr. Jack, if I may, sorry, I pronounce you there. The absence of profession, I wonder what's the, what would the presence be? Ellen Snow, being able to walk outside by myself, yes. Benjamin Sebedi raised his hand. Perhaps you could post in a Q&A, Benjamin Sebedi. Jared, you're leaving my door unlocked, yes, thank you. This is what safety in our communities looks like. For me, also as a person who works alongside reproductive justice advocates, a place where teenagers can get birth control if they want it, if they want it, right? Boys, girls, anybody, anybody can get birth control, access to abortion, access to healthcare. An adult who can help them. Healing circles. We still have a raised hand. I'm not sure how we would address that. Jada Williams, mutual respect and protection of one another's physical, emotional, spiritual and mental well-being. Nemi, sorry, you were gonna say something? No, I'm sorry, I was just gonna write the Benjamin in the chat and ask to put his question in the Q&A. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Jack, for answering that question again about presence would be peace, feeling safe. He, him, thank you. Adrian, safety is a community where housing is stable, affordable and environmentally healthy. Hello, yes, access to outdoor space where neighbors know one another. Yes, yes, yes. In Ventura, we had a park we were trying to get built for about 20 years here. And in the meanwhile, they built this beautiful park on the East side, which is where mostly white and middle upper class folks live. And on the West side, which is 96% Latino, they built a pool, Olympic sized pool over there and everything on the East side. West side couldn't get that park, but just recently put enough pressure we got that park. Outdoor space in so important. Let's see, where are we at? Apple and abundant resources weren't wanted or needed. Yes, not having to watch my child walk all the way to his destination in his own neighborhood. Yes, I feel you Derek, that is the same here with my child. Everybody has basic things they need. Yes, yes. Food, shelter, healthcare, reproductive healthcare as of right now, safety and communities feels untenable. I hear you Anna Bidner. Because it's something to be bought or traded for. It is a consumer economy, isn't it, safety? But safety would be known if I'm cared for based on the sole characteristic of being a community member. Thank you, yes. Just that being enough, right? Just that being enough. And I wanna just emphasize what you said there because this is the principle, the foundational organizing principle for so many folks who do restorative and transformative justice in communities that are marginalized and disgraced by our current group of leaders, right? And that is, is that we're just by being human are enough to have safety in communities. Checking in on neighbors, thank you Jessica Rowe. Being able to walk out of my front door without feeling fear. Safety feels more internal and external, yes. It can't be conditioned or bought. And then my children, Jose Villalba, not be chastised for having a funny last name or for not being Christian, yes. Yes, that's very triggering for a lot of us. Thank you. Anyone else wants to add and join? I'm so grateful for your responses. Wonderful, thank you. Okay, so I'm gonna switch us back to our, I'm gonna switch us back to our, bear with me for one second. I'm gonna share my screen again so that I can switch us back to the slides because I wanna go one more place before we end. I know we're heading into the red zone of time. So I wanna talk for a moment about community engaged scholarship as it is currently described because there are lots of different names for it that people use in different places depending on what you're doing. I have been teaching, I teach these big classes at UCLA. Sometimes I have up to like 900 people in a one class. That's just probably hard to understand at week first. But I have 16 TAs and we do this big thing. And the idea of course in an institution like that or in a class like that I should say is that you then have this very corporate model, this very corporate model of public education. And a lot of people say it doesn't work but the way that I look at it is that I got 900 people here that are like here to listen to me. So I better have something to say but I also better understand who I am in relation to the community that we are in. So that's why we do the land acknowledgement obviously is because we need to set a context and a space and then understanding for where you already are. We can't really talk about reparations before we talk about land back. Those things can be in conversation but we need to understand the context, right? So I get to talk with a lot of students. And if I get to talk with a lot of students that means I have almost 900 willing workers to engage in a community that we're in. So I wanted to share with all of you who are teachers the way I do this work in answer to something that you had asked Dean which was like, so people are feeling like they wanna know how do we do this work? And the question for me is really comes down to a couple of things. My former colleague and friend who we lost several years ago now unfortunately in 2011 Clyde Woods. In fact, you can see behind me there's a picture from Haiti that he gave that to me about six months before he died. He came back from Haiti, he gave me this picture. He used to say, you know, we're not, we cannot be academic coroners. Like we're not here to like be just giving everybody the trauma dramatur of what's going on in our communities. That's not our job. We're not here to perform some kind of like social triage. We think too much of ourselves. And he and Ruthie Gilmore who are very close went to grad school together. They had this really interesting intellectual argument that was ongoing about social debt. And social debt is not something I won't go into too much here, but originally like people like Orlando Patterson talked about it. A lot of people talk about social debt as like really kind of a complete and pervasive evisceration of life that people like especially racial capitalism affects particularly in the context of slavery and enslavement. And Professor Gilmore talks about social debt as one of the byproducts of mass incarceration. But Clyde always used to say, don't talk to me about this social debt. And when I talk, when I talk about New Orleans and nobody dead here, all of us are alive. Like we're doing all of these arts practices. We're here fighting back with the blues, with hip hop, with all of these different languages that we use to state our very aliveness, right? And so I don't wanna be an academic coroner. I love what Ruthie has to say, by the way. I mean, she and I are constantly in conversation about these things and she is just such an incredible, incredible model for how to do community engaged scholarship. But I point that out because the most, the thinkers who think in the most complex ways about these things, right? They argue, they don't know all the time who's right, things change, right? So when we do community engaged scholarship we should be prepared for there to be no resolution to these things. We should be prepared to be in process, to be in beloved community together. We should be prepared for the fight for sometimes the loss as part of even movement work, right? And then we should be also prepared to understand where we regain our energy. Too many people and a lot of organizers talk about there's like a cycle and like there's an issue that comes up. We realize we gotta do something about it. We organize, we fight, we win or we lose. We're exhausted, everything's been extracted. We're exhilarated, whatever the case. We retreat, we regroup, we recalibrate. But a lot of times we don't restore and we don't spend enough time in that place of restoration. What happens in that place of restoration and rest is that you start to learn about your community. You produce art. You produce all kinds of things that bring you closer into community and help you to understand your context. And that is what you need for community engaged scholarship. So what I do is I ask community organizations what they need. That's where I start. I don't get, a lot of people will ask their students, hey, go find a project. And that's great until they descend on a nonprofit organization or grassroots organization and say, hey, give us a project and create more work for the organization. So we need to ask people, what do they need? Like I don't start from what's on my syllabus that I need to teach them per se, but I'll go to Healing Hearts Restoring Hope, which is a victim offender, transformative justice organization in Boyle Heights or the Hunger Action LA or LA Cannes that works on Skid Row. But what do you guys need? And sometimes they say, we need a logo and a webpage or at Healing Hearts Restoring Hope, there was all these women who were like in their late 60s who were like, we've been running this for so long. We don't know nothing about the Snapchat, like Instagram, Twitter, tweeting thing. We need a platform and what we can do that. Okay, well, we also need a couple of commercials. Can you guys make commercials for us? Okay, so my students are making these like little YouTube commercials for the LA co-op lab, acting things out, how to make a co-op, those kinds of things, right? The people at Hunger Action LA said, we need you guys to come and lead our low vision seniors to the farmer's market on Saturdays. We could do that. We could do that. And we could also help you, if you need it, translate your 70 page people's guide to where they can get food into Spanish. And update it, Healing Hearts Restoring Hope said, our files are a mess. Can you come in and reorganize? And through all those kinds of contacts that people have, eventually my students ended up filming these little snippets of victim and offender encounters. And now Healing Hearts Restoring Hope can use them on their website. Learning about community from community members requires focus and discipline. It's not the fun, easy class, the one off, whatever. It's that there are practical things to be done. There's fascinating research to conduct. There's not statements to proclaim or victims to say. We have to completely reorient our understanding of what community engagement is. We have to understand that freedom entails what seems like a lot of ordinary work. And in doing this work, we are empowered to take stock of the skills we have, many of them result of privileges that have too often been denied to marginalized communities. We want to understand the conditions and the possibilities of this work, also coming back to what I had originally been talking about around security and public safety. And the answers that you gave, thank you, around freedom and safety. We want to understand these things as a challenge to white spatial imaginaries. We want to understand them as a challenge to carceral logics, a challenge to settler urbanism. So even if you say something as simple as, I want to be able to breathe the fresh air, that is itself a radical practice. And we need to be able to understand that as freedom. And if we can't put a whole lot of really intellectualized language to it, maybe all the better. Maybe we're trying to strengthen relationships of reciprocity and accountability, what we call research justice in order to remake the role of a public university in racial justice. Anyway, I'll stop there because I want to be able to answer questions and engage with folks. But I'll leave you with this, that I just read a couple of days ago by Julie Livingston, who's a journalist, that healing the body requires healing the body politic, the collection of people who together form a larger whole. That will be intending to the relationships that constitute the body politic and their greatest and most intimate iterations, which is very important for us. And that's why we have to be a community as much as possible and we have to trust the process as much as we can. Not to give us resolution, but instead to deliver us into a greater understanding and awareness of ourselves and each other. Stop there. Thank you so much. Wow. I want to do something a little awkward now. First, I want to thank you so much for the information, the inspiration, the incitement, the revolutionary vision of pedagogy is extraordinary. And Amy and I were not at all prepared for this level of dynamism and invitation. Had we been prepared, we might not have done a webinar. So now we're all stuck not being able to see each other. And yet I want to do this awkward thing of inviting folks who can stick around to pose questions directly to our guest about things you've heard, things you are yourself thinking about in relation to what she's been talking about. Maybe you're thinking about your own pedagogy and want to run questions by her or maybe you want more elaboration on some of these community building projects of what she has a part. So I'm saying that in the Q&A, that's the right place to do it, this would be the time for you to raise questions. We can kind of pause and just let you gather for a moment or two. I certainly have my own questions, which I can raise if nobody else does. But I'm gonna go ahead and give folks a moment to see if they have questions to pose for our guest. And I also wanna encourage appreciations that people might have for each other because again, we're all here in community and just because we can't see each other doesn't mean that we're not all here. And so we had so many replies. We had like 48 different replies to the questions that I asked. So I know that people saw something in the Q&A that spoke to them. So you're free to also appreciate each other. Can I begin by asking you a question about, and I see one just popped up in the Q&A, so I'll make mine very brief. A lot of academics sometimes feel like they're just chained to this academic project and their career and the restrictions of their university and so forth. And somehow you've been able to turn that around where you're using the institution and all that it affords you to do the work that you know needs to be done. And how did you know to make that move? Was that something that you grew up with? Is that something from your graduate training? When did you say, hey, I've got all these tools and I'm going to go use them rather than be used by them? Thank you so much for that question. So I'm gonna just again, like trust in the process and the community here. And even though I can't see all you all, I just, from your answers, I wanna just assume this is a place of no blame, no shame, but also of seeing each other here. So I will just quite honestly say to you that I have the privilege of having tenure. I did the grind that everybody's supposed to do. I was trained as a PhD student with some really amazing folks and I wrote what I had to write and all of those things. So I did the work, but on the way, I became more and more uncomfortable with a lot of the things that I was then asking to mentor students into. And part of it is because like in any organization or corporation or institution, there are those kinds of relationships and unequal labor and all of those things. But I realized like, this can't just be it. Like I do think there's something really valuable that's just the intellectual pursuit. That has a place. And I think thinking is really important. Where would we be without CLR James? Where would we be without Du Bois or all of these folks who, but who are also very involved in community. But there's also something about what, at least the University of California says that we are here to serve the public good. That's our, in the master plan. So make good on it, you know? I mean, I think for me, if I wanna write about communities, which I do, that I wanna be in community with folks. I wanna learn how, if I'm writing about getting free and I'm writing about mass incarceration, I should know how to do transformative justice and restorative healing circles. So I wanna learn and I wanna learn from organizers. So I think part of it is just an ethical practice, but also arises out of a frustration with the institution as it is, which I think is gonna change quite a bit and it should now. The institution as you mean academia in general? Yes. What about others? What other questions do folks wanna post in the Q and A? I accidentally answered, I just responded to a question and then it disappeared, but there was a question from somebody in Q and A about how we handle the fact that universities are white supremacists by and large, predominantly white institutions by and large, corporate neoliberal by and large, especially private schools. You've answered that to some extent, I realized, but it also sounds like you don't believe that the thing is so rotten to the core that it can't be used for your purposes or do you anticipate a transformation into something better? I'm always hopeful, but I'm also very real about these things. I don't know, the purpose of a lot of these academic institutions is profit. It's not actually education. So luckily there's some great folks inside who really believe in education and who are gonna keep doing it no matter what, who imagine themselves as insurgents inside of an institution who have incredible students that keep them thinking really interesting and important things and keep us curious and human. It's just like in your house, I'm sure all types of ingrained patterns of patriarchy and all kinds of things, right? But you don't move out of your house. You can't really escape that. It is white supremacy and it should be named as such and it should be called in whatever, however you wanna do it. But eventually you gotta get back, you gotta back away from the spin and the extraction that white supremacy also does, which is to constantly tire you out and get you fundamentally distracted. And Toni Morrison talks about this. It's just the fundamental distraction of racism. And you gotta think about what makes you whole. So you notice the questions I'm asking you are, what makes you feel free truly and what makes you feel safe? And those things are so important because we wanna come from there. I'm not saying anything that your question is bad, it's good, it's amazing, it's so important. And once we answer that question, once we recognize that that's where we're at and also we recognize like we'll never give up that fight. I mean, they get tired, we get tired, but we're not giving up. And we have a whole lot of good things on our side and we have a legacy to uphold. What I loved about the answers to the questions you posed is that so many people about the freedom question answered in some form or other about being with other people. So many people wanted to cook for others. And about safety, it was freedom or safety in community. And I found myself thinking something like, could you imagine saying to people who answer is safe to myself, can you imagine that without other people, whatever your answer was, could it exist without other people? And the answer of course is no, that those versions of safety and freedom could only exist with other people. And then the more difficult question is, can you imagine that on behalf of other people? If that's good for you, cooking a good meal is good for you, isn't it good for somebody else? Well, what would it take to make that possible for somebody else who might not have resources you have because of their economic situatedness, their racial situatedness? Such a great, thank you, such a great followup. And that's the thing is that when I'm asking those questions, your answers are where we begin. So if you wanna cook for people, that means you need a place like a store that actually has fresh food. You need, you can't be living in a food desert and expect that you can constantly be cooking for people. You can't be living in a place where you don't feel safe sitting outside and have constant like outdoor picnics. You can hear my dog is like co-signing on that. So these are fundamental rights. I have the right to raise my child in a safe community or I have the right to not have kids but I wanna have kids and I have the right to feel embodied in a safe way. They all, it all starts here, you know, like with these feelings. Yes, I think you're absolutely right, Dean. There's a question in the chat from Ash about allies and accomplices. The role of allies or accomplices on the path to freedom. Thank you. What a salad we look like within the freedom making framework, yes. This is a great question and I think one is on everybody's mind because all of us have some privilege in one way or another and it's not easy. And I do a lot of workshops for people, some really, really privileged people and then some folks who are like, I don't feel like I got no privilege, never, ever, ever, ever. So what is the role then for people? So a lot of times what people think is if you wanna be an ally or an accomplice then you gotta really, truly understand what these people going through. You can't. You can't. And it's okay. That's all right. You gotta understand, yes, but like means of production, the relationships of the economy, the political economy of what's going on. Understand as much as you want, you should as you can. Try as much as you can and get as close to and people love that like spirit of accomplice and allyship, right? So if you know that you would, that I mean, just like I know I never walk in some other people's shoes, right? Just as like a cis-hedral person, like what it's like to be queer and really wanna be out. What it's like to be trans and be in constant danger. Like those things, I don't know, but I tell you like, I will adopt a poise of curiosity and I will ask when I don't know and I'll always be in relationship to as much a choice that we can share as possible. So if someone as like I'm trying to be an accomplice or an ally too, says, hey, look, this thing you kind of came up short on, I don't, in my curiosity, I said, oh God, I'd love to learn more about it. It's not so much that having the right words or taking the right professional development or checking the box, right? But it's a way of being. So it really requires a kind of turning into and deciding this is who I wanna be. I wanna be an ally, accomplice on the path to freedom for historically marginalized and oppressed folks. Nobody should be able to throw you off that mark. That's you. And so what solidarity looks like is you never leaving that mark, no matter what happens. Is you never leaving that role for yourself and it's not easy. Is you constantly reasserting, I messed that up. Can I say this all the time as a parent? I messed that up. Like, can I try, I haven't do over? Cause I'm curious about what would happen if I had said something different. It's just about, and there's no amount, like you can't learn all the language, all the words. It's you who you are. Keep coming back. Just keep beginning again. That's how you do it. I'm so delighted by that answer because I just heard Keyanga Yamada Taylor give a very, very similar version of that same answer in an interview. And it was so shockingly clear and so generous, but also like handing responsibility back to you, saying you might have messed up. You might not, but you have to stay curious and stay in the game too. Nobody should throw you out and don't step out of the circle just because you feel like you don't know. So it's beautiful to hear this, this resonance between your answer and hers. We have time for a couple more questions. There's one or two, there's one more question here in the Q and A about how do we as students resist practices of surveillance introduced into higher ed? You know, I know some people are celebrating how down at UC San Diego, they are able to monitor your sewage to see about the spread of COVID. And on the one hand it's like amazing and on the other hand it's somewhat terrifying about the implications for that kind of surveillance. So what did you have thoughts about this? But students in particular. Yeah, that's a really good question. And I will admit that it often stumps me. I try really hard not to be in a space of like despair or like giving up about my personal information because I know that everything is tracked. Everything we do is tracked. Everything we do online, where we're going, there's always cameras everywhere, everything. So I'm not sure about how to not be surveilled. But when you say resist the new practices of surveillance introduced into higher ed, it makes me think the video, the Roshay, is that right? I hope that you're talking about organizing and you're talking about where the university invests its money. And that's an organizing question, I think. And that is a question also of awareness all the time of what people are doing with your personal business. And people have a right to know that their information is being used. So people should always be what you call in restorative and transformative justice work at choice. Like when we're not, right? We can't choose. It's just like I was telling you with the ring stuff, right? You get ring because you wanna make sure your house is safe and the police can use it against your neighbor and arrest them over some BS, right? But you wanna be able to constantly unveil. This is the beauty of Cedric Robbins' work he always says that racial regimes are hostile to their own discovery. They hate being discovered. Peel back the curtain over and over again if that's all you can do. However, the other thing you can do too is to create practices of community that are purposefully and intentionally outside of surveillance. So try, if you can, if you have spaces in nature where that's possible, but also practices that restore the wholeness of the human being. I think that's the only way that we're gonna like at least preserve our integrity as human beings. So that's a little bit of a different tack and whole other conversation probably but important nonetheless. In fact, it's the last question and this will probably be a good one to end on because you really did speak meaningfully about the cycle of activism and the necessity of restoration. And so the final question I see in the Q and A is asking you to elaborate on what that looks like. What kinds of practices of rest and restoration are you talking about? Oh, I'd love to answer that question. It's actually the first time that anybody's asked me that in a very long time. I think maybe once somebody asked me that but what am I doing right now is that so I had started to write this book that Dean mentioned and I'm really spending time in the fields with farm workers and then spending time with cultural conveners, people who are musicians, who practice like Bandango who are in Sonja Rocho, who do like community convening artists who are muralists, people like that, right? And who are just like doing that work, the goddess's work to bring us together. And I thought, well, I just don't know how I feel about this relationship ethically if I'm not involved somehow. And I don't imagine myself as like inserting myself there but instead learn to practice. So learn an instrument or learn how to facilitate a circle for victims and offenders. And so I've been learning with people and when you learn with people how to do circles like that and there are a lot of folks, this is really instructive for us because as much as everybody likes to talk about, oh, you know, the whole world is going to shit and it's awful and it's terrible. Yes, but all of this time in our communities we have people, you know, the grandmas, right? Who are making the dinner after church or we have the people who are making murals and places they're not supposed to be making murals. I wanna be in that. That's where I'm trying to be. And I'm trying to also learn how to create peace and justice in places where they say it's impossible. Prisons among foster kids in schools that are so elite that they can barely see what community they're in. I love to figure like how to, it's not so much me trying to figure out how do they solve that but more how do the people who are completely outside of those experiences come in, learn and facilitate healing? And what are those organizers doing? That's what I wanna know. How are they keeping themselves whole and waiting in that rest place? What's the arc that's being created? What are the conversations? What are ways that people are engaging with each other without reinventing those same old ghosts that haunt us around judging each other, blaming each other, fighting amongst one another? Instead of what would happen if we all tried to like accept each other, learned how to give a real apology, learned that we don't just throw a community member away because they did something that wasn't cool. We don't just cancel them. We don't send them in the foster care. We don't send them to jail. We try to practice, like try not to get caught up in the localities on that guy. No, let's talk, developing those skills. Sometimes it doesn't work. And the most important thing I learned in transformative restorative justice is that you could say you're a victim and you decide I don't wanna participate in a victim offender circle. I don't wanna talk to the person who killed my sister. I don't wanna talk to that person. The amazing thing about this work is that, that offender can apologize. They can learn the skills to truly apologize through self reflection and accountability. And you don't have to accept that apology, but that doesn't mean they can't still do the work. So there's places where people can always learn. So we learn in all times with all beings and you don't have to be part of the conversations you don't wanna be part of, but you can still do the work towards justice and healing and transformation. And that's how I stay in that. I have to tell you that after many scholarly talks, I find myself with a whole list of books I need to go read that have been referred to. And that happened, but I've also been making lists of emails I have to go send to my administrative colleagues and faculty colleagues. The subject line is we have to do this thing. I've got a long list of things you more than incited me. I'm inspired of course, but also I'm seeing things that I could only bagel and incoately perceive for possibilities and pathways for new projects for pedagogy and engagement. And I'm just so grateful to you. I'm very confident that other folks who are on this webinar felt to the fact that there's still 28 people who have attended all the way at six, 20 tells me that I'm right. People are really into this. So I thank you truly for this extraordinary talk and conversation with us all. It was just really wonderful. Thank you so much, Gay. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate all of you who are here today that I can't see. Thank you for staying here in community with us and I appreciate it. I wish that I could be there in person maybe next year. There was that time I was gonna remind you Dean when we were talking about, well, maybe we'll reschedule for April. And now here we are. Yeah. Someday, someday. Thank you so much. Goodbye, everybody. Thanks for attending. Goodbye, goodbye. Thank you. Dr. Johnson, thank you so much. I'm gonna go ahead and end the meeting now. Just wanted to say thank you so much. Sorry for the hiccups there in some of the tech, but that was really wonderful. It all worked out. Thank you so much. Have a good evening. Bye. Bye.