 Welcome, everyone. My name is Kat Kanaisal. I'm a university development and alumni relations. We're so happy you could join us today to honor Michael Omi, and we really appreciate your support of homecoming. We all benefit from many generations of donors like you. So now to start things off, I am honored to introduce our Chancellor, Carol T. Christ. I'm delighted to welcome you to this symposium, an honor of Michael Omi on the occasion of his retirement. One of the gratifications of having as long a history at Berkeley as I do is the opportunity it gives you to see the arc of a colleague's entire career. I remember vividly when Michael joined the faculty, and I remember our first conversation about racial formation and racial classification. Michael has taught me more about those subjects than any scholar I've met. Michael, to me, is an ideal Berkeley faculty member, one who represents our ideals as an institution. He's done groundbreaking work that has changed how we understand race, work that has had incredible staying power. First published in 1986, racial formation in the United States was released in its third edition in 2015, a remarkable shelf life that reflects its importance. Indeed, that work is the subject of this symposium. But Michael also excels in the other dimensions of a faculty member's responsibility. He won the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1990, when he was still a junior faculty member. And Michael has excelled in leadership. He served as director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change, now the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, as associate director of the Haas Institute for a fair and inclusive society, now the Othering and Belonging Institute, and as founding chair of the Asian American Research Center. Beyond the campus, he's been the co-editor since 1995 of the book series on Asian American History and Culture at Temple University Press. From 1999 to 2008, he served as a member and chair of the Daniel E. Koshland Committee for Civic Unity at the San Francisco Foundation. Since 2002, he's served on the project advisory board on race and human variation for the American Anthropological Association that resulted in the current traveling museum exhibit, Race Are We So Different, which has just been displayed in over 35 cities throughout the United States. He's a founding member of the Faculty Steering Committee of the Center for New Racial Studies, a University of California multi-campus research project based at UC Santa Barbara. He's won the Community Changemakers Award from Asian Health Services in 2008 and the inaugural Distinguished Teacher and Mentor Award, the American Sociological Association section on Asia and Asia. Americans gave him in 2005. Since I've become Chancellor, I've observed Michael's leadership on many occasions, as he's worked for change through many campus groups. Michael was born in Berkeley and he earned his undergraduate degree here. In so many ways, he demonstrates what we aspire to as a community. Congratulations, Michael, on your retirement. But in true Berkeley fashion, I look forward to your active engagement on the campus and beyond for years to come. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Stephen Small. I'm a professor of African American Studies and director of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, which is one of the sponsors of today's event and one of the many institutes, departments and centers on campus where my dear friend Michael Omi has had a big impact on a significant leadership role. I'm very excited about that in the Chancellor's remarks. The Institute for the Study of Societal Issues and the other sponsors of today's event, including Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, the Asian American Research Center, the Othering and Belonging Institute, the Department of Ethnic Studies, the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice and the Center for Race and Gender. I know that many of the students and centers are so pleased to have the opportunity to celebrate Professor Omi. Thanks also to the homecoming team for making this possible, and thanks to all of you for being in attendance today. During Michael Omi's career thus far, and it's not over yet, he has touched so many lives, including my own. And he's made enormous contributions to our understanding Today, we're going to hear briefly from three different scholars, as well as from Professor Omi and Self. In the interest of time, I'll keep my introductions brief to each of the scholars, where you can find far more information on their biographies in the links to the Symposium website, which should be posted in the YouTube chat. First, it's my pleasure to introduce Professor Victor Rios, Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara, and one of Michael's former students. Welcome Professor Rios, please go ahead. Thank you, Professor Small. It's wonderful to be here celebrating the intellectual contributions of Michael Omi. I'll just start by giving you my own intellectual trajectory. I've been in the field of sociology for about 16 years. I received my PhD in ethnic studies from Berkeley in 2005, and so after ethnic studies, I found work in sociology and found a meeting in sociology and was able to contribute a lot to that discipline. One of the traces that you see in terms of conversations about race throughout the 15, 16 years I've been in the discipline of sociology is that you always have people going back to racial formation theory. You always have people going back to Omi and why not, whether it's quantitative papers, whether it's qualitative papers, thousands of them that have centrally focused on the work of racial formation, whether it's books, hundreds of them in just the discipline of sociology alone, where racial formation theory continues to be the dominant theory in sociology. Now I have to admit that when I was at Berkeley as a grad student taking courses with Michael and having him on my committee, I took it for granted. I didn't understand the kind of immense contributions and the immense influence of this theory on various disciplines, including sociology. As I navigated through my assistant professorship, associate professorship, in the discipline of sociology, people would want to know where did you do your work, who trained you and of course one of the people I would say was Michael Omi and right away people kind of understood that that meant I understood how to analyze race in sociology. So my own work, my own theoretical contributions, whether it's looking at the youth control complex or looking at cultural misframing have been really anchored in the work of racial formation in the influence of Michael Omi and Howard, why not? So as an example, I get to Berkeley and I'm trying to figure out my own background, my own kind of trajectory, and you can't separate at least in my sort of background and in my tradition of learning of intellectual development and training, you can't separate the personal and the intellectual. You have to talk about both. So in trying to understand the personal and Michael Omi being very patient, hearing students talk about our personal experiences and backgrounds, and then giving us the tool set, this macro tool set to understand our condition. And so racial formation, understanding racial projects, for example, understanding hegemony as it relates to race, and then understanding emancipatory movements really helped me frame the 1990s because that's where I came from. I came from Oakland, California in 1990s. I was a street kid that ended up getting lucky and graduating college going on to Berkeley. And so understanding how to analyze the school to prison pipeline, to understand how to figure out why the super predator thesis in the 1990s was so influential where black and brown young people were being criminalized left and right in the media, criminalized left and right at school, criminalized left and right in society by police during this time period. And me showing up with just scattered information and then being given a framework to understand, right, racial formation theory to understand how this was a racial project, a contested racial project, because there was also resistance going on or young people were fighting the ways in which the system was constructing them. So early on in the 2000s, I'm presenting my work on criminalization and sociology and criminology. And people are pretty much saying, look, we don't know what you're talking about, right? Criminalization is something that's de jure. It's in the law. There's no de facto criminalization here. Folks in ethnic studies had always been talking about this. But bringing this knowledge to the mainstream in terms of criminalization has been my endeavor really for the last 16 years. And so one of the outcomes of this has been this big explosion in understanding race and criminalization within criminology, within the study of crime and justice in sociology. So now scholars are using criminalization, are using racial formation to understand how the racial state controls racialized populations through crime, control technologies, resources and strategies. It's been interesting to see that development that now you talk to someone about criminalization in mainstream, mainstream disciplines and they get it, they understand. So that I think has been an incredible contribution of racial formation. It's hidden in the backdrop of various theories that we've created over time in my research lab, right? But it's always there influencing the way in which we understand the racial state. In particular, I think what's been really dynamic about racial formation theory for me is it's anchoring in hegemony and in Gramsci because for me, that's the place where you can sort of navigate multiple worlds, understanding capitalism and those with the means of production and how those with the means of production kind of control populations and then understanding culture and race and how those two kind of bridge together and also intersectional justice, other frameworks that connect really well here. So in terms of being a public intellectual, racial formation theory has allowed me to really be able to plug into the contemporary time period and understand and also explain to mass audiences, say politicians for example, say grassroots organizers for example, how is it that in this moment where we have a different strand of racial formation taking place? Like, you know, Malcolm X would always say, you know, racism is like a Cadillac. They bring out a new model every year. And so we have to understand that new model every year and racial formation theory allows us to do that. And I'll conclude with understanding emancipatory movements and how racial formation theory has allowed me to really analyze that. So I've been to Ferguson, Missouri early on after just a few weeks after the killing of Michael Brown by police. I've been in various areas, Oakland, California, Watts, where young people have been killed by police and in seeing the movements against police violence, right, trying to understand how young people are always contesting not just the violence by police, but also the way in which they're being framed and understood. So the very notion of race itself, how is it that race and crime come together to define the entire existence of an inner city population? So really understanding emancipatory movements of young people as movements that are constantly reconstructing, recreating, and hopefully at some point, reducing a new understanding of race that will hopefully benefit the population and its movement in the long run. So I'll leave it there. Thank you so much, Michael, for your contributions. I know for me intellectually, I've come a long way. Many thanks to that work that you introduced me to early on in grad school and that legacy that you've left behind for others in sociology and beyond to continue to grow that scholarship. Thank you very much, Victor, for a very timely presentation, much appreciated. Now I will hear from Lisa Lowe, Professor Lisa Lowe, who is the Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies and Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. Welcome, Professor Lowe. Thank you. It's a real privilege and joy to be a part of this group of scholars gathered in honor of Michael Omi, a dear friend and colleague for over 30 years. We'll hear over and over today that racial formation in the United States has co-authored work with Howard Winant has been an altogether transformative work. And since his publication in 1986 with revised editions in 1994 and 2014, it's completely changed the landscape for discussing race and made possible so much scholarship that's followed as Dr. Rios has just explained in the disciplines of sociology, political science, and history, but also in the interdisciplinary fields like American Studies and Ethnic Studies and Black and Asian American and Latinx Studies. I couldn't have written my own 1996 book on Asian American racial formation, Immigran Acts, without their work. The conceptual advances of racial formation in the US were profound when it was published and its relevance hasn't diminished today. It remains crucial to the university curriculum and still provides the necessary tools required for deciphering racial politics in our present moment. Let's consider some of their core definitions and arguments about race that continue to guide us today. Firstly, that race is not a fixed identity or fixed category. It's not determined by biology or heredity, but is rather a socially constructed process and racial meanings change in relation to specific conditions. Race can't be reduced to phenotype and racism is never merely a matter of individual personal bias. Secondly, they've well established that race is always a social relation, a shifting formation and a living process designating a relation of power on the social terrain. Rivals over race are always mediating a variety of conflicts and contests, social, political and economic, and race is always articulated with other social differences such as gender, class, sexuality, nation, ability and religion. And finally, racial relations mediate hegemony. Like the British cultural theorist Stuart Hall, Omi and Wynand drew from the Marxist Antonio Gramsci to elaborate race as a central to the process through which a particular group or party gains, holds or seeds dominance. Hegemony is not static but is actively constructed and maintained in any given historical moment. In their now famous formulation, they say that, quote, race is an unstable and dissentered complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle, unquote. In other words, racial meanings shift in the dialectical relationship between the state that names racial categories and the social movements and communities that inhabit, contest and transform those categories. So in this way, racism and racial inequality can't be corrected by merely changing individual attitudes or individual prejudices because they are the result of a society that has not materially reckoned with its foundational histories of indigenous dispossession and removal, slavery and Jim Crow segregation, stolen labors of indentured and immigrant workers and the lives lost in imperial wars. Until this work of reckoning and transformation is done, race in the United States will continue to be a terrain of struggle over belonging power and survival. What I want to emphasize most of all, as Dr. Rios has said as well, is that racial formation in the U.S. not only guided us in how to understand race and civil rights in the 1980s, but it also explains the reasons that race continues to be the locus of the contradictions we live and struggle with today. In analyzing the relationship between the racial state and anti-racist social movements in the 1960s, Omi and Wyand explained that social movements demanded not only an end to segregation and racial inequality, but many groups from the Black Panthers, young lords, Iwo Kien and the American Indian movement to third-world, anti-colonial, anti-imperial and anti-war groups all demanded a radical redistribution of property, jobs, housing and political power. In this sense, while the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was a response to these broad, active social movements, it didn't resolve the contradictions between the state founded on racial colonial exclusion and the communities disenfranchised by these histories. Even as it created anti-discrimination laws, laws in themselves could not provide the necessary means and resources to resolve persistent racial injustice. As they state, quote, the racial order is equilibrated by the state, encoded in law, organized through policymaking and enforced by a repressive apparatus, but the equilibrium thus achieved is unstable for the great variety of conflicting interests encapsulated in racial meanings and identities can be no more than pacified at best by the state, unquote. What I take this to mean is that Omeon Renat's idea of racial formation helps us to understand that civil rights in 1964, outlawing discrimination based on race, religion, sex and national origin, shifted racial meanings and may have pacified some radical demands, yet de jure civil rights were not enough to bring thorough or fundamental changes to the racial state or to the racialized social and economic order. Although social movements prompted the Civil Rights Act, the granting of civil rights proved to be a state reform, one that offered racialized citizens nominal inclusion in a state and society that continued and still continues to reproduce racial hierarchies. Civil rights altered yet deferred the contradiction between white supremacy and demanded social change so that it has continued to erupt over and over in subsequent periods. As we've seen, these contradictions have resurfaced in the dialectic between state exclusion and the racially dispossessed in the battles over affirmative action in the 1980s, over multiculturalism and color blindness in the 1990s, in struggles against Islamophobia and anti-Blandtists in the 2000s, in the backlash against the Obama presidency, and most recently in the campaigns against critical race theory and teaching the history of slavery and K through 12 education. Because racial projects, as only in why not discuss them, condense and mediate a wide variety of antagonisms over dominance, extraction and political power. The achievement of racial justice is limited when the struggles are confined exclusively to racial recognition by the state, whose history has always been, the state's history has always been to racialize and gender citizenship in the service of capitalism, and which has served to protect a society structured in white dominance to slightly modify Stuart Hull's formulation. Well, me and why it's racial formation has been part of the curriculum for generations of college students since the 1980s. Students learn how grassroots social movements challenge racial segregation and education, housing and labor, and that these were crucial to the transformation of race and racial power. But racial formation also provides a social theory with ramifications beyond that period, which explains how racial emancipation and enfranchisement during reconstruction, during the civil rights era, and today can significantly remake the meanings of race, even as those redefinitions may fall short of transforming the social order or resolving material racial inequality. Furthermore, transnational migration from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, and the intersections of race with gender and sexuality class and region have complicated older descriptions of race and racism. Yet even as racial meanings have shifted, race continues both to mark the enduring contradiction between the promise of liberal inclusion and the material conditions of racial exclusion, and to illuminate precisely those points where protest, pressure and rebellion can affect maximal change. Today, it's Black Lives Matter, Indigenous protesters demanding an end to line three of the Keystone Pipeline, policing and prison abolitionists and migrant justice activists condemning border violence and migrant expulsion, who are the most recent voices calling attention to enduring racial justice. In his 35 years at UC Berkeley, Michael Omi has made an unparalleled contribution not only to the study of race and racism, but also and perhaps more significantly to their transformation. Without Michael, so many of us could not do the work we've done and must continue to do. So Michael, I wish you the very best and give you love and admiration as you begin your next important chapter. Thank you very much, Lisa. We appreciate your important contribution and comments on the wide variety and range of Michael's career. Next, I'm delighted to welcome Troy Duster, Chancellor's Professor Emeritus here at UC Berkeley, founder and former director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change. Troy has been a close friend and mentor to me personally and professionally for many decades. He's also been a mentor and close friend and colleague of Michael Omi, as well as many others. Welcome Professor Duster. Thank you. Well, let me begin by placing into a kind of a larger social historical context, the contribution of Michael. Let's go back to the middle of the 20th century, where people were teaching courses in race relations. There was something called the Canon. The Canon is the agreed upon textual materials for a given course of inquiry. So in that period, race relations was dominated by the idea of personal prejudice. The textbook for the period was by Gordon Alport, and it was called The Nature of Prejudice. So throughout that whole period, there was pushback, it wasn't only that there was a notion of personal prejudice as dominant, but the Canon, what you had to deal with was the Alport framework. Well, even the early work by Gunnar Myrdal and his associates, which produced the American Dilemma, they concluded that America was involved in this remarkable contradiction between its stated aims of being a nation of individuals who had equal rights and the history of slavery and of course, the oppression of blacks. So even in Myrdal, we had this idea that if you just are able to get to people's minds, get them to stop seeing the world in terms of racial prejudice, then you'll begin to resolve the American Dilemma. So late fifties, there was pushback, Herbert Bloomer wrote a piece called Race Prejudice as a function of group position. And that forming, that framing began to put a little dent in the notion of personal prejudice as being the way in which you understand race relations. Again, let's go back to some examples of that period. Blacks could not enter certain restaurants or hotels. And the only would say things like, well, I'm myself, I'm not personally prejudice. But as the owner of this restaurant, I can't afford to let people in who are people of color, because I'll lose customers and others. I mean, the whites just won't come. And the same with covenants, which were restricted. Supreme Court will strike them down in 1948. And covenants meant that you could not, by law, sell your home to a Jewish person or a black person. And even though that was restricted, stricken, it went on for another 20, 30, 50, and even some would say it goes on today. Now, Lisa and Victor have gone into rich detail about the ways in which racial formation really transformed the study of race. But I want to add a notion that there was a particular dialectic that was going on between the race prejudice canon, what would become the new canon, the new canon is racial formation. And the genius of it was that it regarded race as both fragile, ineffable, and also deeply structural. How is that possible? How can it be that something was both fragile and rigid? Well, the fragility of the concept was clear, if you looked across different jurisdictions, from Louisiana to Illinois, the notion of race meant very different things. And across nations to Brazil, across the Pacific to Hawaii, that race was obviously a concept that was fluid and fragile. And at the same time, there were these rigidities, the notion that, again, covenants were in place, which would make it impossible to sell your home. If you were a white person who was quote, not prejudice, and wanted to sell your home to a minority person, you could not. Indeed, the real estate agents of the period were enjoined not to sell across racial lines, or they would lose their licenses. And here was the genius of racial formation. You could have quote, the absence of racial prejudice at the individual level of real estate agent who would willing to sell a home across racial lines, but they would lose their license. Enter racial formation, which now began to explain how it could be both fragile, elusive and rigid. And for the next 20 years, the canon of racial prejudice was upended and replaced by the new canon of racial formation. Now, in some sense, the current political football around critical race theory, and whether or not there's in America systemic racism, that that that political football which has been taken over by the right. And it's not reached the point where they're saying, you can't teach race theory, critical race theory, because it makes whites feel uncomfortable. That's actually the language of at least six or eight different state laws now prohibiting critical race theory. Critical race theory owes a part of its genesis to racial formation. In the very real sense that we're talking now about systems of structures, laws, systemic racism. You remember doing the George Floyd demonstrations, we began to hear the term for the first time from media talking heads, we heard the term systemic racism. Actually, I have a assistant who put up a graphic showing that in the first few weeks after the George Floyd demonstrations, anchors were using systemic racism at about 15 to 20 times more than they'd ever used it before. And that's I think a function of the success as Lisa was indicating of the ways in which racial formation theory, it was introduced, penetrated and began to dominate the canon for the last 30 years. So many of those demonstrators without knowing its social origins were manifesting the insights of racial formation in this idea of structural, institutional, systemic racism. But that's not the only kind of influence that Michael has had. Let me move now to his his vital role in the way the census counts and categorizes people of color. Because of his work on racial formation, Michael was invited to join the National Commission that reviews the census categories. Let me just give you one figure which I think you'll find dramatic. In 2010, those in America who self identified as mixed race was nine million. 10 years later last year, 34 million Americans identified as mixed race. That is a dramatic shift. Indeed, in 2010, twice made up 64% of the US population, self identified. Last year, it dropped to 57%. And I think in that simple framing of the problem, we can begin to understand the surge of the far right. The ways in which white, especially white males feel fragile. They feel the circumstances have been altered. We're getting Tucker Carlson talking about replacement theory. Replacement theory, that's borrowed from French fascism, that somehow those who are not quote, French are immigrating into France, and they're replacing traditional white French males. Well, that has now been imported into the United States. Replacement theory is now part of this surge that we're seeing in the media. People are getting on in marches talking about Jews will not replace us. And the anger about the Afghanistan situation in which hundreds of thousands of people from Afghanistan are migrating into Europe and in the United States. And what's happening? Well, the Republican Party just voted a few days ago, 50 to zero in the Senate, not to not to permit this to go on. So here we have it. Michael's contribution as a sympathetic and supportive mentor to students from all kinds of frameworks and backgrounds is well known. He's been a low key mentor with graduate students from all frames, all perspectives in the last decade. He's been an every man, particularly that particular ethnic students ranging in methodology and in interest. So with that, I want to congratulate Michael. And with that remarkable portfolio, he moves into retirement. Thank you. You're on mute, Steven. Yes, yes, I should pay attention. Thank you, Troy. For those comments, I'm forgiving us this larger framework. Now it's the man of the hour, Michael himself. Let me first extend my deep and abiding personal appreciation for everything that you've done, Michael, for the Institute of which I'm currently director for the students and scholars and indeed for staff at UC Berkeley. And I'd also like to take the opportunity following Troy to wish you the very best in retirement. I'm delighted that you plan to stay active, hopefully not too active, you have your life to live. Well, we look forward to continuing to work with you over to you, Michael, to make a few comments. Thank you, Steven. Really appreciate that. Let me see here. I'm going to bring a view here. And thank you all for those wonderful and very insightful remarks from all our panelists. Let me say first that I'm putting some of my retirement in quotes, because I continue to have to nudge students to finish their various writing projects as well as still intending to be involved in some of the centers as well. So it feels like a slow fade more than a kind of really sharp break in what I'm doing. And, and maybe that's the way it's supposed to be. That's an easier way to sort of transition. Let me say to that, each of you have offered some really interesting takes on on on me on my work with Howard Wine. And I want to thank Victor Rios, for example, about criminalization, about looking at and extending some of the work around racialization or racial formation into new areas. And let me say that Howie and I have profited immensely from people who have sort of expanded the framework of racial formation, oftentimes pointing out our flaws, or inconsistencies, or lapses, and really extending them into new fields, which has been really productive and just enlightening and for us to see how people have sort of ran with the ball. I also want to thank Lisa for giving a better presentation of racial formation than I could. And also for her incredibly expansive work about racism, about capitalism and imperialism, and the ways in which she's really, to me, sort of expanded my outlook to think much more in terms of the globe, in terms of the world, and how that unfolded. And I guess, lastly, Troy, thanks for that contextual argument there, you know, drawing from the work of Herbert Bloomer and the work you've done with Herbert Bloomer around race and group position. Those insights were very important for Howie and I to think about a theory of racial formation to begin with. Let me just make a few comments since, you know, we're running kind of late in the hour. I also want to say that much of that work remains incomplete around thinking about racial formation in terms of the current sort of social, economic, and political issues, the divisiveness, which racks our own nation. And to encourage people to think about and take up those topics much more deeply. Troy's right. I mean, one of the things is quite replacement. I mean, drawing from the book, a 20-lang book by Renaud Camus about French and French identity being seriously eroded by the presence of Muslims has been a sort of, we've written a real global right wing racist nationalist resurgence. And our own country has not been immune to that. And in many ways, this notion of white replacement, I mean, it goes way back to, there's always been fears about this. Madison Grant talking about the passing of a great race, the ways in which immigration restrictions were always in place from these fears of diluting a particularly Western European white stock. We've seen various political incarnations of movements which have arose in protest of this from the know nothing party to various, you know, variants and incarnations of the Ku Klux Klan. And in many respects, what we're seeing now, the proud boys, you know, the Boogaloo boys are really just the latest contemporary expression of those same themes that we've been plagued with for quite a long time. But Troy's quite right too about the diminishing the ways in which a racial demographics of this nation are rapidly changing and what they, what kinds of things they forebode. For example, I think there's a statistic like a third of the counties in the United States are now majority people of color. Now that's an amazing shift. And in many respects, I mean, it depends how you count white, obviously, but what is seen as this declining white majority and fears in fact, and it's gendered as well, particularly among white males, fears of a fall in status and grace as a result of these kinds of changing things. And we need to think about voter suppression laws, immigration reform, and yes, current debates about the teaching, the very teaching about race and racism are, you know, pretty much a manifestation of these broader things which are going on for us. And really they beg people to take racial formation of whatever kinds of theories and begin to talk about it to explain it in many ways. And also we need to think very seriously about what white we might mean by anti-racism. What is an anti-racist ideology policy or practice and how might we encourage and draw and learn from social movements as well about the forms of kind of resistance and challenges that we could make to the present structure of race and racism in the United States. So there's a lot to do and I'm, you know, I'm grateful and and I'm sure you know how he's grateful as well that some of what we've done, at least it becomes a starting point for other folks to take up the torch and begin explaining the kind of world around us as well as to think deeply about what we can do to change it. Thank you. Thanks Michael. Thanks for your summary. Thanks for your encouragement. We all love you. We will miss you. We hope you stay around. We have a couple of minutes. Let me just tell one quick story before I close. We have six minutes left. Colleagues on the panel have spoken about many of your impressive personal characteristics and contributions. They haven't mentioned your sense of humor and your ability to deliver a quick line at the right time. Now we all know you and our colleagues have spoken about you as a scholar, as an analyst, as someone who is a mentor and intellectual, someone who is deeply committed to social change. But you and Diane also need to put food on the table for you and your family. So I came back from England in the 90s and I told you I've just spoken with the editor of Routledge who publishes your book and she told me, Stephen, if you're going to write a book can you write it like Michael Omi and Howard Winant? And I said oh why is that? And she said because that's our best-selling book at the present time. And Michael said to me I wish they had told me it was the best-selling book. I haven't seen any royalties for a while. I hope they've given you your royalties. I hope it enables you and Diane to continue to put food on your table. Okay we wish you every success. We do have time for a quick question before I thank the speakers. Do we have an ability to do that? Does anyone on the panel want to make a final comment or raise a final issue? We do have time for the rest of the day for those who are here. Okay you've left them speechless Michael. That's okay. That's fine. My thanks to everyone. Let me just close. Okay thank you Professor Omi and thanks again to Professors Rios, Low and Duster. Thank you all for providing such rich and nuanced reflections on Michael's work and on his contribution. Finally thank you again to everyone who joined us today and is in attendance. If you're here in the Berkeley area in Berkeley itself please join us for the in-person symposium that will continue this very fascinating conversation for the rest of the afternoon and for the rest of the day. If you need details about the symposium you can find them in the chat. Thank you also to the staff and technicians who have made this presentation possible. Thank you everyone and have a good day.