 For our first program today, I'm super excited to have Dr. Claudia Garcia-Lewis coming to us all the way from San Antonio, Texas, y'all. So big up to Claudia. We'll be doing a talk on rupturing the black and white, the binary Afro-Latina, Afro-Latino Latinx, or Afro-Latinx, bridging the black and brown divide. This is my sister, love her to death. We went to grad school together and she's gonna drop some knowledge. So show her some high-line love, y'all. Buenos dias. Love it. Well, it's a pleasure to be here. Lody's and I go way back. I actually grew up in the Pacific Northwest. I grew up in Hood River, Oregon. How many of you have heard of Hood River? Woo! Yeah! It's a small, small farm-working community, but I wasn't aware that there was going to be middle schoolers here and let me tell you I am so excited to have you all here and so I'm gonna try to tailor my presentation to you all if that's okay with everybody else because I think the importance of education is also empowering our youth to believe in themselves and to understand who they are and how they can be a change. And so I will read some things but then I will, I will read, re-tell them in a different way so that it's so our younger audiences can understand. So I have a presentation set up and as a Latina what ends up happening is that I have a presentation set up and sometimes I go off cue and so I ask for you all to just bear with me. This is a process that has taken me years to arrive at. So I want to start off with my positionality and so what positionality means is who I am, how I stand in the world and how I see the world. And so I want to start off by the first the first bullet point which is my birth name. I was born in Mexico and I was born close to Guadalajara and one of the most important things about ourselves is our name. However when we immigrate or when we go to communities that don't speak our language they often take away our name. So my name, my birth name is Claudia García Medina. That honors García, my dad's family. Medina is my mother's family. And so in the Chicana feminist tradition we like to honor the legacy of our family and so I'm going to honor my parents. I am the daughter of Maria del Consuelo, Medina Jimenez and Jose Ascension García Gomez. When I went to school I went so I immigrated as a farm worker, grew up in Hood River and so in school they couldn't say Claudia García Medina so guess what? It's too long right? So they said let's take away the Medina so I became Claudia García but it was really hard for some people to say Claudia so they would call me claw. I became a claw right? And so when they did that what ended up happening was that it took away my identity and so I used that now as an educator I have the tools I have the knowledge I have the strength to be able to push against that and so you saw in my name it's García with an accent and I always tell my students I'm not García, I'm García. If you don't know how to use that accent make sure that you figure it out. And so for my young students if your if your name is a name that isn't in English honor that because there's so much attached to that name right? And so my presentation today is honoring that I'm a Mexican immigrant. It took me a really long time to acknowledge and celebrate that I'm Mexicana. I used to lie and say I was born in LA because everybody wants to be born in LA especially if you're growing up in Hood River Oregon so I'd say yeah I was born in LA now to make up these lies and lies that I wanted to so deeply believe because I was told by society that because I was Mexican and I was a foreigner there's no way that I would be successful and that I was completely opposite of what success meant. Right? And so I want now I feel pride in being a Mexican immigrant I am the third oldest in my family but I'm the first to graduate from high school. My two older siblings were pushed out because their education did not make them feel welcome. They didn't feel welcome in classrooms they weren't taught to be proud of who they are and so I am not lucky to be a first-gen student I fought for it and so for those younger ones for those that view who are on who are on campus here at Highland I want you to also understand that this has been a process of generations and so me being a doctora a profe is a is a dream come true not only of me but also my family right so it's carrying through the legacy of my brothers and sisters who have been pushed out of the system and so I come to you my positionality is embedded in that it's embedded in struggle it's embedded in being a mother so you'll see my my two little munchkins right here my daughter Victoria my husband is Haitian he's first first generation born in the US from Haitian family so we're a family of immigrants like we really are immigrants right and so we are the dreams and the hopes of our parents and so my daughter is dressed as Frida right here for for influential women's day because she understands that she is a synthesis of both right and so my research and the way I come to this research is not because I said wait a minute Latinos aren't just people who look like me there's black Latinos there's Asian Latinos it was because it was born out of me being forced to see that my children would someday have to fight for their right and their identity right and so I come to you in this way and I want to start off with my positionality because as a mestiza woman as a Latina who presents as a Latina doing research on Afro-Latinidad is something that I'm always conscious about I'm here rather than an Afro-Latina being here or an Afro-Latin next individual talking about Afro-Latin next issue so I want to make sure I start off with that positionality and to make sure that I I'm honoring the the gifts and the experiences and the stories of my participants and so my research my dissertation was inspired by my children my children who are Haitian I came up with that term it just fits you know they're they're Haitian and they're Mexican so they're Haitians right and so what I uncovered was that within higher education research there was no scholarship on the experiences of Afro-Latinos and so I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and when I watched the univision all I saw was blonde hair blue-eyed people people who were lighter than me and so I thought that that was the representation of Latinidad I thought those were Latinos when I went to college I got on an airplane and went to Venezuela and when I got off in Venezuela I was in Caracas I looked around and it was the sea of Afro descendents like I was so confused I thought I had gone to the wrong place because I had never been made aware of the fact that there are Afro descendents Afro-Latinos in Latino America and so but I was able to get on a plane come back and I didn't have to deal with it because that was not an identity that I was forced to live through so we conveniently forget to think about items because if they don't if I am able bodied then it's really easy for me to forget about people who don't who have some type of physical limitations right so it wasn't until I became a mother and started doing research on Afro-Latinidad that I said wait a minute the voices of Afro descendents are missing from higher education research and so what I found was representation right and so when we think about representation within literature when we think about representation and the voices that are included within literature I found that there's this notion of anti-blackness within the US and colorism so colorism is coined by Alice Walker a phenomenal black woman who came up with colorism and so colorism means people being treated differently based on their skin tone so the darker individuals are treated worse even within groups right so within the black community within the Latino community individuals who have lighter skin who have more fair facial features who have lighter hair tend to be treated better because they're they're approximated more we'll have questions at the end and so within my know even within minoritized communities there's also this notion of identity formation so when we think about identity and we think about identity formation we have to consider that there is this rich history of slavery and I say rich because it's so dynamic and complex but its legacy still persists to this day and so we see and even within our own cities we see how gentrification is taking over in communities but communities that were historically redlined so they were redlined into being segregated and people black and brown communities being pushed into these these spaces also this whole notion of the social construction of race like what is race do we know what race is so we see it on federal forms right we see what are the what are the racial categories African-American or black Hispanic ethnicity there's other now right yes Asian yes what else white Native American but these are social constructions because if you go to Brazil they have over 200 categorizations for individuals Hispanic does not exist outside of the United States and so that's a social construction grounded within geographic spaces does that make sense if you go so my husband's Haitian he grew up in New York if I when I would go to New York they would say that I was Spanish right and so geographically in New York Spanish was identified as people who speak Spanish but they were Puerto Ricanos there were Dominicans there were Salvadoran years they were all sorts of different nationalities but that was what being Hispanic is here in the Pacific Northwest we have mostly in when I was growing up in Hood River there were mostly Mexican immigrants and so anyone who spoke Spanish automatically was Mexican so I want us to understand that within the research on Afro-Latinidad and student affairs and higher and higher education these were the two things that I identified was that identity was embedded within the this complicated history of slavery and because Afro Latinos presented black they presented as black they were often assumed to be African-American but my students the people who I was interviewing they understood that the legacy and the history of African-Americans was not theirs and they were very transparent in that process so I will get back to that in a little bit and so what happens with Afro Latinos and Afro Latinidad is that this they identify they develop this gerasinated identity which means basically this identity that is truncated right pieces cut up into small pieces and it's based on the social construction of geography how many of you know that there's a Spanish-speaking country in Africa Spanish speaking country in Africa I want to see your hands up high and so for those if the other people look around very few right but what's the name of the country so for middle schoolers now you know geography right you didn't know you're gonna learn geography but here you go equatorial New Guinea okay are they considered Latinos why not they speak Spanish but Brazilians don't speak Spanish they speak Portuguese and they're considered Latinos that's the messiness with the social construction is what I'm trying to get at is that it's socially constructed and because it's so messy the lines are often blurred this also this notion of literary discursive separation of blackness and brownness within the United States if you are black you cannot possibly be brown we've identified this time and time again so Afro Latinos are positioned in the middle where they can't possibly be Afro Latinos and now it's more accepted with Cardi B being you know being very vociferous about being Afro Latina and what that means but she also talks about being questioned about that identity and then also this racialized subjectivity of misty socket in black America I'm sorry this racialized subjectivity of being misty souls in black Americans so what is a misty soul I like to do I like to do community participation what's a misty soul or misty song okay so mixed other people one more person what about my middle schoolers Mestizaje is the number one term that Latinos living in the United States adopt Mestizaje is a mixture that comes from this historic legacy this is a trans and I'll come back to Mestizaje in a little bit because I define it transatlantic slave trade how many of you are familiar with this map and so for a lot of people when I do presentations even when I uncover this I was shocked but when you look when people were enslaved from Africa and brought to the to the Americas you will see that the grand majority went to South America and Central and the Central America and the Caribbean five percent came to the United States so when we think about Afro descendants and we think about the descendants of Africans we also have to expand our definition of what that means and that it goes beyond the United States oftentimes we are victims of our own education and oftentimes in the United States is very US centric but we also don't talk about these things so we think about Afro descendents and we think about Afro Latinos it's a huge population and it makes up a great part of who we are within Latin America so as a Mexicana who presents Mexicana I wasn't forced to see this but this is also the background of the PowerPoint presentation but the Spaniards they were meticulous record keepers they kept records on everything and so one of the things that they developed were castas and so castas is essentially a ranking of mixtures and so at the top left hand side you will see that it was espanol with amestiza and at the very bottom you can't see it because of the of the what's this called some close captioning thank you it's two black people africanos Afro descendants right and so they began to create this categorization and ranking of individuals this was in Mexico where I thought that there were no afro mexicanos now Mexico actually counts afro mexicanos and afro descendents and we actually and you know this isn't part of the presentation but I as I was doing research I found out that Guerrero was the first black president in the Americas in Mexico there's a state named after Guerrero yanga was a libertador an enslaved person who ran away from being enslaved and founded the first free pueblo in the Americas in Mexico and we mexicanos and I consider myself mexicana we erase that history and there's so much richness and pride in that are there we have a state named Guerrero so I started off with my positionality and I like to question things so I said but how did we get to the point where we begin to uphold colorism so remember we talked about what colorism was how do we get to a point where minoritized individuals individuals who are people of color buy into the notion of colorism and I started asking questions and the more I looked dun dun dun oh one of the things I wanted to say was also the crown and religion so the crown of Spain actually they funded the exploration into the colonization into the Americas into in Mexico and so that was there was a large religious component associated with it but then I started looking at images of who is a Latino who is a Latina OX and so we have Celia Cruz and we have Cardi B and we have Eleanor Choa and we have Amara la Negra and we have Shusha and we have these are all Latinos and when you look at that and you say wait a minute but that's not a Latino within the social construction of what we have in our head then I began to question well then what is a Latino do you have the same question because look at the diversity here and so my research through my research I came to find and that Afro-Latino OX is our neither biracial nor multiracial as we define them within the United States but rather rich amalgamation of historical mixture between Europeans conquist European conquistadores various indigenous groups and also blacks and so when we think about Afro-Latinidad we have to then rupture away from what we've been taught about the social construction of the rupture from the federal guidelines of black white indigenous does that make sense so the problem ethno-racial categories so ethno-racial means categories that are based on race so ethno-racial one race categories are grounded and constructed within geographic spaces so I talked a little bit about how there's there's there's blacks against in California so the mixture of black and African Americans and then you have then you have people who identify as Afro descendents you have people who identify as Spanish even Latinos in which took me a while to understand identify as Spanish within the within New York area but then you have people in my study I found students who who identified as Garifuna right Garifuna indigenous native peoples from Central America you have people who identify as mestizos we have people who identify as mulatto knowing that mulatto was utilized in a negative term they identify as mulatto and so we begin to find people who are identifying beyond the social construction of categories that the federal government has positioned for us but what we also need to understand is that within the United States we have this black white racial binary and so oftentimes when we talk about race relations it's often positioned from one side is black the other side is white and black right and so what ends up happening is that our conversations tend to stop there when we want representation we want diversity it's always well black people this white people that and what has happened is that it has created a negative experience for everyone because then representation all in a sudden becomes black when black individuals don't even have a voice in a lot of what happens also this racial binary dominates the formation of knowledge so we think about education and when I was doing extensive research I came to find out that in fact we weren't really talking about the black-white racial binary but what ends up getting into textbooks and into research was often falling a line falling along the federal guidelines so Latino who's a Latino I don't know who's white who's Native American who's Asian American and so these they also control the formation of knowledge because in order to receive grants so you all don't know this but as faculty members we have to apply for grants in order to do research and so we have to use those categories if we decide to not use those categories we don't get funding it's very difficult to get funding beyond those categories so it impacts the way research is conducted and the type of research that is produced so it limits our ontological groundings and terminology for assessing at the validity of race and ethnicity that's the conclusion that I came to so going back to how do we how does this racial binary and it all ties into MLK I promise I promise I wanted to understand then how is slave how was slavery justified because as a person I can't imagine inflicting pain on communities entire communities entire villages and so I said how do you convince masses of people to do that and so then I I did research and I identified the and you know there's limited text out there but it's something that I arrived at which was there's this curse of ham and so the curse of ham is that ham walked into his father walked in on his father his father was naked lying drunk and so ham walked out and told his siblings that their father was lying drunk but he saw him naked and so that was a big sin his brothers came and walked backwards and put the blanket on top of their father and that way they didn't see him naked well ham was cursed by his father that was the the curse of ham the curse of cane cane killed his brother and so God placed upon him a marker and so there was this notion of okay well ham and cane they're sinister individuals in history so there was this narrative that was depicted that said black people were the descendants of both bloodlines and because there was a mark placed upon them then it must be black skin and so that justification was utilized to justify the enslavement of individuals because when it was it was in a time when the Bible ruled and when the Bible had high influence and so justification of slavery was passed on in that way mestizaje josebas kinsuelos how many of you have heard of josebas kinsuelos okay so la raza cósmica the fifth race josebas kinsuelos was a Latin American philosopher in 1910 Mexico just like many Latin American countries had just gone post revolution and they were finding their independence but the country was divided it was so divided that they needed something to bring people together but they still the Spanish descendants still wanted to maintain control so what they ended up doing was that Latin American philosophers josebas kinsuelos in Mexico in particular developed this notion of la raza cósmica the cosmic race he was a descendant of Spaniards and he was one of the elite classes in Mexico so the cosmic race and his philosophy went like this that the cosmic race would one day rise and be superior than even the white Europeans because they were a race they were a mixture of indigenous black and European and so what would happen was essentially that they would rise to become more dominant and so a lot of people in the in the United States who are descendants of Latin American or have lineage in Latin America because there was no identity formation within the United States they adopted mestizaje as this term right like idealistic term I'm going to become like superior like everybody wants to be superior we're gonna become superior and so mestizaje took on this notion of pride but what we weren't told is that mestizaje is actually Darwinian term and so for my middle schoolers I know that you know what Darwin Darwin who Darwin is right who's Darwin there's a famous saying survival of the fittest right and so what Vasquezuelos believed was that eventually over time the mestizos would continue to rise but you would have to breed out the brute and by hit by that definition he meant black and also the ignorant by that definition he meant indigenous and so eventually what would result was this likeness towards European but that included the European descendants the Spaniard descendants that lived in Mexico and then the Americas and so in that case when we look at the definition of mestizaje when we begin to look at it because more complex right now it's also a Darwinian term and so finally going into the colonies and in the Americas how do we understand racial formation within the United States we started I started looking at colonies and what colonies had established as blood fraction statutes so how many of you know what blood fraction statutes are back there so what is it blood fraction like counting I'm half this ethnicity half this ethnicity or a quarter this a quarter that depending on what your parents were and how they identified or how they were identified by others yeah and we've heard the one drop of black blood renders you all the way black all the way black right and so we've heard these things and so that started in the colonies and they also had anti miscegenation policies which meant that racial mixture was criminal illegal and so in this way just like in mestizaje the notion of mestizaje there was the whole notion of the castas right remember we saw the castas were where European mixtures were at the top and then African black mixtures were at the bottom and essentially this upheld these these beliefs but now through policy so the legacy of colonization is one large theme that I continue to uncut that I that I continue to look at and I look at the invasion of the Americas and this one drop rule is very different within the United States than Latin America in Latin America one drop of Spanish blood got you closer to whiteness whereas in the United States one drop of black or black blood rendered you black right so how do we then tease this out in the context of Afro Latinidad and their experiences as them trying to find identity and belonging within either category so it amounted to this loss of identity and family history so enslaved slavery essentially it ripped apart entire communities right villages were torn apart but that legacy continues just like I started off with my name and I said gotta see I is my dad's lineage Medina is my mother's lineage we are able to trace back who we are by our name but what happens when entire families are ripped apart you can't do that you don't have the ability to trace back who you are and oftentimes that's why ancestry DNA and all these things are so popular because we want to know where we come from and we want to understand who we are but the similar similar situation to what happened in the Americas happened in the United States happened in in Latin America where indigenous communities were also torn apart and you saw the transatlantic slave trade map where massive amounts 95% of individuals who were enslaved in Africa were taken to the Americas that exact same thing happened and so this whole notion of historical mis representation and exploitation has occurred across the Americas but we're often only taught one side which is within the United States so when I started looking at this literature I wanted to see what my role was within this within perpetrating these lies and that's why I started looking more into discriminatory policies and how these discriminatory policies are being played out in the United States today so cities are becoming more diverse but hyper segregated and so even though schools have been desegregated right legally desegregated they're becoming segregated through SES so now through neighborhoods through social economic status so we see hyper segregation and a lot of the communities they're even more segregated than they have been in past years especially in urban epicenters historical redlining we still see the effects of historical redlining to this day where you will cross the street and go to schools that are better funded and have better teachers and have better resources and less student enrollment and so yes children who go to these schools are going to perform because they have the support at their schools but their but children across the way are expected to do the same which much with much less so I wanted to understand and connect the dots between the legacy of colonization policies such as misogynation such as racism within our legal system even though we say that it's supposed to be arbitrary or that it's that it's supposed to be what's the word unbiased right it's it's it's often not so then thinking about schooling and policy deculturalization has happened to every minoritized community and deculturalization spring says is the stripping children of their culture and replacing it with the dominant groups and so I talked a little bit about how my experience was also shaped and formed and the reason why I do this research the reason why I do this research is because I want my children to know that they're Afro-Latinos that they're Haitians and that they should be proud of who they are so understanding who they are and where you come from gives you voice but above all it gives you a strong foundation to be able to stand on and so when someone tells you lies Christopher Columbus my daughter is in first grade and so I taught her I told her I taught her about Christopher Columbus and she created a booklet and she took it to her teacher and she said this is the real story of Christopher Columbus and what is her teacher going to say no that's not true so her teacher sent me a message and she said thank you for empowering your daughter to do that and so now we have to be able to understand that the history and what's happening today matters right and so for our younger kids and for all of us to be able for as educators to be able to understand that history continues to impact how we see ourselves how I see myself within a group full of people versus how my students see themselves so in my classroom what I do I speak Spanish I teach in Texas I decided to teach in Texas because I love speaking Spanish and that was denied from me my name Claudia Garcia Lewis I introduced myself like that all the time and at first I was really shy right deculturalization happened to me they took my name they made me feel ashamed of being bilingual right and I didn't have anything proud to stand on because I felt that I was inferior because my educational system taught me that I was inferior and so part of my process and going through this research is also trying to understand where I lie so now as a professor I have the opportunity to force because students are in there and they have to take the class right force conversations about the history when we have these conversations there's resistance but resistance also means that there is some sort of insecurity talking about it when we talk about race and racism and colorism and prejudice these are heavy topics when we talk about historical discrimination that's painful for both people who are benefiting from it but then also for people whose families have endured it and so coming to this notion of perpetual foreigners it doesn't matter who you are if you even Native Americans feel this notion of being perpetual foreigners indigenous peoples to this land feel like they're foreigners like they don't belong like they're on someone else's land because when we feel powerless we feel like guests who don't have rights and so I wanted to understand how our schooling reinforces this notion of being perpetual foreigners and you know being raised as a in a traditional Mexicana household my parents always said you don't question the teacher the teacher knows best and so when my teachers would send notes to my parents Claudia is doing this or is not doing this my parents would and I would say like no puppy I did everything I was an ESL till I was in fifth grade but I learned how to speak English in the United States I immigrated when I was four but I was an ESL 10 I was in fifth grade and so when I would tell my parents I don't want to go to that class like I don't learn anything I know how to open the door close the door that's the window like I knew all that stuff and the teacher would say no we still need a keeper here and my parents would say Claudia you don't question the teachers they know best for you researchers took those experiences and they said Latino parents are disengaged they're not involved in their children's education they don't want to be involved in what's going on in the classroom and you see how these cultural translations right where parents are respecting the teacher gets interpreted through someone's perspective as not wanting to be involved in your children's education so I do this with my students I encourage them and push them to have these difficult conversations and I bring in scholarship that rejects this notion of deculturalization and we know that diversity benefits whom mostly white middle-class individuals because they come from more homogeneous communities than people of color do and so we know that affirmative action has benefited mostly white women but then we're told when we're a person of color and we're walking through campus that we are the affirmative action case and so I push my students to think about what that means for them but then also what it means for the students that they will be teaching because I teach in a program for an higher education program and every single interaction that you have with students and every single interaction that you have with parents and community members will forever inform how they see themselves in relation to education this is a matter of life or death and I'm not just saying it because it sounds good it really is it's people's livelihoods when someone is discouraged from coming back to the classroom you're not only impacting them you're impacting their future families and their grandchildren because they will be able to see the possibilities and so when we're forced to believe that we're foreigners perpetual foreigners right in every single space we inhabit if we're perpetual foreigners and we never feel like we belong or that we're good enough that impacts how we are how we feel and how we speak I used to be petrified petrified I used to my heart would like pound out of my chest every time I had to talk in class I hated to talk in class even as a doctoral student I hated to talk in class I was scared because my first language was Spanish I was scared to read out loud because I didn't want to mess up but most of all I was scared of what others would think of me I didn't want to speak in a way that made my voice be scared right so like that you know where you can't breathe it's scary and even now I get questioned when I when I talk in class students push back people push back oh one of us and so that's called the imposter then position of identity but the imposter syndrome we have been imposed on to us this notion of being imposters and not being able to be in spaces that were designed to keep us out so the boy one of the most important thought scholars in our in our history said the problem of the 20 20th century is a problem of the color line the question as to how far differences of race which show themselves chiefly in the color of the skin and the texture of the hair will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing the utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization and so many philosophers can have continued to quote this but out golf who's a who's a brilliant scholar said if Dubois were alive today he'd probably tell us that the problem of the 21st century will prove to be the lines between communities of color or the question to cross ethnic relations and so what I'm here to do today and to challenge and you know in the spirit of MLK MLK not only brought together communities from across the board but he walked across and joined brown communities so the March on Washington has been in history it's a it was an important March but what we don't hear about was how he reached over to Gilberto Gerna Valentin and gave him 15 minutes to speak to the Latino community but he asked him to speak in Spanish these are examples of black and brown bridging one another Cesar Chavez is a historical figure for the Latino community and MLK sent him numerous telegraphs when when Cesar Chavez was on hunger strikes and leading efforts in California for farm workers and one of the one of the quotes that I love said our separate struggles are really one a struggle for freedom for dignity and for humanity so when we think about MLK bringing people together and celebrating MLK I know many of us marched but then we forget once we leave that March that the real work is bridging together minoritized marginalized communities so that we see each other through our unit through our through our mutual experiences of rejection and hardships finally People's March he was assassinated prior to before the People's March but he called upon Chicano movement organizers and he said we need to build we need to bridge our communities please organize and let's get us all out there and so Bert Corona Corgi Gonzales and Ray Stegerina were were the prominent figures of the Chicano movement and MLK reached out to them so you know as it's MLK week social media feeds are filled with MLK and and all of the things that he has done he visited Puerto Rico and and was also an ally to Puerto Rican cause and we know Puerto Rico has been on the news lately for for many things but what MLK did is what Alcoff said we needed to do we need to bridge the black and brown communities marginalized communities and so I want to end with this quote because I know my time is up in the spirit of MLK when we look at modern man we have to face the fact that modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast with a scientific and technological abundance we've learned to fly the air as birds we've learned to swim the seas as fish yet we haven't learned to walk the earth as brothers and sisters and so this notion of unity we can't have unity without understanding history and we can't understand history without having difficult conversations about who we are and what we represent in the now and so I did not ask to be born who I am but I do have the obligation to make space for individuals who don't get into spaces that I am in and so that I think is the legacy of MLK is making sure that we create spaces for people who do not have access to those spaces it's not about talking for them it's about making sure that every single thing we do we're bridging gaps and we're making sure we build bridges rather than building walls thank you so much