 Thank you so much for being here, welcome to the library, we're so happy to see your faces and at this in-person program and welcome to all of you all in Zoomland. Today's program is with author Dante King, I'm Shauna Sherman, manager of the African American Center and I'm so thrilled to be welcoming Dante into this space to share his new book, The 400-Year Holocaust. I first met Dante when he was a trainer at the city's DHR department and his presentations were on point cataloging anti-black racism in the United States so much so that there were sometimes the information in them were tough to hear but he was always there supporting us telling us you know it's going to get deep. So we also work together again on the Black Employee Alliance whereas dedication to improving the workplace for black employees in the city was very impressive and he's always demonstrated a vast knowledge of our history so it seems natural that he's come out with a book and so I just want to give so much congratulations to Dante for publishing his new book, it's such a great accomplishment. Before we get started with our program I want to acknowledge that we are on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramay Tushaloni who are original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula and continue to live, work, and play here today. As the indigenous stewards of this land and in accordance with their traditions the Ramay Tushaloni have never ceded loss nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place as well as for all people who reside within their territory. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramay Tushaloni community and affirm their sovereign rights as First Peoples. As the African-American Center and following the lead of our city's reparations task force we also honor the gifts, resilience, and sacrifices of our black ancestors, particularly those who toiled the land and built the institutions that established this country's wealth and freedom despite never being compensated or fully realizing their own sovereignty. We acknowledge this exploitation of not only labor but of humanity and our working to repair some of the harms done by the public and private actors. Because of their work we are here and will invest in the descendants of their legacy. So now on to our show, I'd like to bring Alexis Kovins up to the stage who will tell us more about the program and introduce our special guests. Thank you. Hello everyone, welcome to an evening with author Bante King. My name is Alexis Kovins, I'm the Executive Director of the California Preterm Birth Initiative and was first exposed to Dante's work when I worked for the city and county and since my transition over to UCSF he has been instrumental in helping us advance the work of black maternal health at UCSF and we are extremely grateful to the public library for hosting this event. I'm going to read Dante's bio. Dante King is a native of San Francisco. He's the author of the 400 year Holocaust, White America's Legal, Psychopathic and Sociopathic Black Genocide and the Revolt Against Critical Race Theory. Dante is also a historian, scholar, thought leader, facilitator and coach. Dante has worked and consulted for more than 15 years as a human resource management professional specializing in the implementation of anti-racist practice and organizational development and change. Dante was previously Deputy Director for the San Francisco Department of Public Health where he led the development and implementation of workforce and health equity policies and programs. Dante has consulted and led anti-racism courses for Stanford Medical School, John Hopkins and currently teaches a course through UCSF School of Medicine called Understanding the Roots of Racism and Bias, Anti-Blackness and its Links to Whiteness, White Racism Privilege and Power. Before we hear from Dante, we're going to hear a few remarks from Marguerite Malloy. She is an attorney and an activist and she also wrote the foreword for his book so I will bring up Ms. Marguerite Malloy to share remarks with us. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. First off, I am delighted to have the opportunity to introduce Dante. He is a warm and centered spirit. He is my friend and he's a comrade and it's my pleasure and my honor and my privilege to introduce him to you a little bit more personally than to read his bio. I do this because I think that if we can center ourselves for a moment or two and think about why we decided to come tonight, what we hope to hear, what we hope to learn, what we hope to be exposed to, I think that that would help us all be very present for the moment because this is going to be an experience. This is not going to be the traditional lecture where you hear a lot of information that one day you hope you can use or a lecture where you hear a lot of information and hope that one day you'll get a chance to follow up on that. This is an opportunity for you to look at yourselves, to look at the communities in which we live, to look at the institutions and the systems in which we work and play and recreate and leisure and love. This is an opportunity for you to look at yourselves and to recognize that the stories we've been told, the history that we've been offered, that that's not the whole story, that there's so much more to the existence and the experiences and the trauma and the pain and the anguish and the lives and the loves and the hearts that we've all experienced, particularly as black people in this country. But also what Dante does is helps us realize that the things that we've experienced, the pain, the trauma that we've experienced is a stain on everyone, people who are not black, people who have not experienced the exact trauma or pain, but it's a stain on this country, a stain on the world because you know the United States leads the world in so many ways. So I'm hoping that you will open your hearts and your minds and be very present today to hear from someone who has really become a scholar, who's lived a life that has drawn him to this work and a life that has drawn him to be an educator and to share this because so many of us know things and don't share what we know. We'll know things and hope that if we share them, oh my goodness, what will people think? As I was on the ferry on my way over today, someone asked me what I was coming over to do and when I told him I was coming to do, you kind of saw the head turn like, okay, I guess I don't want to talk about that topic. So so many of us have information, have experiences and knowledge and we don't want to share it, but Dante has devoted his life, his presence, his being, to sharing, to educating and to helping us all realize the impact of anti-blackness in this country. So it's my pleasure, my honor to introduce my friend and my comrade, Dante King. Hello again, everyone. Let me turn this on. Hello. All right, there we go. All right, well, thank you very much to all of you who are here for being here, and I want to thank the people who are joining in from online. I first want to acknowledge Alexis Cobbins, who is my sister and one of my best friends. She has encouraged, supported and just ushered me in my work along the way and through so many doors. I've been able to touch so many people. She mentioned that I teach a course at UCSF and it's because of her bringing me to UCSF and me getting a contract there, meeting other people, indoors opening. So I owe you so much and I say it all the time. And then Marguerite Malloy is just a dear sister. She's like an angel to me. She found out that I was doing this work and was in the process of writing this book and agreed without any hesitation or thought to edit my book. She read the whole book chapter by chapter. We went back and forth and she edited some things. She gave me some additional information of resources which I used and included. And I just appreciate her so much and she also wrote the foreword. So if you read the book, she's the one that wrote the foreword. Her name is on the cover. Someone was like, why would you put the name of someone that edited your book on the cover? And it's because we use the labor of black women without giving them credit, you know? So I also want to acknowledge my family who's here and I would not be here today if it was not for my mom. Mom, can you stand up for a second? This is my mother, Deborah King Cooper, and she has just, we underestimate or we undervalue how much nurturing and love and support, mental reinforcement, affection, what that does in terms of building someone's confidence. And at every turn of me either being scared or fearful, my mother has been there. She's been my best friend and I'm not a religious person. She is my religion. I say that because I worship the ground that she walks on. My mother, I would wake up to notes on the mirror with my mom writing. She'd have to leave for work and there would be a posted note on the mirror without fail almost every morning. Or every morning, good morning and hello, my beautiful and wonderfully made son. I've stayed many of them because when I think about it, it just brings me to tears. But whether there were challenges in school or in my employment experience, she's just been right there. And so I could never thank you enough. I could never repay you and I adore you. I also want to acknowledge my brother who's in the back, DeWine King. He's just my best friend, Marcel Walker, who's here somewhere. That's my little brother, DeWine's older. I want to say thank you to my auntie Lynn who's here, my mother's sister. They're road dogs. They go everywhere together. You won't see one without the other. And I lastly want to say thank you to my father who's back there. Really short note about that. My dad and I were not close or haven't been close. He's always been in my life. But there were some things that I didn't understand about him and I didn't understand his life. And this work that I do, understanding the ways in which white people have established a culture that vilifies and is treacherous against black men and especially black men who are masculine and have the ways in which this culture has been designed to exploit us, I had not humanized my dad's experiences. And once I was able to do that and really see him as a person and say, oh my god, this is what you were navigating as you grew up in this racist world as a black man, my heart just opened for him. And so I just want you to know I love you with all my heart. I really, really do. And lastly, thank you to the San Francisco Public Library for hosting this event. Thank you to Shana Sherman, my dear sister, who was just a rebel in a lot of the things that we were trying to do within the Black Employees Alliance. Kimberly Cox, who also is a part of that group, and just there every step of the way as we try to change and improve circumstances for employees in San Francisco. So with that said, I'm going to go into some of the content and we'll get started with the program. My work, can I say this in my book? I wrote my book for Black people. I wrote my book inspired by many other authors, the likes of James Baldwin, the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois, the likes of Dr. Joy DeGru, Angela Davis, and so many other authors and literaries who have either written papers and or published books on this topic. And so I see my book as an additional contribution to a conversation that has been ongoing for centuries. I'm just adding to it in a different way. But I wrote my book for Black people and anyone who wants to understand and who cares about what Black people have endured and what we still endure ongoing in this country. I also wanted to ensure that I used a framework that challenged white supremacy at its core in the way in which racism, which is a very ambiguous term, is discussed in the mainstream. You know, people name, oh, we're dealing with racism. No, we're dealing with anti-Blackness. And so just as much as this country was built to celebrate uplift and use Eurocentricity as the standard, this country was also developed in ways that not only exploited Black people, but it created a cultural orientation, behavioral orientations where people have been programmed to mistreat, to abuse, to undervalue, to see Black people and think of and deal with Black people as less than and it's deeper than implicit bias. It's a psychology. And so the reason I use the terms white America's legal, psychopathic and sociopathic Black genocide, because when you begin to understand the actions that were taken to shape culture, you will see that it's diabolical. So I'm going to go into this. I've simplified this definition of anti-Blackness. So anti-Blackness is a white American legal, social, cultural, economic, institutional value and belief system. It involves the deprioritization of humans labeled as Black people, as well as the criminalization, hypernegativity, hyperscrutiny and negative positioning of Black people and or Blackness through all aspects of American life. And so anti-Blackness, since it is cultural, we experience it mostly and mainly by white people because it's just innate for them because everything in this country whether we are discussing language, whether we're discussing the way that we dressed, whether we are looking at the way that we expect someone to show up and present in terms of whether their hair is neat or combed or they're well-spoken or articulate or intellectual or smart has all been framed through a white Eurocentric measuring rod. Okay? At the same time, because traditionally Black people were coming from a different linguistic orientation, so we sounded differently when we spoke, you know, our hair texture and all of these things that are cultural affects and specific to us because they weren't seen as acceptable and through a lot of force and domination we've been made to conform and assimilate into this culture just like every other non-white group. But the significance of anti-Blackness is that we experience it from white people but we also experience it from Asian people who don't understand how they have been programmed in this way, many of them don't. We experience it from Latinx, Hispanic people, and we also experience it from Black people who are looking at us to present like white people have designed that we should be showing up in every way. So some examples that I go to and some of you that are familiar with my work may have seen some of these. So this is the 1600s, right? So picture this and I want you to close your eyes for just a second. Picture being in a context where you have been brought to a new region, a new country against your will and people are raping you, they're raping your son, your eight-year-old son, your nine-year-old daughter. They're screaming for help. These people are leading church services. This is happening every day. You get whipped for having a baby because you've been raped by a white man and you've had this child and now you get whipped, 30 lashes on your back. How would you feel? Think about the emotions that would come up in your body. Think about the effects and the impacts that are developing amongst an entire group of people who now form a community out of this trauma. All right, you can open your eyes. So you start fighting back. How many of you would fight back, my show of hands? You have nothing to lose. And so because you start fighting back, you start resisting the forced labor. You start resisting the trauma and the atrocities that are being inflicted upon you. The people who are in charge and they are responsible for designing the white American legal system, they begin to create laws. And some of the laws are casual killing act, they say. Whereas the only law enforced for the punishment of refractory servants resisting their master mischiefs or overseer cannot be inflicted upon Negroes nor this obstinacy of many of them. Be suppressed by other than violent means. So because Negroes are being stubborn, they're not going along with the terrorism, we need to use stronger force. Be it enacted and declared by this grand assembly if any slave resists his master or other by his master's order correcting him and by the extremity of the correction should happen to die. That his death shall not be accounted a felony. But the master or the other person appointed by the master to punish him. Now this could be another black person that we put in charge, an Indian person, a white person. So it's training everyone to be able to degrade and denigrate black people. So it says the person shall be acquitted from molestation since it cannot be presumed that premeditated malice which alone makes murder a felony should induce any man to destroy his own estate. So because we see these people as property, because they are seen as property by white people, we're gonna give white people the benefit of the doubt. They would chastise them, but they would never wanna kill them because they would lose an asset. So we're gonna absolve, we're gonna create a culture that absolves you of killing black people. That's 1669, here's 1680. We're at the frequent meeting of considerable numbers of Negro slaves under pretense of feast and burials as judged of dangerous consequence, for prevention whereof for the future, be it enacted by the king's most excellent majesty buying with the consent of the General Assembly and it is hereby enacted by the authority aforesaid that from and after the publication of this law, it shall not be lawful for any Negro or other slave to carry or arm himself with any club, staff, gun, sword, or any other weapon of defense or offense, nor to go or depart from his master's ground without a certificate from his master, mischievous or overseer, and such permission not to be granted but upon particular and necessary occasions. And every Negro or slave so offending not having a certificate as aforesaid shall be sent to the next constable who is hereby enjoined and required to give the said Negro 20 lashes on his bare back will laid on and so sent home to his said master, mischievous or overseer, and it is further enacted by the authority aforesaid that if any Negro or other slave shall presume or lift up his hand in opposition against any Christian shall for every such offense upon due proof may there pay attention to this by the oath. That just means somebody claims that you try to do something to them. You don't need any proof because they are white. They're telling the truth. So you don't need any proof, right? So you appear before a magistrate and the Negro is gonna have and receive 30 lashes on his bare back will lay on and it is further and it is hereby further enacted by the authority aforesaid that if any Negro or other slave shall absent himself from his master service and lie hidden lurking in obscure places committing injuries to the inhabitants and shall resist any person or persons that shall by any lawful authority be employed to apprehend and take the said Negro. So we're gonna get Kim, we're gonna get Angela, we're gonna get Chia Maka, we're gonna get Robert to go out and search for the Negroes. And if they happen to kill them, it's okay because it shall be lawful for such person or persons to kill the said Negro or slave so lying out and resisting and that this law be once every six months published at the respective county courts and parish churches within this colony. So we're gonna have prayer, we're gonna hear from our soloist and now we have an announcement that says if Negroes invoke or evoke any type of fear or threat to you, you can report it and they're gonna get 20 to 30 lashes on their bare back and if they go out and they run away and resist the term, the forced labor, rape, murder, they seen it happen to their father, they seen it happen to their mother, if they seen it happen to their daughter, but if they run away from that circumstance, we can dispatch you, you can go out and murder them. Now let's have communion. And this is the context everyone that the white American culture is being built upon even though that language does not appear until 1681 in a law concerning marriage. That's the first time you see the term white appear in America in a legal sense, okay? And it's concerning, I go, I tell about the story of my book, it was because an Irish woman wanted to marry a black man. And so she begged her boss at the time who happened to be the Lord Governor of the colony of Maryland. And he allowed her to marry him against his desires but he went along with it. And so you see this law appear the next month. I think that was August, September rolls around and the law says, three born and other white women. That's the first time you see it. And so they develop the organization that is called white people. And at that moment, so a lot of people when they talk about anti-blackness or racism, we talk about what's been done to black people. But I want you to consider this. What's happening in developing the white identity in the white mindset, in white emotionality as people are being programmed to be able to commit such actions and exhibit such behavior without consequence, it's unchecked. And this is, this constitutes, you have Christian people doing this, this constitutes. And I want everyone to say this with me, white, morality, it's moral to do these things. So if you go on to 1705 and this is part of a statute that's packaged that includes a lot of the laws that have been established in Virginia during this period. These examples are from the colony in Virginia. It says, and if any slave resists his master or owner or other person by his or her order correcting such slave and shall happen to be killed in such correction, it shall not be accounted felony but the master owner in every such other person. Everyone say that in every such other person. So giving correction shall be free and acquit of all punishment and accusation for the same as if such accident never happened. And now we're gonna clarify some things because, and this is the part that I want everyone to understand this overemphasis on the institution and predicament of enslavement. There is an overemphasis on that. I don't wanna undervalue or speak less in downgrade with people experienced, but I want you to pay attention to the language in this statute. And also if any Negro, Milano or Indian bond or free, bond or free shall at any time lift his or her hand in opposition against any Christian not being Negro, Milano or Indian. So who are we talking about? Yes, because by this time in the mid 17th century around the 17th, I go to a court case in 1767 and also legislation in 1767 that basically said we can now convert blacks and Indians to become Christian and prior to that year, prior to this law, it was illegal for Christians to be enslaved, but they made it legal so that baptism didn't change the condition of freedom or bondage. So we can baptize these people, they'll be Christian and remain enslaved. Okay, so if they're now distinguishing and making distinctions between which Christians can do harm to which Christians. If you're black, you can do harm to a black Christian. That's fine, you can have that in fighting. If you're Indian, you can fight a black person or Christian, that's not protected under this law. The only people who are protected under this law is white people. So for every such offense proved by the oath of the party, there goes that word, oh, receive on his or her bareback 30 lashes well laid on, cognizable by a justice of the peace for that county wherein such offense shall be committed. 30 lashes of this, it's training black people, free or enslaved to have a difference to any and all white people. So let me ask you and you can just turn to your neighbor and answer this question. Which white person would you trust? It's setting it up so that you are in a heightened degree at a heightened degree of fear every moment. Your safety depends on what white people think of you in any given moment. So what is not psychopathic or sociopathic about this? Then you get to the 18th century and they codify it's sanctioning color as the main condition of what we're looking at. So this is the Negro act of South Carolina 1740 and they say, section one declares all Negroes and Indians to be slaves, free Indians and amity with this government, Negroes, mulattoes and mestizos who are now free accepted. So the people who were alive at that point, if they were free, they remained free. But everyone else coming into the colony, anyone that's born into it, you're gonna be a slave if you're black or Indian. But here's the pivotal piece and take out your phones. I'm gonna have you take out your cell phones. Section two, under this provision, it has been uniformly held that color is prima facie evidence that the party bearing the color of a Negro, mulatto or mestizo is a slave, but the same prima facie result does not follow from the Indian color. Everyone type in, kiddo? Okay, that's my aunt. Oh my God, that's my dad's sister. Okay. Everyone type in prima, P-R-I-M-A, space, facie, F-A-C-I-E, what do you come up with? Who said that? Can you say that again? At first sight. At first sight. So anyone by sight who looks black or that they're mixed with black is a slave. Okay. In 1855, the Missouri court, a court in Missouri gave this instruction to a jury where a young black female who had been with this white man since she was eight, he started raping her at 14. She had bore two children by her. I mean by him, she had bore two children by him and she was pregnant with a third. And he continued to rape her through her pregnancy. And so someone agreed to represent her, her name was Celia, and she warned him, if you continue to do this to me, I'm going to kill you. She told his daughters that she was going, if they didn't keep him away from her, she was going to kill him. How desperate do you think she was? How desperate must one be being raped, having children and continuing to be raped through your pregnancy? You know nothing but trauma. And the reason that I take this approach in my work is because when we are taught history, because white people have detached their emotions from humanity, we learn history that way. And so we don't humanize the experiences of black people and or understanding of lived what they went through. And instead, we say ignorant things like, oh, our ancestors will be so proud. No, they won't, no they wouldn't. They didn't want to go through this. That's crazy. They didn't want to be here. They would not be proud. That's ridiculous and it is delusional. So he gave instruction to the jury, if Newsom was in the habit of raping the defendant who was his slave and went to her cabin that night, on the night he was killed to rape her or for any other reason or purpose and was struck with a stick in the doorway and she happened to kill him, it's murder in the first degree. So they convicted her of murder. The jury sentenced her to death and they appealed it to the Supreme Court of Missouri. The state Supreme Court refused to overturn Celia's conviction, but her execution was delayed long enough for her to have the child and then she was hanged and the baby was stillborn. Can you imagine what type of anxiety courtesor must have been running through this young girl's body? She couldn't even bring a healthy child into the world because she was scared that she was gonna be murdered. We have to humanize the experiences of our ancestors to understand what it is we're going through now and we have to stop with the traumatic approach of you'll get over it. It's not that serious. You know, you can't live there. No, we need to create spaces where we can talk about our traumas or we can try to come together to build community, to organize against these racist systems of people that we have to deal with every day, every week because people say, well, black people are resilient. No, we're not. We're just dying earlier because we're holding the trauma in our bodies and we get so angry, it results in sweat running down our back. It results in with us going home at night because we're not speaking back to the people who are inflicting the pain. We're going home to get on the phone with our best friend and give it to them for two to three hours. How many of you have done that? Can't sleep. And then you die at 60. And you go, oh, but black people are so resilient. George V. State, this is the Supreme Court of Mississippi in 1859, they considered whether a trial court sentenced to death for a black male slave raping a nine year old girl was a legal sentence. The court concluded that the male slave could only commit rape upon a white woman. Here's what they said in the transcripts. The crime of rape does not exist in this state between African state, African slaves. Our laws recognize no marital status between slaves, their sexual intercourse is left to be regulated by their owners who can also rape them without any recourse or responsibility. The regulations of law as to the white race on the subject of sexual intercourse do not and cannot for obvious reasons apply to slaves because their sex is promiscuous. So because black women are promiscuous, they can't be raped. And this is a Supreme Court ruling. Florida, this is 53 years after slavery. And they say in this ruling, the Florida Supreme Court, that because black women are immoral, essentially, that they can't be raped. What has been said by some of our courts about an unchaste female being a comparatively rare exception is no doubt true where the population is composed largely of the Caucasian race. But we would blind ourselves to actual conditions if we adopted this rule where another race that is largely immoral constitutes an appreciable part of the population. McQuarter v. State, Alabama, 1953, they determined you can use the race of a person to determine whether or not they are rapist. In determining the question of intention, the jury may consider the social conditions and customs founded upon racial differences such as that the prosecutor ricks was a white woman and the defendant a Negro man. So because he's black, he's a rapist. This is legal precedent, legal precedent. My mother's mother was born in 1919. Her mother was born in 1889. My mother was born in the 50s. And these are the conditions and the circumstances that they had to look out for, that they had to navigate through. And then we say, well, why don't these students do as well as these students? Because we are expending 60% of, if not more, of our brain energy, of our emotionality on dealing with challenges that others in this context are not dealing with. The bar is much higher and we are still expected to be great. It is a setup. It is a setup. And so you have Brock Turner. And this is not too long ago, 2016. And the judge basically says, and then my decision to grant probation, because he raped sexually assaulted this student, the question I have to ask myself again, consistent with those rules of court is, is state prison for this defendant antidote to that poison? Is incarceration in prison, in state prison the right answer for that, for the poisoning of Jane's life? And trying to balance the factors in the rules of court, I conclude that it is not. And that justice would be best served ultimately with a grant of probation. So this is the value of having white skin. So you can be a rapist. And I have many more examples of, but I'm just gonna share two. This is November of 2021. And this judge says, this week, the article says, this week, Mr. Belcher was sentenced in the assault on MM and in sexual attacks on three other teenage girls. He raped four young girls facing up to eight years in prison. He was instead given eight years probation by a judge who said he agonized over the decision. I'm not ashamed to say that I actually prayed, here goes Christianity. I actually prayed over what is the appropriate sentence in this case because there was great pain. He prayed over it. And it just wasn't the right decision. But we have been pathologized as the prototype for rapist, as the prototype for criminal in a context of organized crime that has been committed by white people. But because we don't see it that way, it's not been normalized through that lens, we suffer. And we suffer through judging each other and judging other black people using a moral code that is not used for white people and for non-black people. Does that make sense? Okay. President Abraham Lincoln, I'm just gonna quote from a few of our presidents. And these people have been telling us who they were, we just haven't believed them. He says, I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. That I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters, or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. And I will say in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races, living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior. And I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. Here's the next president that followed Lincoln, Andrew Johnson. If blacks were given the right to vote, that would place every splay-footed, bandy shanked, humpback, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, nose, woolly-headed, ebb and colored in the country upon an equality with the poor white man. He says, as long as I am president, this will be a country for white men and a government for white men. Turn to your neighbor and say, and what do we see today? And then we say, oh, well, wow, we had a black president that was monumental. There's nothing monumental of using a black face as a puppet and a sign of symbolism to advance and perpetuate an agenda of white supremacy. And because we only look at that as progress because we come from an orientation of lack and have low expectations. It takes one person to be able to move into that neighborhood and we see that as progress, that's a tool of oppression. Only people who have come from deprivation and who have been deprived would see such as progress. It's insane. Lincoln, this is 1969, he says, you have to face the facts. And this is where we are, everyone. I'm sorry, Nixon, right, right. So Nixon, you have to face the facts. The whole problem is really the blacks. But key is to devise a system that recognizes this without appearing to. So if you understand and know anything about the eugenics movement or medicine and what white doctors were espousing back in the early 20th century and the early 1900s, they spoke about stopping access to black people's, about stopping black people's access to resources and organizing us and putting us into concentrated areas to live together and then cutting off our access to resources. They said that would solve the whole problem, the black problem in 100 years. Doctors will renown medical doctors such as Charles Davenport, Madison Grant. So I'm gonna show a video that demonstrates what black people were dealing with after the enslavement period. Because that's where I wanna focus and concentrate some of our attention because we're given this story as though these so many actions were taken to improve conditions and circumstances for black people. But you will see based on some of the connections that I will try to make in the time that I have left that things are the same today just as they were back then. So this video is called, this is an excerpt from the actual documentary, Slavery by Another Name. It's also a book that was written by Doug Blackman. With the end of Reconstruction, the nature of both crime and punishment in the South changed dramatically. In state after state and county after county, new laws targeted African-Americans and effectively criminalized black life. It was a crime in the South for a farm worker to walk beside a railroad. It was a crime in the South to speak loudly in the company of white women. It was a crime to sell the products of your farm after dark. Anything from spitting or drinking or being found to be drunk in public or loitering in public spaces could result in confinement. So there was an over exaggeration of African-American criminality during this time period. It's not to absolve all prisoners from having committed crimes, but there were many trumped up charges. One of the most infamous set of laws to come out of this period were the pig laws passed in Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, enhancing penalties for what had been previously misdemeanor offenses to now felony offenses. In Mississippi, theft of a pig worth as little as a dollar could mean five years in prison. In Tennessee, hard labor might result from stealing an 8-cent fence ring. But the most powerful, the most damaging of all of these laws were the vacancy statutes. In every sudden state, you became a criminal if you could not prove at any given moment that you were employed. Under slavery, most black crime was punished by slaveholders, leaving the courts to discipline whites. Now, only about 10% of those arrested were white. Now, what does this mean? Does this mean that white people are not committing crimes in the South? We know that's not true. Southern states had a history of placing prisoners with industries that would bear the cost of guarding and housing them in exchange for their labor. Now, states also began to charge fees renting prisoners to companies by the month. The highest rates were for the strongest workers and longest sentences. When you go to the 13th Amendment, one of the fascinating things about the text of that amendment is that it says that slavery is abolished, except in the case of a punishment for a crime. And within that wiggle room, what you see in it is that there's still the possibility of extending slavery, as it were, by another name. Convict leasing. The system of convict leasing to develop. It took time for the state to realize that prisoners, believe it or not, could be a source of profit. Once that revenue starts coming in, they're pleasantly surprised. This is new revenue we never had before. The state of Alabama earned $14,000 in its first year of convict leasing, 1874. By 1890, revenue was $164,000, roughly $4.1 million today. States throughout the South and hundreds of counties and cities were engaged in some form of leasing convicts to private industry. And it gave tremendous discretionary power for the private owner, either a landowner or a corporation or a coal mine, could be any business concern to do what they wanted with that African-American. So I want you to have some discussion just very brief. I'll give you two minutes with the person that's next to you or two people that are next to you or find someone in the room. What are you taking away from this? Because the entire legal apparatus is shaping culture and the agenda is not one that is centered on humanity and caring for people. It's transactional in nature. It's about money and power. And also what Cheryl Harris says in a paper that she wrote in 1993, which I use in my work as well, there is an inherent need that is built into white identity and white culture, an inherent need to subjugate other people to give yourself and your culture value. So the subjugation of black people is necessary in order for white people to have someone to feel superior to. Does that make sense? W.E.B. Du Bois says in black reconstruction in America that the conditions were so strenuous and so bad that black parents could even control their own children. You have no self-agency, no communal agency. How is that different from today? So I'm gonna give you two minutes to just what are you taking away? Just one thing and just have some conversation based on what I've shared up to this point. All right, if you hear my voice, clap once. If you hear my voice, clap twice. Okay, what was one thing that came up? What did you talk about? Anyone want to share? Marjorie? She's gonna bring you a mic. Thank you, Shawna. Because businesses and industry might need labor at any given time. They simply needed to signal that to the city or to the state. And the state would then go pick up, you spat on the sidewalk, you were out last night, you don't have a job, they would go, they would farm us for their own economic and that city or that state to look at the black folk in there. They must be criminals. So you begin to identify us as criminals. We are the majority in the prison, but in reality we're the majority in the prison because y'all need some labor. So if we create that environment that lists today that because you see the majority of us in the jail, we must be criminals. No, y'all need us in the jail. That's why we're in the jail, but we're in the jail and we must be criminals. Absolutely. And it reinforces that psychology in the white mind, in the black mind, to everybody, there's nothing but black people in jail. They must be doing something wrong. It's an implicit reaction. And these people, if you, the key factor that I want you to take away is that they had at every turn and have at every turn the ability to change laws to fit whatever agenda they want, to Margaret Reed's point. Oh, you spit on the sidewalk. If you cannot prove that you have a job, and I wanna clarify one thing, if you cannot prove that you have a job that white people recognize as employment, then you're going to jail. How do you survive that context and stay healthy and stay sane? It's an impossibility. And so we have to make room. Black people and people who care about black people, if you care about black people, you have to make room for white supremacist trauma and trauma caused by anti-blackness that is happening infinitely. Every day of our lives, I share examples in one of the last chapters of my book of four young girls that were laughing and playing at their school at lunchtime in New York in 2019. And they took them into the office and strip searched them, searched in their bras and panties because they suspected that they were on drugs. How is that any different than the legitimizing the white suspicion that I showed you in the law of 1680 or 1705? It's total control, mental, spiritual, emotional cycle, every physical, it's everything. So in 1866, the Civil Rights Act declares all persons born in the United States to be citizen without distinction of race or color or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude. And any citizen has the same right as a white person, as a white citizen to make and enforce contracts, sue and be sued, give evidence in court and inherit, purchase, lease, sale, hold and convey real and personal property. This is federal legislation and things at this period, during this period are not as they are now. And they're worse because you don't have a technology or a propaganda machine to show and demonstrate that states are not enforcing laws the way that Congress is writing them. Does that make sense? So black people still face terror and discrimination because the same people that went to war on behalf of the institution of enslavement now have the power to legislate laws and make court rulings for the people that they were trying to maintain enslavement for. And DuPois also talks about that in his work. Now these black people are put in the context, even though the Confederacy didn't win, they won. Because 95 to 99 of black people remain in the South until the early 20th century, okay? So you think progress. No state, this is the 14th Amendment. Two years later, no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law nor deny to any person within a jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. So we have citizenship, we're supposed to have equal protection under the law. But Dr. Wilson says, and this is for where we're going next, I keep trying to warn black people, your security does not reside in civil rights laws. A law is merely writing on the books and writing does not protect people. The law is only as strong as those who enforce it. And you've got the law written by your enemy and enforced by your enemy, which means that when the enemy decides to stop enforcing it, it's over for you. Or the enemy can decide to rewrite it. So you've got 1870 enforcement acts that are passed. This one prohibits people banding together or to go in disguise on the public highways or upon the premises of another because who's disguising themselves at this point to commit harm? You've got it. You've got the red shirt, you've got the KKK. So they create legislation to try and protect black people. The 1871 act, which is known as the KKK act, that also comes along and authorizes federal troops to protect black people down in the South who are being prohibited from being able to in for or act on their rights if they've been granted. So you've got this whole period of reconstruction, right? You think things are getting better. So, Kirk Shank comes along. The Colfax Massacre, 1873, where white people organized and they surround black people in a meeting center in Colfax, Louisiana. And they shoot into the center murdering approximately 150 black people who were meeting to decide who they were gonna nominate to run for office. And they were also organizing so that they could enforce their right to vote themselves. What does the Supreme Court decide in 1876? Once this case makes it up to the Supreme Court that the 14th Amendment was not designed to protect individuals against the actions of other individuals, okay? The Supreme Court overturned the convictions of the whites who were charged with conspiring to deprive those blacks of their constitutional rights, including the right to vote. In 1883, in the United States v. Harris, they held that the Court, the Force Act, the 1871 KKK act, a law passed to protect black Americans against violent terrorism that was unconstitutional because the 14th Amendment limited Congress to taking remedial steps against state action that violated the 14th Amendment and applied only to acts by states, not to acts of individuals. So what is this setting up as protections, as legal protections from white extremism are being dismantled by the Supreme Court? What do you think this sets up? For what? What is it set up of white people to do? They are authorized to commit extremist violence against black people and it is being facilitated by the American government. The highest court in the land, people, this is major because all you hear was so many black people got lynched during this period between 1883 and the 1960s, or whenever they say the cut-off period is, it's still happening now. But this is reinforcing the orientation that it is okay to commit murder against black people. It is the resurrection of the Casual Killing Act of 1669. And so let me go back, 1875, they enacted civil rights law. We wanna protect black people that they can enforce their rights to be able to in public accommodations have equal treatment in public accommodations, public transportation and to prohibit exclusion from jury service. What does the Supreme Court decide in 1883 that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 is unconstitutional and that it's okay to discriminate? Here's what they say. In the majority opinion, in the civil rights cases, Associate Justice Joseph P. Bradley struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, holding that the 13th Amendment merely abolished slavery and that the 14th Amendment did not give Congress the power to outlaw private acts of racial discrimination. So how much progress gets made? And then they say, you know what, black people, we don't want you with us. This is 1896. Yeah, so we're gonna make sure that you can't use the bathroom. You can't eat in the same places. You've gotta go through the back door. You've gotta go upstairs to the movie theater. You can't use this water fountain. What does that reinforce in black minds? What'd you say? In theory oratee that you do not matter at all, you don't have a modicum about you. And what does it enforce in the white mind? Because we talk about the trauma that's being done to black people. What's the trauma for white people? But let's reframe it. There's nothing superior about it. It's delusional. It's crazy when you need to make other people less in order for you to have esteem and value. Hey, Cheryl. And Cheryl, in front of you, is that Carol? See, I know people by their profiles. Good to see you both. But what you said is justification? Someone use the word authorize. It's authorization. It's the facilitation of codified cultural and legal terrorism. So you've got Strom Thurman, who's the governor of South Carolina. He was a U.S. Senator until 2002, but he ran for president in 1948. And he says, I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches. This is what he ran on. This is an excerpt from his presidential campaign speech. So I'm gonna play a video for you that will convey and add further clarity to what begins to prevail because of the orientation and foundation that's been laid by the Supreme Court of the United States. Understanding of the equal justice in 1892 was taking a serious risk. On the night of March 9th, when Wells was out of town, her friend Tom Morse and two others were jailed for defending themselves against several white men who had attacked Morse's grocery store. Mass vigilantes dragged Morse and his two friends from their cells to a deserted railroad yard. Morse cried out, tell my people to flee. There is no justice here. This is then she, a term that came to be applied to any mob killing of blacks, disheartened Wells. When she had come back to Memphis, she saw that the community was absolutely devastated and so was she. No one knew quite what to do. But when she read those words, she said, this is going to be her mission as well. And she begins to talk, begins to tell black Memphians, there is no justice for you here. The system is not working for us. No one is trying to get these killers of our young men. And it is, we should go. And though they did, at least 6,000 black Memphis residents would heed Wells' call to leave. It was the beginning of an exodus that in the coming decade would number in the millions. The murder of her friend also opened her eyes to who the true targets of the lynch mob were. When her three friends were lynched, she began to realize that even black people, middle class black people could be victims of that. And she talks about how until that happened, she had believed that those excesses, what you call excesses against the police, were only directly against those people who had perhaps done something to deserve it. This opened my eyes to what lynching really was. An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and keep the niggers down. Ida Wells is one voice that says that some of, that these assumptions of black people, that we can actually come to some negotiated settlement with whites in this period is a false assumption. And that you have to fight. That the only way we're gonna do it is to fight. Ida B. Wells would eventually leave Memphis for Chicago. There she began her crusade against the murder of Southern blacks where she would continue for the rest of her life. But across the South, lynching continued. Edward White, Vance McClure, Link Wagner, Robert Williams, George King, Scott Sherman, John Fry, Ovid Belzer, William Smith, Valacan Francis, A.L. Smart, Mr. and Mrs. Morris, Patrick Morris, Gilbert Francis, Byrd Love, Isaac Pizer, Lewis Senegal, Joslyn Dysell, Frank James, Lewis Mundt, Hiram Weidman, Desano Osano, Antelope Mungosso. The tragedy today, I think, is a lot of people think they just want somebody. But a ritual, eyes and lynching was a part of the culture of the South with even religious and patriotic connotations. Think about this. Some white folk, if they had the time, dressed up in their old army guard, their old army uniform, to come out to the mentee, racism reached a point where it was so dramatized, so ritualized and codified in the laws and in the practices that it was the most normal, patriotic and most religious thing that you could do is to worship segregation. Legal terror facilitated by the highest, one of the highest branches of government in this country. And so you've got Ida B. Wells, who does work, investigating what's going on. This is 1911, 14-year-old L.D. Nelson and his mother, Laura Nelson. And look, it has copyrights on them. These are postcards. Pictures that were taken at the scene and then sold. This is what it means and has meant to be American. Anti-blackness is embedded in the American cultural identity. We know that we like black people less and we call it implicit bias. We're mindful of it. We just don't speak about it. We know that we're comfortable seeing black people terrorized, traumatized, aggressed, assaulted, murdered. And look, we're gonna take a picture and pose with them hanging from the bridge. And as much as I want you to pay attention to the black people who had to endure and suffer these atrocities and their families who had to endure and suffer these atrocities, I also want you to pay attention to the white people who are gathering around and normalizing it. This is the barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son, Joe, and there's no enforcement by law enforcement. There's no accountability by law enforcement. We're gonna pose with the authorities we're about to lynch him or whatever he did. One woman, three men are lynched. John Hartfield will be lynched by the Ellisville mob at five o'clock this afternoon. Not has been lynched, will be lynched because he was dating a white woman. Governor Bilbo says he is powerless to prevent it. Thousands of people are flocking into Ellisville to attend the event. Sheriff and authorities are powerless to prevent it. So you're going to be murdered. It's advertised in the newspaper. And you've got the governor saying, well, there's nothing I can do about it. Where is the protection? And these are the conditions that my great-grandparents, that my grandparents are parenting through. The love is undergird by anxiety and fear. Come over here, get over here, don't act out, stop. Be good, we gotta go, hurry up, come on. Let me put you in activity so nothing happens to you. It's not because I want you to learn a new skill or trade, I want to keep you safe. Every aspect of black American life is undergird by fear. And it is a righteous fear. And so what I want black people to embrace and understand when they say that we are angry, it's a righteous anger. As James Baldwin said, to be negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all of the time. So own the anger, don't look at it as a trope. How dare you call me angry? Yes, I am angry. And you would be angry too if this had happened to your community ongoing and was still happening to you. And the fact that you don't recognize my anger and embrace it, you've not taken the liberty to go out and find the historical reasons as to why the fact that you've taken no interest in understanding what I and people like me have to go through on a daily basis reinforces your disconnectedness from my humanity. And therefore the problem is not with me, it's with you because you have embraced and ingested the psychopathy and sociopathy of white American culture. So again, I'm just gonna flow through these very quickly and I want you to pay attention to 1920, Minnesota, Abram Smith and Thomas Schiff. What about this is not psychopathic, facilitated legal, it's a legal psychopathic and sociopathic black genocide, 1936. In the vast majority of reported lynchings, and this is from Without Sanctuary, the court's coroner's juries or other official bodies chosen to investigate the murders concluded routinely that black victims had met their debts at the hands of unknown parties, at the hands of persons unknown, or by persons unknown to the jury. Not only did distinguished public officials at all levels of government hesitate to condemn lynching, but some also chose to participate in lynch mobs. US Senator from Mississippi, William Van Amberk Sullivan, I led the mob which lynched Nells Patton and I am proud of it. I directed every movement of the mob and I did everything I could see, I could to see that he was lynched. Cole Bleese, 1911, South Carolina, I would have gladly resigned as governor rather than use my power of office to deter whites from punishing that nigger brute. If necessary, I would have come to Honay Path and led the mob. Governor Bilbo, 1948, I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the niggers away from the polls and this is the environment that we're in with descendants of people who have passed this cultural psychological heritage onto their descendants and with black people who know nothing of our history and don't have this context to understand it in this way. The photographs stretch our credulity, even numb our minds and senses to the full extent of the horror, but they must be examined if we are to understand how normal men and women could live with, participate in and defend such atrocities, even reinterpret them so they would not see themselves or be perceived as less than civilized. The men and women who tortured, dismembered and murdered in this fashion understood perfectly well what they were doing and thought of themselves as perfectly normal human beings. You had any ethical qualms about their actions. This was not the outburst of crazed men or uncontrolled barbarians, but the triumph of a belief system that defined one people as less human than another. For the men and women who can prize these mobs as for those who remain silent or indifferent or who provided the scientific scholarly explanations this was the highest idealism in the service of their race in preservation of their heritage. One only has to view the self-satisfied expressions on their faces as they pose beneath black people hanging from a rope or next to the charred remain of a Negro who had been burned to death. What is most disturbing and pay attention to this about these scenes is the discovery that the perpetrators of these crimes were ordinary people not so different from ourselves. Merchants, farmers, laborers, machine operators, teachers, lawyers, doctors, policemen, students. They were family men and women, good decent church going folk who came to believe that keeping black people in their place was nothing less than pest control. A way of combating an epidemic or virus that if not checked would be detrimental to the health and security of the community. This is 1935 in Florida because he made a white woman feel uncomfortable. But I want you to pay attention to the background. This is 87 years ago, whose grandmother? Whose grandmothers are these? Do not look at the Negro. His earthly problems are ended. Instead, look at the seven white children who gaze at this gruesome spectacle. Is it horror or gloating on the face of the neatly dressed seven-year-old girl on the right? Is the tiny four-year-old on the left old enough one wonders to comprehend the barbarism her elders have perpetrated? Ruben Stacey, the Negro who was lynched at Fort Lauderdale, Florida on July 19th, 1935 for threatening and frightening a white woman suffered physical torture for a few short hours. But what psychological havoc is being brought in the minds of the white children? Into what kinds of citizens will they become? So I'm about to close. Dr. Wilson says, the primary function of anti-black racism and discrimination is not simply to be mean, but to impair the psychology and consciousness of black people so that we remain in a state of chaos so that we never have access to our full potential, our full mental capacity, our full emotional capacity to love. Because every day we're experiencing trauma and then we come home when we don't have to pretend anymore and we're taking it out on the people we love and don't even know it, because we've never been able to exist without fear and pain and trauma. So Dr. Alvin Poussin in 1971, he says, I think we have to establish that white racism is a mental illness. Many white social scientists would like to define racism as something that is normal, as a cultural variant. As long as we approach it that way, we really don't deal with the pathology of racism itself. It's like saying that cancer, because a lot of people have it and this society is somehow normal. Dr. Bobby Wright in the psychopathic racial personality, some papers that he wrote, a part of a collection of papers that he wrote in 1975, he says, in their relationship with the black race, whites are psychopaths. And their behavior represents an underlying biologically transmitted proclivity with roots deep in their evolutionary history. The psychopath is an individual who is constantly in conflict with other persons or groups. He is unable to experience guilt, is completely selfish and callous and has a total disregard for the rights of others. One of the best methods that can be used to measure the psychopathic traits of the white race is observing and analyzing their universal overt behaviors and attitudes towards blacks. He says, psychopaths simply ignore the concept of right and wrong. By ignoring this trait in the white race, the lack of ethical and moral development, blacks have made and are still making a tragic mistake in basing the worldwide black liberation movement on moral suasion. It is pathological for blacks to keep attempting to use moral suasion on a people who have no morality where race is the variable. Lastly, second to last, Dr. Randy Borum, Department of Mental Health Law and Policy at the University of South Florida. He says, the transition into becoming a terrorist is rarely sudden and abrupt. What we know of actual terrorists suggests that there is rarely a conscious decision made to become a terrorist. Most involvement in terrorism results from gradual exposure and socialization towards extreme behavior. I have more than 2,500 slides, more than 1,000 examples of laws and policies that whites have enacted from the 1600s until the early 2000s, displacing, subjugating black people and they have been programmed. Asians have been programmed. Hispanics have been programmed. Everyone has been programmed to think less of and to expect less for black people. And we have been programmed that way as well. Absolutely. It's an orientation of black. So Malcolm X, who I love and adore, and this is the last quote, he says, when you are in your own nation, in your own land, you're in a position to get justice. But when you're in another man's country, in another man's land, under another man's flag, under another man's government, and under another man's court system, you have to look to that other man for justice and you'll never get it. And Negroes are the authority on that. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Any quick questions, I know we're over time and I'm gonna go out and sign books for maybe 30 minutes or so. Does anyone have any questions or thoughts that they would like to share before we? I love you, big brother. You're one of my heroes too. Thank you. What's your name? My name is Barbara Wilson. Barbara, thank you so much. I'm gonna try and definitely stay there. I also was just offered a professorship through the Mayo Clinic. So, but I really don't know because even to present this, you all, I'm gonna leave from here and be a probably past midnight because it startles me. I'm emotional and I can't come down sometimes. I've had to take prescription medication to be able to come down legalized reign. There's just no way I'll be able to reconcile this. So thank goodness I have a great therapist. Shout out to Latina Tatla. But it's also the stress of being black every day and having to deal with anti-blackness and even delivering this work. Being in rooms of people who won't ever do anything to change and they're looking you in the face and telling you that you have toxic masculinity. It's a trope of white supremacy to minimize and diminish black men who emote confidence, self-assurance, and or masculinity. Well, my nephew, I'm so proud of you but you already know that because I was probably one of those examples of those kind of folks that I wanted to see how the Lord was gonna bless me. So I could do some of that to them. And then they, this is unbelievable. Oh, I've never heard of anything like this but Lord is going to bless us. And they are going to find out that you're not God. You're not God of testimony. And I believe it from the top of my head to the soles of my feet with my toes that God, he's gonna handle it, take care of it. And I just hope Lord, even if I'm 120, can I be here to see it? Thank you very much. Thank you, I love you auntie. And I just wanna reinforce that this work is meant for black people which is why I begin the book with a letter to black people and it's to people who care about black people. If you don't care about black people then the book is not for you. If you want to over intellectualize what our experiences have been and can't really feel the depth of the sadness and the pain that our ancestors endured and that we still go through, my work is not for you. And I think she had her hand raised as well. The mechanism to undo the law in a way, to not, you know, they're on the books but there's other processes that they use, case in point, redistricting. They're talking about silencing people's votes. I was just on the redistricting for San Francisco and they were trying to dilute the voices of the black people in the last standing black community in San Francisco Babyhunter's Point. The school system, there's a video that just came out about segregation in the San Francisco schools right here in Babyhunter's Point today. And it says in this video that I watched, the keynote speaker is from the school of the Haas Institute, I think it's from something else now. Anyway, that your socioeconomic, even though San Francisco is segregated and it's been segregated and the schools, they segregate kids by socioeconomic class and if they're surrounded by all kids that are poor, the outcomes are damning. And they said they don't care how much. If you put eight times the resources back in the school, it still won't make up for what is being, the harm that's being done. So what I see today, they had laws like in the 18th up until the 1940s saying that the state of California had its choice how they were gonna educate black children. They didn't have to educate them the same as white children. See, they have these things, they have these laws in the books, like you said, federally, but then they come up with these other things to legalize it. Just like when they got rid of slavery, they still, then we became a resource for the jail. We were still slaves, but legally. I mean, the slavery was gone. Nothing changed. Nothing changed. And so this is what I see in 2022. I don't see anything changing. And it's not. My father went to UCSF dental school. He graduated in the class of 25, UCSF in 1973, decided to bring some black dentist to create some black dentists who work on black people in San Francisco because of the racial segregation and they couldn't go to a white dentist. So he worked in baby 100 point all those years, but they, that was the only time that they created that program because we had a large population here at that time. We had not been gentrified out. And also because they had enacted civil rights laws before where they were trying to meet quotas. But I think to the point that Cheryl just made, and one of the things that we need to stop doing, I would say as a black community, is putting the responsibility on us. Well, what can we do to improve our community? We can't do anything more than what we've been doing as surviving. What can we do when we don't control our own circumstances? And when 10 of us who are more skilled, have more educational experience, have more positional organizational industry experience, apply for jobs, they're only gonna let two of us through because they can't have too many of us at the table. And then the question becomes, what are we going to do in many cases? And I watched it in working for the last organization that I worked. Black people were well beyond qualified, way more qualified than non-black people in many cases. And then they would say, well, they're not the right fit or we want to look at temperament. So it changes from the skills and qualification. You'll never meet the bar. So there can't be any collective control of our outcomes if we don't have control over how decisions are being made and our own economic educational opportunity. And the other thing too, is education again is a tool of white supremacy. Yes, we needed to survive in this cultural context, but it means nothing when we're in that cascade. It's just a calling card to survive white supremacy. And so the degrees that I have and I got a master's this and a bachelor's degree, that means nothing. It just gets me through the door and it doesn't even get me through the door most of the time. And when it does, I'm the lowest paid, the last to receive certain level types of benefits, it is a situation in orientation of total chaos and it can drive you crazy, but it drives us dead. And that's what I want us to understand. It drives us to unhealthiness. We've got maternal death rates that are skyrocketed and it doesn't matter how much these people make in terms of their economic strata. You've got affluent women. There's an article that I share in my book, a study that was done. Black boys coming from the richest families in America are over 60% gonna end up poor, over 60% of them. They had access to the best schools, the best resources. They learned well. They were involved in all of the sports. They're still gonna end up poor because of anti-blackness. Last question, then we're gonna go. It occurs to me that the CIA bringing cocaine into the black communities was part of a way of suppressing the vote. And I want you all to be aware that there was a class action filed by three attorneys from the Bay Area, which got consolidated with other class actions in the Florida courts, where it was dismissed because the attorneys never even filed for discovery. Wow. And they're still practicing to this day in the Bay Area without any kind of, without being disbarred. They should have been disbarred. Wow. Anybody with more information on that? I'm happy to give it to them. Thank you so much for saying that. And during that period, when people need to understand that the federal government was aware, there's a documentary on Netflix right now called Crack. Pull it up and watch it this weekend. And it's the first, and Michelle Alexander in her book, the new Jim Crow, she talks about the way in which not only do they bring it here, but then they criminalized it heavier than they criminalized powder cocaine, which was what white people were using. You got five times the sentence. And then the first time they introduced minimum mandatory sentences. Up until that point, Alexander points out that the highest timeframe for someone committing a drug offense was between six and 12 months. 1985 crack, five year sentence. And then it goes to 10 years. You see people getting 15, 20 years for marijuana. And then not only do they criminalize the people who are settling and distributing, but in 1988, they criminalized users. So we see black mothers and fathers facilitated, removed from black communities. It cuts off the reproductivity of black families. It's the eugenics movement, legalized and normalized. So we need a new context and another framework to understand this reality of terrorism and genocide that we are in. It is not just microaggression. It is not just racism. It is anti-black terrorism and genocide. Thank you. Hello, I think I have one other question out here. I'm over here to the right. Okay. I'll make it very quick. Oh, you remember my name, that's great. And I do hope you seek God in your direction because your book is medicine for me when I come in from a meagre or shower of anti-blackness. Pick up your book, I read through it and then I'm saying it again. I do, that's my medicine, the work that you're doing. So thank you very much. And I was just gonna, that's how I say this. I wanted to piggyback on something someone else said. I'm a fraternal twin. I have a womb mate. We don't look the same, but I shared the one with that individual. And unfortunately during their struggle, they had a diagnosis that didn't go the way it's supposed to underneath. I wanna say Kaiser Permanente, I can't stand them. And Kaiser Permanente had misdiagnosed my fraternal twin and she ended up driving on her own seven miles to an emergency room. She called them on her cell phone and told them, I'm here in the parking lot. I'm, her heart was failing at that point and I need someone to will me into the emergency room. You know, she waited about an hour and a half and no one came out to get her. That's not it. Then she, an African-American man finally willed her into the emergency room. By the time they got her in there, she coded and died. She didn't, she was revived, but it took a year and a half for those died, those doctors at Kaiser Permanente to finally say what it was. She shouldn't have ever been left to drive to that hospital. They had found amyloidosis, very rare disease. And when they found it, the doctors that had done the exploratory surgery, they had to put a pacemaker into her. You know what he said? When we challenged him, he said, why didn't you do the analysis then? And he said something like, it's not my fault. I wasn't supposed to do that. I mean, really callous, unprofessional. As my Kaiser Permanente has that, you know, you have an agreement you don't have. You're not able to sue them directly. It's arbitration. And they're the first ones when asked in the state of California who's gonna help and participate in physician-assisted suicide. Kaiser Permanente raises their hand right away. They are horrible. They aren't genocidal. Yeah, I agree with you. And I won't go into detail, but something pretty traumatic happened with me and my father where it resulted in him being in the hospital. And I had, he was at my house. And so I had full responsibility for him. I brought him home. They released him when they shouldn't have. He came home with me and then I was unable to revive him. And so I had to call the emergency room again. And they came and picked him up and took him back to the hospital. And then when I went to get him, actually the first time I went to get him, I told the nurse I was on the phone with her. I'm three minutes away. I'll be pulling in with an Uber. So just please wait with him outside. I'll be right there. Because they had to bring him out due to the pandemic due to COVID. I asked her to wait with him. And when I got there, he was sitting outside in one of those roller chairs with his shirt unbuttoned. Incoherent. He was still high off the medication that they had given him. And I burst into tears ferociously. I could not, I was so angry. And if I, I don't want to say what I thought of doing, but it really angered me. And so it's negligence in every aspect of our lives. And we have to be there for each other when we see it happen into one another to call it out and to call attention to it and to have the courage and the confidence to be able to call it out. But it's not easy. You have to be willing to risk something. I've left jobs because I wasn't willing to lay down for it. And I wasn't willing to lay down for it when it was happening to other people right in front of me. So you have to be willing to care and to stand up for not just others, not just yourself, but for others and not be so self-absorbed because that's the only way we're gonna build community. And that's the only way that we are going to live healthier lives. We shouldn't have to take it home with us. Let's give it back to the people who are giving it to us in the moment. And let's find other people like I have Cheryl, like I found Kim, like I found Marjorie. Let's do it collectively and together.