 Hi Patrick, hi Brittney, hi Charles. Hello. Who'd like some water? Fire Brigade. So I asked the three friends here if they could actually start with an opening or something and Brittney could you start us off? Sure. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Well it's really an honor to be here. I will say I worked very hard this week to not be nervous to sit in between these two. I was only mildly successful and Charles was making fun of me backstage because I actually wrote down some thoughts but the only way I can handle this moment. But I'm really honored to be here closing this out. I'm thankful also for this theme because hope is something that I continually wrestle with especially as a millennial on the tail end of being a millennial. Especially as someone who works with young people for whom hope seems to be fleeting often. I've been studying by choice the speeches of black women over time and I was reading Maria W. Stewart's Why You Sit Here and Die. She gave it in 1832 in Boston. She was one of the first black women to ever leave copies of her speeches. And she was talking about the importance of education in particular for young black women. And she was convinced that if we just made education equal and white people could finally see how brilliant and dedicated and committed black folks were then the scourge of slavery and racism would suddenly disappear. And all I could think to write in the margins was what possibly gave you the hope that that would happen. If I'm really honest about where we are now where I know my ancestors to have been I was in that moment really struck by her conviction because I didn't necessarily share it. And history has proven that if we put our hope in people we're going to continuously be disappointed. So then I turned back to my faith. I was raised by not one but two preachers. My brother is a preacher. I'm the heathen. And I looked back at Dr. King's words and looked back at this concept of the mountain and the mountain of despair biblically and found myself in Matthew where Jesus is telling us that faith is the thing that can move or dismantle the mountain. And was suddenly inspired by the idea that if we take stones of hope from the mountain of despair if we do that enough eventually there will be no rocks left for despair. There is no mountain. But what does it mean and we talk about all the time in the education space what does it mean to have critical hope instead of what we lovingly refer to as hokey hope empty hope that is beautiful but has no substance. And so that is what I continue to wrestle with that is what I believe a lot of young people especially young people have called it wrestled with during this election and I chose to use my franchise but I understand the conversation behind why some other people chose not to because they were frustrated by what they were being told they had to put their hope in. And so I'm hopeful that we can actually wrestle with this idea of critical hope and how we hew that stone in a way that bears real results and not just to more rhetoric. Thank you. Patrick. Supposed to follow that. It's fantastic to be here. Thank Tom. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you to our friends at the Brooklyn Museum. It was a it didn't take my organization the Open Society Foundation to think twice about partnering with the museum on this terribly important conference. We think that you are lifting up a set of values that we intend to work or to continue to preserve and protect in the ill-livable era that we find ourselves in. It's thrilling to be here with Tiffany and I'm always inspired to be with Brittany. What did I say? Brittany. It's okay. Brittany? Yeah. You said Tiffany. Oh, so sorry. It's okay. It's okay. We'll get it right tomorrow. It's okay. This is the last session. This is the last session. New Yorker. It's okay. It's okay. And so it was fun to be with Charles not just because he used to Charles blow that you all know as a phenomenal writer for the paper of record but actually first got to know Charles in Brooklyn in the playground with our kids as I saw him as a father working on his own to raise beautiful black children and he's always been an inspiring role model for me in that regard. But it's thrilling to be here in this museum because it brings back a lot of memories. First, this was a place where I used to go and hide whenever I needed to cut school and tech. You could actually get away. Somehow the guards didn't realize I needed to be in school. I just wandered the halls in the Brooklyn Museum back then. And it also brings back memories of activism because I can recall being out on the streets in front of this museum when so-called mayor of New York, Woody Giuliani, was trying to pull down Cussofili's paintings from the walls of this museum, his beautiful black Madonna. So this place is important to me and I see Basquiat crowns hovering over all of your heads. So it's incredible to join this particular conversation. I come at it. I love hearing your words, Tom, and I always love hearing Dr. King's words in particular. I remember a great quote from Stokely Carmichael when Dr. King asked him after a speech how he thinks he did, how he thought he did. Stokely said, Doc, I didn't understand a word you said, but you made me tap my feet. Those words always make me tap my feet. But I feel as if I come out of this issue of hope and the ewing of a stone from a different place. And you will forgive me, but I'm in a room with lots of creative artists. It's been a wonderful conference about creation. But sometimes, as an activist, as an organizer, when I see a stone, I think of hurling it. I think of David. I think of taking on the lives. And I think of power structures that I wish we could take our hammer and chisel to. Not to birth a terrible duty, but just to completely take them apart. This is a time where I decided that I'm not going to censor and check my anger, which seems to me these days ever present. One of the phrases that I've been hearing a lot of late, which I've always found to be trite and I really hate this phrase is talking truth to power. I've never been interested in talking truth to power. I've always been interested as a creative organizer in helping to disrupt power, to dislocate power, and to relocate power into the hands of those who don't have it. I think often these days of what French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote when he said that power is not an institution. It is not a structure. Neither is it an inherent strength that we are formed with. It is a set of dynamic relationships that we use to describe roles in society. And the nature of power is that it's not fixed. It can be disrupted, which is where imagination comes in. And for me, it's where black imagination comes in. Imagination is the ultimate disruptor. It is what allows us to go into dark and silent places and to say something with meaning. And it is what allows us to be presumptuous about the space that we are required, required, compelled to occupy. I think it was Alice Walker that said that dark times require fierce dancing. And so I'm excited to be here to join Brittany and Hincholl and some fierce dancing up here on stage. But I also hope that it's going to be rather precarious and we'll have a real discussion with you about imagination and how we wield it at this moment. So I'll be a lot more brief, I think, than you guys. Because Tom has already told me what he wants me to say. Because I've talked to Tom, I've mentioned this concept to him quite often. It is about the starvation or the lack of nourishing of the imagination. And because of my experiences as a black man in America, I'm specifically concerned about how we rob people and particularly children of their abilities to dream about things that are not rooted in oppression and perseverance and struggle. And as a parent, any of you who've ever tried to go to a bookstore and find a book for a young black kid where they could see themselves as the principal character in that book, it is incredibly hard to find one that is not about it is okay to love yourself, a historical figure, or some other form of perseverance. And so the framing of identity for our children from the very beginning is in opposition to a force. That from the very beginning they are taught that whiteness is centered and that they are somehow operating around it and learning to deal with it and get their arms around it. And what I keep saying is that black children dream too. They look up and they see the same set of stars. They hear the wind whistle through the trees in the same way. They see the mountain and they wonder what it would be like to get to the summit. And yet none of the imagination creations do they see themselves doing that. What impact does that have? We first come to know ourselves by reflection and that reflection is often through art. It is through literature, it is through television, movies, it is through painting. And when you are absent, what does that say to you? And as you grow and develop and become a person in the world, what does it do to community when you think about how many hours you log considering, naming, fighting oppression rather than dreaming, loving and creating. I often try to imagine a world where that oppression did not exist because then what are you then? What are then your creations? How then do you use your energy? What might we have made? It's an incredibly important question. Toni Morrison says about her writing. This is after Toni has actually won the Nobel Peace Prize and people are still saying to Toni, one day you're going to grow up and tackle the real issues which Toni takes to mean right about white people because there's no white people in the books, right? And she talks about striving her whole life not to create under the white gaze, meaning when she would read something, she knew when the author was writing to white people because they were explaining things that did not need to be explained if they were talking to her. That's an incredible burden that you think that you're living through your life. Explaining things that do not need to be explained. Passion, energy, imagination or infinite commodities. As she puts it, one of the major effects, maybe not even the intention, effects of racism is distraction. It keeps you explaining things that don't need to be explained. That takes time away from you loving your family, being in your community, creating beautiful things that will exist after you are dead. And so I think this question of hope comes, we have to wrestle with the idea of what is the hope in? Is it in getting past or is it in liberation from? When Nina's phone was asked, what does freedom mean to you? She said, freedom to me is the absence of fear if I could just live without any fear. Hope for me is that I don't learn to settle myself with this, but it is eradicated from my thinking that I no longer have to carry that package on my back and that I live a life that is absent of fear and full of imagination and creation and energy. Thank you. Looks like you were going to join in there. No, you know, first of all, when Charles says that he's going to be, you know, brief, isn't that what I was supposed to say? That he hasn't really thought about. Wait a minute. Just tells you, don't play poker with this guy. So I love the feeling of contrast that I was sensing in some of what Brittany said, some of what I said, and some of what Charles just lifted up about the need and the desire to not have to walk through a world that's defined by your otherness to it. But I don't feel any tension in it. I actually think that is the essential power that we're searching for and seeking out. Quick antidote. I had this one remarkable moment, remarkable, may not be remarkable for you, but it was remarkable for me in Pretoria, South Africa, where I had the privilege to serve as the U.S. ambassador under a different president. In the four-year of my home, I had this fantastic chalk drawing by Robert Pruitt. There's no proof. I absolutely loved Pruitt. This epic sister who had her one arm on her hip just kind of thrust out a little bit and she was wearing a t-shirt that looked like it was a school shirt, but it said some coleslaw on it, and it was just really prominently displayed in my household. Directly opposite that piece was a piece by Cajende Wiley of a young brother staring out at the world with a tremendous amount of audacity. I used to always love watching interactions that people had with those two paintings. Whenever young millennial South Africans came to my home, they immediately looked towards the Cajende, always had amazing conversations about the Cajende, and could place themselves in the sustained gaze of the young person looking out at them. But one time, I had an older Brit come to my home, and he told me that he had visited every previous ambassador for the last 20 years at that residence and wanted to, he was pleased to meet me, but when he stopped at brother Cajende, he looked at it and he said, huh, this is not what I would imagine in the home of a U.S. ambassador. And I felt so great about that reaction. And then, another instance, there was this difficult meeting that I was going to have in my residence with a diplomat from the United Nations who was running the global HIV initiative. And we're having a tense conversation about how resources were going to be allocated and it's going to be a really tough conversation. He comes into my home, he sees the fluid, stares at it, sees the words on the t-shirt and looks at me and says, what do you know about Molly? And clearly he's referencing the ancient institutions of scholarship that are suggested by the language and the t-shirt that the figure has there. And instantly, the tension between us evaporated. We had an incredible conversation about African scholarship predating interactions with Europeans and for a moment, we existed in a world before Columbus, right? And I was able, we're able to connect with the basic humanity in one another that had absolutely nothing to do with modes of resistance and oppression. And it made all of the other work that we were doing just feel like an incredibly light load and we could see possibility and opportunity in the future. So sorry to go on with that anecdote, but as Charles just laid out a frame for all of us, I was just sent back to that moment and appreciative of what the creative arts could do in that kind of disruptive space. Reminds me of that little wonderful jewel from Langston Hughes where he said, give me all your dreams, your dreamers, give me your hearts melodies that I may wrap them in a blue cloud cloth with two harsh fingers of the world. And I think that our children are deserving of that quality and that wrapping that Charles just described. I will, you know, this is in a practical sense is making me think about the days and nights in Ferguson. So I grew up in St. Louis County and was a, still I am a Ferguson protestor because Jason Stockley was just acquitted. And there's so often when we find ourselves kind of defending our space from critics who by the way all presume that you pay my salary and for like very expensive trips and all that. Apparently you do. That is the running narrative by the folks who don't like us. Anyway, when we would find ourselves defending ourselves we would often discuss the love and the family that was built in the streets. And what brought us out there was love for ourselves and for one another. But behind the scenes, behind the curtain what we started to have to reckon with over the last three and a half years now is that a lot of our bonding was actually trauma bonding. And so as our relationships have started to break down we've had to reckon with the fact that they were built because we had to find love in spite of because we had to create joy despite the circumstances because we had to resist oppression through our joy. And so I find myself very hesitant when people want to name all of the assets of black people in particular but marginalized people in general and they say, well, we're so resist, you know, we know how to resist, right? We're so persistent. And that can't possibly be our greatest asset. I just don't believe that. And so I'm really glad that you said that and I'm trying to stitch back together some of these relationships and actually spend time with each other in nature, right? In joy, in worship, in all of these spaces that are absent of the very literal oppression that we were dealing with, right? Because we've learned how to love on each other because I had to get this tear gas out of your eyes and you had to get out of the mind. And so suddenly I had to trust you with my life and we just met 20 minutes ago. So we have been trying to transition out of that place and not solely define ourselves in resistance but begin to define ourselves in liberation, which is a real challenge. I will say the reason, though, in a practical sense why it's a challenge is because I often find that imagination is robbed at both ends, right? So you don't ever learn how to imagine when you're growing up in oppressed circumstances and then when you finally break through the third wall and begin to imagine someone takes it from you. Sneakers are a perfect example. We've got young people all over this country who are taste makers. We are all wearing things and wearing things the way that we're wearing them because young people on the streets figured out to wear them that way, right? Brun DMC started wearing their Adidas shell toes without laces because that's what the young kids here in New York City were doing. Adidas figured that out, right? Put them on tour with a rock band and said we can commoditize this. Guess who didn't make money off of that? The kids just started wearing their sneakers in the first place. Dapper Dan, right? The reason why we see logos all over everything now is because Dapper Dan started that, right? If we want to talk about art and art as commodity, I mean fashion is a continual example of this and I find that young people who finally get their hands on some of that critical hope and finally get their hands on some of that imagination then become discouraged once again because the thing that they imagine gets taken from them perverted and used in ways that they never intended and shipped all around the world and their pockets are still empty, their dreams are still deferred, their neighborhood is still not what it should be and people are telling them that they're everything but a child of God even though they've created the world that we live in. And so in a really practical sense every single day when I work in education, when I work in activism, when I work in organizing, that is the thing we keep coming up against. You tell me to imagine, you tell me to dream and I did and it was taken from me. I mean, I think that's fascinating and interesting and I think it, to me this always comes, it forces me to put things in a grander historical scope, right? And my upbringing, which I don't talk about very often because it can sound like I'm advocating for segregation but I grew up in a segregated town and not because we didn't want to be around white people, they didn't want to be around us, right? So integration, the federal government finally makes Louisiana integrate in 1970, when he was born. There were two schools in town, the black school, they made the high school, the white school, they made the elementary school, all the white kids left went to an old academy which they set up, paid for partially with tax-free of money, so black people were helping to pay for them to go to the escape. But one thing happened when they did that. It provided a certain level of insulation from the scars that we gather all of our lives from having to constantly be faced with discrimination and oppression. And that black high school had, you know, it has probably one of the oldest operating buildings in Louisiana. It was started right after the Civil War. It was a college set up to educate the sons and daughters of free slaves. Still a high school, always been black. So when I would see movies like Do The Right Thing and put some black people on these walls and I was thinking, there was nothing but black people on my wall. Like everything about, every room I ever walked into, black people were the smartest people in that room. So when I was an adult and I would walk into a room, the idea that I couldn't be the smartest person in the room didn't never occur to me. And I would encounter other brilliant people, black people, pedigrees much better than mine, went to all the right prep schools and all the right Ivy League colleges, but they were always the one, the only, free-thrown questions. Somebody said something today, tomorrow, upset them. So they came into the space and what I was envisioning is that they were covered in scars, covered in scars. And they could never see themselves as as valuable as I thought that they were. And they could never see how brilliant they were because they were constantly focused on how do they see me and what did they say. And that was never a question to me. That's why to me, racism has always been the biggest joke. It's almost like I can't even get mad about it because it's so funny. It's like, wait, so you're trying to say... You're better than me, before we even do any work, inherently from birth, you're better than me. That's funny. I don't even know how to process that. And so I just think navigating the world with that kind of confidence which that space allowed us to have, apart and separate from this trauma and the struggle was just a beautiful thing. And I'm not advocating that we need to do that, but I'm just saying, if we're not going to do that, we have to create spaces that are safe. But I know people hate the word safe spaces. I also look at sometimes that those kids are protesting and I'm like Zora Neale Hurson, who said sometimes I feel discriminated against, but he doesn't upset me. He just confuses me. How can someone deny themselves my company? It is beyond me. So I'm looking at those kids at a certain point, just let it go. Go somewhere where people appreciate you and honor you and that you're not literally banging your head against the wall to get somebody to see you. At a certain point, it's not about, it's not your problem. You didn't create the system where you are oppressed. Somebody else did that. Let them go do that work. I want to enter, but I want to have the conversation like we're just in a barber shop and just let it go. Just listening to your description, Charles, of growing up in a segregated community and having a clear sense of identity as a consequence of that is powerful for me and I can relate to it in so many levels, but particularly as an immigrant child born in the Congo of Haitian descent comes of age here in New York during a period of intense racial contest in 1970s into 80s America into Reagan America and I can recall the first time I think that I became conscious of black popular collective imagination and it was around comic books. I grew up in a huge comic book collector kind of obsessed with comic books and I can remember my African-American friends always getting so excited whenever black superheroes didn't have their own comics. They just appeared in other comic books. So remember all my friends getting so excited every time the black panther finally made an appearance in a fantastic four-comic book or whenever the Falcon appeared in Captain America or when Aurora appeared in the X-Men I couldn't get our own books but my friends would get so excited and I didn't get so excited about it. I always wondered what the heck is such a big deal about this placement because I was never looking for myself in American popular culture. I didn't have that same appetite for defining myself through how the rest of the world or that rest of the world reflected me back on myself. It's true since I knew the black panther and Falcon and Aurora and Luke Cage all created by white folks. I just didn't quite get it. For me, growing up as a kid, my superhero was too stand-over-ture. So I knew that I came from the first black republic that freed itself. That was my superhero and my real life superhero walking around playing his day was Muhammad Ali. I needed to see myself reflected as white people presented me back to myself through comic books through movies and I was always terribly confused by that to be honest and I felt out of sorts. It wasn't until confession, it wasn't until I had to raise my own kids in America and I had to get them books and I began to appreciate what the music was telling them, what cinema was telling them, what all of pop culture was telling them about where they belong, how they were the most resilient people on earth and why they were resilient and how their resilience was defined that I became to really appreciate that duality and the threat of it. Well, I wanted to ask all three of you about that because the two of you have children who are growing up and have been successful and to keep going with what you've said and hope at both ends of the day. In a sense, you're working with kids. So where do you create and how did you create for your own kids that safe space of imagination? I mean, they're still young adults but you're really successful kids just out of college and into medical school and doing all kinds of things and your kids are doing well. But the great tragedy for me is that I can see that my children are covered in scars. Scars that I don't have because they went to elite New York City schools which meant that they went to schools and there were people looking at them and all of the things that I could see in colleagues and their constant questioning about were they valuable enough and where they were, I can see my kids asking the same questions and it breaks my heart because I'm thinking to myself, you know better and yet I bought the same line because the school has more resources. The school has professors who have taught here and one has a Nobel Peace Prize but I did not sufficiently weigh that against the cultural impact that not seeing yourself has on a kid I think that I was caught up in the idea in the hope that the world had changed a lot since I was a kid and you know from my daughter to write her college essay about how she was wearing her hair natural because she wanted to express herself in contrast to the way all of her friends were telling her she should be that this was a revolutionary act for her part of me wanted to applaud the bravery of it and part of me wanted to cry because she felt that she had to make a statement and that she thought it was a revolutionary act to allow her hair to grow out of her head the way that it naturally grows out of her head so I think there are smart kids there are great kids but I often think if I had it to do over again what would I do differently and if would I try to balance some way I would do a small school that had almost no resources country school 200 people K through 12 there's nobody there nobody on that faculty got a Nobel Peace Prize I can tell you that but no one at that school ever told me no about anything every time you the imagination would be sparked and we say we should do and they would say okay great how you gonna do it and they would help us to do it when we read about the constitutional convention I was like this sounds like a play they said you should make a play and we all these teenage boys wrote a play about the constitution acted it out on stage took a picture, sent it to the Library of Congress which I think they still have but where do you think Hamilton came from? exactly but it was about teaching us to learn to love the idea of exploration and learning and that your ideas are valuable that your imagination is important that you can dream it has nothing to do with just the position to someone who is trying to oppress you it's just about what can you think of and let's make it happen and I miss that idea for my kids I feel like I'm gonna get emotional because I am your children my parents were both highly educated they were educated my father is no longer living my mother is and had to make that choice that is indeed a false choice that says do I send my child to the best school knowing full well that they will be outnumbered in every way possible or do I make the choice that my parents made for me and send them to neighborhood schools even though this neighborhood school is not the neighborhood school I went to my mother went to high school I went to high school with the first black man St. Louis this idea like literally I can see myself in the highest seat in the city was not an exception that was the rule St. Louis is home to the oldest black high school on our side of the Mississippi it's where Arthur actually some of their high school is where Tina Turner went black imagination just supported, prospering and then fast forward a few decades the summer before Michael Brown was killed Ferguson was actually already in the news for the neighborhood rather where he was growing up in the school district where he went to school Normandy schools because they were unaccredited they were one of three unaccredited school districts in the entire state and there was an old Missouri law passed by under John Ashcroft when he was governor that allowed parents to transfer their child out of an unaccredited school district to an accredited school district at the cost of the unaccredited school district so the money followed the child which is essentially how desegregation worked in St. Louis this is essentially how desegregation works in a lot of places and I didn't say integration I said desegregation because that's what actually happened if you talk to a bunch of black educators in a city like St. Louis they'll be like yep deseg ruined all these schools because it took the few resources that were had it took talent and placed it in these other places right in these suburbian schools way across town it took the kids, took the money, took the teachers put them across town and gave everyone the idea that that was better that proximity to whiteness was going to be the thing that saved you and that left a school system that was not the one that my mother was educated in so the choice that she made was not between the school that she was growing up in and an elite private school it was the schools that were left behind and an elite private school and she chose the elite private school for lots of very real reasons and I don't fault her for any of those but I still remember the first time I decided to wear my hair natural and how revolutionary it felt and I remember when my unangie my mother is one of seven is her youngest sister unangie was the one who could do the hair so I used to they always go together but I used to crave Saturday mornings because that's when unangie came by to do my hair and however it was she was twisting my hair, she was braiding my hair if she was hot combing it and the whole kitchen smell like grease whatever it was I knew it was going besides Sunday and it was going to be the blackest day of my week and that affinity that safe space that I had to just be whomever and talk about whomever and I had to code switch and do all of those things was salvation and so I find myself trying to create that salvation for other people preserving our institutions creating new institutions, heck I mean at work I literally wrote up a job description I said this needs to be happening you should hire me to do it and I'm going to hire all people of color to do it with me and that's what happened because I wanted to create that space for other people I wanted to create that salvation and so it is it is hard to exist in the space that says what could I have created if I wasn't always trying to create by pushing up against something I'll be brief I'll just I will be let me take the next little one seriously for me being a black parent in America is like being a museum director you're just constantly about the business of curation you are being at least for me constantly thoughtful and vigilant about what is coming what your children are receiving what's coming in through that television what they are hearing about themselves obviously all parents are vigilant white and black but I feel as a black parent that I've had to be the watchman because I know that my children are always being told that they are a particular thing and that thing is brutish and so I have felt as if I've been in the business of curation constantly to preserve their imaginations I'm struck by the image that you with the visual image of this desegregation thing of and it gets back to what you started with Charles taking kids to whiteness because it depends on certainly in the liberal white imagination that's a good place to come so it still depends on thank you for being honest about that by the way no but you know I think still so many white liberals don't understand the concept of whiteness as something that got created so powerful I think about this new book of Toni Morrison's the origin of the other and it you know exists to make the people in power the racial dominance disappear to those people but and she also the interesting thing about her as a writer she's so fascinating she said you know it gets it's really devious how racism because she starts by discussing the racism that happened in her own family where a great grandmother shows up for the first time everybody's eager to meet her and she describes it as a tar black really elegant woman that people are so afraid of all the men in the house stood up immediately she's the only woman that to have before and she pointed the cane at Toni Morrison her sister she said these two have been tampered with they were lighter skin than the others and Toni Morrison said you know that kind of poison doesn't escape you and it was you know if that only came from the structure of racism that the great grandmother is working against well you start with this idea of like what white liberals want which is a fascinating subject to me and you need to look no further than James Baldwin to hear somebody excuriate the white liberal because here's the thing the entire structure is problematic on the one end people want to punish you on the other hand they want to pity you and both things operate as a violence right pity requires the perch the only way you can pity me is that you believe that you are here and it rolls down to me right most black people are like most people in the world we don't want anything from you tear down your white supremacy and we're fine this thing you built take it with you and we're good but I think that there's a constant desire to pity and to hand out and to give and to ameliorate the effects of white supremacy without dismantling it yes I can't tell you how many rooms I've been in with wealthy white liberals who feel really good about writing a check for five grand and that was then to get the way a gown that cost three times that much and they think oh my god look what I did this evening you know people don't want that if you believe what the anthropologists said there is no such thing as race as we understand that it is a construct that we created and based it on the kind of ephemeral nature of skin color and we use that to permanently advantage some people and permanently disadvantage other people and if it were not for us designing a system that did that human beings would be human beings some would be horrible, some would be brilliant and it would have nothing to do with the way that they looked focus not on handouts and charity turn around to your neighbor and say this is our problem I did not create white supremacy I did not benefit from white supremacy I gained nothing from it it is not mine if you benefit from it it is yours and it is your job to help to dismantle it oh sorry can we talk a little bit so take a museum like this what is its job in that? art for me is tricky because I started my career as an art director, graphic person so I have always been both writing I was an English major at first and then design but everything about representation seems to me to be part of the problem museums value the beauty of white art in a way that it does not value other art and then groups other art as kind of indigenous and craft but this other thing white lady in big dresses that is high art we talked about that yesterday with some indigenous artists people didn't want their contemporary they wanted to be Indian, be a Native American the way white person fantasize about that that has always been complicated to me to walk through the rooms of a museum and then to get to a room small high floor where it is like like and that always said something to me too because it was a visual very visual apparent segregation and valuation of imagery and if I could not see myself on the first floor what does that mean if I had to literally find the map to find a corner what does that say drops the mic every single time here I always struggle with the question of what is the role of museum what is the role of institutions we all need to recognize even when institutions like this are being led by remarkably progressive visionary leaders we have to understand we have to we always have to appreciate where the resources come from and ultimately what kind of pressure that brings to bear and what the ultimate legacy of it is and the consequence of it that being said and I always felt kind of I always felt as if museums were memorializing the theft of something I couldn't quite name it but it just never felt right but that being said there's always a remarkable opportunity in museums in these institutions to better represent the quarrel that we're having with ourselves it was paraphrasing Yeats there who said that we make of the quarrels that we have with others rhetoric and the quarrel that we have poetry and every now and then I see the quarrel that black folks are having with themselves and their own imaginations represented in these halls I remember being at the phenomenal Marshall exhibit some months back and just being thunderstruck absolutely thunderstruck and I came across an image of a black couple dancing a slow dance in the quiet space of their living room with a flickering candle there and just seeing that kind of affection amongst black people represented through the heart and spirit the blossoming heart of a black person reminded me that our poetry is especially in the quiet places and not in the loud ways that it's often given expression by others I think of the Afrofuturist who absolutely force a different kind of again disruption on me when I come across their works there's this phenomenal South African artist who I have a huge crush on her name is Mary Sabande and she is the first woman first woman in the line of her family in the recorded history that she has of her family she is the first woman amongst them stretching back over a century and a half the first one that's not a domestic and in her art she decided that she was going to give some representation to that and she depicted a series of domestic workers but you'll see like this domestic worker herself Superman's cape that she's going to adorn herself with when the other folks aren't there watching her so when I think about institutions like this what they represent how their resource I always just think it's absolutely revolutionary when someone like Mary Sabande is represented in the Venice Biennial or Marshall is decorating the halls of the Whitney and it gives me that space back that I think Charles is trying to reclaim for our own burden free imaginations I mean I have anxiety with this question because I spent plenty of time in museums growing up but fine art in particular felt it felt as though the intentional effects of making fine art inaccessible to some of us inaccessible to others was successful in my life even though I grew up with well educated parents in a very comfortable middle class setting going to the finest schools and I I was on a panel right before the opening of the Black Sony and y'all know which one I'm talking about with with a young woman who is here and I was like I'm going to come to New York and you're just going to like tutor me on this because I don't get it and I'm tired of being in rooms where like everybody gets in and I don't get it they don't get it either but that's the point that I'm coming to right because I have seen art in particular be weaponized in so many spaces in a way that like not only can you not access this thing either pity you because you can't access it or I I determined that you're not valuable because you can't access it right or because your access to art is something totally different and I'm not going to call what you do art right I'm going to call what I do art and put these walls around it so I think I'm like admitting that I have real anxiety around that question and I'm sitting here thinking like what do I want to say about this and I'm like I don't know because I have seen the walls that have been erected around art and the structure of the museum I have watched it lock out so many people that I wrestle with it I will say that there is to your question though about what the role is I mean it's to make I think often about reading third grade reading the role at the beginning of the day and reading the most imaginative names on the planet right and making sure that like the apostrophe is in the right place and the accent is in the right place and that you read Arielle the right way like all of those things and feeling such beauty in that moment when your parents had you they imagined a world where however they named you was good enough right and that everybody would value it the way that they value your name and so for me the role of the artistic institutions is to make sure that all of those names all the hyphenated names all the apostrophe names are just as valuable and will be pronounced as correctly as Trevinsky like that to me is the point and can I just add this one thing the other thing is that very often when I even when I see tribal art or whatever it is or even antiquities think Egyptian antiquities or whatever always nameless it's about the culture the culture created this thing so there's not even a name to give it you know it's not a person so you can't even say okay there was this brilliant person who revolutionized Egyptian casting that allowed them to create these gorgeous statues that you're looking at no it's just the culture so it's like you can't tell me I don't believe this thing that there is not people who across the globe who have done this thing other than just in western Europe I don't know about that being anxiety that's pretty about as eloquent to an expectation that we should meet as I've heard and I think it's beautiful and I want you to come up here and ask the last questions the last one of the day and you're the head honcho come on up you know I'm actually sitting here with tears in my eyes and I'm sure many of you feel that way too so it's hard to have a question but I want to thank you and I guess if there's one you know final question I'm a pragmatic kind of person I want to get busy and get to action so you know if there is something that we should commit ourselves to in terms of freeing the imagination and building future you know building greater equity and helping children achieve the greatest of selves there are things that we can all be doing right now sorry to go practical and Tom don't ever do that to me again well can I just say this the Brooklyn Museum is already doing a lot my first New York City apartment was about two blocks this way so my kids when they were little kids spent afternoons in this building right were they playing hooky with Patrick no no they were like solar sized kids not this juvenile delinquent and they did the art program and you know and I believe this thing where you guys open the museums to the community on the weekend it's just I see people in the museum space who now just think it's they can come here there's a real thing that exists like that place is not really our place there are a lot of museums part of it is representation part of it is a feeling that this is there's no that you're welcome here or not and I think the Brooklyn Museum has done that I still long to have more varied representations from all over the world in the permanent collections among the things that the museums prize most I feel in the permanent parts of museums that it is still saying that 95% of the art ever produced that is worth anything came from western Europe and that is just a lie yeah when I was asking this question by the way I wasn't thinking about the museum necessarily so I don't want you guys to feel pressure to have no I just want to say that but I agree with you I just want to say that I completely agree with you and you know for example we're going to be connecting African and Egyptian art because of course Egypt is part of the continent of Africa and until we have the capital funding to do that we made little interventions talking about Egyptians as Africans now I'm going to make an intervention talking about why we know names or don't know names of people so that was a great idea too but I want to let you know that we're trying to integrate more and we have much further to go so I really appreciate that and I absolutely agree with you so a few ideas I grew up with parents who were expert curators they knew because they made that choice to send me to the place where I would not learn the things that they wanted me to learn they had to teach me at home so I knew when Aunt Angie was putting that hot comb through my hair that Madam C.J. Walker invented it and I knew the history behind it and that was a requirement in my household those were our dinner table conversations I watched eyes on the prize and I was a child so I moved the box set so it was you can tell how young you are a box set it was my chance at least it was not deities there was a clear expectation in my house because my parents did that decorating the thing though was that because they had made the understandable choice to put me in the institutions that they did almost every classroom I walked into teachers included the only person who had ever learned those curated materials was me every single time and that was not my parents fault that was everybody else's parents fault and so if I make a request of you if I set you with a charge it is to stop acting as though black history and black art should only be taught to black children but Chicano art and Chicano literature should only be taught to Latinx children that queer art should only be taught to LGBTQI children if it is all of ours if that is the country to which we aspire then let's let it be all of ours and stop making sure stop allowing our children to be teaching fully grown adults that which they should already know on the political front because I spent a lot of my time there but it intersects with how we write and how we speak and the language that we choose we have to stop seeding ground that this idea of equity and inclusion and liberation is somehow a liberal thing so we get labeled social justice warriors and all you know this is an issue of political ideology you're swinging too far left if equity is only an issue on the left then we're in more trouble than I thought we were and we see the ground every single time somebody accuses us of that and we say oh no we're inclusive we want to have a big dent and we do that all the time worried about where our funding is going to go worried about which board members are going to be mad at us worried about which folks are going to censure our writing I see it happen all the time it is happening in my inbox right now we just have to stop doing that like I don't have any flowery language around that stop it the last two things I will say I have been spending a lot of time trying to think about hope in the context of love and in the work that I do people don't really want to talk about love they want to talk about throwing the stone not the actual hope part but I was really convicted you want to know how young I am I found myself ending a lot of my Twitter threads with a heart and a fist emoji and in my head I was saying love and power because to me they always went together and I found myself doing some studying like I often do and I happened upon a quote from Dr. King about this combination of love and power and I became immediately obsessed with it because what he talks about is that love without power is actually anemic and that is the kind of love we usually talk about this flowery kumbaya love that doesn't have any substance but he talks about combining love with power such that love is used and love and power together correct everything that stands in the way of injustice and I was like that makes sense to me that is the kind of love that I want to define and redefine and so I think that one of the things that we have to do in our rhetoric, in our language in our relationship with one another is actually redefine love to be highly accountable highly responsible highly respectful and not empty the last thing I will say is and this is especially to any folks who run institutions like this one is to keep providing space for people to be deeply authentic because every single day that I stood in front of children and chose to be someone else they saw it every single day I stood in front of children and chose to be myself they saw it when I chose to do the latter I gave them permission to do the same and I have students, mentees people that used to work for me people that have seen me from afar say when you wore that orange jacket instead of a gray suit or when you wore your hair like that and when you did all of these things it gave me permission to be my full self and I'm hoping that that can take over so much that that again is no longer the exception but the rule so to continue to get people that platform profit I will I'll also blow up the museum I think this is just a special and absolutely magical and transporting space let's have more exhibits like the one put together some months ago on black female artists and their remarkable power but let's also let's do and we're willing to sponsor let's do more of this let's all recognize that there's a reclamation project that we are all a part of and that 140 characters is not a conversation make a facebook post is not really activism and that we all have to work together to make this a museum without walls and to go further out and to take folks like Brittany and Charles and to have conversations with them in Marcy houses that have this kind of animating intelligence to it and let's keep just let's keep investing in the instinct that Zora Neale Hurston describes as our desire to keep adorning and transforming the world thank you thank you so let's give it up for Patrick Brittany and Charles