 Welcome, and thank you for joining us this evening for the Matter of Black Lives Panel, featuring Amanda Johnston, Sean Taylor, and Samson McCormick. My name is Katrina Bruton. I'm the African-American Central Librarian here at the San Francisco Public Library, and I'm excited to be moderating tonight's discussion on the use of poetry, humor, comics, and literature to facilitate discussion on the current state of Black America. I'd like to first begin the presentation by introducing our panelists. Amanda Johnston earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. Her poetry and interviews have appeared in numerous online and print publications, including Poetry, Kenfolks Quarterly, Muzzle, Pluck, and the anthologies Small Batch, Full, and the Ringing Ear, Black Poets Lean South. The recipient of multiple artist enrichment grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Kristina Sergeyevna Award from the Austin International Poetry Festival, Johnston is a member of the Afro-Latian Poets and a Cave Canom graduate fellow. Johnston is also a Stone Coast MFA faculty member, a co-founder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founding Executive Director of Torch Literary Arts. Sean Taylor has been a lecturer at San Francisco State University, where he has taught classes in hip-hop and popular culture, media studies, trans-culturalism, and digital humanities. In the cover of comic books, Taylor is one of the co-founders slash organizers of the Black Comics Arts Festival that annually takes place over the Dr. Martin Luther King Holiday Weekend. A writer with two published books, including People's Instinctive Travels and the Passive Rhythm, and Big Black Penis, Misadventures in Race and Masculinity, his writings have appeared in the New York Times, Rad Dad, and the online edition of Ebony. He may find his writings on geek nerd culture at thenerdsofcolor.org, and he will also be launching a podcast media venture during the latter part of this year. Samson McCormick, our third panelist, is an award-winning stand-up comedian, writer, and social justice advocate. He has been touring the country, performing at venues that have included the legendary Howard Theater, the Comedy Store in L.A., and the San Francisco Punchline and Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. One of the most celebrated LGBT comics today, McCormick exhibits a down-to-earth and light-hearted sense of humor and effectively engages audiences on topics of religion, politics, race, and sexuality. So tonight's discussion will begin with our panelists each presenting a 10-15 minute presentation followed by a brief Q&A for myself before opening the floor to questions from the audience. You shot him. When he came back, he shot and he fell, stumbling past the shot, dying, shot dead. He died then, there, fixture of his hands and fingers. We know nothing. My name is Amanda Johnston. I'm a black poet who will not remain silent while this nation murders black people. I have a right to be angry. That video you just saw was created by the poet and visual artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths for Black Poets, Beak Out. I'm going to start my presentation with a poem because those are the tools that we were able to bring forth as poets and they're continuing to share and push forward the message of working against police violence in the United States and abroad. Facing us after Yusef Komenyaka. My black face fades, hiding inside black smoke. I knew they'd use it, damn it, tear gas. I'm grown. I'm fresh. Their clouded assumption eyes me like a runaway, guilty as night chasing morning. I run this way. The street lets me go. I turn that way. I'm inside the back of a police van again, depending on my attitude to be the difference. I run down the signs, half expecting to find my own name protesting in ink. I touch the name Freddie Gray. I see the beat cop's worn eyes. Names stretch across the people's banner. But when they walk away, the names disappear from their lips. Paparazzi flash cuts across the protesters' stare. Call it riot. The ground. A body on the ground. A white cop's image hovers over us. Then his blank gaze looks through mine. I'm a broken window. He's raised his right arm, a gun in his hand. In the black smoke, a drone tracking targets. No, a crow gasping for air. Thank you. Thank you. So Black Poets Speak Out was a campaign that started, it was very personal. It started in 2014 in November, right when the non-indictment for Officer Darren Wilson came in the murder of Mike Brown. When that happened, I was sitting in my home in Austin, Texas. I was at the island in my kitchen, and I was completely devastated. Because there's no difference between Mike Brown and my daughters. There's no difference between Mike Brown's family in Ferguson and my family in Austin, Texas. And if I'm watching this boy, this 18-year-old who was graduating from high school, getting ready for college, lay in the street in his own blood for four hours in the United States of America after doing nothing, that could be my children. That could be me. So I wanted to do something. I don't like feeling helpless. I don't like feeling out of control. And maybe I am. But we can do something. I said there has to be something we can do. So as a Kave Kahnem fellow, I turned to the largest organization that I'm a part of with all of the tools at my resources, which is poetry, which is literature, which is the community that I'm a part of. And I asked the fellows and faculty, what can we do? We started to have a conversation. My sister, Mahogany Brown, called me and said, I can feel you. I can feel you through these internet posts. I can feel you needing help. What can we do? And between Mahogany Brown, myself, Jericho Brown, Sharina Rodriguez, and John Terry Gadsden, we developed an idea to post videos online. We said we could do that for several reasons. One, first to put your face and your personhood into this work, that you are taking that risk to say, I, my name, Amanda Johnston, am not going to sit here and allow this to happen without me responding, without me acting quickly in unison with people across the country. So we said we would do these videos. And within a few days, there were over 100 videos internationally posted online and shared through social media. With those videos, you also hear that opening statement. My name, and I am a black poet, or allies say, I submit this video in support and solidarity with black poets speak out, and I have a right to be angry. We unify all of the videos with that statement to show that it's not off puts, right? It's not outliers and one-offs of people doing this work, but that we are a concentrated, unified group of people who have said that we are tired of police violence in this country. We are tired of watching our loved ones slain in the street. So we did that, and then organically it started to grow. Black poets speak out then had the videos, but we needed to be in community with each other. We needed to see each other, lay hands on each other, hold each other. So we started doing live events. December 6th was the first reading in Washington, D.C., the first live black poet speak out event. Since then, we've had well over 50. We've had panels, programs, readings, poetic, protests, have all happened across the country and in the U.K., but we needed to do more. So we continued doing the work, and we decided we wanted to do a letter writing campaign that directly tied the art and activism to civic engagement. So in 2015, January 1, I dedicated myself to write a letter every single day to elected officials from my home state of Texas all the way to the White House. In 2015, I sent well over 400 letters. Now I want to be clear, that is work, but that is not marching. That is not the same as sitting as sitting. That's an email, and that's something that everybody can do. That was that easy to send. You can send mass emails. So it was really easy for me to do, but what was really telling was to see the non-response. I had emailed Ted Cruz as a senator from Texas. I emailed the White House. I emailed 150 state representatives, and I got back less than 10 replies. So being 2016, that's good information to have as a voter then going forward, right? And what does all of this have to do with poetry? Well, poetry has been around forever, and as James Baldwin said, it is of the people, right? That poetry is meant to disturb the peace. That artists are meant to disturb the peace. So when we're watching all of this unfold, it was quite natural as a poet to see the work that it needed to do in community. So let it write in campaign. And then fourth, and finally, it has grown into lesson plans. Where we now offer online lesson plans for educated... How many people are educators? Or related to... Okay, wonderful. Please come and see me afterwards. We collaborated with Mosaic Magazine. Mosaic Magazine did a free lesson plan from Black Poets Speak Out that they published in their magazine, but you can also get it online. I brought a few issues with me. Please take them back to your campus. So we wanted to make sure that education was a part of the Black Poets Speak Out campaign because we know that there are new generations that are coming forward, that there are young people who might not see everything that's happening, but they're hearing it, right? They're feeling it. It's in their community. So we wanted to give them away an opportunity to be able to talk about what they see going on in their communities. Because let's be clear, young people, young people of color, young black people are the people who are suffering the most percentage-wise from this crisis, right? So we want to make sure that we're addressing them and talking to them and letting them know they're not crazy. That we see it. That we're here and that we are unified with them. And this work is also intended to make sure that we don't forget, that we don't become numb, right? When you start seeing hashtags and you start seeing the list and you start seeing the news and other media outlets look away and turn away, it's up to us to continue to say names like Mario Woods. It's up to us to continue to say names like David Joseph. Now I'm from Texas, Austin, Texas. Have you heard of David Joseph? David Joseph was murdered February 8th, 2016 in Austin, Texas. He was 17 years old. He was naked. He was unarmed. He was shot within seconds of police arriving to a 911 call at 10.30 am on a clear Monday morning. That child needed help. And what he got from Austin police were bullets. Have you heard of Sandra Bland? Sandra Bland was moving to Texas from Illinois. She knew her rights. She knew the law. She died in a jail cell she should have never been in. Have you heard the name Larry Jackson? Larry Jackson was murdered in 2013 in Austin, Texas. He attempted to use a bank. He went to a bank in the afternoon well after it had been robbed at 8 am that morning. He came to the bank late in the afternoon. He had committed no crime but he was chased down by an Austin police detective. That detective commandeered a vehicle to chase him. Cornered him under a Shoal Creek bridge, pistol whipped him, beat him so badly that his colon ruptured and then the forensic showed he was shot execution style in the back of the neck. I share these details so that we don't forget. They want you to forget. I share these poems so that we don't forget. They want you to become numb. They want it to be business as usual. We have children. Children we are responsible for who we're trying to raise. We need them to know the truth. I'm going to speak out has videos from children as young as 10 years old like Nicholas here and our elders and seniors who are well over 80. I'm going to let Nicholas speak to you. Name is Nicholas Haujan who will not remain silent while this nation murders black people. I have the right to be angry. I'm going to leave a poem that I wrote called We all know or at least we have known the police have protected us just not all of us. We all have to be treated equal. I believe in equality. Black or white we have to be treated the same. It seems like the cops have flipped the aggressive switch on. And they are pointing it towards black people. We're just asking the police to stop shooting these young black men. Please stop this terrifying repetition of people of color getting murdered. It's horrible to even think about police shooting and killing young people of color. Please, you have to stop murdering and start protecting. It's your job. It's all of our job. It's all of our job to stay focused and attentive, to not look away, to not become numb, to be allies for each other, to show up and witness and to remember that we have power. One of the greatest lies is to say that we are powerless. We are operating under system of laws that we created and we obey that we trust. So what happens when we start to say that we matter more than the lie? April is National Poetry Month and I'm going to close with a small writing that I shared with the Academy of American Poets that was published in this month's issue of Poetry Magazine. As we celebrate National Poetry Month, let us widen our gaze to see clearly the people and lives blurred in the margins of rhetoric. Let us ask ourselves how we are using our power and privilege in language to empower our communities, lift the voices of others and speak for those who have been silenced. Over the past year, I have watched poets and allies rally in the word to speak out against police brutality through the Black Poets Speak Out campaign. I've seen poems raised at demonstrations in the name of justice. I've watched a man attend an open mic searching for the best words to share with his son when children were killed by those sworn to protect them. He was given James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, June Jordan and more. The poets read him the words of Ross Gay, Evie Shockley, Dinez Smith and others. In this way, I have turned to my own writing searching for the best words in my life. Right, I've asked myself who and what are my poems in service to. Let our poems be in service to the people. Let each word work relentlessly to call forth the best of our humanity. Thank you. How's everybody doing? Probably makes sense to kind of talk about my growing up. I was one of those odd kids and they were like, yeah, he's odd. And never knew what it really was. I read my first book at three, Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree. And then I finished The Hobbit in kindergarten. And once I read that, it pretty much kind of changed the course of my life. And for two reasons. One, reading in words and language have become an obsession for me. But also the idea of fantastic worlds became something pretty significant. My mom's from Jamaica. Dad's from Puerto Rico. And so they had kind of like, you know, Puerto Rico is the United States. My dad like seven times grew up in a pretty abusive household. And so comic books and fantasy science fiction became like the ultimate escape. And people look at comic books as like childlike things. But if you think about how difficult it is to read a comic book, you're looking at a comic book. You're looking at panels on a page. Picture here, picture there. So your mind is actually having to build a bridge between the panels. And then you're also looking at language, spoken to characters, not to mention dialogue, internal dialogue and stage direction or play settings. And so it's really a complex art form. And once I discovered comic books, I pretty much checked out of the world. I was like, okay, you know what, I don't want to watch my mom getting beat anymore. You know, I don't want to watch. I don't want to get beat by my mom's boyfriends anymore. What am I going to do? I would just get a stack of comic books and I would just be basically had a fort built in my closet and I would just sit there and read all day. I'd go to school, go to school, get through it, come home and read all day. And so this type of this like this idea of the fantastic. When I hit around, I mean, when I came out and everybody's like, oh my God, everybody's so juiced about Star Wars and I was like, there was no black people in Star Wars. And I remember being on the playground and this kid, Matthew May, which is his real name, screw him, he basically was like, you know, as a kid you want to play whatever TV show or movies out. Let's play Star Wars, let's play whatever. And he's like, oh Sean, you're a nigger. You could be Dark Vader or Chewbacca. Not Darth Vader, mind you, Dark Vader. And I remember like, okay, and I remember going back into Miss Mianowich's classroom and getting, you know, those big yardsticks and I came up with a little lightsaber and start smacking these kids with it. I was like, okay, I'll be the biggest, baddest, blackest force of evil in the entire galaxy. Yeah, absolutely I will. And I remember just like that rage as even, you know, this is kindergarten now. This is this rage I was feeling there and I realized that the stuff that I love didn't include me. Spider-Man kind of books didn't include me. Superman didn't include me. Like nothing included what I looked like at all. And so then part of me was like, this is not okay. And now as a parent, these things still don't include my daughter. And this is the, we're in 2016 and you have like, you know, this like the diverse book movement that's been, you know, slowly gathering steam now. But I realized that, you know, this stuff, this the firmament of the fantastic is our stuff as well. Every single culture has a mythological tradition. Has a tradition of the fantastic. Has a tradition of magic, whether it's shamanic magic, traditional magic, we have that. But we have been so excluded in being as a black person. There's probably very few cultures in the world that produce as much culture as we do that has influence. I was telling Samantha here earlier today I was at the southern part of the Philippines in Karkar on the island of Cebu, which is right before you get to Mindanao. And there's a burnt out church in the middle of a forest that had Snoop Dogg spray painted on it. And I'm like, we are in the middle of literally nowhere. I don't think I've ever been anywhere remote in my life. And I'm like, wait a minute, we are everywhere, but we aren't there. It's kind of like if only our echos existed, but the source of the echos gets erased. We're just there all the time, whether it's corn rolls getting called boxer braids lately or people saying that some celebrity invented Bantu knots like Bjork have been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years. And so Paul Mooney, everybody wants to be one, but nobody wants to be one. So, and I realize that in the stuff I love, like the science fiction fantasy speculative fiction that we don't have enough of a presence. And Mark Dairy has this essay called Black to the Future, and he's the funny white journalist who kind of like coined the idea of Afrofuturism, which probably people are hearing a lot about right now. And the entire black existence is science fiction. I mean, white people came from a different planet with superior technology, landed some place new, took people, abducted them, and landed them onto a different planet. I mean, the entire black story in the Americas is an alien abduction story. And there's something really kind of like mind blowing about that when you really start parsing it out. Like, you know, and then as Man was saying earlier, but we came from a sci-fi abduction story to superheroes because how are we even still alive? How is it that we've come from, I mean, we're watching the contemporary police brutality. I mean, Jim Crow, not that long ago. Historical time, slavery, not that long ago. And if we look at it through a trauma lens, people expected to be over and healthy right away. No. That's not really going to happen. So now we're in this time frame now where barriers to entry for cultural production are almost non-existent. Like, my phone and my pocket is probably more powerful than the computers in the Viking space mission. I have a recording studio, I have a movie studio, and so now we can create culture and disseminate culture at a flick of a button. And so for me, it was how do I get more black kids, you know, or kids who identify as black or they're biracial or whatever to get involved in this geek stuff because I think the geek stuff is very powerful. I mean, you look at the top 20 movies of all time, all but two are sci-fi or fantasy. All but two. Of all time. But then you look at how many people are people of color are actually in the first three leads. Doesn't exist. How many women are in the first three leads? Doesn't exist. So that's problematic. I love this stuff. Because it's our modern mythology. Grant Morrison, comic book author, saying that the comic book that we have now, the idols, they're basically cave paintings that we're touching up and making them new for newer generations to come from behind us. And for me, it's so important for representation because if you look at black representation in popular culture and media, it's not three-dimensional. It's tropes. You know, Hillary Clinton and her super predator things are coming back to Haunter now and the idea that we can't do anything more than just, you know, be violent or have violence done to us or that we produce other culture for people to consume but we don't get any part of it. I'm like Buster Rhymes, hip-hop MC said, hip-hop, for example, is the only art form that makes money for people who don't even like it or the people who produce it. And so what I wanted to do was really kind of take back maybe it's a little bit Marxist of me but I wanted to kind of create production avenues for black people to get into this geek stuff because I think it's really powerful and important. And so I allied myself with a couple of people about 15, 16, 17 years now where I did a huge comic book drive. I was like, okay, because there's so many kids in the hood, you know, and there's that whole thing whether it's true or not that prisons are built by third-grade literacy rates and so we were like, we want all these books and so we got, I think 13,000 comic books donated to us and we just gave them out into the neighborhoods where we know that people were under resourced. We just gave them out and so we would have basically comic book clubs and people were looking at us, you know, big black guys tattooed whatever, like, we have perverts coming in with comic books, like, you know, but we came in and we were like, we were giving comic books out and so we would actually go to libraries, church basements, and read comic books with kids and teach them and the literacy was incredible because they actually got to imagine themselves. We started with Spiderman because Spiderman outside of his alter ego Peter Parker, his face was covered so anybody could be in that mask. There's that identity, identification that could be there you know, because, let's get real, because most comic books are just adolescent white boy power fantasies you know, Batman, I'm rich, my parents died let me kill somebody you know, Iron Man, I'm rich, let me beat somebody up, I mean that's all of these, there's a power fantasy, but when you start adding race, gender, sexuality all the cultural nuances to this geek culture, we get things like Octavia Butler I mean, if you haven't read Kindred you should just after today go buy it, and then buy 12 copies a share of people because it's probably one of the most transformative text of my life. A black woman protagonist in an ostensibly science fiction novel was unbelievable. You know people, we always get told that we don't exist in this space but then you have Bill Delaney, you have George Schuyler in the 20s, you have Tenerife Dewey, who's Stephen Barnes' wife, you've got N.K. Jemisin, you have Nalo Hopkinson, Eddie Ork before, you have all these people, Aizidjama Everett, who's local, and we are there we are creating these worlds because I think that we've been prescribed worlds for so long whether they're fantastic, I mean like, how am I supposed to like connect with friends or Seinfeld or anything else because there's a white cultural default which is fine to a degree I'm not saying that you can't be a different color and appreciate somebody else's culture, I'm not saying what I'm saying is that when I'm erased completely when I'm omitted, and don't be Native American or Asian in America you don't even exist in popular culture and so there's nothing wrong with, you know, we want that, that's why I'm part of this group called the Nerds of Color or websites at thenerdsofcolor.org and it's every possible color, sexuality class, and we're all writing about this stuff because we're finding things A, we critique but B, we promote a lot of people doing this stuff and for me it's important because I think there's nothing more amazing than the activation of an imagination especially for people who are oppressed because if you don't have the ability to dream yourself out of your situation, you're stuck and you have to be able to deform the idea that freedom, liberation is even possible, which is a supreme act of science fiction and so being able to do that, I think we've done some good, I mean like we were here in January, we I'm the co-founder of the Black Comets Arts Festival and it happens over Martin Luther King Day weekend every second year this year and the kids are just like you mean there's black superheroes that people are making and like you see their faces and just this world of possibility in their eyes and I guess the highest form of praise I ever received was from my daughter who's eight now but at this time she was seven and she's like, daddy, I was like, yeah because if you have kids they have that act of where you're like, aw dang like, you know, daddy I'm like, yes, baby, she's like, you're doing really good work and I was like, why am I doing good work? She's like, well because me and some other kids, you know, we get to be in space, we get to fly spaces, we get to have powers because other people aren't thinking about that and did I cry? Yeah but it was such a powerful acknowledgement that, you know, this stuff matters to people and I'm not just like some weird 43 year old guy who still wants to play superhero and so I'm like, if you want to give your kids reading, give them geek stuff, give them comic books, give them science fiction, give them things you'd be so surprised at how much literacy levels, like critical thinking levels because what science fiction can do and geek culture can do, talk about problems like these problems in ways where people don't automatically just like shut off. Because we see so much tragedy every single day. Most of us have developed a really thick skin, social and psychological psychic warfare skin whereas I can talk about race through Star Trek and talk about that. I can talk about the idea of taking back your community through vigilanteism in comic books and really talking about these things and so more than just it being a place for for fantastic representation of oneself in these context, I think it's also a place where we can really get people to start being activated about things. So, thank you I'd like to now take this opportunity to discuss some of your views in terms of the relationship between expressive mediums such as poetry, humor and comics and activism. So, clearly activism can take on many forms depending on one's own interests and strengths. What advice do you have for others wishing to use their particular talents and interests to promote discussion or effect change and anybody can just jump in whoever is most comfortable. Show up. That's really number one. You all showed up tonight. Thank you so much for showing up. Every action starts with that first movement of presence, right? Would black poets speak out? It happened because people wanted to show up. We wanted to do things and, you know, not everyone has the same skill set. Not everyone has the same drive, you know to be that person with the bullhorn at the front of the protest. Some people are, you know, like during the civil rights marches, there were plenty of people making plates and passing them out to the people who were passing as they were marching on their way to D.C. So we need people at all points of those levels, but first you have to say, I can show up. You have to look at your hands and say, what can I bring? You know, you can bring poetry. You can bring fantasy, literary writing. But first we need you to bring you. Oh, sorry. Oh, I would say not being afraid. For a long time, I was afraid because I lived in a closet. So when you live in a closet and people tell you, you know, and I'm from the south, so you know in the south it's, oh, mind those white folks. So it was that and living in a closet and I had to learn how to shatter both of those barriers in order to bring about issues that affect folks. Some folks who will never be able to open their mouth and say, this is how I'm affected by this particular situation. And I don't do it to be an asshole, but I do it because it needs to be said. And I get emails sometimes from people saying, oh, like I was in Detroit a couple months ago. And it was mostly white audience and I talked about race and some stuff I saw in Fox News and this guy sent me an email afterwards and he said, oh, I enjoyed the set, but I'm glad that you kept the race stuff to a minimum. Like it makes people very uncomfortable, but if it makes you uncomfortable, stop doing it. I think knowing the difference between being an activist and being activated I think we're talking about this earlier. I think that artists people who want to make a difference burn themselves out too quickly because what the deal was like, you want to come up and play chess? No, I got to go to the rally and I got to spring my words and show my art. I'm like, but you need to actually take care of yourself because if you're burnt out, you can't be of any use to anyone else. And you start resenting your talent. Then you start moving away from your talent because you use it only in the service of one thing as opposed to healing yourself with your gifts. And I think that there has to be a fine balance. And I think that if more people who do activist work became more activated and know when to turn it off and when to turn it on I think we wouldn't lose so many people. I don't think we'd burn so many people out. Thank you. And then this next question I just kind of wanted to know on a personal level what have you learned any of you, what have you learned in the time between beginning to share your medium in this context and today? Were there any surprises along the way through this journey of sharing your talents and using it for the greater good? I've realized how many people of color are invested in capital W whiteness? How many? Because there's a very comforting thing to be a part of the mainstream. And once you decide to kind of go your own way people are like, no, no, no. And as if it's wrong it's an anomaly of some sort. Because we live in a world that's white default and everybody subscribes to that particular default and when you start doing something different especially if you look at geek spaces if you ever want to hate the world read comments after an article about race and superheroes you will hate the earth by the third post. And it's because it's always been the province of particular demographic and now we want to take things differently. I mean like when how many of you remember when John Boyega was slated to be in the new Star Wars film and you see just the sheer, everybody's like oh my god, how dare you you could believe that a big ass dogman could fly a spaceship but you can't believe that a black guy could be in a sci-fi context. There's a problem there that's very terrifying but then also a lot of the heat came from people of color who were invested in certain ideas into them and so when you are like the trailblazer or the herald of a new idea you take a brunt of that, you are almost responsible for that shift in consciousness and shift in perception and once you start changing the way you see and experience things that's when a lot of the danger comes out that's when a lot of the fear comes out because you start grasping at straws and start punching at you because you've just disturbed their baseline for X amount of years and all the color are really invested just as much as white folks are in a white supremacist construct. Thank you. I want to add to that as far as things that were surprising also yes the investment is totally there but young people and how they are are really they really give no fucks and the respectability politics are not there in the same way and that's refreshing, that's what gives me hope in Austin after Sandra Bland died in Waller County there was young people, college students organizing a silent vigil and protest march to the capital, to the Texas state capital they did that with no permit they did that with social media organizing they did that in ways that I had not seen before where it was the issue at hand what's surprising to me is when you embrace your freedom, true freedom and you stay focused on the matter at hand which is justice which is really quality if we're going to go for that unapologetically so much stuff can happen amazing things can happen when you make space for that they did this again protest with police escort with no permit over 300 people marched to the Texas state capital I'm talking Ted Cruz land here I'm talking Abbott as governor Jesus and without incident it was in silence it was beautiful, it was amazing what they also did was they said we're going to line up in a certain way I said huh what now I was there they asked me to come and share a poem I'm like I got you, I got the poems but then watching they were like we're going to line up black people first I was like you can do that at a protest tell people where to stand all people protest, no black people first because they understood that we are the ones putting our lives on the line and you are not going to marginalize us you are not going to put us to the side when we are out here demanding justice for our own lives they said black people first then brown people next then other next then white people in the back of the march and then everybody followed there was no incident and everybody respected that and everybody knew why and then we marched all the way from east Austin across I-35 which is the main highway that cuts through Texas running from north to south 6th street right through I believe it was pretty no there was some festival going on but there is always a music festival in the live music capital of the world and we marched right down 6th street again in silence hundreds of people in that order got to the steps of the Texas state capital it was amazing and then they said we are not going to do any interviews with any major media outlets until every brown blogger, twitter media journalist gets a comment first I said you can do that they said yeah so for me that has been very surprising and warming and encouraging to see we don't have to follow the masters rules once you start saying that once you start doing that that's what you see now that's what you see with the disruptions that's what you see with the outcries that's what you see with the organizing in new and brilliant ways is because they change in the rules and we need to catch up that's the future alright thank you so much thank you for having us unfortunately I would like to thank our panelists for their thoughtful commentary on the subject of blackness and social activism in America I'd also like to thank our audience for coming out this evening if you would like to be kept in the loop on future events through the African American center please be sure to leave your email address on the sign in sheet on your way out thank you and have a good evening thank you