 So, it's my honor now to introduce our keynote speaker for this morning, Tamika Butler. Tamika serves as the executive director of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust, a nonprofit organization that addresses social and racial equity and wellness by building parks and gardens in park poor communities across the greater Los Angeles area. She has to leave quickly today because she's opening a park in Los Angeles tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. Before her role at that organization, Tamika was the executive director of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition. She has previously served as the co-chair of the National Center for Lesbian Rights Board of Directors. She serves as the institute co-director for the New Leaders Council Los Angeles and is a board member of both the Lambda Literacy Foundation and Trust South LA and is an advisory board member for the Legal Aid Society Employment Law Center's Fair Play for Girls in Sports Program. Please join me in welcoming Tamika Butler. Thank you everybody. Thanks for your patience. So good morning everybody. My name is Tamika as was previously mentioned and I'm super excited to be here in Denver. Part of the reason I'm excited to be here in Denver is because I'm from the Midwest. I'm originally from Nebraska. My parents were born. My dad was born and raised in the projects in Nebraska with his 14 brothers and sisters. My mom was born in South Carolina and moved to Omaha because her dad was in the military. And so I know Denver well. There's a very rich pipeline of folks from Omaha to Denver. Denver's a big city for us. I have some family here that I didn't tell I was coming since I'm leaving in a few hours. So I always put my Twitter handle and my organization's Twitter handle up here, tweet freely and I'll just deal with my family later. But I grew up actually predominantly in Okinawa, Japan. Like I said my dad was in the Air Force and so I was in Okinawa, Japan from second grade until right before I started high school and we moved back to Nebraska for high school. It was really exciting for my parents and it was devastating for me and my sister. They promised us Hawaii or California or Florida and then they came home and they're like, and we're going to Nebraska. And so we ended up in Nebraska and Nebraska was this really eye-opening experience for me because when you grow up on a military base overseas everyone's just American. And when I moved back to the states it was immediately clear that everyone didn't just see me as American. They saw me as black, they saw me as gay, they saw me as a woman, but it was no longer I'm just an American and the divisions and the lines were so present and though I knew I was black, I have black parents and my mom gave birth to me, it was still really hard as a freshman in high school to be experiencing this different world. And so I went through high school in Nebraska, I went through college in Nebraska, I really wanted to go to Columbia when I got into Columbia and my parents didn't have any money and so I stayed in Omaha, I went to Creighton and had a full ride scholarship but as soon as I graduated I knew I had to get out of the Midwest. So I mean look at me, I'm black, I'm gay, I mean I can't be in the Midwest. And then I went out to California, I went to Stanford for law school and immediately all my friends were like oh my god you're so Midwestern, stop talking to people. And so I realized that I'm actually very Midwestern. I practiced law for a few years, I was an employment discrimination attorney, hated it. I loved my clients, I loved the work I was doing, it was so important but oh my gosh being a lawyer was the worst. I married a lawyer, my wife is lovely and our relationship is much better now that just one of us is a lawyer. And so I kind of you know I went straight from Creighton to law school and when you're young and when you really have no marketable skills because all you did was go to school, the perfect place to end up is in the non-profit world and not because you don't need skills to be in the non-profit world but because the non-profit world has the creativity to see your ability to do more than just what your resume says. And so I worked at a number of different organizations that folks talk about but I'm currently at the Los Angeles neighborhood land trust. And so what is the Los Angeles neighborhood land trust? So we're an organization that builds parks and gardens and low-income communities of color. That's the easiest, most straightforward way to say it. We do policy advocacy too, we have a greenhouse out of high school where we do youth development and college readiness, we do a professional development and civic engagement program for adults who are the members at our parks and gardens but at our core we're an organization that builds parks and gardens and low-income communities of color and for us it's about park equity, food justice, environmental justice and racial justice. And it's really about centering the communities and all that we do and organizing those community members to lead our work and really to be the folks who are building and managing our parks. We don't build a park unless the community says they want to park. We don't design anything in the park unless the community says it's what they want and it's not that we're showing up and saying here's one picture, here's another, put a little sticker next to the one you like. We show up with a blank page and we let them conceptualize what they want to see in their community and through the whole process we're developing local leadership. Now, why you might be asking do we even have to exist? Why is there a Los Angeles neighborhood land trust? And I asked the same question when I was exploring the job because I knew my mom was going to ask me that question. Is she again lamented on how I just wasn't a lawyer anymore? And so I asked around and I was like, why is there a Los Angeles neighborhood land trust? And years ago in the city of Los Angeles there was a rule. It wasn't an official rule, it wasn't written down anywhere, but there was a rule. And the rule said that our department of recreation and parks, it's really hard for me not to say parks and rec like the TV show, but they get very upset. But it was very hard for them to ever keep a full budget. Whenever the city made budget cuts, it was always their department that got the cuts. So in order to get the most bang for their buck, they said we will only build parks if we have at least five acres of land. That's it. So if it's five acres, if it's less than five acres, we won't build a park there. And so in the abstract, that seems like a great idea. Get the most bang for your buck. And practice what it meant in a place like Los Angeles is that in the higher denser communities, which surprise, surprise, were often low-income communities, communities of color, they weren't building any parks. They weren't building any green space. And so now if you go to California and you're in Los Angeles, or if you do it the cheaper way and you just look at a Google map, if you look at the view of where there's green space in Los Angeles, it's golf courses, country clubs that are private. And they're mostly on the west side. So think Santa Monica, think Beverly Hills. And they're in areas where there was more space. And they have beautiful community gardens and beautiful parks. But in low-income communities of color, that doesn't exist. So our current mayor, Mayor Garcetti, who has brought the Olympics back to LA, despite what you know, there's people on different sides of that in LA, but he's brought the Olympics back to LA. And he is a person who, through his pursuit of the Olympics and in his early career, really believed in the need for folks to have green space, to be able to get outside and get active. And so he and his wife, when he was a young council member, got together with a group of their friends and they created the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust. And we were never intended to be another Parks and Rec, but we were intended to help fill this gap and provide park equity because this policy was creating a situation where certain people were being excluded. And when we think of people being excluded from parks, we think about things like this, right? We think about not too long ago, when I was in college, the summer between when I was going from college to law school, I was working at a law firm. One of my white colleagues said to me, I didn't know you could swim. How do you know how to swim? And I'm like, well, I grew up on Okinawa. I know you don't know where that is, because you've never left Nebraska. But it's an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and so I learned how to swim. And she's like, that's crazy. When I was growing up, black people didn't know how to swim. I said, well, they did. But your parents didn't want you to have to be in the water with my parents. And so you just didn't see them swimming, right? And so we think of intentional policies like this, when we think of the ways in which policies keep people out. But you can have an unofficial policy, just like in LA. Not too many years ago, our organization is only 15 years old that also result in the exact same thing. So even though this is a picture from the 60s, and these are kids that look just like my mom did when she was growing up in segregated South Carolina in one of the most beautiful beach communities, but she couldn't use the best beach. You have children of color who are constantly on the outside looking in, wondering when they're going to get the same things as everyone else. And you could say, well, this is just an LA problem. We don't have anything like that here. This is a great state. Everyone likes to be outdoors. We have so many parks. But this is a United States problem. Has anybody ever heard of this book? Raise your hand if you've heard of this book. One person? So this book is written by Madison Grant. Does anybody know who Madison Grant is? Who's Madison Grant? I like you. So Madison is the author of this book, The Passing of the Great Race. This book is a book that Hitler was known to say was like his Bible. So this is a book that talks about how people of color and immigrants are ruining the master race. And Madison Grant also happened to be a man who was in the inner circle of all the important people during his time. He was in the same circle as presidents, as elected officials, and he is one of the folks credit it with starting our national park system. He is one of the four founders of the national park system. And so is it a Alabama keep colored people out problem? Is it an LA we only build when we have five acres of land problem? Or is this a problem inherent in open space conservation and everything that we have embedded in our American culture? Were national parks created to preserve our land and welcome people in? I don't know if I believe that because it's not really our land. The national park system was created to take land from the people whose country this really is and keep them out of it so the white folks with privilege and power and money who Hitler loved could enjoy it without them ruining it. And this just isn't a park's problem. This is a problem for our country. This book, The Color of Law, it's a fairly new book. If you haven't read it, you should read it. And the subtitle, Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Now the guy who wrote this is a white guy. Super nice white guy, lives in Berkeley, so he's clearly like a dope liberal white guy, right? He's even Jewish, like he's great. I was on a webinar with Richard, and I said Richard. I didn't call him Dick. I said Richard. I said, you know, you're a white guy and so this might be a forgotten history of how the government segregated America for you, but I guarantee no one in my family's forgotten how the government segregated America, right? And this book talks about the way in which governments pass policies to ensure that black people couldn't own land, couldn't buy housing. And he talks in detail and it's brilliant. It's a brilliant book. He talks in detail about the way in which I will never, as a black American, be a black American in particular who doesn't play sports or do music, I will never be able to accumulate as much wealth as my white peers. Because I don't have the same history of folks in my family having the ability to build wealth. There were policies written to keep us from building wealth. And when it wasn't housing, when housing wouldn't work, when the courts tried to step in timidly and say you can't do this with housing, then they used policies that said, okay, well we're gonna make this a park. We're gonna make it a segregated park, but we're gonna make it a park. And we know this. We've all heard of redlining. We've all heard about the ways that the government worked to keep people apart. And it's not just parks, and it's not just housing. It's the laws we have about what communities are zoned to allow for oil drilling and for toxic plants, right? This is a picture of the Exide plant in California that is in a brown community that has been having spills and hazards all the time. And nothing is really fixing it, except for the people organizing themselves. But then you think of a place like Porter Ranch, which is white in LA, and they had a leak. And they still, the news is talking now about how we're not gonna have enough gas to heat through the winter because they haven't been able to return to their normal levels of storage of gas at Porter Ranch because those white people ain't letting that happen, right? And so what are the rules that allow my community that I live in in LA to have the highest number of active oil drills in the country because it's a black community? What are the rules and policies that our governments put in place when they designed our interstate system? What are the pieces of the interstate that destroyed communities, that ripped through communities? And now when you're on the interstate, where are the communities that just get passed over with no exit because you don't wanna go there? How did we come up with this saying, the other side of the tracks? Because the people in power put in the tracks to keep some of us on the other side. There's a reason why, again, my community in South LA where we build a majority of our gardens, when I look around and I say, I wanna eat something healthy because I'm me, like when I eat, like I'm a chubby girl, I come from a chubby family, I gotta eat healthy. My wife is like this beautiful, like six foot two skinny Canadian woman who eats Taco Bell every day and never gains a pound. And she's like, our neighborhood is great. There's a Taco Bell in every direction. I'm so glad you made me move here. But we know that it's because there are certain rules in place that allow this to happen. And it's about racism, it's about colonialism, it's about all of these things. And so when we're thinking about healthy living and active living and eating healthy, we have to be clear that we have to think about it in an intersectional way. We have to think about our work in an intersectional way because the reason that there are folks who are living at a disadvantage is because of the multi-layered ways in which white supremacy is constantly working to keep them down. Now some of you are like, did she just say white supremacy? I thought we were talking about parks. And Kanye, I mean, Kanye is such an appropriate picture here because that's the look we all have every time he speaks. We're just like, Kanye, man, you got with Kim and it just all went to hell. But yes, we're talking about white supremacy, we're talking about colonialism, and we're talking about these things because in our work at the Neighborhood Land Trust, we realize that the intersection of these things are literally resulting in neighborhoods that are killing people. The resulting and things where your neighborhood is the reason that you can likely attribute your death, your cancer, your inability to get pregnant. And we know it's like that for so many communities. Now not all communities, right? When the Fresh Prince left West Philadelphia and went to Bel Air, things changed. There is a 12 year life expectancy gap from Bel Air and Watts. And even if you're not from LA, many folks have heard of the Watts riots. You know what Watts is. My best friend in LA is a teacher at a high school in Watts that is literally located in the projects where she regularly has to go under desk because of gang violence and shootings that are happening outside of her classroom. And that is about parks. That is about our policies. That is about the way that low income folks and folks of color have less access to the things they need. And as a result, they're more reliant on public facilities, but the public facilities aren't there. Because if you remember, there's those rules that have prevented them from being there. But at our organization, we really push back. And we try to say we're gonna look at it differently and we're gonna do our work differently and we're not gonna listen to what folks think about this community. We're gonna go to community members and we're gonna build the communities together. Ooni Dad Park is a park where we have a garden, it's a playground, there's barbecues. Literally, if you go to Ooni Dad Park on any day, by 7 a.m., there are people in that park. On a weekend, there are families staking out the grills so that they could barbecue. That mural in the middle on the bottom has depictions of folks throughout history who are Filipino and have made amazing historical impacts. This park is located in a Filipino community. It's a community that's quickly changing, but it's called Historic Filipino Town. And whenever folks come on tours from the Philippines, literally tour buses pull up to our park to take pictures of the mural. And that's a mural that we didn't design as a nonprofit that builds parks, but that the community designed. Because they wanted a place that folks could come and see themselves and be themselves. And the only reason we knew that was important is because we were able to have deep conversations about gentrification and racism and what it meant to be Filipino. We were able to do that because we pushed ourselves to do it when some people would be saying, shouldn't we just be building a park? We've done this in Fremont. This is a high school in South Central where we have a state-of-the-art greenhouse. No other public school in LA has this state-of-the-art greenhouse. We have a program with students where we teach them how to farm, we teach them how to garden, we teach black students and brown students who would never talk to each other, how to become best friends. One of my favorite stories is that one of our students from last year wrote us a letter thanking us for teaching her how to grow her own food, how to grow food from the country her parents came from, how to cook, how to make things with the food she grew, how to understand what food justice means. And as a result, she was not only going to college, but her part-time job was gonna be at Chipotle, not McDonald's because Chipotle was more responsible than how they got their food. So you know, it's not perfect, but we're getting there. And we really don't do anything unless the community asks us. This is one of our future parks. This is in Compton. A lot of folks have heard about Compton. This was a Shell Superfund site. Shell came in and in this really open field, there were homes and they knocked them all down. And the community got together. One community member in particular who said I was pregnant with my daughter when this happened and today she's about to leave for college and we still don't have a park. Shell told us they were gonna give us a park. The county couldn't build a park here because they couldn't take on the liability of their environmental issues. And so they brought us in and we led the community and the community didn't just wanna talk about the park. They wanted to talk about racism. They wanted to talk about the fact that they can't breathe. They wanted to talk about all of these different things. They were intimately involved in exactly how many trees there are. Exactly how many parking spaces there are because they want more people to bike and walk. It's about looking at all of the work together and realizing there's a real sense of urgency in the work we're doing. Sometimes people get intellectual when they think about being active or eating healthier in the environment. They think about science. They think about health. They think about medical things. But at its core, it's about people. When I took this job, my mom said to me, when did you become an environmentalist? I said, mom, I'm not an environmentalist. Do not say that out loud. But also when you taught me because even though folks constantly are saying that folks of color don't care, I'm pretty sure my mom and people in our community are recycling and at the recycling center more than anybody. I'm pretty sure my mom makes me rinse out everything and reuse it. We got a lot of plastic forks from fast food restaurants in my house. I'm pretty sure she told me that I can't have every light in the house on, that we're not air conditioned in the whole community. Shut the front door. Right? Like I'm pretty sure that low income folks of color understand the environment and they understand the urgency and they understand that it's better for their health. It's better for the environment and it's better for their people, for their community. So sometimes we like to talk about things in the abstract but we have to talk about it as it relates to people. And we have to realize that there's also some urgency because communities are changing. I was talking earlier and I said, I keep telling my wife, my wife is, our family's from Canada and they moved to Phoenix because they hated how cold it was. And she grew up in Phoenix and then in California. And she does not wanna leave the West Coast. She's just like, the weather's perfect, it's amazing. And I, you know, I like seasons. Sure, California has spoiled me but I keep telling her Denver is our dream city. I'll send her job opportunities. I'm like, that firm you worked at in LA has a Denver office. You make the same amount of money but you live in Denver. Like I'm trying with every bone in my body to get my wife to wanna live in Denver. And when I was talking to somebody about this earlier we were like, yeah, everybody has that same idea. And those of us from here are like, what the fuck? Like, why are you making everything so expensive here, right? So I think we all understand the urgency, right? Folks of color, folks who have been in communities for a long time are seeing the craft beer signs go up. They're seeing the record store that all of a sudden is cool again. They're seeing the way their communities change. And then what happens to the folks who have been living there? Particularly if they're folks of color. No one cared about our communities, right? When I used to be at the bike coalition and people would be like, yo, you know black people don't like bikes. You know black people think bikes are the first sign of gentrification. And I'm like, it's not about the bike lane because black and brown people have been riding bikes. Black and brown people invented bike share. Ayo homie, let me hold your bike for a minute. I'll bring it right back. We invented this shit. So it's not about that it's a sign of gentrification. It's about the fact that you're gonna stripe a bike lane in our community but you still can't pick up our trash. The buses never come on time. We still don't have that grocery store you promised us. The resources aren't here. So who are you putting that bike lane in for? Because you didn't care about our community before different people started to move here, right? The community I'm in right now has that same sense of anger. When my beautiful white wife is walking our adorable designer dog because I have allergies and I needed him not to shed, she was walking the dog the other morning and she called me upset and she's like, this black guy just saw me and he yelled at me and he said, go gentrify somebody else's neighborhood. And I made sure she was okay. I talked to her and I was like, babe, you know, white people have said worse to me in every neighborhood. At least he said hi. But we're all aware of what's happening and there is some urgency because it feels like we're losing our communities and when we lose our communities, it's so much more because all of a sudden the train that I ride every single day now has more white people on it. And when I'm wearing my baseball cap and my hoodie and maybe eating my Skittles, somebody can kill me because even though this is my neighborhood, now they feel unsafe because now they've decided to come here. And that's real shit for us. And it's even more real because stuff is really, really urgent now. And sure, like our good friends, our good allies, they're uniting, they're having the biggest marches in history. They're showing up at airport saying, you know, hey, there might have been a retweet of fake news about Muslims but because it was about Muslims, it's okay. But I love my Muslim neighbor. I literally, this is, I Googled airport protest. This was the first picture that came up and I know that white lady in the picture. I have really good white friends. She used to be my boss. But for a lot of us folks of color, we're like a word, now you guys wanna show up because for us, we're still wondering what you're actually gonna do to help with some of those things we were talking about in the community. Are you gonna show up for just a march and write a really clever sign? Are you gonna be honest about the fact that the reason white supremacy persists is because white people who benefit from it, even though they might say it's bad, they're not willing to really do all it takes to get rid of it. And again, you're like, wait, aren't we talking about parks? Yes, this is a park. This is not only a park. This is called Emancipation Park and Charlottesville. This is where people rallied. So for some of you, you're like, wait, why are we talking about white supremacy when we're supposed to be talking about parks? This is supposed to be the park lady. But because for some of us, when we think of parks, this is what we think about. We think about how parks are spaces where people come together and convene and sometimes it's really great with the mural of your community and your culture that people come from around the world to see and sometimes it's about hate. And so that's why we have to talk about racism and white supremacy when we're talking about living healthy and being active. Because when you look at this picture, when you force yourself to look at it and not look away, how can someone be healthy and be active when a day at the park turns into this? And maybe you don't think about this stuff when you think about parks. I think about it all the time because I don't have the privilege not to think about it. And you have to ask yourself, if you're in this room because you care about this work, but you're not talking about these deeper issues and you don't feel like you have to talk about these different issues, then what kind of privilege do you have that you allow yourself to ignore it? And maybe right now, this is rubbing you a little wrong and you're thinking, but that's not me. I'm not a tiki torch racist. That's just not who I am. In fact, I don't even see race. You know, I'm out here fighting for racial equality, but we're beyond that. We're beyond wanting equality. You have to be fighting for equity. And the thing that's fucked up about all of these equity equality pictures, whether it's people looking over fence at a baseball game, whether or not it's people having different sized ladders and picking apples from a tree, why should any of us have to be on the stool for those resources? Why can't we just have the books and the knowledge and the parks and the apples at our disposal? Why are there even the barriers there? And if you can't think about a quality being different from equity, if you don't see race, if you don't understand why I'm talking about white supremacy, I mean, it's probably because you might have a little bit of white fragility. And you might be in this place where you're getting a little stressed out. I've never given one of these talks where at some point a white person doesn't walk out because they're fragile as fuck. Or where they're like, oh, that's not me. I don't know what to do. And it's hard. It's hard to sit in that discomfort. It's hard to be honest about your privilege and your fragility. I am in a relationship with a white woman who I love very much, and there are times where she brings shit at me and I'm like, you better go find a white friend because I'm not the one because this is about you and your guilt and I don't have to make you feel better. Me doing anything to make you feel better is a gift. And I don't owe you anything. And in fact, because of the policies and practices that this country has put in place, if anything, I'm owed some real shit. So if we're honest, when you live in a world where you could be being honored as a native person and somebody could make a joke about Pocahontas, or where you can be a black kid, a kid just playing in a park and you can get shot because you look dangerous, or when you can be undocumented and just going to the park to play or the school to get educated and you can be deported because somebody has deemed that you are illegal because we think people can be illegal. When you are a trans person who constantly faces people looking at you and staring at you and not seeing you for who you are but only for the spectacle they want you to be, you understand that you're owed some real shit but you spend your whole life helping people who are like, well, I'm a good person. I don't need it to the right charities. ACLU man, I'm there. And you have to make them feel better about what they're doing. And when they say sorry, you have to accept their apology and you have to make it seem like they did you a favor. When in actuality, you're doing them the favor. So folks have to realize if we're really gonna do transformative work, then sure, be like everyone's favorite Canadian or least favorite Canadian, let's be honest. Except for Selena Gomez, she took them back again, but say sorry and let's move forward. Let's do the work and let's be honest about who you're gonna be. In this work, are you just gonna be an actor? Are you gonna be somebody who shows up, who gets the accolades, who plays the parts despite the fact that we all seem to forget that you do fucked up shit? Are we gonna just show up and be actors who really aren't changing the narrative at all? We're just showing up and playing the role. We're just saying we're the good person. We're doing good work. Or are you gonna be an ally? Are you actually going to engage in the verb of being an ally, of doing something? And if you get to this point where you are an ally, realizing that you might be in a room where somebody says something inappropriate, and do you go to Facebook and change your icon to a rainbow flag, or change your icon to I stand with, insert tragedy here, or do you say something in that moment? Do you take action? And if you get to that point, are you honest enough with yourself about your privilege and about what you gain from right supremacy to say that being an ally isn't enough? Because I gotta tell you, as folks of color in the current world we're in, I love a good ally, but I got enough allies. I'm ready for some accomplices. I'm ready for some folks who are not just gonna say something or do something in the moment, but then go back to their life and say, well, I did that good thing today, Bob. What did you do today? Well, Jane, I said something too. That's awesome. Great. Are you engaged in it every single day? Are you my co-conspirator? Are you willing to risk something? Are you willing to put it all on the line? Because I tell you what, every time a woman, a person with a disability, someone who's queer, and particularly a person of color, every time we speak up and every time we do something, we're at risk. Every day my mom is concerned that that's gonna be the day that I'm not alive anymore. Because I'm black and I'm young and people see me as a young black man. And because I talk a lot and I'm not good at not saying what I think. I have to remind her I'm not good at that because she and my grandmother raised me to always speak up when things are wrong and to just do more than speak up, but to do something. So what are you doing? I have lost jobs because I've been willing to do something. I have got accused of crimes because I have been willing to do something. I have had people fear me because as long as I'm black, my skin is a weapon and they're mine. What are you willing to risk to do this work? And are you willing to be honest about the fact that you can't just do something and then be like hashtag woke? Because for some of us, we are woke all the fucking time. We don't ever get to sleep. We can't ever step down. We can't ever give up. We can't even have a break. We gotta do our real job. We gotta do the job of making white folks feel better. We gotta do the job of code switching and being polite. We gotta tell a joke every so often in our presentation about white supremacy so that we still don't scare people too much. We have to stay awake all the time. So if you are really committed to doing this work and whether it's for parks, whether it's for healthy eating, whether it's for active living, whatever the fuck it's for, if you're willing to do it, are you really woke? And even if you are new to this so you have to take a few naps, how do you make sure that you keep fighting in the way that the folks for whom so much is being taken from, the folks for whom it's expected that they do the work for you such that they don't ever get to nap? If you have to take your naps, then when you wake up, you better be woke as fuck. Hashtag woke AF. Thank you.