 My name is Olivier, I'm building a VHS sophomore and we're here with my friends, Jeremy and Boniface, who are part of the Brothers Keeper group and something I like to do on my free time just watching Netflix. Boniface, you can introduce yourself and say something like that. Hi, my name is Boniface and I go to VHS and I'm a junior and something I like to do on my free time. I don't know, I don't have a free time sometimes, so yeah, so I'll just pass to Jeremy. I am Jeremy, I go to VHS as well, I'm 11th grade. And what I enjoy to do is playing video games. Which ones? I play all sorts of things, color, duty, FIFA, Gran Tato. Okay, yeah. So it's my turn now to introduce myself, I'm assuming, Olivier. My name is Taisha, I am the director of racial equity inclusion and belonging for the city of Burlington. What I like to do, I'm not going to tell you how old I am, I'm not in the grade, but what I like to do is I like to watch a lot of Netflix of my free time, but I'm also a writer, a poet, I also play four instruments. So I guess what I like to do in my free time is to be creative, but I'm an introvert as well. So I like to be by myself and I like to be in silence. I have to, you know, gain my energy from that, from being alone. I like the writing part. And I make films, I would show you my, I have two awards on my wall for best screenplay at, I won six times, but there's two on my wall that are the most important to me because they were the first two. And then the other ones were kind of expected because I kind of got a big head about it, like, yeah, of course I'm going to win best screenplay. But the first one was in the Atlanta Film Festival and is the first screenplay that I've ever written. I've never shot it. I shot like a little promo for it, but I've never shot the entire film. But I have, I have web series on on YouTube and things like that. So I have shot films. I have shot short films, shot some music videos. I'm from Minneapolis. So the filmmaking scene is pretty big there. I won't call it amateur filmmaking because we weren't amateurs, but, you know, the local film scene was pretty, pretty substantial. Wow, a lot of things. Can you actually explain a little bit more about racial justice, a job? You want me to explain it more about racial justice and the job itself? All right. Yeah, right now my focus is to to ensure that we have a racially just recovery from COVID-19. And that means a whole bunch of things. It means making sure that black and brown businesses have the money that they need to to get through, get through COVID. It means that making sure that black families and brown families have food, access to health care, transportation, internet for students, all of those things come in with this racially just recovery. But I'm also focused on other things for the city as far as like if the events we're going to have a big event next year called Juneteenth, it's going to be the first one in the city. And if you don't know what Juneteenth is, it's the day that marks freedom from slavery for black people in this country. They were free for two years, but nobody told them. So the army had to go and and release them from from their masters who who had them still enslaved. So that day is called Juneteenth because it happened on June 19th. And the slaves, you know, kind of nicknamed it Juneteenth Freedom Day. So we will have our first celebration as a city next summer on June 19th. And we're going to take over Main Street. We're going to take over, you know, Church Street. We're going to take over Battery Park and I have concerts, poetry readings, different like music musicians coming in and I have games. And we're going to also have a learning piece because a lot of people I've noticed here in Burlington don't know very much about Juneteenth and its importance and its significance. Yikes. How do you guys manage to keep all of that together? Just wondering. All of that together. Oh, but you just mentioned like that TFTs and why you do and everything. I have a team of people who work with me, but I also reach out to the to the community as well. We had our first listening session last week with the community. And we're going to have another one that involves the youth, the black and brown youth of the city so that y'all can help me like you can tell me, hey, this is what is important to us as far as racial justice. This is what racial justice looks like to us. And I will create a program to make sure that that is pushed through. But I do have a team of people that help me. I'm not doing it all by myself. Hey, do you guys have any program that work with students in schools? Not yet. My department is really new. I just started in April, but we definitely have that on the horizon. But we need to hear from the students as to what y'all would like to see. What would be helpful for you? I don't want to just implement something and everybody's like, oh, yeah, that's bogus. I don't want to go to that, you know, but I do want to implement something that that y'all want is something that you feel like will be supportive for you. And also the things that you said, you guys are focusing on, like, how is it going? Like, are you feeling like you guys are doing it or? It's going, we're doing it. We're doing some stuff. But, you know, it takes a lot to change people's minds. And so I'm not focused on changing people's minds and focus on changing the rules. So it's like you can be racist. You can hold on to your racism. I don't care, but this is how we're going to do it. And these are the rules that we're going to abide by. So personally, you can be a racist person, but you're not going to perform racist acts in any way and get away with it. So that's the core of it, you know, it's kind of like if you like basketball, it's like, OK, I'm going to change where the free throw line is. I'm going to put it at the top of the key. Now, that's different for people. We're like, well, that's, you know, how are we going to make this free throw? Well, if we're not three three point shooters, right? But in order to make a free throw, you're going to have to learn how to be a three point shooter, so you're going to have to play by different rules. I don't care what you did in the past, but this is how we're going to do it in the future. So that's kind of my my game plan as far as racial justice in the city. I'm going to change the rules. Do we have any questions? Do I have any questions? Oh, do you mean? Oh, what is the reparation? The reparations task force. Yeah, what about so reparations? So the slavery began in this country in 1619. And it lasted until 1865. And when they released the slaves who were working for free, being beaten and hung and raped and brutalized, born into slavery, died in slavery. When they released them, they released them with nothing. They said, OK, you're free, but you don't have any food. You don't have a house. You don't have any way to take care of yourself. But go and try to figure it out on your own. You have no rights to a job. You have no rights to be paid for your labor. You have no rights to do anything but to be free. And black people were resilient. We somehow made it through that. And but the people who owned the black people, the white slave owners, they got reparations for each slave that they let go of federal government. The US government paid them thousands of dollars because they felt like that was lost income for them to have that free labor. So the United States government paid the white slave owners to release their slaves. But the black people who were released got nothing. One of the things that that we need to understand as black people is that we built this country. If you've ever been to Washington, DC, the entire Washington, DC, the Library of Congress, the United States Supreme Court, the House of Representatives, the White House was all built by slaves for free, designed and built. And if you go into those buildings, you see like the marble and the carvings and like the artistry that went into it is actually pretty spectacular. But we didn't get any pay for that. The slave owners did. And if you look at like the real world system, the infrastructure of the country, we did that. Black people did that and got no pay for it. So reparations is an acknowledgement of the harms that were done by black that were done to black people. And the riches. So white people are very rich, right? You know, they have a lot of money to have fancy houses and all of that came from us, from us doing their work and them being being paid for it and them being able to pass that down for generation after generation after generation. That's how they are so far ahead of us. So reparations is to repair that is to fix that. My family arrived here from the continent of Africa in 1700. So for nearly 200 years, my family was enslaved. So for me, it's very personal because I descended from enslaved people. And there have been other harms done to other groups of people in this country. The indigenous population, they got reparations. Well, they got treaties and land and money for white people stealing their land. The Japanese got money for white people putting them in internment camps. The Chinese got money from white people, you know, being racially offensive to them. The Jewish got money even though we didn't have the Holocaust here in America. The only group of people who have not been gotten any type of relief from the damage done by white people are us. So that's what the reparations is about. It's about fixing that. Why do you think that hasn't happened yet? If I were to break it down to the essence of it, it hasn't happened yet because I don't think people can get over the fact that their grandfather owned my grandfather, so for them, I'm always going to be less than them because their grandfather owned mine. Regardless of what I do with my life. Right. And my question was, like, since you said that we pay that we like to change it, what do you think that like what the city is doing right now to improve that? But we're doing a lot of things. What I what I want to do, Olivier, is to make sure that race is not a determining factor in any measurable outcome. Because right now, if you're black, it's going to determine where you live. It's going to determine how you live. It's going to determine how much money you make, how healthy you are. But there's there's systems at play that ensure that. So I want to change those systems to ensure that me being black has no bearing on how much money I make or where I live or where I can go to school. And so that's my job is to change those systems. How is that going? How is it going? I'm like, April, but it's curious like, you know. Um, it's going OK. You know, I get my fair share of hate mail, but I also get a get my fair share of support. You know, I moved here in the middle of a pandemic, so it's not easy to connect with the community because I got here. It was it was March 16th. Everything was shut down on March 17th. So I have been like working from, you know, I feel like my body is still back home in Minneapolis. I don't feel like I'm in Burlington. I feel like I'm I'm in Minneapolis and and it's different, you know, because I don't really see people like how I normally would or go, you know, go out and engage with people how I normally would. And also, did your group, are you working with the government or are you getting any help from? Yeah, do I work for the government? Yeah, are you getting any help with your group? Oh, not really, you know, because, you know, everybody's quarantining. And I get out, I go to the grocery store. I go, I go to like Target and to, you know, Best Buy, you know. But I don't you know, I haven't been like communicating with people, you know, one on one, like going to someone's house and like just sitting down and just chilling and having dinner. You know, I haven't been able to do that or or go to like, you know, big events at a park and just like be in the same space with a lot of black people. I haven't been able to do that. Only for seven question. But it says what is like if you become like if you succeed in what you're trying to do, what would that look like, you know? Yeah, what I'm what I'm trying to do is to plant seeds. And, you know, one of the things that that I've learned in doing this work is that success can mean a lot of things. And we have been working at this for 401 years. So what I do now, we might not be able to see the fruits of, you know, the trees that I plant right now are going to be give shade to generations after me. So success for me looks like planting those seeds and putting things in motion that can't be stopped. How can you all as students get involved in this work? Like I said, we're going to have a some listening sessions with with the youth. It's going to be BIPOC only, so black, indigenous people color only. And eventually we'll get around to the white students eventually. But right now my focus, my center is on black and brown people. And in making sure that that you have a voice at City Hall, making sure you have a voice in this state and making sure you have a voice in this country. And so I have to stay focused on that and not be pulled into, you know, what about the white people? I can't really be concerned with that right now. I'm concerned with the all I'm concerned about the people who look like me. And it doesn't matter to me whether you came from the continent of Africa yesterday or 400 years ago. We are still in this together. We still originated from the same place. We're just here in America, you know, at various times throughout this history. So I am very black conscious and very black centered in everything that I do because of the anti-blackness that runs rampant in this country. Final question for me, at least. Like, I don't know, like speaking of the white kids, right? Not many of them were pretty much just the same, like as kids as students, because they don't know much about the past and history just like us. So why don't you like, like, is this group called like my brother's keeper? And there's just a bunch of us like kids. Why aren't there like white kids during the same thing that we're learning because we pretty much have the same knowledge? Hmm. That's a good question, actually. So you do have the same knowledge. Unfortunately, that knowledge is white centered. Unfortunately, there is a standard in this country and that standard is whiteness. And you have to assimilate to that standard. You have to get closer to that standard in order to be accepted. They don't have to do that. So what you are learning is about how to be closer or acceptable to white people. They are not learning how to be acceptable to you. And so they already have an advantage. From that standpoint, if you look at what you're learning in your textbooks, what are you learning besides Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior, who are the black heroes of this country? Besides him and Rosa Parks, right? So they have they have taken people who they find acceptable and they weren't acceptable in the sixties, but they're acceptable now and they have, you know, catapulted them and they say, this is a standard of what you should aspire to be. No Malcolm X, no Carmichael Stokely, no Black Panther movement. You know, Angela Davis. None of those people have been exalted in that way. Why is that? And so Martin Luther King, Junior did a lot for black people in this country. He also ensured that we wouldn't fight back when people are beating us and spitting on us and killing us. You know, we're going to turn the other cheek and white people like that. That's what they're going to teach you. Be that docile black man so you can be acceptable to us. Don't step outside of that. And that's wrong. You can step outside of that if you want to. Now, the. So if you look at everything that's in your textbook, I'm going to circle back to that. It's not a celebration of who you are. It's a it's a celebration of whiteness. So you need things like my brother's keeper, you need things like a racial equity director, you need things like this, because if not, you're you're kind of erased and you don't have anything to look up to or to aspire to. Because you're not seeing reflections of that in what you're studying. You're only seeing white heroes. Wow. Thank you. Well, it was nice talking to you. Thank you so much for answering the question. We know about it. There's no. Yeah, none is such. None is such a website to see your movies and music videos. No. That's probably not a good idea. I'm sorry. Go ahead. OK, I'm going to ask one question. Just one more. What is your vision for Burlington in the work you're doing? My vision for Burlington is that, you know, everybody can experience freedom. OK, you know, right now, what what does safety mean for me and for you? And what does safety mean for people who don't look like us? I think that all of those things should be the same for everybody. I should feel just as safe as white people. I should have the same opportunities as white people here in Burlington. And so should you. So my whole my goal here is to to make sure that that that happens. Yeah. Do you have any questions for ours? Yeah. Oh, please. Just wondering. So tell me a little bit about your experience as a student at Burlington High School. Like, what is that like for you? Well, I'll say sometimes we struggle in the beginning. Yeah, it's pretty hard to get to fit in and everything. Yeah, but you get used to it as as when you're going forward. That's my experience. I don't know. I guess we like like you said earlier, like we came from different different time periods, so like it's like different for each of us. Like you said, like you you guys need like more opportunities for the black community and stuff like that. But to us, the people who just came here like four years ago, I feel like this is the land of opportunities. I feel like I'm getting all the opportunities that I can get, you know, so it's just different. OK. Yeah, I'm not speaking like what you're me has said, but when you see when you like the new camera like us, it's kind of hard to get used to it. Yeah, it's kind of, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So with you, you said you got here four years ago. Your family got here four years ago. Yeah. OK. And you felt like, you know, this is the land of the free and the home of the free. I don't feel where we came from. Yeah, yeah, I get that. I get that, you know, there's a different levels of poverty, right? Like being poor here is very different than being poor in Africa. Right, right. In Africa is very different from being poor here. The houses here, the poor houses here are very different than the poor houses in the continent of Africa. And so I do get that. I get the. There is something about America that protects you from being in a war zone, right? Like you will not be in the war zone in this country. There's there hasn't been a war on these lands in civil war. So there's something something to that, right? But what are you giving up for that? What are you giving up for that? Are you giving up? I don't know what country are you from, Jay? I'm from Tanzania, Tanzania. So what culture are you giving up to be accepted here in America? Well, that depends on like how you got here. But for people like us, we don't we don't feel like we left anything. You know, we don't feel like we left anything back in Africa. OK, because we pretty much had nothing. So it's like starting over or something like that. Yeah. So are you saying that you have not experienced any racism here in America because of your black skin? Well, no, not personally. You have not personally. OK. But it doesn't mean that I disagree with what you're saying. What about you, Olivier? I have got called the inner school. OK. Yeah, I know that. Yeah. That that that does something to you, right? Doesn't it like you feel that word reverberate through your whole body? Like I feel it right now in my toes, just because I've had it called to me, called of me before. So I feel it throughout my whole body when someone says it. So I know. I know the pain of that, the emotional pain of that. Great. And it carries a lot of history with it, too. Right. So one of the things that are unique to to you black men who you black young men who have been here more recently have come here more recently is that that entire history of blackness, of American blackness is laid at your feet. Like you probably didn't even know you were black until you got here. And it's laid at your feet, right? And you have and it's a it's heavy. It's heavy to carry all of that because you're somewhat disconnected from it. And for people to just say, oh, yeah, you're black. You know, they're not going to, you know, if we get we walking down the street together, me and Jay, they're not going to say, oh, yeah, Jay, we know you came from Tanzania. Did you say Tanzania? Yeah, I did sit. We know you came from Tanzania. So we're going to let you go. But we know Taisha, she descended from slaves. So we're going to beat the crap out of her. Are they going to say that or are they going to see us as both the same? Like, so now you have the legacy of slavery at your feet, too. And everything that that means. So now, as Olivia was saying, you you have. The prospect of being called the N word on a regular basis. Now you have the prospect of being less than just because slavery happened in this country. Right, right. And that's that's why I think this is it's like important like that. My brothers keep a group. It's it's important to know about this stuff. So we're like aware of it. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Um, I didn't I don't I don't know if I caught your name. Is it is it Boni? It's Boniface. Boniface. So what are your thoughts, Boniface? Have you been treated differently since you got here? Well, I think for starters, I've been here like two years. And the only place I've been to school here, home and work. I think I haven't. You are all in in Vermont, too. You're in the in one of the I think it's the second, second whitest place in America. Yeah, that was so hard to find that out. I recently found out I was like, whoa, holy mother. So for me, coming from a place like Minnesota that I thought was really white, you know, living there, but coming here was kind of a culture shock to me because I wasn't able to I can't just walk outside and see black people. I have to like really search for y'all like I have to really search. And if you see me and I see you on the street and I'm waving like a crazy person, it's because I feel so much joy because I saw another black person. Minnesota, I didn't have that problem. It's like black people were were everywhere. And, you know, I was born in Illinois near Chicago. I didn't have that problem there. I have a lot of family in the South, Atlanta and Texas and Louisiana. I don't have that problem there. So here was very different for me to come here and and be in the sea of whiteness in this way. So I just wonder how it felt for you coming from your your various countries in Africa to be in the second whitest place in America. What do you guys think? Well, I don't know. It hasn't been I mean, it has been difficult because I don't know you have to fit in and to talk to people and people like they don't care about you, so you have to keep saying too high to everybody. Like, for example, in class, you can't just sit in there when they like the teacher hasn't started teaching. So you have to talk to someone in there. So you just have to make communication better in there. Like, say hi, even though they don't say hi to you, you just jump to the next person. Yeah, yeah. And and that's not going to be different anywhere in the country. I've lived in a lot of places and it's going to be that same dynamic wherever you go. Boniface. You don't have to say hi twice everywhere you go until you find that that person that says hi back to you. And I know that that's probably disheartening to hear. You probably thought that that was just a BHS thing, but and it may be just a Burlington thing, but it's an American thing. Yeah, Bonnie, you got to make sure you say hi twice. Well, I do say that twice. I'm just saying that that's going to that's going to be the story. No, I should. I actually don't like people ignoring me. So I just keep boring them until I say hi. Very sorry. OK, OK, I think that. Make it so we have three minutes left. I'll wrap it up. Well, thank you so much. I learned something that he know. Yeah, yeah, I think for your time and your answers. It's kind of being in history class again. I love history. I'm history, but I just love it. Not because of what happened just because of all of the things that were at play and understanding how history tells the story of the present. You're not going to understand what's happening right now. If you don't understand what happened then. Right. Yeah. All right, I think that's it for now. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for joining.