 Good afternoon. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm Elizabeth Sackler, and it is indeed a pleasure for me as founder of the Sackler Center and also as the current chair of the Brooklyn Museum to be hosting States of Denial, the Illegal Incarceration of Women, Children, and People of Color. Thank you very much. Thank you. That first clap was Susan Rosenberg. And Susan Rosenberg came here and did a wonderful discussion. And if you want to see it, you can, and all of the programming we've done, this is our 14th, www.brooklynmuseum.org, slash EASCFA, slash video. Susan Rosenberg just came up to me. For those of you, well, most of you probably know, but for those of you who don't, Susan Rosenberg was a political prisoner and was incarcerated for 17 years. She received clemency in 2001. And she just came up to me and she said, thank you for kicking ass again. And I said, at this point, it's going to take a hell of a lot more than kicking ass to get out of where we are. So with that, though, I would like to acknowledge that's a co-adinga. If you would stand up, please, do you mind? 37 years incarcerated. Original Black Panther. Panther 21, our hero. The 2015 and 2016 programming for states of denial was made possible by the NOVO Foundation. And we have had this year already a series called Touching Humanity, Creativity, and Transformation. We had Max Kenner came and spoke on Reflections on 10 Years of the Bard Prison Initiative. And Mothers of Bedford came. And we had a film screening and discussion. Just last weekend, Brian Stevenson was here with Anthony Ray Hinton. And it was a glorious and moving and upsetting and thrilling opportunity to hear the two of them as many of you know. Of course, Brian's work with the EJI is absolutely essential. I want to thank NOVO for having supported this series. Thank Pamela Schiffman, who is the executive director of NOVO. And to thank Jacinia Santana, who is the program officer of NOVO's initiative to end violence against girls and women. So thank them. Yeah. Yeah, we have to remember who is with us. During this week, I was thinking a lot about how to introduce today. And the first thing I need to tell you is that on June 2, the Sackler Center first awards are honoring Angela Davis. And she will be here, feminist scholar, activist for social justice. There will be a film. There will be the First Lady of New York City. There will be Angela in discussion with Gloria Steinem. And I'm sure it is going to be a very, very special occasion. And so I hope that you can join us. In thinking about this and thinking about what it is to be concluding our second year, we began States of Denial in 2014. As I was thinking about it, I got hit with this truth. And it sort of came down on me that I've been doing this here at the Brooklyn Museum for two years, but there are entire populations in this country who have known all about this and more for multiple decades. Prison loss of children, unchecked abuse of prison guards, and police officers. In fact, people have known about this for 200 years and of course the first peoples for 500 years. To people who say that the system is broken are, I can't say criminal justice in the same, it doesn't make sense to me. So to say that our prison system is broken, I say no. This system was conceived and built and functions exactly as it was intended. To criminalize and send away people of color to disenfranchise entire segments of our population, of our country people, of our sisters and brothers, and to tear apart the fabric of family and community and to render a people mute. And I am sorry to say it has been so successful that we have a lot of fighting to do. If in 1971 you happen to be aware, Angela Davis wrote, edited. If they come for you in the morning, Voices of Resistance, and it was published, that very book, she edited it with Bettina Abtecker and other members of the National United Committee to free Angela Davis and all political prisoners. The book begins with an open letter. It's an open letter to my sister, Angela Y. Davis, by James Baldwin. It's five pages long, but it ends thus. Quote, the enormous revolution in black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning of the end of America. Some of us, white and black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own which it is. And render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber, for if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night. Therefore peace, signed Brother James November 19, 1970. Things were covert, things are now overt, and things are not going to get any better, things are going to get worse, and so we have to act to change, and that will not be easy. We have to act fiercely. The meaning, the meaning of our lives must be recognized as inextricable from human relationships and moral values. If we relinquish that, we have relinquished our humanity. And Kathleen Cleaver, welcome. Please stand up. Today I wish she came in right on to you. Today I want to thank our panelists, Kathleen Cleaver, Monica Dennis, Jamal Joseph, Carmen Perez, Laura Whitehorn. We twitter back and forth Laura and I for your bad values and for your action over all of these many decades and our new generation coming up to help lead the way. And I thank of course today's moderator, my sister and the extraordinary Executive Director of the Accurrectional Association of New York, Sophia Elijah, for the culture and social care. Sophia, we can applaud one more time because she is receiving the 2016 Lawyer for the People Award from the National Lawyers Guild, New York City in August. Please join me in welcoming Sophia Elijah. It's all yours, baby. Well, good afternoon. I am really, really tickled to be here. That's a real professional term, right? I really appreciate you all coming. Spend this afternoon with us. We're going to take up a very serious topic. And we're going to talk about the role of culture in social change. But before we move into that topic and bring our guests up, I'd be remiss if I didn't give a shout out to the role of cultural institutions in cultural change and social change. And let's start with the Brooklyn Museum where we are right now. I am a criminal defense lawyer by training and we always start with the large and then we go down to the specific. So now let's talk about the specific because we are at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and that is the entity that is put on States of Denial. So let's clap it up for them. I want to acknowledge a very special person in the audience and there are a lot of special people in the audience like all of you, but one person in particular who I want to shout out and it's not someone that I've known for a long time and there are many of you in the audience who I have known for a long time, someone in the audience who I met very recently who journeyed to our office up at 125th Street in Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard a few weeks ago and we had the most amazing conversation. As many of you know, the work of the Correctional Association is multifaceted but one of our focuses is on the issue of violence and abuse inside the prison system here in New York State with a particular focus and calling for the shutdown of Attica. Not because Attica is the only problematic prison and I assume many of you read today's Daily News article that focused on Southport and the horrors there and we could go on and on and on. But our campaign calls for the shutdown of Attica and the gentleman who came to see me spent 20 years in Attica for a crime that he did not commit and he went in when he was 18 years old and that's Antonio Yarbrough and I'm going to ask him to stand up. Mr. Yarbrough was the first of the many exonerees under the Brooklyn DA's Wrongful Conviction Review Project and it was just amazing that he is now able to join us and he came to see me to say, I am dedicating myself to help the Correctional Association in your efforts to expose the violence and abuse inside this system. Thank you, Antonio. Without further ado, I'm going to ask my wonderful panelists to come up. Kathleen, Monica, Carmen, Jamal, Laura. As I said, let's give the people what they want. I'm going to open it up with a pretty general question and in my life I try to do everything from the left perspective so we'll start from my left. So the question is, and we'll just go around, which is why, starting with you Jamal, why do you commit your life to this work? That's a pretty broad question, but in just a couple of minutes, why do you commit your life to this work? Why is it important to you? It's important because if we don't use arts for information and radical transformation, we will be overtaken by a tsunami of disinformation, psychological and physical oppression, colonization, all the things that you can think of that happens if there's no antidote to the poisons and all the things that are happening. And so it became clear to me, we'll talk about this a little more. I'm sure that when I walked into the Panther office at 15, how important art and radical transformation were, how important it was for us to tell our own stories. I'll tell a story really quickly. I guess I first became aware of it even before the Panthers. It was a simple truth that kind of happened in a moment with my grandfather. And I was doing my homework by the TV. The only way I could get away with that is because he was watching TV. And to understand that his parents and older brothers and sisters had been slaves. So he knew about lynching, brutality, Jim Crow, all of that firsthand. He had done everything. He had been a merchant marine. He had been a taxi driver. He had been a prize fighter. But above all, he was something that we call back in those days a race man. He had been a Garveyite. But he was retired and he could cuss like a sailor. And a Tarzan movie was playing on TV. Johnny Weissmiller was swinging across the screen. He did the Tarzan yell. And there were white hunters with guns. And they had the guns on the damsel in distress. And the Africans are standing on the side. And we now know many of them weren't even Africans. They were actors in black body paint. They looked stupid and ignorant and afraid. Tarzan does his Tarzan speak. And lions come and elephants come and they save it. And grandpa's just sitting there looking at this. And this was his critique. After about three minutes he goes, Now what the fuck is that? He said, boy, tell me how in the hell a little Pecklewood baby fall out the dam plain. He run in the jungle. He speak lion, monkey, everything. I can look like they crazy. He changed the dam channel. First cultural critique. Then we turn to Harry Reid. A young Harry Reid who was doing what I later came to know was an editorial. And he was talking about the race for space back then. The big thing was that the Russians had been just in the space. And what was going to happen if we didn't? And he gave Mr. Reid maybe three minutes. And he was his critique. Use a frying pan face, onion head, lion, mother fucking cracker. Change the channel. And at that early age I knew not to trust just everything that was fed to me. And I think that is the basic reason we can't trust everything that's fed to us. Now that is what I call a personal response. Kathleen, why is this so important to you? Why do you commit your life to this work? I was kind of born into it. My parents were civil rights activists, challenging segregation, going to court. My father worked in the all challenging all white primary in Texas before I was born. And when I was born in Texas it was probably one of the most racist places in America. My very, very first memory. Really, literally my very first memory in the world is of being stopped by the police. In my parents car they were speeding to get to the hospital because my brother was sick. So I just thought that was bizarre. The very first thing I remember is police. But that was the South. Why do I do it? Because going up in Texas and Alabama and other parts of the South the racial domination was so intense. And my parents were activists. They were college educated. They were teachers. And they were part of a movement in Tuskegee. The same movement that you've heard about the Montgomery Improvement Association. Well in Tuskegee we had the Tuskegee Civic Association and we worked together. So I grew up in the civil rights movement. And it seemed to be the most important thing to do. And I never changed that attitude. Okay. Now we've heard from two. Thank you. Two veterans. Now we're going to hear from some more recent activists. Monica Dennis. Why do you commit your life to this? Good afternoon everybody. I'm Monica Dennis. I have the privilege of organizing the Black Lives Matter here in New York City. But I do this work. I'm a seventh generation African born in the U.S. Which means I have no idea where my people are from. I know where they're trafficked from. And that frame has centered everything that I do to be engaging with the state from the time that my family was brought here. Engaging with the state in terms of carceral violence, reproductive violence, racial health violence and the ways in which racial terror was actually, my family had to always be responding to the racial terrorism that was happening in their daily lives. So organizing is the way that my family did that. So I come to this work out of actual need to stay alive. And I continue to do this work because as a person that's literally the first person in my family that's born, in my mother's line that's born outside of a rural context that's born in a city. The dynamics are not very different than what they experienced. So I come because I need to have my humanity restored every day. So that's the approach I take to organizing because I believe in liberation. And because I want to see all peoples that have been marginalized by this work free. And I want to do it in community. And I want to do it in ways that are restorative. And so the way that I see people organizing here and across the country is why I do this work. So I have a long history organizing. But at the core it's just to maintain my own humanity, my own dignity and the dignity of those in my community. I'm just going to tell you now because otherwise Monica's going to be worried the entire time that I'm going to share this. I'll just get it out of the way. So Monica and I probably know each other longer than I've known anybody else on this stage because her uncle was my first boyfriend in college. So we keep it tight. Okay, Carmen, why do you commit yourself to this work? Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Carmen Perez. I'm the executive director of the Gathering for Justice and the co-founder of Justice League NYC. And for me I feel as a very young person I grew up outside of Los Angeles in a city or town by the name of Oxnard, California. And I grew up in a very diverse community. My best friends were black, Korean, Filipino, white. We were really a conglomerate. We were the United Nations. And our culture was hip-hop and basketball. There was definitely within my own family seven generations of gang membership. Later on at the age of 17 I lost a sister who was buried on my 17th birthday. Her and I were a day apart. But I also had an older brother who's 14 years older than me in and out the system. And so at an early age I learned how to bail my oldest brother out and be Mrs. Perez. And so criminal justice or criminal injustice working within the system has been something I've dedicated my life to. It's not something that I went to college for. I studied psychology for self-healing. But it was because I really saw the young people that were being impacted by incarceration as myself. Those young people were actually me and my friends. There were the people that needed some guidance and some opportunity. And luckily for me I had basketball. And I had a family that I created outside of my nuclear family where there was domestic violence. And so for me it was creating my own identity. But also really tapping into what I was born to do. I know that I was my father's 92 years old. My mother's 72. And recently I've kind of changed the way in which I say things. I usually say I'm their oh shit baby. Like oh shit what? Like we having a baby. I'm in my fifties. How can that happen? But I'm really a miracle baby. I know that I was brought in. I was born to do this work and to dedicate my life to the liberation of our people. Poor black brown people. And I also see my liberation bound in the liberation of black folks. Particularly because when black folks are free I know that my people will be free. And so very similar to my sister. California has always oppressed Mexicans. We've also been lynched. My father was deported under Operation Wetback in the 1940s. My father was born in 1924 and generations and generations of California. He didn't cross the border. The border crossed him. And so I do know that it is my responsibility as an educated woman, as a person who made it out my neighborhood to go back and reach back and remind those that are hopeless to have hope and create the opportunities and the path for them. Right Laura, you are like Jamal and Kathleen, a veteran organizer up here. Why do you commit your life to this work? So I think we just heard all the reasons why I do. I want to follow Jamal's leadership and start with one little story and then say my main reason I do this work. And that was when I was in I think I don't know sixth grade or something. It was the 50s. And there was a song that we had to sing. I love the United States of America. I love the way we all live without fear. And I had just been learning about the civil rights movement and what was going on in the south. And also relatives of ours had lost their jobs in the school system because they were communists. So I turned to my best friend and I said, I hate this song. It's a total lie. And the music teacher called me a communist so then I had to go home and say I didn't know at that point what a communist was. I had to go home and ask. So I thought these are all lies that they're telling us. So like Jamal said, the main reason I do it, I guess I was really organized by the Panthers thrown into a different kind of sense of things. And I want to bring our comrade, late sister Marilyn Buck into the room who was, we did time in prison together, Susan, Marilyn and I. And Marilyn always said, you need a vision. We can't fight without having a vision. And I think if we're going to talk about culture, that's one of the things is that what makes me feel whole when I read the newspaper every day and I see what our government is doing here and around the world is that vision of transformation that you talked about. And the last reason is as a white person, it gives me a chance to be a human being instead of a white person. And to do something about the fact that I see all the time and in prison it was true too, in prison as a white person, when I was the first three years I was locked up, I was in DC jail, Baltimore city jail. Even though the guards had power over me supposedly, socially I had more power than they did in the society as a white person. And those contradictions are something that kind of drive me crazy. And if I didn't do this work I'd probably be crazier than I am. So it gives me a chance to try to be a human being and learn all the time in a different way and hope that we can have a society that we'd want to live in one day. We are experiencing a very interesting dynamic. We've lived for us. We've lived long enough to see this change. And that change that I'm talking about is, in the 60s and 70s I think we would pretty much agree that mainstream media outlets were generally adversarial to the movements and the causes that we represented. And now we're experiencing something a little bit different. So first I want to talk with Laura, Jamal and Kathleen. How did you back then basically circumvent those adversarial media responses and provide a way for the masses to know and understand the issues that you were focused on? And I'm going to start with you Laura at this time. When I was in Weatherman in the beginning the first thing we did every day was go out with a stack of Black Panther papers and sell them. And we said, you want to know what's going on? You want to know the truth? And these are the people who are making change and this is what we have to do. And we had to sell our papers. I know you've talked about this too. We had our quota and we had to sell our papers and we had to talk to people and we had to talk to white people because we were brought up by the Student Unviolent Coordinating Committee that had said to us if white people want to do something about racism. Be like John Brown. Do something in your own community. Do something to the state while you're at it. So that was one thing. The other thing that we did was we took over TV stations. During the war in Vietnam we took over TV stations and held up signs and interrupted broadcasts. We did a lot of running off of leaflets. You were talking about Attica before. When the Attica Rebellion happened some of us moved up to Buffalo for a while to work on the Attica Brothers case and make sure that they weren't kind of on top of having many of their comrades murdered by the state. They also weren't going to end up doing a lot of time in prison. And what did we do there? We mimeographed. We mimeographed flyers. You might have to explain to some people in the audience what a mimeograph is. What a mimeograph is. We may have lost a few people. If you explain to me what Instagram is, I'll explain to you what it means. I got you. I got you. And we did something else that was really radical, which is we talked to people, you know, which we, right? I mean, we organized. We were out there talking to people 24 hours a day, which is why I still have a sore throat today. But those were some of the things. I don't know if I agree that the media now is so much more. I mean, we've got... We'll get to that. Okay, we'll get to that. But anyway, those were some of the things that we did on posters. I mean, you showed some of the posters. We can talk later about the graphics that we did that we're trying to convey what was going on that was invisible if you only looked at the major media. Kathleen? Well, I happened to have become... Because I sent out a press release to announce the fact that the Panther Party, which was a very small organization, was having a demonstration outside the Alameda County Courthouse on the day of Huey Newton's appearance in court to be arraigned for murdering an Oakland policeman. Kathleen? I had to send out a press release to announce to the press that Huey Newton was going to be in court, and that Black Panther Party was holding a protest demonstration outside the courthouse. And this is maybe two or three weeks after he'd been arrested. Policemen had died. He had survived a shooting incident in Oakland. Now, this is 1966, which... I'm sorry, 1967. Every time you turn around, there's a story in the newspaper about a policeman killing a black person, usually a young man, and it was justifiable homicide. This is a regular staple of the news. This story was quite policeman-killed by the Minister of Defense at the Black Panther Party for self-defense. That was not the normal news. It was amazing. And so we planned a demonstration, but to get out the demonstration, we created leaflets, we created press releases. The Black Panther Party was essentially in collapse at that time, but as we held these demonstrations going to court, we revived, we put out flyers, we put out posters. We didn't have any budget. We didn't have much of a treasury by then at that time. And so everything we did was either created or donated, and so it was the culture, the images, the drawings of Emery Douglas. We made posters, other people made posters, the circling the courthouse, the berets, creating the images of protest and struggle that we could do as teenagers and young people in Oakland, and that was, that had a cultural impact. To this day, it has a cultural impact. I don't know if we understood that. What we understood was we had to save Huey's life, and we really didn't have the resources, particularly because he was going to go to trial with the Defense Minister of the Black Panther Party for self-defense in an incident in which a very well-known Oakland policeman who was fairly brutal was killed. So from that start, the Black Panther Party began to generate its message and convey what we believed through images, through drawings, through songs, through protests, through the way we dressed, the things that we could actually control. We have access, although we tried to get to it, to the television, and then we'd hold press conferences and we'd be on television. But really it was a popular medium, and it was popular protest that attracted a huge amount of attention, particularly from young people. When I say young people, I mean all the way down to little children in the street. I knew we were, we had caught on when I heard little boys in the neighborhood where I live in San Francisco. They didn't play cops and robbers. They played cowboys and Indians. They played Panthers and pigs. Okay Jamal, how do you follow that? So I think what we understood was that is that if the media wasn't going to cover us, we would cover ourselves. And I think we understood that we were making the news that people would relate to because we were doing things in the community that people understood. So the images, and we caught lightning in a bottle maybe without realizing that we had done it, but in the same way that hip-hop did. Because our fingers were right on the post in terms of what was happening. Even the Panther uniform was something that everybody had in their closet. Everybody had a black leather coat, and you can get the beret. And this image of what was going on in the community, people would read the paper or look at the short films that were coming out. And it would say, that's me right there. I'm seeing myself. That's my story. Nobody is telling that story. So we didn't wait for permission. And a lot of times people are waiting for permission to do a program. My wife Joyce reminded me of this when we started a youth program called Impact Repertory Theater. And I was worried about funding. Where were we being? She said, how did the Panther start the breakfast program? And she reminded me that we saw a need, that kids were hungry, that there was this fallacy that kids are disrupted in school and black students don't do well. And we realized that maybe the problem is in first grade that if a teacher is telling you that three apples plus two apples equal five apples and your stomach is growling because you didn't have breakfast and barely had dinner the night before, it's hard to concentrate and learn. And so we went out and got donations, got spaces and started feeding kids, not waiting for RFP, not waiting for permission. We knew that that had to be done. And so that was what the Panther newspaper was about. And that was what about this thing that we used to call in the party, creating colossal event. We'd create an event, right? We'd say we'd want to bring attention on something and create an event that we knew that would get coverage in a way that couldn't be ignored and that we couldn't interpret it in the community because it wasn't just going to be a voice on the radio, it wasn't just going to be someone that you saw on TV that was a disembodiment kind of voice of God telling you to use. Panthers were out on the corner selling these papers, showing people images of what was happening and each Panther had learned to be able to kind of express themselves. So when you came into the Panther office, my first trainer and mentor and section leader was Saku Odinga. And I was an honest student and Saku asked me, what can you do? I came to think I was going to get a gun that first day, but Saku asked me, what can you do? And I said, well, I'm an honest student. He says, that means you could write then, right? He was like, go out and cover what's happening with this rent strike and these school takeover and put my skills to work. And so that is the idea. The idea is not waiting for permission and audacious and innovative and let people see themselves and they will respond to those images. Your mention of Marilyn reminded me. Marilyn Buck was in, what was that group in the Bay Area? Oh, Third World Newsreel. Third World Newsreel. And they made films. Now, how did they make films? Third World Newsreel didn't really have any money. They had the collaboration of off-duty television cameraman who would bring their, being huge cameras that you carried around on your shoulders back then, cover our events. Marilyn and some other people in the Bay Area would edit them and we'd make these little short films. One of the best ones, my favorite film actually is called Black Panther. It's about 15 minutes long. And we had the ability to generate attraction, generate information by showing these basically home movies of the Black Panther Party and that intrigued others and so filmmakers and photographers were gravitating towards us and so the images that we could generate became very widespread in Northern California through Ramparts Magazine and through other newspapers and through the Black Panther newspaper so the visual impact of what we were doing was distributed very widely and it attracted more and more people so every time we'd have a demonstration we'd get more people and then we'd get more coverage until essentially the Huey Newton trial became not only a phenomenon but it became the engine of building, rebuilding the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area and then across California and Eldridge Cleaver who was an ex-convict on parole at the time Huey Newton was shot said to me, we were engaged at that time, he said, well it's more important to me to make sure that Huey lives than for me to stay off parole so he just basically threw caution to the winds and became openly, while on parole from California State Prison, openly the Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party which did end up getting him arrested again but so we had this tremendous appeal through popular media things that people hadn't seen and doing things people had never seen before and they were, I just remember the first demonstration, not demonstration the first time we were rallying for the demonstration David Hilliard and I were on a flatbed truck in the Bay Area in Oakland and we played Junior Wilson so it's a shotgun, attract attention and they said, come down to the courthouse see about Huey Newton they said, well he's going to get killed and I was like, he's going to the gas chamber I said, not if you come down and support us so we had this energy that was a cultural energy because it was basic, it was real it was about things that everybody knew but no one had ever seen an arrested black man being treated in this way by people in his organization so we changed things from day one quick story a friend of mine reminded me we got into our Panther uniforms and it was our first time we were dressed up as Panthers and we couldn't get anybody to take the picture and he says, you remember that picture he says, yeah, remember we held that Polaroid out and took that Panther for a year he said, you know we took the first selfie brother, power to the people a Polaroid selfie that's not a good look as I was listening to you talk about Third World Newsreel and the efforts that Maryland engaged in it reminded me of Maryland telling me how they would take some of that footage and they would go into poorest communities that they could find and they would literally project those films on the sides of buildings in the poorest neighborhoods to educate people about what was going on and to try to mobilize them so we're not doing those things now we've got social media and we've got other we're going to learn about Instagram together Laura so Carmen, I want to turn to you how are you using the available media outlets today to organize and I'm going to put the same question to you Monica so I think media is still very unreliable and because what we see currently in the media very similar to what happened in the past is an assassination of character individuals particularly around the Central Park 5 Gena 6 but also in regards to the victims of police brutality the way in which they're portrayed in the media the way in which they are criminalized and then you have those that are doing mass shootings and they're it looks as though they're saints so what we've done is we've taken our we've taken a spin as to how we utilize social media we use Twitter, Periscope so that we could own the narrative and we could release information as it pertains to real time and I think that's the difference between back in the day we also still knock on doors and organize and have the face to face but it's also really important to make sure that when we are live somewhere that we are actually telling the story in real time so that it does not get co-opted by mainstream media that then shifts the narrative and I know that for us we have people like Roland Martin that are our allies Melissa Harris Perry but then again we're seeing that people like them are also their segments are being taken away based on what the way in which black and brown people are portrayed in this country and so for us you know we use Periscope I see my sister right here Lindsey using Periscope providing this audience and the outer audience the opportunity to be here in real time and I think that's what's really important about all the different avenues but I will say that there are paid provocateurs that do pit people against one another on Twitter and we've seen that currently in the matter movement we were talking about co-and-tow pro back in the day where you could see the person that was coming into the meeting and you could tell that those individuals were the ones that were part of the FBI and the CIA or whatever Mr. Balafonte always talks about his therapist being one of those individuals but for us it's also knowing that it looks different now there are individuals that are coming in and trying to shift the narrative there are groups that will attack some of us that are using different tactics but it's our responsibility to constantly share our story and own our own narrative I completely agree with Carmen and others who we know the mainstream media is hostile in this current moment and it is dependent upon that hostility to continue to incarcerate us to continue to murder us and continue to enslave us physically and physically and so what excites me about the current way in which we're using cultures that we're actually tapping into indigenous and traditional ways that black people have used culture and so it brings forward and it doesn't leave behind the history of people that have come before us because Carmen and I were talking about the real energy around pitting the generations against each other in terms of movement building and that is a strategic tactic of white supremacy and we're talking about the culture and the culture and the wisdom and the knowledge and the technique and the culture and the history then I have to figure it out for myself and then I think I did this on my own and it is not the case so what I love about the way that we're using culture is I have to depend and I have to go back to the history of people that have come before me. We see things like the free black women's library here in California is using her takes her bicycle around community and actually gives books out about black women and collects those and is using it to politicize so again telling our stories the controlling of the narrative the way in which black Twitter can get people together very quickly is extremely effective and by that I mean the accelerated pace at which we can change a dynamic so if something is happening not only we're seeing it in real time but the again black Twitter as its own culture responds and requires a particular demand is extremely effective and then what people would like to reduce to hash tags actually become cultural cultural icons in a sense or cultural pinning so if you could have things like say her name reminding people not only to to know the history of who is being murdered but also like we have to include women in this so there's like so many things that are working on on a level around culture that is actually tapping into the way black people use language the way we use networking the way that we connect with each other the way that we use imagery and I feel that this platform allows us to just advance that a lot quicker and I just want to add also you Mr. Balfonte always refers to Paul Robison as artists being the gatekeepers to truth and so a lot of the work that we do has been around you know imagery and we do use Instagram to like get a lot of our flyer our events out but we Instagram yeah we'll have an off the record conversation yeah but even the I can't breathe t-shirts we developed those overnight in my apartment it was like three in the morning and one of the things that we were doing is that we were talking to my girl dream who was connected to JZ and I was saying hey we want to drop a banner we want to do a dine in the court she's like girl you're out of your mind you can't be doing a dine in the middle of the court during a basketball game and so then we decided to think about something different and it was developing these t-shirts that we could then hand over to the players and that happened within 12 hours right and so like also using like culture as as a way in which we and also our artist friends and our radio friends to amplify our message is really important like I know we hit up one of our brothers Ebro from hot 97 and we we got to talk about the raise of age campaign because 16 year olds in New York state are being tried as adults and that's something that the correctional association has been working on for years but for us it's really tapping into other sources not just Twitter not just Instagram but also if we know some of these artists can amplify our message it's also really key because they're also telling you in a platform and using their platform very similar to the civil rights movement where you guys used a lot of these different artists to kind of amplify that was the work that was currently happening because we all do great work right and sometimes we do it in silos but it's a real opportunity for us to just continue to push the message out and that's what we were able to do with Flint I hit up Ebro at midnight send him an email six in the morning he's on the radio he's talking about there's a registry for the people of Flint this is what's happening in Flint next you know we have $25,000 of donations with supplies for the people of Flint who have been suffering and so I think for us it's just using different means and making sure that we are able to control the message as well. $25,000 with the newspapers can you imagine? No I'm saying suppose we had to sell that many newspapers to raise $25,000 one thing on Twitter because I'm a big fan of Twitter and partly because it saves my marriage because otherwise in the morning I'm ranting at what's going on and Susie says to me use your tweets so that's good but the reason I really love it is to talk about taking back the narrative when the Stanley Nelson film about the Panthers was on PBS there was a Twitter conversation going on internationally where people were saying things like you know we're watching the murder of Fred Hampton and people are saying they murdered him in his bed my god people were learning and then other people were responding to them it was like a conversation and so it wasn't about controlling the media so much it was about controlling the media from a collective organizing kind of community and I think that in all of the stuff that we've been talking about the process that goes on that's about building a different kind of concept of what people can do it's about building a revolutionary vision in practice where people are not just saying okay let's get this story into the newspaper but are creating culture and creating communication to do that in a way that's much more horizontal than just you know saying oh look we got an editorial into the New York Times which is also good because you know it influences other people but so I'm not saying it very well but it's something I'm learning more from your generation even though I don't know Instagram yet but I think we're also more than just things that people say it's conversations and it's also tapping into different audiences right so some folks aren't necessarily reading the news every day we get our messages from Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or Periscope so it also helps to tap into multiple audiences that maybe don't have access to mainstream media anybody else want to add something before I switch? I also think as a the way that we've been able to use social media to raise funds for illegal funds right to actually let people know that people have been taken away while engaging in direct action and so that being a critical piece where again when you're talking about people who have history of people being disappeared the fact that we can know real time that this person has been arrested at this point please everybody mobilize to call this particular precinct to respond to show up let's raise funds so also being able to engage the state that way has been extremely effective extremely effective and just one more thing sorry and to also build solidarity right we saw that with Ferguson when Palestinians were sending messages and who were being pepper sprayed and so it also allows you to build solidarity outside of your community your city and your state and even your country. Interesting very interesting okay we're going to shift a bit I'm going to start with you Jamal so Jamal you have recently produced an amazing film called chapter and verse and I'm not going to tell the audience what it's about because you're going to share what it's about and I know Kathleen you're writing you're writing your memoirs and I know Laura you were in a film we can talk about the movies called the weather underground but these are all cultural expressions in one manner or another and starting with you Jamal I wanted a wide tell the audience a little bit about chapter and verse and why did you think it was important to do and so that the audience knows ahead of time when we finish the Q and A we're going to watch a clip from chapter and verse and we're also going to watch a clip from a video that Carmen provided that shows some of the work of the Justice League so back to you Jamal why did you do chapter and verse and tell us a little bit about what it's focuses on. Chapter and verse is an independently produced feature film and Daniel Beatty who stars in the film and I live in Harlem and we wanted to do something about our community which is Bill de Blasio talked about a tale of two cities but there's a tale of two Harps and so you have brown stones that are now selling north of four million dollars across the street from tenements where children are growing up in poverty on the block where we live and the neighborhood where we live there are condominiums selling four million dollars literally across the street around the corner and across the street from housing projects and one particular project has not one but 13 different gangs and it's that zip code you know one of the five zip codes that we talk about in New York State where you know the majority of black and brown bodies are coming from young men so when we walk down the street we we experience that duality we see both worlds we realize that every black man that we pass is what I call the third man the statistic that says that one in three black boys or brown boys in Harlem may one in eight may wind up in college but one in three is guaranteed to go to prison and Daniel is a Yale alum I'm a full professor at Columbia University but even sitting in that room we realize that we were sitting with the third man albeit for being you know a political prisoner of war I'm the third man in my family in terms of someone who spent close to ten years in prison and Daniel's father and older brother have spent most of their lives in prison so the story is about a black man coming home from prison a former gang leader after eight years and trying to rebuild his life and the sacrifices that he has to make to consider what he has to do in terms of giving up his second chance at life so that a young man that he winds up mentoring can have a first chance thank you Jamal Kathleen why are you writing your memoirs I mean we all want to read them but I know it's a labor of love we've been talking about it for a while so why did you... I've been writing this book probably longer than half the people in the audience have lived but that's because I keep shifting and improving and setting it aside and also raising kids and teaching and trying to make a living so I have about... I have written in the third version about 27 chapters I've thrown out six I'm about to wrap it up it's called memories of love and war the time frame not that I write about all this period is from 1954 to 1984 and what happened in 1954 to 1984 the whole world basically changed 54 is when the brown decision was reached in the United States Supreme Court but 54 is also when the Vietnamese won their independence this was the third attempt and they finally won it and the United States began then trying to sabotage Vietnam and so that was my connection when this world changed in America and in Asia and in the third world the world was revolutionized and so I began talking at that period of time taking it through the 60's and the 70's because it's a how do I put this a story that happens in the United States in North Africa and in Europe and then back to the United States through the vehicle of my experiences going up going to college creating college joining the Black Panthers joining SNCC I'm sorry never got a chance to join the Black Panthers I got recruited and married but I never had a chance to actually join and being involved in a revolutionary struggle inside the United States and outside the United States that was brewing internationally it was actually phenomenal to know that there were people in Cuba there were people in Zimbabwe there were people in Vietnam there were people in Germany there were people in North Africa there were people in New York City there were people in Oakland all fighting against what we call imperialism or racism and we tried in particular in California we could have closer ties with Mexicans and closer ties with Cuba but when we were living Algeria was an independent state the president was the leader of what they call the non-aligned nations so the Black Panther Party and the government of Algeria were working together you might say while the United States was barred from functioning because of their participation in the Six-Day War which many of you hear much too younger to know what the Six-Day War was but one of the many wars in which Egypt lost territory to Israel so the the book is the story of one person my story set in a world context that's radicalized this country and also helped generate a reaction to that radicalization this made this country much more to use a bad word fascistic Laura do you want to comment on the film the weather underground so when I was about to be released from prison I agreed some people came in and visited me and they said they were making a documentary about the weather underground and I agreed to be in it for a couple of reasons one was that while I was locked up I was writing and reading and communicating and I noticed that what had been sort of a revolutionary impulse that we had had in our generation ending white supremacy by making a revolution and overthrowing the state and all that stuff we talked about had become unlearning racism workshops and sort of really and I mean I think there are probably good things for white people to be told what we do that is obnoxious and arrogant and racist but the bottom had fallen out in a way that was a little rebelling and resisting there was the Simi Valley verdict after Rodney King there were a lot of things going on but for me white people were not responding in that same way and so I said well I want to be part of this because that's what I want to say about the weather underground the reason I joined it was that it had they had a position where that began with the oppressed nations inside the United States the black nation Native Americans Latinos, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and so I wanted to tell that story I thought the film would tell that story and I also thought that it would tell some of my reality which is the reason I had joined the weather underground as opposed to some of the other groups that arose from the Students for a Democratic Society was that weather when I joined it was primarily focused on solidarity with the Black Panthers and so I thought it was going to tell that story and I was very disappointed that it didn't because I felt that and I really like the guys who made it they're very nice guys but they wanted to make a mainstream movie so they interviewed people who would say the most sort of things about orgies and this and that was totally unimportant and bury the lead so I was that's why I didn't want to talk about that and the other reason I agreed to do it was that I wanted I wanted people to know that there were still political prisoners in prison I wanted people who would say wow that was groovy people running in the streets people doing this and that to know that right now still there are people who are doing time who don't organize as we're organizing against mass incarceration and to abolish and change and throw out the prison system and replace it with something humane and something that builds communities and that actually deals with damage not just the damage from crime and from fights but the damage from the system on communities and that communities do that themselves like what Jamal was talking about about the breakfast for children program was an example of that in the beginning we get the political prisoners few but in 43, 44 50 years then we are a movement with no teeth and a movement that doesn't recognize our own history all of us and doesn't stand up for the people who've fallen by the wayside so I agreed to be in the movie to do all those things and it didn't do them so I was very disappointed but there it is so another movie must be made thank you very much so I'm looking out in the audience for my time keeper how are we doing that looks like a two okay oh that means we have two minutes okay no two minutes before we go to Q&A there you go so this is a question for anybody on the panel who wants to take it on you know one of the things that we have learned through our political histories is that history does have a way of repeating itself and issues of police brutality unarmed black and brown men being killed in the street horrific conditions inside the prisons corruption inside politics we continue to be destroying the earth everything that was a problem war I mean I guess the U.S. is probably in as many wars or more wars than it was in the 60s and 70s currently although there are declared wars so there was a lot of organizing then and now around the same issues and at the same time back in the 60s and 70s but we didn't know what was going on but we learned later on was about COINTELPRO and a very targeted effort on the part of the state to destroy leadership to destroy movements that were challenging the established order and for Monica and Carmen who are on the front lines now and Laura, Kathleen and Jamal and myself to some extent who are playing I'll say a supportive role how can you challenge and protect yourselves from the same kinds of efforts because if COINTELPRO existed then I think it's probably reasonable if there's something analogous going on now even if we don't know what we call it so any one of my five wonderful panelists take a stab at that question No good please Oh good they're fighting over the mic Well what we know, well just in New York City alone the amount of surveillance of the NYPD is prolific and it is expanded in a way that we have not seen ever before in the history of the state so the access to technology is actually working in behalf of the state and how they use it, how data is collected through every Facebook like every online shopping that we're doing and then to bring into the political sphere any conversations that are happening so just to be straight up in front of it that we are under constant surveillance and we know as activists our homes are broken into our families are harassed family members who might have any connection to the immigration process and getting at any level of status here in the United States are being harassed as well we're being confronted with it very upfront and centered in that space and I don't ever walk with the assumption that I'm going to be protected so that's like my first line of defense that I am not expecting protection from the state ever I'm expecting the state to interrupt to dismantle to break up relationships and so the way that we choose one of the many ways that we choose to counter that is to center our relationships particularly in the group that I organize with the always go back to do we know each other are we connected to each other what vision are we connected to what is the political framework around which we are organizing so that when anything if anything should go awry or people try to infiltrate we know our own people we know our own tribe we know our own community and we can spot that out but really anchoring back into relationships and then doing things that are in some sense is so transparent that there is nothing to hide right just being like we are coming for it when whatever the different ways are being super transparent where we choose to be so that there's nothing too high or nothing to get at also not having this monolithic view of one charismatic leader are not allowing that narrative to be put upon this particular movement that there is no one singular leader that we are a leaderful movement as you've heard said and so there are so many spaces to infiltrate that we're not going anywhere right we're not going anywhere and then the training of leadership development so that it never becomes about me as an individual but I represent a collective anybody could be sitting here anybody could be responding and so how do we create sustainable movements so that the movements just continue to evolve but I never walk with the sense of I always am aware whether I was in this movement or not that I am being watched and profiled and our students are being watched and profiled in schools right we know that that profiling starts very very early Sister Monica really hit all of the points she really did one of the things is to remember the reason or question the reason the movement in the first place and everybody said it in different ways people use words like humanity remember the human being understanding that if it was happening to as Sister Carmen said to a friend or somebody else in the community even though the cuffs are not on me I'm under arrest as well in the Panther Party we would say we always do this challenge when I'm talking whether it's a large group or to some students you know as Kathleen mentioned we were a small organization effective but small but boy when I go out as many people that come up and tell me that their uncle, their grandfather, their auntie were Panthers we would have had like a million members but rather than throw anybody under the bus and blow up the spot I say this to them I said ask them what was the number one thing we learned in the Black Panther Party tell them not to talk about the 10 point program or the 26 rules of disciplines and all the stuff we studied from Malcolm to Marx and Mao and every Panther will answer that question essentially this way if there was one thing we would brainwash one thing we can remember as we are in our 50th year they will say we were taught to have an undying love for the people and the way we judged that was day to day seeing what we call a brother sister or comrade brother sister not listening to their words but seeing their practice so somebody out may be well studied either because they had degrees from college or studied a lot in prison and can quote a lot of theory and it would be that man or that woman, that brother or sister that weren't quite as articulate one as well read maybe had just learned to read in the Panther Party but they were up at 4 o'clock in the morning every day to feed those kids and then from there to a welfare center to work with the mothers and then from there to a building that was being take over and then when they were exhausted patrolling the street at night and let me tell you that when you get up in the morning and it's freezing cold in your apartment because we didn't have special Panther condos with the heat you know our apartments were on you know we didn't have the heat and rats were running around too to get up and to travel across town 50 kids or 100 kids that weren't your kids and when you're exhausted at night to get out that car, get off that bus because you see cops with somebody against the wall with guns drawn with somebody who's not your brother or your sister or your friend but you get off the bus anyway because you understand that you're connected that's not hatred, that's not egotism that's love now, here's the thing about knowing who you're working with their consistency must show up if they're there every day and this is why we can use all the new tools to reach people but at a certain point it's about being in the room and doing that work alright because you can fake an orgasm yeah but you can't fake the love right because it's a one-off that's quite an analogy tomorrow but if you're really committed if you're really committed it's a day in, day out struggle we all know in terms of raising kids or long marriage that's day in day out work so we have to judge that work and that's really, really important and that's how we begin that and lastly this is real important just because you have a device that says you can say anything you shouldn't say everything as a defense lawyer told me when I was a young panther don't say anything on the telephone in the panther office or in the speech that you don't want to hear repeated in court but we think social media gives us permission to say anything to have their arguments and back on that idea of love I challenged this audience to do something that Sister Sonia Sanchez always talks about when she speaks she says I want to give you one of the toughest assignments you can imagine she says and you may think it's about organizing you may think it's about fasting and protests of boycotting she says when I'm challenging you to go one week without saying a bad word about anybody because that's what our movement is based on I wanted to talk about that for a second I just have one comment there was a woman somebody here if you're old enough might know Ellen Cooper Jackson she edited Freedom Ways anyway she and my mother and James Shaxson all grew up together and I'm quoting her when I say it's a protracted struggle and it will continue I just want to bring the voice of Safiya Bakari another late comrade who was a member of the Panthers and did time in prison then when she got out spent all of her energy until she died really young working to free political prisoners and she wrote a lot about Coantel Pro in her papers and what she talked about was something really simple if you have a beef with someone talk it out and it's you know it's it's not saying something bad about the person but it's also talking to people and working out differences and I think one thing that's really instructive to me about the younger generation movement is that there's a variety of political positions that people have and still work together and so and we were a lot more like you know you follow the line or else you're you're out and I remember I mean this is some people in this audience will remember this that some of us had something called the John Brown anti-clan committee for years it was a good it was good work but we couldn't unite with white people who talked about ending racism because we believed and I do that it's white supremacy it's not racism okay fine what the you know I mean really so that kind of like how many angels can can dance on the head of a mimeograph machine you gotta be able to like you know sort of see where look at the heart of what people in the practice what people are trying to do rather than you know what are your differences so I think it's real important so Safiya talked about people's courts they had one people's court in the in the late days of the panthers where she had a beef with someone and they actually had you know people held a discussion in a court and worked it out I don't know if it's you know she tells the story I don't know if it was if it was as good in practice as it sounded but some ways of working out those differences because that's really opened us up to a lot of a lot of agents because they come in and they say hey I know you really got a beef with so and so and I'm going to tell you what she said about you and then you know and it just builds it's very hard to counter that without some kind of honesty I will say I just kind of I love the fact that I'm the youngest of five and I have such an intergenerational family because it's a reflection of the work that I do now working for Mr. Balafonte but for me it's really about thinking before you talk right and in the six principles of nonviolence one of the principles is attack the forces of evil not people doing evil and we're also taught suspend your first judgment and I think a lot of times even as activists we create all these we want freedom we want liberation yet we create all these barriers on how we can actually work with one another and I think that's something that I see very different from the work that I've done with young people who are incarcerated and men that are incarcerated they're not creating all these barriers oh well she's not from New York so I can't work with her she's a woman I can't work with her I think what happens often times in the movement particularly is that because we have different tactics or maybe we're not centered on the same ideology or methodology we then create these conflicts that are not really real and so I love the fact that you're talking about you know talk to the source and try to resolve it but that doesn't necessarily happen I think that's where we get caught up on this Twitter battle but also personally I know there's a situation that happened in one of our meetings where three hours of our meeting was discussing this individual who's an elder and for me I was like well he's not my oppressor he's not my target you know we're trying to you know dismantle the system and I was really conflicted because it actually kept going and there was this intergenerational divide happening so I went to Mr. B and I said hey Mr. B like I know you don't you didn't like everybody in the in the movement and but you got along right you you you were constantly connected you kept your eyes on the prize and how can I do that because sometimes I could get caught up in my feelings and he said something so profound that took me really out of my feelings and he said those that are working for the liberation of our people are only subject to change to support and friendship those that are being divisive are playing the enemies game and that's really the way in which I try to operate because it's really easy to say well I'm not really aligned with you know we marched from New York City to DC with three criminal justice reform bills to highlight and elevate the individuals that had been killed by police brutality and we called on our generation allies to come and support us people are like we don't march anymore we don't do that we don't care about marching but it wasn't about the marching because we were going to march there's a hundred of us that were committed to 250 miles what we wanted was the support of our generation to show up for us the way in which we showed up for them and so I sometimes feel that back in the day it was very you could see what was happening in regards to COINTELPRO sometimes we can't even see it because it's our own people that sell us out and so I just kind of wanted to say that because I think what we're missing even in this movement now is yes it's a leaderful movement and it's beautiful and it's committed to the elevation of the most marginalized is that we still need to figure out a way in which we really talk to one another we really build with one another and I see that's where the opportunity is because we are committed to actual the liberation of each other and our people but I do I did want to highlight is that sometimes we get into these and even the word beef because you know some of us come from the streets beef is very different on the streets than it is in the movement like you could go to Twitter and start some beef but if you come to the streets there's some real stuff going down so we got to keep it a buck and like also try to you know not use the language that we use in the streets onto this like radical movement ideology or space because it means two completely different things so I just wanted to say that okay so we have some time for some questions now we only have one mic that's intentional I also so those of you who've heard me moderate panels before you've already heard this but I'm going to remind those of you who might have forgotten because grammar school is a long time ago questions and in question marks so if you have a statement something profound Elizabeth Sackler opened up talk to her you can see about being on states of denial next year but today we're taking questions and we'll have answers from the panelists and please state your questions succinctly because we want to give ample opportunity for a number of people to pose questions and then we'll hear from the panelists and then we're going to watch those two video clips that we spoke about first question sir what is the role of oppressed people's economic power and the use of the same in affecting social change anybody want to take that one so real quick one of the most effective things is I'm just having a conversation with someone about this is boycott you know it was an effective tool in the anti-apartheid struggle Columbia University and this is not covered widely enough but it's a model that students and faculty at Columbia pressuring the administration a few months ago President Bolliger sent an e-mail announcing that the board of trustees at Columbia University is divesting from any portfolio from any company doing business with prisons but it's you know in terms of their campuses and their schools just to say this happened at Columbia we wanted to happen there so yeah people can we from the Montgomery bus boycott to other things when people understand that their dollars mean something that those solidarity dollars mean something it can really be an effective tool you know I'm and also oh great investment back into black business is also important so if you're gonna withdraw I know we've done black Friday all these different things but also reinvesting and knowing that you know you should go back and invest in black business you know I'm reminded and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention today is March 20th today would have been my father's 94th birthday and the reason I bring him up other than of course he was very dear to my heart is as I was a young activist and I thought that I knew everything and I had no that required to be turned sideways to get into the front door and you know I would shout black powers loud as I could as he was saying we should say grace over Sunday dinner he would say to me you know the only power that really matters is green power and I hated hearing him say that but the reality was we're selling newspapers to raise money right you're on asking radio personalities to help raise money we have Kickstarter and all these other we'll get back to that Laura we'll talk about Kickstarter there's other online ways to raise money but there was something that mattered about having some green power if we were going to achieve any other kind of power and so I just want to lift up that reality and I think it ties into the question that was just posed next question I'm sorry I came here late so I didn't hear if you had spoken about culture as much as you've spoken about you know the movement I was in IWK which was Iwakun which was the sister organization to the young lords back in the 70s and we moved on from there got into culture and I did a show on the black Asian relationship back in the early 90s and tried to collect a great deal of historical information about this since my father had a laundry in the middle of the black community and we were able to collect a lot but I couldn't get any funding to do it I couldn't continue I had a professor down in Virginia who was ready an African American professor who was ready to collect all the information we wanted to gather I couldn't get any support to show you know all of the that I know personally in my own life the relationship between black nations now that relationship has transformed it's going to another level particularly in more recent times and in the riots that was in LA I'm really interested in continuing to collect that information but I'd really like to hear perhaps you can speak to this the real relationship that our two communities have well I will say first of all to my brother from Iwakun which stands for the harmonious fists bow to the people and I have to whenever this comes up we have to invoke the name of Yuri Kuchiyama and sister Yuri was lived in Harlem sister Yuri was Japanese lived in Harlem raised her children in Harlem and was a force in the liberation movement a force in the movement to free all political prisoners of war so you're right and I think those stories have to be told and we should talk afterwards so that it's captured that people can see that people can hear it it is really about being griots if we could turn to the culture aspect of what we do I consider myself an artifice and a griot someone that combines arts and activism and the griot was the storyteller in Africa who sat in the center of the village usually underneath the big tree called the Babao tree and he or she had the responsibility of talking about the history and the current state of the tribe but they also had to be entertaining they needed to do both so if you were a good griot and knew all of the history but you were boring people would be like man I'm going to the next town because I'm not ready to take a nap that griot but if you were a griot that was really entertaining but your facts were wrong they'd call you out they'd be like man the griot was beating that drum talking about that hunt talking about Abdul who killed that lion it was his little sister Keisha I was there so in that spirit it's our duty to tell these stories but also to put the human face on it as someone who teaches arts and culture to my students it's not just young people our communities will look at a film or play or listen to a song it's good and the best way to make it good is if we can personalize these stories and a lot of times I think even as activists telling stories we think we have to talk about the ideology or the movement but if you get a small story about someone who first transformed their life and then dedicated their life to transformation or something that was amazing people will kind of latch on to that to do that so let's figure out how to tell that story and so that people are repulsing those stories sending people to the link to do it to me that's the way to do it is to continue to tell the story and to tell it in an exciting way that people want to repeat the story and just to add one of the things that we did in 2005 when we were first founded by Mr. B is that he took delegations he took young people from all different walks of life to different communities we went to Epps, Alabama to learn about the African American struggle we went to California to learn about the Latino Chicano struggle and then the Dogganation Orange County for the Asian Pacific Islander struggle as well as the poor white in Appalachia to find our interconnectedness and really build a national movement that was grounded in culture, spirituality and nonviolent and that was something that I mean what he did for so many of us was so profound and I wish that funding would be available so that we could continue to build that movement and build that collective strength and power but unfortunately there's people don't want that right so we have to find other means to get the Kickstarter campaign to really build relationships and it was really based on music it was based on culture and it was based on storytelling to like be in Appalachia with poor white folks and dancing to folk music was like something I've never done in my life and it was just so beautiful to have that cultural exchange even currently right now and the work that we do with the gathering inside detention centers we use art music film as a tool for transformation bringing in documentaries from the different movements so that young people could really own their own story and find themselves and see something greater for themselves than what they're giving in public schools so I just wanted to say that. Monica do you want to add? Okay. So listen we have a long life of art going to show the video clips so what I'm going to ask each person to do is succinctly that means short. State your question and then we're going to hear all the questions and then the panelists can pick and choose what they're going to answer but we're going to do all of that in about six minutes. Go for it Jamila. Alright. So really quickly first thank you for acknowledging the Columbia Struggle because something that's really important for the city so CUNY and the new school are all doing their prison divestment stuff so thank you for bringing that up. My second thing is in terms of white supremacy so something that's really huge right now is people doing like these these trainings on anti white non anti-white sorry about that anti-racism. Could you speak more to that in terms of what that looks like because it's so huge right now and honestly really problematic and I don't think people understand why it's so huge. Hi family. I don't know everybody here. For those of you I don't know my name is Shawnee Jamila I'm an artist and cultural worker and one of the things that really roots my work is this idea of expanding our collective political imagination that you can't fight for a better world if you can't even imagine what it looks like and so I guess I want to hear you riff a little bit on this idea of the role of community in our in our work. Thank you. Next question. How you doing? Coming from a former inner city gang member perspective for myself from there's a lot going on. I'm going to make this brief. I know we limited time but there's a lot going on out there within people in this conscious community right. It's like they separate themselves from the community nowadays with the people see it at night you know nowadays it's like it's a conscious community and then they raise the hood. That's a big problem. Which way are you directing so like which way would you direct the people to go because we can sit here and talk about this which is great we need to have discussions but if the people are not directed towards doing something it would be in vain. Thank you. Hello everyone I just wanted to say that I'm really happy to be here. I'm really happy to learn from all of you and I think that all of you have done amazing work in your years of doing this and all of your experience so thank you for being here for the young people who are in the room who are learning from you all. My name is Sinisha Morrison. I work at the correctional association. I am a youth justice advocate. I thought I recognized you. Yes so my question is what would you say to young people who are interested in doing this work and how to engage other young people around history of this movement and how to pretty much get young people on board with what is going on now and just engaging them and getting them to learn about what's going on the connection between what happened in our past and what's happening now and how important it is. Thank you. Next question. Good afternoon. My question mostly is for the two panthers but in general one element of the Black Panther Party was the element of self-defense and given the level of police repression and police brutality and police murder it was like up front out there in the community we are going to take a stand to stop the police and monitor them in terms of the murder and the brutality and I wanted to know how folks felt about is there relevance or a need or what role can that play today in dealing with police brutality and murder? Okay, thank you. I believe that that's a form of struggle we need to wait. Okay, thanks. Next question. Hey, family. When we look at a movement that's so full of young leadership now Carmen I know he talked about Mr. B. and how he's played that mentor role with you can we talk about what the role of active involvement can be for elders in the movement when we talk about issues like political prisoners that still exist? Okay, thank you. Next question. Isn't it most important to ensure that we all vote? Now families vote, our friends vote and get out the vote. Thank you. Okay, thank you for that. Next question. Question to Jamal and to Kathleen. Can you say anything about Beyoncé's performance and if you can also the new Black Panther Party? Okay. How are we time wise? It's my time keeper. It's tight. Well, the thing is actually you can't do it that way. No, so here's what we're going to do. So we have anti-racism, collective imagination, consciousness in the hood, versus the hood in how do we engage young people in history and culture? There was a self-defense question about the Black Panther Party and elders in the movement. Anybody? And Beyoncé. I don't think we left anything out. Okay, so listen. For my panelists, each of you can take one of those and give a quick response, but just one. I'd like to do a quick one about collective imagination. So what we do in a program that I run, Impact. I worked at a place called City Kids. Sister Amiria Otto was here. She does something called Auto Brand Artivism. It's the idea to get young people in a space and give them the skills and see them imagining themselves in a different way. So first of all, we create a space because young people are coming from physically abused, being bullied, being told they're not good enough, hearing that they're bitches and niggers and whatever you can imagine and freeing them up to understand that they are safe to be who they are, safe to imagine and to dream. When they begin to imagine themselves differently, they can imagine the world differently and imagine themselves as an agent of change. So that power of storytelling and that power of understanding of difference first in their lives and then in the world is so important. And so I'm a big, big advocate and active worker in empowering young people through the creative arts. Not just to put on a play for a place sake, but to see themselves and their world as a different place. And then what actions can you take toward that beyond just performing, but to do things in your daily lives? I'll take on the youth question. So I often kind of see myself as the bridge between youth and elders, art and institutions and all these different things. But for me, my love is for young people and working with young people, particularly that are incarcerated. And a lot of the work that we try to do is to bring in the best of the best into the detention centers or youth prisons so that young people can also have access to this different level of consciousness. I can't see the brother who asked the question. But I will say that the work that we do and the people that are in our space are directly impacted by the issue. The individuals that are in our space are formerly incarcerated, are also artists, are also formerly gang, former gang members. And so those are the people that are going back into the community to make sure that the young people are coming into the space we are, or we got to go back into the hood. So it's not mutually exclusive. It could be both, right? I think there doesn't need to be a conscious person and it doesn't need to be somebody who's unconscious. I think it's just really about opening the door for opportunity because I come from the hood. I also was one of those young people that was told you're going to do, this was going to happen to you, this was going to happen to you. But there was an individual that believed in me and that was my basketball coach Pat Bell. He believed in me and all my sisters that I grew up with on the court. And he provided that opportunity and I feel like those of us that know the hood also should continue to stay in the hood and also be in other places to open the door. And I will say in regards to like you, and I'm down to also speak to this further because we're running out of time, but I will say that you know, we're always looking for somebody else to save us and I think we're the ones we've been waiting for. Yes. I'll speak to... There's like a thread for a couple of them and I know you're going to speak to art. It was an anti-racism question. Yeah, okay. I'll try to do it real fast. So what I was saying about the unlearning racism is that it is white people's problem on an individual level, but changing it is a systemic a systemic issue. It's not about being a nicer person or not saying or taking seriously when someone says to you, you know, don't use the word beef and like act like you're from the street. But is... No, it's like you know, in prison I learned that when I said, oh I had a fight with my friend, my friends thought that I meant that we beat each other up, you know, and my family fighting was yelling. It was a different kind of a thing. It was just and so being aware of the things that are about privilege how it works, very important. But if you don't do something to fight to change it, then it's meaningless. And so, you know, when I say this, I know there's someone in the audience that we're going to do some conversations about Jewish identity. And what does it mean to have a Jewish identity? And I always say, the only time I identify as a Jew is when I speak out about Israel because I don't want them acting in my name and I have a responsibility and I get a pass because people don't think I'm anti-Semitic. They just say I'm self-hating. And then if I don't try to build BDS boycott, divest, and sanctions then I'm just doing the same thing. So to me, it's a matter of whether you're doing something in solidarity and action, or whether you're just saying, hey, I'm a good white person and I don't use bad words and that to me is it. And on the elders thing, I think, I mean there's a lot that, you know, I think that we need to be answering questions that younger people have. And we need not to be thinking that we know what they should be doing. And so I said before to Monica and Carmen, people my age, sometimes we should just get out of the way and not start telling you about, oh, well in our day we're doing it this way and that way. Until you want to know something from us. And other than that I think it's basically about just being willing to answer the questions and tell the truth about what we did. And not what was done to us indifferent like when people talk about their organizations a lot of times we want to talk about what someone else did to us but what we did, the mistakes that we made and to try to be honest about it and sometimes being honest about it means that you push us about it and then we come across with the real deal. I was, most of the things have been, have been responded to but just in direct connection to this. So I have a long history with the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond which is a grassroots community organization based in New Orleans that does anti-racism and community organizing trainings and what often gets left off is the community organizing piece. If we're not doing any type of effective dismantling white supremacy whatever all of these spaces are called and it's not connected to community organizing then it's just conversation. And so the tactic of these workshops used to be, and I'm not saying this is not what the Institute is doing, but what we see happening now was to actually collectivize and bring activists together create a political framework and then move from outside of that. What that piece is not so much happening you're seeing people coming, feeling a particular way getting, oh okay, I can now be friends with everybody but never taking that level of action. And so when I think about all of these themes I'm also thinking about the space in which the healing from internalized racial oppression that has to happen as part of these movement spaces. What does it look like for people of color to heal from the messages of internalized inferiority and what is the work of white people to heal from and change that your connection to internalized racial superiority. I cannot imagine I use my collective imagination or be futuristic if my day-to-day is really rooted in denial of my own self actual real-life systemic conditions about being able to feed family on my children getting profiled in schools and then what I internalize so while there's the systemic aspects that we're addressing I also know that there's the healing from the internalized messages that keep perpetuating all of these dynamics that we see movement generation to generation. And so and I think that's the space where elders there's always space for elders I've done 20 years my model of organizing is through rites of passage which is rooted in the history of the elders informing young people and that it's a bidirectional relationship it's not ages it is collecting on the wisdom of our elders and sharing the passion and energy creativity brilliance and leadership of young people and so there's always space and we have to make sure that the work of our elders is centered and we talked about this a little bit earlier so that we are actually seeing ourselves as part of a continuum and not as a starting point and then we won't have to keep restarting in 10 years when the next thing happens. I think Kathleen said she would take on the Beyonce question and self-defense I'll start out with self-defense Black Panther Party for self-defense was the name of the organization that began it later just became known as Black Panther Party and I want to say something about self-defense coming out of the south self-defense is our core culture we have to defend ourselves culturally we had to defend ourselves educationally we had to spend ourselves with weapons they may not always been used but where I grew up in Alabama and many other families there was always a shotgun and there was some revolvers also in the drawers you were taught how to shoot you were taught how to pay attention I don't remember ever seeing but we would hear the Klan's gonna march and everybody would get ready but to politicize it and take it to the urban areas to the west coast of New York it became a different phenomenon but that's the core and it's still the core of any self-respecting self-defending community that's gonna survive in this racist economically dominating cultural wasteland of America did you leave anything out it's a great country now back to Beyonce I happened to be on an airplane going back to Atlanta and the Super Bowl was taking place so very fortunately I was not offended by this the Super Bowl pastime or what do you call it halftime show and then when I saw it I was somewhat flabbergasted and the person who asked me about it sent me the video and I said it's almost pornographic and she said you don't watch too many music videos do you? I said no I don't it bothered me I've talked to a lot of Black Panther women now I'll tell you the Black Panther men said they liked it that was cool so the Black Panther women I've heard from we did not wear any fishnet stocking shake our booty and wear tams I mean that was just absurd it's about something else it's about completely something else that's promoting something else it's using those images for some other purpose and I think it's very offensive myself but because of Beyoncé's worldwide popularity and the Super Bowl's worldwide popularity I just figured just leave it alone why bother but it's clearly nothing in any way shape or form representative of Black Panthers it's taking the imagery that has been popularized by a group that was popular because it stood up against racism and police brutality and taking that strength and attributing it to something as commercial and as insignificant as a music video or as halftime show although the former mayor we used to call him guliani remember all the demonstrations we had posters against guliani well the fact that guliani got upset about it I kind of like that one quick thing I promise this to be a minute to our organizers and just connecting just a couple of dots if we're just organizing outside of the community and not around people's needs then it just becomes that something people see on TV or on Facebook or on Instagram we have lofty ideals to people who are struggling every day we talk about freedom and liberation and justice freedom to somebody who is hungry and we're dealing with poverty and especially children in poverty it's epidemic proportions freedom to someone who is hungry is a meal folks liberation to someone who is homeless is a safe, dry, warm place to sleep and what we understood when we were talking on the shoulders of the civil rights movement to the liberation movement is you have to go and organize people around your needs and that's why when the police surrounded Panther officers and other Panthers couldn't get there the community came out they may not have agreed with everything in the 10 point program but they understood that these kids are feeding my kids I went and got blood pressure medicine when the hospital turned me away you may call them criminals and terrorists those are my brothers and sisters so I'm putting my body in front of these bullets for these Panthers last quick point and I attributed to Joyce Joseph who always reminds me that there is no start date on activism and no expiration date on dreams so let us fight that fight excellent okay so just before we turn on the two videos and I hope that you'll watch them and remember the panelists will be available afterwards because I know you're going to have more questions you'll see them off the stage please join me in thanking them for engaging in this amazing conversation this afternoon