 I'm so delighted to be here. I've been looking forward to it for seven months because this is such an important thing that we bring people together around the recommendations of the Kerner Commission, but beyond the Kerner Commission around a vision for society which values the apparent goodness and sacred value of everything we're doing that knows that everyone's child is our child that has a vision for a community, for a society in which the dominant values are respect, love, responsibility, community, and that the resources are distributed in a way that allows every person to fulfill their highest potential and the noblest aspirations in a caring community. And I think part of our job together as the people who are promoting policies is also to promote a unifying vision so that we can really build a very broad constituency for this new will that we're seeking to create a very different society. But keeping the best of what we've got at the same time. So my job is to introduce each person and then we'll do the same thing we've done before. That is, make it to the front and take your questions. The first speaker is Julian Sellerser. I hope I pronounced it right, we've never met. Sellerser, Sellerser who is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and a CNN analyst and commentator. He's written 18 books on American political history, the latest being The Fierce Urgency of Now, Lyndon Johnson, Congress and the Battle for the Great Society. In addition to that scholarly work he's published over 700 op-eds and is regularly on TV. So thank you very much, Julian, your turn. Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here and to discuss this publication which is a very important and timely one at this moment in American political history when a lot of the energy at least in the White House has moved in a different direction. So it's important to come back to these themes. My chapter in the book focused on the media and race relations. When I put out a new version of the Kerner Report, one of the striking parts of the report and there were many of them, was what it had to say about how the media covered what happened in Detroit and New York and how the media generally covered issues related to race and the problems that the commissioners found in how that was done, many of which unfortunately are still relevant today, sometimes relevant in different ways. The Kerner Report was not totally critical of the press. It did conclude the commissioners that in general, the news media had made a serious and a very legitimate effort to provide a pretty balanced and factual account of why violence had erupted in the cities. But despite the best intentions, the report said in 1968, much of the coverage had been overly sensational. It had exaggerated certain elements of what had occurred including they said incorrectly labeling the violence as race riots even though much of the violence was black on black violence. And as a result, the commissioners concluded with disappointment, quote, we have found a significant imbalance between what actually happened in our cities and what the newspaper, radio and television coverage of the riots told us to happen. We found that the disorders as serious as they were were less destructive, less widespread and less of a black-white confrontation than most people believed. And they went through a series of problems such as the way the newspapers used scare headlines that were not based on solid evidence. They also talked about how the media failed to deal with some of the underlying conditions including systematic problems with policing that were at the heart of why the violence unfolded. And they also talked about the paucity of African-American journalists who were actually covering these stories. The media report and write they said from the standpoint of a white man's world. They made a series of recommendations but at the heart of their conclusions was that the media coverage was in itself part of the problem with what the response was to these kinds of situations in the conditions of the city back in the 1960s. This fed into the normal prescription for why violence occurred, which until the Kerner report had been the riffraff theory that this was produced by agitators or by delinquents rather than a rational and serious response to the conditions that African-Americans faced. After five decades since the publication of the Kerner report, it's become clear that the media didn't fully respond to some of the warnings issued in that document. And as a series of scandals unfolded centering on police brutality in 2014, 15, 16, right through the day, we see some of these shortcomings playing out again. Most important, the driving force behind a lot of the stories we've just been watching in the last few years, it's worth remembering, came from citizens who captured the violence on their cell phones rather than from the media itself, which points even though those were then shown to something of a shortcoming in terms of coverage of criminal justice. And this goes back to Rodney King where it was captured on a camcorder by someone who happened to be watching outside his balcony. The press was often slow after these videos emerged to connect the issues of policing to the issues of racism. Often the stories in several studies that have been produced from Ferguson, from Staten Island were often treated in isolation, focusing on bad cops rather than on bad racial situation. One study of Michael Brown and Ferguson found that it took over 10 days for much of the media to start using the terms race, racist or racism in what happened. Only 7% of the stories that did use these terms dealt with the violent acts that were committed by the police connected to that. Another study revealed that earlier, between March and April of 2011, before the policing incidents that we've recently been watching, 73% of stories broadcast on television about African Americans were about sports and crime. So I go through a few of these studies that show these ongoing problems that we've seen. There's also been a continued disconnect between media coverage of policing and the economic circumstances that surround these communities. And this was at the heart of the commission report that the underlying economic problems from unemployment to housing conditions wasn't really looked at and rather the trigger moment of the confrontation between the police and the resident was the focus. And the Kerner report really urged a change in how we understood what was going on in the cities and how the problems of race work connected to economics. The report ultimately calls for the Marshall Plan in the cities to try to address some of these issues. But it's remarkable looking back to the 1980s in how a lot of the coverage of race-related issues and crime, whether it's media coverage of the crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s to the recent policing videos don't really deal with these questions at all. And so the report, my chapter here goes back to it. This isn't totally surprising, nor is it unique only to the issue of race. The historian Dan Rogers has argued that our national discourse since the 1980s is centered much more on individuals, markets and autonomous units of society and culture as opposed to institutions, organizations and structures of power. And he looks at how this works from social science to the media to other forms of intellectual life. And I think part of that is reflected in how we study issues of race. I'm moving through the points because I have two minutes left, so I will get to it. Another problem that I highlight is the tapes themselves. On the one hand, the tapes were quite powerful. They revealed to the public the way that policing work and the connections with racism in a way that almost nothing else could in that you actually saw it unfold before your eyes. The problem is that the tapes often became the focus of the news coverage rather than the issues of policy and law that were really in some ways more important in the long term to addressing these. The tapes were sensational and they were very effective for the media to catch eyeballs, as we say, both on television and in print. But rather than the tapes being a foundation for hard hitting analysis of what was wrong in the criminal justice system, they often just became a mechanism for telling an ongoing story and the tapes in themselves became the story rather than the public policy issues that we need to address. And there's a danger because as we know, the media moves on very fast in our current day and age and when interest in that material faded as we are watching right now, so too did a lot of the media attention for the issues. Finally, I talk in the paper about the problem that we're watching in a lot of the media with an increasingly partisan media that has emerged in the post fairness doctrine era of American journalism since the 1980s and a lot of the issues that the Kerner report was talking about are now talked about through a partisan prism, which is very destructive and makes it difficult to move forward in national conversations. And I do end the paper by looking a little bit, the chapter by looking a little bit of have we really improved in terms of the number of African Americans in the newsroom, whether television or in print, as the Kerner report said was going to be essential if we were gonna have different kinds of coverage. And unfortunately, the gains are still limited. Reporters, African American reporters still hover about 10 to 12% of all journalists. And so the numbers are not nearly as strong as many hoped back in 1968. I end with a few, two very specific recommendations of what needs to be done. It's hard to deal with a macro problem like this. One has to do with journalism schools where I think, I suggest that there might be a kind of rethinking of the way in which journalists are trained to deal in part of their training with more interdisciplinary classes that look at the institutional and organizational configuration of problems, whether it's the presidency or whether it's race relations, rather than a story by story basis and just focusing on how to tell the narrative. And second, I say that politicians historically have played a huge role in bringing attention to these kinds of issues, such as Robert Kennedy when he traveled to impoverished areas of the country and got the media to actually start writing about what's going on. It's gonna take some kinds of profiles of courage today to make sure that attention on race relations from policing to employment doesn't disappear in all the coverage of President Trump. Thank you. Now I get to introduce E.J. Dion, well-known to many of us who watch television. He is a Rhodes Scholar, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, professor in the foundations of democracy and culture at Georgetown University. In 1975, he went to work for the New York Times, covering state, local, and national politics and served as a foreign correspondent. He joined the Washington Post in 1990, first as a political reporter, then to write a regular column for the Post, which is now syndicated in 240 newspapers. He's author of six books, co-author of seven more. His most recent one, Why the Right Went Wrong, conservatism from Goldwater to Trump and beyond. I just wanna say what a joy it is to see Dorothy Stoneman, who's an extraordinary figure in our country, an activist friend of mine once said that unfortunately he thought the movement was divided between grim do-gooders and joyful do-gooders. And Dorothy is a joyful do-gooder. And she has spent her life living up to Isaiah's command to undo the heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free. I also wanna say that this conference is dedicated to fairness and justice. The definition of unfairness is to have to speak before the Reverend Barber. And so I hope you will give us all a certain handicap here today. On the other hand, an even greater unfairness is to speak after the Reverend Barber. But I know Joe Stiglitz is up to that task. I also wanna just salute Alan Curtis for the extraordinary work he's done on this project. And also Fred Harris. Some of you may remember that Fred Harris ran for president and his slogan was the issue is privilege. Now, I think, by the way, there was a day when Mo Udall, another great candidate that year, was outside a factory and he heard Harris volunteer giving out, you know, leaflet saying the issue was privilege and it was sort of very, very cold. And Mo Udall turned to the Harris volunteer and said the issue is pneumonia. But I think we all long for the day when Fred Harris's slogan is seen as out of date. Unfortunately, it's not out of date yet. Lastly, I just wanna salute Julian. For those of you who have not read it, his Princeton University Press put out an edition of the Colonel Report a few years back. And his introduction to that is the best brief history you're gonna find on the Colonel Commission Report. And if you haven't seen it, it is really worth looking at. I'm going to interpret my mandate very liberally here today. I thought that wouldn't be a problem in this particular audience. I already did so in my essay in the book. I was sort of told it was going in a media section, but I was actually more interested in how do we move forward? And what can we learn from that past? But I won't even recapitulate my chapter, though I would call your attention to the fact that my chapter is a lot about class, race, and what at the time was the new ethnicity. And it struck me going back to the history of the Colonel Report and the response to it, that many of the arguments and many of the struggles that we are having today are struggles we went through before, 50 years ago, and we are still trying to think straight about both class and race. I do want to salute two figures in my chapter. One is a wonderful man known to some of you, Monsignor Geno Barone. I know Alan worked with him many years ago, who both struggled for racial justice, was an ardent supporter of civil rights, and also asked Americans not to forget the Italian American, the Polish American, the Irish American folks, who also had their own struggles. And one of his big allies was a young city council member from Baltimore called Barbara Mikulski, and we saw where she went. On April 4th, we will mark the 50th anniversary of one of the darkest days in our nation's history. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the ensuing riots signaled a collapse of the hopes of the vast movement that had gathered in our nation on behalf of equal rights and social justice in a smoky haze of self-doubt and despair. A little over a month earlier, on February 29th, of the authors of the Kurniker Mission Report had envisioned a very different future in which our country would move boldly to right wrongs, heal divisions, and secure justice. And its calls alas have not been fully heated over the last 50 years. A shrewd politician back then named Richard Nixon sensed the direction of the political winds at the time. When President Johnson's commission released its report, and with its famous section blaming the rioting on white racism, Nixon would have none of it. The commission, he said, blames everybody for the riots except the perpetrators of the riots. He urged retaliation. Nixon knew that his call for law and order was drawing working class whites away from their alliance with the New Deal and the Great Society. I have found a great audience response to this theme in all parts of the country Nixon wrote to his former boss and president Dwight D. Eisenhower. Now it's easy to forget that the core themes of contemporary conservatism were born in response to those events in 1968. The attacks on big government, the defense of state's rights, and the scorn for liberal judicial activism of liberal do-goaters, liberal elitists, liberal guilt. I'm a Catholic, I see nothing wrong with liberal guilt. And the liberal permissiveness. All of these were rooted in the reaction that gathered force as liberal optimism receded. From the death of JFK in November of 1963 until the congressional elections of November 1966, progressives had been triumphant and what they did changed the world. And I'm gonna get back to this. Civil rights and voting rights, Medicare and Medicaid, clean air and clean water legislation, Head Start, the Job Corps, federal aid to schools all had their roots in this great liberal wave that began to ebb when Lyndon Johnson's Democrats suffered their broad losses in 1966 and that decline was sealed in many ways in 1968. Now we, on the progressive, on the liberal side share, some blame for the waning of that moment just because right wing politicians used law and order as a code for race, and they sure did, did not mean that concern about crime was illegitimate. On the contrary, we were, although we didn't fully realize it at the time in the middle of a historic crime wave. Liberalism itself was cracking up in 1968. Liberals turned on each other over Johnson's Vietnam policy and the old civil rights coalition splintered as advocates of racial integration ward with defenders of black power, a slogan voiced in 1966 by a young activist named Stokely Carmichael. Martin Luther King left this earth at a moment of gloom for him at least in the short term. I feel this summer will not only be as bad but worse than the last time, he said four days before his death in a sermon at Washington's National Cathedral. He was referring to those riots at the previous summer and then came the days of chaos following his assassination. Godfrey Hodgson, a great British journalist who stands as one of the wisest chroniclers of the 1960s, wrote that for those who had dreamed the dreams of the new frontier and shared the hopes of a great society, this was perhaps the darkest moment of the entire decade. 50 years later, is it possible to recapture the hope and energy of the days and years before that April 4th? Is it possible to rekindle the hopes of those who wrote the Colonel-Commissioned Report? We could begin by celebrating all that was accomplished by way of reminding ourselves that American politics can produce moments of bold reform. And if I have anything to say about the media in my little section here, it is that we cannot simply reproduce this argument that the great society failed, that all these programs fail. That is, if I may say so, a lie about the past and we shouldn't be complicit in it. Calvin McKenzie and Robert Weiss brought note in their book, The Liberal Hour, that the period demonstrated what democratic politics can produce when public consensus crescendos, when coherent majorities prevail, and when skilled leaders provide direction inspiration and relentless energy. We must begin, as I say, by insisting that this wave of reform is not a failure and that this nation is vastly better off for it. The authors of the Colonel Report partook of the confidence that genuine success brought about. We have allowed the critics of reform to misdefine an entire era. Some of its programs and some of the era's programs may not have worked as well as many hoped, but it is worth remembering both that many did and that so many of them were never funded at particularly high levels. If one takes the time as a whole, one cannot escape the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan's observation that, and I quote him, there have been more successes than we seem to want to know. It is possible to learn from both success and failure and to enact a social policy that is at once compassionate and pragmatic. You can even imagine a catchy slogan for such an effort. Yes, we can. And we need a new spirit of empathy in our nation that grasps the inequities in our society bred by both class and race. We need a politics that does not cast one group's pain against another group's pain. We need a politics that does not deny the persistence of racism and the need to overcome again and again and again and that also does not deny the often hidden injuries of class that are felt by African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and whites alike. We can have the moral imagination to grasp the depths of our injustices, the intellectual ingenuity to find ways to right wrongs, and the hope that Americans can act in concert again in keeping with that beautiful first word of our Constitution, we. And we can have confidence in a new generation that is more diverse than any in our history and less scarred by the failures and the shortcomings of the past. For another great American was lost 50 years ago this year and I would close with his admonition to us. This world demands the qualities of youth, Robert F. Kennedy said, not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. Our country yearns to be young again and with God's help we will be. Thank you. Jay, for that, I think he's revived our energy, our relentless energy and our vision for we. Thank you. And now I get to introduce Salinda Lake who is a prominent pollster and political strategist for progressives, currently serving as president of Lake Research Associates. She's helped elect a number of candidates to the U.S. Senate and House, especially focusing on women. And she was the pollster for the 2008 presidential candidacy of Senator Biden. She's worked with the AFL-CIO, the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood in message projects which is part of what we're reaching for today are these message projects that help redefine language on the economy, inequality, big money in politics, climate change, public schools and teachers and criminal justice reform. She's co-author of the book, What Women Really Want. Thank you. Here she is to tell us. Thank you, Dorothy. Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for everything you do. Thank you very much. It's a great honor to be here. I have to say I feel kind of like an imposter on this group of really eminent people. But I do have one credential and that was I was born and raised a Republican and I became a Democrat in my first Democratic campaign where it was a very low level. Volunteer was Fred Harris' campaign showing my good judgment from day one. I want to thank Alan as well for a tremendous leadership on this and all of the panelists. And I want to actually head forward although heading forward right now feels a little bit like back to the future. And as Van Jones said, this election has turned out to be the great reveal. I am sorry to say that I, or maybe I'm happy to say and sorry to be here, that I frankly never thought 50 years later we would be here today. I really thought we would be much, much further along on so many dimensions. And I think many of us feel that way. And I think the job of the pollsters out there is to hurry history to quote Marie Wilson. And to make sure that in 10 years from now and 25 years from now we're not having the same conversation. I am from a school of pollsters and we work only for progressives. Two thirds of our work is on issues. It's actually not on candidates where we feel very strongly that the job of the pollsters not tell you what to believe. The job of the pollster is to say how to say effectively what needs to be said. And so I felt very, very comfortable being part of this chapter and drew from a lot of great partners that we have worked with. Obviously the issue is privileged. It remains privileged. The issue is on people's minds though, I think more than in 1968. The issue is of inequality. This is a known problem now. This is something that people volunteer. This is something that upsets people. And it particularly upsets them when they focus on the future. And the next generation. Because people are stunned that the next generation will be worse off. They believe firmly it will be worse off than they are now. And the dream of America is always that you come here from wherever you come from. You get a fresh start. You work your brains out. You raise those teenagers who you absolutely despise every other day. So that they, I can always tell the parents of teenagers. So that they will have a better future. And that promise seems really blown asunder to many, many Americans. And so I think that there is a lot that is very powerful in the current dialogue that we should take advantage of. People also want change. There are some factions that don't. But ironically, and it, but who's this to understand our opposition here? Trump won in part because he was rated on election day the more change oriented candidate and the more optimistic candidate. Now that may seem hard as he was tearing everything down. But that's how voters viewed him. And certainly that's how his supporters viewed him. So people are ready for change. They want to retrieve the optimism of America. And I think they're ready for the next Fred Harris for president. So what are our opportunities here? First, I really wanna pick up on what EJ said. And I'm gonna test a message with that language EJ that the first word in the Constitution is we because Americans have no idea what's in the Constitution. In fact, when they get the trend amendments, they're against about four or five of them until they're told to see amendments in Constitution that they're all for them. God bless America. But their average guess was that there are 19 judges on the Supreme Court because they think, well, it's Supreme, it must be big. And I kind of heard that word nine, but nine would be too small, so it must be 19. But people want to come together and people believe there is much of the fate where we are all in this together. And unfortunately, much of the conversation on the left doesn't seem any more together oriented than the conversation on the right. So there is really room for a new conversation. And I'm excited, I would be horrified. I pray not to have to follow Reverend Barbara, but I think that the religious voice that has been in this conference in this setting is a very, very important one in terms of talking through how we come together. So first of all, we need to establish causality. I'm gonna give you a couple of rules for the road. And we need to stop talking in passive oriented language. We need to stop talking like this just happens, like the weather, because when things happen like the weather, then people think there's nothing they can do about it. But when we say these are caused, these are the results of choices, they are human caused, then they can be human fixed. We can make different choices and we can have different outcomes. I love the pollsters and we are not one of them who say, well, we can't mention race. Now that's really hard when you're given advice to somebody like the leadership conference for civil rights, okay, don't mention race, okay, cool. We'll rebrand the whole project. Of course we have to mention race, we have to be explicit about it as one of the divides in our country, but it is not an easy conversation to have in an inclusive way. And I think we're still struggling honestly to figure out how to have that conversation. We must make sure that people understand, and it is since 1980 and both of your remarks said this, we've had a relentless ideological dialogue and training since 1980. Of course we're not gonna overcome in a one poll or one election, but it has suggested that economic inequality is natural and that it is immutable and neither are true. We have to suggest it is not natural, at least it is not the American way, and that it is not immutable, we can do something about it. Values are very, very important and the most powerful kind of messaging is values-based messaging. So first of all, we can't see the top values that people want. So the number one value that Americans want that the right uses more than the left is freedom. There is absolutely no reason we should not, we should see the freedom value. What real freedom means is what we talk about. We should also not see family, we should not see fairness, security, interdependence, community. We have to have a values conversation. We tend to start immediately with the policies of the outcomes. We tend to start also, refer to those policies and acronyms. Well first of all, your mother should have told you a long time ago, leave your acronyms at home. That's very embarrassing when you take your acronyms out in public. So do not take your acronyms out. And start with a values-oriented statement that grabs people's attention and speaks to the common values we all hold dearly. Secondly, we need to tell, and I appreciate your point about the systemic system versus the individual. And in fact, when you only tell individual stories, what people try to do is fix the individual rather than fix the system. So even when you're using individuals, you need to make sure that they illustrate a systemic problem that needs to be fixed. So people don't still fix the person. We were doing a thing on minimum wage when people said, it was a single mom working with 12 and 13-year-old daughters and she couldn't make it obviously on minimum wage. But it said, well, she shouldn't have had those kids, she couldn't afford it. Little late now, I come from a ranch in Montana. We say those horses are out of the barn, okay? A way down the pasture. Then they said, well, she shouldn't be on drugs. Who the hell said she was on drugs? She's too busy to be on drugs. She's too bored to be on drugs. What are you talking about? She's a single mom working two jobs of a 12 and a 13-year-old. People try to fix the people. We need them to fix the system. Leave facts at home. Now this will be the most disappointing thing for all of us because we think if we just get the fact out, it'll be irretrievably convincing. Not so, particularly in the era of fake facts and where voters can't discern facts from fake facts. But in general, numbers move people from the emotional side of their brain to the factual side of their brain. It's not where we want them to be. Secondly, Americans, this is a dirty little secret, Americans are terrible at math. So we ask people, you know, which is worse? Only 70% of Americans graduate or 30% of Americans fail and they go, oh, that's 70%, it's a lot worse. That's a lot bigger number. Okay, my favorite moment was when I was doing work on abortion and one very brave guy said, well, I'm just confused. How many months, how many trimesters are there in a pregnancy? And the other guy said, yeah, you know, I've been wanting to ask that question all night. So Americans, maybe not good at biology or math, hell, who knows? Let me read you as a closing remark, two examples of messages that we worked with that are powerful and they can be vastly improved on. But just to say, we have these messages, we need to organize around them and get them out. These were developed with Anat Shankar who is a wonderful cognitive linguist that many of you may know and there's a great deal of credit. So the first one, families come first. They may drive you crazy, but everyone knows families come first. Whether it's for that newborn you swear already smiles, your elderly mom or your spouse who got laid off, providing for your family and being there when they need you isn't negotiable. Every working parent should get paid enough to care for their kids and set them off for a great future. If politicians wanna talk about quote family values, it's time they started valuing families. And that means making sure Americans dedicated strivers and builders make ends meet. We work in order to make the future brighter for our kids and more secure for our families. We work for thriving communities, hardworking Americans deserve to make more than a decent living. They deserve to have a decent life. And the last one, which you already set me up for, we can do it. Americans gone through tough times before and come back to build a middle class, the world envy. After the Great Depression, we banded together through government. Notice I use the dreaded G word government explicitly to build roads, open schools and guaranteed work paid enough to live on and retire in dignity. But then a greedy few rigged the game in their favor. Today, many jobs don't cover our needs, let alone enable our dreams. It's time to do right by those who clock in and out every day to keep America working. If we value everyone's freedom, we need to adequately pay for our work, time to be with family and a secure foundation on which to build a good life. Those aren't the only messages, but it shows it can be done, we can do it. And if we join together in common narrative, the kind of common narrative that was identified 50 years ago, then we can be in a better place, hopefully five or 10 years from now, not just 50. Thank you. Gonna keep writing our narrative. And since you, we're gonna embrace all of those values you named and you remind me of FDRs for freedoms, which we should re-embrace, right? You remember them? Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from fear and freedom from want. Everyone can agree to those, right? I'm now gonna introduce Amy Allison, who is, where is she? Oh, there she is. She is the president of democracy in color and she is the host of a democracy in color podcast, which you can find online and which you can watch. She explores critical issues at the intersection of race, color and politics. She's the author of a forthcoming book on women of color in politics called She the People. She serves on the boards of a number of wonderful organizations and comes from Stanford University. Welcome. Thank you. Good noon. Thanks to Linda and all the organizers for having me here today. I've been thinking a lot about messaging. I think we should just take notes from the teenagers who are leading the charge against gun violence here because somehow they naturally know that to talk about simple decency and morality, to lift up a standard, which was a common way of talking about politics and the role of government 50 years ago, should be reignited and celebrated and lifted up. Let's make things simple. Let's make things simple again. I'm president of democracy in color and I've been thinking a lot about our democracy and our diversity. Four years before I was born, my mom headed from her all white eastern Oregon town of Sweet Home to Virginia to register voters and she was there staying with civil rights families and attending church services and she said we were there to register voters but actually it was I myself in that experience was transformed. She was there when the Voting Rights Act was signed. And at the same time, the Immigration and Naturalization Act was signed to laws that came on the heels of profound and very powerful sustained civil rights action. And those are the two laws in our country in 65 that transformed who was in our country and how to define American. Now, a few years later, she met and married my dad at Oregon State and I'm the legacy of their partnership. But in 1967 and 1968, the idea that we would have those who were the doors to being able to participate fully as citizens in our democracy that they were starting to campaign and win elections. So we had Shirley Chisholm who was far ahead of her time being elected into the New York State Legislature on with an idea that was profound and was prescient because she defined the people that she and they would say in the church carried the water for was everyone. People of all races, people of all gender. She talked about people's sexuality, LGBT and that was in the late 70s that she defined the demos as everyone. And because this country had started was such a small conception of who even deserved to vote. That's a white man who owned property could vote. To expand it in the 60s, opened up a floodgate that we see over the last 50 years. Of course, her iconic run for as a first woman to Democrat to run for president opened people's eyes to a possibility that our government and our leaders could look different. Well, in the early 70s, we had the first and really the last national women's conference in Texas that was to define a women's agenda. Now a lot of people my age and younger didn't realize that the federal government at that time, thanks to Bella Abtug and some leaders in Congress that were fairly newly elected had a vision that they were going to take their access in government and allow and connect and fund people on the ground to be able to define an agenda that could be carried forth in government. A group of black women who were delegates to that national conference saw the list of women's issues and realized that when you define a woman's issue as abortion or as fair pay or even as harassment in the workplace that it was too narrowly defined to be able to encapsulate the needs and the perspectives of black women. And it was black women who brought an expanded idea of what a woman's issue was to that conference way back in the early 70s. Other women of color got on board, Asian American and Latino, and the term women of color was born. It was always intended to be a political and movement and organizing term. It was intended to be an encapsulation of a group of women who realized that their experience as a people of color was as significant as being women. But there was in political parlance and in the media a common way of describing which is to say, here's a woman, here's the women's vote, or here's the black vote, or here's the Latino vote that ignored whole parts of identity. In the early 1970s and in the 1980s, we saw both organizing a cross race to among students we can see most powerfully, the third world strike in San Francisco State that was able to bring together races and said that we are gonna argue for creating a history and an education that includes people of all races. And from their activism were, I'm very personally very grateful for Asian American, Latino studies, Chicano studies, African American studies, native studies that were born out of that activism. Why am I saying all this? Because I like going down memory lane. And I like to remember where I came from. I'm biracial and my own existence is to have a hope for us to come together as a race and we are so, as a people, and we are so deeply troubled right now, but we've already gone the path before. I went to college during the backlash against multicultural education, and we were in a struggle to preserve that space. But when I was in college, I worked on and was involved with Jesse Jackson's campaign. The reason that that political and movement was so important and holds so many lessons is because he articulated a rainbow coalition that could include everyone. Without Jesse Jackson, it would have been hard to imagine a multicultural coalition that coalesced around a leader like Barack Obama. The 1965 Voting Rights Act and Immigration Act fundamentally changed our country. It changed who's here and it changed, it opened up immigration to non-white countries in 1965. And so the influx of people coming from Asian countries and Central and South American countries and Mexico has forever changed the face and the possibilities of our country. The fight over immigration now to limit immigration or to deport immigrants and the fight over who has access to the ballot box to restrict access could be seen as the ultimate battle in terms of the electorate having full access to express their community's needs through the ballot box. So here's what I want to challenge us to think about. 50 years after the current commission, the part of the commission that says, how are we gonna find the will to make the changes in our society to truly make it fair to all parts of our community has so much to do with bringing the least represented people who have the least opportunity to actually exercise their full citizenship rights. If you think about women of color, that term was defined in the 70s, but women of color today are still the most underrepresented group in our society in terms of leadership. 20% of the population and 4% of elected officials all the way up and down the ballot. Women of color, it's no mistake, are leading our country's most exciting and vibrant movements. Everything from Black Lives Matter to the DACA to other movements that we can see that are defining the zeitgeist and direction of the country today. And in the women's march, it's a multiracial, it's women who are taking the lessons from the 70s and they're creating not a women's movement, but a movement of women that's broad based and social justice. In a state like Texas, there are three million Latinos alone who are eligible and not registered. In Georgia, there's 1.2 million people of color who are eligible and not registered. My great hope for this opportunity, which we saw the glimpses of over the last 50 years and can fully transform our country, is to bring in the people who I haven't been recognized as a key to our future through some structural changes to engage, talk to, and make sure that they have access to vote and that they are focused on leaders. I believe that starts by centering women of color and everybody else will come. There is an additional person who isn't on your agenda, but in the spirit of making sure that everybody is engaged and ready to vote and that we are looking to the next generation and realizing that leadership is gonna come from among people who have suffered poverty and who have transcended poverty. James Mackey is joining us as a speaker on this panel. James is a young man who grew up in Columbus. He found the YouthBuild program. He is now the organizer of I Have a Future in Boston. He served on the YouthBuild National Alumni Council. He's a community leader for Opportunity Youth United and he has that same commitment to getting young people out to vote that we just heard from Amy about getting women of color out to vote and if we can get all our constituencies out to vote, we will definitely get the power. We'll be able to build the will because we will have taken the power. James Mackey, where'd you go? Oh, okay. Do I have to? Great. So, Frederick Douglass once said that it's easier to build stronger children than to repair broken men. Right now is a bittersweet moment for me because I'm still processing the opportunity that I just had recently over the past few days. I had the opportunity to build a relationship with my son who just turned six years old Friday, the first time that he and my father and the rest of my family had the opportunity to build together. Back in 1985, my father was incarcerated. I wasn't even born yet. I was still in my mom's stomach. This was during the crack epidemic in Chicago, Southside. He was 19 years old at the time and he was looking for opportunities to find jobs. He was kicked out of school and unfortunately that led him to incarceration. Fast forward six years later, I remember vividly my older brother telling me that I will grow up to be just like my dad. Now, knowing how the media perpetuates black and brown young men, knowing how I was only six years old, I believed that. I practiced that, I lived that, I experienced that and I became that young person that society viewed as a criminal. From Chicago to Columbus, Ohio, I was kicked out of every public school system that I attended. I'm not proud of it, but that's what happened. That's my life. At the age of 18, I remember vividly my 18th birthday. I walked into school, Independence High School in Columbus, Ohio and I get a call on the intercom like, James Mackie, come on down to the office. So I go down to the office like, I came to school today. What's up? There's like, I'm sorry to tell you but we can't have you back here. That was my last time stepping into a public school system as a student. At the age of 19, I lost a little brother to the prison system. He was 17 at the time. That affected me. That was my little brother. He looked up to me and it was because of the lifestyle that I was living, I felt like I led him down that path. At the age of 20, I lost a step brother to gang violence. 10 days after my birthday, a month and a half before his 16th birthday. It wasn't until six months later until I decided to change my life around for the betterment of myself, for the betterment of my family and for the betterment of my community. And you wanna know why? It's because I believed in my ability to change. When I say I believe, I want you to say it back. I believe! I think y'all can do a little bit better than that. I want you to say it like you mean it. Because you're here because you believe in this current report, right? And what's going on, right? All right, so when I say I believe, I want you to say it like you mean it. I believe! At 20 years old, after six months, after losing my younger brother, I was fortunate enough to find a program called Youthville. That's where I had the opportunity to meet Dorothy Stoneman. And there was one particular moment that really transformed my life around. I was in the program for a month. I literally stopped doing all the gang banging, selling drugs, all the stuff that I was doing. And I decided to commit to making that transformation for, again, the betterment of my life, my family, my community. And I did that. And during the school session, we have morning meeting, afternoon meeting, and closing meeting together as a group, as a team, as a family. Language is important as a family. And the principal was walking around like, you know, I just want to give a push-up to this young man. Push-up means that you're appreciating someone. I just want to give a push-up to this young man. He's doing a phenomenal job. He came in focused, faced many adversities, but it's going to prosper. And that young man is James Mackin. I had my head down at this time. I had a headache, but after he said that, my headache went away. And I was surprised the fact that he acknowledged me. He believed me. Now, when I say I believe, he say I believe. I believe! Because the principal acknowledged me and believed me. I felt like I had a level of expectation to succeed because of that. We have a lost generation of young people because no one is there walking with them as they are going through all of these barriers that they're dealing with. We have to believe in our young people, their ability to be prosperous, even them, who else will. So I was fortunate enough to travel on a national level for youth build, spoke all around the country, but that doesn't mean anything. What means something to me is when I had that opportunity to get my first job, to working at an organization to help build forceful leaders of young people, learning how to organize in their community and learning how to take action. They were learning about awareness around specific issues that affected them. They learned how to organize their own peers to really change the narrative of how society views our young people. And they exceeded that. I was fortunate enough to work with Dorothy Stolman when Opportunity Youth United first started on a national level to support those 5.4 million young people across this country who are in dire need of jobs and education. That's the same thing that they were in dire need of 50 years ago. So I'm just curious, like those people who are in power, the privilege, the white people, do you believe? Because if you did, then I don't think we'll be having this conversation again. So Opportunity Youth United, I started that and we built up Community Organized, I didn't start that, let me just clarify, I didn't start that, I was a part of it. But we built community action teams on the local level. OIU was on a national level, community action teams was on a local level. I started the first community action team around the country and it was a huge success. Now there's around 10 to 15 community action teams around the country. I believe in my ability to succeed and I did that. I started an organization called Stuck on Replay, specifically focusing on elevating the voices, uplift the community and influencing policy makers who are making decisions around criminal law reform. I didn't say criminal justice because criminal and justice together doesn't make sense. If you think about what justice looks like, mostly justice look like for most of the privileged white people in our American society. That's what justice looks like and that's what they call criminals. That's why criminal and justice together. Anyway, that movement started up a movement to really engage those who have been affected most by the criminal justice system, excuse me, criminal law system to step up to the plate and elevate their voices and do something about the laws, policies, and practices that are affecting them. If we're not involving those who have been affected by the issue to be a part of the conversation to sit at the table, then they'll continue to be on the table. Right now, I'm a community organizer for a movement called I Have a Future, specifically focused on ending youth criminalization and youth jobs all across the state of Massachusetts. We wanna make sure that every young person across the state of Massachusetts has an opportunity to thrive. But if there's lack of funding opportunities, if there's lack of support systems that are in place to support our young people, that won't happen. So if I believe, I'll let that slide. If we believe, then our young people won't continue to be left beyond the wayside. And I know my time is wrapping up, but I wanna say that my purpose in life is my life experience being given to numerous young people around this country to show them that, yo, you can be who you are and be great at it, because I believe in you. And no matter what anyone says, you will be great. No matter what anyone says, you will be great. And I'll end with saying, the work that I do with I Have a Future, we lobby at the state house with young people. They are at the table, they are meeting with their legislators, talking about specific demands that they need in order to have access to opportunities. We have to stand with our young people. We have to march with our young people. We have to rally with our young people. We can't leave our young people behind. We can't leave them at home. If I had an opportunity to bring a young person here, I definitely would have, but I just literally came from Columbus, Ohio, visiting my family and they weren't with me. So I would say this, end with a quote by Martin Luther King. One has the moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I'll say it one more again, because that's how I say it from my front. One has the moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. Too many laws have yet and still are being passed that continue to criminalize and cripple black and brown communities. And if we don't do anything about it, nothing will change. But first and foremost, we must believe. Thank you. And I know that James speaks for thousands of young men and women who are eager to play the same role that he's playing. So this is my speaking time, so now I get 10 minutes. Who's, you're gonna warn me? Okay. So I wanna talk about building a force for good that arises from local oppressed communities. Building unity across race, reclaiming our democracy, changing our economics. I think I'll just do those four. Right. And I wanna say that it has been totally inspiring to me to work for 40 years with young people like James who experienced the worst in society, but who as soon as something as simple as a principle, acknowledging him and respecting him happened because it's the opposite of everything that had ever happened to him. He woke up to who he was. And so our job in the programs that we replicated around the country, which Alan referenced at the beginning in which I wanna honor Roy Priest who's in the room who had implemented this program. He was the first public administrator at the Department of HUD who was in charge of implementing the youth build program once Senator John Kerry and Major Owens helped us get it passed and into law. And then Roy Priest said, I see this, this looks something good. I wanna run it. So he ran it. And then we worked together for a long time. He's now the chairman of the board of Youth Build USA. So thank you, Roy, for 25 years of making youth build work. All of the youth build programs to provide what was at John Jackson, is that his name from shot? Talked about earlier, about love. And we understood the power of love. We understood contradicting also all of the forms of oppression that made young people feel disrespected, powerless, useless. They expected, our research showed that most of our students expected to be dead or in jail by the time that they were 25 because that was the expectation. And then after youth build, that changed radically. They all expected in another 40 years of life. And it isn't really very hard to create a context which is so respectful and loving, filled with opportunities for somebody to create their own future and to envision who they wanna become and giving them the education, giving them the job training, giving them a chance to build something of value in their communities that everybody respects. And suddenly, instead of being the guy selling the drugs, it's the guy with the tools and the hammer of building affordable housing for homeless and low income people. That is a very different identity. So once you change your identity and you become a force for good, well then somebody says to you, well what, if you had the power, what would you change in society? And the young people will sit together and they will say, we would end hunger, we'd end homelessness. We would provide affordable housing for everybody. We'd make sure everybody had good healthcare. There'd be no wars. There'd be no violence. We'd get rid of the guns. And so the list emerges. For any group of low income young people that you gather in a room and ask them if you had the power. And they may have never been asked that before. And then the next question is, well how would you get the power? And then they start thinking about that. And that's why when James talks about going to talk to elected officials and we're trying to mobilize young people who have envisioned themselves as change agents to mobilize their peers to do the same. And to make sure that they don't throw away their power but they use the power that they have in a democracy and that we build a force for good, a force of young people who are driven by a positive vision of community and by principles of love and inclusion. We've always thought it's not really helpful to organize on the basis of anger and rage because it wears you out. But if you organize on the basis of community and respect and love, it actually feeds your spirit and you can keep doing it for 50 years as so many of the people in this room have done. So James referenced the opportunity youth united. So we have formed that organization and they are trying to do that. And surrounding them and Monique Miles is in the back of the room from Aspen. We're working with Aspen and with a whole bunch of other groups to create a campaign. Reconnecting youth campaign where we're asking the federal government, we're not gonna back off just because they don't wanna spend more money because look what they're doing. They're spending money all sorts of ways and giving it away. So we're building the campaign to get them to spend $4.5 billion more because with that spending, they could expand all of the existing authorized successful programs for low income young adults to get back into education, job training, service and leadership. We could get to a million young people if they would spend just $4.5 billion more. So that's what we're aiming to do with Congressman Scott is a partner in that. He was here this morning and we're gonna need huge mobilization however of people at the grassroots, both young adults and friendly folks from other communities, other classes. Okay, end of that, that's sort of the, so we're gonna build that movement. How much time I got? Okay, so I'm gonna move on to building unity. So the young people in this opportunity youth united are very deliberately black, white, Native American, Latino, Asian American. They decided and they deliberately try to get to know each other on Friday the whole group of the leadership is going to Arizona and they're gonna visit the Navajo and the Hopi tribes and they're gonna be oriented by the Navajo and Hopi member of this council into the history of oppression of Native Americans. And they're going to the Native American Museum because what do most Americans know about Native Americans if they're not Native Americans virtually nothing? Native Americans have the most disproportionate numbers of young people in poverty and in all the other negative things but they sometimes don't even get mentioned. So this opportunity youth united is trying to build unity and we have rural white young people in this movement and they talk about what it's like to be a coal miner, what it's like to have grown up in rural Kentucky. We wanna build those bridges, we wanna all become bridge people. We need a movement to end poverty which takes everyone's poverty equally seriously. Some of our use of language I think undermines our own ability to create a powerful movement. There's 43 million Americans in poverty. By, if we talk about the proportionality, then it's 27% of Native Americans are in poverty, 24% of African Americans, 21% of Latinos. Just not, I'm getting the numbers mixed up, I'm doing it from my memory, but it's only 9% of white people. But if you change it into the absolute numbers, suddenly you're surprised. It turns out that it's 18 million white people. The biggest single group of people in poverty in the United States are white. Now who know, who knew, who thinks about that? They're pissed off because first of all when white people climb out of poverty, they can disappear into the middle class and they can abandon their history as having been poor. So they disappear as leaders. There's very hard defined organizations that are focused on how to end poverty for the 18 million poor whites who in poverty. I think the numbers are 12 million Latinos or 10 million African Americans, one million Native Americans, one million Asian Americans. 43 million people could create quite a lot of power if we could bring them together and if we could then support them with the right messaging. I tried what you referenced. Where elected officials say don't mention race. Well, very wonderful progressive leaders in the Democratic Party have told me don't mention poverty. It doesn't get us any votes. We can't talk about poverty. We can only talk about the middle class and I've never gotten beyond that. We have to get beyond that. 43 million people need to know that we see care, respect, and I want to change the conditions that are keeping them down. And the addition on that of the racism, that's a whole story we understand because we've talked about it all day and the mass incarceration. But we need to bring people together to create that political will. We need to read, okay, I got one more minute. Oops, I got, please wrap up. Okay, but maybe I'll get it into the panel. I got a whole list of messages, the roles for the media, but we need to reclaim our democracy. There really has been, someone referenced it earlier, I think it was Diane, a deliberate movement against democracy. So we've had the concentration not only of wealth, but the concentration of power combined with that wealth, which has made the rest of the country feel like quite powerless, and we need to take back the joy of having some agency over creating the world the way we know it ought to be. And we're gonna have to talk about the economic system more than anybody really wants to. We're operating in a one rule, what do we call it? The one rule market where everything legally is focused on the wealth that is produced by the workers going to the owners, and profits are everything that counts. That has to change. There have to be cooperatives. There has to be a different, there's only about 300 cooperatives in this country. And so this isn't in the current report, I'm throwing in a few extra stuff. So what other thing I wanna say, throw in an extra thing? One of the big challenges to all of the public benefits that have been created by our good government in the United States is privatization. Privatization of public services, privatization of schools, privatization of the military, of colleges, of prisons, of job training, people who want to make a profit from providing public goods, but at the expense of the taxpayer, people don't talk about it enough. We need to talk about it because it is affecting our quality of life and will affect it even more if it's as successful as the people who are pushing it wanted to be. Thank you for being patient with me. Okay, now I'm joining the group. Questions? Who said that? In the back. I can't see, I can't see. Can you come out from behind? Yes, okay. You're the one who says right to things, right? Good, welcome. I just, I want to say the most powerful ways to expand democracy and make this a more just country have been multiracial at their core and it stretches back to the very beginning of our country. When you mentioned we needed bridge people, I've never heard anyone use that phrase. It's something that I use. A bridge person explicitly reaches out to people different than themselves, identifies with a legacy of people with different experiences and has a heart for other people and through that working together figure out common cause. It's a thing that can make, makes America at our best a wonderful place and helps us to fulfill the promise that we were taught and were given when we were born here. So the question is what can we do both and I advise philanthropic organizations, donors and other organizations who are trying to do something about the fact that we are not only, to say we're in silos right now is not to speak strongly enough about what's happening. We are disintegrating our common language and respect for one another has disintegrated. What can they do? What can we collectively do to encourage these kind of multiracial groupings? And I think to the extent that we can, both in our own organizations and our participation, make sure everyone is there. Like develop a consciousness to say who is not present and make sure that those who are have a least opportunity to speak up. Like think about the Emma Gonzalez and her beautiful speech after the tragedy at the high school in Florida. She's LGBT Latina and have her voice at the center and everybody else is including a conversation that way. And I think we need to reorient ourselves in terms of public policy development and in terms of increasing our communication and interaction with one another in order to do exactly what you're doing, which is to say to support and to draw inspiration from a multiracial solutions that we know that we can come up with. Could I just say something very quickly? I appreciate the question. I've always thought that hope is the virtue on which faith and love end. And I realized in saying that, I'm picking a fight with Saint Paul because he said love is the primary virtue but that when we look back at the moments when we had genuinely multiracial movements for progress, they were actually moments when we had hope for success. And when we had a faith that not just individual action to fix ourselves, but collective action, action together, action through government, action through unions, action through churches and synagogues and mosques. When we had faith that this work could get somewhere, we were much more likely to work together. And I think that the divisions come in when we lose hope in those possibilities. It's one reason, one of my favorite lines that President Obama used is when he said, yeah, they accuse me of being a hope monger. And I think hope mongering is not a terrible idea. And that may be very abstract and kind of spiritual but I think that we are at a moment of great, when despair sets in is when our division set in. And so we gotta find plausible, defensible reasons for hope. I would say, sorry to interrupt Dorothy. I mean, it's definitely hard now seeing the fact that we have like phones and tablets and stuff like social media that we're all tuned into consistently. Like how can we really build relationships with folks when we're always on these devices consistently, right? And I think that another piece is like just be your genuine self. That's the best thing for us to do. And I've been building relationships with Dorothy and her community in Belmont over the past three years. And we literally go to Belmont and have conversations about race dynamics and how can we build a better community not only within Belmont but also in Boston as well. And so really being our genuine selves. There are so many times that I have on a daily basis that microaggression and macroaggressions happen to me where we can just be in a space with just a selective group of people and they will not even acknowledge that I'm in the room. And that within itself, I would just say, it's cool, I'll introduce myself to you. How are you? What's your name? And you have to challenge the ideologies that people have and prove them different. That's what I'm all for, like proving people different and challenging folks. If I, I'm sorry, I'm gonna jump into, I mean, just looking at the civil rights era of the 50s and 60s, what's interesting is not simply interracial, it's the interorganizational dimension of it. And when you look at something like the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights, which was the umbrella organization for the movement, it included multi denominations of different religious organizations. It included parts of organized labor and it included pure civil rights activists who found commonalities of issues who pooled their resources. And I think that's really essential and it cuts against some of the divisions we've even seen within progressive politics. And so I think that's gonna be important, especially when you have in some ways the representation of the backlash in the White House right now. Another question? Sure. But they basically follow that we are together, we are one and the young communities are very much a part of what the Black community, a little white people go into the Black community and try to organize and it's like, not as a factor sometimes, as someone who has experience in the Black community, how do you share that? The second thing I wanna share is that I've been working with the U.S. presidential on a union campaign in the United States. There, they were immigrants, Black, and this was amazing. And one white guy said, they read, you know, oh, read that God. Love is done, so the Black assistant, working with them, the alternative reality that we exist now because it was a problem of others with social media and also the situation is the ultimate reality set by Fox and Rush One Mall. And that's all you hear. So I think we have to go back to Bruce on the ground. He then developed that multi-banded unity, but he has to have part of it. Thank you for that. I just wanna add one thing. It is in the interests of people who don't wanna see the change for this unity not to happen. So we need to understand that there is a force that tries to keep people separate. It was very threatening, I suspect, when Martin Luther King was successfully bringing people together around issues of class. And I think we will be hearing from Reverend Barber soon who is trying to do it again. Yeah, and I just, I wanna say, I said my remarks, I'm both, half of my family's white and half is Black, so I feel 100% confident talking to white people about race. I wanna say white supremacy and racism cuts across party and personal political identification. And one of the things that we have to be honest with as we build multi-racial unity is to call white supremacy for what it is. It's baked into the institutions, everything. I mean, the people who built this building, we sit in, education, I don't have to tell you because you lead organizations, politics. It's the reason why a lot, I know this is a C3 event, but I will say a lot of people in the Democratic Party, which was always associated with being more progressive, spend millions of dollars creating TV ads aimed at Trump voters to get them to vote when they've already proven that they will not and ignore millions and millions of people of color who should be, we should be talking to them, registering both campaigns, a party and progressive organizations like unions. So I'm gonna call it for what it is. There's a certain kind of blindness that is preventing true multiracial unity and for those people who are white in the room, our special responsibility to truly become a bridge people is in identifying where assumptions or blindness that are created by race are impediments in true multiracial organizing and bringing people in, having a heart for people and getting out of the way. And I say that with love because I believe we can do it. We've done it before and I think we can do it again. Yeah, DeHenry. You know, I think that the costs of the Trump era are enormous to the country, but I think the Trump era has created a series of changes that in the longer run might actually be good for us. Change of one is just mobilization that is going on around the country where confronting this reality has brought enormous numbers of new people into activism. But number two is, I have noticed, I'm part of the media, I write a column and comment. I've noticed far more willingness in the last year for people to use the word racism when the word racism is appropriate. And I think that we are, you can argue that we will never call out all acts of racism will be, there'll be inadequacies here, but I think that there is much more calling out of it. But the other point I wanna make is I think it's very important to reach people where they are and where they live. And I appreciated the comment about people when Dorothy's comment that there are white people and African-Americans and Latinos and Asians and Native Americans who suffer from difficulties. And I think that we've gotta speak to all of those groups if we're gonna solve some of these problems. And I guess the debate that worries me among progressives is that we are, people wanna make a choice that you either abandon identity politics or you abandon white working people. Well, we can't abandon identity politics. What does that mean? We're not gonna walk away from African-Americans, Latinos or Asians or LGBTQ people, but we cannot abandon brothers and sisters who themselves face some real oppression. And we've gotta find a language that can pull us together. Can I have the ad? Yeah, one thing. We, as a society, we use the word racism more than we use the word classism. Classism got kicked out as a word decades ago because it was named, like someone used to wear a classism, like they're promoting class warfare, right? So everyone stopped using it. But hey, we need to look at classism and racism, and homophobia and all those isms and adultism. The idea that adults are better than young people and have the right to control them in every possible way. But we still have, I'm less of an optimist than E.J., who is a great optimist in American politics. He's been for years writing about this, but I still think the media has a long way to go. I mean, and even with the coverage of the S-hole remark, it was almost a surprise at that moment, and the surprise itself was indicative of how little we're discussing what just happened in American politics and confronting a big part of the coalition that Trump just put together. And so, you know, either if we're talking broadly or we're talking about this president, I think there is a lot of work that the media has to do and others have to do to change the conversation. And that's what the Kerner Commission did. I mean, that's what they were saying. That was part of the contribution about dealing with white racism. And that was the headline in the Washington Post, which was so shocking, how it was inscribed into American society, economy, and politics, and we need to get to where they were pushing the country because we're starting- Can I just say, let me just- The Redwood Bomber is waiting for us. We have to all stop. She's been holding up the wrap it up sign. I know you love us, but we gotta stop. Yeah. That's right. That's right.