 Hi, everyone. Welcome. I'm Paula Lance. I'm the James Hudak Professor of Health Policy and Professor of Public Policy here at the Ford School of Public Policy. And it's my distinct pleasure to welcome you all today and to be moderating this panel with some of my favorite people and a new friend on this important topic of racial justice and public policy. So we're delighted that all of you are here in the room with us. There's people watching online. Thank you all so much for joining us. I do want to take a moment and acknowledge a special person in the audience. And that is our dean, Celeste Watkins Hayes. Thank you, first of all, for organizing such an inspiring and important two days of events here at the Ford School. But also, thank you so much for your inspired leadership and creativity and your day-to-day leading the charge here at the Ford School. We love you. Thank you so much. OK, also want to acknowledge a sponsor of our panel today. It's the Center for Racial Justice here at the Ford School and also our media partner, which is Detroit Public Television. All right, so for the run of show here today, I'm going to do some very brief introductions. And then our panelists will tell you a bit more about themselves and their work in the space of being in academia, but also working in many, many different ways on issues related to racial justice. I then have a few questions to pose to the panel. We have important things to say. I'm just going to apologize. I had a time. We're going to run out of time. We don't have enough time. This is a big topic. There's lots for them to share. We're going to try to get through as much as we can and carve out some time at the end to get some questions from the audience, both in the room and online as well. If you're watching online, you can submit a question by clicking a link on the web page. And if you're here, there should be little pieces of paper with QR codes on them throughout the room. Are they there? OK, so you can use that to submit a question as well. And my colleagues, Katrina Haman and Kellen Epstein will be helping moderate the Q&A session. All right, ready to go? We're ready to meet the panelists. OK, let's start with E. Patrick Johnson, who is the Dean of the School of Communication and the Annenberg University Professor at Northwestern University. Dean Johnson is a prolific performer. If we have time, maybe he'll sing for us. I don't know. He's a scholar, and he's an inspiring teacher whose research and artistry has greatly impacted African-American studies, performance studies, gender and sexuality studies, as well as communication, science, and study. Kathy Cohn is with us today as well. Kathy is the David and Mary Winton Green Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, where she's worn many administrative hats and has a new role coming up I learned last night. Professor Cohn is a political scientist, scholar, and social activist, and much of her work focuses on black politics from the vantage point of intersectionality. Also with us today is a new colleague for us at the Ford School, Mo Torres. He is a Michigan Society of Fellows postdoctoral scholar and also an assistant professor in both the Department of Sociology and the Ford School here. As a sociologist, Professor Torres' research and teaching interests are in political economy, urban politics, and race class inequality. He's currently working on a book, which I cannot wait to read, which explores the politics of fiscal crisis and urban austerity in Michigan from the 1970s to the present. And then also my colleague and friend here at the Ford School, Anne Xi Lin. Anne is a professor of public policy here at the Ford School, and also she's the director of the Lieberthal Rogel Center for Chinese Studies here at the University of Michigan. She's a political scientist and has a great body of work. More recently, her work has been focusing on how people experience and respond to policy implementation, diving into the reactions of people who are targeted by public policy with a special focus on this happening in racialized context. So please join me in welcoming Anne. Anne is here today. All right, so to start, there's more you could learn about all these people. You could read their bios. But I've asked them to all to just take a few minutes and give you a couple of highlights regarding how racial and ethnic inequality and racial justice figure into their scholarly work, their artistic endeavors, their community and public engagement, their public policy, work, activism, however they want to further introduce themselves to you. So we'll start with Dean Johnson. It's wonderful to be here. I consider Dean Watkins Hayes not only a friend, but family. And I miss her dearly. You stole her away from us. I'm not sorry. I'm happy that it's only a four-hour drive or a quick plane ride away from her. I often describe myself as an academic trickster because I don't sit easily in any discipline or any field. Much of my work, most of my scholarly work is qualitative and with different kinds of methods, including ethnography and oral history. And my artistic work and my scholarly work dovetail with one another. They inform the other. And most of my work engages marginalized communities who are marginalized based on their racial, gender, or sexual identity, or their regional identity. Much of my work focuses on the US South. And specifically, I've done two big oral history projects. One focusing on Black gay men of the South and another project on Black lesbians of the South. And I'll talk more when we get into our conversation about specific policy implications of that work. But my artistic work as well is based on that scholarly research. I perform the narratives that I collected over the years, and that's been wonderful, taking those stories to spaces that have the idea that no gay people live in the South, which is curious to me. But elevating those stories in a way that can lead, might lead to policy change. But we'll get into that later. My turn. OK, fantastic. I, too, want to thank our dear Dean Watkins Hayes for the invitation to participate in this wonderful event. I am not at Northwestern, but I represent Chicago. And we miss you also. But since I'm a graduate of Michigan, I think it's OK that you're here. I'm going to start maybe outside of the academy and just say I promise you'll stop me. Two minutes about my upbringing, because when I was invited, I kept saying, I've said to everyone, I don't do policy. I don't do policy. But the more I thought about it, my life is defined by policy. I am what is considered to be an affirmative action baby. I had an opportunity for better educational opportunities because our house when we were young was taken, I say, by urban renewal. And my parents decided, OK, we're going to move us out of this predominantly black neighborhood into a predominantly white neighborhood. Within two years, the new predominantly white neighborhood was predominantly black again because of white flight. And so I feel like everything about my upbringing was about thinking about the complexity, the beauty, the resilience, the difficulties faced by black people, and the political environment defined by anti-blackness. And so I couldn't imagine being a scholar that wasn't deeply anchored in thinking about questions of racial justice. And I think because of that upbringing, because of the expectations that my family sent me, I would say, into the academy with, that my community sent me into the academy with. I'm always thinking about questions of not only the struggles that black people face, but I want to emphasize the complexity. And here we might think about the framework of intersectionality, to think about the ways in which class plays a role, sexuality, gender. I don't do region, but maybe I should do region. My first work, as Paula knows, was on HIV and AIDS and the ways in which black communities responded to that, both from those who had what we might consider to be indigenous power and those who were being stigmatized and demonized, all within black communities, that type of complexity. And then more recent work is really focusing on young people, and in particular, young people of color, thinking about their positionality with regards to politics. But the ways in which the filters of race, racism, anti-blackness shape their politics and how we might think of their future politics. So I'll stop there and turn it over to Moe. So I'll join the chorus in celebrating Dean Watkinsay, except from the other perspective to say that I'm very happy you're here and not in Chicago, personally. This is kind of a surreal moment for me in a few different ways. One, I was an MPP student here, and I think I took calculus and microecon in this classroom. So it's weird to be on this side of the table. And also, I mentioned Professor Cohen yesterday. I don't think I told you this part, but actually, my senior thesis, the theoretical framing, was based on your 1997 article in GLQ. So I'm very happy to be very excited about it. So my work is on urban fiscal crisis, and specifically here in Michigan. As you all probably know, Michigan has no shortage of fiscal crises from big cities like Detroit and Flint to very small cities like Benton Harbor, Inkster, Highland Park, Hamtrimic. The list goes on and on and on. But I appreciate probably your emphasis on inequality in your question, because many people, I think, know the story of Detroit as a story of urban decline, of white flight, of de-investorization, of the collapse of the automobile industry, and just essentially a lot of sadness and misery and social problems in the city of Detroit. But I'm really interested in inequality, a relationship of who has a lot of resources and who has many fewer. And so when you zoom out a little bit from the city of Detroit to metro Detroit, you have a very different story. Detroit's population is about 600,000. But in metro Detroit, there are four, almost 4.5 million people in the metro area. Detroit has a lot of poverty and a lot of social problems in the city of Detroit. But actually, metro Detroit is one of the wealthiest metropolitan areas in the country, even with the rates of poverty in the city of Detroit. Some of the wealthiest cities in Michigan and in the Midwest and actually in the country are in metro Detroit. So Bloomfield Hills, Gross Point, they're very wealthy places. And so when I think about inequality from a metropolitan level, my questions that I ask are not what went wrong in Detroit to cause all the problems that the city is facing, but rather thinking about the metropolitan economy as a whole, how did we get to a point where we decided it was okay to have a city like Detroit with high rates of poverty and extreme blight and problems throughout the city right next to some of the most affluent communities in the entire country. And so Professor Derek Hamilton yesterday asked us, what is an economy for? And I think one way to answer that from the perspective of metro Detroit, the purpose of our economy, the way we've built it, is essentially to make sure that we funnel as few resources as possible into places like Detroit, Flint, Benton Harbor and other places and hoard as many as we can in the surrounding metro area suburbs. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. It's such an honor to be here and to be on the panel with people many of whom, some of whom I have admired for my entire career. I also want to say my thanks to Celeste because it was really working with you and when you were associate dean of academic affairs that made me really feel like I could take another step in my career and to be a leader. And so I just am so appreciative of everything you do for us here. I've had a really weird career and I just wanna get that out first because I don't necessarily recommend that you follow my career. Here our choices don't make these. But one of the reasons I think it's a weird career is because I have really, although I didn't do it intentionally, been just consumed with understanding how people that we think are similar, that we think are characterized by some trait or characteristic that they share are actually different. And I am passionate about both recognizing these axes of inequality that exists within the world but also understanding that people who are on and access of inequality can be very different. And those differences really matter. So I did a dissertation and the first book on prison programs and really wanted to look both at prisoners and prison staff and to think about how this, one overwhelming characteristic that defines them, incarceration or working with incarcerated people conceals a lot of differences in those groups and how are those differences made meaningful. I had the great good luck to come to the Ford School of Public Policy and to work with two people, Sheldon Danziger and Mary Corcoran who are just giants in having social science and particularly the social sciences that are not sociology, economics, political science, history, sociology, anthropology, really take poverty seriously as something to study and understand and combat. And so thanks to them I was brought into a world where I really could think a lot about racial differences in the experience of poverty and very proud to have put together edited volumes that really sort of, I think, center that important difference and why those differences within groups and how we might think they matter. Again, lucky to be at the University of Michigan in a metropolitan area, which is one of the most concentrated communities of Arabs outside of the Middle East. Arab Americans, many of you probably know, over 300,000 in our metro area and this is, this and LA are the largest communities of Arabs in the United States. And I got fascinated by how people on the outside especially after 9-11 see Arabs as monolithic, people from within the community understand that this is one of the most diverse communities in the world, whether we're thinking about race, whether we're thinking about religion, whether we're thinking about class and have been very grateful to be able to work with that community and to write about that community. And then a couple of years ago, I got pulled into this problem that my friends in science and engineering were focused on, which is why was the federal government investigating Chinese-American scientists? And sort of from that place where I was like, okay, I'll help you proofread your letter to Congress, to all right, this is really crazy. Something important is going on here that we need to pay attention to have become very active around, advocacy for Chinese-American scientists, but even more than that, advocacy for understanding that China and the US are two really large, important countries, very important differences and diversity within those countries, and yet we are sort of careening down a path where we try to take the most cardboard cutout version of people from each country and sort of put it against each other. And so very grateful now to have the opportunity to lead the Librethorical Center for Chinese Studies and to try to bring my expertise as somebody who studies American politics into this US-China relationship. Thank you. So we could spend a lot of time having panelists talk about their perceptions of what are some of the major problems we're seeing in the US and globally with racial inequality and social injustice. What I've asked them to do, little different, is to help us think about, from their perspective, what should be on the strategic agenda for change? What do they see as some of the most promising policy changes, system reform changes that are going on that will address racial inequality and social justice issues? So I'm gonna start with Ann and we'll get their thoughts on that. And maybe we'll have, feel free to bancher with each other if you like. I'm gonna be really short. Democracy is the most important structural reform and structural, institutions of democracy are the most important thing that we need to defend. The more I study China, the more I understand that authoritarian practices are not just practices that other people have, they are practices that we have here at home. And if we do not resist them for everybody, for voting rights, for African-Americans, ballot access for people in rural areas, reliable rule of law counting of ballots, if we do not protect these institutions of democracy, we can't get to any of our other concerns about social justice. Can I build on that? Yeah, I think democracy is actually right. I would say maybe that there is no democracy without economic democracy and that there's no racial justice without economic justice. So I often hear racial justice kind of very narrowly defined as sort of an agenda that asks what do people of color, what do black people, what do immigrants need that other people do not need? And I think that's the wrong question. I think the question that I ask when it comes to racial justice is what do people of color need? And it turns out that from that perspective, people of color need what all humans need. They need good education, they need healthcare, they need housing, they need schools, all those things. And someone yesterday asked Derek Hamilton about his experience working on the Bernie Sanders campaign. And it was really kind of funny seeing this question of racial justice play out with his campaign. So there's one reporter once who asked him, what is your racial equity agenda? And his response, predictably, and I think he was correct also, was to say universal healthcare, Medicare for all, abolish student debt, a green new deal for housing, all these very ambitious sort of universal programs. And the media kind of destroyed him for days after that, saying like, oh, he has no answer to what racial justice should look like or anything like that. But it turns out that most people of color in this country are working people and working class people and they need things that are related to economic justice, redistribution, things like that. Well, I'll take up the theme of democracy and disagree with the two of you. And so I want to say democracy and I wrote a piece recently, well, not that recently, a couple of years ago called death and democracy or either democracy and death, something like that. And my concern as a political scientist is there has been, and we're together here so, but there's been a proliferation of the crisis of democracy. What happened to the guardrails? Oh my God, Trump is horrible, which Trump is horrible. But my concern is it suggests somehow that democracy was working prior to Trump. At prior to Trump, there was Black Lives Matter movement, there was Occupy, there was immigrant rights mobilizations, right? Which spoke to the kind of crisis of the basic things that Moe is talking about here, the kind of lived experience in particular of poor people and particular of poor people of color. And so I worry when we say we need to defend democracy that we're suggesting that we need to defend a democracy that existed in 2015, which was not working for poor people and people of color. So democracy doesn't work when we see the kind of routine killing of Black people. Democracy doesn't work, right? When we see Flint not having water or kids of color not having the same educational opportunities or young people taking on more student debt than we've ever seen before. And so I guess the question for me is that we make a broader argument about democracy, about what is the vision of democracy that we're demanding and that we're willing to defend? And for me, it is not the kind of re-institution or the guarding of traditional democratic institutions that have largely not supported an expansive understanding of justice and rights in particular for communities of color. So okay, that's my first, you want to banter. So there, there you go. But the second thing I'll say, and I took the question also to be kind of what's happening that we can hold on to that's exciting. And for me, what's happening is, I always say I'm kind of interested in politics from the margins, the politics of resistance. And all of those moments of mobilization and movements I just talked about, it seems to me are really opening up a new type of discussion about what should be on the agenda. We say for democracy, I might say for policy policy advocates, policy makers, policy students. So when I think of, for example, the movement for black lives, many people would say, ah, that didn't work, right? Oh, there's no defund the police. But people are talking about policing, right? They are talking about what does it mean to have a police budget that's larger than the budget for education, right? People are starting to think about how do we use the framework of abolition to think about kind of concrete policy initiatives that speak to a vision of getting rid of kind of carceral logics and carceral institutions, right? I would say that in fact, the mobilization that we've seen from in particular young people over the last, we could say the last decade, has reshaped how we talk about democracy. Both the things that we need to defend, like the guardrails, but new guardrails, new ways of thinking about what does a functioning, equal rights-based democracy look like? And for me, that's the exciting part of where we are right now. It may not have delivered the exact wins that we want, but they may have done something, I think, more important, which is to expand how we are starting to think about what we can expect, what we want, and what we're willing to defend. So I'll stop there. I'll piggyback. And talk about democracy in a different perspective in that is, I think we need to think about what democracy means for different constituencies, because it doesn't look the same for everyone. And an example I'll give you from the research that I've done, when I started conducting interviews in the South among black gay men, it was between the years 2002 and 2004. And one of the things that was happening during the second Bush administration, and one of the things that was happening politically is a push for marriage equality. HRC and other large gay organizations were lobbying Congress for marriage equality. And marriage equality, it'll come as no surprise to many people, was not on the top of the list for black gay men in the South, or lesbian women either. On the top of that list was housing insecurity, employment discrimination. And so there was this mixed match between a larger politically white queer organization and a kind of on the ground grassroots community-based black and brown queer organizations about what democracy meant for these different constituencies. So I think that there needs to be an alignment about what democracy means, because it doesn't mean the same for everyone based on power, based on class politics, and so on and so forth. And I think one of the things that I think needs to happen more is, and the panel before us had a discussion about this when we talk about the relationship between the academy and communities, there needs to be more inclusion of more grassroots organizations and more high-powered organizations that have the platforms and the ear of politicians like HRC, and we can, that's a whole other conversation we can have, about what is needed on the ground because my access to marriage as an institution may benefit me because I'm of a certain class position, but that may not be what I need because I can't get a job based on some other kind of identity category. So I think racial justice looks different for many people as well. I have a certain perspective growing up as a working class, I call it, people call it working class, I would say we were the working poor, seven people growing up in a one-bedroom household, that's the lens through which I arrive at a place like Michigan sitting on this panel. That's very different from someone who is the, has the benefit of generational wealth. And so we need to think about these intersections very differently depending on region, depending on class position, a lot of different metrics and not just a kind of monolithic lens. Thank you. Can I come back? I mean, again, I think this, everything that everybody else has said is so crucial, I think it's so crucial to understand that one of the reasons we're having this conversation about democracy now is because people who were protected and privileged by the democracy we used to have are now in fear of losing some of that and that is why we are also concerned about it. I am totally there. There's a important understair is an important debate if you move out of the United States about countries like China, and I will just not even countries like China, China, which has managed to in 40 years of economic reform, eliminate extreme poverty. And we don't take that very seriously in the US because oh well, how do they measure it? And just because they've achieved this, but there's still lots of inequality in China and all of that is true, right? But the deal that the Chinese government has made with its people is we will give you a better life. Don't bother us about how we give it to you, right? And I think that we as social scientists but also as people, political actors, need to learn from China and countries like China about how you address deep poverty and social inequality and lack of social opportunity as opposed to just accept that in our country. And clearly, I mean, I think every person on this panel is committed to that. We cannot do that without also understanding the type of government that undergirds it. So we know, and especially in academic settings, we understand that there's key frameworks and evidence from social science research, critical race theory, history that have revealed very convincingly that there are structural factors and system factors in the perpetuation and codification of racial inequality and socioeconomic inequality. And that includes through law and public policy. I'm taking moderator prerogative here. I'm gonna lob out a question to my colleagues related to something that I'm working on right now, which is the pushback, the increasing pushback, primarily from state legislatures on the teaching of divisive concepts, such as critical race theory, structural racism and inequality, banning of DEI initiatives, et cetera. So I'm just wanting to get reactions from my esteemed colleagues here about what we're seeing. And I'll say, again, I'm doing research on this right now. There are 10 states already and more in the works that have passed laws banning these concepts. Most people think it's happening in K through 12, but in higher ed and public institutions of higher education regarding divisive concepts, and there's another group or a banning DEI, et cetera, et cetera. So I would be interested in your reactions to this. So Kavi and I had the pleasure of being on the list of banned authors in Florida. Congratulations. I know, someone texted me and said, oh my God, you've been banned. I'm like, what are you talking about? And it was fascinating to me. It's like, I didn't know I had meant so much. And I was, the New York Times picked up the story and then it was a wrap. And all these media outlets started getting in touch with me, wanting me to do interviews. And I actually did three. And one of the ones I did was Democracy Now. And I didn't mean for, I was asked to be on the program and they asked the questions. And one of the questions was, what did I think about the Santas' policy and so on and so forth? And one of the things I said went viral and I didn't mean for it, but I said, the Santas has said that African-American studies, no, I'm sorry, black queer studies lacks intellectual, there's no intellectual content or something. And I said, the only thing that lacks intellectual content is the governor. Because he doesn't know anything about anything. And specifically black queer studies or black people from what I can tell, because he also doesn't have a degree in African-American studies. But let me back up a little bit. I think one of the things that the left fell asleep on years ago, when it looked like for a while we were going to keep electing a Democratic president. And the right also thought that as well until Trump. They focused on the local level. So conservative voices, and this is not a thing against conservative voices, I think it keeps us all, I think the back and forth keeps us all honest. But there is a particular kind of conservatism that I think started getting elected to local school boards and getting involved at the local and community level that people weren't paying attention to so that by the time that someone like Donald Trump gets elected, it's a wrap for us all in terms of certain kinds of progress we've made in terms of what gets taught in schools. I am a product of a public school system that taught me nothing about the history of slavery. The only thing I got in my high school, and this is in the 80s, high school about slavery was that it happened and then we moved on. And so it wasn't until college that I realized that oh, there's this more complex history about how slavery happened as an institution. And to think that now there's legislation that has been passed that suggests that K-12 students can't even learn about a historical fact because it's trickering is absurd. So I think the threat that we're facing now is a lack of historical knowledge being passed onto the next generation of young people and students that is going to be devastating to our democracy because if you don't understand that past, there's no way that you can forge a future. And for me as someone who does research on and teaches and now as an administrator about these issues of race and class and sexuality, it's disconcerting to me to watch our institutions of higher ed pander to the legislature watching those three women presidents testify in front of that committee was horrifying to me because it was such a setup. But then to watch our institutions give in to it was even more horrifying. So I think we have to resist as much as we can because the space of higher ed I think is and the right noses is the last bastion of the possibility of democracy. That's right. Thank you. I'm just gonna say ditto, yes. And just a couple other things. One is just to say, I would even take us back further to the infiltration of the local as the right wing strategy. Again, it's not bad or good, depending on your politics for me, it was bad. But if we think about the Tea Party, right, that that emerges from a strategy of taking over the local and eventually electing Tea Party candidates into office who can then mobilize and structure a national agenda. That the right has always I think been very smart about understanding where there are possibilities for growth and control. So that's one thing I would say too, I worry that in fact those of us, and I'm in a blue state, didn't take this seriously enough. We thought we were protected, oh, it's just Florida, it's not just Florida. It is an Indiana, I think they recently just passed legislation that said if in fact you don't present two sides of an issue, now an issue like slavery doesn't have two sides but that you can be fired even with tenure, right? So there is both the direct impact, there's the signaling and the chilling effect, it will change even those of us in blue states who are teaching students and we think they're amazing, they have to go get jobs in other places. So it will have an impact on what we do. The third thing I'll just say is as someone who studies young adults and I think to Patrick's point which is exactly right, this is a generational warfare, right? This is a moment of what does it mean when you teach in particular young people but young white people an accurate history of this country and their ability to then position themselves relative to a Democratic or Republican party, right? I mean that's what's at stake for the Republican party. It was the same type of framing after Obama when in fact they said we would never see another Republican president again which of course we have but there are these moments where in fact what is in front of us feels like it will be re-aligning the power in the country and I think we have to take this very seriously not in terms of just what we are able to do but what does it mean for how in fact we teach history in this country? So I would like to echo all of that. I've been thinking about maybe more to the left to the political spectrum where kind of liberal institutions fit into all of this and so your question Paula was are we worried about this? Should we be worried about this? So my short answer is absolutely. As someone as an academic pre-tenure like I'm personally very worried about this. I considered taking a job in a state that is slightly more red than Michigan and at a public university and one of the questions I asked the provost was like is it smart for me to take this position? Like will this state turn the same way that Texas, Florida, other places have gone? But it's interesting just following sort of how universities have responded to some of these kind of debates just a few weeks ago there were people that made waves on Twitter and social media. Faculty in New York state, faculty in Texas who have been either fired or suspended for speaking out against the genocide in Gaza. And that is not a right wing Republican governor saying that you need to do that. That is liberal Democrats in higher education doing that on their own. And so I've been very concerned about that. I've also been concerned for a long time about how when Democratic administrations, we can think about Clinton, we can think about Obama, are in office, DEI can mean a lot of different things. DEI can mean racial justice, very redistributive policies or it could just be window dressing. And many Democratic administrations, what they do is they pursue policies that actually create more inequality, that actually make our lives more difficult. But they speak a good language related to diversity, equity and inclusion. And so in the minds of a lot of Americans I think, and Wendy Brown's written quite a bit about this fairly convincingly I think, in the minds of a lot of Americans they see a bundling between DEI initiatives and this rhetoric that Democrats are often want to use with economic policies that actually make their lives worse. And so Wendy Brown I think even 10, 15, maybe 20 years ago was warning that if Democrats pursued this path where they talk about diversity but they actually make working people's lives worse through their economic policies, there's going to be a pretty significant backlash to those diversity and equity and inclusion policies because a lot of people just don't understand sort of the difference between all these different political agendas. And so that's not to say that Clinton caused the right wing attacks that we're seeing now or that Obama caused those things but they certainly were complicit in producing the situation that we're in now. The only thing I would, I agree with everything that has been said, the only thing I would add is some scrutiny on this concept of divisiveness. If the concept of divisiveness means we need to protect young people or older people from tough questions that you can't solve by yourself. If it means moral dilemmas, I think our position should be you cannot be human without confronting divisiveness, without confronting moral dilemma. And what kind of a world are you trying to create where people are protected from learning about bad stuff? It's a world in which you are eventually told this is the stuff you can learn and everything else don't bother. Thank you all so much. Time has passed quickly. We don't have a lot left so I wanna turn it over to the audience now. So I assume we have some questions that have come in. So Katrina and Kellen, thank you. Thank you, Paula and thank you all so much for being here. So a question we received is the type of work you all do is very hard and I have no doubt personally exhausting. What advice do you have for students and other scholars of color who are motivated to work in the arenas of politics, policy, and racial justice? All right, I'll go. Don't, no, I was saying that. That is not my answer. One of the things that I have found, one is yesterday I was listening to the first session and I think it was the first session, someone brought up joy. And I do think that there is a way in which when we talk about all the difficulties and challenges it feels depleting, which is absolutely true. But you know, the idea of in struggle you meet people that you love who nourish you, who you care about. I'm here next to a dear friend, Mary's there, Celeste. So to say that as we join collectively to do good work, you meet good people and you feel like you're a better person or they hopefully make you a better person. But the other thing I would say is at least for me I have never contained my work to the academy, meaning I am deeply invested in doing work that is meaningful to organizations and people and activists who have a vision of struggle outside the academy. Just very quickly, I don't want to take all the time. I have a survey project called the Jen Ford Survey Project, the survey 3,000 young adults with over samples of young folks of color. And I do this and we do this work, one, because it provides us with data and as social scientists, we think data is important. But also because we do it because we want to support the work of movement organizations to think in complicated ways about both what they're asking for and also how they're organizing. So we recently just published a report with the Movement for Black Lives on how black people imagine public safety. So if we go beyond just the framework of defund the police, how do they think in complicated ways about the need to feel safe, but understanding that they don't trust and they actually fear the police, right? And so how can we map that out? And it seems to me that in doing that type of work, right, you build relationships, you extend yourself outside the academy, you feel like the work is meaningful and that there are organizations who can kind of push the work forward. So I guess I would just say to think broadly about who your collaborators are and the reason you're kind of in the arena doing work because I think if, in fact, you can make those types of relationships, you will feel good in the end. Even though you're exhausted, you'll feel like you've done the right thing. Oh, me? So I became Dean August 1st, 2020. That's all I need to say. And I am with the search firms that do searches for deans and provosts and all those presidents call reluctant leaders because I didn't want to do this. And who would want to take on an administrative role, especially at this moment, but even then in the middle of a global pandemic and post George Floyd and protests and all the things that was going on in that moment. And I looked back at that time and realized that I was in a deep depression during all of that. But about six months in, I had to give a report to the provost, all deans do about what you've accomplished and what's your strategy, your goals for the coming year. And when I looked at all the things that I had accomplished just in six months by just sitting at home, being on 10 hours of Zoom, I realized that I was the right person at the right time for the job, even though I didn't want it, I was probably the right person for the job at the time that I got it. And looking at that list of things that I had accomplished did bring me joy. Cause people can ask me, how are you enjoying being the, I said, there's no joy. What are you talking about? But seeing other people's lives being transformed by the smallest of things that I was able to leverage as Dean did bring joy. So my advice is, and it may sound cliche, is lean into the thing that you're most afraid of, because you never know the impact that your leadership, your activism, whatever the case may be, the impact that's gonna have on communities that you want to serve and that you want to help elevate. And now I can, four years in, I can say that more things bring me joy. It's not a joyful job, but more things bring me joy. And I take solace in the fact that because of who I am and my framework for leadership, I'm able to do some transformative things while I'm in the role. I have a chronic illness, but I had that chronic illness in its worst manifestations, basically make it very difficult for me for about 15 years of my career to do anything that I was supposed to do well. And I came out of that experience, realizing that if you always measure yourself by what you should do, you'll always fall short. The world, the work that is there is too big for anyone to do. It's probably, again, coming back to this idea of humanity, good for us all to be a little bit more humble about what it is we could do. And so once I didn't come to it easily, sort of was pulled to it kicking and screaming, realized that that's, this is what I have. This is what I can do. I'm much more grateful these days about being able to do anything at all. And I think that it has been a, I see so many of my colleagues who are doing fabulous work and so many people outside of the academy who are doing fabulous work, but they keep getting bogged down because they know there's so much more out there. And I think we just has, as humans, have to tell ourselves, this is what we can do. This is what we can do. And trust that when you have more capability, you will do more, when the situation gives you the opportunity, you will take it. And that's really what I think, Patrick, when I listened to you talk, right? I mean, that's, you didn't ask for the situation. It came to you, right? And then it gave you the possibility to do things that maybe you didn't realize, needed to be done or could be done, right? Oh, my turn. No, I second everything that everyone has already said. Injustice in many ways thrives on precarity and in a precarious environment with very minimal social safety net. I think a lot of us worry about sort of speaking out for political causes or being too radical because then what consequences will we face at work or in other kind of spaces and things like that? But I think just seeing activism from the last really 10 years, I mean, yeah, occupy Black Lives Matter and now the protests that we see on campus for Palestine happening weekly, daily in some cases, there are a lot of opportunities for bravery, a lot of opportunities for courage. And if more of us are fighting for racial justice and racial equity, they can't take all of us down. So it actually does make us safer when more of us kind of step up and fight for things that we believe in. Thank you. So how do we ensure our focus on racial justice is expansive enough to include a global context? Relatedly, where do you see intersections as they relate to broader conversations on multidirectional solidarity within racial justice movements? Happy questions for a fight. That's great. Often are very quick to say, people who work on X, they're very consumed by X. I know they're consumed by X, that probably means that these other things aren't important to them. And we don't give others a chance, I think, in sort of saying your, I identify you with X, I think that X is not open or not sympathetic or maybe just doesn't care enough about this. So I'm not going to reach out, right? And as I think, we will say, people are so much more diverse and different from that. If you start from the premise that I want to understand you, I don't just want you to get you to do what I think is important. And I think it's a very logical, you are consumed by something, that's what you're going to work on, of course. And so you often don't have necessarily the space to reach out and that's okay. You do what you can do, but we can make it easier for us all to reach out by sort of, you know, and the person who sort of extends their empathy or their desire for empathy first. I mean, I think obviously the benefits from that are really life changing, movement changing, life changing, all of those things. No, no, no. Mao, it's all you, it's all you, go ahead. I feel like, let me just go, not because I want to go in front of you, but because you have done such an important work of putting Gaza into the conversation and I don't want that to fall only on you, right? And I do think that part of what I have learned is that the framework of racial injustice, anti-blackness, white supremacy, cellular colonialism, travels. Even if people aren't able to travel themselves. So in our survey data, we note that black people are much more likely to express concern about this administration's position on Gaza, not because they've gone to Gaza, not because they fully understand that the condition of settler colonialism there, it's because in fact they recognize racial injustice. I think we could say the same, and it's not the same, but the concern about Haiti, right? And the condition of people in Haiti and the lack of engagement from the US government in thinking about Haiti. So I do think there are ways in which those of us who have an opportunity either in the classroom or outside of the classroom in the political work that we do or supporting others can begin to expand our framework again in thinking about what is a racial justice and international, intersectional, global racial justice framework look like. That is not to smooth out or to ignore really important differences or to say that we don't always understand all of the nuances and there are always nuances, right? In different parts of the world, but it does mean that to Patrick's point, we should lean in to building on what we understand here and trying to assess how it travels elsewhere, whether it is Gaza, whether it is Haiti, whether it is Ukraine. If in fact we suggest that we are committed to racial justice, it cannot just be racial justice in the United States. It has to be a kind of broader, more global commitment to racial justice. Now it's your turn. That was beautifully stated. There's a long tradition of what used to be called third worldism, third world solidarity between left movements and racial justice formations in the United States with the global South and the rest of the world. It's my own political consciousness, the earliest moments that I remember in my life were protesting the war on Afghanistan, protesting the war on Iraq and that was really important in my own sort of political consciousness, my own trajectory and for a long time after those movements, anti-war movements sort of died down here in the United States, I was pretty worried that it would actually never come back. Like I think there was a definite decline in sort of connections between the United States and the rest of the world in our social movements. But in the last few months, I'm actually not worried about that at all. I think we're reclaiming a lot of that energy because racial justice cannot be limited to the United States. The United States is not just a random country in the world. The United States is the only global superpower. It is an empire. It maintains colonies all around the world. And so the position of the United States, if we're thinking about racial equity as Americans, we actually can't just be limited to the borders of the United States. We need to think on a global scale. So this question comes from one of our amazing MPP students. What advice do you have for policy students hoping to advance racial justice and equity? For example, reparations for black Americans in a space where progress has often been limited by bureaucratic structures and perceptions of political feasibility. Well, I'll speak as an Evan Stoney. No, I knew you were going to say that. Claim it, claim it. Part of my taxes in Evanston and the sell of pot go to... I'm not selling pot. I just want to be clear. We're filming this. I'm not selling pot. Oh my God. Part of my taxes and the sell of legal marijuana goes toward reparations for black residents of Evanston. And I think I'll have a part of two communities that has happened. So Evanston and Mary may be correct if I'm wrong, but I think Evanston was the first city in the US to have this, but my home state is North Carolina and Asheville also now provides reparations to black communities vis-a-vis property ownership. So I think that's a start. And I also think that again, going back to my story about how I became a dean and how reluctant I was, I think it's also important for us to, as policy students, as scholars, academics, to get involved at the community levels in which we live, joining school boards, joining, running for God forbid you, running for office for city council, so that policy is affected at that level. Because I don't think, and Evanston is sort of an anomalous situation because of its history of political activism, but I think a policy like reparations for black folk couldn't have come about had not certain people been on city council. And so I think it's important for us to be in these positions whether we want to be or not, because it is hard work, so that we can affect change because being around the table does matter because even if we're not the ones that actually lead to the actual change, maybe we can hold the door open for someone else to come in, to join us around the table and take up that mantle. So I think it's really important that we stay engaged and not just leave it up to everybody else to do that work. I just want to say to the young public policy students, first of all, congratulations. You have the most amazing dean. You should be here with me. But I'm gonna go back to where I started earlier, which is to say I feel like young activists have expanded the framework through which you should be doing your work. So what does it mean to produce a kind of policy agenda that moves forward an abolitionist framework and commitments, right? What does it mean? I was talking with Derek yesterday about this. Baby bonds, I love baby bonds, but how do we think about baby bonds in relationship to racial capitalism? So is it a way to circumvent and keep capitalism in place and tolerable or should we be directly thinking about what are the policies or how do we even frame baby bonds as a way to address racial capitalism, right? How do we think about participatory budgetary policies, right? And the ways in which you can allow communities limited even autonomy to decide on what the investment looks like for their spaces, right? So I just think that there are ways in which young activists have provided us with new frameworks for thinking about policy work. And now it is incumbent upon young policy makers to kind of reimagine what the policy field might look like. I'm looking at Mary because Mary said this great thing yesterday about we often kind of lean back into tried and true policies because we have data on those, right? How do we produce cutting edge commitments to new policy agendas where we don't have data but where we are testing them out? And I just think that this is one of those moments where you can shift the policy agenda. And I think you have a leadership team that would support that type of risk taking that is embedded in hearing and partnering with communities who will be on the front line of receiving those types of changes in policy. And actually connecting that point to the international question that came from this also, many policies are not tried and true in the United States but are tried and true elsewhere. And so even looking beyond the US orders, for examples, of what we can do here. I heard this argument a lot with universal health care. Well, we don't have the data on what universal health care will look like. Well, there are actually plenty of countries in the world, Canada, Western Europe that have universal health care. I've lived a good part of my adult life in Brazil. Brazil's a country that is very similar to the US in a lot of ways, but it is much poorer than the US. And in Brazil, there's universal health care free at point of service. And so I, multiple times as an American, have gone to get health care in Brazil while living there. And as an American, I go with my ID cards and my credit cards and bank statements, try to get all the financial information that I can to them. And the first time I went in, they just laughed at me. Like, no, we don't handle anything related to money here. You just come in, tell us what you need, and we provide you with health care. And it's not a perfect system by any means, but it's definitely tried and true compared to what we have here in the US. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, hard support. I mean, I think there are so many models out there that we limit ourselves by not just looking within our own borders or just looking within our own group. And the other thing I would say is I would, I've been part of the Ford School for a long time. I love the focus on policy analysis that we have and the commitment to analysis. I would also say that we could do more to encourage people to be creative about solutions. Because if you're creative about solutions, nine out of 10 of them are going to be sort of dumb, but that's okay. You know, the way you figure out whether it's dumb or not is sort of to work through the implications and the support and who would help, but who won't help, et cetera. And I think we're sometimes afraid to have a space where students can be just be creative about what if we tried this? Or what are the building blocks that I would need if I wanted to start sort of tearing policies apart and putting them together in different ways? We have time for one more question. Can black, queer, and more broadly racial liberation occur within current public policies? How much of the most marginalized expect the system of public policy to provide a politic of liberation? I know, I don't like, really? I just have never thought about a policy, politics of liberation and policy. But, huh, I, well, okay. I mean, I think politics of liberation will undoubtedly involve policies. Say the, oh, go ahead. Can you just read it again? Because it was a long question and it had a lot of different parts. Okay, yes. You put two together. There was, it was a CIS. I know, I know, I know, I know. It had two questions. Okay, can black, queer, and more broadly racial liberation occur within current public policies? How much should the most marginalized expect the system of public policy to provide a politic of liberation? It's the second one that throws me off. But, one of the things I will say to the, in answer to the first question, yes, the possibility is there, yes. I think one of the biggest questions right now around policy and black queer life is black trans women and the rate of their murder, access to health care, and so on. And that is driven by policy. And there are so many states that are passing anti-trans bills that are actually making the situation worse. It was already bad, but it's making it worse in terms of access to health care, but also just protecting their lives when they are murdered and the people are caught. And so I think that there's lots of organizing around this, particularly in Chicago and other parts of the country, grassroots organizations. And we also have folks in Washington who are also advocating for a change in the policy. My partner right now, my husband, is in DC right now meeting with, I know, this is crazy, because he's not a politician. But anyway, and he just texted me last night, he's on Capitol Hill, he just texted me last night a sign outside of that woman from Georgia's office, I won't call her name, that says bathrooms are for men and for women, follow the science. And it's that kind of ideology and idiocy that has a deadly impact on trans people and black trans women and men specifically. And so there is a possibility, but we have to be vigilant around these legislative policies that are really impacting and making people more vulnerable to crime, to homelessness and jeopardizing their lives. So again, there is a possibility, but we have to stay vigilant. Can I just say really, I think everything you said is right, but not about liberation. And I think that there is a possibility but not about liberation. So I think all of that is absolutely right in terms of keeping people safe, in terms of respecting their dignity. But when I think of liberation, I think there are systemic changes that have to happen way beyond policy. And I don't wanna discount the importance of safety, liberation, agency and power as a way as moving us towards a path towards liberation. Right, for me, there's a tension there, a systemic tension, but yeah. I really regret that in the role of moderator, I'm also evil timekeeper. So our time is up. There is so much more we could talk about. I wanna thank all of you and the audiences for joining us today. And for those who are here, please join us for a lunch out in the Great Hall right now. But thank you so much. Please join me in thanking our panelists here today, but also for your ongoing inspiring and amazing work that you're doing in the areas of racial justice and social equality. Thank you all and thanks to all of you.