 Hi guys this is Susham, your anti-racism officer and this video is about what Black History Month means to me. Black History Month is primarily about connecting, it's about connecting with ourselves and with our friends and family and with our heritage and our history and our culture. Black History Month also has a really really really important space for healing, for taking care of our mind, our mental health and our bodies, for seeking out intergenerational exchange, trading stories and sharing our histories and remembering the struggle of those that came before us without whose strength we wouldn't be here today. I think I feel during this month emboldened to express and share who I am in new and creative ways to really think about what self-determination means and how I reclaim myself and how we reclaim ourselves from narratives that we didn't write or previously shout out from and within that I think it's important to remember those most vulnerable members of our community, for example Black queer folk or Black trans women who are experiencing an increase in violence and precariousness against their bodies and against their lives and so we must see that in order to heal we have to get past just surviving, we have to be given that chance and the best way to empower those people, the best way to empower our communities is to unlearn the harm we do to ourselves in our thinking and in the limiting of ourselves. I think I will end on the fact that Black History Month has to be a really important time for non-Black people also, we've seen an incredible engagement with the Black Lives Matter movement over the past few months and that's really encouraging but also we need to remember that our activism, our engagement doesn't stop with just posting a Black square and so Black History Month is also about unlearning and learning and reassessing our relationships of Blackness and to Black culture and to take the thousands of resources, all the new that are out there, the events, the films, screenings, the talks, the tours, taking all of these resources and taking them forward to do the real internal work and to create those better relations in our own minds. So I think I just want to end on the fact that Black History Month is a real chance to see Black people, Black lives, Black bodies centred and celebrated and elevated and uplifted and I think it's really important that we find the joy in all of those moments, we find the joy in our history, we find the joy in the movement and in the struggle and that's really important for me during Black History Month.