 Established in 1998, 23 years ago by Tony Castro, Unity Through Diversity Week is an educational programming series that celebrates, focuses, and explores the rich intersections of our global communities through workshops, presentations, performances, etc. As you know, the coronavirus has impacted our community beyond description. And despite everything that's happening around the world, we're so grateful to be here with you today virtually to connect with our community, with our family, especially at this time. Since February, our committee consisting of faculty, staff, and students has worked tirelessly in making Unity Week happen. I would love to give a special thank you to our Unity Week committee consisting of incredible colleagues across campus. Without you this week would not have been possible. I know collectively we were thinking how we would make this happen since we're so used to being together and brainstorming and being in community, but despite all of these efforts, everything that's occurred and being able to be in community through Zoom the last month and a half to make this happen, I am so immensely grateful for each one of you in making this happen. Additionally, I would love to give a special thank you as well to ITS, Access Services, and to Mark Lentini who has been answering numerous questions. Mark is from Instructional Design. I want to thank him for his expertise in navigating our first signature programming week through Zoom webinar. And this is a task y'all. So Mark, thank you so much. And ensuring that all of our events are accessible with live captioning and ASL interpretation. So without further ado, I would love to introduce Shannon Weitz who will introduce our opening keynote speaker. Enjoy y'all. Thank you Doris. And a big shout out to the Unity Week team who is holding down the back end of this presentation for us all. Good afternoon Highline community near and far. It is my incredible honor to introduce our Unity Week keynote speaker Rosa Clemente. Pre-corona, our committee was thinking about a theme which means discussing where we are collective we, our students, our local and global community, where we are at this moment in time and what programming would speak to it. We lifted up ideas of collective liberation and community care and what it means to reclaim your education, your story, your brilliance, to rewrite the narrative through unlearning and relearning what was there all along. Community, resilience, knowledge, power, and the ability to take care of each other. Rosa Clemente was a natural choice as someone who is embedded in and has researched liberation struggles and speaks to the critical importance of mutual aid or collective care as an antidote to capitalism. We didn't know at the time how important these topics would be, but in our current moment, they are essential to our path forward. Rosa Alicia Clemente is an organizer, political commentator, and independent journalist. In Afro Puerto Rican born and raised in the Bronx, New York, she has dedicated her life to organizing, scholarship, and activism. From Cornell to prisons, Rosa is one of her generation's leading scholars on the issues of Afro-Latinx identity. Rosa is the president and founder of Know Thyself Productions, which has produced seven major community activism tours and consults on issues such as hip hop feminism, media justice, voter engagement among youth of color, third party politics, United States political prisoners, and the right of Puerto Rico to become an independent nation free of United States colonial domination. She is a frequent guest on television, radio, and online media, as her opinions on critical current events are widely sought after, which is why it's so great she's here with us today. She, where are we at? Her groundbreaking article, Who is Black, published in 2001, was the catalyst for many discussions regarding Black political and cultural identity in the Latinx community. She is the creator of PR, Puerto Rico on the map, an independent unapologetic Afro-Latinx-centered media collective founded in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. She is currently completing her PhD at the W.E.B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Rosa was the first ever Afro-Latina woman to run for vice president of the United States in 2008 on the Green Party ticket. She and her running mate Cynthia McKinney were to this date the only women of color ticket in American history. Rosa Clemente speaks truth to power and we are in store for some facts. Please join me in welcoming Rosa. Somebody else has to start the video. Here we go. Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for having me. It's, yeah, the whole world has changed dramatically for a very, very long time. So I just wanted to share some of my experiences of how I became an organizer and how I've stayed in the movement and been part of a lot. I hope I didn't, I hope people could still see me. I'm trying to figure out the PowerPoint at the same time. So there you go. Okay. Now this is, I'm trying to see, I don't see myself when I have the PowerPoint up. We can see you. Okay. No, that's fine. As long as you could see me and then everybody could see that PowerPoint, right? And then click on presenter view of the PowerPoint. Okay. So people can see me still and see the PowerPoint? Yes, indeed. Okay, great. I just want to read a little bit of something that I had prepared and then just go through, it looks like a lot of slides, but I'm going to go through them really quickly so we could spend a good amount of time on Q&A. So I love quotes. Sometimes a good quote can get you to a day or a couple of days. So, and I want to thank everybody that's on right now. I know like everybody's getting very stressed about not having human contact as well as Zoom meetings and virtual things. As an organizer, it's not in our DNA to not be around people. So we've had to adjust to maintain social distance. I'm based in New York, but you are all based, I'm pretty sure, in Washington state. So both of our states, yours was hit earlier and now New York, New York, not the entire state, but New York City is still dealing with a lot of not only patients, but a lot of people continuing to die because they can't quite figure out what would be, what is then how this thing started, let alone a cure for it. So Bell Hook says education at its best is a profound human transaction called teaching and learning. It is not just about getting information or getting a job. Education is about healing and wholeness. It is about empowerment, liberation, transcendence, about renewing the vitality of life. It is about finding and claiming ourselves and our place in the world. So this is how my story begins. So people could find me, they could tweet at Rosa Clemente, Instagram, Black Puerto Rican PhD. For me, my story begins in the South Bronx in 1972. I was born in the Bronx when the Bronx was burning. I was born in the Bronx when there was extreme, extreme amounts of poverty. Although the section that I grew up in in the Bronx is still the poorest congressional district in America, but we do have the best congressperson ever AOC. So, you know, that should let people know that poverty is not something that keeps people from practicing or organizing, although there are a lot of systemic wrongs that come with poverty, of course. But I didn't grow up in what people will call a movement household. I have a lot of friends, most of them, their parents were in movements in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. So they were all growing up in movement spaces. I did not grow up in a movement space or movement household. I did have a great sense of pride about being Puerto Rican. But it wasn't until I got to college that I began to even understand what Puerto Rico is a colony, why we have political prisoners, why our women were tested on, and sterilized, why people fighting to be free in Puerto Rico were either attacked, assassinated, or incarcerated for fighting for Puerto Rico to be free. I had to go to college to find that out. So when I was nine, my parents moved us into the suburbs. So I grew up, like I said, in the poorest congressional district. And then 21 miles away, when I was nine, my parents moved us to this suburb called Westchester County. Probably everybody knows Westchester County now because it had the first outbreak. And a part of Westchester County was in New York where the first outbreak, community outbreak was happening. And that was New York. So I grew up in the suburbs. But every weekend, my parents, my mom would take me to the Bronx. So we would maintain our connections with so much of my family in the Bronx. And my father to this day still owns his business over 50 years in the Bronx. So my mom would take us. And then the older I got, and I lived in this small, small community called Elmsford, New York, was like one mile. It's not even the city. It's a village. And I grew up. So for five days, I was in like this utopic kind of high school where it was very racially diverse. None of us were expected not to go to college. We all participated in all parts of the community. I mean, I was a cheerleader. I ran track. I was in Rotary Club, Key Club. I was student government, all that kind of stuff. But the older I got, I was realizing that my cousins were not going to get the same opportunities that I would get. And I at that time would have had the language to say, well, it's structural economic inequality is the reason a lot of my cousins did not go to college. And a lot of them have been in the same place they've been in for 40 years and haven't been able to kind of break out of not as individually out of systemic oppression or economic inequality. It's just that the resources are never given to us in our communities. So when I did go to college in 1990s seems like forever. I went to the state university in New York in Albany, New York. Albany, New York is what I'm at now. Albany, you all know now is the capital because Governor Cuomo, who it's interesting because the only people that really like Governor Cuomo are people who don't live in New York State. He has he has done a lot at this current crisis. But he's doing exactly what he should be doing. So for us to New York, there's a lot of things he's been doing wrong for a very long time that this coronavirus has also exposed the amount of inequity in the state of New York, particularly in New York City. So I'm just checking in since I can't see myself, but I'm everybody hears me, and I'm good, right? Hello. Yes. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I had to drink water so dry in my house. So when I went to college, I joined up with a student organization called the SUBA, the Albany State University Black Alliance. And from there I became that's how I began to understand what it means to be a leader. The student affairs office that time it was called Minority Affairs. We don't use that language anymore. Thank God. But you know in in these spaces is where not only did I begin to understand the history of my people, the history of the African-American struggle, of feminism, of LGBTQ issues, of Asian Pacific Islander issues, you know. And it was because our professors and our administrators encouraged us that my professors encouraged me to get into Black Studies and understand the roots of Puerto Rico, you know. They also got me to kind of come out of my shell because I was very shy. I just kind of observed the first year that I was in school. I just wanted to do good. I don't want to make sure I was graduating from college, but it wasn't until late in my sophomore year that I became or put me on the track to the person that I am now. And it was because of this professor that you all see right now, Dr. Vivienne Verdel Gordon, who took me under her wing and told me that I should leave political science and join, become a major in Africana Studies and to really dig out the roots of African-descendant people in Puerto Rico, which I wouldn't have ever, I never was told that as a Puerto Rican, even though my father is visibly a Black man. Like, he's Black, but it's just for in the 90s especially, but in the Latino community, we mostly view ourselves through our ethnicity or our land or where we live. We don't really do a grade. We don't talk about race well, you know, at least not at that time. And even now, at least we are having major discussions of what it means to be an African descendant, what it means to be Black as a Puerto Rican and all of those kind of things. But for me, as much as I learned in the classroom, it was like really hanging out with my friends, debating other people, going to see speakers, going to, you know, going to student council and saying, well, you're not giving the Black and other groups the type of money you're giving to the whatever Frisbee Club or whatever those kind of different things that we had to contend with. But for me, Dr. Gordon saw something in me that I really wouldn't have seen in myself for a long, long time. And especially as a young woman, really not understanding hierarchy the way I understand it now. You know, so what I often tell students of color, when you're coming to these institutions that first like you didn't get there by yourself, the reason we are even in these academic spaces institutionally is because there were people who fought for us to be in these institutions. And it was part of a struggle of an era of the civil rights era and the Black power movement era that really had millions of students demanding to not only be accepted at a college, but that the resources would be there and that they would be the same, that they would be on, have some type of equity with still what would be white predominantly white institutions, right? So I think it's always important to students of color be very clear about these institutions and that a lot of times, most of the time, these spaces were not made for us. And I speak from an experience of going to a state school, going to an Ivy League, where I got my master's at Cornell University, and UMass Amherst, another public university where I'm finishing my dissertation. But when I graduated, the man you see his name is Dr. James Turner, I have met him through Dr. Gordon, and he said, you should come get your master's at Cornell University. And I was like, Cornell, that's Ivy League, like I could never get in there. And he said, no, you're going to come with us. We have our own department where we have our own building. And you can come and study about the Young Lords party because nobody has talked about the Young Lords. And the Young Lords were an organization in the late 60s, much like the Black Panther Party. And, you know, kind of was a Marxist socialist organization that was also paramilitary, meaning that it sought the right for Puerto Rico to be free by any means necessary. And part of those means would be being a paramilitary organization. Basically in the late 60s and 70s, you had a lot of organizations that began to take up arms in this country, or also talk about imperialism and war that the United States was imposing on so many other countries. So when I got to Cornell, I do remember one thing, I remember a lot that Dr. Turner said, but I do specifically remember when he said, you're not here to just get a master's from Cornell University, you're here to be a scholar activist. And that's what I've been in the academic spaces for a long time. How do we use our scholarship for the betterment of our people? You know, sometimes we get lost in these white predominant institutions and we lose who we are or we don't want to really talk about who we are as a people or what has happened to us because, you know, understanding resistance and I mean understanding oppression is not a fun thing. Like understanding the history of this country, the American project, really what it is is this American project is predicated on three things. The denial of women to have any type of equity or equal rights with their husbands. You know, if the founding fathers didn't see the women in their lives as important or that they had the same equity, then how would they see black people that they were enslaving in the United States of America? So, you know, that idea is that we sometimes come into these spaces and we're like, I don't want to start trouble. I'm just trying to graduate. But as a scholar activist, and we should all be scholar activists, you shouldn't just be going to get a degree, you know, but I also think with the coronavirus right now that this is going to change the entire trajectory of what the academy looks like, you know, right now you have a lot of universities that are saying they're going to have to cut their spending by 25%. There's hiring freezes. A lot of adjuncts are being let go. So it's weird to be in the space where I've been a scholar activist for 25 years about to finish my PhD. And I don't know when I'll be able to teach, you know, but for me, what Dr. Turner really taught me is that you always have to do work in the community. And no matter what, that we just can't be taking the privileges that we have, that so many of our people don't have, to take them for granted is very problematic. And while I was there at Cornell for two years, I really did get to go into in-depth research of not only the Young Lords party, but about slavery in Puerto Rico. And one of the things that I've done post my masters is a lot of my work is really based around Afro-Latino, Latino, Latinx identity, and how I racially classify myself as black, which for a lot of people still very problematic, but that can be part of the Q&A. You know, so our scholarship that we produce is not just for us, but it's for our community. As scholar activists, we have the responsibility to use our serious scholarship to empower our communities, but to also understand that our communities are consistently under attack that many of the people we know will never step foot into any institution of higher learning, but many people in our communities have organic knowledge, street knowledge, through their lived experiences, and that we must never forget that or not form artificial barriers because we have a degree and some of us don't. And that's also a tenant of community organizing. A lot of times people think that community organizing is because you've got hired at a nonprofit to do something. Community organizing is really first and foremost about letting the people that are closest to the problems to be the people that come up with the solutions, that we do not go into communities to impose what we think the agenda or the right way to protest or the wrong way to protest can be. That we really take, you know, and listen to the people. And that's what we call grassroots organizing, literally from the bottom up, not from the top down. And in the last five years, with a new generation of young leaders, black, brown, undocumented, native folks, Asian Pacific Islanders are you are all as younger people coming into a time period where all those intersectional intersections of your identities are not, you're not being asked to choose one or the other. When I was in college, literally, people would be like, are you a Puerto Rican first or you're a woman? And you're like, how do you even separate those two? But we didn't have the language until Kimberly Crenshaw came up with her theory of intersectionality, you know. But when I talked to about the American project is that a lot of times we have to understand that the people that are being oppressed, that it's not an individual oppression, that the that white supremacy and patriarchy, transphobia and capitalism, right, are part of the American, it's a part of the American problem, but it's a glow. These are global issues as well. Yeah, so a lot of my work that I also do is, as a historian, is trying to tell younger people that your history does not begin with our colonization. You know, and I think indigenous brothers and sisters have told us this forever, that the history is a continuum of hundreds and hundreds, even thousands of years. And a lot of times with people of color in any setting, we talk a lot about of the oppression, which we should be talking about white supremacy and systemic inequity. We should be talking about that. We should be understanding that, you know, these things have been put upon us, right? But that our people and what we bring to the table does not begin with colonization or capture, enslavement or genocide, right? We have a history that predates all of the systemic oppression that's been inflicted on black and brown people, right? And that we are a diasporic people. So, you know, black people all over the world, they're in Australia and they're in Palestine and they're in New Zealand and they're in Puerto Rico, they're in Cuba, they're in Brazil, they're in the Dominican Republic, like the reason it was called the transatlantic slave trade was because that's what it did. It captured people on the continent of Africa and it dispersed those people as enslaved people in most of the western hemisphere. And a lot of people don't understand that the amount of Africans that were captured, there'll be people who debate this, but pretty historically at this point, people say 60 million to 70 million people were taken from the continent of Africa and dispersed throughout the world. But most of those people don't end up in the United States of America. So that's why when you, when people are like those black people in Puerto Rico, I'm like, yes, because Puerto Rico had slavery and the Dominican Republic and Haiti, well, Haiti didn't, Haiti became the first black republic of the world that was independent, but of course, that there was slavery in Hispaniola, right? So what we don't understand sometimes is that we're like, where are all these black people? And it's like all over the world, we're all over the world. And that is part really of our, not only disbursement, but also it really speaks to how we've worked together as a people, you know? So as a historian, I try to contextualize things by looking at the past, understanding the present, and knowing that the future is shaped by not only events, but by people who struggle for justice. So when I was about to graduate before I went to Cornell here at SUNY Albany, this woman, Dr. Moreno Vega, she came to speak and she was the first Puerto Rican, first Hispanic, first Latina that I ever heard refer to herself as African descendant. And after she spoke, I chased her down and I was like, I'm going to graduate and I want to come work with your organization. And she's like, well, you call me when you're in New York City, but here's a list of books that you need to read to understand who we are as a people, African descent. And what she gave me to read, it really brought an understanding to me about what people mean when they say an African diaspora, but what does it mean when people say we're African descendant people? So when I graduated from Cornell, I went to New York City, I started teaching. I was wanting to teach history, a year into teaching. I left because at that time, well, people use the phrase now, the school, the prison pipeline. But it was beginning in New York at the time I was teaching. And one day our principal called us in, you know, and he said, we're not going to be able to get new history books or English books this year. And I was the history teacher, because we need to build a holding cell in here. So if any of the kids come in, or bring a gang violence or smoke and weed or all that, we're going to detain them in the school and wait for the police to come and arrest them and process them to juvenile detention. Now, mind you, this was middle school. I had eighth graders. And so I left. I said, I cannot be part of something where you're going to decide not to give me books and teach young people the history that they should be knowing, because you want to have a holding cell in a school. Now, 20 years post that everybody knows the school, the prison pipeline, right? And that's kind of how I bring it all together. Sometimes when you're doing organizing, it doesn't seem like people are getting it or people are understanding or people are moving in the direction you think they should be moving. But this goes back to scholarship and activism. Those of us who have that type of information are the ones that should be doing studies in our community and should be writing the reports. But also, you always talk again to the people on the ground. They know what's up, and they're usually going to have the solutions to that. But after I wrote this article, who was Black, it was very controversial back then because a lot of Latinos, Latino, Latinx folks were like, we're not, we're everything. We're multiracial. We're bi-racial. Why do you have to call yourself Black? Why can't you just call yourself Puerto Rican or at that time Hispanic? And I was like, because I'm a Black Puerto Rican. And if you don't, the problem was not me identifying with it as much as it was people saying, why do you have to bring race into everything? But this article you can find on my website. It's almost 20 years old, and every year it gets revived for a new generation. And it's not the greatest writing, but it's just really me sharing my experiences with how then understanding who I was as a person of African descent or a Black Puerto Rican that led me to organize with the organization that became my political home, the Malcolm X grassroots movement. And coming into the Malcolm X grassroots movement is really where I began to really not only become a good community to organize or philosophically to have a political ideology and to know what I was willing never to concede to, right? Or what I wasn't going to do, you know? And to this day, the Malcolm X grassroots movement is alive and it's a lot of younger people in it. But as a family, we've all kind of gone, not our different ways, just geographically our different ways. But I mean, these are my comrades. We talk all the time. We're organizing in different spaces. But at the end, we also always think about what we learned in the Malcolm X grassroots movement, which is self-determination. And so in this time that we're at now, self-determination could mean me deciding to run for vice president of the United States on the Green Party ticket after Cynthia McKinney called and was like, do you want to be my vice presidential candidate? And I was like, yes, you know, because I want to at least be part of some political party that is talking about the issues that are really affecting what we were calling then the hip hop generation, right? Those of us who grew up in hip hop, not just around music, but really the politics and the culture and knowledge within hip hop or becoming a hip hop journalist, as some of us began to be called, or being a woman and going into hip hop spaces and really telling men that like we're sick of the patriarchy, we're sick of the homophobia, the violence, and all of that. So by the time Cynthia asked me to run, I was considering myself a hip hop feminist. And that's a term that John Morgan, her book is called When Chicken Heads Come Home to Ruth, where she coined this phrase of hip hop feminist, like women like us who love hip hop, but we love it so much that we can also critique hip hop. And that's some of the work that I was doing, running for on the Green Party, you know, people can ask me questions. It's been like now 12 years. But I will say that it's interesting because the Green Party platform, if you look back at it, everything we've been advocating, we've been advocating for over 30 years. And now you see a lot of the platform stuff that we had in the Green Party now have kind of gotten mainstream, which I think is fantastic. You know, I think it's great that we have someone like AOC who could link up with Bernie Sanders and talk about a green new deal and all of that. So I mean, ideas are never, they're not stagnant, you know, and for some reason, maybe we were a little too ahead of our time in 2008. But now we know that, you know, at least for me, the reason I ran is because I wanted to bring really issues again of the hip hop generation, especially our mass incarceration, because at that time, we were massively incarcerating people. Now there's a movement to decarcerate. But in the early 90s to the early 2000s, I mean, that's where we go from having 400,000 people in prison in the United States to 2.7 million people. And a lot of that is because of the crime bill that Bill Clinton passed as a Democrat, and that a lot of Democrats, Black and Latinos included signed on to that. So can I just get a time check? Because I want to make sure I have time for Q&A. Yeah, you have about 10 to 15 more minutes. Okay. So when I got to UMass and Hearst, after I ran for vice president with Cynthia, it was very hard for me and her to get hired. There was a lot of animosity towards us. I mean, part of it was like, how dare you run against Barack Obama? You know, and part of it, I mean, we would always tell people, I was like, it's not like we're going to win. We're the Green Party. Well, it's just trying to get 5% of the vote so that we could break the two party system. But we didn't achieve that then, and we haven't achieved it now. And what a professor from UMass and Hearst called and said, you know, you need a break from just organizing. You've been through a lot with this run. Think about coming to UMass and Hearst to get your PhD in Black Studies. And I went two years, two years after I ran. But when I got to UMass and Hearst, and the first year I was there, there was a hip hop manager. His name is Chris Lighty, and he committed suicide. And at that time, you know, it's so weird because younger generations now, you all are very open to having discussions about mental health. But even in 2012, people were not having the level of discussions now around not just self care, but really about mental health and what that means. You know, and after he killed them, he committed suicide. A lot of his friends who were mostly men, like 50 Cent and Russell Simmons and Puff Daddy and all these huge, huge JZ, all these huge hip hop stars were like, there's no way he would have committed suicide. He had too much to live for. And then they started this conspiracy theory about maybe his wife had killed them. So I was like, this is crazy. We should be talking about this in hip hop. And I wrote an article where I came out with my story about dealing with postpartum depression, but also for a long time dealing with anxiety in my life and bipolar depression. And I could never really put my finger on it. Like, and it really got to a point personally where people would be like, Oh, that's just Rosa. She's going off. And I had to keep thinking like, no, there's something not right, you know, and I started doing my own research, but people were beginning to talk about mental health. So when he committed suicide, I wrote this article about how in hip hop generation, we had to have serious and healing discussions, you know, so as one who suffers from depression, myself, it breaks my heart to see those lose this very difficult and often lonely battle, you know, and you know, I think it was that article was, I needed to write it, but I didn't expect a little bit of the blowback I got on that. But the blowback came from people that are highly motivated and are always on the go, you know, that are in my life. And I was like, you're not taking time like just taking a break. Also, three years before that, not only did I mean, seven, sorry, seven years before that, not only had I had my daughter and didn't know that I really went through postpartum depression, I also went to New York over the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the Levy breach in New Orleans. And, you know, to this day, you never forget pictures of people who are dead, basically, when we got there, the ninth fourth was still completely under water. And there were bodies laying around. And, you know, I don't think I ever dealt with all of that trauma from Hurricane Katrina, I kind of just kept going, kept going, kept going, and then seven years later, kind of all caught up, you know. So, in catching up, as I was finishing at UMass Amherst to go live, to get a post of pre-doc at California State University in LA, I ended up joining Black Lives Matter. The first chapter did start in LA. And you see this picture right here with Talib Kweli and a poet, Jessica Camor, and Philip Agnew of the Dream Defenders. We also covered, while I also went down with Talib and Jessica to support the rebellion that was happening in Ferguson. So, if you look at it from the Trayvon Martin trial and George Zimmerman walking to then the Ferguson Rebellion, to then the two years of Black Lives Matter all over the country, trying to disrupt and, you know, all that comes with Black Lives Matter, I also wanted to also represent, like Afro-Latinos, we consider ourselves Black. We're part of this Black Lives Matter, but we as a Latino community also have to deal with the anti-Blackness in our communities. And we as a larger community have to stop like erasing Asians and Palestinians and indigenous people that if we're not in a multiracial coalition, we're not going to get things done. So, you know, that you see Ferguson and this is when we got arrested, which is its own story itself because we have to go to trial for when we shut down the highway, the 101 in California. Anybody that's been in Cali, the 101 is the biggest highway and we shut it down on Thanksgiving Eve. And then a couple years later, you know, Puerto Rico happened and right after Hurricane Maria, I just gathered a group of young people that were very media savvy and was like, we have to go cover this right now. We have to get to the island because we're not going to really see the truth of what's happening on the ground. So, we were able to, I created Puerto Rico on the map. We went to Puerto Rico. We traveled around for 10 days. We got to see not only, unfortunately, the destruction, but really at that moment what Puerto Rico taught me was this idea of mutual aid. Because by the time Trump threw the paper towels, people were already doing what they needed to do to survive, you know, because so many people in Puerto Rico have been left behind, especially Afro, Puerto Ricans, elderly people, people who live in the mountains, all of them were totally abandoned. But in that abandonment came a new consciousness in Puerto Rico. And what I mean about that is that for a long time, Puerto Rican people, you would, you know, how can we get free? How do we not be a colony anymore? How are we going to be able to be our own country? And a lot of people would say, well, what would we do without the U.S. government? Well, Hurricane Maria literally showed us what we can do without the U.S. government, and it just brought a different consciousness. And that's really a key part of community organizing that most people become conscious of something that happens, something they see, or something that happens to them. That's usually what brings out your want to be not only treated right as a human being, but also like, what are we going to do about this? Because if we don't do something, then we feel lost. And then this was a two, three years, now, I think this was the Golden Globes three months before that, the Me Too hashtag became, as you all know, so popular. But Tarana Burke, who's right on point, that's Tarana right there. Tarana has started Me Too like 15 years before it became a hashtag. And this was the year that the Hollywood, a lot of Hollywood actresses came together for the Time's Up movement. And Tarana was invited, as she said, no, I want to bring like seven or other women that are organizers and are doing great work. So for me, it was perfect timing because what those people had just happened in September. And then here comes this opportunity to go to the Golden Globes and spend a weekend talking to people that have money and resources about what they should be doing about Puerto Rico. But I always tell people the other side of that is that those Hollywood actresses also needed us as community organizers, you know, because a lot of people like was said to me, you know, they used you. And I was like, nobody used us. We're community organizers. Any town have a platform. We go to that platform. But really what I saw that weekend were all these powerful Hollywood actresses that have been abused and then whole career and had never had someone speak for them. Finally have some organizers like us like, no, you know, whether you work at Kentucky Fried Chicken, or you work at a mall, or you work, you know, at a TJ Maxx, or you work in the fields or you work on a Hollywood set, like women are tired, like literally times up, women are tired of this, and we're going to come together as women to talk about issues of patriarchy, you know. And to also understand that patriarchy, there are women who perpetuate patriarchy. And there are men who do not perpetuate patriarchy, you know, and this is the same thing with LGBTQ issues and trans people's issues. It's like one begets the other. So we have to always be talking about why this stuff is systematic. So I'm just going to go through a couple more of the slides because I want to now in this coronavirus time that we're in. So this is a mutual aid that AOC, Alejandro Ocasio-Cortez had done with one of the baddest ass women organizers ever, Mariana Papa, you know, and basically they put this out to say, you know, listen, they're not, the government is not telling the truth, Trump and them are lying, like we're going to have to depend on ourselves. And if you see it, you know, it's like, obviously, things that we're all doing now practice social distance and boy, public transit, clean, you know, clean services often, but also like, where can you identify how you support a community? How do you support the people in your building or your block or your co-workers? Who can you work with that what we talk about when we talk about organizing, it's solidarity, not charity, you know, how do we build a pod map of who can help with what issue and that you should always not worry about starting small, you know, that it's usually a small group of people that make the most effective change, you know, so I hope you're able to download this or make sure that you all get it. I'm sure everybody screenshot in it, but this is what I have on my wall, you know, like mutual aid, who's going to help us, we're going to help ourselves. Basically, we got our block, you know, and I was reading something today about pandemics. And I don't have the author who wrote this, but it says historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world or the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us, or we can walk through lightly with little luggage ready to imagine another world. Are we ready to fight for it? And for me, I've been ready to fight for it, but I think this virus has really exacerbated and really also is a big check-in on organizers. Are we like effective enough? And if we're not, why aren't we effective enough? So you can screenshot this too. I had like two huge anxiety attacks as this was beginning to happen, you know, partly because all my families in New York City, including my parents, and that I could not get to them, I couldn't see them because I would not want to get someone else sick. But I thought it was important again that people share like this thing is not only causing mad anxiety and panic. It is really devastating young people from like my daughter's age 15 to I would say 25 because, you know, one day my daughter's in school and the next day she's not. And now a week later, like we have to have all these teachers and professors all of a sudden be able to do online learning. And there's been many reports that students just in general, especially college students actually do not like online classes like that. So it's going to be interesting to see not only what colleges do, but what high schools and middle schools do as they begin to open up again, you know. And for me like so many people at least maybe three weeks ago we're talking about going to normal and I'm like normals what God is here. This is if this is not a wake up from under nature that I don't know what it is life as we know it has changed. As my dear comrade Calliocuno just wrote we cannot, should not and must not act like this is has not changed. And then I probably have like three minutes if I may have less but my husband is an essential worker. So you know the first two weeks what I did begin to notice right and now what everybody knows now is most domestic workers, most healthcare aides, most bus drivers, grocery workers, custodians are predominantly people of color. Most waitresses are predominantly single women and women of color. And with all this talk about reopening and all the talk about people not having PPE, my husband is a custodian and he's working in hotspots. The PPE he has we have to buy it you know. And this great artist is anybody's an artist please check her out her name is Molly Crabb-Apple. She did this series of sketches of workers for the nation magazine so that's my husband and his sketch but then that's my husband's full protective gear that we have to find on our own as he is an essential worker. I won't read this because it has a curse in it but it'll just say well it's here and all this essential real retail workers are heroes. Essential retail workers aren't heroes they're hostages they want to go home they want to be safe but they can't because they'll literally start to deaf on the streets because without their jobs they'll be homeless with no healthcare and no food. And then I put up here for people who do want to do some organizing about mapping our roles in this new social change of the ecosystem that we're at like in the middle we should always have equity and inclusion and liberation but also who are the people who are going to experiment? What does it mean to be a frontline responder? What does it mean to build a vision? Who are the people ready to disrupt and shut it down? Like who are the healers so we don't have to depend on doctors all the time? Where are other healing mechanisms that come from our communities? Indigenous communities are being ravaged right now and nothing in the mainstream media is talking about Indigenous Native American people and the one thing that we should know is that Indigenous people that history that they get passed down is also history that is also part and parcel of how not only can we be storytellers but also healing in a way that is not just dependent on some pharmaceutical company. And then I just put some organizations here because there's so many great organizations doing incredible work but that we really should think about this idea and also this is another obviously protecting Asian American and Pacific Islander working people because the attack against Asian people have quadruple and the Department of Justice doesn't want to put out those numbers but there's community organizations all on the ground recording everything but and going back to this this is something a group in Atlanta community movement builders and look these are the things we are under attack or not under attack these are the things that people need to live on food, water, shelter, healthcare and safety and food there's a break in the supply chain water was already contaminated shelters were already and I mean shelter like your home so many of our communities are gentrified we can't afford rent obviously everybody's being hit with not having healthcare for the most part you know and again having a very very incompetent I don't even know the words to use anymore to describe what is happening in the White House and then for those that do work against mass incarceration there's an organization called RAP releasing aging prison population because here this is where Cuomo looks good but Cuomo hasn't released one person from Rikers or any of the state prisons and the biggest outbreaks are happening in state prisons and in Rikers Island right now and he refuses to let people out that are in Rikers because they don't have bail or on non-violent felons this is from the dream defenders that could show you how do you demand the decarceration which also includes ending ice and abolishing ice because there's so many people in detention that are um they're not putting out the numbers of how many young kids have been dying in ice either and then the fact that we even had to do a marathon like this you know with all these incredible people to get masked to people should really wake people up and then when you get a chance I did a great interview with AOC obviously very powerful you can see it on my website it's just some of the new people some people I interviewed I decided you know I can be home and have to be like isolated but I'm always going to do something that's what I do you know I the show I do now is called disrupt the chaos I just started it and I said we need somebody out here that's really speaking to people but particularly highlighting activists and um artists and everybody I've interviewed today uh to to date is an activist and an artist and I'll end with this um May Day is this Friday there are going to be May Day strikes all over the the country all over the world um we're encouraging people not to go to work um which is a big ask um we're encouraging people to not do online shopping and we're encouraging people to not pay rent you know to start things in your community to have rent strikes because we're not getting any of the money that's really being put out there so what we're telling people is to strike in place no shopping no rent no mortgages cancel debt cancel student debt you know and um we're joining up with so many of the workers that have um really put themselves on the front line especially at Amazon and Instacart and Whole Foods because uh Amazon and Whole Foods owned by Jeff Bezos Jeff Bezos doesn't even give his workers pay time leave or anything like that you know so we're encouraged and everybody to be parts of May Day and I think I should stop there probably uh thank you so much Rosa um if you want to stop your screen yeah I want to see people now okay I don't know are people hear me it's a lot you were awesome we could see you we could hear you and that was probably I got to get better at it it's probably better not to see yourself because there's you know so much that happens with that um but thank you so um community please join me in thanking Rosa um Rosa if you could see us all right now there's more than 90 people here and I imagine that there would be a ruckus round of applause and gratitude for your words thank you for having me and just like this is all new to me too you know because I thrive off people's energy you know I'm you know that for me as a public speaker like part of it is like I always go the day before and I just kind of go around where the people are and get the vibe and the energy the feel of the room and I just have a plant right now and my daughter I told not to interrupt me for an hour and a half well we appreciate you being our first you know keynote speaker ever to do unity week through zoom so um we're gonna just take a quick five minute break um for folks to sort of get up move around maybe have a class to get to whatever it is just enjoy this five minute pause to some great music um and we'll resume in about five minutes for a q&a session with rosa um please use the q&a feature on the bottom of your screen to submit your questions and we'll get going back with those in about five minutes welcome back highline family uh we will now resume with questions for rosa uh we really have some excellent questions and geo is going to join me for the q&a portion uh also feel free to add more questions as we go along um so here we go hi geo hey all right so rosa the first question what advice do you have for young scholars interested in becoming involved in community organizing and using their education to create a positive impact in their communities but don't know where to start yeah i mean community is really like a geographical location so it's always going to depend on where you're at whether you're in a rural community a city um what state and all of that but i mean no matter where you go there's always a community organization there's always people in a you know city rural area small town big town there are always issues you know and there's always going to be some type of community organization that you can link up with but um we can't do that now you know like you know that's that's an interesting question because it really has just changed for us as community organizers because like i said part of being an organizer is that you're talking to people and you're meeting with people and you i mean i mean for me like i can tell immediately if that's a person i want to work with or a person that i don't want to work with just by like being around them for 30 minutes or whatever at some event you know so right now we can't really do that you know and we don't know how long we're going to be where we're at with social distancing um as they call it but you know all you could do right now is find online um and support like we like support the mayday strike or being artists that shares your art or you know write write your own experience that's happening i think that's as a historian i think it's really important that people document this moment in their families and in their you know household because that's all we're going to be able really to do right now um yeah so save my internet connection is unstable i hope not um yes so right now you know there's so many organizations that are doing incredible incredible work especially around mutual aid and what you can do on your block because that's you know thinking bigger than that it's too overwhelming right now for even seasoned community organizers yeah thank you all right thank you um the next question is for from mariela um highling college is the most diverse college in washington three fourths of students identify as a person of color our college is in the process of hiring our first vice president of diversity equity and equity uh inclusion in your view what's one must do and one must not do for someone in this type of role oh is someone as a vice president of equity and stuff yes okay um so um i'm like a big critic of those type of positions although so many my friends have positions that where they are the vice president and all of that um you know like i think it's it's problematic but you know this does not pertain to your institution your well it could depending on who the faculty is you know you could be a majority um population of people of color but if the administration and faculty doesn't look that way then it it is very problematic you know and i think that the words like diversity inclusion are just words that are so at this point antiquated and completely dated you know i think they're marketing terms for universities and colleges you know um yeah so you know the more and more i i am in academia the more and more i'm like all of this has to change now you know like if the academy or the college of the university is not responding to the students needs immediately especially coming up in in the fall like we're gonna see a lot of almost every institution of higher education is now trying to figure out what that's going to look like i mean like i'm i i've taught online and i did not like it yeah i was like i don't i don't like you know not seeing my students i don't like that missing that energy so i think a vice president coming in is going to have to really figure out what do these words mean you know and how are people especially younger people now completely now have questioned capitalism which wants to question our capitalism begins then a lot of students are gonna begin or should begin to understand that a lot of these universities are neoliberal have adopted a lot of neoliberal policies especially corporate like policies and marketing policies you know and that's not what higher ed is supposed to be but um i can't have a definitive answer because i don't know where we're gonna be tomorrow or let alone september you know yeah well i guess you know following up to that that um the same question from mariela is that so much of the dei work at highline um and i sure i'm sure it's not um any different places outside of highline but it lands on the shoulders of poc staff and faculty and more specifically women of color what's up with that uh what should we do about this um you know i i i don't see that changing you know in fact i was just reading article um from the chronicle higher education so for students that might not know what that is that's like kind of the main source of information for all types of faculty administration and what jobs are out there available and i think i might have it here if i just share the name maybe i don't i don't but it's the name of it is uh you got your phd now you might not work in the college and what it really is is saying that because of the economic disaster and recession we're in that not only how they put on hiring freezes that a lot of people who had gotten their position to start in the fall all of those um um all those offers have been rescinded you know but you know as a woman of color yeah that's i know i know like all all my women all my block and brown sisters that work in all levels and all types of universities that um are in my crew i mean the main thing they always talk about is the emotional labor you know and that it is expected especially from from women of color in fact one of my friends wrote an article like i'm not your mammy i'm your professor you know and she just broke it down it goes with even students not you know respecting and calling her doctor so and so all the way to the administration really as she says they just keep you on kind of this cycle of blue ribbon panels and commissions to try to figure out something they know they have the answer to so what i what i think is going to happen in the fall is first universities are slashing right now left and right and they're trying to push the online um learning which a lot of students are pushing back on are saying if we're going to be online there's no way i'm paying that type of tuition you know so i think right now in higher education it's really the unknown um at the moment especially when students come back like they're coming back from all different states you know i mean my my belief is we're all infected like we all have the virus that's my belief um well it manifested in a lot of people probably not but i mean the the big group right now that's having strokes and having heart attacks are 25 to 35 year olds is what they're finding out that they have the virus but they're like they're coming out of or not being intubated but now they're dying of strokes and heart attacks so like the medical community the world health organization is like we don't even know if this thing has mutated yet so i think any type of question we have now is going to be like i might have the answer today but i don't know what's going to happen tomorrow you just i don't know i think that's a really oh sorry i just think that's a really good point about um you know when our students come back thinking about where they're coming from um and what they've been through think already as an institution with predominantly white faculty we struggle with our faculty really understanding where our students are coming from and that trauma-informed instruction and um and care and so really knowing that many of our students are you know they're already traumatized just by living in the system but then on top of this so coming back with just these fresh wounds um it'll be super important for our institutions in higher ed to respond differently this time um and forever yeah all right um your next question is from Alexis you spoke about the transatlantic slave trade as well as the school to prison pipeline what other systemic institutional structures would you say contribute to the disproportionate rates of black and poc that are incarcerated well i mean um mass incarceration is part of the system you know what it is is people have to study what white supremacy is and that white supremacy is so as a systemic kind of overarching um ideology but also implementation it's at every level right so like i'm not sure is she trying to ask about how why we have mass incarceration or what else affects mass incarceration i think they want to know um what in what other ways are pocs and black people are being incarcerated are being incarcerated mm-hmm what other like institutional structures contribute to that okay okay that's all right um everything like even the coronavirus like it's disproportionately affecting african-american latinals and um native indigenous brothers sisters and non-gender conforming people right so what it really is is like what's been happening like let me say the last week it unfortunately started with van jones again kind of writing this article about if black and brown people would just eat healthier and not not drink a lot we wouldn't be susceptible to the coronavirus right so what you have now is a lot of pundits including black latino one black and latino ones being like well if your community just ate better you wouldn't be dying but what really they're not talking about right is that poverty is the pre-existing condition to everything if you're poorer you might end up in jail for jumping the turnstile if you're poorer and walking and have your mask on and there's three of you six feet apart and you know you're a group of young people of color and then across the street there's a group of young white men um you know if one of the people in your group doesn't have a mask who are the police going to go to first who are they going to take it first they're going to take it black and brown people first so you know like there's been so many reports right now of particularly black men who have been stopped like a target and price shop everywhere because they're wearing masks but new york state you have to wear a mask right and there's been so many attacks against people asian folks in new york and california you know like in la in the bay in new york city where asian people are being attacked you know so it's not just like about mass incarceration as more it's like who who will the police ever stop first right it's always going to be black and brown people who's going to get ticketed first black and brown people it's just the way it is it's it sucks and it's horrible but um it's just predominantly that's the society we live in now and what this virus is showing is showing every an equity heightened you know um and so why are black and brown people dying disproportionately it goes all the way to black women are the least believed when they go into an emergency room and say they're in pain there was a recent filipino brother who got turned away from four er's and he died at the fifth one you know um because the other four wouldn't let him just come in and get even triage there's a story about a young latino brother in california that went to one of the smaller clinics and because he didn't have insurance they didn't want to test him and six hours later he died of a massive heart attack because he had the corona virus so what we're going to see is actually more fascism by the carceral apparatus in this country because they're even talking about maybe people will have to have immunization cards to prove that they don't have the virus but what they're preparing for us to do is to act like wearing a mask and getting your temperature anywhere you go is normal and we're going to to push back if that's not a public health issue you know so what you're seeing is the really like i said at the end it's that poverty has been the pre-existing condition and any faster is poor people first that are going to suffer but really this conversation at this point should be is why are we not dismantling capitalism because if we're not talking about dismantling capitalism one of the stores you know that's what we're seeing with the what's going on with the Tyson food um and in waddlewood Ohio or smithfield they're talking about how their workers had the virus and their their bosses knew they had the virus but part of it also was that many people are undocumented so they didn't want to go to their boss and be like i should have a sick day you know because they're also undocumented people so i went a little bigger because you can't just look at it in that one like kind of microscopic way you know basically people are being worked till they die you know basically now essential workers are important when we haven't been given them a livable wage or health care it's you know it's a lot that's happening right now so i think there will be a disproportionate effect on young black and brown men um and queer folks because once the fines start because they've opened up these states and i'm telling you by the end of the week a lot of these states are going to be in trouble and they're going to implement higher like more quarantine orders and people are going to start pushing back and anytime people push back black and brown people usually get the brunt of of the kind of police state that we already have we already have it right like black men get killed for wearing hoodies now you're telling black men to wear masks like that's real and we really have to question all these additional rules and you know like you're saying we do need to push back against what what we're sort of accepting as um as what's in you know what we're accepting as an infringement on our way of life um that's why people support all the frontline workers right now you know and it is nurses and doctors but like i said it's custodians and grocery workers and you know people that are like look what this country should have done would have been to pay people to stay home okay you know and giving 1200 people like 1200 dollars like what rent does that pay in any big city disrespectful and then getting unemployment i've been trying to get unemployment now for five weeks but you can't get through the phone lines you know so that's happening everywhere so all the all the capitalistic structures are collapsing and this is why trump and the people like him can say things like people want to go to work either that they're going to die or that older people are dispensable well this is not just older people get in there so we have the question at all yep at the time that's right so we have one final question and a couple minutes to answer it um but i think it kind of adds to that question at all and what we do with this so uh what advice do you have for students in becoming a scholar activist and what advice do you have for faculty and staff to nurture and support the formation of scholar activists well i mean scholar activism as a term you know it's it's been around for for a while and it's really more um when you see within black studies or um ethnic studies latino studies feminist studies queer studies those those departments or programs or are the are usually the front line for the students of color right because you know once you take a black studies class and you see a black woman who's a professor or a native brother sister non-gen the conforming people that's teaching you know literature or anything like that it changes um it just being they they said just being exposed to faculty of color empowers students you know i'm more like not just being exposed that you know why any institution at this time is a predominantly white institution not you at highland which is very rare is a crazy thought when people of color are the majority in this country in the next 10 years right so my advice is that you know whatever you're studying it should be about benefiting the community period you know so if you're being an engineer don't go work for bp gas or whatever you know like and and that's kind of hard to say if you're going to be a lawyer do you want to be a corporate lawyer or do you want to be a lawyer a people's lawyer that fights for people's rights you know um do we want to kind of normalize now this craziness of people working and like i said not having a living wage a scholar activist is not just about your scholarship on your campus it's supposed to be about and about how you're using what you learned not to tell people what you learned but to create the vision that you see and if anything this is this is what we have to do and this goes to professors to look as a professor when i'm in a class the last class i thought taught was online but what i say in all my classes is my job is to make you an organizer if you don't want it then you can go take another class right because as a scholar activist my job is to create a space where young my students can not only be um um challenge and challenge me but can leave as organizers and whatever they really want to hone in on and if you're an organizer it takes you a while to say wait i gotta work on this one or two issues i can't be around 11 issues but um my friend just sent me this because he's like every teacher every professor right now is struggling online you know to do this online thing and i'm like no professor should be fighting back like how did all of a sudden our teachers and educators not only have to go online in like three days when 30 of the population doesn't even have a computer internet what's the burden that we're putting on professors to do all this work while they have to take care of their families at the moment right so that question falls with within capitalism itself everybody should just get paid to stay at home if the federal government can give the federal reserve a trillion dollars and tell us they can't just give us money to stay home right there is the problem but he sent me this he said you don't have to write the next novel you as a professor don't have to worry about the next journal you don't have to start that podcast right what you can do is observe this pause as an opportunity that's what i think this is telling us it's like mother nature being like i'm giving you one more chance like i'm giving you one more chance to get it right and i i do not like seeing things where people like oh now that people are staying home the sky is clear or i can see the water i think that's beautiful but it's also like well the reason that's happening is because of this and really the water wasn't dirty because of individual people it's because of dirty fossil fuels and all of that you know and it's a weird kind of thing i see online a lot but you know that the system right now is prioritizing money and capitalism and not humanity so we all need to be able to take a break and let me say i am very bad at taking my own advice because i was like i started a podcast i think nine million zoom calls and i finally was just like why do we feel the need to be super productive i think that's that's because we all are in art within a capitalist system where you think if you just relax for a day you're doing something wrong where it's like well if you take a pause that picture you wanted to draw or that song you wanted to write or spend six hours playing games with your kids or you know all of that like i i don't like it you know and i'm struggling with myself you know a lot like i want to say no to everything i'm like why am i being lazy i'm just at home but it's like this isn't a lot of anxiety too because i don't know my daughter i don't know if she's going to go to school tomorrow i don't know if my husband's going to get sick i don't know if this thing's going to mutate you know so i know i went a little bit over but i feel like just trying to be as authentic as i can i definitely don't have all the answers and but part of me is consistently questioning why i feel the need to not work harder than ever before and i think we end up feeling guilty you know so i don't i'm not into self-care as much as i'm like what does community care look like like what does it mean to check up on your friend and just be like oh by the way you don't have to do anything today you can netflix and chill for real you need a moment you know i've had to say that's a couple of my friends that are like i'm finishing my this this that and the other i'm like girl you need to just spend some time with your family or just maybe sleep you know so we're all it's it's it's i just end with saying in our lifetimes we've never seen this so there's going to be a lot of experimenting happening there's going to be a lot of questions asked there's going to be a lot of things that people want from us but what i think this has really shown us is that everything that we have been fighting for which is canceling student debt livable wage no gentrification healthcare for all the government is kind of doing it right and they told us for how long we don't have a trillion dollars to cancel yes you do in fact the trillion dollars and you cut independent on budget by half would cancel student everybody student debt it would give everybody a universal basic income which Andrew Yang definitely pushed but universal basic basic income sweet in Denmark and all these other countries have it and third why do we have an administration that is like look you guys got to get back to work don't you want to work it's like no dude don't you want to work like that's why a federal government exists it exists to come into these situations but you know obviously with the administration we have now and look i'm not saying that after november whether he goes or he doesn't we're still going to have to fight for canceling student debt and liberal wages and healthcare and hazard pay for all these workers on the front lines you know so you know yeah i'm sorry i'm not so eloquent on that last one just a lot it's a lot we're all dealing with but i'll always be an organizer it's in my DNA no matter what that's what i'm gonna do you know and i surround my people myself with people that have really good vision and i really have a good group of friends that you know we rely on each other right now for like what do we use this moment for um first to mourn everyone who is going to continue to lose family members but also like this might be the last breath of a capitalistic system one that extracts or system that extracts extracts including human labor or extracts it or uses it till it drops dead at least i think a majority of us understand that more um than we would know at this moment who gives me chills uh well thank you for speaking to you know all of the things that i think many of us are thinking about right now and feeling and observing um we really appreciate your presentation today um i think we need to wrap it up family hi-line family community um so great to see so many people here today um and again thank you Rosa Clemente for your wisdom your powerful message um and things for us to continue to chew on as we move through this moment and and make it not just a moment but a movement right a movement to get all of those things that we see states or institutions be able to do so quickly that for years they've said they couldn't so this is a hard time to push yeah and especially if anything help care because we see look at i mean two of my friends are ER doctors one in New Orleans and one in the Bronx and they they're innovators so they intubate and they're reusing masks still you know what i'm saying i think we really have to be careful too that this moment like people are acting like it's just what it is now whoever's gonna know like if anything it really like everything Bernie Sanders said it's been true for 40 years but man is it truer than ever or an AOC and what they've been saying but also what organizers have been saying forever in this country that you continue to extract you're destroying the planet you're destroying humanity and this is what will happen a pandemic and this could happen again and again and again so we really have to have different visions of what we want and we also have to really be gentle with ourselves too like you know you should if you're anxious you should be anxious and if you're having a panic attack that does not reflect on you as an individual it really reflects on a system that does not value our humanity period thank you so much for having me i really really appreciate my first one so you did it now you know how to do a zoom webinar we want to let folks here know that we'll have the powerpoint i think Rosa you said you would share that oh yeah i'll send it because i added someone so i'll send it to you right we'll have a recording of this video available as well i believe um on our ccie on our highlight website for folks to follow up with i really encourage you all to follow up with the organizations that rosa mentioned and also tune in to her disrupt the chaos is that a daily thing on facebook or i'm going to start it tomorrow again it's on instagram live but i do facebook live it um you know so yeah i'm restarting it back and we needed to get some better equipment but yeah and folks who follow me on twitter or facebook and um instagram yeah i've been really enjoying enjoying watching those so tune into that folks um also in the chat feature you'll find a link for our unity week survey your feedback is super critical in enhancing our programming and we would appreciate it um tomorrow we have um april 28th at 10 am we have another presentation unity week event with tochi on yabuchi um we have included the zoom hyperlink in the chat feature and you can also find it again at our our website um you're having my my girl jules on right julie yes and wednesday we have julie c and this whole organization that has just started out of you know out of this of um seattle artists of sustainability sustainability efforts something like that but uh yeah julie is going to be here on wednesday talking more about mutual aid and this idea of how we take care of one another in times that we continue to learn that our government doesn't have us and that we are the best that we um we are the best for one another and how we can how we can link so uh thank you everybody i guess this concludes our our session today um have a wonderful rest of your day be safe take care of those around you um and join the movement peace thank you everybody stay safe