 Good evening, everyone. Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us for our program at Mechanics Institute online for Not a Nation of Immigrants settler colonialism white supremacy and the history of erasure and Exclusion with author Roxanne Dunbar or tease who's joined by our San Francisco poet laureate Tonga, Eisen Martin I'm Laura Shepherd director of events at the Mechanics Institute For those of you who are new to the Institute We were founded in 1854 and we're one of San Francisco's most Vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city We feature our general interest library an international chess club and ongoing author and literary programs and our Friday night cinema with film series So please visit our website at my library.org and also we're open our doors are open and come down to the library Five days a week You can see all the listings of our programs and also the hours of operation Etc on our website. So please come and visit us. I Also want to mention that copies of books by our authors tonight not a nation of immigrants is available at Alexander book calm or at any of your independent bookstores and copies of blood on the fog by Tango is available at city lights books. So you can get that online or visit the bookstores in person so what What a powerful and potent topic for tonight It seems like we as Americans have many conflicting ideas and values About what constitutes our country's identity and citizenship, you know, most of us have grandparents or parents that that immigrated to this country as immigrants or refugees and Waves of immigration due to industrialization poverty genocide famine political disruption corruption and now climate change have been catalysts that have influenced the flow of people to the US over several centuries So we're going to be talking about the various attitudes and stigmas About immigrants and our attitudes that prevailed tonight with two experts and I'd like to introduce our guests Rex Roxanne Dunbar or tease grew up in rural Oklahoma in a tenement family Farming family and she has been active in the international indigenous movement for more than four decades Decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues Dunbar or tease is the winner of the 2017 Lanin cultural freedom prize and is the author or editor of many books including an indigenous people's history of the United States our recipient of the 2015 American Book Award. She lives in San Francisco and you can connect with her website and Tango, Tango, Eisen, Martin is a poet movement worker and educator his latest curriculum on Extrajudicial killing of black people called we charge genocide again has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country his book titled someone's dead already was nominated for a California Book Award and His other book Kevin is all devised was just published by City Lights pocket Poets series and shortlisted to the Griffin's Poetry Prize and also won a California Book Award and an American Book Award and his latest book Fog a Blood on the Fog also published by City Lights Pocket Poets just came out and he is also co-founder of Black Greater Press But most important. He has just been nominated as San Francisco's eighth poet laureate So please welcome our two guests Roxanne Dunbar or tease and Tango, Eisen, Martin welcome Hello everyone My much much appreciation and thank you especially Roxanne for the for the honor of this conversation um to to to to to not necessarily go straight in into a deep end but to ask you to Play predictor Where how you know given, you know, we had we had this heightening of contradiction You know, it's it with the you know with uprisings with you know, kind of the the the the The excitement or the the the self-confidence of this neo confederate tendency when you look at the Performance art they pulled off in the capital Now seems to slid to a kind of a lower altitude When do you think well how much time do you think we have before contradictions heighten again and What do you think that might look like? Well, we got a glimpse. Oh, thank you. Thanks mechanics. It's wonderful and everyone who's with us Yeah, we got a glimpse with the Trump four years and Kind of continuing what is Possible You know an armed insurrection in the capital that was that was something unusual So I think there's a lot of fear and Dread we have many Many Crises ahead of us the climate change That's looming of the we're living with already. I mean, it's here and It's going to get worse and If we don't have some Competency and governments, it's going to be difficult and The subject of immigrants and refugees of they're going to be there already are but they're going to be huge numbers of climate refugees And rich countries have an obligation. There's ones in the United States Has created one third is what they've calculated one third of the carbon that You know that that exists in the atmosphere from industrialization the Western Europe created the rest and Yet most of the people who will be Affected are in areas of the world In the south mostly That are going to be devastated Especially island people and people on shorelines so We have a duty I think here to find a way, you know to Change people's minds about It's one of the reasons I wrote the book is to raise consciousness about how badly Immigrants have been treated in the United States especially on the border but also in general You know, it's a it's a real grind or it's a real meat grinder they have to go through and We accept very very few refugees. I think Afghan Afghanistan there are two million refugees in Iran more than that in Pakistan and 1550,000 in Germany only five thousand in the United States And we created them we created those refugees so this is It's a very serious time and I Think those of us who write and speak And especially poets I'm a great believer in the power of Poetry to Get to people at a level that's not just in the brain, but in the heart In In the in all of your research for this book, what did you did you come across anything that really surprised you? whether it was, you know moves that These people made or this or you know a government You know a move that that the state apparatus may Well is much worse than I thought, you know, it's a settler colonial country The United States. It's a settler colonial state That is they're not that many of them The that You know wiped out the majority of the indigenous inhabitants. There's the United States New Zealand Canada Australia and Argentina and Uruguay on South Africa, they only got to 30% or so And Colonization of Ireland only, you know only in the north the scouts Irish who were Said as settlers Who are only half the Irish Catholics are still half so the United States It's also the most powerful country in the world based on it. It's real estate and enslaved labor that built capitalism and So We as people in the United States have a Kind of individuality that comes with I mean a state being Formed as a capitalist state is the first one the first republic that was formed as a capitalist state So we we have those values of property of Competition of individualism that doesn't lead to community And we see people trying to make community through religion or organizations and all of us And and it's very difficult to sustain and it and on a large scale So The thing that surprised me most was How the United States needed Settlers to replace The indigenous people when they took the land they needed people to buy that land to bill So they really had to recruit, you know, they had to Flyers to Scandinavia people were very poor in the early 19th century in Scandinavia even hunger famine So you get some Scandinavian refugees German, you know that these countries were poor at that time Eastern Europe So then they're they're very badly treated once they they come they have to go through this process of fitting into a settler state so it's History and the late historian Noel Ignatius Wonderful book called how the Irish became white, you know, blue high blonde English speaking people as refugees and Republicans are colonized people colonized by Britain and yet within 20 years of their arrival as starving refugees They have become the police. They had joined slave patrols They were anti-black racism is sort of the James Baldwin says it's requirement For an immigrant to be accepted as an American so it's a One another reason I wrote the book is Hopefully, you know People who are immigrants or children of immigrants the title alone will You know bring that readership that was who I was really speaking most to is Try not to become a settler, you know to understand try not to become Americanized because we need to change this country and Immigrants can help do that. You know, they come with different views, especially third world immigrants Could could you talk more about this, you know, these kind of processes of turning immigrants into shock troops For these colonial masters Help me to read a little bit about that right at home About the Italians This is a chapter six of the book. That's titled Americanizing Columbus During the 1880s a million or more Italian immigrants arrived in the United States mostly from southern Italy Suffering the stigma of being Catholic in a Protestant country and also dark complexed. They were subject to extreme discrimination Italians and other Catholic immigrants became Americanized and accepted as white through the Roman Catholic Church and a process rooted in the myth of Columbus, especially with the 1882 founding of the Knights of Columbus by the Irish Americans and the subsequent 400 year anniversary of Columbus first landing the Caribbean This was a self-indigenizing process with the Catholic Columbus being positioned as the original founding father of the United States So in this chapter the important role of ideology and identity politics and building the capitals militarist United States is reflected Like the mass of Irish famine refugees preceded them four decades earlier the majority of the four million Italian immigrants to the United States Were fleeing grinding rural poverty in southern Italy and Sicily They were peasants stuck in medieval socio-economic relations while others were Poletarian sharecroppers and migrant farm workers all without skills beyond agriculture Most were motivated by jobs in the booming US Industrial Revolution with plans to earn money to return to Italy and buy land or start a business in The United States Italian migrants were met with endless insults and newspapers and magazines Which described them as swarthy kinky-haired and criminally inclined and Regarded as racially impure in an era of pseudo race theory of eugenics Their children were often refused access to schools and adults were turned away from public places and labor unions and Even in church forced to sit in segregated church pews set aside the black people They were catcalled on the streets with epitads like Dago and Guinea the latter a term of derision applied to enslaved Africans and their descendants and More racist insults like white inward and inward walk In 1912 the US House Committee on immigration debated whether Italians could be considered quote full-blooded Caucasians and Immigrants coming from southern and eastern Europe were considered biology quote biologically and culturally less intelligent Employers often preferred light-skinned slovox and poles to Italians, even though they were also Catholic Railroad bosses wouldn't hire them because of their small stature in the mining industry English-speaking workers felt the skilled and supervisory positions While Italians were hired as laborers Even those who were educated and skilled were unable to secure any jobs besides manual labor Only in the 1920s did Italians become more integrated into the workforce More Italian immigrants were employed in semi-skilled jobs and factories as well as skilled positions But a third remained in unskilled positions Even Italian American Union members faced prejudice with meetings held only in English and Italians were not elected to official positions In 1885 a group of Italians in New York formed the Sons of Columbus Legion To celebrate future Columbus anniversaries mingling with the Irish and the Irish American founded Knights of Columbus Who had succeeded in getting the 76 foot Columbus monument installed At the center of Columbus Circle in New York in 1892 the 400 year anniversary of Columbus By then the Irish had spread throughout the country And as Michelle Rolfe toil notes with the full benefit of white status Columbus himself became more Irish than ever Until Italian Americans made new gains in the continuing contests were racial and historical legitimacy The Knights of Columbus lobbied state legislators to establish October 12th as a legal holiday And by 1912 they had succeeded in 14 states and two decades later convinced the Franklin Roosevelt administration to make it a federal holiday The oppressed masses of Italian immigrants would find the attachment to Columbus an avenue to acceptance They realized that the accepted representation of Columbus as first founder of the United States served to connect being Catholic and being Italian with the very birth of the United States Therefore Italian immigrants could present themselves as Italian descendants of the original Italian Catholic founder Not so much as immigrants but returnies as part of a revised origin story of the United States Historian Danielle Baptiste shows how casting Columbus as the first immigrant rewrote history Even though he never set foot on the continental man mass that became the United States, I was never an immigrant himself And even though the English colonies that became the United States didn't even exist in 1492 Later in 1965 when Italian Americans campaigned overturned immigration exclusion restrictions They employed the origin story based on Columbus to great effect In 1971 James Baldwin wrote I've had my fill of seeing people come down the game point on Wednesday, let us say, speaking not a word of English And by Friday discovering that I was working for them and they called me inward like everybody else Baldwin critiqued the tragedy of how the immigrants pursuing lie of white supremacy will help to steal the vitality from immigrant communities And in the debasement and defamation of black people they debased and defame themselves He wrote white people are not white Part of the price of the ticket is to delude themselves into believing that they all Baldwin characterized the United States as a destination where Europeans of all sorts could be melded in contrast to Negroes and Indians He wrote no one was white before he or she came to America rather they were Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, English, French, Swiss, Norwegian But in the white Republic one is either white or not Italian American journalist Christine Grimaldi limits what she calls the paisanos of shame Italian ancestors and contemporary Italian Americans such as Rudy Giuliani and Mike Pompeo who celebrate Columbus as an ancestor and embrace right wing ideology of white supremacy She writes those of us who challenge whiteness through activism and essays still benefit from it too We will never experience the racist COVID-19 backlash against Asian American people and their businesses though the virus overtook Italy and travel from Europe to New York So that gives you an idea of the processing of immigrants and turning them into settlers and races In your research did you kind of uncover who were like the managers of that rebirth or was it or did it really stand Or how how strongly did it stand on already cultural precedents You know like like Gerald Horn kind of asserts that nobody turns that psychotic even in a generation let alone in a month you know So getting into the architecture of that grooming what did you what what protagonists did you find Well you know settler colonialism in the United States is such a a really really distorted dehumanizing process it's linked with genocide In every case settler colonialism has the aspect of genocide it's the attempt like the boards in South Africa to kill and replace the people who are already there So this was from day one you know the British founding of the colonies a settler colonial was the first settler colonial experiment If you don't count Iberia you know where they ethnically cleanse the moors and Jews to settle in 1493 deported them all to North Africa That was a kind of model that was the model of what then Columbus was the connective tissue to the Americas So it's such a rotten a rotten kind of platform on which the United States was founded 150 years of of chattel slavery and you know forced importation of Africans and genocide pushing out the indigenous farmers and villages out of the what became the 13 colonies so this was the fundamental basis and then the primary document before the Constitution the Northwest land ordinance Northwest referred to what was called the Ohio country on their reason for the independence to because the British wouldn't allow the settlers to expand especially expand slavery over the Appalachians So they keep the British out you know and headed for the Pacific and China that was their stated goals at the founding and so this Northwest ordinance laid out the maps to the Pacific and the it was very very sought out the process of taking the continent was actually planned they even had in the Northwest ordinance the area was taken it would be under military control until they had eliminated or outnumbered the indigenous residents whether they were Native Americans or in the case of Mexico taking half of Mexico, Mexico and only then could it apply you know it could be handed over to a non military but still federal control until it was even more settled settlers coming in buying land and then eventually statehood and that often took three or four decades of genocide of violence and this was step by step that was the end of the Ohio which was turned out to be eight states you know from Michigan and Ohio not not just not just Ohio but it's called the Ohio country and pushing those native people out to form confederations and try to fight them off then and south you know so constant war every day the United States existence has been war there's never been a day without us making war somewhere and once they reach the Pacific they jump over you know to colonize the Philippines and Guam and all the islands of the Pacific and the goal is always to control China still is isn't it we see how kind of strong corporate media as well as really almost you know with media entertainment Texas education really gives you know it gives the consciousness of most people that this kind of just full immersion in a conformity to imperialism did you find the same broadcast or the broadcast being that just as effective back then or was this hyper militarization just so ingrained in the you know the day in day out culture that it wasn't as necessary militarism was so ingrained in you know in the conquest of the colonies which took 150 years you know to ethnically cleanse those 13 colonies that became the first state so it was a bloody you know genocidal project and I wonder I know you can talk a little bit about genocide could you read society's wander together like hopeful drops of a virus citizen testaments bent on offering me a nation of breadwinners to hold me back like it's a brinks of concrete sometimes like flesh my Martin Luther King permanence turned away from a podium into the reeds like God is the dangerous twin black august to the mountain top balcony on my bedroom floor you know they steal you from the earth itself and suspend you and your broken neck from their foolish you for you from the loyalty out of their gray superstitions loyalty out of their agrarian reform I returned to my mother completely disrespected for peeling the heat off of purgatory they kill poles like me walk me away from my poems never to be heard from again in this final industrial complex of blood lines picked over picked through a sporting spiritual death of your devil at least half made police become a pretty word I'm reading a lynch mob shoestrings like they were tea leaves teaching you how to write about cities it's the 25th century in the mirror people tyranny against your chump chance yet chump to be mocked even with a gun in your car a cubit of needlework spell tuned for the proletariat the relapse ministry talented people curled up in a fetal position next to a diamond dime just another service day in the theatrics of tea house fascism in a bouquet of surveillance cameras in the poverty of God new blue eyes corpses of water newly potted presidency of one big shiny coin if you ask animated capitalism and other not literal words killing is white freedom the deification of hyphens medicine bread and pictures shows great protesters in LA guests of our ink drop kicking rows in the graveyard DC make like a stone torn in half the pen advances despite CIA God post despite non-African passing futures of metaphorical will not surreal day in a horn written life horn player improvising king like a radio prize fight featuring shongo himself a real hand sweeps the land of racism now return to the ground now make progress with the gun or mother of manual they put on music that evening a swing and type body language for you to drink with four minute $5 bills for your body language some applause my past stomach lining neither a good thing or bad thing like being psychic on the way to a lethal injection it'll sit you down with Lady Day Lady Day leading youth who surrendered their souls to Africa too soon polity thought floating in a cup of water she saved me access in my stomach access in the love of the American lynched coast leaves wooden avalanche into the wrist or mother of manual avalanche into the sharp keys pain the deal you make with pain a piano makes sense for them laying hands on the world gradually addressing the bend the next on the streets to the north travelers sailing in pain repeating pain in the north 10 trigger fingers on that piano harmony would have me putting a hundred fights on every direction offered a lady day leaning on trees again recruiting the country side itself saying lay it plan out on this light and make your poems a corner pocket of men I've greeted the blues itself America may clean my dead body but will never include me there goes the poet killing without killing never mind this painting of your language may I be a meaningful lynching across passing good and dead by the afternoon I'm off to make a church bell out of a bank window a kitchen's made more to the masses back in the day before that we had no enemy somewhere in America the prison bus is running on time you won't lose your job before revolution is somewhere I won't be home for breakfast everyone out here now knows my name and I won't be turned against for at least four months the cop in the picking line is a hard working rookie the sign in my hands getting more and more laughs it says the picking line got cops in it I can take care of those windows for if you want with someone else got to go inside your gas tank was clear the man to rich people and talk too much this year. Hey, why don't you go ahead and throw down that marble park bench everyone's looking up at you know get the Romans out of your mind. Maybe a good night sleep with a change the last 20 years of my life plan instruments like punching the wall would you have me do replace the population, give brotherhood back to the winter stop smoking cigarettes with the barely dead you know they listen in on the Sabbath police called the police on me. There was a white candlestick beneath my detention I ruined the soup again thought the judges he took off his pilgrim robe behind the white people's door and more I didn't get lucky I got what was coming to me toes. They find me back the man said of course to himself. Washington windows with a wheel to live tin can on his left shoulder enjoying the bright brand new black with our party goers both supernatural and supernatural down earth. What is this elevator traveling side to side, like 1000 bitter Polaroid pictures that you actually try to eat all the furniture on this street now to the cemetery furniture but we have commitment. This morning a essay opens the conversation between enemies why because you control every grain of processed sugar between here in the poor person's border, because in a tin can on my left shoulder I can hear the engines of the industrialization you should get in the painting you know, tell lies more deeply. This month I'm rooting for the trader carding cement to my pillow here we will build them high again not talking much. And once you climb up the organ pipe to apartment floor I'm high again calling everything church, seen alone to a courtyard thanks to a horn players holy pastime I'm just putting a real jacket on it. Talk about a real five years, keep memories like these in the pocket next to the tall receipt that man lost a wager with the God of good causes I mean stood up for himself a little too late maybe too early. I can still see 20 angles of his jaw zigzag include the cold world of the industrialization is an art to it. I will tell my closest friends one day. Thank you. Back back to the, the, the, the president, or back to your profit sign. As as this late stage imperialism grows later and later and it seems that the shock troops are more and more being left behind. What is the modern incentive for for them to participate in this seller colonial project. Yeah, you know we've seen really started in the 70s as the backlash, as I see it to the civil rights movement. This fear of the started very quickly the john birch society was formed in 1956 of three years after the Brown versus Board of Education desegregation decision that they realized, these are very wealthy people of Fred Coke. The Pope Brothers, who funds many right wing things now. And of course, Robert Welch, the candy man, the candy fortune man, form the john birch society and named communism. As the United States is going communist as the same as, as the attack on white supremacy. So they somehow combine the two. I remember as a very young person. That I wrote a letter to the editor, there had been the civil rights movement burning of white churches. And someone had written a letter to the paper this is an awful right good. And that it was really communist, who were doing that burning the churches that it wasn't, you know, it wasn't the Ku Klux Klan that wasn't white people. Because the black people were communists and, and they wanted people to feel sorry for them. I felt that was outrageous. It was ridiculous because, you know, I've been raised to Southern Baptist and I was pulling away from it and I, I felt like the white Southern Baptist around me, you know, that perfectly capable of turning black churches. And so I wrote that so I got all this mail from about communism, and I couldn't figure it out they had pictures of the metropolitan opera showing communism. And finally dawn on me is because the black and white people together, you know, black, the metropolitan opera had integrated. And so anyway this this kind of conspiratorial thing was there but then our, you know, our youth movement of the civil rights movement set off the youth movement, red power and brown power, black power and then anti Vietnam or massive demonstration so we, and I was part of that we and the women's movement. We thought we were winning. But there was, there was a kind of revolution that came. And the second amendment. The NRA got taken over by the second amendment foundation, founded by a former border guard white supremacist form this white supremacist group called the second amendment foundation so that was one thing in our a got taken over in 1975 by have been kind of a you know just a hunting and fishing. And a thing coupons and stuff but it became a really quite nice it's a quite nationalist outfit now. But that's when it became on white Vietnam bits. And then regan getting elected, definitely a fascist we had already had him for eight years in California as governor, we tore apart the university system and wrecked everything and then became president wrecked more. And so this was, and then these white farmers started, you know, malicious, began malicious and then it accelerated in the 1990s and blew up with of course the Oklahoma City bombing white nationals did that and this is been a long process and it. I kept telling people like it's a you know growing up in Oklahoma I was noticing these things because some of them, you know, I knew, I knew some of these people. I mean I knew who they were. And people on the left will kind of blouse a about it over, you know, they're nothing we're so but we saw our movements disappear, you know, and, of course, the whole Central America interventions that over throwing, they're trying to overthrow the Sandinistas and succeeding in the late 80s and stopping the Revolution and El Salvador and Guatemala. So, it's, it's been, you know, it's been a process that's taking place that now we have. We started a president. And in 2016. And we could see that there's actually a very large number of people this is in a small group, this is at least, you know, 30 million people. It's, you know, our future is not. Not very bright in terms of what what we need to be thinking about. And as far as, you know, the immigrants and especially the border goes this is, there's such an empty immigrant sentiment and the United States that Trump only put it into words, you know, vulgar as he was their rapes, their crooks, you know, their gangs. It wasn't true. And, but, and immigration policy has always been based on exclusion deportation. He was a Cambodian guy who was a prison firefighter. When he was young, he was involved in a robbing killing and spent 10 years and then he got hopeful with behavior. And he still he was put in, they picked ice picked him up to deport him, even though he'd never been to Cambodia, his family left his boat people went to the Philippines he was born in the Philippines. So if they deport him, he'll go back to a country he's never been to does not speak the language. But this is hard, you know, just heartless and and of course the border is just the Asians recently saw this treatment or woman's treatment of people. So, like I said, we have to find some way to make this wealthiest country in the world. And take responsibility for damage done, but also just, you know, just that wealth that that is needed. The ships, why not the, the whole US military become a refugee rescue operation, you know, rather than, you saw that for a split second with the Indonesian earthquake and then tsunami back in the early part of the century. US warships were, you know, we're acting as medical ships were rescuing people. And it was so nice to see and I think the military people people in the military really love doing that. As they did when in the, you know, with the voting and you know the pandemic and all of the National Guard being able to serve in a non war capacity. So I think people in the United States, the majority of us, you know, want to do what is positive, but we're not very organized. We want to give audience now the opportunity to round out the rest of the conversation with with questions. I'll see a couple in the chat. One question you've covered, I think a couple of times as far as what do you see happening in our future but if I may make that question actually a little more specific. What are prospects of, you know, unity, especially between black and indigenous, you know, political efforts of revolutionary efforts, as well as, as well as brown people to who have, who definitely found themselves in the, you know, in on the wrong of the spear. Yeah well hopefully we can revise something like existed in Chicago back in the 80s of the Black Panthers and the American Indian movement, Puerto Rican Socialist Party in this rainbow coalition. This was not that, you know, Jesse Jackson took that for his campaign later 20 years later but it was it was an amazing thing and it, it spread, you know, into different places but it, it, it had its birth in Chicago and it also included these poor white Appalachian you could almost call them refugees, you know, from the closing of the coal mines and all very very poor white people were in that rainbow coalition. So I think it was, it was not only ethically you know a coalition, it was class based, you know, in working class. People were all working class and so I think we don't have enough attention, you know, to the working class it's a very diverse working class now. And was so excited as many other people were with the Alabama Amazon attempt, you know, unionization but getting, I think that would be a good basis for our developing unity is to think about, you know, reintroducing or looking at, look at James Tracy and Amy Sony's wonderful book on the rainbow coalition, you know, and how it function, you know, in depth. And I think they, they wrote that book with that in mind, you know, to, for us to think about that this, this is still possible, you know, it's possible to and more needed than ever now. This this this next question I think represents two of the questions. Well, for those of us working in teaching capacity, what are some ways we teach youth of color who may have PTSD to respect themselves in this colonial settler state there was another question to about, you know, healing, healing what what might be interpreted as a kind of a low cultural esteem self esteem. Is that really the first part again. Well, I give you line for line. For those of us working in teaching. What are some ways we teach youth of color who may have PTSD to respect themselves in this colonial settler state. Yeah, that's a really good question. There is so much trauma in the society. Especially for people of color and especially youth. It's so hard to be young in this country and imagine a future that that is not very likely to come to pass. You know, in a good way. So I think education is is the sites of education, formal and informal community groups that are also involved in education bringing speakers and all. These are vital, you know, vital teachers are really really important people. There, there, no one would go into teaching to become rich to be famous. Or for any other. I mean it's a, it's something I decided to do very young and I've never regretted a, you know, a life of teaching. And it can, because it, my own experiences with education, I feel like saved my life. That is sometimes the only anchor that sometimes it's the only meal that a young person has, you know, the only sustenance the only love and care there's a lot of dysfunction that's associated with poverty and drug and alcohol use. And the injustice system that, you know, juveniles get caught up in. That mark their whole lives, you know, forever, end up in prison. We have to form community to deal with this and really, really support our teachers, you know, insist on reasonable priced housing for teachers. They can't even live in the Bay Area, they had to commute from the valley. And even there it's getting expensive. So this, we, we have a very even here and you know, and probably the richest state of the country. We have so much poverty and dysfunction and so I think, I think we have to. Well, you know, I keep saying community but it's been so hard in the past two years, of course, with the pandemic to, to sustain community. Hopefully we can get back to it. We all hate zoom but at the same time. I think that's a lifeline. The last question, I know we're almost out of time but the Nobel Prize in economics was was given to David card and other researchers who prove that immigrants do not take jobs from others. How can we move the attitudes from a grassroots level to policy level. Yeah, this is the, you know, the mythology of immigrants taking jobs is is perpetrated. I think from above it because in order to cheapen labor, you know, capitalism is so conservative that the more contingent that workers can be like the Brussels system, you know, the, the, and then the deportations the operation went back. That was his official title in the 1950s. You know, the, the Mexico has been a pool of cheap labor for the United States since since half of it was taken by war by the United States and we live in former Mexican territory and indigenous territory. And we have to, we have to honor immigrants but like in my book it's not. It's not a nation of immigrants, it's a nation of separate colonialism, a state of separate colonialism in which immigrants are expected to become settlers. They are people of color, especially poor people of color, you know the United States is very tough quotas they require mainly they allow people who that will mainly they do brain drain of third world countries, you know, the India, Africa, they educate their people and then they lose them to the United States. They have doctors. A medical education in Mexico is free, all the way up to, you know, a licensed doctor, and about one third end up going to Canada, getting recruited by US or Canada, and really get their doctors license they do x-ray or lab but they aid 10 times as much as they would in Mexico. So this brain drain is not the same thing as fair immigration, you know. And so when there are poor people at the border, Central Americans, climate refugees but also refugees from US wars in the 1980s that ruined their countries, smash them and then rebuild them. And Asians, US occupied Asia for 35 years, the Marine occupation, and then kept dictators in power. And so these refugees that we create then we call them unwanted immigrants because they're poor. So I think we have to become aware of the unfairness of US immigration policies and refugee policies. It's just unacceptable that United States refugee 56,000 people a year are allowed to have refugee status in the United States, a country of 350 million people in the richest country in the world. There's no other place has such a restrictive refugee policy. So, yeah, I think we need, we need to, you know, I is kind of a trick title, not a nation of immigrants. Of, of hopefully people who are against immigration will read it and change their mind. Not is a, you know, they might be attracted to it. Yes, let's get rid of those immigrants. I greatly appreciate you. If we could all give a kind of a silent round of applause for Roxanne. And thank you to the mechanics Institute for hosting us. Thank you and thank you. I also want to thank Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz for her compelling and powerful book and also to our San Francisco poet laureate, Congo, Eisen Martin for your incredibly ferociously beautiful words that that move us forward and and and challenge us to think what we are and what our values are. And this is a huge and deep subject, and I hope that you'll purchase the books by both of our authors and be in conversation with neighbors with friends for a reach out across the political divide and try to make more community and also to promote to promote justice through for our country and for other countries as well. So, thank you very much, and we'll see you once again online or in person at mechanics Institute. Good night. Thank you.