 I'm not comfortable saying I'm an environmental racist, but I have to say it because I'm part of an institutional systems that do lead to these disparities that I'm doing research on. But the process getting there actually is I have to give credit to my peers and particularly faculty on this campus who've challenged me. They've known my environmental justice work, but they also know that the kind of institutional racism that they've confronted their entire lives is around us and shapes our universities, our cities, our neighborhoods. And so the first step I took towards just being able to say I'm an environmental racist, I have to give credit to Kristin French who's a Woodring professor here. She was already working with a group and they did a diversity training with us. And it was two Fridays. First Friday went off and it was really nice and then it literally was Thursday night at 11 o'clock when I got a text from Kristin. She said, Troy, one of our facilitators and presenters tomorrow, which was a presentation about her identity as an Asian American got sick. Would you mind filling in? I'm like, well, okay, what do you want me to talk about? You know, this is all taxing. She says, can you talk about white privilege? And I kind of thought about it and I started making a PowerPoint slide coming up with some thoughts to see if I would get any traction and maybe could say something useful. And I felt like, yeah, I was, and it was one of those times where I really systematically kind of interrogated my history, who I was as a white male and many of my different experiences and it started to kind of crystallize. And I said, yes, I'll do it. And so I gave a talk on white privilege in the environmental field. And then the second person that pushed me even further is Damani Johnson, Vernon Johnson, who's an African American political scientist here at Western and is a real leader in taking on these institutional racism. And he helped me pay a lot more attention to Robin D'Angelo's work who writes about white privilege, what means to be white, but also white fragility. One of the key aspects and challenges in confronting institutional racism is we don't think of it in institutional terms, racism. We always think of it in individual terms. It's part of U.S. culture to be individualistic. And so individuals will be very uncomfortable with being associated with racism because they've never been racist, right? That's the claim. They've never done anything racist to a person of color explicitly on purpose, right? And so talking about racism gets really uncomfortable. So what Damani challenged me to do was to actually change my talk from white privilege, white environmental privilege to confessions of an environmental racist. I pondered on it and I read some more of Robin D'Angelo's work and thought about this. And so I agreed to do that in a facilitation with an environmental group that we were working with to model what it's like to not be racist explicitly, but part of a set of institutions that end up leading to racist outcomes. So that's the process that I've gone through with the support and help and mentorship of others challenging me to do that. And that is now something I've done with my department, my college. I've done it with an environmental group and someday I hope to have an opportunity to do that with my students. It's a conversation we need to have more of because that's how we make progress on these really tough issues.