 I'm Patrick Holmes and welcome back to the Berkeley at Home Variety show. This week's episode is going to look a little different and not just because I'm recording from a different location within my apartment. We didn't have an episode last week out of respect for and in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter protests and Blackout Tuesday. And I'll admit that we struggled with how to proceed with this show in light of the moment we find ourselves in. We want to do our part to speak up for justice and amplify Black voices, so that's what we're going to do today. In an email sent to his colleagues and later posted to the Berkeley blog, Associate Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the Haas School of Business, Marko Lindsey said, Black Lives Matter equals if anyone kills a Black person? Their punishment should be the same as if they killed someone from any other race. No matter if they are white, black, or blue. If anyone kills a Black person, they should be arrested, tried, and convicted of murder. He goes on to say that, the true problem with the recent videos of Black people being slayed is that there are thousands of others who experience the same fate, but because they aren't recorded, you'll hear nothing about it. I encourage you to read Marko's full message, which along with the other items featured in this week's episode is linked down below. Associate Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute, Denise Hurd said, This is our national ritual. A Black American like George Floyd, Tamir Rice, or Breonna Taylor is killed at the hands of police. We cry with grief and rage. We re-experience the trauma of every other Black or brown life cut down and we demand change, only to find ourselves in the same place a day, a week, a month later. It is exhausting, it is painful, and it can leave us feeling helpless and hopeless. But while you may feel at times there is no end in sight, I believe that there is. There must be. As Dr. King stated, time is neutral. If things are to change, we must participate in that changing. Associate Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute, John Powell, participated in Rise Up for Justice, Black Lives and Our Collective Future, an online event organized by the Institute. He said, We are faced with two pandemics, the pandemic of COVID-19 and the pandemic of institutionalized racism. I don't know which is worse, but together they are really deadly. He went on to say, But when we face them together, I think we can handle both. In a forum on racial justice, Chief People and Culture Officer Eugene Whitlock had this to say. To give a little context for this meeting, for those of you who were kind of watching, this was originally going to be a meeting to talk about the employee morale survey results, but the murder of George Floyd and all of the circumstances around that have really taken over what our agenda is. And rightfully so, I'm assuming all of you here saw the murder of the murder that took place in Atlanta, which I want to use this platform to give a little commentary about that because I'm surprised, but not surprised that it happened. So I look at the body cam footage and all that stuff. So here you have somebody who was handed down by the police. They knew he had no weapon, was running away, shooting at them with something that they themselves say is not legal force, but they killed him anyway. And you would have thought that after George Floyd's killing or after the numerous ones before the police departments would have sat down and said, Hey, we need to really rethink what we're doing, abundance of caution, any sort of conversation that should have prevented from what happened in Atlanta from happening. But it's clear to me that those conversations either aren't happening or if they are happening, the people who are listening to them, it just doesn't register. One of the conversations I often have is around, OK, we need to get the police to do implicit bias training and so on and so forth. That's only going to work if people actually have an interest in changing their, how they view other people. The fact of the matter is that in the United States and probably worldwide, people who are the other and in the United States, it tends to be people of color are not viewed as the same amount, let's say, of human being as the majority, as white people. So white people on average tend to view people of color as less than human, which is why they are able to do things like kill people or discriminate against people or be actin' biased ways against people. It's not always an intentional sort of thing, but all of the neuroscience, if you really want to get into the detail and you read about it, when you do brain scans of people and show that images of people from different backgrounds, it shows that people are registering other people as humans. This is a fundamental problem that needs to be addressed and recognized. And it can't just be, and part of it is when people get hired into the police, what sort of mentality are they bringing with them? And that's the question that has to be asked is what sort of screening, gatekeeping are we doing for people who get to be the police? Because for some people, it doesn't matter what we're going to do to train them and recondition them. They're bringing in whatever lifetime baggage they have with them, and then we're giving them a gun. So I can't say we should abolish the police. We should defund all the police. But there has to be something fundamental that we do differently in thinking about who gets to be the police. That, I think, is really the question. Who gets to be a police officer and carry a gun and have lethal force? In late February, I had the opportunity to sit in on a listening session on campus climate. Chancellor Christ and her leadership cabinet all gathered to hear from Black members of the campus community. The stories shared were both gut-wrenching and heartbreaking. The event made clear what many already knew and had been saying for years. We still have work to do to combat anti-Black racism at Berkeley. The thing that really struck me was that in many cases, the perpetrators of anti-Black racism were peers. This is not to say that there aren't institutionalized forms of racism that need to be solved, but it is to say that there's room for all of us to be part of the solution. We can do this by educating ourselves about and confronting our own internalized racism. For me personally, I've been part of equity inclusion efforts for most of my life, but I recognize that there's still more I can do to educate myself about anti-Black racism. I've started reading White Fragility by Robin D'Angelo, and I have a list of books that I intend to read after that. We're not going to solve hundreds of years of anti-Black racism with a reading list, but it's a place to start. I hope you will join me in doing what you can to be part of the solution. I'll leave you with a poem by Frank Worrell, a professor in the Graduate School of Education. Thank you for watching. I came to the U.S. in 1980 to complete my PhD. In December of 1989, I had my first run-in with the police in this country, and I spent about half an hour kneeling at the corner of 24th and Telegraph, with a gun held to my head by a policeman. After that and several other incidents, I wrote this one. It's called I Am Black. I am Black. I am Black in a land where for many, being Black means to hate being white. I'm Black in a land where for many, being Black means the cops shoot first and ask questions later. I am Black. I am Black in a land where for many, being Black means that only you understand oppression. I am Black in a land where for many, being Black means wearing handcuffs when going home from praising God. I am Black. I'm Black in a land where for many, being Black means that only you understand racism. I'm Black in a land where for many, being Black means regularly kneeling at the side of the road with a gun held to your head. I am black. I am black in a land where, for many, being black means not running in the street if you wish to live. I am black in a land where, for many, being black means persecutions from blacks for treating blacks and whites equally. I am black. I am black in a land where, for many, being black means to embrace anything Afrocentric and despise anything Eurocentric without considering the value of the things I embrace or despise. I am black. I am black in a land where, for many, being black means forgetting that black and white are created in God's image. I am black in a land where many forget that black, brown, red, white, and yellow are equivalent members of the human race. I am black. I am human. Lord, help me.