 Good morning Highline Familia. My name is Doris Martinez. I use she, her pronouns and services director for the Center for Cultural Inclusive Excellence. Also this year's MLK Week Co-Chair. Welcome to our final event of MLK Week Democracy for Whom, examining MLK's three evils. It has been an honor and a pleasure hosting this amazing week of programming for you all. Before we begin today's program, just wanted to share some logistics for y'all to, of course, to enhance today's program experience. If you have any questions throughout our presentation, please of course engage with us, utilize the chat feature. Click the button at the bottom of your screen to type in your questions. You can also add questions at any time and also utilize the Q&A section at the very bottom of the screen. You'll see that box right there. We also would greatly appreciate it if you could check in using our Google form. The URL is being posted in the chat. By checking in, you are helping us to keep track of how many students and community members we are serving with our programs. And of course it helps us to get to know you a little better. So please fill that out at any time before you leave. We cannot see or hear our attendees but we know you are here sharing this vibe and this love with us. So if at any point of the program that you have any technical issues or throughout the event, please utilize the chat feature. And one of us here from the MLK week planning committee will be here to assist you with your needs. Before we begin today's program, we want to do a land acknowledgement to center our space today. We'd like to take the moment to collectively acknowledge all indigenous and first peoples of the land and space in which we live and breathe. For our community at Highline College, we recognize that we are on occupied Duwamish, Coast Salish, Muckleshoot and Puyallup lands. We recognize that all of us are joining this conversations from all different areas. So we also invite you to reflect and thank indigenous and first peoples of the land and spaces in which you are coming from. Thank you. And now I will pass it on to today's host, Geo Mark Pannello, who will introduce our final presenter of MLK with 2021, Lydia Graham. Geo, take it away. Thank you Doris, thank you for grounding us and starting our last MLK event with land acknowledgement. Good morning everyone. Good morning everyone. My name is Geo Mark Pannello and I am the mentorship program's leadership advisor at the Center for Cultural Inclusive Excellence. So I have the honor of introducing our last and final presenter for this year's MLK week event. This presenter has been to Highline Ashley back in 2015, I believe April. Lydia X. Z. Brown is an advocate, organizer, educator, attorney, strategist and writer whose work has focused on interpersonal and state violence against disabled people living at intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation and language. They founded the Fund for Community Reparations for Autistic People of Colors, Interdependence, Survival and Empowerment and co-edited all the weight of our dreams on living racialized autism. They are currently creating their own Territ Dec Disability Justice Wisdom Territ. Lydia is adjunct lecturer in disability justice or disability studies at Georgetown University and adjunct professorial lecturer in American studies at American universities, department of critical race, gender and culture studies. They serve on American Bar Association's commission on disability rights and as a chair of ABA civil rights and social justice sections disability rights committee. Often their most important work has no title, job description or funding and probably never will. Let's all welcome back to Highline, Lydia XZ Brown. Thank you so much for that introduction, Geo. And thank you all for hosting and having me here. I see that we've got a lot of folks joining today and I just before we get started, wanted to ask you all a couple of questions. So you can all type in the chat box. You can send a message to just panelists or to panelists and attendees if you could drop down up to you. If you're here, would you type into the chat box just quickly on a scale of one to three, how knowledgeable or comfortable you feel about, let me just talk to the horn at me, about the concept of ableism. So one is you feel like you know very little, two is you feel like you know at least some and three is you feel like you know a lot. Where do folks feel? Seeing lots of ones and twos and some decimals, there's always decimals. There's always decimal points. So a handful of higher numbers, 2.5 and a three, mostly were at ones and twos. I'll just give you another couple of seconds to type that in if you're still thinking about it. And then just another question. On the topic of disability justice, which we'll spend a lot of time talking about today and about how disability justice is in fact different and distinct from disability rights, they're not the same thing. How comfortable do folks feel about disability justice? One again is you feel like you don't know much, two is you feel like you know some, and three is you feel like you know a lot. So again, getting a lot of mixes of ones and twos primarily is where we're seeing. So lots of ones and twos on average. Okay, cool. I always ask these questions and I always wanna know because if everyone said I'm at a three or higher, everyone's like, I know everything about ableism and disability justice, then what am I here for? I no longer have anything to offer. I will just show myself to the door and leave. But it's actually great when we come to the conversation with different levels of knowledge, different background, and I'm really excited for that. So with that question out of the way, I'm going to show some slides with you and should be able to share those. Right, and someone mentioned I'm a person with disability, so I experienced a lot of that. We literally live and breathe ableism every single day. The image that you all see on this screen shows silhouettes of people of different body shapes and sizes. They are moving, sitting or lying in a variety of different ways. Some of them have mobility equipment. One has a power chair, one has a manual chair. One has a cane and one has crutches and one has a baby stroller. One has a service animal, a dog pawing at their foot. They are moving in a variety of ways that might be considered unprofessional or inappropriate. I don't believe in that concept of inappropriate or unprofessional. It is bullshit and riddled with white supremacists and ableist cultural norms. I believe that we should all move in our space in whatever way is most comfortable for our body minds. My favorite person that's on this screen is actually the one that is lying horizontally, flat on their back, on the left-hand side. That one speaks to my soul. That one has been me for basically the last two years or so and I encourage you all to move in the way that feels most comfortable for you. If you would prefer to be outside, if it's a habitable outside, feel free to move outside. If you would prefer to be on a couch or a beanbag chair or a bed, then you are welcome to be sitting or lying in that space to be as comfortable as you'd like to be. If you'd prefer to be moving around, you are welcome to do that. If you have friends, partners, roommates, family members or caregivers that you like and you would like to be with you, they are welcome to be with you. If you have critters, kitties or doggos, of course they're welcome to be with you. I don't actually see any of your videos because of the format we're in, so it really doesn't matter what you have on or off the non-existent screen. Although I will say the one thing I don't like about the Zoom webinar format is I can't ask you to show me your dogs and your cats. But what I can do and I'm going to ask you to do is to please send me pictures of your dogs and cats. That's my cell phone number in the chat. That is actually my number. Please text me pictures of your cats and dogs, but also tell me who you are so that I'm not confused. That is my favorite part of every Zoom and that's the best way that I can partake when we are conversing in this way. This is an invitation for you to consider what your body-mind needs to be as comfortable as possible in this moment. This is an invitation to remind yourself, to remember and to affirm that your body-mind has needs and that those needs deserve to be met, that your body-mind is valuable and worthy, that you deserve to be here, that you are perfect and wonderful, that you are special and an offering and a gift, that you are ordinary and that you are unique all at the same time, that your presence is deserved, that you deserve to literally live, to be, to breathe, to take up space, that you deserve to be part of this community, to be part of a home, to belong. This is an invitation to consider what it is that you have carried with you into this space today. What is it that your body-mind needs for you to know? What is it that it needs you to understand? What does your body-mind in fact itself need to know, to crave, to desire? Have you carried with you your rage, your anger, your righteous indignation, your grief, your sorrow, your mourning? Have you carried with you your frustration, your anxieties, your irritation, your exhaustion, your bone-weariness? Have you carried with you your excitement, your eager anticipation, your gratitude, your satisfaction, your joy? What have you carried into this space with you? Have you had something to eat or to drink? If not, do you have something available that you can go grab and bring that to you? This is a reminder that if you have the ability and the resources to meet your needs, that you deserve to do so, that you deserve to meet your needs. And it is also a reminder and a radical demand that for those of us who do not have the resources, the support or the infrastructure to have our needs met and cared for, that it is not because we do not deserve this, but in fact that we deserve infinitely more and better than what we have now. I begin every presentation with this offering, this invitation, this invocation. And I invite us now to take a moment of grounding of pause to tune in to what our body minds are telling ourselves now, what it is in this moment they are screaming for us to hear, to understand, to listen to where our body minds are in this space so that we can meet ourselves where we are at. Sometimes people like to close their eyes for this, you can, you don't have to, but let's take that moment of pause and grounding together. Thank you for doing that with me. I begin every presentation and every facilitation in the same way, because it is a practice that is rooted in disability justice. And I mentioned that just a couple of minutes ago when I asked you about it. Disability justice is at its core and radically intersectional framework and also a series of demands and visioning for the future. And among those demands is a belief in affirmation and a requirement that we honor our bodies and minds, that we honor the bodies and minds of those around us. And we also must make space to honor our own body minds to affirm that we deserve to exist, to be present, to live, to breathe, to be, to literally take up space. Disability justice asks us to consider the needs that our body minds have, as necessary and deserving and not as burdensome or evidence of lack or disease or defect. Our body minds are worthy and valuable and sacred and deserve to be held and loved. My second note for us as we get started in our conversation today is a note on content. The image on this screen shows a person in a ponytail yelling into a bullhorn, up at the words for the content worthy. My body today is yawning a lot and I'm not sure why, but there we go. The content note is that as our time together progresses, I will be speaking in varying degrees about some topics of violence and abuse. And so I want you all to know that before we move in. I don't ascribe to the belief in social justice spaces that we need to pretend or move as though we are somehow removed from the topics that we speak about, that the things that we talk about are isolated and siloed from our lives. Rather, I know and I recognize and I understand that many of us have actually survived or witnessed the types of violence and the forms of harm that we'll be talking about today. And so if at any time you feel a need to take a break, to decompress, to reground yourself then you are welcome to do that. If you find it a certain point that you can no longer participate or engage at all, then you are also welcome to withdraw from this space. And I will not assume that that means that you hate me except that, you know, as I tell everybody, I do have very intense social anxiety. So my social anxiety will assume that you hate me, but if we're being honest about it, my social anxiety already believes that every one of the 70 of you that are here, personally and individually hates me so much that you're hoping that I get COVID and die because that's my social anxiety, but we can all look at my social anxiety and tell it that it can go sit in a corner and shut up and think about what it's done because it is bad and wrong and we don't need to listen to that today. That's my social anxiety for you. And just as a clarification about the content note, there are no photographs or videos that depict overt acts of violence. There are some images that express some harmful ideas, but there are no images that actually depict acts of violence. There will not be any graphic descriptions of any acts of violence. There will be some levels of non-graphic detail about some types of violence. So just as a heads up for what we'll be talking about and I hope that that is useful to you. And we can all also just collectively remember to tell my social anxiety to shut up and sit over there because we don't need to listen to it. I wanna begin by talking about our current situation, where we are and what feels to me often the complete absurdity of our situation. Here we are barely two weeks out from there having been a fascist white supremacist attempted coup in this nation. One that left many people of privilege, particularly white and wealth privileged people feeling confused, shocked and horrified because for perhaps the first time in their lives they experienced the shattering of the illusion that this nation was built on a foundation of principles like democracy and freedom and justice that this nation had progressed past the point of overt white supremacy where white supremacy remained an ideology at the fringes and that was adhered to only by a handful of people and not that it might be something that could threaten the apparent political stability of the status quo. Whereas for many of us in communities of color in black, brown, native, Asian and mixed race communities our reality has been very different where what happened two weeks ago was instead simply another albeit jarring reminder of the reality with which we contend on a daily basis that it was a reminder of the violent present and past of this nation a nation that was founded upon the premise of stolen land and genocide. A nation that was founded and built out and made economically prosperous because of the institution of chattel enslavement and because of generations of exploitation of black, brown and Asian immigrants and because of the continued legacies of exploitation and extraction all in pursuit of and in service of the singular obsession with the idea of self-sufficiency with the idea and the necessity and the belief and the necessity of resource and wealth hoarding. That this nation has never quite strayed far from what it started as. Only the appearance of it has changed. The appearance has become more comfortable for those of privilege and with access to resources and power but the reality has not shifted much at all for those of us who are at the margins of the margins. We come in the middle of nearly a year into a global pandemic. One which has fallen hardest, harshest and most deadly on black and brown disabled poor immigrant and queer and trans communities. We are here gathered virtually instead of in person in the room where I was when last I visited Highline and I hope perhaps one day I can come to again. We are gathered here in a space where we're re-exhausted, burned out, done, used up. Where we struggle to pay attention. Where we struggle to listen. Where we struggle to care. Where we struggle to do the things that at one point were if not easy, at least manageable. At least we had a way of doing them. And now we do not. We come at a time where no matter how much people tell us that they believe in us and they support us and they care about us no matter how much we may in fact believe that and that may in fact be true. We are nonetheless trapped by the expectation to work, to achieve, to perform. Because if we do not, if we fail, if we stumble, if we falter, then we may lose our place academically in a job, within a family, within a community. With the pandemic, it became impossible for many of us to pause, to rest except for those of the most power, privilege and resources. Because it became all the more urgent that we had to rush to complete, to meet deadlines, to finish, to do work, to earn money, to perform academically. And if we fail to do those things, if we fail to prove our abilities, our capacities, our intelligence, that it would mean that we were at fault. That it would mean that we would have to instead demand that those with access to power and privilege and resources, those with the power to shift and to change radically and immediately the systems and processes that subordinate much of us and much of society could actually do so and would do so. Rather than making the radical demands that we could, too many people in our communities have settled instead for asking for breadcrumbs. Rather than asking for a reordering or reimagining of how it is that we've decided that bread should be limited, metaphorically speaking. My friends know that I like to abuse metaphors and drag them out until they're basically useless and you will be subjected to that repeatedly during our conversation. And it occurs to me in thinking, too, about the ways in which we lie to ourselves that if we get along long enough, then things might get better. We might survive, it might be okay. That if we compromise enough, then we might arrive to a tolerable state of affairs. But many of us who are here today, those of us who are here today as negatively racialized people, as disabled people, as queer people, as trans people, we know that that was never true, that that promise was always a lie. It was always a beautiful illusion meant to ensure our compliance without changing anything at all about the systems that enact violence and death in our communities. So I wanna start by talking about this myth of our capabilities, our self-sufficiency, our intelligence, the belief that these things will somehow save us, will elevate us. The belief that our intelligence is what will prove or determine our worthiness, our ability to be considered and held within society, the ability to be considered human, to be respected, to be believed. The image that's on this screen is a graphic that comes from textbooks that were widely circulated around the beginning of the 20th century. This graphic is labeled steps in mental development and its subtitle is where they stumble, the limit of development of each type. The graph shows a staircase and on the staircase from the bottom to the top are images of people who are labeled as idiot, low, medium and high grade imbecile and moron. Each figure is also further explained by the type of work they are believed capable of performing, from mere self-preservation to simple menial work, simple manual work, complex manual work and work requiring at least some reasoning and judgment. The people in these images are depicted as light-skinned people who are wearing period clothing of that era. Many of them are slooped, slumped over, looking away or down from the person viewing. They have low muscle tone and affect. They are leaning, not able to stand on their own. Images that are meant to depict a particular idea and concept of mental disability. These terms that appear on this screen were actually used as medical diagnostic classifications for much of the 20th century. They were used to represent the idea that certain people not only lacked whatever intelligence is supposed to be, but lacked it in a manner that could be delineated based upon what kind of work or production each person in each category was deemed to be capable of performing. These terms have never really disappeared. The concept of intelligence and the concept of an intelligence quotient or IQ test, as many of us know from at least online quizzes, even if not from necessarily a formal evaluation, arose out of race science and eugenicist science. Eugenics as a practice was the belief that the human genome and the human gene pool ought to be proved. So that only those who are fit to reproduce ought to be reproducing and ought to be able to have children and to be reproduced and to continue existing in the world. And that those who are less desirable in society because of physical inferiority or intellectual inferiority should not be allowed to reproduce at all. The eugenics movement was at one time considered mainstream progressive science in the United States. It was the science of proving why non-Jewish white people were supposed to be superior to Jewish people and all people of color. The science of determining how and why whiteness was superior and the ideal form or realization of humanity. Eugenics was mainstream. Eugenics was progressive. It was the forward-thinking science of the day. And many people like to believe that eugenics no longer really exists today or that if it does, again, that it is a fringe belief rather than something that is particularly core. When in reality, eugenics has never disappeared. It only became so closely associated with the Nazi regime in Germany, the Third Reich, that the word eugenics fell out of favor. But the belief system embedded in eugenics never did. In 1927, the Supreme Court of the United States heard a case called Buck V. Bell, which centered around the forced sterilization of a white woman named Carrie Buck. Carrie Buck had been sterilized after she had given birth to a child who was born as the result of being conceived in rape during her indentured servitude. Carrie Buck lived at the Virginia colony for the feeble-minded. She was labeled feeble-minded in earlier terms for what we now call intellectual disability. Her baby was labeled feeble-minded and her mother was also labeled feeble-minded. She was sterilized because the administrators of the colony for the feeble-minded decided that it would not be a good idea for her to be able to become pregnant again and give birth to additional children who might also be feeble-minded. Her case was taken to the Supreme Court not to challenge her sterilization, but rather to seek a ruling from the Supreme Court to establish precedent enabling widespread eugenic sterilization. The case was brought as what's called a test case. That is a case brought to set precedent to advance a particular cause or political ideology. In this case, the ideology of eugenics. And the court ruled in a sweeping decision that not only was Carrie Buck's sterilization not a violation of her individual rights, but in fact, it was in the public interest and for the greater good. Carrie Buck's sterilization in other words was a matter for the public. It was a matter of public improvement. The Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who wrote the decision wrote, and I quote, three generations of imbeciles are enough. That decision has never been overturned. And between 1927 and 1979, the United States documented more than 70,000 sterilizations, largely of black, Latinx and Asian women who were sterilized primarily for one of three reasons, criminality, sexual promiscuity or deviance and mental defectiveness. And those three categories were meant to allied clear distinctions. They in fact blurred easily into one another. And this was intentional. These questions, these ideas of who ought to be allowed to reproduce, of who is desirable in society were meant very clearly to fall on lines of race, class and gender. Those who were considered of lesser or lower classes who ought not to be allowed to reproduce, who ought not to be allowed to have children, who ought not to be considered part of respectable society. The eugenics era was also the beginning and the end of the old form of the workhouse, the institution where poor people would be sent to be partially imprisoned, to be exploited out of free labor as a means of paying off debts that would never be paid. It was the beginning of the modern asylum, an institution where disabled people of all types would be placed in squalid and fetid conditions, left to rot to live the rest of their lives away contained from the rest of society. And it was the beginning of mass criminalization and mass incarceration, even before the war on drugs that many people like to try to trace mass incarceration only to that particular point in time. Mass criminalization began in the earlier part of the 20th century because that is the time period in which immigration from around the world began to grow in numbers in which Jim Crow laws began to expand as a result of white backlash to generations of formerly enslaved black Africans and of descendants of enslaved black Africans gaining at least in theory political and civil freedoms. And it was also the era in which criminalization began to be wielded as a particular tool of social control, of management, of containment, of those deemed undesirable and unfit. Forced sterilization did not end in 1979, however, as of course neither institutionalization did nor incarceration did. The activists and advocates have documented sterilizations as recently as 2013 in California in prisons, particularly of Latina women in prison in California, and as recently as this past fall in immigration prisons run by ICE. Forced sterilization has never disappeared and neither have the ideas of eugenics. The ideas that some people simply have greater intelligence and physical acuity and others lack it and that those who lack it ought not to be suffered to reproduce for fear that they might contaminate the gene pool of the future. You might be wondering what this has to do with us and what this has to do in particular with education, with college, and with the moment that we find ourselves in in this pandemic and really it has everything to do with where we are. The belief that only the strong ought to survive. The belief that only the intelligent are considered worthy and deserving of respect, particularly in an academic environment. The belief that only some of us actually should be considered as human, fully human and that the rest of us have to constantly prove that we count as human, have to constantly try to prove that we deserve to have even the most basic form of respect, that we have to prove that we deserve to have food or housing, to have care, that we have to earn the right to live, that we have to earn the right to breathe. These ideas are rooted in eugenics and they are steeped with ableism. So let's talk about what ableism is. At its most basic form, ableism is a system of thinking and doing that harms disabled people or people with disabilities. And this is a side note, I do use both of those types of terminology intentionally. You can ask me about it later, we can talk about it separately. But at its core, that's what ableism is. It is a system of thinking and doing that harms disabled people. It is a belief system, it is a value system. In other words, ableism is a form of systemic, structural and institutional oppression. What that means is that ableism is a system of power differentials and power relations where people whose body minds are considered healthy, whole, functional, sane, stable, strong and intelligent. Are granted enormous political, social, cultural and economic power at the direct expense of people whose body minds are instead deemed sick, broken, defective, disease, disorder, deficient, weak, unstable and stupid. Ableism teaches us which kinds of people count as human and which do not. Ableism teaches us which kinds of people ought to be allowed to live, to breathe and to be and which ought not. Ableism teaches us which kinds of people should reproduce and which kinds of people should be reproduced. Ableism teaches us which kinds of children should be allowed to be born and which people ought to be allowed to have children in the first place. Ableism teaches us who is considered valuable, worthy and desirable and who is considered expendable and disposable. Ableism teaches us who is worth living and saving and who instead is acceptable collateral damage, tolerable. Ableism is at its core a system of oppression that is rooted in, connected to and extricably tied to, dependent on and necessary for every other form of oppression. In particular, Ableism is virulently racist and white supremacist. In particular, in this country, it is anti-black and anti-native in particular. Now, what do I mean by that? This happens on multiple levels, in conceptualizing disability, in responding to disability and in deploying ableist logic and ideas. Under global white supremacy, disability is always hyper-visible when it is convenient and deliberately rendered invisible also when it is politically expedient to do so. Under white supremacy, disability and ability are always defined as against whiteness. What does that mean? It means that whiteness is defined as health, strength, stability and intelligence. So under white supremacist ideology, because of the way that structural racism works, when white people are disabled, what white supremacy teaches us is that white people's disabilities detract from their ability to fully experience whiteness, to benefit from whiteness, to be considered fully as a white person and therefore as a human. That's not to say to be clear that white disabled people do not experience or benefit from white privilege because they absolutely do, especially at the expense of disabled people of color. But what it is to say is that white supremacy teaches white disabled people that their disabilities are all that is standing between them and being fully human. That to be considered human, to be able to participate in the institution and the ideology of whiteness, they need to hide, overcome or mask their disabilities. Under white supremacy, disability becomes hyper visible in white people when disability means deserving of care, support, accommodations and access. And disability becomes deliberately invisible in white people when it becomes inconvenient and detracts from the ability to be considered fully white and fully human. At the same time, when people of color, black, brown, native, Asian or mixed race people, when we are disabled, white supremacy teaches us that our disabilities are evidence of our supposed physical and intellectual inferiority, that our disabilities confirm and exacerbate that we are inferior. Under white supremacy, our disabilities become hyper visible when they are evidence that we cannot behave, that we are non-compliant, that we are scary, that we are threatening, that we are defective or deviant. And our disabilities become deliberately invisible when our disabilities would otherwise be considered a reason that we should receive care or support or access or accommodations. Ableism and white supremacy operate in tandem. They go hand in hand. Ableism and racism even work together to define what we recognize as a disability and what we fail or refuse to recognize as a disability. We do not, for example, recognize as disabilities, developmental disabilities caused by lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan, a largely black town. We do not generally recognize as disabilities those caused by environmental racism or classism, by access, by lack of access to safe or clean housing when people live in housing that is infested by rodents or insects that is full of black mold or mildew or crumbling infrastructure that causes physical injury, that causes and exacerbates asthma or emphysema, that causes and exacerbates psychiatric conditions. We don't recognize as disabilities those kinds of disabilities in the same way. As disabilities that are associated with encoded with whiteness. We do not recognize often as disabilities those that are more common in communities of color, like the way that postpartum depression shows up in Asian American communities, where disabilities like lupus or fibromyalgia or sickle cell that are much more common in black people than they are in any white people or even non-black people of color. We do not recognize as disabilities the effects of intergenerational and collective trauma in survivors and descendants of survivors of the Holocaust or of genocides in Armenia and Palestine and Eritrea and Rwanda and elsewhere around the globe. We do not consider as disabilities in the same way, disabilities that are caused by nuclear weapons testing and largely native areas of New Mexico and in the Pacific islands or of the nuclear bombs that were dropped in Nagasaki and Hiroshima causing cancers and birth defects. We do not think of disabilities those caused in survivors of napalm in Vietnam. We do not think of disabilities those that are caused by sexual violence, intimate partner violence, family violence, parental violence. We do not think of the disabilities of trauma that are caused by incarceration and family separation. The disabilities caused by long-term surveillance and mass criminalization. The disabilities caused by witnessing death, by witnessing addiction. The disabilities caused by surviving the foster system, the native residential boarding school system of immigration prisons. We do not think of disabilities those that are caused and exacerbated by other forms of oppression. Even though disability is more prevalent in every other marginalized community than it is in every analogously privileged or resourced community. Poor people experience higher rates of disability. People of color experience higher rates of disability. The LGBTQ community experiences higher rates of disability. All communities that experience marginalization in any form experience higher rates of disability. And yet ableism and other forms of oppression seek to render invisible the ways that disability shows up in our communities. But ableism and racism also go far back in our history. During the institution of chattel enslavement of black people. Ableism showed up in psychiatrizing enslaved black people as mentally ill. For doing things like engaging in work stoppages as a form of protest called Diasthesia Ethiopia. For attempting to escape to freedom or wanting to escape to freedom which was diagnosed as Drapatomania. Ableism shows up throughout the history of the United States response to native peoples and their nations by labeling entire nations as intellectually inferior, as mentally defective, as diseased or disordered merely for existing differently from white Western European culture. This was the logic of ableism operating at civilizational scale here within the borders of the US and outside the borders of the US in colonies beyond the mainland. And in colonies occupied and militarized by other colonizing and imperial nations. Ableism shows up in the ways that we've talked about Chinese immigrants ranging from the 1800s to now where the language is the same speaking about my people as dirty, as diseased, as contaminant, as contagion. Leading to passage of the only law ever passed by Congress banning all people from a particular ethnic group from immigrating even a little bit that was enforced for several years. Today, we see it more casually in discussion of Chinese restaurants as dirty, as gross. And talking about MSG is this apparently very scary thing that is bad and somehow threatens everybody's health, not just the people that actually have an allergy but everyone, right? But we see it more insidiously and more dangerously around pandemics and epidemics like the 2004 SARS outbreak or last year with the pandemic emerging of COVID-19 now speaking of our whole people as engaging and freakish monstrous practices that lead to us becoming a threat to civilization, to the rest of the world. We see the logic of Ableism operating in the way that the federal government through co-intel and other operations sought to disrupt and to end and to suppress resistance and dissent movements throughout the 1900s, the middle of the 20th century in psychiatrizing black liberation movement leaders of Puerto Rican nationalists, of people in the queer and trans community as being mentally ill, psychotic or schizophrenic simply for agitating and organizing for rights and freedom. We see Ableism and racism hand in hand in every part of our society. According to the Department of Education Civil Rights Data Collection, students who are disabled and who are black and brown face the highest rates of suspension, expulsion, restraint, seclusion and in-school arrest. According to the advocacy group heard helping educate to advance the rights of deaf communities at least 50% and as many as 80% of all people who are incarcerated are disabled. That up to 100% of people on death row are disabled. That up to 80% of people who are killed by police have a disability. Meaning that people who are black or native and who are disabled are at the highest risk of being targeted for state violence. Ableism and racism trace their way through every part of our society. Through the knowledge that as disabled people doctors are three times as likely to make a rapid and risky life or death decision. That people with my particular disability are likely on average to die three decades younger than non-disabled people. The second leading cause of our deaths is suicide. And the rest of the causes of our deaths lung disease, cancer, pulmonary aspiration pneumonia that's the word I'm looking for. That they're often caused by lack of care and by outright and overt medical discrimination. And we know the statistics are stark. That black and native people in the US face the highest rates of maternal mortality. Have the shortest life spans when you account for what healthcare is supposed to be like. Have the highest rates of a number of intense and chronic health conditions and disabilities. And are more likely to face discrimination by doctors and in hospitals out of racist ableist beliefs about our capacity to feel pain or to experience suffering or distress. And we are also the most likely to have the police called on us to be committed to a psychiatric ward as dangerous and unstable. Ableism and racism go hand in hand. This week we've been honoring the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who wrote famously and repeatedly, not only about the ills and the dangers of white moderation and the necessity of attaching racial justice to economic liberation, but who also wrote about the harms of capitalism, imperialism and racism in causing and exacerbating disability. And in weaponizing disability against our communities. Not enough people know about this, but should. The last part of this definition of what ableism is and how we must understand it is that ableism is rooted in and tied to capitalism and eugenics. We've talked quite a bit about eugenics. Let me linger and pause on how it is connected to capitalism and economic injustice. Ableism and capitalism define our value and our worth based in what we produce based in our production. We are defined as valuable based on what kind of job we have, what kind of college degrees we've attained, what kind of work we perform. If you have a white collar professional class job, you're considered more valuable than people who are laborers or have blue collar jobs or who are in professions, rather than people who have a white collar position. But ableism and capitalism also teaches that we're valuable not just based on what kind of work we do, but based on how much work we do. What are we producing? How quickly are we producing it? How frequently do we produce it? How consistently do we produce it? And to whose benefit and to whose detriment are we producing it? We are taught that our value is predicated upon our achievements. What kind of job do you hold? Can you hold a job? How many hours are you able to work? What are you paid? How many things do you go to and participate in? How many leadership positions do you have? How many organizations have you joined? What kind of work do you do? Ableism and capitalism teach us that our value and worth depend upon our productivity. That we constantly have to earn the right to be considered human. That we are not considered human as a matter of course, but that we have to prove that we count and we have to earn it over and over again. Ableism teaches us to be ashamed of the ways in which our body minds work, to be ashamed of what we look like, to be ashamed of what we sound like, to be ashamed of the ways in which we struggled things that are hard for us and to be afraid of the ways in which we might lose capacity in the future as we grow older and as we move through life. Because Ableism does in fact work across all systems in one way or another. And Ableism teaches us that we always have to engage in a political game of scarcity. That if one group of people gets rights, that they only get rights by taking them away from another group of people. If women get rights, then men must be losing rights. If people in the LGBTQ community are gaining rights, then straight people must be losing rights. If black people or other people of color are gaining rights, then white people must be losing rights. If immigrants are gaining rights, then citizens must be losing rights. We are all taught to believe that no matter what communities we belong to, even when we belong to other marginalized communities, that our rights always come at the expense of somebody else losing theirs. That our freedoms come at the expense of somebody else losing theirs. That there's a limited amount of rights and freedom and justice to go around. And if I get some, someone has to lose it. In other words, I talk about this as the concept of disavowal. We are all taught that we may only lay claim to our own humanity at the expense of somebody else. The image on this screen shows silhouettes of people who all appear thin and able-bodied, holding up protest signs. And there's a member of their group holding out their hand to say no, not you, to someone who's sitting on the ground. We are taught that we have to throw somebody else under the bus just to be recognized as human. In the autistic community, I hear it all the time as being autistic deserves respect because it's not a mental illness and it's not mental retardation. Which tells me that people who say that say that we only count as human because we don't belong to this other group of people. I'm asked to do that all the time. As a light-skinned East Asian person, I am asked by white supremacy to throw my lot with white people by throwing black and brown people, including black and brown Asians under the bus. To say I will get to count as almost human if I throw other people of color under the bus to do it. I hear all the time from physically disabled people. Well, I have this physical disability, but my mind works fine. Everything's working upstairs. Everything is on. What they're telling me is that they count as human and they deserve rights because they're not like me. And all the time in the queer, trans, and ace communities, I hear, well, being queer, trans, or ace is not a mental illness. There is nothing wrong with us. And the underlying connotation of that statement is that the people over there that are correctly labeled mentally ill, there is something wrong with them. Those people don't deserve rights. Those people don't deserve freedoms. Those people deserve to be controlled, to be policed, to be criminalized, to be locked up. Don't let me in with them. We do it all the time. Rather than building linkages or recognizing opportunities for solidarity, rather than demanding justice for everybody, not just a few people, we buy into this scarcity politics, the scarcity game, where we think that only some people can get rights at a time, that there has to be a limited number of people who get rights. Enableism is so insidious and that it often comes into our movements to say, let's use ableism in theory to try to fight against other forms of oppression. But we can't do that, right? We hear all the time, well, racism is a mental illness. Racism is the real disease in society. And what does that tell those of us who are people of color who have mental illnesses and sight disabilities? That the way that our brains work can be used as a metaphor to represent hate and vitriol and violence against us? I saw it for the last four years when the previous president was in office, people that were supposed to be my political allies, like people who claim to be on the same side as me, whatever that's supposed to be, right? Would say things like, well, Trump is unfit to be president. He's incompetent because he must be mentally ill. He's narcissistic. He's psychopathic. He probably has a learning disability. He might have dementia. Maybe he has ADD. He can't walk down a ramp while holding a cup of water in one hand. He's fat, he's ugly. All of these ideas about him that are rooted in ideas about his body. And while I can guarantee that Donald Trump does not care about and is probably not personally upset by other people just insulting him, the connotation behind these insults is that you think that the rest of us who have those conditions, that none of us deserve to be in a position of leadership, that none of us deserve respect, that none of us count as human. Because rather than saying, well, Donald Trump's policies are awful, Donald Trump aligned himself with white supremacists, Donald Trump has been accused of sexual violence by multiple people. Instead it's, well, he must be mentally ill. He has a disability of some kind. And this is what we've been contending with. Ableism is so steeped in our movements that we use the language of ableism even when we are allegedly fighting against oppression. And that gets us nowhere. Audre Lorde taught us, there is no such thing as a single issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives. The image on this screen shows Audre who is a black woman with a small afro and glasses speaking upward and outward. Many people may not know that in addition to being openly queer and black and a writer on womanism and feminism that Audre Lorde was also disabled. And she wrote about that too. She taught us there is no such thing as a single issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives. All of our struggles are connected. If nothing else is clear from today's conversation, understand this. Our struggles and our movements and our communities are all connected. Class oppression cannot be divorced from racial oppression. Racial oppression cannot be divorced from gender-based oppression. Gender-based oppression cannot be divorced from disability oppression. Our communities and our struggles are all connected. We must also understand they are not the same. The image on this screen is of Lila Watson who is an indigenous elder in Australia. The image here is a color photograph. She's an older person with silver hair and a pink scarf smiling warmly and invitingly. The quote says, you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together. Dr. King told us that the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice. Justice for me looks like liberation for all of us. We are not free until every single one of us is free. We have not achieved justice until every single one of us has experienced what justice and freedom are. Our struggles are all connected, but they are not the same. Disability justice as a guiding framework, as principles, as practice, helps us understand and put into action these beliefs. The 10 principles of disability justice as outlined here by Patricia Byrne begin with intersectionality and understanding that our struggles and communities are all connected, that our oppressions are all connected and they end with interdependence for collective access and liberation and understanding that if our struggles and our oppression are connected, then our liberation is too. We do not get anywhere until we get there together. The image on this screen showing Patricia shows a mixed race Haitian-Japanese woman in a power wheelchair on a stage. She, along with others like Mia Mingus and Aurora Levin's Morales and Eli Clair and Sebastian Margaret were co-creators of the Disability Justice Framework. Disability justice teaches us that we all deserve to be held with love and care. Dr. Cornel West told us that justice is what love looks like in public. If justice is what love looks like in public and as Mia Mingus and Alice Wong and Sandy Ho remind us that access and disability justice are love, then disability justice is a politic of love. It is not just a politic of what we are against, but it is also a politic of what we are for, of how we are for. It is a politic of changing radically the things in society, the processes, the systems, the structures, that imbue and that underlie the belief that some people are more human than others, that some people are more valuable than others and replacing them with systems and structures that value people above all, that value people above profit, that value people above institutions, that value people above ideologies and that value people in all of our complexities for and as who we are, that value the beauty in communities of color, in blackness, in brownness, in Asianness, in indigeneity, that value who and what we are is disabled people, to find the beauty and the wonder of disability, of madness, of neurodivergence, of Crip life, that value and hold with love and care and tenderness our queer lives, our asexual lives, our trans lives, that value ways of knowing that come from being poor and working class, that come from faiths and lack of faith of all kinds, from not just the Christian tradition and the white atheist tradition, but that also come from Christians of color, from the Muslim community, from Jewish community. I love the concept of tikkun olam, to heal or repair the world. That is the work of justice, to honor and to know the Buddhist tenant that life has been suffering in pain, that all of life contains suffering and pain, but it doesn't have to be this way, that we don't have to settle for pain or distress. The politic in Catholic liberation theology that teaches us that actually when systems and states and corporations harm and extract and take and exploit from us, that that is a moral wrong, that our liberation has to come through not redistribution as a mere concept, from thinking through why is it that we believe that some people deserve to have an enormous amount of resources and wealth, and that it is somehow simultaneously acceptable and correct that other people should be deprived and denied of all resources, of housing, of food, to understand continually from the traditions in Jinnism and Sikhism of ahimza of respect for life and living things, to understand and to respect and to honor the belief that godliness, if we believe in that, must dictate how we treat and honor our fellow human beings, and that if we do not believe that there is a God or that there are gods, that simply being alive in this cosmic universe, the way that energy ebbs and flows, that if we, when we are born, we are made of stardust and that when we die, our remains, all the atoms that comprised our existence return to the stars, that that alone makes life a gift worth living, worth living and loving, worth making the world more just, more free. And at the end of the day, disability justice offers to us that in our work toward freedom, toward justice for all, we must make sure always to leave nobody behind. The image on this screen is of Shane Neumeier, a white person with short hair, glasses and facial disfigurement who is looking at the camera. Disability justice exhorts us to make sure that we leave nobody behind. As we move toward and build and sustain a better world, what does it mean to hold each other, to witness each other with love and with care? What does it mean for us to demand justice unapologetically and unflinchingly, but never to do so at the expense of our own selves? And never to do so at the expense of whole communities? What does solidarity look like? What does it imbue not just with performative politics, but with love and with care? I know that a lot of folks had to leave early, but for those of you who are still here, I think we have a little bit of time set aside now. Yeah, thank you, Lydia. We will take a quick five-minute break. Intermission and then we'll come back around 11-10 for Q&A. If you have any questions for Lydia, you can use the Q&A feature on the chat or you can message the panelists as well directly. And also just a reminder, please leave a feedback for us. The link is on the chat as well, all right? I don't know if someone is playing music, hopefully someone is, but we'll be back in five minutes. All right, welcome back Highline family. I would like to invite Lydia and my co-host Doris on the stage, virtual stage. Hey, fam. We're gonna go ahead and resume our Q&A questions. We have questions already on our Q&A box, but if you have other questions, feel free to drop it on the Q&A chat feature or Q&A feature and also just chat with us, you know? All right, so I guess I'll just ask the first question. If I can find it on my screen, oh, it's right here in front of me. Lydia, how do we explain ableism to others or make others more aware of ableism? It can be kind of hard to figure out what the best way to have a conversation is. And what I always try to tell people is that it really depends on context, right? Like, are you having a conversation where you and someone else said, let's talk about ableism together, which could happen. I haven't had that happen a whole lot in my life, but it could happen. And if it does, then, you know, you might wanna start by explaining ableism is a system that hurts disabled people. It's the belief that disabled people are inferior, that disability is bad, and there's a lot of different ways to conceptualize what that's like and how it affects people. But if it's come up in the context of some other conversation, which it usually does, then it really depends on the context of that conversation. If you're talking about racism and sexism, and someone says, well, what about people with disabilities? You could just say, well, discrimination and prejudice targeting disabled people is called ableism. There's a word for that. But if you're hoping to try to educate someone who hasn't really thought about disability before, you know, that can't be done in just one conversation. You can tell them this is what ableism means. Here's a definition, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that person will have a full understanding of it. You know, they probably won't. I don't know that that really solves the problem that you've asked or really fully answers the question, but I hope it helps a little bit, at least in pointing you toward the ability to open up more conversation. Sometimes it helps to give examples too. People ask me about that and I say, well, here's an example of ableism that's interpersonal. If someone says to me, wow, I would have never believed that you had a disability. I don't think of you that way. They believe that they're giving me a compliment. They intended to give me a compliment. They're very well-intentioned, but the compliment is rooted in ableist idea, which is that if someone is disabled, that's bad. That if someone is disabled, they can't be smart. And if someone is disabled, that would be a factor against that person. So they say, well, I don't think of you that way because they're like, well, I don't wanna think of you as this bad category. So letting that person know, like I appreciate that you're trying to compliment me and I'm glad that you like me or that you like what I was doing, but being disabled isn't actually a bad thing and there's nothing wrong with having a disability and it doesn't make me less than. It's part of who I am. So you might not think that I look like whatever disability means to you, but that doesn't mean that I'm not. And a better compliment might be that you like what I did. And I appreciate that. Now, an example of systemic ableism is the fact that in the United States, it is 100% legal to pay disabled people sub-minimum wage, less than sometimes a few cents per hour for work. This is totally legal. It comes from a law in the 1930s called the Fair Labor and Standards Act, ironically named. There's a part of that law called section 14c that makes it legal to pay disabled people less than minimum wage. So that's systemic ableism. It doesn't require an individual person to be an asshole who hates disabled people. It is, it exists in the law. So sometimes giving examples like that can help. That's powerful. The next question for you, Lydia, is states this. For those who work in disability services or might someday, what can we do specifically to ensure our systems do not create more barriers towards student support and success? So this is Lydia in response to that. I'm used to saying that because I'm in meetings all day long. It's like, okay, yes, I recognize in this scenario, you do know who I am. I always encourage people in services systems that if you don't personally have a disability, and I don't know if you do or not, it's not my business, but if you don't have a disability or if your disability doesn't generally affect your work and it's not the same kind of disability as students that are working, that are working with your office is to actually consult with disabled experts about what your processes are, what your policies are, about what's working and not working for disabled students. And that can be done a little bit informally with people that are in the community, but that's not a substitute for having other folks do it because people that are part of the campus community might feel inhibited in their answers. They might not feel able to be fully candid and they may not necessarily have a sense of how other people do things, but it helps to know to do students at a baseline feel like it's working or not working for them. And if students feel like that services are not working for them, then it's important to figure out why and then consult with disabled experts about what you can do to address those particular concerns. So a couple of specific things that come up often are number one, access to diagnosis. It's very common in disability services offices at universities and colleges to require students to provide documentation of a disability. And there's an important reason for that as you know, right, working in that field. The number one reason is you don't want students to be able to say, well, this person got special treatment and you don't even know if they have a disability. And you also wanna make sure that somebody isn't necessarily claiming that they have a disability that they don't have to be able to receive something that for them would be an unfair advantage whereas for a disabled student would level the playing field. And I understand that mindset, but I actually challenged that a little bit. So I encourage offices to consider that students may have disability related access needs that they might not have documentation for. And it's much more likely to be the case that students who are queer or trans who may face family estrangement or disownment, that students of color because of structural racism and that students who are poor who might have access to health insurance or to other financial resources to get an evaluation or to get diagnosis for a particular condition are less likely to have paperwork that says, yes, this person does in fact have rheumatoid arthritis. Yes, this person actually does have dyscalculia. Yes, this person actually does have a traumatic brain injury. That person is much less likely to have the paperwork but it doesn't mean they don't have the need. So using policies that require students to have documentation inadvertently perpetuates ableism, classism and racism by making it much less likely that by degree and by proportion, students that are more marginalized including many disabled students from other marginalized communities are less able to access support. And on the other end of that question when staff or faculty are concerned, well, what about an unfair advantage? I always look back to the principle and the idea of universal design or access centered work which is recognizing that the way that our classes should be done to begin with shouldn't just assume that everyone can do one kind of assessment. And if more professors could be educated and you're in a position to do that, right? If more professors can be educated about alternate ways of doing assessments that don't presume that all students can demonstrate knowledge or skill in one form of valuation then there's less of a likelihood for disabled students needing to ask for an accommodation. So for example, if all exams assume that everyone can do it under timed conditions then people with dyslexia or ADD or cerebral palsy are all going to have to ask for accommodations to take that exam. And students whose disabilities might be more hidden might feel less comfortable or less safe asking for accommodation or might lack documentation to do it. And so we're just gonna fail or just do badly on that exam. When if the professor had instead considered here's an exam, you have two ways of doing this assessment. You can do a time 60 minute exam or you can do an open book 24 hour exam. It's two different sets of questions, pick one. The professor still is grading the questions on the same timeline but it gives students an option without having to disclose a disability what is better? Cause there's other students with ADD for whom that 24 hour open ended exam would be a nightmare. Like that's actually really bad. And then there's other students with ADD and other disabilities who would have a really hard time with the 60 minute timed exam. And that's just one example, right? There's other ways to do it but that's just one basic example of helping other people, staff and faculty realize that you can get around the fear of someone faking or getting an unfair advantage by just building in multiple modes of access to begin with. Let students decide for themselves what works best for them. Wow, thank you. That was very insightful. Thank you. Your next question is, can you walk us through the difference in using the term disabled person versus person with disabilities? I knew someone was going to ask someone always asks. Sometimes I get emails. Like I gave a talk recently to several hundred people and after the talk I got no less than eight emails. All asking the same question. So I started copy pasting the answer. So disabled person or disabled people is what's called identity first language and person or people of disabilities is what's called person first language which is pretty much what they say on the tin. Both sets of terminology have long political histories in the disability community. Person first language came out of the movement of people of intellectual disabilities many of whom were institutionalized sometimes for decades at a time in squalid conditions that were called the snake pits like Willowbrook was referred to. And they would say, you know instead of being labeled like the words that were on the slide earlier idiot or imbecile or moron or mental retardate as a noun that those words were used in a dehumanizing way. They were used to, they were weaponized against people who were in the institutions as an excuse for medical experimentation for physical, sexual, financial and emotional abuse. And so people who survived as institutions would say we are people first, call us people before you call us anything else. And it is important that you acknowledge our humanity before you use any of those other labels because for so long our humanity has been explicitly denied and language is a big reason why. Identity first language in contrast comes out of the blind, the deaf, the autistic and the mad community among some others. And it's a way of saying that being disabled is part of who we are, that it is part of our identities just in the same way as I'm Chinese or Asian-American in the same way that I am queer, so I am also disabled. And if we know generally most people who are not assholes know that if you referred to me as an Asian-American attorney or as a queer writer and advocate that you're not reducing me to only my race or sexuality or acknowledging that my race and sexuality are important parts of who I am, that they do define me and that they are one of many things that define me. So likewise, I'm also a disabled person. I'm a disabled advocate. I'm a disabled lawyer. I'm a disabled, other nouns can go here. And just as I will tell people who will say, well, I don't see color, I just see people which is terribly racist. I will say, if you don't see my race, you don't see me. And if you don't see my disability, you also don't see me because my disability is part of who I am. And if you say, well, I don't want to think about your disability because that makes me uncomfortable. That says a lot more about you than it says about me. And both languages are important. So I use them both when I speak generally about disability when talking about myself and my communities, I use identity first language. Person first language is still very important in the community of people of intellectual disabilities. Unfortunately, it's also been co-opted widely. And the most vocal people about person first language are usually non-disabled people who will insist to the ends of the earth that person first language is the only respectful way to talk about disability. And it's to the point where a lot of us will joke about this, like about how euphemistic non-disabled people can really get where they just so much want to separate the word disability from the word person because they just at their core subconsciously believe that disability and personhood are mutually incompatible, that saying a disabled person's an oxymoron because a disability is such a bad thing that you wanted away from the person, that we will say I'm a person who happens to have the experience of being diagnosed with a condition on the spectrum of a disorder of autism because we're just gonna be in a competition now to put more words in between the word disability and the word person, even though that's a very white English-centric language issue, right? Like in Spanish, adjectives come after the noun. If I'm an autistic person, I'm a persona autista. And if I'm a person with autism and persona con autismo, like either way, the word persona comes first in the construction. So it's a very English-centric debate to the extent that it's still a debate, but that's basically the difference in a nutshell. If you're asking what to use, if you're talking about disability in general, I use both interchangeably, disabled people and people with disabilities. If you're talking about a specific community, if you can look up what that community generally uses, use that community's terminology, it's the blind community, and it's the community of people with Down syndrome, right? So if you don't know, you can ask. If you don't know someone to ask, you can try to Google or get someone to help you in Googling it. If you are talking about a specific person, look at what they've written about themself to decide what's probably the most appropriate thing to say. And if you're not sure and you have the ability to ask, you can ask them. Like if you have another invited speaker and you don't know what they want to be referred to, I just ask them, what's the most respectful way to talk about you? And people appreciate being asked, better to ask them soon. Thank you so much, Lydia. I love that point that you just made, just being able to ask someone. Oftentimes like when we have conversations with students on campus, that's usually something that, you know, folks get a little apprehensive about. So thank you so much for sharing that insight. We have another question. What do you do for work? Oh, well, a lot. In full time, I'm a policy lawyer. I work at the Center for Democracy and Technology on the Privacy and Data Project. And I work on issues of artificial intelligence and algorithmic discrimination against disabled people. And part time, I lead the policy and advocacy work of the Autistic Woman and Non-Binary Network, which focuses on neurodiversity, disability rights and justice, gender justice and trans liberation. I also teach as an adjunct lecturer at two different colleges right now. I teach at Georgetown University and I teach at American University. I'm a writer and I do a lot of consulting work on basically teaching people how to not suck. I love that. Come to Highline. We need, we love you out here. Well, hit me up later and I'd be happy to talk through a contract and a proposal. Okay. Where's the president? We do have a few more questions here. Your next question is, hi Lydia, thank you for your thought provoking talk. Through our educational system, we are often thought to classify things one dimensionally. What are some tips to be more conscious of intersectionality in our everyday practices? I would say, you know, it's really just asking ourselves all the time who are we leaving out from this conversation? Who are we including and who is not present? And that's all that I think of. So if someone is talking about how nobody would ever do this to X group, probably they're wrong because probably people are and are continuing to do whatever this is to X group. Like people say, well, you could never get away with saying that to women these days. Well, actually people probably do all the time. Or well, you would never say that about poor people. Actually people probably do all the time. You could never get away with doing that if somebody was black. Actually they probably do all the time. You're probably sensing a theme here. And, you know, the other thing that people say, you know, I've been very inclusive and I think that's the other thing to watch for. The instant we think in any situation, I've included everybody. I've, you know, this place is very inclusive or very welcoming and you stop there. You probably made a mistake because we are never inclusive, right? That's, it's a practice, it's not an endpoint. And we might think we are very inclusive today, right? But let's think about this. And not to knock the wonderful planning that you've all done, right? But in all these events, I've been doing lots of virtual events. How can you access this event? You have to have an internet connection. Firstly, to get an email or to go on a website to get the information about the event. And secondly, to get in on the day of. You have to be literate enough to understand how to download an open Zoom as an application to be able to get in. And you have to be able to figure out cognitively how you can and cannot be seen by the speaker and how you can participate and ask questions or not. And who can't do that? People who might live in group homes where their access to the internet is prevented altogether or extremely supervised, monitored and limited. People in jails and prisons who are disproportionately poor and black and also disproportionately disabled like we talked about earlier. People who have intellectual disabilities that have never been taught how to use the internet even if they technically are allowed to like no one is stopping them from using the internet. They're in control of their life but nobody has taught them how to use the internet. People who are too poor to afford a phone or a laptop or a computer. People who are too poor to pay an internet bill. And people who are so poor that they have to work, you know, three, four jobs just to make ends meet. So they're too tired to check email or go to an event, right? So that's just a few examples of who are people that can't be participating in an event like the one we're doing today. So thinking like how can I be more conscious of intersectionality in my daily life is thinking wherever you are, whatever you're doing, who can't be here, who isn't here and what can I do to change that? How can I change that for the future? So for example, how can I make sure that I might know someone who would be interested in this but doesn't really have a working computer, especially in a non-pandemic, could I go over to their house and we could, you know, get on my computer together? Is there someone who would like to get on and has a computer but has never used Zoom before? Can I teach them how to use Zoom? Is there somebody who would like to participate in a lot of things like this but can't afford their bill? Maybe I can't pay their bill, but can I help other people in our community together help that person pay their bill so that they can get on the internet and get connected to community, especially during the pandemic? If somebody's in a group home or someone's in prison and they can't have access to the internet basically at all, how can I get the information to that person? I know someone, my cousin, or the person down the street is not able to participate in events like this. How can I get them the information? Will it be notes? Will it be a conversation? Will it be a phone call? And it's an invitation to both pause and think who is not present and why in the policy we're deciding, in the event we're running, in the space that we're creating, and how can I change that? All right, thank you. I think that's all the question for today. We've reached our time, 11.31. I know time is social contract, but still, you know. Thank you so much again, Lydia, for being here. I will pass on the microphone to Doris and Betty to kind of like end this off. Hi, everyone, and thank you again, Lydia, for coming in and sharing your knowledge with us. We really appreciate it. This concludes our Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior Week, Democracy For Whom, Examining MLK's Three Evils. Thank you all for attending today's program, and thank you to all our presenters that presented this week. As we conclude, I wanna take a moment again to thank our 2021 MLK Planning Committee, Jermaine Santos, Dr. Daryl Bryce, Erin Mottica, Jody White, Georgia Peary, Gio Marc Panelo, Jerry Ventura, Fuzi Balau, Edwina Fui, Doris Martinez, and myself. Without all of you and your dedication, this would not have been possible. Thank y'all so much. Again, Lydia, thank you. And if there's any way that our audience can get ahold of you, please include that information in the chat. I'm sure there'll be folks who would love to connect with you. And again, we would love to have you back on campus once things get back to some sort of new normal. In the chat feature below, you will find a link to our program survey. Again, your feedback, everyone, is absolutely critical for us to continue enhancing our program. So please, we would greatly appreciate if you would provide us feedback in that link that our lovely moderators are including. Of course, this conversation does not end here, y'all. The Center for Cultural Inclusive Excellence has amazing programs planned for you throughout the entire quarter. So stay tuned for up-to-date information through our website and I will include that as well, ccie.highline.edu. The Intercultural Center will be hosting programs starting next month. And our signature series will continue with Unity Through Diversity Week. I believe this is year 24 and that will be April 26th through April 30th of 2021. So come and check us out. Again, thank y'all so much for being here. I wanted to end this with a quote by Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as he closed out his speech for what inspired this theme, democracy for whom examining MLK's three evils from his 1967 speech entitled America's Chief Moral Dilemma. For those of you who are telling me to keep my mouth shut, I can't do that. I am against segregation at lunch counters and I am not going to segregate my moral concerns. And we must know on some positions cowardice asked the question, is it safe? Experiency asked the question, is it politic? Vanity asked the question, is it popular? But conscious asked the question, is it right? And there's time when you must take a stand that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but you must do it because it is right. Much love Highline family, we're out. See y'all soon. Have a great Friday and the rest of the week.