 Just a few words of introduction for Karl. Karl is a staff attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts. He's been a longtime activist and organizer on racial justice, issues of war, immigrants rights, LGBTQ rights, and Palestinian self-determination. During the Occupy Boston Movement he was part of its legal defense and support team. He's a longtime resident of Boston's Roxbury neighborhood. He was previously a criminal defense attorney with the Roxbury Defenders Unit of the Committee for Public Counsel Services. More recently, Karl was the developer. Distinguished lecturer on public interest law at Northeastern University, where he taught a class on social justice movements and the law. So thank you, Karl, for being here and take it away. So I want to thank you for bringing me here and it's great to see all these folks here and folks that are out on the internet. I appreciate that. And then I got scared. I said, man, I'm going to go to the Berkman Center. What am I going to talk about? So I figured I'd start by meta-talking, talking about talking, right, and blaming you for bringing me here. So I said, okay, so it's going to be a bunch of folks who are talking about internet and society, and I'm going to be talking about, traditionally I talk about racial justice about, and because a lot of stuff is sort of rising to the fore today in the streets, on the internet, in courthouses, in city halls. I'm actually, the reason I'm dressed up is because I'm going to be in city hall later. I wouldn't have disrespected you all and dressed like this. Honestly, I wouldn't have. I wouldn't have. I have a thing about respectability politics, and it's like just because I put a suit on, you should listen to me. Not that you all here at the Berkman Center respect any such rules. So I said, what should I talk about? And I was really thinking about technology and the sort of movement for racial justice, and movement for social justice that's existing in the United States now. And I was like, how, how do these two things interface? And just specifically right now at the ACLU of Massachusetts, we actually divide our work, right? So we have a project called Technology for Liberty, which you folks here probably know, Kate Crockbrook, who does amazing work. And I was like, you should invite Kate. Kate should come here. And then we have our, she spoke a little while ago. So I don't want to repeat anything that Kate said, or a little bit. And then I was thinking, and then our racial justice work, we call our Justice for All project. But one of the things that Kate and I always say is, I'm going to do a visual Venn diagram for y'all. So there's our Technology for Liberty, and there's our Justice for All. But the real place that real things are happening is where those two things overlap, right? And that's, I think, one is all of you folks, all of the folks in the street, those things people say, oh, hot damn, that's, that's where it's at. Things like, you know, the militarization of police, things like the targeting and tracking of Black Lives Matter activists in Baltimore and Maryland in general, where police are using technology that they said, oh, well, the NSA is doing this would be great if we could do this and find out who is where and use available technologies to do those things. So I think there's that overlap. So in that and thinking about what I was going to talk about, I was thinking of how really the ideas of technology and also the ways you all, and I'll admit a little bit, but not get myself in trouble. Before I was a lawyer, I actually was a, I did not a programmer, but I did some database design work when I got out of college. That's what I did for a number of years before I went back to law school. So I think of things in that way, in some respects. So one of the, and you can accuse me of being sort of cutesy about this, ways I wanted to talk about it is thinking about operating systems. So let's talk about operating systems. So if you think of what an operating system is for and problems that exist when you make it and after it exists, right? Some of those things are, you know, what are the features going to be, right? What is the problem it's made to solve? And what is, can a virus be introduced? Does it, after it exists, does it have a virus? And what are the bugs that are in there, right? In that structure, if we think of other things, things are not directly things that we think about, like technology, like this computer in front of me, this phone in front of me, this microphone, the folks in the back that are broadcasting this. But if we think of other societal structures, like countries and governments, right? And multinational organizations and non-profit NGOs, right? Those exist in a lot the same ways, right? They have features, they have bugs, they can be sort of infected by virus, right? And I'm going to put something forward to you and I'm going to put it forward as a question. The United States of America, right? If it had an operating system, if it had a foundational, if it had a, you know, a beta release, what are the things, right, that were that? And I would say one of the things of that is our foundational documents, right? And the developers were, you know, generally considered, you know, the founding fathers and the framers, right? So there's actually a Venn diagram there. There are people who are considered the framers and there are people who are considered the founding fathers. There's quite a bit of overlap of those two groups. There's some argument as to which, who some of those people are. But in the most foundational document, right, for that, for this operating system is the Constitution, right? I think that's, it's not arguable that that would be the most foundational document. And before that, and related to it, is the Declaration of Independence. And one of the things, I've never thought about it this way until I got invited to the Berkman Center, but one of the things I think about the Constitution that I frequently talk about when I talk about racial justice is I heard someone recently say at Harvard Law School, so we can blame them. Y'all, but across the street more, centrally, is that the Constitution was the most perfect document that has ever been written in all of history. Don't say that to black people, right? We will take offense, right? Because now it's a thing, feature, bug, or virus, right? Because in the Constitution, so I'm gonna, now my computer won't talk and I don't know. No, maybe yes. Okay. And I'm gonna have to put my glasses on because one of my things is I'm getting old. One of the things that's in, do I have it? Do I have it? Oh, now I scroll through. Give me one second. And so I can tell you a really easy way to remember where this is, because then you can, it's Article One, Section Two, Clause Three. So it's in Article One of the Constitution, right? It talks explicitly about race, back there. And also, when you amend the Constitution of the United States, people might know. It actually, some constitutions, it actually removes the language in some statutory structures. It will remove the language and it will replace it with other language. In the American Constitutional System, it doesn't do that. It just, you add something that modifies language and you leave the original language in and you have the additional modifying language, right? So you can think of that in terms of Code Two. It's like, you know, you comment something out, add some addition down here, or you say, ignore that subroutine. It's still there, so you know, historically, it's still there, but we're not going to do that. So in the Constitution, it explicitly talks about two different races of people. It talks about black folks and what's the function there? Black folks to human beings is what? No, there's a mathematical ratio, a mathematical three-fifths of a human being. And for what? For what function is that for? So you can actually see the answers up there. It's for apportionment of representation. So actually the southern states argued this. The southern states said, well, we would actually like to count those things that we have out there in the field because we'd like to more represent representatives, right? That was not a mistake. They didn't accidentally write that code and put it in there and be like, oops, it was a typo. Someone thought about this for a while. There was a big argument about it. People said one, right? Because obviously the argument, the initial three-fifths is obviously a compromise, right? This was called the three-fifths compromise. Because the northern states were like, no, no, no. Those black things, they are not people. They do not count. You don't get to count them because southern states had a whole bunch of enslaved folks. Northern states were like, well, it's not going to help us to count black people because we're not going to get a lot more representation. Three-fifths of a human being. Normally I ask because I don't want to leave our native brothers and sisters out. It actually, and you can have the answer up there, how much did native people count actually in that, I'll say, zero? Actually, it's still the case that it's zero. But that has something to do with native sovereignty for some positive reasons. But I think that, I point that out to say sort of in this, in my sort of cute analogy in creating this operating system. Is that a bug? Did someone accidentally put that in and not realize what it was going to do? Right? No. That's actually a purposeful, that's a feature of the system, right? And so one of the things that I say when I speak publicly about this in general is that that's in the code, right? That's in the foundational document. And it says, this is the way we're going to look at people. And I think it's impossible to think that something so foundational in the Constitution doesn't affect what we do and say today. Even though that the three-fifths representation isn't the case now. However, there are a lot of questions about people in prisons and jails. Do they count, where do they count for representation? Do they count for representation at all? Because a lot of small communities that have very large prisons, that have certain racial constructs, many of these people's great, great, great grandchildren have, they say, well those people shouldn't, definitely shouldn't count or those people definitely should count, depending on how you want to look at it. But I think that leads to, it certainly leads to what might be today an unintended consequence, but the dehumanization of black and brown folks. And I call, I put a name on that because I think when we're addressing things that in a technological sphere or in a societal sphere, being able to name it is being able to address what the problem is, right? And trying to get where you want to go. And that this is an institutionalized system of racism. It's a specific kind of racism, right? It's a very specific kind of racism. And the kind of racism it is, is white supremacy, right? It's a system that says, and even the creation in the United States, the creation of whiteness, was a thing to say, because whiteness didn't exist before that, right? When colonists, when settlers first came to the shows of what will become the United States, people said they're the Christians and the heathens. And then they had a problem, because they converted a bunch of the people they were calling heathens. And they were like, oh now they're, well we're the people who've been Christian for longer. And that was too much to say. So they said, well we need another way to define us and that, not me, but some of my, depending on which side of my family tree you go up, some of us, but not how I'm perceived racially today. But there needed to be a different way to do that, right? And a structure was created for that. Whiteness was invented as a social construct, right? And they said, we are white. We're going to draw an arbitrary line and say those people are not, right? That is those people, native people, those people, you know, later coming Asian immigrants, and most specifically enslaved Africans. But I think that system, that thing that needs to be addressed now, that in the original proprietary closed operating system that was developed, right, in that system, that needs to be rooted out. That needs to be either reformed, fixed, or replaced with a new version. And subsequent to that, there was a system that was created, right? After, you know, chattel slavery was abolished in this country, the second system of social control existed. And that was Jim Crow, right? Separation of races explicitly in public places, explicitly on public transportation, denial of people of the right to vote, and many other structures explicitly at law, also features of the system, like purposeful structures that were created to separate, to alienate, to lesser educate, specifically in those cases, Black folks. And then the third system, so the third system is more subtle. The third system purports to be an open system, right? Because it's like, well, you can pull yourself by your own bootstraps. Everyone has the right to work. Everyone has the right to vote. Well, except for formerly incarcerated folks, or currently incarcerated folks, depending on where you are. Massachusetts, if you were formerly incarcerated, you actually do have the right to vote. Although no one tells you that, and if you don't know, a lot of times you can't, because you don't believe you can. But the disenfranchisement still exists in many ways. But the current system is a system of mass incarceration that's highlighted by mandatory minimum sentencing structures, that's highlighted by the war on drugs, that's highlighted by the war on immigrants. And when I talk about the war on immigrants, I always say one thing, and I think it's particularly poignant here in Massachusetts. When we talk about the war on immigrants, and I'm not going to say his name, but the presidential candidate that's running, is when we talk about the war on immigrants, it isn't all immigrants. Because I went to law school at the University of Wisconsin, and up until that point, that was in 2004. In 2004 and before, the most likely country of origin for someone who's an immigrant to the state of Wisconsin is where? No. Canada, just geographically, borders. It's like they come across the border, and you can't tell. You can't find them unless sometimes you can hear their accents. You're like, oh my god, you're not from here. They say flag or something, and you're good lord. There are immigrants among us. So all respect to the Canadians and their prime minister, and their native people, I'll say. But in nobody ever, not once, and that was in 2004, 2005, where all the immigrant rights protests, uprising, people really coming out in the streets, people saying undocumented and proud, and a lot of organizing here in Massachusetts, nobody, not ever, not once was saying that Canadians are bringing in disease, that Canadians are bringing in weapons. I'm sure that there were some Canadians that committed crimes. Those weren't splashed on the tabloids and said, what must we do? We must deport them. They're taking all of our jobs. That's never been said, not ever, maybe it has been in one place. Someone tweeted it once, somewhere, probably, go find it. But it isn't the common conversation. Who is it? It's Mexicans. How many Mexicans are there in Wisconsin, or Mexican-Americans or Latinos? Not that many, but that was the commentary. And the same thing, we're in Boston. I'm pretty sure there are some Irish people that came here as immigrants. I'm pretty sure there are some undocumented folks, and good for them. That's great. That's awesome. But that isn't the part of the conversation. The part of the conversation is immigrants of color. And that structure fits into the feature that was built in a long time ago, that there's a system of white supremacy, there's a system of racism that says, those are brown and black people, don't like them, can't afford them, don't need them, don't want them. And here's everybody else, the actual people who deserve the things in this country, because they stole it first. Right? Like, that's the structure, right? And I think that's the thing that we have to address. That's the thing we have to address. So that being the background, I wanted to talk about sort of where we are today. And I think I said, when you asked me for a name, I said black 2.0, because that sounded cool. And it made all you come here. You've been tricked. But I think really what's happening today is that it's a new day. People are doing, people always ask me if I'm hopeful. And I'm like, have you seen young black people, mostly women, a lot queer, in the streets fighting for justice and not really respecting the rules that have been laid down by their forebears? That's happening. That's happening on the internet. That's happening right now as we speak. And people are doing really amazing things and challenging hegemony in ways that haven't been challenged before. And also using technology to do that. So here's where I give the big shout out to Facebook. Everyone's looking at me like, what? Black Lives Matter started where? No. Facebook. Everyone's like, damn. I didn't have to start on Facebook. But it started on Facebook, right? So Alicia Garza, an activist in an organizer, an incredible person in the San Francisco Bay Area. And also, I get trick questions. Sorry, I set you up with a trick question. I'll do another trick question. Around what incident did it start? Some people want to say Ferguson, right? You might think that. I would say it's the time I thought that. Because it seemed to come to the fore. But it was after the verdict in the Trayvon Martin killing. Alicia Garza penned this incredibly powerful piece and saying, do our lives matter? Are we human beings? Do Black Lives Matter? So that was just a piece in one of the sentences she wrote. Someone she knew took that and put a hashtag in front of it. So that's the second founder of Black Lives Matter. Because three people are accredited. Right? So another Black woman put a hashtag in front of it and on Twitter said, hashtag Black Lives Matter. And then, did the third step and said, hey, in real life, we should do this on the streets. We should do this in our communities. We should do this in New York. We should do this in Oakland. We should do this in Cleveland. We should do this in Miami. And started steps to start organizing people. And now we have. There's Black Lives Matter Cambridge. There's Black Lives Matter Boston. There's Black Lives Matter New Bedford in Springfield in Worcester. And people doing things, like interrupting presidential candidates, bringing conversations to the fore that have in the last 50 years not been conversations. But that is Facebook, Twitter, and then also coast to coast. Because those three women are Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrice Cullors are in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York. And also, none of those things are Ferguson or St. Louis. A lot of people think like Black Lives Matters, it started in Ferguson. That was sort of the multiplier to make it a bit of a function. That was the multiplier because while that conversation was just starting, right? What happened is Black Lives Matter, I'll call that the Ferguson. If I was doing this as a Venn diagram, I would sort of be like, here's the Black Lives Matter circle. Here's the, what I'll call the Ferguson rebellion circle. So Mike Brown is, I will say murdered, because a lot of times people say Mike Brown died. Sometimes people say Mike Brown was killed. I say Mike Brown was murdered. Killing someone is not against the law, right? Many killings that happen are not illegal, right? People drop nuclear weapons on countries and kill 200,000 people, legal, right? People go to war, legal. Someone defends themselves and self-defense, legal killing. But a criminal killing and illegal killing is a murder. I always am explicit about saying that Mike Brown was murdered, right? So Mike Brown was murdered by Darren Wilson. That is covered up and protected by police departments and by prosecutor's offices. There is a lack of an indictment. And that uprising, and that happened in Ferguson in St. Louis, and the responding sort of militarization of police, use of absolute brute force against folks, and the corresponding sort of technology and communication response to that. So you have people like we the protesters, or now called Campaign Zero, like during McKesson and Netta, and folks live tweeting this stuff, putting it on the Internet, putting it on Vine, putting it out on Twitter and everywhere else, and people saying, wow, I can see this in real time. I can see this in a way that I never would have saw it before. Because people frequently tell me who aren't in our communities that are affected by police violence, they're like, wow, now that there's so much police violence, we should do something. And I was like, and I'm like, here, okay, so here's my only graph. I did a Venn diagram, and I'm going to give you my only graph that I did put in a PowerPoint. Here's the graph. Police violence over the last whatever, you know, 40, 30 or 40 years, or really, I mean, if we take a very long look at it in the United States, over the since the existence of police in the United States, right, it isn't, I think sometimes when people talk about use the word reform, and they say, well, we want to get back to a point. And Louis C.K. has this joke, and he says, can I swear on it? I'm going to because of respect. He says, black people can't fuck with time machines, right? He's like, because what year are you going to set it to? Like 1950? When people say the way we were, like 1950, I'm not going back to 1950, right? Unless you give me a lot of makeup, right? And I'm not living my life that way. I'm not going back to 1920. I'm certainly not going back to anything that starts with 18, right? There's no way we're going back, right? So there's not a place in history that we can go back to. So when people talk about reforms, like saying, we need to change this and fix this slightly, because then we can get to a point where the Constitution can be respected. That's a little bit scary to me, because there needs to be a lot more change to back to my analogy to the operating system than that. There needs to be a lot, but there needs to be a fundamental change, because this is something that was built with very, very serious structural at the core problems to it. And if you have that, you know, I'll ask you in terms of technology, if you have that in terms of a piece of hardware, a piece of software, do you do a rewrite? Do you do a bug fix? Or do you scrap it and start a new project and give it a new name and give it a new numbering series, right? That's a rhetorical question. We can leave that. We can leave that out there. But I vote for you need to really, you need to identify the problem. You need to identify what the core problem is and then say, hey, maybe we can, maybe it's, maybe we can salvage some of this and we can do some of the structure, but we need to do very, very deep replacement. But when we're talking about, well, if we change specific policies in a police department, that seems like a very, you know, you're talking about a whole forest and you're staring at a leaf going like, look, there's, you know, some problem with this leaf, a very, very specific solution to a very, very broad system of structural racism that exists in this country. And I'll say structural heteropatriarchy, too, because it exists in more things than just race relations. I usually tell a silly joke, which I saved you from, but now you're doomed, about someone gave this speech, I think someone gave this as a graduation speech in a completely non-political way, so I think I've liberated it and used it for this political reason. And maybe you guys know, if you can tell me who the person I stole this from, I'll give them credit from this point on. But there are two fish and they're swimming in a pond, right? They're swimming along. It's a nice day. And an older fish swims up next to them and says, the water is beautiful today, isn't it? And the younger fish kind of nod their fish heads. Sure. The older fish swims on, the two younger fish swim along for a little while. And one of the younger fish looks at the other and says, what the hell is water? And I think this speaks to sort of the structure of us being able to look at the problem and how all of you who have, you know, written code have done this. You looked at the stuff for like a million hours and you're like, why does it equal one there? Can it just be zero? Like, can I just make it, can I, I'm just going to add a line and be like x equals one. And then that will, I don't know where it's getting broken, but at this point forward it will sort of be fixed and then it isn't fixed. You're like, what is changing it? Where in the code is it getting changed? And I think in many times in that structure, you need to look out much more broadly. You need to look out much, much more broadly and say, oh, something is happening in another place. That's affecting this in a, in a much grander scheme than I had imagined previously. In code. It really is. We're going to have a, we're going to have a long, different threads are changing variables. It's all race conditions. There's a lot of things in hardware. Really, we have to call it that. Is it for that reason? No, it's not. No, it's the acronym. Okay. You can talk about timing and what finishes you. Oh, a race, right, right. That sort of makes this to me. I might use that. Make note. Someone tweet that somewhere out on the internet, a race condition. But I think, and so then I actually use that idea of the water a lot of times to say, you know, we're fishing the water. We're acting like we don't, we're like, we're just swimming along, living our lives. We're born here. We die here. Everything we've ever known has existed here and we're like, what's water? So I've stolen that, that joke and used it as a sort of explanation of where we are now. But I think one of the, the ideas to the solution is looking at the civil rights movement and then also looking at what's happening now in the streets. And then I think it's incredibly important because we clearly wouldn't be where we are today in terms of the new civil rights movement, black lives matter movement, the black liberation movement. It's a little political what you call it because some people claim sort of ownership of different parts of those. So I put them all out there. We wouldn't be where we are today if it wasn't for the use of sort of very specific, you know, technologies. And I think among those are Twitter cell phones that can do recording and shout out to the ACLU plug for the ACLU is the ACLU people might know litigated case about five years ago called GLIC versus CUNIF, which created the, clarified that you have a First Amendment right to record police when they're going about their activities. That certainly exists in the First Circuit. So in New England and Puerto Rico, you're good. You can do that constitutionally. However, in the practice, actually what happens in the streets, police do different things, right? So we, the ACLU just defended a case in an MBTA station where someone was recording a police interaction and the police said, you have to leave. And he said, I'm in a train station. Why do I have to leave? I'm going to get on the train. They're like, you're trespassing. It's like, it's a train station and I'm going to get, I live here and I'm going to get on the train. And there was some sort of back and forth of that all recorded actually doubly, trebly recorded. It was recorded on security cameras from the MBTA. It was recorded on two cell phones because there were two individuals who had been sort of aware of their rights recorded that and then he was arrested for trespassing. But it's a proxy arrest, right? Because you say, it's really like, I mean, it's really like saying, I don't like who you're going to vote for. You're going to use your constitutional rights. I'm going to make up some other reason to arrest you. So we're seeing some of that behavior in this sort of battle for, at least part of this battle is about police accountability. But I think one of the things that we talk about in terms of sort of movement lawyering and lawyering, community lawyering, and I think the technology piece actually plays into that very much the same way because I look at my work as supporting work. I don't look at it as the end result. And one of the sort of another joke that I make is when I'm sitting with people who are sort of thinking about these problems is, how many lawsuits is it going to take for black people to be free in the United States? And people look at me and go, why are you saying that? I don't like that you're saying, especially lawyers, like I don't like you saying that because the answer is there's not an answer to that question. That's not a question you can answer. And that in itself is not going to be the solution to the problem. It is part of it. So one of the things is, so for lawyers and law and technology folks, what does that mean for us in the struggle for people's justice, human rights, and basic civil rights in the United States and in the world? And what I think the answer to that is we need to show up for people. We need to see what people are working on, what the important conditions they're trying to address in their daily lives, and support them in their struggle for justice. I'm old and I'm really into movies and I used to watch TV a lot as a kid. And I always think of it's like mash. People watch mash? Yeah. And it's like we sew the people up, stitch them up, and send them back out. And I think that's really what people being able to share their experiences on Twitter, people being able to document experiences of police brutality, and people being able to sort of promote those and challenge the Japanese, challenge ideas that have been out there. So a lot of the things like if people know Black Lives Matter, they know that because of Twitter. If people know Oscar So White, Variety Magazine was never going to write a story entitled Oscar So White. Because they were the ones keeping the other, I don't know, Variety, but I guess I don't know many industry magazines in Hollywood, but I guess Variety is one of them. But they're writing the other story. They're going to say no, it's good, we do this great thing, and all of these people make this decision, and these are the best movies in the world, and these are the most beautiful people, and these are the most perfect actors that exist. But that's challenge in many ways. And in pop culture a whole bunch of other things are challenged, right? Beyonce just came out with an album and people said there are a lot of racial justice things here and we're going to talk about them at length in very deep ways. And then people have responded to that, right, and said oh well, she said this thing and that's racist because she commented on Becky, people know the Becky argument. She said Becky and then I'll say something that's going to get me in trouble. The person who's most identifiable in the entire world as Becky, felt offended, like oh my god, I can't believe you said that. But that conversation would never, there's no way, how many years, before 2000, that that conversation ever would have come to the fore. Conversations about basic things in people's basic lives about race, about racial justice would never have come to the fore without the ability for people to self-publish, without the ability for social media that's instantaneous, that's fast, and that people can get together. You all know this, but I say this to folks who are less technologically aware. I'm like Facebook is, you know, 500 people you went to high school with that you have absolutely nothing in common with and Twitter is, I think people say a thousand, make now 100,000 people who you don't know who you have everything in common with, right? So immediately, you know, now we can get that that word out to people who are like-minded and just recently folks, did you're sealed? Did you guys have the seal? Did you have to change your seal here? Yeah. So what did you do? So what do you do now? What's on the letterhead? It just says Harvard Law School. It just says Harvard Law School, nothing. It's like what do we do? So I actually talk about this to folks in, so shout out to Reclaim HLS, Reclaim Harvard Law School, and then the folks across the way at at Belinda Hall who, you know, did that struggle. But that struggle informed, I'm going to give you a list now, maybe this is the last thing, that informed the struggle that happened at Brandeis University, who were struggling for social justice, right? Those are Ford Hall 2015, so which actually was informed by another struggle that happened in the 60s at Brandeis University, which also informed the struggle that happened at Boston College, struggle against racism there, which also encouraged folks at Boston Latin School to challenge young teenage girl, black women, challenging racism, like very pretty nasty stuff that was happening and still is happening in their school, which informed stuff that was happening at Yale University. People see about Kelham College, they just started throwing monopoly money at the president of Yale, wasn't happy about that. They said, Reclaim, and Reclaim HLS said, shout out to our brothers and sisters and other folks at Yale doing that, which informed, not to keep it in Ivy Leagues all the time, the University of New Mexico is talking about Native people's rights in the seal at the University of New Mexico. They're like, us too. This is ridiculous. This is our seal. This is New Mexico. This is one of the largest Native populations in any state in the country. We're not going to go for this, so people can see, oh, what is it? I forgot the name of the hashtag, sorry. People will be able to find that if you look at University of New Mexico, so just this weekend that was happening at the University of New Mexico. Those things are viral in a positive way. That stuff is spreading in ways that it never would have happened before. Those structures wouldn't have happened before. That's incredibly inspiring to me. I see really young people doing incredible stuff. I think because of challenging this operating system that we've been living under and using tools and technologies that exist in ways that they might and might not have been designed to do. That's intro of my stuff. I wanted to talk to you all, and I'm not sure we're on time, but that's a good point. I wanted to have some conversation with folks here and online. I don't know if you can tell us what people are saying online if they are. Anybody's listening? I actually neglected to do that as part of my introduction, that people can ask questions and participate online via the hashtag Bergman. I'll take a moderator's privilege by asking a question. That is, what is the relationship between what's happening online versus what's happening offline? There has been some question as to, is social media getting too much of the credit because so much of the work that actually makes change happens offline? On the other hand, as you said, this online presence of these issues has had this amplifying effect. Can you talk about the relationship? When people say technology, I always think it's funny because a hammer was technology at some point. Paper was like, wow, paper. It's a great idea. People say technology is only something that was invented in the last 38 seconds. That's a silly thing. When I started doing organizing stuff in Boston, I remember going to a training and how to set up phone trees. I would call you three and then you had a chart on paper, other kind of technology, and you actually have to call those three people and they call three more people. It would take an hour and we would have 500 people would be contacted like, this thing is going to happen. We're going to do this event. We're going to do this protest. We're going to do this blockade. That's not a lot different. It's like the structure, okay, now it's, then it was phone tree, then it was people might have done facts, like people send out a bunch of like blast facts. People would have facts less than, say, send to 50 people. You could use a ball of paper and it would be stinky thermal paper. But now it's, whatever, it's Twitter and it's email and it's YouTube and it's Vine and it's Facebook and it's Snapchat, but I'm too old for Snapchat. But people doing those things in ways just with more technology and then people say, this is because of Twitter, which I just said, so I apologize. The structures would have happened. It would have happened in different ways. But I always say, it's in situations where there is oppression, there is going to be resistance. That's going to happen. And that pendulum swings and swings back in the sort of mid 80s. It wasn't so, for some things, it wasn't so good for some things. It was really good. I think folks talking about AIDS activism and AIDS HIV stuff were really rebelling because the feelings of the oppression and the, you know, the government's saying, we're not even going to talk about this. People did push back against that. But you see that pendulum swing, right? And it's usually like a generation and a half. In the 60s, we didn't have any of this, but we did because we set up our own newspapers in the south. We use what was called the wide area telephone service, lots lines. So that you didn't pay for each call. You paid a monthly fee and you could call within that whole area, whether it was a national line or a state line and so forth. But it was a question of reaching out and that wasn't enough because on the ground, things didn't happen until that information got out. Right. And this is the question I have being so far back into the 60s, what happens today? And with the voter registration today, it's not enough to have all of these electronic connections. People have to get out and get on the ground and organize and go out and visit people. Otherwise it's not going to happen. And this is maybe a few of the people, I don't know what the percentages know what's going on, but then it begins to spread out in, I don't know whether a mushroom or a circle, but it physically has to be done on the ground. It's not enough to have this electronic connection. I wholly agree. And actually I tell people, I'm like, if you want to cheat in organizing, if you want to really build connections with people, meet them where they are. Go to where people are struggling. And that's how you build, you know, it's like someone could be online and I could have, you know, I know a bunch of people I know by their, you know, screen name, right? You say, and you, all of you have probably done this, you meet, like, oh, you're, and then you say some silly name that they picked when they were 12 on some gaming system. And they're like, yes, that is my name for the rest of my life now. But I think that is clearly part of it, right? It's like the technology, all it is doing is creating human relationships, right? And transferring information. But the human relationship is the most important part. Because when there was organizing for voter registration in North Carolina last summer, with what's going on with the laws there with voter suppression, people came to me from North Carolina over the internet and said, well, how do we train the people to go out and teach people how to go down and register? And I pulled documents out of files that I have from the 1960s that were used in Mississippi and got them to other people by sending them over the internet. And they printed them out and handed them out and started a school to train people to go out and register people to vote. It wasn't enough to know that this was necessary. You had to know how to do it. And that is on the ground. And that is the, as you say, the people-to-people relationships. And I think I'm going to do another kind of really nerdy example. I used to read comic books all the time. I still do a little bit, not very much. But I used to read Green Arrow in Green Lantern. And Green Arrow has all these arrows, like one was a net, one is sticky goo, and one is a bomb arrow. And I think right now we're organizing. It's like we want to have a movement for social change. And I think all of the people grab the Twitter arrow for everything. And it's like there's the other one, like go to meeting, in church basement, talk to human beings, drink bad coffee, and stale donuts. They didn't look stale. But I think people reach for the new tech arrows too much. And using the other one, use some of the other arrows. Use some of the other arrows. I think that's a really important thing to do. And that's great. You have this old file, but you actually did a double. It's like when you shoot two arrows at once. I don't think you can do that. But you use the old, said I'm going to go to my physical paper file, get this old, probably Xerox 73 times or mimeographed, right? Mimeographed 100 times and it's all crooked because it's been copied so many times. And he was like, I need to get to someone and you like scan it, cleaned it up with some really good software and then sent it out. Right. I knew these two arrows. I didn't know if you were monitoring. Okay. First, just great to see and hear you talk. And we met a long time ago. And I just sold you out really bad. Yeah. Eight years old. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about string variables on like Good Morning America. That was community television. It's a long time ago. But we did meet and predicted, predicted like Google auto driving cars in like 1984. Also, though, we met, I think, having a beer in the East Village Avenue D. I was saying 95. Something like that. Yeah. So doing totally different early pre-internet stuff near just just on the precipice. But on the Black Lives Matter thing, there's something interesting as well. You know, moving, I've only been in Boston just two years now, I guess or so, and become involved in my wife's Unitarian Universalist Church that she grew up in. And, you know, you might see over in Harvard Square, the Black Lives Matter banner is now there. And our church in Brookline has put up Black Lives Matter. All the Unitarian churches have put a physical banner in front of the churches that says there's hashtag, essentially. And there was something. And then we have special Sunday school curriculum for my five-year-old daughter. And they're writing, you know, why do Black Lives Matter? And, of course, it takes a lot to figure out how to teach it at that age. But there's some there's this legitimacy. It's a thing now, right? People say that on the internet. It's a thing. But the idea that like, it's not this, it's not just Black people organizing in the streets and having in their spaces, it's become part of the vernacular or the thing that you can talk about sets that like a mostly white Unitarian church puts up a big giant. I mean, this is a permanent sign. This isn't like a banner we're putting up for a week. This is up. So that's been, I've been, I was more skeptical until that started happening. Now this is, you know, Boston Unitarian Churches. We'll see if we get to other churches, some Catholic churches where I grew up in California, I hope maybe someday. I'll just say, I thought you're actually going to say this. So I actually just spoke at Concord, the Unitarian Church in Concord. They had their sign ripped down in Jamaica Plain, Jamaica Plain. Twice they had the Unitarian Church that had twice had their sign ripped down. Oh, no, that's that's not a Unitarian Church. It's the other. Yeah. And then I live currently in Coppinscourt in Dorchester, which is a Black neighborhood. And my neighbor had a Black Lives Matter sign that I had given them a white couple had their sign burned. So I'm just going to say this in Blackboss in the blackest part of one of the blackest parts of Boston had a sign had a symbol in front of their house burned, which has a lot of to it. It also was like a kind of it was like one of those election signs, like it's kind of it's very plasticky. And so it's not like, you know, paper, it wasn't just like you light it and it burns. So it's like you have to spend some time burning and also when it burns, it's nasty. So but I think there's a positive to this because when people see this, all of those communities, right? So this happened in Bedford. I spoke at Exeter synagogue in Bedford. They were like, Oh my God, people are stealing people's signs in Concord. They ripped down a sign in Jamaica Plain. They number of times ripped down a sign. And this thing happened in Dorchester and people. And then this thing happened in Harvard. People know that the black tape thing, right? And everyone's like, I can't believe it happened here. And everyone else is sitting in the corner, all the black people are like, Oh yeah, really, you're surprised because I'm surprised that you're surprised. Right. That's what we're surprised about because and I actually spoke at a conference with some folks after while that thing was happening at Harvard. And someone said, Well, it wasn't anyone from Harvard. And I said, Have you? So you all know, because you've walked through the hall. I'm like, if I said, Okay, walk me through the hall and point to point the black faculty to me. Some of those pitch, whatever, this isn't a commentary on those people, but it's like some of those people you wouldn't know because they're black and white pitchers. Some people are light skinned. Some people have different hair textures. And you'd be like, Well, maybe and race is an indistinct thing anyway. But you wouldn't know the person or people who put the tape on knew very specifically. That means they knew who those people were. However famous all of those people think they are. They're not that famous that the average person walking down the street in Cambridge is like, I know every one of these people, right? Some of those people you might know the average person and doesn't know who those people are. It was someone in here. So I was saying, look, you don't know if it was faculty, administration and or students. And someone just looked at me and was like, faculty? Like, look, somebody did it. Somebody did it, right? There are hate websites, right? There's this thing called Royal Asses, which is like a hit piece website for all of these young activists have come mostly activists of color and their allies at Harvard like that exists. That's because there are people with very deep running white supremacist attitudes who want to spend their time attacking people who are standing up for justice, right? And I think that thing, actually in movies you call it name evocation, name evocation. Like when you say the name of Baltimore, something, I can't remember what happened. Something happens when you say Baltimore's name. And like Beetlejuice, when you say Beetlejuice, he either disappears or comes. There's also, there's something, there's something you're not supposed to say in Game of Thrones. It's like one of the characters, the Lord of Lights, other person. Like if you say it, it's bad and you get, you die or whatever. But this is the same thing with racism and white supremacy. Like when you say it, it wakes up from the corner, it comes out and it like kills you, breeds fire and rips your sign down. But the great thing about that is now the battle has been joined. Now it's on. Now it's like, okay, look, you want to deny that there's racism at Harvard Law School? Where did the tape come from? Well, there are people who say like, oh well, those young people did it because they're seeking attention. But that's hardly believed except by people who are of that mindset. But I think there's really bringing that out. I think the signs have done this, right, that people now who want to keep the old, you know, repressive structure in place are have to, because before they were just like, we like it the way it is. We like hetero patriarchy. We like the class structure. And we like the racism because we're the beneficiaries of it. Or we're too afraid to say anything. And now it's like, it's out in the open. Oh, I just saw this in the morning. Yeah. But going back to the situation in Georgetown University, where they sold, I guess, 100, 200 slaves or something to that effect to basically pay out to get the school back to track and it's got a nice some momentum. They were on public radio yesterday. And apparently that's going to trigger a lot of like all the Belinda Hall kind of things. And I think it is like amazing. Someone said that there are sort of two just very briefly about that is if we start doing this, we're gonna have to change the name of everything. And I was like, sipping my tea. So one someone said that, but there was a killing of a sheriff's deputy, you know, someone just in a criminal act, someone killed a sheriff's deputy in Texas about six or seven months ago. The county attorney, the prosecuting attorney for the county and the sheriff came out in the news. And this woman reactionary ultra ultra conservative, like just brain saturated with the water of white supremacy, she gets on TV and it's like, and she says, this is Black Lives Matter, like, like Black Lives Matter activists did this. Pretty sure I don't know that guy didn't see him in a meeting. So she said, and then she says, but she says, the singularly most true statement of the movement that I've heard anyone ever say, she gets on TV and says, and she's just ranting and she's like, this is what happens. People don't respect law enforcement. And she leans into the mic and says, these people are trying to change the very fabric and structure of the culture of the United States. And I was like, you're damned right. I was like, I was, I was watching, I'm like, this lady's crazy. What did she talk about? Oh my God, I can't believe her. And then I went, yes, that's right. That's your 100% right. But the thing is to her, that is the most terrifying thing to the rest of us. We're like, yes, that is your 100% correct. That is absolutely, we're trying to do no denying it. Thank you very much. I agree. We should shake hands. Yeah, I just, it's interesting that you brought up that. So she's speaking on TV and you were mentioning something on public radio. And earlier at the beginning of your talk, you were talking about the 2006 immigrant rights mobilizations. And in those mobilizations, the key, you know, the key medium is really radio. It's Spanish language, commercial talk radio, where these DJs in Chicago and LA and New York all get together and say, we need to turn people out to defeat HR 4437, the Samsung Vanderbilt, like it's going to be totally nuts. It criminalizes even being undocumented. And that's the key mechanism that turns out millions of people around the country in the largest coordinated street protests in U.S. history, actually. And so I think that sometimes like similarly to the way that you're sort of emphasizing the importance, continued relevance and importance of the face-to-face organizing and meeting in addition to the social media piece, I really don't think, you know, we spend so much time at Berkman with our brains marinated in, you know, in the internet technologies that we have to not lose sight of what's happening in the broader mass media space as well. You know, I talk about that in terms of processes of transmedia mobilization, so thinking about the way that all these movements actually work across multiple platforms, and that's what's most effective and powerful. But it also has the flip side, which is that, you know, the people who are, you know, people who are going out there saying, you know, Black Lives Matter, activists are, you know, are horrible people and are cop killers and this type of stuff, like, they're not just saying it on, you know, some tumbler somewhere. They're saying it on nationally broadcast, you know, television networks and satellite radio networks, and they have millions of people who believe whatever the fuck they say because they say it enough times and they have a big enough microphone. So I wonder, yeah, I mean, if you could talk a little bit about that too, sort of the relationship between these different channels of media and the continued relevance of the mass media platforms, even as we're excited by the affordances and possibilities of the network to communication. They're also saying it on that vile racist rank stuff on Pinterest. I was like, I stumbled across this and I'm like, holy god, I didn't know this was possible, really. I was looking for something because I was looking for like a graphic that a different, an ACLU chapter had done and I was like, oh, and it brought me to, it just ducked up, go, search I did, brought me to Pinterest and I was like looking and I'm like, and I saw, and I was like, what is this? And I looked and it was like, I'm racism, like, wow, you can look at shoes and wedding dresses and like clan material. But I think it's important, I think it is the same thing as saying which hour are we picking? Is it the church basement? Is it a community newspaper? Is it art? Is it flyers? Right? And I keep telling people that. I'm like, look, when people, a lot of things that people do in others, I'm really interested in this and you call it trans media, say what you said again, trans media globalization. I'm gonna use that too. But I think I'm a big proponent of like club flyers. I'm like, because have you ever seen you go to a club and there's 5,000 people there? They got there somehow, right? And the old school way is someone, someone somewhere handed them a small, a quarter sheet of paper and they looked at it and they're like, this has the information. This has a cool picture on it. It's like Instagram in physical sense. And I think, you know, that happens in a barbershop, right? In the black and brown community, a lot of stuff happens in the barbershop. And if it's there, it can also inspire a conversation about that. And that can be a card that has, in the ACLU does this, has, you know, your rights, like, you have the right not to consent to a search, you have a right not to let the police look at your cell phone, you have a right to do these things. But I think from the most, I think we have a tendency right to lean towards the technology of five minutes ago and not the technology of, already 500 years ago, right? But, and then certainly radio I think is a part of, is an important part of that. Danger, discontent with the, the Constitution as it exists. And it is somewhat a document of its times. It's archaic in a lot of ways. Do you have another particular document that exists that you see as a more perfect social contract? Or do we, are we left to our own devices to compose something? Well, I think that's a complicated, right? And then very political answer to that. But, but I, no, no, so that was, that was my preface to that. I mean, most other, I always say this, and this is like the most anti-American thing you can say. Most other constitutions that were written after the United States Constitution, I mean, as a compliment to the United States Constitution, they were like, this is good. We'll use this as a crib sheet. Right? Well, it was, you know, so they, the constitution, which is head utility, but the Indian Constitution, the South African Constitution, I thought someone said it up with Soviet, a lot of other constitutions have, have, you know, economic rights in them. A lot of other constitutions have LGBTQ rights, have crazy of all crazies, have women's rights written into their constitutions. We tried that. People were like, nah, not so much. We don't think that's a good idea. We're not going to write that, right? The Equal Rights Amendment was, was denied. Yeah, that's the problem. They, it's not that they don't see the differences. They don't have differences with the existing language that you do. They might, but they're afraid of what would happen if they opened it up. Oh yeah, I think so. And, but that's, I mean, if you really say that, then what you're saying for those people, you're really saying you're afraid of democracy. You're afraid of the American people. Into turmoil or dictatorship or some other abyss, you know, as a reason. Yes or no? I mean, revolutions obviously, you know, sometimes they don't exactly have the results that were, that the people propelling them intend in the beginning. They end up in ways that they didn't imagine or are not pleased with and may take long periods of time to resolve themselves or they may not. Certainly, certainly. But I think, but also the, the, I think you started with, but, you know. Well, to some, to some people and then maybe less to others. Yeah. And just jumping on that point, I just want to mention that Switzerland's constitution is a very modern document and it sort of changes all the time because we have ways of changing it. But it doesn't influence much into attitude itself of the people in Switzerland, still a country that has a lot of discussion about, about racism, about these issues. Still a bit behind when compared to the rest of them to do to Europe and, and to, to the US. So how much is changing a paragraph of a document? No one really reads except lawyers. It's going to change a systemic problem. I agree with that. And so, so certainly not the premise of my thing was we should all get together and have a constitutional convention and edit the constitution. Although that wouldn't be probably a bad idea. But, but I think really what has to happen, what I say, and this is, I'm stealing this from a woman who used to work at the ACLU of New York, Candace Tolliver, so I'll credit Candace, is litigation, legislation, and I'll add constitutional change are just tools to build community power. Because if we have strong and power communities who believe in, in social justice and understand what their rights are and understand how to defend those, the other things are going to fall into place. And we always see that happens all the time. And I'll just say really quickly, we're currently representing someone in a civil rights lawsuit against the, the Transit Police Department. A woman actually was checking on the safety of another woman. A police officer was there. The police officer said, you know, why are you doing anything? The police officer turned on our client, Mary Holmes, started beating her, started pepper spraying her, beat her with a metal baton, arrested another officer, tackled her and arrested her, actually put her in a car. Another officer put her into a car while her face was burning. She said, please open the window. They, the officer went in, started the car, turned the heat on and closed all the windows. So we're currently suing Alfred Trin, one of the police officers, Jennifer Garvey, a former, now she was fired, a former police, MBTA police officer and the MBTA Transit Police Department. That happened before Mike Brown was murdered in Ferguson. There are, there are like this number of people standing around watching it happen. Everyone is just flinching back and they can see that it's wrong. Someone, she drops her cell phone, which she was on, calling 911 at the time. Someone picks it up to her and later gives it back to her. Someone picks up her bag and things and gives it to her, but no one does anything. People are just like sort of flinching and looking and like, that's wrong. Two years, about two years later in September of, of 2015, a very, very similar incident happened, except this was, that was on the street at a bus station in Dudley Square, in the same bus station, but on a bus. A woman was accused of like, maybe the allegation was that she took a bar of soap or something from one of the kiosks in the station. Police officer follows her on her bus, says, you have to come with me. He gets very physical with her and she's surprised and says, what, for what? He takes out pepper spray, sprays her on a bus full of people. Takes out a metal baton, starts beating her with a metal baton. The woman is also four foot 10 inches tall. He's about six foot three or six foot four, probably outweighs her by 150 pounds. Pepper sprays her, beats her with a metal baton, and then takes out a nine millimeter semi automatic pistol and has it pointed at her. And the people on the bus, and this is a very viewed, this video was viewed like numbers of hundreds of thousands of times. The people on the bus are, you can see there's a person videotaping, there's also 10 other cameras out. And they're like, you put that gun away, put your gun away. You should be ashamed of everything yourself. Put the gun down. And he does. The Constitution didn't change. The law, nothing changed about the law. What changed is people's cultural attitudes to say, we're not going to take this shit anymore. You cannot point guns at people on a bus. The first thing you teach someone when you teach someone about a gun is if you take out a gun, you should be prepared to shoot it. The second thing you teach someone about a gun is if you shoot someone, you need to be prepared to shoot everything behind that person. Because if I'm not going to do it hand gesture in this room, but if I have a gun and I pointed it at someone in this room, people are like butter to a bullet, right? It's just going to go through you, right? And it's going to go through the person who's behind you, like certainly, like it's not going to stop, right? And it's probably going to go through that wall. So if you're a police officer and you're in a bus station, in a black neighborhood, in the middle of the day, right? And if the bus is full of people, it would be insane to do that, to do what he did. But that community of people and there was an activist, someone who's part of the movement was on that bus. There was another activist on the sidewalk who saw most of this happen. They followed, they actually, I was at Harvard at the time, someone texted me and said, this thing just happened. We're going to go to the Roxbury police station. And I said, no, no, no, if it's MBTA, they're going to be over by South Bay, a different police station. They're like, okay, we're going to go. They don't know this woman at all. They went and they bailed her out, right? And then she said, I don't know who you are, but I'm hungry. They were like, let's go to the Victoria Diner. It's always open. We'll go there. We met with that two ACLU lawyers, me and another lawyer went and met with her there. Shout out to Rahsaan Hall. We met with her, talked to her. And that's a different thing. That would not have happened. A little bit technology and social media, a little bit community training, people meeting, talking about cop watch, saying you have a right to record the police. Shout out to Sarah Wunch, the attorney at the ACLU, who litigated the Glick case with the law offices of Howard Friedman and the attorney David Milton, who litigated that case. All of those things played together. And it's a new day. You don't beat up folks for no particular reason. You don't pull all our guns on people. That is done. That was a different day. Like the prosecuting attorney in Texas said, it's like we're changing the very fabric of the way this society works. And that's a different one, right? People are challenging police authority in ways, unjust police authority, in ways that people have never done in the past. What's going on? Yes. And what control does the person who records it have before it's shared and uploaded? And all of that. And also, what were your thoughts about the recent New York Times piece about police practices in Portland? Oh, I thought you were going to ask me a different New York Times piece. But did people see the New York Times piece that did video of police incidences and they showed a close-up and then they did a zoom out to see what do you think happened here? And they showed a very close-up view and then a very far view. But as to, wait, your first question about, I'm sorry. Oh, the app. So it's a number of apps. So ACO has different affiliates in different states. The ACO of Massachusetts currently does not have an app to do this because there's a bunch of concerns, which I think you guys can think of. Sort of where does it get stored? Is it stored on an ACLU server? Is it stored on the cloud? Like, is it Google? And there are a bunch of concerns with that. The other is a person power concern because like, you know, okay, so all of you go out, you all say, we're going to go cop watch and you all record. You all download an app and you say, I'm going to use this. Most of you are going to do a, I actually did this, right? I downloaded the New York was the first app and I started it. And I was like, okay, it's cool. And it was like my foot, right? Like I just recorded, I didn't, you know, I just turned the camera on and was like, okay, stop recording. And it's like, this will be sent. And I'm like, wait, it just got sent. And so most of that footage was, you know, someone's foot, like the side of the wall, you know, my left, my eyebrow. So there are different ways to implement this. A lot of the apps actually have videos put in that teach people about like, know your rights videos. The Arizona one has a lot of stuff about immigrants rights and interactions with the police. There's the California one. There's the New York one. So we've had discussions about a lot of that, the concerns, and haven't particularly come to a decision. But people can check out the New York one is the most, I think, relevant one to hear. There's actually, I think even a way to submit a civilian complaint built into the app. But I think those are, I'd be interested in talking to people about that. But A cop, every kid has a smartphone. You turn it on. That's it. And if it isn't stored locally on your phone and it's instantly transmitted, that gives you a record that's verifiable, that's time-stamped of what's going on. Yeah. And I think that's, and we do talk to people about saying, I will say though, in one way, it certainly is not always a deescalating tactic for young folks. Because if you're in Matapan and you're like, they're running up on you, and you're like, this is, I was a public defender for a long time, so I've read this police report or some version of it 150 times. Kids in playground, it's eight o'clock at night. The park closes at nine. Cop doesn't like that they're there. Cop goes up to them and they're in a neighborhood that is a neighborhood where there's a gang. Cop goes up and be like, you guys need to get out of here because you're Axe Street guys, right? Get out of here. And the kid's like, no, we don't have to leave the parks open. Someone takes out a camera and records. That's much different than if I were to take out a camera and record a traffic stop or if you were to take a camera out, right? Because the cop's going to be like, oh yeah. So sometimes that can be escalatory. But I tell people, you should rely on your common sense, right? Because you know, maybe this will be better if I do this. Maybe it won't be better. But also, we need to challenge when this unjust authority is being used. We need to challenge that. And that's, historically, it's never been a safe thing to do, right? There are civil rights workers who are buried in the South people have never found, still, right? So I'm not saying to risk at that level, but it's always some risk to challenge, hegemonies to challenge, you know, authorities. And your second question was about the practices changing. I was wondering if you thought that was tied to, like in Portland, you know, they're now working to identify with someone's mentally disabled and working with them. Yeah, so I think there are a lot of things. Actually, someone just said this. They said, oh well, it should be a very different circumstance with someone with mental, you know, who has a mental condition now. I was also, I was a public defender, and I'm like, do you know how many people in the criminal justice system have, like if I would ask them and say, you know, do you have any, do you see a doctor about something? It's like 85%. Like also, whatever, I mean, not to judge anyone's room, but a lot of people in his room maybe have, you know, talked to a therapist, been on some indication. It's like, that's United States, like a lot of people have. And that's not a bad thing. That's a sort of, you know, owning up to that. So I think, should people be trained in that? Is there a different way to handle it? Because if you say people with mental health conditions, people who have drug addictions, you just, you know, that's an enormous amount of our population. It's also an enormous amount of people who are in the system. So there needs to be direct ways. And because of the opioid crisis, which has a better name than, you know, when it was crack cocaine, it was like, the war on drugs, get everyone. When it's the opioid crisis, it's kind of like, we have a crisis we need to deal with. That is racialized, right? And I think because of the, you know, black liberation movement and other things, a lot of these things are changing in positive ways, right? Hard stop then. So I think she's been waiting for us wildly. Hi, I really enjoyed your talking, just hearing your questions and responses. And I was curious to go back to when you were talking about how Black Lives Matter movement started, you mentioned the sort of three women who sort of brought it to the public eye and began organizing. And so I was wondering sort of why women, why now, why women of color? Is it just by chance that this one writing got sort of caught fire? Or is there something in the moment or something in the new technology that is sort of helping bring these voices and empower these voices? So I also stole this quote from someone else, but I don't know who it is, but where there's oppression, there's resistance. It's not, there's no, and there are no, also there are no coincidences in the world in anything, right? People like, wow, that just happened on my computer. Wow, it happened again. If you think that's a coincidence, you don't know how your computer works. But, and I think clearly, like, and just going into a little bit of demographics of those women, two of those women identify as queer. One of those women is, identifies as Nigerian, like his first generation immigrant to this country, considers herself like from an immigrant family and immigrant tradition. One of those people defines them, identifies as black Latina. Like that, a lot of times people say, we're not including this voice. And I'm like, what do you, those people are all of those things. And it's not this comma, this comma, and this. It's more like, I don't know how to do it grammatically, but hyphens. It's all of those things packed into one. And that, I think, it's certainly not that that's a coincidence. It's when you, all of us have, you know, multiple identities in many ways, and we move in the world with different privileges in different ways, you know, we feel oppressions. And I think when the people who feel those more, it's much easier for those people to say, look, we're gonna challenge this wholesale, right? The whole thing. And I think that's incredibly powerful because there's no way this struggle is gonna be victorious without, you know, including all of the people who are feeling different forms of oppression. And I think it's amazing that, you know, Alicia and Opal and Patrice are who they are. And I think that is one of the reasons, whatever, if I was that smart, I'm not. And I was like, I'm gonna write this thing, right? It wouldn't have been as successful because of what they brought to it, right? It's the fire that they added to the, you know, it's the fuel that they added to the fire. So yeah, I think that's an integral part of it. Thank you guys. The third in the series, Inclusive Innovation Series, Vicky Katz from Rutgers University is going to be speaking about underconnected in America, how lower income families respond to digital equity challenges. That'll be on the 19th. Thank you so much.