 That's always helpful in this crowd. And we are in a meeting format, so we can all say hi, see each other, which we find very nice. So welcome tonight, and thank you for joining us. If I could get someone in the audience to let me know in chat, they can see and hear me. That would be great. And we'll jump in and get started. All right, thank you. Tonight we are here for Lewis Gordon discussing his book, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization. I will be putting a link into the chat box momentarily that has links to library information and to links to Lewis, as well as the Before Columbus Foundation. We want to welcome you to the Ohlone Tribal Lands and acknowledge the many Romantic Ohlone Tribal groups as the rightful stewards of these lands. The library is committed to outlicking the names of the Romantic Ohlone Tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards of the lands and do so by offering factual information, book lists, programs, and all sorts of info like that. And you'll find that in our doc as well. The library is 100% not a neutral institution. We stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter movement as well as condemn the horrendous violence acts against Asian and Asian-Americans in our communities. Particularly in May, we are celebrating and honoring AAPI Month. We condemn all these crimes and the invisible crimes that have not been reported. We also want to acknowledge that anti-Black and anti-Asian racism both uphold white supremacy, and all of us are harmed by these racial structures. The library believes everyone has a stake in dismantling white supremacy in favor of true multiracial democracy. And when I put that chat link in, you'll find a link to the library's work we've been doing with our Racial Equity Committee. And they have been working extra hard times have made it that we have to work extra hard in this area during shelter in place. So you'll find all the work they've been doing on our website. And three libraries open. Mission Bay, Chinatown, Main Branch, including our children's Main Children's Center. So very exciting. It is happening. And soon, some other branches will open. And of course, we still have what do they call it? Curbside pickup. So but remember to wear your masks, protect my library family and all of our families out there working. Our on the same page is a bi-monthly read. We're encouraged all of San Francisco to read the same book. So for May and June, we are celebrating Vanessa Hoa for her book, A River of Stars, which is a very San Francisco book. And she will be in combo with Ulitsa Ferraris on May 24th. And I'll breeze through now some of these other announcements, but like I said, we are celebrating AAPI month. So we have a lot more events coming up in the last two weeks. Check that out on our website. Tomorrow we're hosting Alia Vols for her book, Home Baked. My mom, Marijuana and the Stoning of San Francisco, a very San Francisco history-rich book combining tragedy and humor. And this is hosted by Total SF, SF Chronicles, Heather Knight and Peter Hart Love. So come join us for that. Our one and only poet laureate, Mr. Tongo Eisen-Martin will be hosting on May 26th next week. Poets from Mississippi, so contemporary giants of Mississippi, poetry and resistance. Please join us for that one. That is one of our silver linings of Shelter in Place, bringing all these amazing people from all over the place. Also, Mr. Tongo Eisen-Martin has been able to bring us other amazing authors, including, we'll be celebrating Marlon Peterson's new book, Bird Uncaged, An Abolitionist, Freedom Song. This is really powerful book. I encourage you all to check it out. It's available at the library or your local bookstore. And Marlon will be in convo with Casey Limone, who is, if you have not read Heavy, I encourage you all to read Heavy, so amazing. But his new book, or his book, Long Division, has just been republished as well. And that is now out on paperback. So both of those books are just hard-hitting, heavy, long division and Bird Uncaged. Get the book, come check out the talk. And that's really our hugest author talk for summer, so please come check that out. And I can't even believe this summer is upon us. So you know what we do at summertime? We go all out. Summer Stride 2021, it's not just for youth. I have author talks every single Tuesday, June, July and August, Tuesday nights is the place to be at your library. And lots more events. All right, for tonight's event, I am excited again to partner with our friends at the Before Columbus Foundation and bringing you Mr. Lewis Gordon. And Lewis will be in conversation with Justin, this mangles, this mangled. Oh, I shouldn't know how to pronounce your name, Justin. Justin is the chairman of the Before Columbus Foundation and the administrator of the American Book Awards, which is an amazing undertaking and the Book Awards is always just the people that are nominated and when are just above everybody else and they should be. So without further ado, I'm gonna turn it over to you, Justin. Oh, thank you so much, Anisa. My name is Justin DeMong. I am the chairman of the Before Columbus Foundation. And I encourage all of you joining us this afternoon to visit us online at BeforeColumbusFoundation.com where you can support programs like this one and our flagship program, the American Book Award. Today, May 19th is the birthday of El Haj Malik El Shabazz, popularly known around the world as Malcolm X. The San Francisco Public Library very generously was able to accommodate this date for a discussion with a preeminent figure in international philosophy, Lewis Gordon, on the topic of his most recent book, Freedom, Justice and Decolonization. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Lewis Gordon, you're in for some big, beautiful surprises. This afternoon, he is gifted not only as a philosopher, but also in the arts of language and is able to illuminate very sensually and with great sense of urgency and momentum, the issues of our day free of much of the, rather turgid and impenetrable language so common in academic philosophy. Lewis's gift of language is very musical and very charismatic and I'm very much looking forward to spending time with him today this afternoon. Again, his most recent book, Freedom, Justice and Decolonization among his other works, some of my favorites, What Fanon Said, published by Fordham University and going back some years, Bad Faith and Anti-Black Racism. So on the occasion of the birthday of Malcolm X is what would have been as 96th, Lewis has very generously allowed to explore some of the ideas in his most recent book, Freedom, Justice and Decolonization through the lens of the life and legacy of Malcolm X. So again, Lewis, thank you so much for being generous with your time and joining us this afternoon. Thank you, Justin. And also for the audience I'd like to begin by simply saying, Wanikisuk, thank you. Thank you so much, Anissa, for your opening, the meeting and hosting it and also for your acknowledgement of the indigenous people of the area. Wanikisuk is from Penoag and the Penoag many of you may not realize were those generous, wonderful people who welcomed the pilgrims, the pilgrims to these lands, to their misfortune, that is the misfortune of the Wanpenoag. Because on the news to them in their act of welcome they were bringing in people who saw themselves as agents of war. Today we tend to think of Christian pilgrimages in terms of peace, but many don't realize that it is a religion and it has a history that was based on war, a war that took the Atlantic and a war that unfortunately is cast an unfortunate shadow over so many for more than a millennium. Also I'd like to say Halito, which is Choctaw and I say Halito because we're talking about the indigenous peoples also of Louisiana but a lot of Choctaw's are also African American and quiet because I'm just saying that since you're in California, Justin and there's so many people who went on that Oklahoma migration and the Louisiana migration and folks forget the complexity of that and also I'll say Wanikam to some of my folks from India, that's Tamil in this case. We already know the strife that's going through from this unfortunate, this terrible pandemic. And with this in the midst of this, of course we come to something very tricky because if I go even more ancient I could say Hotep, which means peace. I could say Shalom, which means peace. I could say Assalamu Alaikum, but we should bear in mind something's going on when we greet people where we have to say we're in peace. That already says something because if you were to think about the Zulu language in many of the Sub-Saharan African languages, when you see another human being you say something like Sahuabona and what that means is, and check this out it means I see you. It's really striking that we live in times where to say there are people who are afraid of being seen and that shows you everything that connects through so many things we'll talk about tonight from the nefarious force of rapacious sovereignty through the way white supremacy tries to make people who are white deputies of the state to put black people on the surveillance. That's right. But in a healthy world if you imagine humanity's view of walking into wellness there's something welcoming about seeing another human being and if your humanity is challenged for another human being to say, I see you is so powerful. And I gotta tell you, and this is a point if we think about what's happening in the world not only the many deaths from the pandemic but man, you know what I mean? The very fact that we're dealing with so much of being governed by right-wing forces that deny truth, deny reality, but also deny decency. So we're meeting tonight in honor of, you know our brother El Ajmalik El Shabbaz, Malcolm X, an ancestor an ancestor born 1925, same day by the way as Max Roach, I mean, same year. Patrice Lumumba, 1925, you know, these, boy, there's a God, that was a year of making revolutionaries. But together right now, we do lament, we have to do something because everything going on right now is something that brother Malcolm knew very well or brother Malik El Shabbaz, which is the change depends on human action. And Louis, the current United States of America seems to have embraced, I think, what can properly be described as a collective revenge fantasy against objective reality. And part of that has embodied itself in the popular culture for almost a century or more to try to convince blacks in America that we have no affiliation with blacks in Africa or throughout the Caribbean or South America. And the reason why I bring that up is because towards the end of Malcolm X's life, this affiliation, this embrace, this sense of joining and growth with the African peoples of the world was emphasized in everything he did. Before returning to the United States just months before his assassination, he had toured throughout the continent of Africa and met with heads of state in 11 separate countries, countries that had only recently thrown off the yoke of imperialism. Now, this position where he landed, if you will, years later would also be taken up by Martin Luther King that is to say that the problems that were afflicting us here inside of the United States could only be alleviated, could the potential solutions for them would only be found by alliances with those who were suffering under the same ages of imperialism of colonialism throughout, not just the Western hemisphere, but throughout the entire world. So I'm going to enter this by reading a quote from one of the best known speeches by Malcolm X, the ballot or the bullet, and then ask for your response. Any kind of activity that takes place on the floor of the Congress or the Senate, that's the government. Any kind of dilly dallying, that's the government. Any kind of pussy footing, that's the government. Any kind of act that's designed to delay or deprive you and me right now of getting full rights, that's the government that's responsible. And any time you find the government involved in a conspiracy to violate the citizenship or the civil rights of a people, then you are wasting your time going to that government expecting redress. Instead, you have to take that government to the world court and accuse it of genocide and all the other crimes of which it is guilty of today. As long as you're fighting on the level of civil rights you're under Uncle Sam's jurisdiction. You're going to his court expecting him to correct the problem. He created the problem, he's the criminal. You don't take your case to the criminal, you take your criminal to court. Now, I think as you mentioned a few moments ago in respect to Malcolm's vision, he did indeed bring a full illumination to our present historical moment. Could you respond to this statement by Malcolm but also what I mentioned earlier in introducing the statement, the kind of labors that American popular culture has engaged in to divorce black Americans in particular from any affiliation with blacks throughout the world. Thank you for bringing that up, Justin. And yeah, that's a great quote from, you know, El-Mali HaShabazz. There's several things that I would like to say. The first part is to just move through the movements of your question because today a lot of people move very quickly into using terms such as black, African-American or even as we know, you know, ADOS, you know, American descendants of slaves, et cetera. And they don't bring, but each time we bring certain terms, they cloud the pathways sometimes through which we need to move. For instance, in my childhood, when I think about us being black, and I would think about the times, one of the beautiful things is I remember when I visit my father, he would play speeches. You know, a lot of people don't remember that but Malcolm makes his speeches around albums. That's right. So I know his voice to this day or even when I think about in the eighth grade, there was a period where, because I was in one of these busing situations, you know what that is, you know, you come out and you're 6,000 white people with weapons, even grandma with brass knuckles waiting for little black children, you know? That's right. And I remember there was a eighth grade teacher. To this day, I know her name is Firman who said, you know, I think you need this book and it was the autobiography of Malcolm X. So there I was, you know, 13 years old reading this thing, you know? And one of the things we learned in there that's connected to what you say is, you know, there are folks today, when they move through this kind of trajectory, Harold Cruz started this in the crisis of the Negro intellectual, where he created a kind of effort to separate off U.S. blacks from other blacks, you know? But, you know, we forget that, you know, Emily Halchebaz's mother's from Canada that his parents met through a coalition work around the Garvey movement in Montreal, of all places. We forget about Du Bois' connection through his father, right, from Haiti. We don't think often about the complexity of the movement of people through the Caribbean and North America and even the cultural elements of it, myelism, for instance, is through those movements. So one of the things we should need to bear in mind is that if we begin to cut off the complexity, the parts of who and what we are, we're gonna be entering the room one-handed or one-legged or one-eyed, et cetera. He was very much aware of this, but the quote you bring up connects to something I talk about in the book and you may know I give a trencher critique of liberal theories of justice. And one of the beautiful things, and for now I'll say Malcolm because the name's more familiar to people, but as we say the X is because he doesn't want a slave name. And I prefer to just say Emily Halchebaz because I think it's beautiful the fact that he did the Hajj. But the thing that we should bear in mind, and this is what he's getting to here, and we, is this, he's making a distinction between government and politics. And many people don't know the distinction. Government is the instrumental administration of power. Politics is the activities through which humanity actually build power and power could be negative using power to take it away from others or it could be positive empowering giving others the capacity to act. I think someone may have a mic open because I hear a lot of scratching sound but if someone might wanna mute that mic. But as we think through that distinction and it's a very important one, here's the thing. If you don't have politics where the people can gather to put the government into account you're gonna have the tyranny of government. You're going to have a situation in which the instruments of power are going to be unilateral. Now this is where there's more going in that we should bring through from his analysis because you see, what he understands is that actually white supremacy and anti-black racism is ironic is anti-politics. It's ultimately an effort to subject non-white peoples to the logic of rule, you see? But here's the thing. If we understand racism, colonialism, settler colonialism, if we understand those mechanisms as practices of disempowerment, no matter as long as you fight, if you do not take on power, you will be subject to them. So it means if you're going to fight against disempowerment that requires empowerment. And the question is what kind? That's why he says ballot or bullet. But the problem is that you see the history of this country, the history of Euro-modern imperialism, the history of whether it's British or French, the French by the way, love to pretend there's no racism in France. There's so much of the racist language comes from France. That's right. And the list goes on. Their biggest fear, believe it or not, is not whether the people of the global South, the damned of the earth, as Fanon would call it, not whether in this country, black people, not in this country where they're indigenous people and the list can go on. The issue is not whether we hate white people. The issue, in fact, if we hated them, they would love that because that would rationalize their actions. That's exactly right. The biggest fear is their irrelevance. And their irrelevance could only come about if we are sufficiently empowered to make their actions inconsequential. So his argument is about this dreaded fear. And we already know he was a proponent of this, of putting the word black and the word power together. But here's the crucial thing. That now brings into the realm of political action. You see? And every instant, I could tell you this as somebody who's spoken in many countries but also across this country, the United States and across South America, et cetera, from Brazil, do you name it? There is no instance. And Frederick Douglass even pointed this out, right? There is no instance of the improvement of the lives of Le Dagné, the damned of the earth, the downtrodden, the poor, the black. There's no improvement that has ever occurred from the benevolence of the dominators, never. What has always occurred to make change, even when we think about our enslaved ancestors, has been them taking to the fields, them taking up political action, them taking up also military action. We forget, as the boys pointed out, it was 250,000 black soldiers that made the difference in the U.S. Civil War. The Confederate could have won. And we can go through many lists like this. We could think about the island of Jamaica with the Sharper Bellen. We can think all the way through, but the crucial thing, if we think about this past year, really think about this past year because you see this past year is an exemplification of this point. It's not that it's concluded, but we know damn well that if Black Lives Matter had not existed, had not galvanized people to say, this is not simply about governing officials. This is about speech and action in the streets. That didn't happen. Any modicum of change we have, and it's not that we're in the whole, we have reached the promised land as the expression goes, but every action, every one of us is here right now because of the committed political actions of those who preceded us. And that point he's making of accountability because you see, he's making a distinction between legal accountability, moral accountability. Those are all, moral accountability leads to yourself. Legal accountability is to the government and its institutions of law, but political responsibility holds an entire country under account. And that is what he's saying. He's pointing to, and I talk about this in the book as you know, that we need to understand what political responsibility is. Because political responsibility is not about me. It's always about us. And he understood that in the way he lived his life. If this brother was thinking about himself, there are a whole lot of things he could have had very easily, but he and many before him, all the way back through to people at Mariah Stewart, David Walker, all the way through to people like, all the way through to Antony Effemin, Du Bois, many others. If we even think about that point about genocide, that was with William Patterson, Du Bois and others taking the United States to court, with charges of genocide, all of those people's actions, right? We are connected to those. So this is what it is to think politically. When you think politically, it's never about you or me. It's always about us. When considering the events over the last year, we saw that at this time, a year ago, the constant regurgitation and replication of these horrific images of police murder, and many people among the community that identifies themselves as progressive or liberal, regarded these images as aberrations, as things that were taking place, that were evidence of failures or glitches within the system. And it seems to me that this created a kind of ironic distance, that rather than accepting the fact that these murders were within the arc and panorama of the history of this United States, deeply contextualized as part of the momentum which brought this country into being. That by isolating them and treating them as if they were specific events along the way, rather than part of this larger constellation of violence, so-called progressive or so-called liberal political thinkers were able to achieve the necessary distance to try to corral the rest of us, let's say, into this conundrum of Jekyll and Hyde electoral politics. As a matter of fact, by the time we got towards the end of the year, these same orifices of corporate media which were pushing this lynching photography, basically on video over and over again, started to try to convince us that our most useful function within the larger society was to participate in democracy as voters. In fact, one of the most bizarre evidences of this, I'm sure you saw it on the Sunday following the January 6th attempted coup, a coup which is ongoing, by the way, so I don't wanna say attempted as if somehow that puts it into the past, because that coup is ongoing. As long as conspirators who are members of the Senate and governors over states remain in office, that coup is ongoing, but more to the point taking those images of violence being committed against blacks with impunity and then rearticulating it as, look how useful these Negroes can be if they only turn out and vote for the Democratic candidate. Could you talk a little bit about that because Malcolm X, again, also was one of the most sharp and lucid analysts of what we now call the media, then called the press, and its use of imagery and sound in order to motivate political energies into a kind of backward loop. Could you expand on that a little bit? You talk about it in your book in relationship to liberal democracy and so-called progressive American politics. Yeah, there's a lot at work there. But the first part is this is where this is where El-Malik Al-Shabaaz, Malcolm and Steve Biko meet. There are many ways in which they meet. But I've also argued elsewhere that what Biko understood very well and Malcolm understood very well is that because what we're talking about is the logic of what we're talking about rooted in colonialism and the philosophical anthropology of racism. Ultimately are anti-politics because you see politics is the use of power that expands the capacity of power. In other words, it creates a circumstance under which people's actions matter. Now that colonialism, mix of racism emerged because its undergoing logic is also linked with capitalism. Yes. And capitalism is a very inhuman practice because it has already subordinated the dignity, the value of the human being to commodification and profit. Not only that, when you bring in the theology behind it Christianity basically is the return of Jesus, et cetera. But it also says within its salvation. And that salvation ultimately needs to have a subject that mirrors it. In other words, it's shifted the old notion of chosenness which was to be called to do ethical things into the racist notion of chosenness, which is to be the superior people. So within that framework, the politics is feared and you could see it in a lot of literature all the way back to the 16th century. You could, but for a lot of the audience right now it would just be too much name dropping to be productive. But let me just say that there was a philosopher by the name of Thomas Hobbes who tried to look at the human being as a completely isolated creature that's at war with every other human being and that a sovereign is to come over and create order. Just keep that in mind. Now that works beautifully for capitalism because if you think about it, if everybody is just by themselves, just think about themselves. That's how you have the self-interested logic of human nature supposedly, okay? And that works very well if you're only for yourself into a mechanism where although there could be the sovereign, the controller of power that's benefiting a particular group, the individual group imagined themselves like their individual gods. Now, why this is something to bear in mind, this is the foundation of liberal democracy. The world we live in takes liberal democracy and liberal democracy in this framework cultivates a form of laziness through which the people are supposedly to give up their power over political life. And it does that through misrepresenting what voting is. Because if you think about it, we treat voting in the United States pretty much the way we treat consumerism. Exactly. That's not patently an inner of itself political. So what does it mean for it to be political? Well, you see, for it to work as political, there's certain things that Beco pointed out and Malcolm pointed out very well as well that you need to have for empowerment of people to work. Because if you look at me right now, my physicality, right? That's physical, my strip. I now have the power to reach this cup of coffee. I could reach this drink of, you know, this juice. But if I do all that, that's all physically connected to me, my physical reach. However, humanity discovered that if we have language, social world, communication, et cetera, think about it, this is amazing, right? We have to be physically distant. But I never say the word social distance. And the reason is physical distance keeps the virus away. But what neoliberalism wants is social distance because it isolates you. We are using technologies right now to be socially close, although physically distant. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. The social world produces power. This is a world where once you have the social ability, communication, et cetera, this is now why politics and speech are so connected. But it's not speech in the form of just saying whatever I have to say. Speech can create laws, can create science, can create beauty, poetry, music, ideas. Speech creates human reality. The more you erode that reality, the more you disempower human beings, the more you dehumanize them and push human beings to oppression. So this is where it comes together because you see neo-conservatism just wants to have physical security and no politics because politics for speech really to work. You need contingency. You need the new. You need something to happen that may be unpredictable. Neoliberalism hates another element. It hates groups. It wants to look at people only as individuals. But you and I know this. You and I have never been discriminated against as an individual. Racism is against groups. Classism is against groups. Homophobia is against groups. Misogyny is against a group. We can go down the list. So now we come to the big point. Neoliberalism doesn't wanna recognize groups. So it means you can only exist as an individual with a ballot. Neo-conservatism will recognize groups, but it's racist. It then says, but black people and all those other groups are dangerous. Control them. You see what I'm getting at. Both of them are against politics. Political action on the other hand is always about possibility. And here's the thing. When you're really acting politically, you don't know what the outcome will be in advance. Nobody knew. No way Alicia Garza and Petrie scholars and others knew that a tweet, an act of saying to black people, I love you. That's what they said. It was a love letter. They had no way of knowing those outcomes. And many people still don't know the possibilities that will come. So here's the thing. They want to say for us to lock ourselves in civil rights as the vote, because that's a consumer model, but voting itself in and of itself is not where the politics is. Political action is the everyday ongoing practices of everything from the forum that is organized for us to speak here. The very fact that someone understood you need public libraries. It's what people do to create schools when there are places miseducating our children. It is down to actions for clean water. It's all the way through to what people are doing daily in the ongoing struggle for air. In fact, it's no accident that the metaphor of our times is I can't breathe. That's right. When we bring all those together, all of those things are politics. Politics is also realizing that we must take very seriously to know our history, to know that their country's without, they've been a long time without police. And the fact of the matter is it is absurd that we're living in a country where there are, there are urban environments that invest 10, sometimes 20 times of their revenue to a group of thugs with guns when even a modicum of that could lead to a healthier infrastructure and society and people treated with dignity. So yes, that what we need to do is to understand and to the efficacy, the power, the beauty and the necessity of political action that voting is more a part of a both and discourse. It's just like you got to go to supermarket to get some food, but when you get home, you better cook it. That's right. So all voting is, it's just that consumer part, but now we got the real political work to do. We got to get the society at all levels to do what is right. I want to reintroduce a quote from Malcolm X again, returning to the speech ballot or the bullet because I think it amplifies one of some of the points that you're making right now. And for those who are not familiar with the biography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X was a great reader of philosophy. In fact, in the more recently published biography some years ago by Manning Maribel, there was some discussion by his immediate aides and bodyguards of his particularly deep readings into Hegel and Kant, both of whose proper names somehow mistakes or made their way out of the index. I'm not sure how that happened, but nevertheless. So returning to this discussion, Malcolm X again from April, 1963, the ballot or the bullet, we need to do it right now, philosophy. It's already too late philosophy. That's what we need to get with. Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your attitude. And once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern. And then you go on into some action. As long as you got a sit-down philosophy, you're gonna have a sit-down thought pattern. And as long as you think that old sit-down thought will be in some kind of sit-down action that'll have you sitting in everywhere. It's not so good to refer to what you're going to do as a sit-in. That right there castrates you. Right there brings you down. What, think of what goes with it. Think of the image of someone sitting. An old woman can sit. An old man can sit. A chump can sit. A coward can sit. Anything can sit. Well, you and I have been sitting long enough and it's time today for us to start doing some standing and some fighting to back that up. I wanna emphasize this, not because it so much amplifies the points if you've just made, which clearly it does, but also because of the very explicit dynamic that he's drawing between a reflective and contemplative philosophy. And one that involves a re-imagining of the possibility of the involvement of our body in some kind of organized political action, which is part of what you're talking about here too. And consumerism and its relationship to electoral politics is very similar to the way that it now attempts to convince us to know what we're worth, take ourselves to market, to sell ourselves. All of these things are part of the language now of employment, unemployment and our usefulness or lack thereof to society. So I mentioned Hegel and Kant as being part of Malcolm's readings. Would you draw anything from this particular statement about a do it right now philosophy? It's already too late philosophy. And this question of sit-ins, there was a rather sad episode over the last year where some in the Democratic caucus donned Kente cloth and knelt in the rotunda as some sort of kind of empty gesture of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. I think that this is exactly the kind of sit-in that Malcolm was criticizing here. Could you speak to us a little bit about this? Certainly, Malcolm also loves Spinoza. He actually, he had a practice in fact, that every, I always say this to my students, try to make sure every day when you go, every night when you go to bed, ask yourself, what did I learn today? And he took it as a practice to learn something every day. He was a lifelong student. And in fact, that's what I call even what I do or what I call a proper professor, researcher, a lifetime student, but a person with the humility to understand that you don't know everything. You got to continue learning. What Malcolm was saying was philosophy be true to that itself. Yes. You see, a lot of people today when they think of philosophy, they're really thinking of professional academic philosophy, which unfortunately is also suffered from its own market commodification. Man, you got that right. Yeah, most people are philosophers are really just trying to find a way to be marketable. They're not really actually thinking ideas. Yeah. But here's the thing. But here's the thing. I'm the head of the committee on public philosophy. And I've always argued that the term public philosophy is redundant. What is oxymoronic is private philosophy because philosophy by definition is supposed to be shared. It's supposed to be part of the world. If we think of philosophy from its most ancient forms all the way through the history of philosophy is actually most of the people we know is great philosophy by great, I don't mean the megalomantic great. I mean people whose ideas are so precious that we hold on to them as we do for their breath. These are people who understood the most enduring allegory in philosophy. Now, when I teach my classes, I actually begin philosophy in East Africa. Philosophy goes back more than 4,000 years. But part of the misrepresentation of philosophy is to convince us that nothing can be thought unless a white man thought it. And so that's why everybody keeps thinking that a group of dudes in Athens invented philosophy. It's completely false. And then there's the other lie, which is, well, they're the ones who wrote. Black people write, Asian people write. And I teach their writings, but here's the thing. If you go back to Antep, Lady Hepset, you go back to Hotep, I could go through a long list of these folks. Every ancient philosopher had a public commitment. The basic element of philosophy was to make life better. And to make life better was such that every philosopher not only engage with the ideas that made life better, but they all also were engaged in actual material praxis. They were actually doing something. Hotep was an architect, a physician, Hepset, he was a physician, et cetera. We could go through the list, but if you look at Plato's allegory, he has an allegory about being in a cave where people think the shadows are reality. One dude, dude or woman gets unshackled, goes and realizes there's an outside. And then goes back to try to get everybody to realize there's an outside. Now here's the thing, professional, academic, a lot of bad philosophy has somebody unshackled, goes and said, oh my God, there's an outside, gets a boulder, put it in front, and go back down to say, nothing to see there, okay? That is what ideological misrepresentation is. However, if you're actively trying to get people to get outside, that back and forth, that effort is what's called politics. Alain Badou talks about it this way. And what that is, right? If you look at the history, the actual history of philosophy, a lot of the people who are involved, there's not only the metaphor of getting out of a cave, a lot of philosophers, right, talked about prisons. And in fact, there were a lot of philosophers who were actually imprisoned, done time, whether it's Rosa Luxemburg, whether it's Machiavelli, whether we can go through the long list, Socrates, we can go through, we can look at these issues, Suri Arabindo in India, the list is long, Gramsci in Italy. And so this thing, philosophy has never actually been sit down, that has been part of the ideological misrepresentation of philosophy. And the more you make it marketable to just sit down and ignore reality, you'll have more people doing that. Right. But there have always been people who say, look, and this is one of the reasons I wrote a book called Disciplinary Decadence. I talk about some of this in this book. There are people who say, look, if philosophy is about sitting down to hell with philosophy, there's more to do with that. Philosophy, ironically, to be true to itself has to be willing to go beyond itself. And this means, this is why some of the greatest actions, communities of action we've known, and I've written a lot about these people and their ideas. Again, if we're talking about in African America, we go from Delaney, Douglas through Cooper, Stewart, all the way through, they were always, they were building schools, they were building institutions, they were building different ways of doing medicine. It'll take a long time to go through this, but the innovations, right? Of philosophy from the global South, from African diasporic philosophy, from South Asian philosophy, what Dalit philosophers in Southwest Asia were involved in, were always simultaneously the idea that thought must be transformative. And if you think about this, real thinking is like a key that opens doors. If your thought closes doors, it's disempowerment. So we need to, so what he's saying was right on, he was putting a very succinct language, a distinction between what it is to do philosophy as a liberatory exercise. Because if you think about a truth, it's what's the point of a truth that's not liberating? Is that really true? That's right. To imprison people, there's a concept called manipulation. Manipulation always depends on lies. So truth is that as a liberatory activity is exactly the way he described it. It's a public praxis. And we need to get rid of this nonsense that there's only one way to think. You see, there are a lot of books behind me right now. I love reading a real lot and our house has several thousand books. But here's the thing people don't realize, most philosophy isn't written. If you took all the philosophical writing ever written, you will only have a sliver, a sliver of philosophical knowledge. It's like jazz. We have jazz recordings. We know most jazz isn't recorded. That's right. It's performed. Most thinking isn't recorded, written down. It's thought. Why do we think when it's not to publish and so forth? Because thinking, acting, those are parts of our life. It's our humanity. That links philosophy to an expression of freedom. If we really take, and I call the book Freedom, Justice and Decolonization, but freedom requires ongoing decolonizing practices and really thinking, really thinking is also a way in which we actually continue to build and open doors through which to understand our potential as human beings. And that potential is an expression of freedom. I think this is enormously important, what you're helping us to understand here. Also, because it escapes this kind of no-nothing labyrinth that's created by looking at the problems created, the myriad problems created by racism, as if they were purely of a moral dilemma, which is often the way that it's discussed, particularly in the United States, enhancing and amplifying feelings that ultimately demobilize the subject that I'm talking about guilt and shame. So one of the things that happens in the scene in the United States, especially in the popular culture, is this idea that there is a virtue to conflating suffering with redemption. And this idea of the sufferer as the redeemer, we know where that comes from, so there's no reason to lean on that, ends up actually demobilizing people who would otherwise not be sitting down, but as you're talking about and as Malcolm has emphasized, is acting. And that action, vis-a-vis what you described in terms of jazz, is its own movement as a, not just an improvisation, but as a reimagining physically with the body, a new possibility, because as you talk about in the book and it's so important to emphasize here again, is that freedom is not a choice made one fine day. A person doesn't simply choose to be free, but it is constantly something that one must choose again and again and again, in order to do this one must act and explore this element, not just philosophically, as you said, but through these other means. Louis, the time is getting away from us and I wanna include so many, I know we have an enormous audience participating and so I just wanna allow some of these questions to come because I know many people are here to interact with you and so I'll invite Anissa Malady once again to return and read some of the questions. If you have questions for Louis Gordon, I invite you again to enter them into the chat, either on YouTube or on Zoom and Anissa will articulate them for Louis and we can take it from there whenever you're ready, Anissa. Sure, we don't have any questions at the moment. Okay, I'm sure some are coming. Yes, now that you've announced it. Please go ahead. I'll interrupt when some come in, how about that? Okay. Okay. Well, there's something I'd like to say related to what you just said, Justin. One of the things, I'm gonna make two distinctions that I think the audience may find useful. Yes. The first one is when I analyze freedom, I make a distinction between liberty and freedom. Yes. Liberty is just the absence of an obstacle. Having the absence of an obstacle doesn't mean you're free. For instance, if you were in a prison and you escape, the prison isn't there, but as long as you're a fugitive, you cannot appear in public. You cannot be known, so you're not free. And the thing about it, and let's just say you do now get exonerated and you can appear in public. Yes, freedom always comes with responsibility. And the reason I made the distinction between liberty and freedoms, liberty doesn't require responsibility. One of the fantasies of white supremacy is a desire to have liberty without responsibility. And the way I bring this up is, this is why I'm critical of the privilege discourse. I argue that white supremacy is actually not about privilege because privileges can be good. I have the privilege of being able to have a conversation with you, an audience here, those of us who are in our education, et cetera, we have certain privileges. Nobody has a privilege to murder, a privilege to maim, a privilege to enslave, a privilege to rape. You don't say it's my privilege to rape you. Makes no sense. However, people can have a license to do that. When you have a license, a license means that you will not be held accountable for certain kinds of actions. And what white supremacy does is to give to white people a license to do whatever they want over certain other groups of people. And historically, think about it, lynchings occurred where people got together and posed with photographs. The perpetrators are there. That's right. When there's been a long history of police officers who treat their position as a license to kill people, to kill black people specifically and indigenous people. A lot of people don't talk about what's done under reservations, right? When police get on them. But so when we understand that, the presumption, this is why even when we had it videotaped in the past, they were able to get off because it was linked into the notion of a license. Now here's the thing. The point you were saying, liberalism love the moralistic stuff, individualize it. And it creates such a profound narcissism. There are a lot of people when you talk about racism, all they wanna know is that you don't call them a racist. That's right. And it's like, you know, okay. So what? If they feel bad and so forth and they go home, fine, but now they go home to a whole institution that gives them a license to do all kinds of stuff. That's right. And you go home to crap in which they have license over you. How here's the thing now. If you link a privilege to people's identity, the idea that people can just change your identity themselves makes no sense there. So again, it's nothing they could do. But here's the thing about a license. You can be handed a license that you reject. If someone gave you a license to kill, that you can kill anybody on the planet earth you'd like and you'll get away with it. You could respond by saying nobody should have such a license. And in fact, what you could do is work with people who don't have a license to create a world in which nobody has that license. If we look at these things as license, it means non-black people, non-brown people. It means everybody, white, black, brown, blue, whatever, can join forces to fight against people having such a license. Nobody should have the license to degrade the lives of people as we have seen in the Euro modern age. Nobody should have a license to do what we're seeing going on right now in West Asia. I prefer to say West Asia instead of the Middle East. There you go. Right? And so no, there's certain license people should not have. And we can collectively politically disempower people from such license. And I think right now what we saw last year that was very unusual in the protests was that in the past, the presumption to get out there and protest was that you saw yourself in a common cause as the victim of those activities. But that, again, is the misguided notion. In the past, that's why a lot of the constructions of past protests were European Jews and say blacks, but a lot of people forget about black Jews and brown Jews, et cetera. But last year, a lot of the whites were not historically discriminated against white groups. There were not groups who could be linked to people who were, say, Ashkenazi Jews or people who may be linked into Armenians, et cetera. They were people who are now part of a different project because they witnessed, they witnessed the absolute disgrace of what happens when people have a license to treat another human being like one just went on a hunting expedition and is kneeling on the head of a buck. That's right. So, yes, the point I want to add to there is I think we need a lot more constructive language through which to understand what it is in terms of freedom we're fighting for and what are the colonial practices we're fighting against? And among them, I would argue, is the very idea that there can be a category of people of a license to function like gods of the gods of the rest of humanity. Anisa, do we have a question out there for Louis? I think you've blown everybody's mind, but I see a question. Okay, there is a question. My mind has been blown. From YouTube, Dr. Gordon mentions Max Roach being born in the same year as Malcolm. Can he speak to the notion of jazz as black liberation practice, specifically during Malcolm's lifetime? The answer is, boy, do you want to get me started? Yeah, I was gonna say we should start another hour. I mean, first of all, I love jazz. You know, I'm a jazz musician. I play drums and piano. But beyond the question of the technical part of playing jazz, the thing that people need to understand about what jazz is, okay? So let me just give a short story. First of all, think about when the boys look at spirituals and then they began to be a transition where Alan Lock and others looked at the blues. One of the things, first we start with the spirituals of the blues. The blues are remarkable, not just as a music, but as an art form in poetry and as a way of life. Because you see, if you look at every bit of blues, blues defies the tonality and a lot of the logic of Euro-modern society. First of all, blues has repetition in which they repeated isn't the same, which is a paradox. Second, blues uses dissonance in which it, because it points out that in every moment of life, there's darkness, okay? If you listen to Thelonious Monk when he plays the blues or you listen to Fats Waller when he would play the blues, or if you listen to Bessie Smith when she sings it, it's not, they don't sing or play music in the regular pentatonic scales. They bring in between the notes. There's always the between note. And that's because life is richly dialogical which means that when we're communicating, we're always simultaneously life and death, joy and suffering. All of those are at once. But then the blues makes a next move. The blues always has, especially in blues lyrics, a point at which there's irony. The blues lyric always has a moment of accountability where someone, one of my favorites from Diana Washington where she had one of the great, there's so many, you know, Diana Washington was great jazz singer, blues singer, et cetera. But Diana, I think it was blowtop blues or one of them anyway. She says, I got drunk last night and I took my man to his wife's front door. That's right. And then on the genome, she says, but she was a 45 packing mama. So I ain't gonna do that no more. Now, what she's saying is, of course, I should have known better. Now here's the thing, when you think of Billie Holiday when she writes Strange Fruit, or when you think of God bless the child, it's not just about sorrow, but these are songs, blues, that actually say black people have a point of view, suffering, we're not an external thing on which masters and dominators act. We are flesh and blood, living freedoms of expression and we suffer. And that moment, it's like when Fanon and L'Experience for Coup de Noir, the lived experience of the black in black skin, white mask, he's saying experience, we have a point of view. And that point about philosophy earlier is crucial here, because I often bring up that it's not only that you have a point of view and experience, but everybody has the experience of trying to figure out their experience. And the theory, the ideas, the meaning you bring to it, that is the philosophical stuff, that is an everyday people do philosophy, Gramsci pointed this out, Malcolm X pointed this out, there are many who do this. Now here's the thing, there is a lot of philosophy in blues. Okay, there's so much, you know, Huey Newton loved the blues and he called it a philosophical music and he was right, Vico did as well, Maboko Mori in South Africa do. And here's what it is, okay? Because that moment of saying I matter, that tweet, black lives matter, that is also the blues. Because that's only a tweet that could come from a world that's treating black life as not mattering. So every blues performance is an act of saying we matter. But now jazz, because blues and jazz are not identical, jazz is very informed by the blues, but now jazz, one of the quintessential thing of jazz, if you don't have improvisation, you don't have jazz. That's right. The other thing that's remarkable about jazz is everything I just said about, when I talked about politics, political performance, you can see it in jazz and what do I mean? Anybody who knows jazz know that you can randomly, just randomly pick a set of jazz musicians from all over the world, put them in a room, and just count down. And it doesn't matter what meter you count, you could count in four, you could count in six, one, two, three, four, five, six, you could count in seven, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, one, two, three, four, five, six, you pick any meter, don't tell them what they're playing. They will start and you will have music. That's right. Why is that possible? Everything in jazz defies the Euro modern value system and defies colonial values. Now, what do I mean? First thing, the only way they could play that way is if they listen to each other. The arrogant consciousness, the narcissistic consciousness of your murdered modernity says other people points of view don't matter. They don't listen. How are you gonna have political life, speech? And in fact, in my writings, I point out that where you can see this analysis, most of all, is in the history of feminist and ancient women theory. Because many societies would argue women should not have a voice. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, most people can name at least 10 books written by a woman that has the word voice in the title. You don't find many men writing books with the word voice in the title. And that's because even if you speak, it doesn't follow that you're listened to. For political action to emerge, you need to be listened to in addition to speaking. So the speech, so the jazz in performance is an act of listening, right? Jazz people collectively get together to listen, even though there is performance, the performers are listening. Now, here's the next part of jazz, again, that goes against that consciousness. The next part is when jazz musicians play, it is the duty of every other musician when any musician takes the lead to do her or his best to push that person to do her or his best performance. That's right. If you think about the selfish consciousness of egotistical capitalism, it's all about me. So if the other person is doing a great performance, I have to sabotage it. That's what racism is, the history of sabotaging, right? Whereas think about what happens in jazz. If the person is hot that night, you know what you do as a drummer or a piano player or a bassist? You push that person to play even better. I remember I was doing a performance, a high 450 metronome fast bebop one time in the 70s. We're just going and the saxophotos was hot. And I remember the trombone player jumped in front of the rhythm section and yelled, please don't die on me, guys, because we were dripping sweat playing. And we were like, we're not going to die, man. And we, and he just tore up the place with his trombone. So that's the second part. Imagine if in the United States of America or the globe, whether it's South Africa, whether we're thinking about India, we're thinking about Brazil, where the premise of the society is that all of its institutions is to do their best to do the equivalent of what jazz musicians do when they make people shine and flourish with their talent, whatever it may be. That's another allegory from jazz. But then we get to the, there are many more, but I'll get to just one more because I know it's taken up a lot of time, but one more that piss off so many white supremacists. And you know what's coming up. One of the things that, one of the things that white supremacy depends on is the idea that black people are not geniuses, are not creative, are not. And in fact, there's a lot of misrepresentation of history, a lot of the inventions, a lot of resources, all the way through the filament that we're using right now as we're able to light our houses, we're developed by people of color and black people. And you know, on all the way through to what indigenous peoples have offered this country. But here's the thing, man, once you go through Ellington to Artatum, and then when you get into bebop, how many genius level, great white bebop artists can you name? And it's really striking. Could you imagine what it just meant? And I know this because black people tell me it's all over the world. To know that the musicians of the 20th century who are on a par with the greatest musicians of all history, it doesn't matter if you say, you know, Sebastian Bach, Beethoven, whoever, any society are those group of black people, right? Across the United States, across Brazil. And as we know, it spread through Senegal, South Africa, et cetera. The musicianships, there were times where European conservatory train musicians used to hang out in the 40s and 50s and they would show up and they would walk over to check the phonograph because they thought the record was being played at the wrong speed. Because they didn't think it was humanly possible for a musician to do what jazz musicians do. Could you imagine the source of pride that created for so many black people? What jazz is, is an expression of freedom that brings out human potential. And it was such a death blow to white supremacy to the point where the attack on the infrastructure of how music is learned in this country affected. Today, sadly, the people who have access to the material conditions to play it are mostly white. And that is killing jazz. It's not that you can't have great white jazz musicians because I mean, you know, someone like Heath Jarrett or Bill Evans was great, but yo, they're not Charlie Parker or Tatum or Monk or, you know, Bud Powell. And my point here is not about a black essentialism or something like that. It's something much different. And that's because you see at the root, at the heart of jazz is a profound understanding that you have to play at every moment with a sense of dignity and respect for humankind like your life depended on it. And that is something so powerful. So there is so much from a philosophy of jazz that's linked into decolonization and also into any philosophy of liberation and freedom. And, you know, and we have to get now to Cecil Taylor and a little shout out to Naomi Chandler and his work on Cecil Taylor because again, the word free and the word jazz are practically synonymous. That's right. That's right. And I know we have another question now. Someone wanna get in there? We can also permit anyone to raise their hand and speak if we, if you aren't into the chat box or you don't know how to use the chat box either, that's possible and okay. We're getting into that last 15 minutes. So I know, I know Professor Henry is out there. I know he's got something to say. I know Dwayne Dedeville has got something to say. And I see Tidros Keros is here today. Hi, Tidros and there's so many others who are here. See, sometimes people get a little shy or sometimes they have trouble on- Well, since you mentioned bebop, I'll just pick up on that thread there. One aspect of bebop composition, of course, is that it's breaking apart the syntax of popular song that preceded it. So you have this enormous body of popular song coming up and right up to the threshold of the end of the Second World War. And then everything that happens culturally, politically and otherwise as a result of that phenomenon is then expressed in bebop through this recontextualizing, breaking down of all this popular music, reharmonizing, changing the rhythmic accents and creating an ecstatic expression out of a world that seemingly was unable to resuscitate itself, unable to revive itself. And yet, as you mentioned, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious, Mom, Bud Powell bring back that spiritual effervescence and that ecstatic feeling. And I also wanna emphasize, in part, the points that you made in respect to bebop also, that this wave of black genius coming out of the United States at that time, revitalized all of the arts, didn't it? Filmmaking, theater, choreography, photography, painting, literature, poetry, all of it finds itself coming out of this flowering taking place in bebop. It does, you know, I notice, I see that my father-in-law, John Comeroff is there too and Padgett Henry is there and a few others in Tejas Keros. And I bring them up mainly because in their work, there is an important analysis that connects to what you just said, which is there's a tendency when people, when some critics would look at forms of domination or oppression, they, there's a tendency to treat the dominated people as if the dominated people are completely material, as if they were like what the Greeks called hulos or hylos, they're just things. But that's not, there's never been true. Every dominated people are fighting from day one and here's the thing, they always affect the dominator. If you were to take the creativity, as Ralph Ellison would point out in going to the territory, if you took the creativity of what black America put here, or if you look at what black South Africa as in South Africa, or if you look at the Caribbean, if you took the creativity from the enslaved people out, you would have dead societies. You know what I mean? There are people right now, you know, when I'm in South Africa, when I go hang out in Soweto, it's hilarious. You know what people in Soweto say about, a lot of the blacks who moved to the white neighborhoods, you know, they run to Soweto over the weekend. And the reason they go there, right? And in Soweto, they call them township refugees. They come there for life, life. The people in Soweto may be poor, but they know how to live. And the reason I bring this up is this is the art of creolization. My wife Jane Anna Gordon wrote on this in Creolizing Political Theory. I talk about some of this in the book, right? Which is creolization, basically, is not about simply mixture. It's about the fact that the best select, the people supposed to get in the bottom, that if you understand humanity as relationships, every relationship creates new relationships. And this is why in many ways, even the speech in the United States, you know, a lot of people don't realize that American speech or South African speech or you could pick, you know, all kinds of other English, whether it's, you know, the English that's spoken in Australia and so forth. They're always affected by the people they dominate and it transforms them. And so one of the things that we should bear in mind, and if you'd like to know, I mean, I know we're talking about freedom, just as the colonization, but some people might be curious about some of the books they can learn some of these ideas from. They're creolizing political theory, Caliban's reason of revelation and revolution by John and Gene Kamarov, or theories, you know, theory from the global side, there's a long list. But what a lot of us have in common is that, and Du Bois argued this too, and for a man argued this, and Sheikh Antidea, what they all understood is that if one understands that we, that all dominated people are fighting, not only for life, but also to have moments of mundane life, moments of just joy, moments of being able to say, I love you to lie down. I miss you, life. Yes. Those are the things that enable subsequent generations to continue living. And so in the midst of, nobody, it's not that they took being, being attacked, sitting down, so to speak. They're fighting, produces culture. And this cultural productivity, this creativity, this is part of the, this is what, if we go back to Malcolm, he's talking about that goes beyond voting, okay? Even though people, I wrote an essay called Black, on black aesthetic, black value. And it addresses this very issue. The reason, if you think about it, why we need these aesthetic productions, why we need these other, why do we season our foods? Why do we have meetings like this? It's because ultimately, an absolutely uncaring universe, doesn't give a damn about us. And it's up to us. We carry the responsibility of bringing value into the world. And the way we bring that value could be a value that builds upon the creativity and the dignity and freedom of others, or we could have an anti-value, a value that's designed to block people's capacity to create livable worlds. This is one of the reasons why I have an analysis of ruin and disaster in the book, because you see this question of creativity that we could find, look, think of it. I mean, what a title, Caliban's reason, because we have learned that prosperal reasons, not Caliban, but Caliban did reason because as we know, he had a mother. He was on an island where he had a history that preceded prosperal. And similarly, when we look in South Africa, I mean the beauty, I love South Africa, the beauty of South Africa, all the way from the complexity of speech, when you say Oza, all the way through to the way people could laugh and enjoy things, and also the fact that people fight. What are the big disgraces, big sources of disgrace? It's already in such a short time there, South Africans who don't realize that they have a history of fighting. There's this propaganda as if whites just came in and handed freedom to them, just like in this country, the U.S. It's like benevolent whites just came and responded to a struggle. No, no, no, no. The people got off our butt, went out there and seized and fought for and construct our freedom. And we're doing it every day in the ongoing productivity of life-affirming forms of expression. May I say something? Yes, T-Dros, go ahead. Well, would you like to put your camera on, T-Dros? I tried. Oh, okay. It's not letting me. I won't say this. I have always been impressed by Lewis's phenomenological discipline, but he's also extremely analytic. The distinctions that he has established between freedom and liberty are so sharp that I couldn't imagine any other device deeper and more splendidly rich than this with which we could understand the practices of white supremacy. Kudos. Additionally, I think there is another book that should come out of you through these distinctions, Lewis. I could entitle that book, Liberty and Freedom. It's so rich. There is so much in it. And from the depth of my heart, I thank you for teaching me. Thank you, T-Dros. Actually, there's a book coming out next January, but the title is called Fear of Black Consciousness, where I actually elaborate those themes. Yeah. And is this Kim Miller, I think, have a question or somebody else I'm trying to see? But thank you, T-Dros. You're welcome, T-Dros, from the heart. And for some of you may be curious, T-Dros Kiros is a philosopher in Boston. He's an Ethiopian philosopher who's well-known for a variety of things, including his work on the venerable Zara Yaqab, whom I teach regularly, by the way. That's an Ethiopian philosopher from the 16th into 17th century. And also, he has written quite a bit. He writes novels and he has written quite a bit on political thought, human rights. And too many issues for me to talk about right now, but thank you, Professor Kiros. Thank you so much, T-Dros. We only have about five minutes. So is Pajit Henry going to grace us with his presence in words today? Yeah, I think he might. Pajit is sometimes, he's sometimes a Luddite. I think when he turned off his camera, he may have turned off some of the others. Oh, okay. Well. I'll ask him to unmute. Okay. Oh, there he is. No, he's... No, it's okay. Come on up, Pajit. Okay, okay. Okay. Whoops. All right. No, the... Wait. All right. No, Louis, this was like a prose poem. And I did not want to interrupt. It was flowing, you know? So spontaneously. And it was so well, you know, the coherence was so strong. For me, it was the interrelationships between what she was saying, how it all came together that was just so engaging. That, you know, I just didn't have a question. It was like hearing a poet, you know, reading a poem and you raise your hand and say, I have a question. So that's really why I didn't say anything. It just, you know, I've said to Louis many times, Louis, sometimes when you are on, just let you go. And I thought you were on tonight. Yes. So I just, when you're on, I just like to let you... Do your good. Really, it was a great experience and to see it emerge live, like the jazz you were talking about. Right? No, I just enjoyed it. I really did. Thank you, Padgett. One little shout out I could give to you is, you know, related to if we had more time, and I encourage the audience to do this, listen to some calypso. Calypso, it has the blue structure, but the political commentary and the philosophical commentary, including, and also the rudeness, because, you know, one of my absolute favorite groups is TLC. I love those three through a little bit, right? And, you know, they could be rude. Calypso brings it in, but the rudeness is also a tragic comic critique. And that would be a whole other conversation for us to talk about Samba and Calypso, but they're all connected to what we say with jazz, because of course the musicians jam, they get together, and what they could do with the voice and what they could do with the instruments, incredible. And we've got to come back and do one specifically on the music, yeah, Lewis? That would be wonderful. Let's do that, let's do that. And I've had a good experience, a wonderful experience because of the work with the Caribbean Philosophical Association. We used to meet in different islands and different, you know, different parts of North America, but we have had those calypso moments where, and jazz moments, and all kinds of performance, because again, one little thing I'd have to say before we depart, part of the colonization is really respect the value of what you do. And we concluded that if we meet as imitation of North American academic institutions, we're in trouble. So we meet, we open with poetry or with a griot each day. It's to remind the audience that we have to be, if we're going to be professionals in our own terms. And it's very important for us that there's no accident why if you look at the history of everybody who fights for freedom, they do it in song, poetry, dance, et cetera. We always have food and we always, and we do that at the beginning. Yes. Because a community that can lovingly play together can understand even when you argue, it's coming from a space, a place of love. Well, I do want to remind our audience, if anyone came in late, that you can visit this afternoon's program on YouTube, where it is archived and available. And you can start from the beginning and begin in the middle and go back and swing in any direction that you like. Again, Lewis, thank you so much for being so generous with your time this afternoon in celebrating not only your own work, but El Hajmalik El Shabbaz, Malcolm X, whose birthday is today. Thank you again, Lewis. Thank you, Justin. And to everybody who is participating and those seeing it through YouTube, continue your safety and health, but do find joy. Because I mean, life has a lot of sorrow, but you don't need to add to the sorrow. The joy will remind you of your humanity and give you strength, because as they said in Mozambique, a Luther continuum, struggle continues. That's right. That's right. Thank you so much. Thank you. And thank you to the San Francisco Public. Justin, thank you both so much for bringing what an amazing speaker to the public library. Thank you so much. And you're always welcome. I'd love to have another one about music. That would be... Let's do it, man. Consider it. Let's do it. All right. All right, friends. Thank you. And we appreciate you being here, library community. What a treat. All right, Justin, Lewis, have a good night. Good night, all. Good night, friends.