Hi, everyone, Sophia Bush here. Welcome to work in Progress, where I talked to people who inspire me about how they got to where they are and where they think they're still going. Good day Whip Smarty's Today, we're going to depart from her normal schedule and we're actually going to re air a podcast that came out last year. Back in August of twenty nineteen, I was lucky enough to interview Dr Molina Abdullah. She is a recognized expert on race, gender, class, and social movements. She was a founding member of Black Lives Matter and continues to serve as a Los Angeles chapter leader. She is a womanist, a scholar and activist, a mother, and a friend. She is an incredible author, and she is a person that I learned an incredible amount from in terms of how to show up disparity in the system and what we can all do about it. In the wake of continued police brutality, in the wake of understanding that police brutality is a public health crisis, and in the wake of horrific videos like that of the death of am On Hereby, the murder of George Floyd, and in our understanding that Brianna Taylor, an E m T first responder caring for COVID patients, was executed by police in her apartment. We have work to do, we have things to confront. I say we because I am including myself as a white woman, and my hope is that all of you will join us today to listen to this episode as we re air it with no ads, just because we know it is the right thing to do. You won't hear from sponsors. You will just hear from Dr Abdulah as she answers my questions, and there are questions that I imagine many of you have as well. So please show up, listen up, and learn from the experts how we can all speak up because people are dying and it's our job to do something about it. I really appreciate all of you, and I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Dr Molena Abdellah. So I want to jump right into something that we were talking about before I realized I should have pushed record. There's an article in the Land magazine and they wrote that you have quote become the scourge of the l A p D. A co founder of the Los Angeles Chapter of Black Lives Matter and a member of the group's national leadership team. You are perhaps the most vocal, visible, and effective critic of law enforcement in all of Los Ange to us, for the past four years, you have organized the grieving families of people killed by the police or who died in police custody into a formidable group of advocates seeking deep changes to policing in l A. And to me, that reads as a very high compliment me too, Like I was like, how the word score just so charged? But does it feel kind of like a badge of honor at this point? Absolutely? Absolutely when we think about what l A p D is. You know, I love the idea that I'm one of the most vocal critics. Right, they need to be criticized, they need to be transformed, and that only comes by lifting our voices and doing work to do that. So yeah, yeah, that's a that's a high enner. Yeah, and prep for this going through and looking at the stats of the number of people who die at the hands of the police in this city and how it's higher than in cities like Chicago, It's higher than in cities like New York. It's it's something that I don't know that everyone is really aware of what what a kind of crisis for the citizenry of l A. This problem is. And it's an interesting topic to discuss because what I realized is that so often in circles like our overlapping circles were analyzing the problem of a system, and in other circles where this topic comes up, people really feel personally attacked. It turns into while my uncle's a cop and is a good guy, or you know, there's a lot of people who sacrifice to to be in uniform, whether it's in the police force or military service or whatever. And I'm curious because of your level of expertise at looking at the brokenness of a system and the historical problems of a system that have been passed down to modern day that I think so many people aren't aware of. And I want to get into that with you too. How do you get people to analyze the system and what the system does to even the quote good guys who volunteer, who gets swept up in it? That's a huge question. Um. I think number one, we start with the people who are most directly impacted. And so for Black Lives Matter, you know, um, A lot of people think that, like the term black lives matter is meant for non black folks to see our humanity, but it's not. It's black lives matter is a rallying cry. It's for black people to understand our own power. And black people, I don't think any black person I know is in any way um duped into believing that the police are here to protect and serve us. Right, So I think getting people to stand up, getting my people to stand up first, right, is hugely important. Right. So there's not a whole lot of convince thing that needs to be done other than you know, policing as we know it hasn't always been and so that means it can be changed, right, Policing that as we know it is a system that somebody invented, and we're people who can disrupt that. And so I think that that's the biggest part is recognizing our own power. We're talking about systems and structures and institutions. But I think for black people in regular neighborhoods like I live in the Crenshaw District, right, black people in my neighborhood, it's not we don't have to think about structures and institutions and systems in like some theoretical way. You know what it means when UM, the current l a p D Chief Michael Morris, says he wants police on every street corner, at every bus stop, at every church pew and every bar stool, and we know that's a bad thing. Like when you see UM now on Crenshaw you usually see UM. You're starting to see like two officers per bus stop just standing there, like with their hands on their belts. That feels like an occupation. It does not make us feel safe. And so we don't have to explain the system to other black people because we all feel the same thing. And that's not to essentialize us, but I think that our collective experiences with police, you know, tell us and inform us. And I think that kind of wisdom and that kind of expertise is the most valuable. Yeah. Wow, I'm just I'm just thinking. I find that I sit when I when I hear you speak, and I ingest and then I'm like, there's gonna be all this air in this interview and my editor is going to be like, why isn't she talking? But because I can't, so can we walk back? I'd like to know about how the mission as Black Lives Matter and Black Lives Matter l A began because you have been an advocate, You are an organizer, You are a professor, sir, you are an academic, and I'm a mama and your yes two wonderful kids, and your face lights up on you talk, and I have so much fun when I read profiles of you. There's always like a mention of what the kids are up to, and I love it because I feel like I'm I'm getting the picture painted. But I'm curious how this all began, because you know, I became aware of you already as this leader in the movement and as an advocate and and for people listening. We finally got to meet years ago at the l A Women's March and they were like, Hey, you're going to introduce Molina Abdullah and I was like what. And I remember when I was like what, I was just so cool, and I remember running up to you and being like, Hey, this is crazy. I want to talk to you about everything that you do and figure out how to how to be there, you know, supporting and anything. Can I just run you through my remarks really quick because I want to make sure they're okay to you, and oh, you were so generous. I just was like, you know, there are all these things I feel like it's really important to say, and and it is an interesting thing as as an activist in my own space and an advocate to try to figure out how to be a proper supporter and ally for my neighbors and for communities of color, and and also not to be a basic white girl who says the wrong thing. I'm just like, I don't know, So I asked you all of the questions and and you are so lovely and gave me the confidence to walk up on that stage and just be like, the only reason that we're here and the only reason there's been any progress has been because of black women, and if we don't start following them the way we should have always been, we're stupid. I didn't use those words exactly, but that's the truth. And and then you came up on stage, you know, with a whole crew in your family, and you gave the most rousing speech and it was amazing, and um, yeah, I just I feel like we've been teammates for a long time now. So that's that's where you and I first connected. And you are this incredible icon in the community, and I'm wondering how from the inception of Black Lives Matter to speaking to set thousand people in the streets of the Women's March, how does that all get started for people who don't know the story. So I don't think I'm an icon. I appreciate that. I mean you are, ma'am. I mean I'm just like even when you said you know expertise in this, I'm not like, I'm just I am just a mam, right. I am just I have three children, and I have a million spirit children, right, and I'm a community member, and I'm my mama's water and my grandmother's granddaughter, and you know, my grandfather thought I could walk on water, and so all of that is in me, and I feel, I believe, I know that it's I use a term called sacred duty, right, it's our sacred duty to not simply sit by as our people are oppressed and degraded and killed. And so I have a loud mouth, and my mother taught me, like, never be quiet, right, never just sit there and take it right. And you know, that's one of the things I really appreciated about our meeting is you know, I don't watch a lot of TV, right, so I knew your name, but I didn't. I don't really you know, watch TV, right. But what I loved about you is one the authenticity with which you approached me, but two that it wasn't a one time thing, that it was well, how can we What can I do? How can I use my platform? What what feels good in terms of what I share? And I know, like we have a whole bunch of friends in common, and everybody you know kind of reports back on their work with you, And I just think it's um really powerful and beautiful When people say, I feel like you've never said these words, but I feel like you've said that. It's also my sacred duty. It's my duty, you know, one of the chances we use in Black Lives matters. It is our duty to fight for freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and protect one another. We have nothing to lose with our chains. And I feel like you've embraced that, this idea that we can't just accept the world as it's handed to us, and as those who are in it for greed and greater power and kind of the hoarding of resources. It's expense of everyone else. Right, they don't get to decide how the world is going to move. We get to decide how the world is going to move. And so I love that you've stepped into that. And you know, I like the term teammates, that we're teammates in this work. That's so kind. Thank you. Really like that, just that my chest feels like it's going to explode. And I do, I do identify so deeply with that term sacred duty. And I think about how the fuel I talked to my friend Glennon all the time, we talk about sacred rage. That like that fire in you that refuses to be quiet in the face of injustice is sacred rage. That is a fuel source that never runs out. And I think we have to press towards the things that like that for us. And it is not okay whether we're talking about the hoarding of resources, or disparities and healthcare, or the disparate experiences of different community these and those experiences being based solely on what those communities look like. This is this is not okay. How could any of us not be enraged? You know, none of us is free until all of us are free. The the the ugly intertwining of the oppression of communities of color and the oppression of women that you know, we even in the most conservative circles in America, you hear people criticizing, um, you know, communities around the globe that they view to be threatening or you know that that they say, well, terrorists come from X, and it's like, well, what do they have in common? They oppress poor people and women, They destroy education systems so that they can promote fundamentalist ideology that is dangerous and inherently patriarchal. Hello, look in the mirror, sir, do you not see that you're doing that here in in ways that are unique to our own country and our own experience. And it is it's our duty to stand for each other, absolutely absolutely, So how does it start? How does this stand start? In l A Because you were among the original group of organizers who formed Black Lives Matter and back in what is the landscape? What happens? And and what did your life look like at the time? Yeah, so, I mean I've always been one who's not not quiet, right, Um. But I've also never been a real joiner, Like I don't like joining organizations, right, Um. I always feel like the deeper you get into something, but more like the drama kind of unfolds. And so I just prefer to kind of move and I would be a part of different movements, but not really deep. And Um, July thirteenth, two thousand thirteen, that's the day George Zimmerman was acquitted in the murder of Trayvon Martin. And Um, tray Von was not the first black boy to be killed by, you know, a white supremacist or want to be white supremaciy this because Zimmerman is also this kind of complicated character right where he's at want to be cop, he's a want to be neighborhood watchman, he's a want to be white guy. He's really none of those things, right, but he's kind of exhibiting, like drawing power from his proximity to it, right. And so the murder of Trayvon, in many ways, it's like the murder of Emmett Till, Right. Emmett Till was not the first black boy to be lynched, right, but there was something special about Emmett's story, and there was the power of his mother, maybe Till, who decided to give him an open casket funeral and let the world see the horror that her fourteen year old son had endured. Right, And with Trayvon, there was something about his spirit, like I imagine the spirit of Emmett, right that it resonated like it resonated at us. And you know when they would show Trayvon's face on the news, um, you know, Barack Obama said. President Obama said, if I had a son, he looked like Trayvon, And I had a son, and my son actually looks like Trayvon, right, like not exactly but very feeling wise, right, like same kind of shiny face, same um, sparkling eyes, right, same innocence and also kind of butting. Um. I kind of like, um, a little naughtiness in my children, right, just like life, like life in their face. Right. Well, mischief is so good for kids. Yeah, that's the word. The thing that makes us investigative. It's the thing that makes us challenge systems. It's the reason that movements are born, because we go doesn't really have to go like that, right. You know. It's like the eight year old that wants to take a toy apart to figure out how to put it together could become the next great engineer or the next great social activists because they want to take it apart and put it back together better. And in the meantime they're frustrating their mother's right. It's like, you know, I joke, I used to be a nanny and I was like, I nanny for the best kids in the world, and they were also like tiny terrorists. They were at moments I was like, where did my sweet little children go? You're evil? And then they come back to you because their kids, right, And that's what I feel like we got with Treyvon. He was a seventeen year old child. I don't like when they call him a young man. He was a child, right, Um, seventeen year old child doing exactly what he should have been doing, and his life was stolen. And then the state gets behind Zimmerman and says he had the right to steal the life of this boy who was ours. And I remember July two thousand and thirteen was a Saturday, and um, we were watching we were glued to the TV, and then California was becoming evening, so it means it was nighttime in Florida, right, and everybody on the news, all the newscasters are going, well, the verdict is not going to come in today. It probably won't come until Monday. And so I left the house. I went to CarMax. I was trying to get a new car because my family was getting bigger. And I remember going into CarMax and almost as soon as I got there, my brother called and he goes, where are you at? I tell him, and he goes, we'll sit down because you're not gonna like it. And he said he got off and they're giving him his gun back. And like, even when, and I don't know if it's like the events of the last week, but even when, when I hear that second part it the gun, they're giving him his gun back, just like hit me and I felt this fog kind of overtake me and grab my kids, get him in the car, and I go home. We didn't buy a car um And at the time, my son was three, and you know, my other kids are a little older, and I'm getting them all together, and I did what like mothers have to do. I'm a single mom, so cook dinner, bathed my son, put them all to bed, and then I found somebody to sit with him, and I had these other moms come over to my house, and we kind of sat and we talked and decided to go out. And there's a park in the Crunchhaw district of Los Angeles, Lamart Park, which is like, um, the cultural center of black l a terrible lee and I hope we can get to this. They've put up a fence around it now so you can't get into the park anymore, but at all at all, even during the day, nope. UM. So that I think has a lot to do with the genter the neighborhood that's undergoing gentrification. And there were houseless folks who slept in the park, so they're trying to keep the houseless folks out. But I also think about like Black Lives Matter was birthed there right, Like every protest you can think of began in that park. So we didn't need a tweet, we didn't need a text, we didn't need nobody to call us. We knew where black people were going. We go there for a rage, but we also go there. That's where we went to celebrate the election of Barack Obama, right, And so they fenced off the park. But on July thirteenth, two thousand and thirteen, the park was open and we knew that's where to go, and that's where we went. And there were you know, easily a thousand people milling around in the park, some crying, some upset, some giving like impromptu beaches. And um, I always tell people like who are becoming activists that the first investment you need to make is in a bullhorn. Right. There's a power that comes whoever has the bullhorn gets to dictate the action, right, And so I had the bullhorn, and I remember there was this young sister there who I was talking to when this was her first time kind of coming out, and um, she said to me, because we were all talking to each other, um, well I don't want to be in this park. And me and the other moms are like, well, what do you want to do? And she said, well, I want to march. So I grabbed the bullhorn and I go we all march, right, and so everybody starts coming together and then there's this kind of this back and forth which I think is really important, where some people were trying to march south down Crenshaw, which if you go south it gets blacker and poorer. Right, if you go north, you actually start marching towards Wilshire right, which is wider and more affluent. Yeah, you might right into Hancock Park, right exactly. And so I'm like, we are not marching south because if you think about like what happened in ninety two, they don't care if you march south right, that's whatever, right. So I remember yelling on the bullhorn. I felt like we were running for freedom. I was like, go north right, and so we all start marching north of Crenshaw and um. We were kind of in the streets like that, intuitively for about three days, and on the third day of protest, we had this group like we just called it like Black Community Organizers space, and then we're about maybe fifteen of us. One of them was Patrise Colors, and I was in that space as well, and so we had become really friends and comrades in that space. And Patrice had been in conversation with Alicia Garza, who didn't know at that time, and opal toemtdie and Alicia hit put this letter online and she signed it black Lives Matter. And so while we were doing this intuitive work, they were talking about how to build a movement, not a moment. So on the third day of protest, I remember exactly where I was. I was. It was the first freeway shut down of the Black Lives Matter era, right, So we were marching north of Crenshaw, and these boys, probably younger than Trayvon, decided we had basically adopted a philosophy this is why the northern pattern was important of disrupting spaces of white affluence. Right, So we're not going to disrupt South l A. We're gonna disrupt the spaces that we see as responsible for the murder of Trey Ba. And so there were these boys and I remember seeing their eyes dart back and forth to each other, and they launched onto the off ramp of the ten freeway, and all these thousands of people followed them. Right. And my oldest daughter, who's a hell of an organizer in her own right, she was eight at the time, and she's um, maybe she was nine. She's fifteen now, so we're six years old, so she must have been nine. She goes, come on, Mama, let's get on the freeway. And I have like my three year old son and a stroller. And I'm a courageous mom, but I'm not crazy, right, So I'm like, we ain't getting on the freeway. And so we stood at the overpass and I took some pictures that wound up like going viral. And right after I took the pictures, I get this text and it originated with Patrese and it said to meet, and it said meet at nine pm at Saint Almost Village, right, which is this black artist community. And so we did, and it was the third night, and we gathered in this beautiful artist village that is set up um like an African village, with this space in the center, and we circled up and then we're about thirty of us, including some of the mama's, including a bunch of my students who had called out into the streets, and then a bunch of Patrice's beautiful artists and organizer friends, and we committed to building a movement, not a moment now. At the time, we didn't know what that meant, right, but it was a commitment that we made, like from our souls. And it felt like because we were under the you know, it was dark and the stars and imagine the moon was full. I don't know that for sure, but in my memory it feels like it right, Like it also felt you felt this ancestral presence, right and that was the birth of Black Lives Matter, and from that day forward we continued to organize UM. I think it took us two or three days to UM organized the first planned march of Black Lives Matter, which we did it in Beverly Hills. We marched down will Shire from Lassie and again will Share all the way down to Rodeo and will Share and those folks thought they were like, what's happening like in fact, they were uttering those words what's going on? Right? We UM shut down that pretty woman mall and did a lot of work and that was it. Yeah, that was the birth of it. When you talk about this intuitive knowing that you have to go north, that you have to disrupt these affluent white spaces to make a statement, because it's not the community south on Crunshot, it's not the community that is suffering from the death of their sons at greater numbers than the communities you disrupted that needed to be disrupted. I know that there will be some people who hear this and wonder what that means, who say, you know, some people who will wonder what that means, and who might say, you know, there were people driving down will Shore that day going what's going on? Like, tell us what's happening? Who would assume I have nothing to do with that? You know, I don't support what happened with Trayvon's killing. I don't think that George Zimmerman should have been given his gun back. How How to people who might not understand what you mean by that? Do you educate on disrupting that system and how that system even a community on Lasianaga and Wiltshire, how their system is supporting the system that let George'szimmerman off. Yeah, so a couple of things. One, most of you are responsible, right if we think about, like the majority of white people voted for Trump, Right, so you're responsible. All of this that's going on is your fault, right, And so there is a direct responsibility. Right. But even if you go, well, I didn't vote for Trump, right, you know I give money to Black Lives Matter, Right, there's still a responsibility. Well. One, there is a the weight of blackness in this country is not something that can just be borne by black people. Right. So the philosophy of disrupting white affluent spaces is about the fact that I say, I'm not scared of anything, and I'm not right, But I'll say that I'm very anxious about my son, and specifically my son, but you know, I'm concerned for all my children, but specifically my son who's now nine, who I'm starting to see his shoulders get brought right. And he was talking to me today and I was like, his voice is a little deeper, like he's not going through puberty yet, but he's growing into he's not a baby, right, And I feel like as he continues to grow, the target on his back gets bigger. And I don't know white moms who feel that about their sons, and so it can't just be a weight that I carry, right. I need you to care as much as I care, and so you will never know what it's like to be a black mom. However, as long as these kinds of injustices happen in our communities, you don't get to just go and quietly eat brunch, right. You don't get to just go to Disneyland or go to the grove we like disrupting the grove, right, or you know, have your meal quietly and say I'm not responsible, because you are responsible. And you know, part of what they're experiencing is a white privilege. That just comes from whiteness, even if you didn't ask for it, right, and so it becomes your responsibility. I think, who is that who said that? Gillibrand right when she said it's white people, and specifically she talked about white suburban moms. Right, So it's not just black people's responsibility to handle racism, right, it's your responsibility. You built this racist system, right and if you didn't personally, so what you're still benefiting from it. And I think that the benefit and this idea that you can divest from what's personal and what isn't, especially for white people, is dangerous and needs to be analyzed because I loved what Gillibrand said. She just got frank and she said, Look, I'm not saying your lives haven't been hard. If you live in one of those rural communities that has lost its hospital, whose jobs have shut down, whether it's the steel plant or the coal mine or whatever, those people are struggling, no question and need help. But none of their struggle is because of the color of their skin. It is not one of the things that has made their life harder. It is not one of the things that makes moms afraid to send their sons to school. It is not one of the things that means that a black boy buying a baby gun at Walmart gets shot in the back by a police officer, and a white boy with an assault rifle at Walmart who murders twenty people gets taken peacefully. This is this is crazy and and these are just facts. And I think if we can start to look at the facts and not have this like weird base reaction of like, but I'm a good person, I have nothing to do with that. It's like if you're if that's your response, then there's something in you that you're worried about where you have some sort of fear that you are quote unquote worse than you claim to be or whatever. And one of the things when we talk about the beneficiaries of the system that I would love to unpack with you is the generational inheritance of the system, because I think and I blame the degradation of our education system for a lot of this. You know, while we were trying to make progress with civil rights and and and the women's rights movement, and you know, Gloria and Dorothy were like speaking and marching and doing all the things. The GOP has been going after the education system for a long time. They've taken civics out of schools, They've let schools become religious and teach you know, sex said that isn't based on fact. I mean things that are dangerous to the public health of a population. And when we lose our history, we make the same mistakes. And so for me, diving into what is historical inheritance look like what wealth was allowed to be created for white people as landowners, as people who were able to get mortgages. Where were mortgage lenders redlining, what communities couldn't be lent to what after you know, the Great Migration and the populace, the populations of black people moving further into the north. Where white people ignorantly think, well, then they were just free, It's like, no, they weren't. They were pushed into ghettos, they were denied any sort of services, any sort of healthcare, any sort of safety. Long after what we consider freedom to mean. And when you look at the generational denial of wealth versus the generational support of wealth creation, and when you look at the generational inheritance of the energy of the police system, which I've learned through conversation. Most people who look like me don't know that the police system literally comes from the system of slave catchers. People don't know that slave catchers became police, and that and that that horrific part of American history laid the path earn for a modern system that people go, well, that's not possible, but there's generational behavior in that system that is proven. I don't care what side of the line you fall on here, the data proves it's dangerous for communities of color to have interactions with the police. Right. In fact, the data says, if you want to keep black people safe from police violence, the most important thing you can do is to limit the interactions. It's the number of interactions. It's not implicit bias training, it's not uh community policing, it's not the diversity of the officers. It's Black people just should not have interactions with the police, and that's how we stay safe from them. And it's interesting to me the diversity of officers doesn't affect the outcomes for communities of color. Even officers of color are dangerous to communities of color. What do we do with all this? How do we unpack some of this generational reality? To educate people on how to change the modern day system. Right. Well, I think it's one really important that we have the conversation about, you know, generational inheritance. Right. And I always feel like so by training, I'm a political scientist, right, So like these debates and all this stuff is like great for me. I love tuning into this stuff, right, But I'm having problems keeping up with twenty candidates, right. And at first I was going to get these people off the stage. Who are these people? Right? But this is the first time ever that I've had candidates who really inspired me, Right, I've had I've heard candidates who are talking about things that are really important, right, not just the nuances of a health care system, which I believe in Medicare for all, Right, but I don't want to spend it all the time talking about how that's gonna work. Right. They're also I think it's important that Marianne Williamson is on that stage and that she was courageous enough to bring up what reparations look like. And she referred to it as a debt that is owed to black people, a debt that is old. And she's not the first person who said this. My dissertation was almost on reparations. But if we think about organizations like and Cobra and people like Randall Robinson, and I know more recently people are looking at Tony he see coats his work. You know, they've been saying that. In fact, Randall Robinson's book is called The Debt, Right. I think it's really important that we have this conversation and if we think about it's not just individuals. So this is where a lot of white folks get nervous, right, because they think you're gonna come take my stuff. And I don't know if you cuss on here, but I want to. So they think you go they say they're gonna come take our ship, right, right, That's not what it's about, right, It's not just about you as an individual, although you do owe a debt, right individually, right, you owe a debt. And so we always say in terms of the Black freedom movement, everybody needs to be involved and they need to be giving their voice, their body and their resources. You do owe some resource, right, and so there is an individual responsibility. But the bigger responsibility is that there are entire industries that are built on the backs of my ancestors. If we think about the insurance industry, right, think about why do you think companies are called state farm and farmers? Right? What is that they were ensuring slave owners for the runaways or deaths of their property their chattel. Right, And so State Farm I don't know what it's worth, but it's a multibillion dollar company. They owe us, right, This country owes us. This country is built on stolen land of Indigenous people and stolen labor of black people. They owe us. So when Marian Williamson says, you know at least two hundred to five hundred billion dollars and the debt is really in the trillions, right, that's a conversation that we need to have um And more than a conversation, it's something that we need to be pushing for because it is, like she said, and like Randall Robinson said before her, a debt that's owed well. And and when you start to look at it as a denial of equitable resource, it would be the same as if today I got a job, same job, qualifications and amount of work as as this guy over here. So it's me and it's the guy. And over the next twenty years, I'm held back I'm denied raises, I'm denied promotions, I'm denied the same health benefits, and this guy gets every single benefit, promotion, bigger package, bonus. And we've done we've done this work. Yet I'm here and he's advanced to here, and he's created wealth for his family and I've been unable to create any. And it's that same spread in a much more horrifically traumatic way, and for generations, for right that for these communities, and that is something that I think a lot of people have a hard time wrapping their heads around. And people I hear because you know, I read the good and the bad online because I need to understand where everyone's coming from as a bit of an amateur social scientist. And people who don't get the reparations conversation say well, we we have nothing to do with what happened two hundred years ago, and it's like, but you're missing the point that that there have been these bell curves that have come out of what happened, and we all ignorantly or consciously supported them and supported the ramifications, and we've got to do something about it. We've got to even out the system in some way to give people a fair shake and a fighting chance. And you know when Marianne says two to five billion, and I'm like, well, we just gave a six hundred billion dollar surplus to the military, so we have the money. You're just telling me we don't have it for people, or we don't have it for healthcare, or we don't have for schools, we don't have it for communities and color, we don't have it. You we have it. It's it's about what we're investing in, and why aren't we investing in each other? Right? Well, I think also that was a great explanation, especially as related to how de facto slavery continued after eighteen sixty five. Right, But if we think about from sixteen nineteen to eighteen sixty five, or what's happened, name was the wholesale theft of black labor, right and black people right and emmons and human beings right. And what that means economically is it's like you took generations of wealth. It's like if you're a great let's say it was your great great great great grandparents, right, they took my great great great great grandparents stuff. They came in and robbed their house, right, And they took everything that they had and then they died, but they passed on everything that they had to your great great great grandparents, and then they built the up even more stole from my great great great grandparents, and then they passed that on to your great great grandparents. And then eventually you inherit it. And you say I had nothing to do with it, No, but you still got my stuff, right, And how it plays out now, and this is how we can get to the gentrification piece, right, And so I have I I live in the Crenshaw District, which at the time I moved into, my neighborhood was about eighty to eight five percent black. My neighborhood is now about sixty black. And so there's these white folks moving in and our home prices. Now, I'm telling way too much of my business. But when I bought it, I was married at the time, two of us with college degrees and fairly good jobs. Where a spent every penny we had to buy the house that was at the time three hundred thousand dollars, right, and that's all we got, right. We can't spend more than three hundred thousand dollars. But we're relatively middle class black people who did that and bought this house for three hundred thousand dollars. The houses in my neighborhood are now going for a million and a half. Wow. And I'm going, there's no way even if I were still married, I wouldn't not be able to buy this house. Right. But the white people who are moving in, and everybody who's moving in is white, they're not rich white people. So like, we got a social worker and a teacher who just moved in down the street, Right, how did you get that house? Right? And I don't ask him that way, right, But as our children play together, there's conversations about the father gets uh, he gets an actual allowance. He's in his forties, he gets allowance from his father. A bunch of these folks are getting these, you know, help with the down payment, right, Um, a thousand dollars a month from some relatives. Somebody died and left them something. My family doesn't have that. And so this is how we see kind of this wealth disparity kind of play out, the theft of black wealth play out in term is of gentrification. And I think so many people when they think about wealth or inherited wealth, assume that you have to be a Rockefeller to be inheriting wealth. And it's like, that isn't what the conversation is. What you're talking about when a family can offer down payment support to their kids who are in their thirties or forties that is afforded by this generational experience that was offered to one community and stolen from another. Absolutely, and we're not saying that you shouldn't take down payment help from your but it's it should have been. Its fairness is that we all have what our families earned. Yes, And I think it's really important to depersonalize the reality of it in a way because I don't get offended. I don't feel attacked that two plus two equals for I'm not like well said to who you know? And and so many people who looked like me in this conversation or like well that, but that just this is they get so upset, and it's like, don't be upset. Learn we have to learn our history, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and we have to figure out how to build a better system, because by the way, the system that is better for you, it is also going to be better for me. White supremacy doesn't have anything for me either. It has nothing for me. I watched six of white women in America vote for Donald Trump, and I was like, you just voted for the husband you hate, for the guy who raped you in college, for the guy who assaulted you in the workplace, for that piece of ship that you go to work with every day who says disgusting ship to you about your ask. You just voted for a man who you hate because he feels familiar to you. For what to uphold the reality of your ad or some other guy in your life who told you he'd take care of you, or that you deserved something, or I don't understand, Like you voted so deeply against your own interests. And look, I know that there was help. I know that there was bought farms running and Russian interference and stoking of division. And you know now we have the data that proves that that the the people stoking that division online, we're doing so from the extremes of both sides. They were playing super conservative and super liberal, just trying to pull us all apart. So when I come from my highest self, I'm like, I really feel for people and I want them to do better and when I'm like in the trenches, I'm just like, what the funk were you thinking? You know? And and and I really think it's important for us, for white people, for white women especially to not feel attacked when asked to look in the mirror, but to go, oh, that's really interesting. I can see this thing. I can see regardless of how complicated my life is, what I've been through, the trauma, I carry, the assault, I survived that whatever, because everybody's had it hard and to say, and there's still all this stuff that exists in society that has my back in a way that other people aren't held. But what quote unquote has my back actually is still aiming to destroy me. Yeah, And if we go back to like the system of chattel slavery, the challenge I think that's being issued is don't be the mistress. Don't be the mistress of the house. Right. So, like a lot of white women wanna again, it's it's this proximity to power, right, say, I'm better off being my husband's wife, right, And so I'm not going to dismantle systems of oppression. But you're also being oppressed, right, And so in order to ever be free, know, maybe you get to wear the fancy dress and you don't have to be the one to pick the cut, right, But you're not free, and you're not free until you get up from the pedestal and say I'm disrupting, I'm turning over this whole ship. And so that's what we want white women to do. I also think that point about white supremacy having nothing for you, I think that's right. Like, so what freedom looks like and I'm not a white woman, so I can't really say from but what I imagine freedom looks like for white women now is not having to I think part of that kind of white people and white women working themselves up into kind of this guilt laden protective space right where they're saying, well it wasn't me, right, is about not being able to imagine more. Right. So Tony Morrison passed this morning, right, and my favorite thing that she said is dream before you think, dream before you think. And I think that as we freedom has to be in imagining, it has to be a dream, right, And we have to think about our dream about right, what it would feel like to walk down the street and not have people like me, women like me looking at you and I'm gonna be straight up like the white women who are pushing the strollers and walking their dogs in my neighborhood, I can't stand um. Now, personally, I might like them, but when I see them and I don't know them, I'm angry because with that comes phone calls on my kids. With that comes police protection. With that comes even you bringing your dog. And I like dogs, but I don't want your dog all of all my kids because your dog is not a person. Right, your dog doesn't get to take up more space on the sidewalk than my children. And you were assuring me, trying to assure me, oh, he's a he's a good dog, right, you don't get to do that. And so I'm saying all that to say I can yes that freedom for white women means being able to walk through whatever neighborhood you moved to with your dog and your stroller, because there's another nothing fundamentally wrong with a dog and a stroller without me feeling like I wish you weren't invading my space. I wish you weren't here right, not in the same way. Kelly light Over Nandez, I hope you've read her book, but she she has what it called her book called for People Listening City of Inmates, But a lot of her work looks at the history of settler colonialism in this country, and in City of Inmates she talks about and I feel like, especially with these mass shootings, right, that's the book everyone needs to read because she talks about the strategy of elimination, right, white supremacist, patriarchal strategy of elimination, colonial strategy of elimination. And so when I say, you know, I wish these white dog walkers weren't in my neighborhood, right, except the ones that are now my friends. Right. But again, if I can just say, that's the difference between a system and an individual. The system you are witnessing an encroachment in what felt like a safe space, and that feels like a signification that oppression is coming for you in your safe space. And every one of those women who you know, you're like, oh, she's cool, and that's the difference, Like you and I, but I don't know, and I don't not feel like we're cool or we're friends. When I talk about whiteness, we have to be able to separate the two. And you have to and thank you for being vulnerable enough right now to say, because a lot of people wouldn't say, like, yeah, this thing that's happening in my neighborhood bugs me. But I think it's so important to be able to say, this is the thing that is triggering and and this is what it leads to, and let's talk about what what colonization has always looked like. And also I really like my neighbors. Both things can be true at the same time. And I think people who are afraid of having these conversations, I think it's because they're gonna have to pick a side, or it's going to turn into a war, or they're gonna feel attacked or like you said, like you're coming for my ship or like you're coming for me. That isn't it. We have to almost academically be willing to look at the we have to look at the social experiment. We have to look at the system and figure out how to make it better. So that I really appreciate you sharing that thank you, thank you, yeah yeah, and so yeah, that that sums it up, that that feeling sums it up. And if I can offer something because as I'm hearing you tell that story, I'm going, oh right. What's interesting is I've never been in any neighborhood I've ever lived in, whether it's like all over Los Angeles, whether it was living down at USC and being down in, you know, off of Crenshaw, whether it was living in the South I lived all, I lived in North Carolina, I lived in Chicago. I've never been in a place where I felt like somebody on the sidewalk wasn't safe. So I've always felt safe. So I've always been the one out walking the dog, like what's up, neighbor like because it's the neighborhood. But that is where my privilege comes in, where someone on the sidewalk has never posed a threat to me. Someone on the sidewalk has never been a person who's going to call the police on my for this, for the sake of this argument, my hypothetical children like and so that's not a thing I've ever had to think about. But what I will say is, since since these conversations have come to the forefront, since I have tried to sit at the feet of women like you in my community and learn how to be a better community member. I'm very conscientious when I'm out on a walk. When I'm out anywhere, I am so conscious of what my interactions look like with people of color in my community. I I I no longer have the privilege of being the aloof person who's like on my phone and doesn't make eye contact with people. And because I now know from conversations like this. A friend of mine lives in Venice and has lived there for ten years, and we were talking about the way Venice is really gentrified, and she said, you know the difference in our experience is that you could walk down Abbot Kenney to go to Jolina take Out and get a coffee in the morning, and if nobody looked at you, nobody would look at you, and you'd be like, everybody's tired. She's like, but if I walk down Abbot Kenney to go to g t A to get a coffee and none of the twelve people I passed makes eye contact with me, I think, is this because I'm tired? Or is this because I'm a black woman. And when she said that to me, I was like, Holy sh it. There are there are just circumstances that there are hoops you jump through in your body that I never will understand. So it is my duty to learn and to make sure that I'm very conscientious of who's around me and how I am either ignorantly isolating or consciously welcoming. M I keep playing with the idea. So one of my one of my best friends is white. One of my best friends, Molly Um. We always play around about, you know, how to address things. And the reason we're so tight is because I can just talk about, you know, ship, right, And I said, you know what we should, right, I should write or I should write something about like how to how to not be a gentrifier? Right, like just basic ship. Like when I was walking with my kids the other day in the neighborhood, there was this white guy. This time it was a white guy with a dog, and he looked me in the eye and said, hey, how are you doing? And me and my kids all went, you know, like it was I'm sure he heard us gasp. And I'm like, that's how to be a white neighbor not a gentrifier, right. I didn't know him, but he saw us. He also pulled his dog off of the sidewalk so it didn't take up space for my children, And I thought that was like, I'm like, he could teach a class he needs to teach a class. I think the point I was gonna make because I had lost track of where I was going with this gentrification piece is around the settler colonialism stuff that Kelly writes about in City of Inmates, Right that when I say I wish we just had our own space, I missed the percent black neighborhood. Right. It's about establishing what you called like and holding onto what you called safe space, right, a space where I know none of my like. I remember when I first moved in, the teenagers across the street were happing the fence, and my natural instinct was to go, hey, what you're doing? Why you hopping the fence? Right, somebody else's instinct would be to call the police because young black men are probably breaking into a how right they turned out to be. I had just moved and didn't know them, the kids that lived there, and they had locked themselves out, right. So it feels safe to me because I know that my kids, when they're half in the fence, are going in the back door doing whatever. The black neighbors are gonna go, do you live there? And pot nine percent of the time they know them, so they'll say, are you locked out? Want me to call your mama? You know, something like that. So that's what we're trying to establish. But when gentrifiers move into our neighborhood. I had one neighbor who I'm tight with now, who said, I remember driving up here and I drive down Washington and looked down the street and I'd say, that's a totally undiscovered neighborhoods And I'm just by who this? Yeah, I said, who are you, Christopher Columbus, Like, what does that mean? We lived here? What are you talking about? Undiscovered? And so this whole idea of manifest destiny, like contemporary manifest destiny, gentrification is really like urban colonialism, right, is also entrenched in this settler colonial idea that I think is tied back. I'm a little disturbed about the conversations as they're unfolding, and I hope that we can disrupt them somehow. Around these mass murders, the acts of white supremacist terrorism, and them boiling it down to oh, it's just an overwhelming sense of hate. No, they're not driven by hate. They're driven by greed and entitlement and the idea that white people own this country. If you read what they're now calling the screed by the El Paso murderer. Right, He quotes Trump over and over and over again. He votes Trump over and over and over again. That he also says, now, I know you're gonna say that I'm hypocritical because when I talk about the invasion, what do Native read the whole thing? What do Native Americans would say that about Europeans? But I've learned my lesson from Native Americans that you can't allow. And I don't want to be quoting too much, but his whole idea, what he's driven by, is articulated as settler colonial ideals. He's artical. He's telling you, I have a settler colonial philosophy, and that's what drove him to murder all of those twenty two people who are now dead. Right. And so it's really important that we understand that when we talk about white supremacy and white supremacist violence, it's not just a matter of thinking or feeling. And this is what you're kind of getting to. It's not just about the individual. It's a about the system. So if we're in a system that's a settler colonial system that's built on stolen land and stolen labor. It's about examining that system and figuring out how to transform things in such a way that essure and fairness and safety and peace and love and all of the things that we all want. And they're so intrinsically to I have goose bumps, literally like running down my legs right now. And when we think about that settler colonial mentality again, the intrinsic connection between the impression of people of color and how it was rooted in the oppression of indigenous people here in America, but in the Columbus era is so deeply tied to the oppression of women. You can read Columbus's writing, and he talks. He talks openly about his shock that the Native women weren't willing to be taken as sex slaves, the the idea that they have the rights to the bodies of humans and the rights to the bodies of women. You know. The reason that I think the scarcity mentality and and the and the politics of that proximal power to supremacy really got to I mean, look, let's be real, it's gotten to white women for a long time, but really got to white women in the Trump election is because he was praying on this notion that you're about to have less, you're about to lose your and it's like, well, we've always lost at the hands of those men. You are the You are the reason that one in four women is sexually assaulted by the time she's twenty two. I don't know a single woman who doesn't have a story. Not a single woman in my life is without a story of an assault, and many too many to count. I can't name everything. And then what happens is we talk about it on a scale, Well, that guy wasn't so bad, but this one, and it's like, no, it's all bad. You know. So it used to be the norm to go to a party and get your ask grapped. That was like you knew you were going to get your ask. You were told to take it as a compliment. And so if we want to undo any oppression, we have to undo all oppression. One of the things that I have been so fascinated by in our conversations is your educating me on the difference between investing in police services and investing in citywide policy reform, which would take funding which is oddly given to the police to do things that aren't even their job, and that would give funding more to social workers, more to social programs, more, more funding that would actually take the if we want to call it the burden of too much work off of the police force, or just stop making them responsible for things that shouldn't be responsible for and actually get into community safety and protection. And I would love you to speak to that a little bit, because I think this stuff is really fascinating and I think that the listeners would be really wowed by it. So I think it's part of again dreaming before you think right. Dreaming allows us to kind of see a vision that's not tied to the what is, but what can be. And so, um, everybody wants to live in a safe community. You know, we've talked a lot about me being a mom. We want to live in a safe community. We want to make sure our children can walk home safely. Right, And as a black mother, I know my children are less safe when there's police around. So what does a system of public safety look like? And I remember, Um, when I first moved to Los Angeles, I lived in Lamart Park area and I didn't know what was happening, but every morning, the old people would come out and sit on the porch, and as I lived there, I started having conversations with the like I was like, Oh, everybody must be from Louisiana, because Louisiana in Texas, right, we all my grandparents sat on the porch, but not that early. And as I was having conversations with folks, they had created a system in the neighborhood where they would come out from seven to eight to watch the children walk to school. And that's public safety, right, that's public safety in the sense that they knew the children, right if the children I remember some of the kids getting told of getting called to the porch for cussing right as they were walking. I want that for my children. What I don't want is men with guns standing on corners, right. I want the grandma's and grandpa's on the porch watching my children get to school safely. And So if we think about what we've invested in what UM. Most major cities have invested in UM spent our tax dollars on their overspending on police. So are cities general fund And we now spend fifty of our city's general fund on l A p D. So all the money in the general fund in all of Los Angeles percent of it. And that's not including you know, that's not public safety overall. That's not fire, right, that's not straight up l a p D. And it doesn't include the contracts that l a p D gets with like the parks right, who give them a share of their budget to write. Why would we be spending of our city's general fund on police when we know that police actually don't make communities safe. There are studies that say, in fact, let me give a real good example. So there was a brother named Grashario Mack who was killed on April two, thou eight teen. He was inside the Baldwyn Hills Crunshaw Mall, which is the black mall in l A right, and at about five o'clock in the afternoon, he was seen inside the mall talking to himself and he had a kitchen knife, which let me lift up for the listeners. It is not illegal to have a kitchen knife. In fact, he was standing in front of t J Max where they sell kitchen knives, right, and so it wasn't illegal to have the kitchen knife. He was standing there clearly dealing with some kind of mental health issue. Right, Um Security who we've talked to in the mall said they didn't see him as dangerous. They just wanted him to leave the mall because people were uncomfortable with him there. Right, But he wasn't attacking anybody, threatening anybody. Somebody called one. The police come back, bounding up the escalators and this is a quote from one of the patrons, with every gun blazing, and they murder Gracario in the to love them all. They don't even bother to clear them all first. And then after they shot him and he was on the ground, they stood over him and shot him more. God, I'm lifting that up because someone who is having a mental health break should not have the police called on that. If we thought about the best use of city resources, What if we had a mental health team where when somebody is having a mental health it's a health issue, they could be dispatched. They could figure out how do I talk him down? Right, They could figure out what is he on medication? Did he take his medication? Who are his loved ones? Right? Who can we call in to give him support? Right? And I think I know that there's cities like Jackson, Mississippi, cities like Newark, New Jersey, where they're beginning to explore reallocating public dollars to investing them in you know, more mental health providers to investing them. And you know, parks don't need police in the parks, they need more youth workers in the parks. Right, they're investing them in intervention and prevention work. So even things that we think of traditionally as crime, right, doesn't have to be something that's addressed in the same kind of with the same kind of occupational style and style of confrontation that police engage. That these are people. What Um the mayor in Newark has done Ras Baraka is hire people, many of them formally incarcerated, who are from the neighborhoods and when something goes down in the neighborhood, they go and have conversations with people who respect them. Right, And so we need to be willing to engage in radical imaginings and dreaming before thinking and envisioning a world that actually creates safety, not just policing. Right. There's an interesting insight for me here, um, because again I don't lump the people in with the system, and I have an interesting purview. I believe into policing because I worked on a police show for almost five years of my life. You know, I spent a lot of time entrenched in that community. And I asked the officers who I was close to, and one of whom I am still close to, who I talked to about a lot of this stuff. We had a lot of deep conversations about their opinions on this and their willingness to say, oh, no, no, the system is broken. We love our brothers, we love our community. We die for each other. But something is changing and it's affecting everybody. And when I ask why does this like, I show a video of Laquon McDonald, I show a video of you know, any of these body cam footage or dash camps that come out eventually, because of course they don't give them to us right away. And I say, why does it become like this? And they talk about the way their training has become increasingly militarized, and how they're not trained to diffuse situations anymore. They're trained at the moment a hand is raised and there's something in it, they're trained to shoot, and you're trained to shoot to kill, not to shoot to wound. This is a problem, and they're not encouraged or required to go for mental health checkens or therapy. You you are you are effectively building a bomb. You are putting a person in a hyper realized state, telling them that every single person who they encounter is going to try to kill them, and if they do, they have to try to kill them first. But what does it really mean to try to be killed? Like the adrenaline is crazy, you can't hear, it's hard to see. And if one of those officers just charges a weapon and kill someone, they have no mental health requirements to process what that means. It gets glazed over, and then they they're told they did a good job, and then we wonder why it happens again. And I I have listened to some of these guys tell me what a toll has taken on them. Yet the system remains the same, and the system is killing people. And it makes me feel the same way when I say, like, white supremacy has nothing for me as a white woman. I have seen how the system doesn't have anything good for the people who are even a part of it, and I see the devastation that it reaks across communities across the country. And so I hope that being able to solely focused on the problem of the system can inspire all of us to try to make it better, can inspire us to say, yeah, I want more of my city dollars going to social work programs, going to you know, community up lift forces going. It doesn't need to be this. Yeah, And I think part of when we say this, right, when we say dream before you think, or when we say radical imagination, or people go, yeah, but how do you get to that? And it feels like this big, overwhelming task, right, But really all we're talking about is a budgeting process. Right, Just move some money. It's not that hard to move some money. Right. We have cities that are moving the money. Move some money. Also, you know, I define myself as an abolitionist, right, and people go, what does that mean? What a good word. But abolitionism doesn't just mean tearing down systems that are oppressive, right, So most people associate abolitionism with the end of slavery, right, abolishing slavery. I believe in the abolition of prisons and police. That doesn't mean I don't believe in public say fifty, and it doesn't mean that, you know, I don't prioritize that, right, I just think it can look very different. And I think that also a lot of times as abolitionists, we only think about the tearing down or what's illuminated as the tearing down, right, So we be we highlight the protests, and you know they want to abolish the police, yes, and we want to build community safety teams. We want to build you know, the grand maybe it could be the Grandma Brigade, right, And it's not that hard to do. And so when you think about it, like those grandparents were doing it, that was abolitionist work. And you didn't have stuff happening in the neighborhood, and so the police weren't there, well they were, but they were kind of kept at baying, right, And so we can it's not as overwhelming of a task as it seems. It's totally doable, right. I mean, if they did abolish slavery, slavery, did chattel slavery came to an end, If the people before us were able to do that, then it should be a relatively easy feat to say, policing as we know it should no longer exist. Let's establish a system of public safety and work towards it and see it come to fruition not a hundred years from now. I'm talking in the near future in my lifetime something I like to ask people at the beginning. But we just went. We went, and we went right in, and I skipped one of my favorite questions. But but I'm thinking about it now, thinking historically, I sit across from so many people who I'm so in awe of, and I'm so into of where you are in this moment in your life. And then I go, were you like this when you were little? I'm fascinating people were as kids? And and who were you as a kid? Were you? Were you always wise? Were you always so sensitive? We're like, who is little Molina? I'm so curious. Yes, I was always like this. I don't know that I would call myself wise now I hear so I was always like this. I always had a big mouth, right. I always was taught by my mom and my grandpa especially that I could do anything, you know. And it's like, I feel like we've spent a lot of time on kind of the heaviness of this work, and but I always found this like using my voice and speaking up for whatever, fun Like it's fun, like it gives me life, Like, No, you don't have to sit there and listen to this fool talking about crazy stuff. How the hell is Donald Trump gonna call Elijah Cumming as a racist? Right? Come on, man, Like, we don't have to sit here and listen to it and like just hear it. One. We need to talk about how ridiculous that ship is. And I know that we shouldn't just be laughing at it, but it's it's like bizarro world. No, it's truly crazy. It's like a person looking at you and saying the sky is yellow and you're like the sky is blue, and they go, are you blind? It's yellow? And You're like what, where? Where? Do where? Are we that crazy to where you're like, hello, are we there? We are? Are we in the same dimension? Like what's happening right? Right? So? I don't know. I think I grew up just feeling like I could always use my voice, always feeling like, um, I was deeply loved, and sometimes I talk about mothering UM. And I remember talking with this group of young moms and I said, and one of them came up to me recently and I said to them, none of this ship is that deep and they were like what, And I was like, even that we're having having this forum on mothering, and there was this one I said, I stressed myself out because I sent my son to school and he left his lunch bag in the car, and then he called me from school like, Mama, bring me much, But I couldn't get back to the school to bring him his lunch, right, And then I had to remember school only goes from eight to three. You are not gonna starve between eight and three. When you get home, you can have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Right, Like, none of it's that deep, right, Like we take on a lot of responsibility and act like everything is so deep. But I think that how I was raised and how I try to live just pouring love into what I care about, firstly my children, but also my community, the world that I live in poor the love in and and I'm gonna make mistakes, Like my son left is I didn't look back to see did he get his lunch? Right, So part of it was on me to not look bad. But so what, just keep it moving and you're gonna make a misstep and sometimes people are gonna get mad at you, but so so what, just keep it moving and living love and living your purpose. And I think my mom and my grandpa taught me a lot about that. What was it like growing up with them? Because you were you were in East Oakland in the seventies, But I'm twenty nine. What's the right I have been for a long what's the what's the what's the vibe like? What what is community like? And what's your family like? Um? My community was complicated, but my like, the first word I wanted to use was it was magical and amazing. And I'm saying that as someone who witnessed. I don't even know how many of my friends get murdered, right who experienced like we found a body in the dumpster when we were little kids? Right Like I grew up. I came of age during the height of the cracked cocaine epidemic in East Oakland, where it was really hit and heart And if I were to give the first word, it was magical. It was amazing. It was a community filled with love. My grandpa used to like sit on the front porch all day long, and we come home from school and sit with him on his front porch and eat watermelon. I know that's a terrible thing to say as a black person, but watermelon is delicious. I don't care if it's a stereotype. It's also that's like, that's California. We're we have produced, We're very Yes. My grandpa would slice open a watermelon, and he's from Louisiana, right, so he would slice open a watermelon and we eat him like out of it would be a bowl. Right, you turn it into a bowl and you just eat with eat the hall and we'd sit there and we would he would tell me stories and it was amazing. And my mother, who was a single mom and a teacher, she would always come home from school late, and she had like an old Vovo station wagon and it would hit the black and you could hear it like a black away, and all the kids in the neighborhood we lived in, a almost all black neighborhood, would come running down the street and sit on our front porch and they would yell it's time for school. And my mom would sit on that porch with them until the sun went down and teach all the kids in the neighborhood to read. And um my grandma, who I don't give as much credit as I should, taught me how to cook. So every day I never missed church, right, So we go to church, and my kids think they're in church a long time when it's like two hours, but we'd be there from nine o'clock in the morning to about two o'clock in the afternoon. We have a break and cook in the church basement, right, so we have hamburgers and coffee, I remember, and seven upcake in the church basement. And then we would go home after church service and I would be at my grandma's house and we would just cook and talk and look at J. C. Penny's magazine's catalog and it was just really beautiful. And it was like the entire community took care of each other and everybody from you know, my grandparents who were there too, my mom too. I remember there was a sex worker is what we call them now, right, who had a son that my brother was friends with, and she would come and teach us a lot, like about being a woman and don't let these men do and it was, you know, she was help. She helped raise me in a way, you know. And it was just a really beautiful community. And I think that they talk about there's a author named Jowanza Kunjufu who talks about when ghettos become slums, and that there's nothing wrong with a ghetto. And so I was raised in a ghetto, and I was raised our neighborhood was called, you know, folk Town, and it was what they would call a gang neighborhood. But they were my family. And so when I think about this now, and I'm sorry for talking so long, when I think about it now, and like the criminalization of the people who were killed by police and how they go, oh, he was a gang member, So what's that mean he was a gang member? Was he committing a crime? Right? So I think about people like Ryan Twiman who was twenty four years just killed last month by l a county sheriff's twenty four sitting in his car and an apartment building that's considered you know, as gang members in the apartment building. But he wasn't doing anything but sitting in the car unarmed. They snatched off in his back door and kill him thirty four shots and then go back to their cruiser, get a an assault weapon and continue to kill him with the assault weapon. Right, and then what do what does the county sheriff do? They say, basically, he deserved it because he was a gang member. I don't care that he was a so called gang member. When I was twenty four years old, you would have called me one because I lived in Fonteil, Right, it doesn't matter to me. For me, that neighborhood was love right for me, that's where my first boyfriend, Almer's Jones, was from, right um. For me, it was where I got love and support and was nurtured into becoming the woman that I am. Right, even I dropped out of traditional high school, but my neighborhood knew I shouldn't have dropped out of traditional high school, and everybody was like pushing me to go back. And like, when I come back now and there's a couple of people that I grew up with it I'm friends with now, you know, still friends with, and they say things like, you know, we weren't even supposed to be alive, you know, And it was my neighborhood that kept me alive, that kept my brother alive. My brother was crazy and you know, was like the other boys in the neighborhood did stuff that would have gotten him imprisoned these days. Right in the eighties and nineties, it didn't send him to prison. What does that mean? So I remember this one incident when my brother and a bunch of the boys who were like probably preteens, like about twelve, maybe eleven or twelve, had broken into an empty apartment unit in the housing projects that were across the street from our house, and they took some of the supplies and began to throw paint out the window. They were eleven and twelve. That was stupid, and they should get a whooping, right, because my mama whooped them, right. But and and what wound up happening is police did grab them and they put them in the back of the car and they drove them home because they knew my mama was gonna whoop him. If eleven and twelve year olds break into an apartment now and do what eleven and twelve year olds do, which is naughty, but it's not criminal, right, these kids would have been taken from their mothers, they would have been incarcerated, and they'd have to live with that process of criminalization for the rest of their lives. Year now in a system that is completely unforgiving. You know, I've shoplifted before. I don't think I've ever said that publicly, but I've shoplifted many times before. Right, I've gone to jail before, Right, But all of those things were things that you know, when I was arrested for the first time in Berkeley, California. My mom recently handed me, like my arrest record from Berkeley, and it said, like, if she doesn't do anything else for the next year, this record will be destroyed. Right. That doesn't happen anymore, right, And so that's what I mean when I say, like the system was forgiving of my brother and of me, but now we would have had a different fate. Well, and there's such a rigidity now. And and even when I when I hear you talk about, you know, the neighborhood and the boys in the neighborhood, now they would have been described as gang members. I wonder about what that means when people hear the term, because so much of what we know, when it hasn't been our life, is what we see on TV. And we think gang member means murderer means someone who kills someone to get in a gang means someone who is a drug dealer means and that's much more often than not not the case. And you know, people get identified as gang members. I now know from my police experience. If they're on the same block as a person who is confirmed in a gang, if they're seen at the same street corner, then all those kids seen with that one kid or gang members by association. That's how the police legally are allowed to identify you. Now. I know a kid who was just released from jail, who went to jail on an associate to murder charge because he was standing next to a guy who got shot in the in an altercation. And when people hear that, they go, that's not probably they can't do that to you, but they did this to this boy. And so I think a there has to be a reassessment with what we believe these definitions to mean and be. We also have to understand that nobody is to be equated to the worst thing they've ever done. And yes to all of that. And I actually think kids who grow up and getting neighborhoods aren't really doing things that are that bad. It's the white affluent kids do much worse and they're not criminalized for that behavior. Right. I think it's part of you know, it's systemic, it's intentional. Manning Marrable talks about that, right, like these systems were intentionally designed to produce these outcomes, the criminalization of black people, right, even the killing of black people at the hands of police. It's not accidental, the disparity and sentencing between cocaine and crack, for example, right, right, So it's all intentional. And we have to remember that children have the right to be children. So like now that I've opened up the can of worms about shef lifting, I won't share this with my mom. Right. The first time I shoplifted, I was in the sixth grade, and I actually was in Berkeley, and my mom had moved me from my neighborhood elementary school to a white private elementary school in Berkeley, like the super white liberal elementary school, and all the kids were rich, right, And the only two black kids I remember black girls I remember were me and Whoopi Goldberg's gold Whoopi Goldberg's daughter Alex, Right. And so these rich white girls, there was some sleepover wanted to go steal some stuff from this toy story called Mr Mops. Right, So we went into Mr Mops and we put a whole lot of ship in our backpacks. We got away with it, and then this is how a sixth grader's mind works. We decided we needed to go back, and in my mind, I'm thinking Mr. Mops workers see thousands of people. They'll never recognize us again because there's thousands of people because I'm Tannora eleven years old, and I don't get no they remembered that you were just in here an hour ago. Right, But I'm thinking Mr. Mops is this big toy store. Thousands of people come in and out, and so that's how we were grabbed because we were stupid enough to go back and believe it. Right, kids have the right to make those kinds of dumb mistakes. Right, not just about that I could go back and get more. We could go back and get more, right, but you know, to take things that don't belong to you, you need to be corrected. But it shouldn't be a criminal justice system that does it. And I think that this is the work of people like Brian Stevenson and others that is just incredible if you look at what's happened since the height of kind of mass youth incarceration um in the nineties, with the passage of things like Prop. Twenty one that gave discretion to prosecutors instead of judges about you know, children and how they were charged. We've seen a dramatic decrease in the criminalization of children, especially in places like California. In San Francisco, UM, there's virtually no children who are incarcerated, right, And it's because people are starting to make choices and starting to recognize especially almost everybody is a parent, right. Kids do dumb shit. You you did dumb shit, right like, so we shouldn't be losing lives and traumatizing further traumatizing these children for doing the dumb ship that they're supposed to do because they're kids, right, and really affords an opportunity to teach lessons. I remember, remember kids, I don't know, you're not really that old. So when I was growing up, we had fights at school all the damn time. Like, we were always fighting, and we thought we wouldn't get suspended if you waited till three o'clock. In fact, you wouldn't wait till three o'clock and fight off of school grounds. Then you could fight, and then somebody got beat up, and then you go home and if the school found out about it, you had to go in and write some ship, I will not fight anymore, you know. Oh, my god, lines, Yeah, when you had to write sentences on the board when you got in trouble. Do you know what fights are called at school now? Assault and battery? And I think that's absolutely ridiculous. Their kids, their children, right, we've all had fights. I hit Damon Skillern and the knows in the first grade because he tried to kiss me. I remember being in the fourth grade, and I can't think of what the boy's name was. He was a sixth grader and he hit my best friend Matt, And I kicked the sixth grader in the nuts great, like a swift kick to the nuts. He dropped. Then it was a whole thing where he was embarrassed because he got beat up by a girl. But I was like, you're bigger than my you know, sixth and fourth grade, like the boys are very differently developed. And I was just like, you pick on kids your own size, and the irony of like this tiny, scrawny little girl like standing over the sixth grader who was in the fetal position, screaming at him about how he should pick on somebody as big as him, and I was like half the size of my friend Matt. But I mean he clocked him, and none of us got in trouble. It was just like a playground thing and that was over. I got in trouble in fifth grade when I stolen a racer and that's when I had to write sentences on the board. Kids take stuff, they do stuff I even think about. You know, you're talking about your brother and his friends, like playing in a you know, construction space, throwing pain around. Like I'm an adult, and sometimes I go through construction sites. I'm just really curious about houses. Like I straight up will pull over, like in the neighborhood and be like, oh, and if it gates open, I'll just go wander around. I've never thought that I was going to get arrested for that. And you won't, right, you won't, right, and ard fight. Little white kids are not going to go to jail for the school yard fight, but my son will. Right. Well, and interesting that the way that we are policing younger and younger children is becoming more and more aggressive. You know, they wouldn't they wouldn't have. I don't think schools were calling it assault and I was eight, but now that's a thing that's crazy. Well, and this is something that's interesting to me. Is the disparity in whether it's potential or actual punishment. Because when I think about the work you do today, and I think about the courage that it requires to step outside and do it, I think about the difference. Again, Let's say it's you and me at a protest, the difference in what happens to us, because you were charged with assaulting a police officer, uh in a courtroom, and the irony that you were that that the man here's this So the story goes, he got grabbed on the arm while he was walking, you know, somebody out of a courtroom, so to be out of the police commission meeting. It was a police commission meeting, thank you. So the I'm like, people grabbed me by the arm all the time, like strangers on the street who are like, hey, Brooke Davis, like can I take a picture of you? Like it is that assault? So this feels ridiculous to begin with that, Like grabbing somebody by the arm and saying hey, like go easy on this kid, could be assault. But what makes it even crazy to me is that another woman said I'm the one who grabbed the officer by the arm. But she's a white woman, and yet the l a p D charged you with assault, and then they managed to drum up seven other charges, so they charged you with eight was eight misdemeanors altogether, So this could have potentially carried a prison sentence of a year. And that's if they did them as concurrent, not as consecutive. Consecutive would have been three and a half years. And I guess what what's interesting to me is that despite someone else saying no, I grabbed the cop, and despite every witness in the courtroom saying we didn't seem Alianna do that, and despite you saying I absolutely did not do that, they were pressing you. And it feels to me as an observer, like this is a policing of dissent, Like this is a policing of your voice. There are and and in at in that article that I got the scourge quote from I get real nerdy on my homework, they said something that I found really interesting that this has and and to quote this has far ranging implications for free speech in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is not the only city led effort to silence activists. The city council also recently created a new set of rules against public disruptions aimed at banning those who disrupt l A City council meetings from attending future meetings, which went into effect last January. Public disruption is a time honored activist strategy to bring pressure to bear on government officials and your lawyers went on to say publicly that the city is treating legitimate forms of dissent as a crime. Yes, and it is our right, our constitutional right to free speech and to protest. We are meant to hold our government accountable because it's meant to be a government for us. So what does it look like as an activist today? When when we think about how kids are getting treated, when we think about how activists are getting treated, when we think about disparate punishment depending on what community you fall into, how do you how do you? How do you get up every morning? Um? So that so I actually was tired to go on a police commission meeting, but when they tried to ban me from it, and you know, talk about all criminalized me for going, I'm I'm never missing another police commission meeting, right, So that's part of how I get up because I actually get inspiration and feel like I'm living in my purpose by doing this ship, right, Like I don't want to just sit home and watch TV or you know, play games or whatever. There's stuff that needs to be done, and I enjoy it. It's like UM, artists in their art, right, Like I have to live in it, right. So it's like artists and their art. Yeah, this is this is the thing that you make with that inner duty. Yeah, it's my purpose, right. I believe it's my purpose, right, sacred duty. Right. And what happened was absolutely the criminalization of black protests specifically right. And so there were other people who've been arrested before I was arrested in other incidents, all of them black white folks. UM had been arrested but not charged. So you know, there was one of the charges that they tacked on, UM was about an arrest when we did a disruption after a brother named Carnell Snell was murdered and they found his murder in policy and we began to chant his name, and I, along with two of my white comrades, white women, comrades who understand that their freedom is bound up with mine, right, all got arrested together. And you were the only one charge. I was the only one charge. And so they wouldn't. They did, never charged. Her name is Gina, who said that she's the one that touched the officer's arm. I did not. I'm sitting here until I saw there was video evidence, right until I saw the video and that I absolutely did not touch this officer. Right, I'm sitting here racking my brain, going did I brush him on the way out? Because what was happening is they were trying to escort out the aunt of a woman named Waukesha Wilson who had been killed inside l APD jail um and I wanted to make sure she was okay. Her name is Sheila. I wanted to make sure she was okay. And then when I got arrested too, I'm going, well, what did I do? You know? And so there is a deliberate effort I believe to not just silence protest, but silence black protests. Because part of what happens when you say, you know, why am I not following black women right is I think when black people engage in protest, we're less bound and tied to the system, and so our protest looks a lot more radical, you know, our protest um is much more far reaching in terms of what we want, and so silence that. And I think people looking at it from the outside are afraid of the energetic power of it because, whether they're consciously aware or not, in in my observation of the power of the protest of black women, it feels so big and to your point, maybe so radical, because it carries the energy of life and death stakes, right. And I remember that guy who made the sign at the first Women's march in d C. That was like, oh, am, I going to see all you all nice white ladies at the next Black Lives Matter protest, which I thought was amazing. And and again, just living in the relative privilege of this body. I can go to the women's march, and I can raise my voice, and I can be an activist, and I can show up in spaces and raise money for causes. And but I don't walk down the street feeling as though my life might be threatened. Very often late at night, I'm nervous. I walk with my keys in my hand. I like, don't park in certain places. That's being a woman. But I don't have the same experience that you or my girlfriend lives in Venice have on the sidewalk. And so I wonder if my sacred rage, when I'm out screaming or on a podium or you know, leading a protest, doesn't feel as threatening because I am inherently not as threatened. I also think that when you talk about kind of the when we've talked about like the proximity to privilege, So when you talk about privilege and the proximity to privilege, um, part of that privilege is a certain degree of protection of you by the system. Right. So absolutely there's the energy piece. But it's also like Courtney and Danny, who are the two white women who were arrested with me? You know, we brought it up, well, why are the two white women not being charged? Not that we want them charge, but why are they not being charged? Right? And it was really the system city attorney right, nodding and going, oh, they're okay, right, it's part of this there, but they're next to us. There are folks You're like, these are what these people are with me, not with you. We did the exact same thing, right, you know, part of them. Gina is sitting up going idea, I even at the time I was being arrested, she didn't touch you. I touched you. You would think at least they grab her too. Nope, never got grabbed, never got charged. A year has gone by, so they can't charge her now. But over and over and over again in the documents that were submitted, everything she's saying, she did it. So I think it's part of the system saying, you know, you might not get all of the white supremacist patriarchal benefits, but you're gonna get some of the white supremacists benefits. White woman, right, you still here, right, And I think that's part of what's happening, as well as the energy. And I think that what you are challenging in the system is at the root of the system itself. You know, you are talking about the disparity in how the system is applied to people of color, and you are doing that as a black woman, and your threat to the system is bigger, and you know the It's not lost on me that historically there has been an attempt to separate women who are trying to make social change with meaning white women trying to make social change from communities of color, because all that the people at the top want to do is bifurcate the people who are upset with them. So so I even wonder if it goes deeper in the court system where they're like, well, if we can make the white ladies feel protected, maybe they won't come to the next Black Lives Matter protest, Maybe they won't be at the next White People for Black Lives event because we gave them a pass. And whether that's a conscious choice or not, there is the insidious nature of let's separate, Like look at women's suffrage, let's separate. Let you know it, there has always been a desire by the powerful few to make sure that the more that the less powerful masses don't realize how much collective power they us together. Absolutely absolutely, And that's like, that's where I think that the sacred duty your when you talk about being a womanist, being being here for like a truly intersectional community of women. We have to double down together because I'm like, oh, I'm not gonna get duped. I'm not going to do the thing they did a hundred years ago. No no, no, no no, no, that's just not gonna happen. I think we need to lift up that there are hella white women doing it right, Like, so Danny and Courtney did go to jail with me, they did get arrested with me right, Gina is saying, don't arrest her, take me right. So there are women who are starting to see who see the rules right, and you know, how to spend their privilege exactly exactly. And I always feel like as we talk about struggle, we always have to uplift the hope, right, that there's it's a you know, Dr King talks about the beautiful, the beauty and the struggle, right, and so I talked about Molly, But I don't think I've never had as many white friends as I have in the struggle, like, because these are white people who aren't perfect, right, but who I trust, right. I think that for black people there's a massive distrust of white folks because it's it's reasonable, right, it's logical. But there's a few we in our meetings we pour something called libation, which kind of honors our ancestors and summons those spirits into the space. And as for guidance, and we always, you know this Sunday when we have our meeting, will absolutely call Tony Morrison, right, will call on those who help us move forward and white people and sometimes we'll lift them up, like on social media, or whatever um white people are are allied group is called White People for Black Lives. They've been since I think they were founded in four um they'll hashtag John Brown, John Brown, John Brown. Right, they're calling on for them the ancestor that shows them how can white people really be down? And we're not asking people to you know, literally sacrifice their lives and the lives of their sons. That's what John Brown did, right, But that he was down like that, like Mama Harriet's freedom means enough to him that he would give up his life and his son's life, right in order for us to be free and order. He saw his freedom as bound up with ours. And I think in the midst of struggle, right, like really engaging in this ruggle, that's one of the greatest beauties that racism is an absent from the struggle. But I trust the white people in the struggle to a whole different degree that I trust, you know, the white gentrifiers in my neighborhood, right, who I don't trust at all, Right, like the ones who are going to call the police on my kids. Right, I'm able to see white people differently as allies as accomplices, right, willing to disrupt a system that seemingly benefits them. And it's such a relief, isn't it. Yeah? And I always tell my daughter, my middle daughter, who is my free spirit, who I say is my greatest joy and my greatest frustration. Right, Um, that every moment is a new moment, right, So every moment is a moment to do something differently. Right. So even if yesterday or this morning you were something that you didn't like, you can change it now, right, and recognize that that's a process to write like change as much as you can. Know that. Also, you're gonna get called out on your ship sometimes, right, Like you're not gonna see everything that I see because you don't know what it feels like. Right, let me call you in, call you out right, and know that it's not personal. It's I need you to be better, right, I need you to be We're not going to be able to take down all this ship by ourselves, right. We need you. We need you to step up. We need you to give your voice, your body and your resources and move it so that we can all be free. And how lucky to be invited. M I really think that when you shift, when you look in the mirror and choose to shift your perspective from feeling called out to feeling called in, because let me tell you something like, I come from a fucking crazy Italian family. I have a whole thing where I'm like, if you ever stabbed me in the back, I will eviscerate your existence. Like we're done. I am, I am ice cold. There's no at least have the courage to like look me in the eye and give me the knife in the stomach, like let's have it, let's have an exchange. So and it's like, obviously that's on the extreme end of like going through the worst of the worst with people. But I think there's a version of that when you get into if you feel called out, you feel attacked. Stop looking at it like that, when I stop calling you out, like you're frozen, you're done, You're the person who stabbed me in the bag. You're over, You're never invited again. I think if we can shift this idea that the call out, if it's happening and you're aware of it, you're being called in, you are being invited. You're being invited into a space to learn to do better, to be better. Take it as a welcoming, right, absolutely, And it is it's funny. It's like I know there's people who are listening to that or like what a weird thing to say, but it's like I'm I just I know it to be true and it and it feels like it exists on the same vibration as that feeling of like the activism is the joy that that's that's the purpose, that's the calling. And I know that anyone who comes into any of these spaces that we all work in leaves feeling fuller, leaves feeling more connected to themselves and their purpose. Somehow, it's it's the thing. It's it's the thing that helps you stop trying to fill a hole and that makes you the filler. Yeah, and it's a really special place to be. And I'm curious on that, on that idea of you know, activism service call what do you what do you think makes an effective activist? So I think activism is small, right, So I define myself as an organizer, I keep saying, I define myself as I got many identities, right, And what that means for me is an activist is somebody who stands up and responds to something. But I think we need to be more than that. Right. So an organizer is someone who builds right, builds organization um and also understands that this kind of messianic leadership model where you're going to be an activist and give a great speech and everything's going to change, is flawed by design in order to get you to think that all we need is another Martin Luther King. Right, the version of Martin Luther King that we were fed is wrong anyway, Right, there were thousands of civil rights organizers, right. He just happened to be one of the best orators of all time. Right. But Mama Ella Baker was a far better organizer than him, right, And so we need to understand that there were all of these people. And so for me, I think what makes a good organizer is understanding that we're part of you are not bigger than the movement. Right. So one of my baba's is Hank Jones, who was one of the San Francisco eight of member of the Black Panther Party, who was criminalized and incarcerated for being an active black man in the sixties. Right, And he always says, in this movement, our job is to kill the ego. Right, So the greatest work we can do is to kill the ego. And I think that that's the greatest internal work that we can do. Right. A good organizer doesn't need to have their ego stroked. They never have to be thanked, they never have to be received accolades for the work that they do, because the work should be about the work, right. And so a good organizer recognizes that the most impactful thing that you can do is to create more organizers, right, So to empower people to not seek an asymmetrical messianic model of leadership that puts you at the top right leading everybody else behind you, but recognizes how strong we are when we all march arm in arm, and that you also don't know how to do every damn thing like I can. I'm a teacher, right, so I teach pretty well. Right, I'm a good writer. You know, I am not artistic. I don't have an artistic bone in my body. And we have someone else in the movement. For me, Lola was a brilliant playwrighting poet, right, who if we didn't have that team, our arts and culture team. When I speak or write, I feel like it can hit people the thinking part. But how do you get people to dream? I can't get people to dream. That's what the artists do, right, because they bypass the mind and get to the soul right. And then I can, you know, put in the thoughts right right. But I can write likewise, and if you needed me to draw a picture, I'd be like, here's a stick figure. I'm so sorry, but you're an artist. You're an artist. I'm a performer, but I can't paint. But somebody else. That's the point, Like a good organizer recognizes, we need performance artists, we need painters, we need people who can speak, we need people who can mobilize. We got the sister in Black Lives Matter, her name Jan, who she can make friends with any damn body right, like will be at a protest next thing. You know, she got everybody's life story. She's telling us what they go and do. These people are at the next meeting because Jan, that's a gift to be able to commune with people like that. And so good organizers recognize that you were, you know, one pin and a stained glass window, you know, and it takes your job is to figure out how all these pieces fit together to form that glass, to form that formation, that's gonna get us to where we need to go. I love that, And I think it also takes the pressure of participation off for people who are starting their journey of showing up, speaking up, standing up, because some people think that if they don't know how to do it, they shouldn't they shouldn't or or don't have permission. And when you talk about organizing in the community and getting back to that village that we evolved in as a people, it highlights the reality activism and social change. It's this is a relay race. We run on teams, we passed the baton. That's the only way for us to sustain is to do it together. Yeah, and it people often define describe it as a relay race, but I think it's kind of a modified relay. Right. So, I was talking to somebody about youth organizing and they were talking about this relay people need to pass the baton. I think the baton needs to be passed, but you still gotta keep running. Oh yeah, that's how I picture it. Is like running in a pack and you just passed the thing around. Maybe I should say it feels more like, I don't know, one of those Olympic torch ceremonies where like everybody goes together, certain people have the torch at different time. Right. But yeah, because if you're running alone, then what's the point, right, I'm not running with the torch and then passing it and then stopping. We still gotta keep going. And when we're all running, that's how we win. I wanna just quickly address um what you said about people thinking they have to have something special. You do have something special, right, I don't know what it is. Maybe you get along well with children, maybe you can cook, maybe you can sing. All of those things are That's what I mean by Mama Ella Baker calls it group centered leadership. Right, all of that stuff is valuable to the movement. Even if you just have good handwriting, that's your one claim. The thing. You've been in romes with people writing on the damn but your paper and you can read what they wrote. We need you who has the good penmanship to be the scribe. Even if that's all you got, Please bring it, like, just bring it and offer it and it's going to be valuable. I love that because people don't realize that they are exceptional. Everyone sort of thinks that like unless they're I don't know the great you know, world changer that there maybe not a value add and every single person is a value add. Absolutely. You said that racism is not simply a matter of thinking or feeling. It is a social hierarchy imposed to afford white people with unearned material and psychic beliefs. And I feel like we've unpacked a lot of that pretty well. But here we are with the president who was quoted eight times in a mass murderers manifesto. Right there is this assumption that the system punishes the people who do wrong, but we are talking about very disparate punishment right now. What do what do we do with this? What do we because I would wager that there's a lot of people listening who feel very traumatized by what Trump is doing and what he's bringing into this country, that his dehumanization of people and the effect it's having. What do you think people at home can do? How do how do they support how do they fight back against it? How do they support making society better? How do they support you? I'm curious how we turn the tide on something that is this insidious. Yeah, I mean, we absolutely cannot tolerate him, We cannot tolerate him, and you know, he's dangerous in terms of his rhetoric policy, and I think that the last week has shown us how he's spurred up white supremacist violence. Right. It doesn't mean that that was never part of this country. It's part of the founding of this country. But in my lifetime, we've always moved further and further away from it. Right. We've always seemed to when you talked about being pushed, right, but it's really two steps forward, one step back, right, So we've always moved forward. This is the first time I feel like a massive push backwards, right, a massive like uh, Sister Soldier had a song Slavery's back in effect, right, and it sounded like the super far fetched idea. But now when you look at what's happening right, when you look at you know, lacking children and cages, right, when you look at family separation, I think it's one of the reasons why you see black people so involved and what's happening at the border is because like there's a transgenerational memory of our own family separation. Right, it's just overwhelming. He has given complete permission for white supremacist terrorists to do whatever they want, And it doesn't mean that they weren't there, but they were being put in check. Right, And I think that even um racism is not just a matter of thinking and feeling. But I think part of that permission is for them to engage the lowest of themselves, right, to say that those kind of lower creature instincts of invasion of ownership of mine, right can be meted out in the most violent ways. Right. When you think about these mass shooters, right, like we've seen things when you go back historic le and you look at what they did to my people under chattel slavery, or what they did to my people after reconstruction during the height of the lynching era, right, the ideas, I don't even know how they brought themselves to mutilate us and torture us in the way that they did. But that's what's moving back around, right, That's what this back again? Right? Um, what is it great again? And he says great any again? That's what he's hearkening to. Right, I've never seen this happen before, and so I'm saying that to say, I don't really have the answers. One super easy one is he gotta go right, he gotta go. It's not radical to say I'm not voting, right, so some people think, oh, well, you know, I'm not voting. The Republicans and the Democrats are the same. They have they both are owned by corporate America. And we can't have his food in office no more. So he gotta go. He gotta go. Congress has to be courageous enough to drag his ass up out of there. We really can't afford to wait until twenty what would take office again one, We can't afford to wait that long. So I think this whole idea of impeachment, I say, a dragging like somebody, somebody just needs to drag him like, you know, I can't say too much, but he gotta go, he gotta go, like I would like to see him go immediately. I think also though, as we talk about voting, and one of my concerns around kind of the engagement with electoral politics, which I think is important, is that sometimes we allow systems to tell us that's our only tool. And I believe in voting, but I believe in what I call voting plus right vote yes and what else are you gonna do? Right? Oh? I love that voting plus right because you can't just vote right, you must vote right. What is your responsibility once every four years for fifteen minutes? No, No, it's day. Yes, local elections, midterm elections, every four years, presidential and who are you in your community every day? Absolutely? Absolutely, So it's not okay. You don't get to sit by and watch injustices happen. Right, this is a birden the black people bear all of the time. Right when we talk about like everyday racism's right, every day we're experiencing something. And I want to go on a whole diet tribe about what I just experienced at Costco. But I love Costco too, It's like one of my favorite places. But they hurt me because I want to buy some pizzas at Costco. I had on a Black Lives Matter T shirt. The guy given me my pizzas. It was supposed to take fifteen minutes game my pizzas away to these two white men who walked up behind me knowing I was waiting. When I confront him, he takes even longer. He decides he's gonna get a bee out of the dance. Sounds so stupid, but there was a bee trapped in the screen. He's going to remove the bee from the screen, and he can't hand me my pizzas because this is more important. And like I felt dumb having to call Costco and say, I feel like this was racism. But I know it was racism, right, I know it was. When you see that happening, one those two white men shouldn't have taken the damn pizzas they knew I was there before them, right, But you don't get to just sit there and watch it happen. And so the everyday things aren't always big things like protesting at a police Commission meeting or joining a march or forming a march. Right, it's also the little things, you know, when you see, well, why did the black way not get picked for the class for the advanced class? Right, ask those questions from wherever you are, whatever it is, wherever when people are on the internet talking about aerial can be black, you know, don't get me started. I was like, what is wrong with you? People, like, what is the matter with you? Give her the job. I think about things from macro to micro and making sure you're making calls, making sure you're donating what you can, making sure you're showing up where you can. If you're witnessing somebody getting pulled over or pulled aside by the police in public, just stand there. I stand around, now, Yeah, I stand around. I have my phone in my hand and I'm like, if I need to, I'll record it. But I just want to be there energetically. I just want to be there. And they hate it. The police hate it when you stand there. Yeah, I'm never pop watched and the person didn't get sent home. Yeah. No, they don't love it. And it's interesting because I, as I mentioned, you know, to be frank, like, I'm still very close to my technical advisor that I worked with in Chicago. And I tell him that and he's like, good, you should good. And I'm like, I like you. I knew I liked you for a reason. Like it's you know, I'm I'm up front. I'm like, I love you enough to challenge you. Here we are. I love this country enough to challenge her. James Baldwin like, I reserve the right to criticize her perpetually because I love her. It is so important and I'm curious for anybody who's listening to us today, who is in the l a area and wants to show up, wants to show up for Black Lives Matter, for a city council meeting for white people for black lives where do they start? So we have a website b l M l A dot org. And we have a website because there was a white ally who said we needed a website, and she donated money for us to build a website. So that's a victory. B l M l A dot org. On social media where BLM Los Angeles on Instagram and b l M l A on Twitter. And if they're listening right now, so that will give you everything that we're doing right So just follow our social media. But if you're listening right now, there's some things people can do right this minute. Right Number one, they can join our monthly meetings, which are every second Sunday of the month. They can join our weekly protest with the families of those who are killed by police in front of Jackie Lacey's office. Jackie Lacey is our district attorney. Five hundred forty people have been killed by police since she's been in office. She's been in office for six years, and she is choosing not to prosecute those officers. So every single Wednesday at four o'clock we're in front of her office. Here's a super easy one. UM. We try to give people sixty seconds for justice, something super easy that folks can do. I talked about the murder of Gracario Mack inside of the Crunshaw Baldwin Hills Mall. Those officers were ruled out of policy by the Police Commission and the Chief of Police is has decided so far that he is not going to fire or discipline them. And so we want people to sign an online petition to Chief More to fire those officers. And that's an easy link. It's tiny u r L dot com slash grocer e O g r E c h A r I O g r e c h A r I O and just sign and share that link. And then you can always donate to Black Lives Matter, show up to Police Commission meetings. There's a lot that you can do our young people. If you're a parent, we have Black Lives Matter youth vanguard who just want a tremendous victory. UM. For the last four years they've been trying to end what they call the random searches and schools. So in l A U S D They had a policy of every single middle in high school, every single day, they would pull children out of schools, usually black children, and physically search them for contraband. You would think contraband is things like guns and drugs, right, Um, in that time, they found zero guns. But what they were putting children on lists for is for having contraband items like hand sanitizer, highlighters, white out sharpies. What. Yes, it was terrible and the children kept fighting. This was a completely student led movement supported by the teachers from ut L A who I I'm so indebted to our teachers. Incredible, Oh my god. They went on strike not for their own raises. They went on strike for the conditions of my children. And I tear up every time I say it, because my daughters were searched, are searched. And they went on strike to end those random searches, to turn our schools into community schools, to bring librarians and counselors into the schools. And we won. And so starting this year, there was an end to random searches and schools and um, so I'm saying that to say, bring your kids, kids to that's what's part of the beauty of the movement people win. Yeah, and I mean kids like bring your four or five six year old. They have ideas like when we talk about dream before, you think they are nothing but dreamers, and they fill us with so much life and imagination and so those are things people can do. I love that and that makes me feel hopeful, That makes me us to feel like on fire with potential. Okay, So my last question for you, and I asked this of everybody because I I get to sit across from so many people who am in awe of and I think that very often, in an ever more digital world where we're looking at people through screens, we kind of feel like everybody else has it all figured out, has figured out how to lead, has figured out how to parent, has figured out how to whatever it is. They're doing better than we think we're doing. But in my experience, everybody still feels like they're trying to figure it out. And so I'm curious. As the podcast is called work in progress, what in your life right now feels like a work in progress to you? Oh? My god? Like everything? Um, I have not conquered my battle with food. I love food. I specifically I'm looking at these peach rings right here. I'm like, I want some of those. So when we stopped talking, I'm eating some. I have not yet figured out how some people buying exercise fun. I don't want to do that, right. I like taking walks, but I don't want to go to a gym. It's nasty. I don't want to go to a gym. I'm a terrible romantic partner. So I'm not in a relationship and I've only been in like while. I was married to my children's father for ten years, but that ended seven years ago. And astrologer actually told me, he said, um. He asked me, well, why are you divorced? And I said, I think i'm married. The I guess I married the wrong person. And he said, no, you married the right person. That's why you're divorced. And he said, I'm not intended to be in a long term relationship. I'm intended to have like these sometimes a year, sometimes three months sometimes, So I have not figured that out at all, and I'm starting to figure out, well, that's what it maybe is. He was right, right, I don't know. There's there's so much. I haven't figured out any of this ship, none of it, Like I don't know what freedom looks like. I can't, you know, I don't know what I'm supposed to be writing a book. I'm going on sabbatical. Haven't started the damn book because I start reading for the book and then get lost in the reading. I haven't figured out how to make myself meditate when Oprah and Deep I don't have those twenty one day meditation hard. Yeah, yeah, I mean I have to make myself because otherwise I would lose my mind. But it's like work. I haven't figured out how do you be an activist and keep a clean house. So yeah, none of it I have to say. I get. I'm sitting here just going yes because everything you're saying makes me feel relieved. You know that it isn't just me. It's like it's a very full plate when you want to have a life and dedicate your life and and you have kids, like I have a dog, and I don't know how to do it. I'm like, who knows how to keep the thing alive? Like what is this? It feels hard? And I feel like I'm always cleaning and there's always stuff, and I just I don't know the answers yet. But yeah, the the practice of self care, it feels like work to me. We're caring for the world feels like joy, absolutely, because self care is selfish care. But it isn't isn't selfish, It is if you don't adapt. So I want you to hear what you said, caring for the world feels like joy. All we have to do is create a model where we reciprocate the care for the world. Right. So self The reason I say self care is selfish care is for a couple of reasons. One, I feel like too many people use it as an excuse to shove the ship that they're supposed to be doing off onto my plate, right, saying that they need their me time or whatever. Well, that work still has to be carried, and I feel like it's the black mama's who wind up carrying it, right, black women being the mules of the world, zorineil Hurston right. So I'm mad about that. But also the selfish care. When people really need care, you can't just say you should take care of yourself. We need to take care of them, yes, And so I believe in a model of community care. I believe that there are times when we need care and we should all be that care for each other. Yes, And I want to clarify I fully agree with what you're saying. And what I'm learning for me anyway, is that personally I have I think, as so many women have been taught to prioritize everyone over myself. And now I'm like, oh no, oh, no, no self care. I can't think that it's selfish of me to sleep right, or to make time to meditate or and by the way I saw, I meditated every day, but I'm trying to get at least two more days when I do, then when I don't. And I'm really in this sort of struggle with understanding that I deserve that because if I if the things I needed to do to be a healthy person I needed to do for my child, they would be done, no question. And so I'm I'm in this stage in the last year and change where I'm like, oh, I have to require it for myself the way I would require it for my kid. And I think that even that is community here, because why are you preserving yourself like I can't die because I got kids in a movement? Right, yes, so you know I probably should scale back on the peach rings, right, like you know we should do some level of care. Um, that's the other work in progress. I never sleep like I sleep maybe three hours, and so that's something I'm trying to work on, you know. Okay, so now I know you see it. Work in progress. But here's a hack I learned. Laugh for real every day, Yes, laugh like my middle daughter. We be rolling like like to the point where tears come out, your ribs start hurting like that kind of laughter every single day. Find something that makes you do it, and then all the other stuff doesn't really matter. Right, So well, I love it. We got life, acts, we got we got some work to do. All right. Onward. Thank you, thank you for coming, Thank you for having me. This show is executive produced by Me, Sophia Bush, and sim Sarna. Our supervising producer is Alison Bresnick. Our associate producer is Cate Line. This episode was edited by Matt Sasaki and our music was written by Jack Garrett and produced by Mark Foster. This show is brought to you by Cloud ten and Brilliant Anatomy powered by Simple Cast. Mm hmmmm