Thank you so much, Frank.
That was incredible, you really just really blew me away.
Just the heart, and the life, and the music,
and just the care in your work was just disarming.
I don't think I can go forward.
[LAUGHS]
[INAUDIBLE] so much coming from you.
Yeah, I think I'm OK.
So let me talk a little bit about what this project is
before I launch in.
And so, Diana knows that I was trying
to get into detention centers, first, as a child advocate.
I was trying to donate just basic toiletries, clothes,
diapers.
And every time I would come to an entrance
or I was told that they would be taking certain things,
the institution felt like it was just--
there was no opening, there was no penetrating something,
I couldn't see beyond it.
And that's actually what's been so surreal about this whole--
everything that's been going on with the migrants at the border
is that, they're always sort of an abstraction.
We don't have any names.
We don't have any faces.
We have Jacqueline, the six-year-old who died.
We have a couple of names, but we don't have any stories.
We don't have any lives.
We just have this abstraction of children in cages.
And I think what really overwhelmed
me was this sense of survivor's guilt. Like, who am I to write
about something like this?
And what was really frustrating for me
was that I didn't want to do this further abstraction.
I wanted to write something who lived.
But because I could never access a single migrant,
I decided to just dive in to the abstraction.
And I found [INAUDIBLE] there.
I guess I just was struck by a lot of the work
that I was doing.
The things that I could access about these migrants
was just documents, the sort of violence of the document.
And so as I was reading a bunch of theory and things,
this "Racial Calculus" really struck me.
So I'll start with that quote.
"If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of Black
America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession
with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory,
but because Black lives are still imperiled and devalued
by racial calculus and a political arithmetic that
were entrenched centuries ago.
This is the afterlife of slavery--
skewed life chances, limited access to health and education,
premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.
I, too, am the afterlife of slavery."
And then I found this Rudyard Kipling quote,
"Take up the white man's burden, send forth the best ye breed.
Go bind your sons to exile to serve your captives' need.
To wait in heavy harness on fluttered folk and wild.
Your new-caught sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child."
"The Axis of Dispossession, Figure 1,"
"Dispossession of land."
"On terra nullius, the state empties
the land through the language of law, and in doing so,
invents property.
The state imagines itself empty, a peopleless void,
a virgin continent awaiting discovery.
But the emptying was not quiet.
Annihilation by violence or virus,
the land accounts for every missing breath.
The land retaliated, froze, and grew barren, formed sheets
of ice and mourning.
Still, its frozen heart is settled,
an empirical construct subject to natural law,
man's mastery over nature.
And so land becomes property.
You could make this place beautiful.
Another future foreclosed, another plain
razed and renamed, another family
evicted, another plot sanitized.
Devastate, disappear, dilute.
Law is the narrative power to obliterate all memory
under colonial domination.
Romance of the vanishing Indian, last of her race.
Logic of elimination.
Logic of accumulation.
Dispossession of land.
It is violence to even represent--
the ship, the father, the mother, the brother, the son,
the daughter, the sister, the child ripped from the land,
packed like cargo, and suspended in water.
Destination-- not land but plantation,
colony, you, stolen, the curved back
upon which the New World will be built.
In this empire, you build against your will,
blackness is landlessness, is namelessness, is enslavement,
is watching whiteness make off with your life, ever more
capital and ownership and property
and calling it individual freedom.
What freedom?
Once property, all land is plantation,
all oceans a graveyard."