WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.460 align:middle line:90% 00:00:01.460 --> 00:00:04.640 align:middle line:90% Thank you so much, Frank. 00:00:04.640 --> 00:00:09.740 align:middle line:84% That was incredible, you really just really blew me away. 00:00:09.740 --> 00:00:14.580 align:middle line:84% Just the heart, and the life, and the music, 00:00:14.580 --> 00:00:20.930 align:middle line:84% and just the care in your work was just disarming. 00:00:20.930 --> 00:00:22.385 align:middle line:90% I don't think I can go forward. 00:00:22.385 --> 00:00:24.710 align:middle line:90% [LAUGHS] 00:00:24.710 --> 00:00:27.920 align:middle line:84% [INAUDIBLE] so much coming from you. 00:00:27.920 --> 00:00:31.490 align:middle line:90% Yeah, I think I'm OK. 00:00:31.490 --> 00:00:35.150 align:middle line:84% So let me talk a little bit about what this project is 00:00:35.150 --> 00:00:36.420 align:middle line:90% before I launch in. 00:00:36.420 --> 00:00:41.780 align:middle line:84% And so, Diana knows that I was trying 00:00:41.780 --> 00:00:48.140 align:middle line:84% to get into detention centers, first, as a child advocate. 00:00:48.140 --> 00:00:55.650 align:middle line:84% I was trying to donate just basic toiletries, clothes, 00:00:55.650 --> 00:00:57.680 align:middle line:90% diapers. 00:00:57.680 --> 00:01:02.720 align:middle line:84% And every time I would come to an entrance 00:01:02.720 --> 00:01:07.640 align:middle line:84% or I was told that they would be taking certain things, 00:01:07.640 --> 00:01:10.430 align:middle line:84% the institution felt like it was just-- 00:01:10.430 --> 00:01:16.550 align:middle line:84% there was no opening, there was no penetrating something, 00:01:16.550 --> 00:01:18.800 align:middle line:90% I couldn't see beyond it. 00:01:18.800 --> 00:01:24.020 align:middle line:84% And that's actually what's been so surreal about this whole-- 00:01:24.020 --> 00:01:27.320 align:middle line:84% everything that's been going on with the migrants at the border 00:01:27.320 --> 00:01:31.610 align:middle line:84% is that, they're always sort of an abstraction. 00:01:31.610 --> 00:01:33.440 align:middle line:90% We don't have any names. 00:01:33.440 --> 00:01:35.420 align:middle line:90% We don't have any faces. 00:01:35.420 --> 00:01:39.890 align:middle line:84% We have Jacqueline, the six-year-old who died. 00:01:39.890 --> 00:01:44.570 align:middle line:84% We have a couple of names, but we don't have any stories. 00:01:44.570 --> 00:01:45.770 align:middle line:90% We don't have any lives. 00:01:45.770 --> 00:01:50.900 align:middle line:84% We just have this abstraction of children in cages. 00:01:50.900 --> 00:01:52.760 align:middle line:84% And I think what really overwhelmed 00:01:52.760 --> 00:01:59.210 align:middle line:84% me was this sense of survivor's guilt. Like, who am I to write 00:01:59.210 --> 00:02:01.740 align:middle line:90% about something like this? 00:02:01.740 --> 00:02:05.240 align:middle line:84% And what was really frustrating for me 00:02:05.240 --> 00:02:10.190 align:middle line:84% was that I didn't want to do this further abstraction. 00:02:10.190 --> 00:02:12.560 align:middle line:84% I wanted to write something who lived. 00:02:12.560 --> 00:02:17.360 align:middle line:84% But because I could never access a single migrant, 00:02:17.360 --> 00:02:20.240 align:middle line:84% I decided to just dive in to the abstraction. 00:02:20.240 --> 00:02:25.370 align:middle line:90% And I found [INAUDIBLE] there. 00:02:25.370 --> 00:02:30.470 align:middle line:84% I guess I just was struck by a lot of the work 00:02:30.470 --> 00:02:31.790 align:middle line:90% that I was doing. 00:02:31.790 --> 00:02:34.100 align:middle line:84% The things that I could access about these migrants 00:02:34.100 --> 00:02:38.450 align:middle line:84% was just documents, the sort of violence of the document. 00:02:38.450 --> 00:02:44.660 align:middle line:84% And so as I was reading a bunch of theory and things, 00:02:44.660 --> 00:02:49.160 align:middle line:84% this "Racial Calculus" really struck me. 00:02:49.160 --> 00:02:52.370 align:middle line:90% So I'll start with that quote. 00:02:52.370 --> 00:02:56.660 align:middle line:84% "If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of Black 00:02:56.660 --> 00:03:00.050 align:middle line:84% America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession 00:03:00.050 --> 00:03:03.870 align:middle line:84% with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, 00:03:03.870 --> 00:03:07.400 align:middle line:84% but because Black lives are still imperiled and devalued 00:03:07.400 --> 00:03:11.120 align:middle line:84% by racial calculus and a political arithmetic that 00:03:11.120 --> 00:03:14.040 align:middle line:90% were entrenched centuries ago. 00:03:14.040 --> 00:03:16.020 align:middle line:84% This is the afterlife of slavery-- 00:03:16.020 --> 00:03:19.980 align:middle line:84% skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, 00:03:19.980 --> 00:03:23.520 align:middle line:84% premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. 00:03:23.520 --> 00:03:25.740 align:middle line:84% I, too, am the afterlife of slavery." 00:03:25.740 --> 00:03:29.440 align:middle line:90% 00:03:29.440 --> 00:03:33.220 align:middle line:84% And then I found this Rudyard Kipling quote, 00:03:33.220 --> 00:03:37.540 align:middle line:84% "Take up the white man's burden, send forth the best ye breed. 00:03:37.540 --> 00:03:41.500 align:middle line:84% Go bind your sons to exile to serve your captives' need. 00:03:41.500 --> 00:03:45.370 align:middle line:84% To wait in heavy harness on fluttered folk and wild. 00:03:45.370 --> 00:03:49.630 align:middle line:84% Your new-caught sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child." 00:03:49.630 --> 00:03:55.710 align:middle line:90% 00:03:55.710 --> 00:03:59.230 align:middle line:84% "The Axis of Dispossession, Figure 1," 00:03:59.230 --> 00:04:01.540 align:middle line:90% "Dispossession of land." 00:04:01.540 --> 00:04:04.420 align:middle line:84% "On terra nullius, the state empties 00:04:04.420 --> 00:04:08.470 align:middle line:84% the land through the language of law, and in doing so, 00:04:08.470 --> 00:04:10.760 align:middle line:90% invents property. 00:04:10.760 --> 00:04:14.620 align:middle line:84% The state imagines itself empty, a peopleless void, 00:04:14.620 --> 00:04:18.010 align:middle line:84% a virgin continent awaiting discovery. 00:04:18.010 --> 00:04:20.079 align:middle line:90% But the emptying was not quiet. 00:04:20.079 --> 00:04:22.780 align:middle line:84% Annihilation by violence or virus, 00:04:22.780 --> 00:04:26.910 align:middle line:84% the land accounts for every missing breath. 00:04:26.910 --> 00:04:31.080 align:middle line:84% The land retaliated, froze, and grew barren, formed sheets 00:04:31.080 --> 00:04:32.820 align:middle line:90% of ice and mourning. 00:04:32.820 --> 00:04:35.520 align:middle line:84% Still, its frozen heart is settled, 00:04:35.520 --> 00:04:39.270 align:middle line:84% an empirical construct subject to natural law, 00:04:39.270 --> 00:04:41.670 align:middle line:90% man's mastery over nature. 00:04:41.670 --> 00:04:44.310 align:middle line:90% And so land becomes property. 00:04:44.310 --> 00:04:47.400 align:middle line:84% You could make this place beautiful. 00:04:47.400 --> 00:04:50.700 align:middle line:84% Another future foreclosed, another plain 00:04:50.700 --> 00:04:53.790 align:middle line:84% razed and renamed, another family 00:04:53.790 --> 00:04:57.480 align:middle line:90% evicted, another plot sanitized. 00:04:57.480 --> 00:05:00.150 align:middle line:90% Devastate, disappear, dilute. 00:05:00.150 --> 00:05:04.050 align:middle line:84% Law is the narrative power to obliterate all memory 00:05:04.050 --> 00:05:06.690 align:middle line:90% under colonial domination. 00:05:06.690 --> 00:05:12.130 align:middle line:84% Romance of the vanishing Indian, last of her race. 00:05:12.130 --> 00:05:15.630 align:middle line:90% Logic of elimination. 00:05:15.630 --> 00:05:16.980 align:middle line:90% Logic of accumulation. 00:05:16.980 --> 00:05:18.330 align:middle line:90% Dispossession of land. 00:05:18.330 --> 00:05:21.450 align:middle line:84% It is violence to even represent-- 00:05:21.450 --> 00:05:24.690 align:middle line:84% the ship, the father, the mother, the brother, the son, 00:05:24.690 --> 00:05:27.600 align:middle line:84% the daughter, the sister, the child ripped from the land, 00:05:27.600 --> 00:05:30.900 align:middle line:84% packed like cargo, and suspended in water. 00:05:30.900 --> 00:05:33.870 align:middle line:84% Destination-- not land but plantation, 00:05:33.870 --> 00:05:36.840 align:middle line:84% colony, you, stolen, the curved back 00:05:36.840 --> 00:05:39.660 align:middle line:84% upon which the New World will be built. 00:05:39.660 --> 00:05:42.570 align:middle line:84% In this empire, you build against your will, 00:05:42.570 --> 00:05:46.680 align:middle line:84% blackness is landlessness, is namelessness, is enslavement, 00:05:46.680 --> 00:05:50.250 align:middle line:84% is watching whiteness make off with your life, ever more 00:05:50.250 --> 00:05:52.740 align:middle line:84% capital and ownership and property 00:05:52.740 --> 00:05:55.200 align:middle line:84% and calling it individual freedom. 00:05:55.200 --> 00:05:56.820 align:middle line:90% What freedom? 00:05:56.820 --> 00:05:59.730 align:middle line:84% Once property, all land is plantation, 00:05:59.730 --> 00:06:02.960 align:middle line:90% all oceans a graveyard."