It's also my birthday. No, it's not. It's not. I'm kidding. Sing me a birthday song. No, don't. So, today our presentation is titled Scaling and Polishing is for Designers Not Just Dentists. I really have no excuse for this title. I just like puns. So, hi, I'm Jill. Hi, I'm Simit. We're product designers at Zendesk. I'm focused mainly on the Zendesk Message Product, which is part of the Zendesk platform, and I'll tell you more about that later. Before I was a product designer here, I was actually an illustrator and brand designer here as well for a couple of years. And before that, I did brand and web projects mostly with other clients. So, I worked mainly on the Zendesk Chat product, which Jill will explain more a bit later. So, before that, I graduated from Industrial Design before joining Zendesk. So, I created this device that can pull light and I traveled to Dubai to showcase it. Okay, so because our talk is mostly about what we design at Zendesk and how we design at Zendesk, we thought we better answer the question first, like what the heck is Zendesk, which I think a lot of you won't know. So, Zendesk is customer service software, basically any way in which a business wants to talk to its customers. So, whether that's like by email or phone or like the FAQ page on your website, Zendesk wants to be the platform that enables that communication. So, I mentioned before, I focus on Zendesk Message. So, that deals with social messaging channel. So, stuff like Facebook Messenger, Twitter Line and Simon deals with Zendesk Chat. And so, that is live chat software which is on websites and apps. So, these are all the products that are on our Zendesk platform. Okay, so design that skills. What does that mean to us? We've kind of identified these three areas in which growth has really caused some interesting growing pains and challenges which we found scalable design to be a really important part of how to solve. So, today we're going to share a bit about how and why we've tried to implement this at Zendesk. Okay, let's go. Growing platform. What does that mean? This dude was our original Zendesk brand. They called him the budi which is a combination of Buddha and Buddy. Isn't that good? So, the budi is just a calm guy. He's just a zen soul in the very chaotic and unglamorous world of customer service. That was the vision. And our founders who founded Zendesk in Copenhagen they were just focused on email support in 2007 and they wanted a software that was nice to look at, easy to use, very different from typical boring, painful enterprise software that was out there at the time. And it worked really well for them. Zendesk grew really fast and ended up acquiring three companies. A lot of you may know Zopim which was a Singapore startup that was acquired. It deals with live chat software. So, basically, you know, Simon works on Zendesk chat. That's Zopim, but it was rebranded. Zendesk also acquired Byme which deals on analytics and acquired Outbound which deals with proactive messaging. So, there are all these acquisitions, right? All over the world. Byme is in France. Zopim is in Singapore. And they're simultaneously developing other products as well over the years. So, we developed Help Center in Copenhagen. Talk in Ireland. Connect in Australia. And as you can imagine, when you've got like a whole bunch of different teams designing different products all over the world, you're going to end up with some really disjointed experiences, different brands, different experiences, different expectations within the product. And we had this vision, right? Of like a seamless Zendesk ecosystem where an agent could come in and just go from software to software and have a really nice time working with our software. And some of this really didn't play well with that vision. And so as idealistic designers, as we all tend to be, we feel sometimes like this. Oh no, I hope my boss doesn't see that. Okay, so going back to our brand. Going back to our brand. So what we did to solve this problem was first we looked at our brand, right? And we looked at this and we were like, I mean firstly, it's a Buddha. Secondly, like it just doesn't scale. We need like a brand that really can scale with our platform, right? We need a new brand with room to grow. So we started thinking about what makes a brand family? What is it to have diversity within lots of different products and yet unity within the Zendesk platform? We looked at super simple solutions and like crazy colour palettes, textures, photography, patterns and all the while we asked ourselves what are the values of Zendesk and how can we represent them visually? So this was the brand that we launched at the end of last year. Basically, every product brand encompasses two simple shapes. We call them the relationship. And so essentially, it represents the communication that happens just between two people.  You just need to make one connection between two people. And that's really what we want at the heart of our software. It's just two people making a connection. And so the two shapes as you saw before, they're like fighting or they're playing or they're jumping and that's what we want our platform to enable people to do to have that interaction. So we developed this system that has really simple rules and guidelines that make it super easy. So if we develop a new product or we acquire a new company, we know that if we want to, we could integrate it into this system really easily. And at the same time, while maintaining that unity, we know that each product can have a really diverse and built out universe. So they all live very independently and yet very harmoniously together. So it can still be a really lively, quirky and vibrant brand even though it's just like simple shapes. It still holds true to that original Zenda's vision of being this creative and charming brand that's not painful and boring, hopefully. And yeah, so that's how we built out a scalable brand system for a growing platform. But of course, that was not the whole solution. So besides the rebrand that Jill mentioned, the product team is also looking to create a unified experience across Zenda's platform. So as you can see, this is what we looked like before. So the level of inconsistency and fragmentation between the products is pretty obvious. We had many different treatments of type, color and layout that just doesn't seem to work together. We soon grew to realise that we needed some form of an alignment and that's why we created our design system called Garden. So Garden is still a pretty small team based in San Francisco with about 1.5 designers and two developers. Yes. So one of the major projects that the Garden team is working on is to provide alignments to our icons. So why icons? You may ask. It seems very basic but what happens when we have many designers across different countries turning and creating assets for different products? We end up with many, many, many icons some of which look the same but are used for different purposes and others that look different but are used for the same purpose. So what do I mean? So take this I icon as an example. So we currently use this icon in three of our products right now. So in chat mobile it indicates when a visitor is looking at a link in the chat dashboard it means that the visitor is active on your website in support it shows that another agent is looking at the ticket and in guide it is to customise the design. So all of this kind of show how we use the same icons for different use cases which might be confusing for our users who are actually moving across different platforms because that means that they have to relearn what this I icon means. Another example will be the thumbs up and thumbs down icon where they all kind of reflect a similar rating system but right now we have about four different styles. So over here you can see that we have a combination of line icons and fill icons some of which are joined and others together. So this also means that there are four different designers designing the same icon which seems to be very ineffective. So what now as you can see this is just an example where the design system is needed. So when the garden team first started on this project we had to all dump our icons into one document and it's now 77 pages long pretty insane. So we are still working through this project but along the way we have found brand AI to be a pretty useful tool as like a common resource file or what we call the source of truth. So all the approved icons are kind of consolidated into this plug-in where we could just drag and drop it into our design files. So the second area that I talked about a growing audience what does that mean? So as I mentioned before Zenda's grew really fast through like acquisitions product new products being developed and as it grew that meant that our audience became more and more diverse. So right now we have around like 35% non-English speaking accounts which is pretty high it's like more than 1 in 3 and we're in around 150 countries and territories and we support over 40 languages. So that's a super diverse audience. And on top of that we have customers like these who are international brands in and of themselves and they need to support a really international audience as well. So how can we help them do that? So a big part of that solution is the I18N team. So for those of you who don't know I18N is the short form for internationalization and our internationalization team basically helps us to localize all our products into different languages. They themselves are distributed all around the world so we're lucky enough to have like one I18N guy who sits right near the designers and we disturb him all the time. So as designers we really need to take the effort to poke them and be like hey can you please look at my design cause we need their perspective. So let me give you an example. So you might for example design something like this and you're like okay that's fine I guess like let's ship that that looks alright. But an I18N person might look at this and be like wait hold on what will happen when I translate all these strings and they become much longer what would happen what will happen then you might get something horrible like this. Okay wait firstly I'm super super super sorry if you speak Tagalog because it's like I Google translator all the text so I'm sure this is gibberish so I'm very very sorry if you speak Tagalog I'm sure it's nonsense but okay it was just to make a point okay and my point is you can see certain parts like how your text starts to like truncate or like one line becomes two lines or like things get super long then it knocks everything else down like that is like disaster if you ship something and then someone in another language saw this you'd be like oh my god quit my job so yeah so how do we kind of try to handle that so this is actually a tool that one of our colleagues made so basically you can type in the English text and it gives you again it's Google Translate but it's an estimation of how long it might be so you can see something like this where it's like save and continue as in English and then it's translated and you can see that the string length can change anywhere from between five characters to like 24 characters so if you think about that when you design how much variation do you need to account for on your design right it definitely will change the way that you design something yeah again it's not accurate lah don't look at the okay anyway as we did this presentation I asked the like funny things that I could share with you also I'm going to share with you some silly stuff so in the Zendesh message product we have this tab called the active tab it's where all your ongoing conversations live okay so it's like ongoing conversations and when it got machine translated so before an IT nine person had seen it it got translated to like Huatong which for those of you who don't speak Chinese means like physically active but you're running it's like so dumb like it's totally nonsensical and if you put yourself in the shoes of like a Chinese speaking agent you only speak Chinese you open up the software you just be like what the heck is a Huatong like tab like it's just ridiculous okay and like another one so we've got two lists one is all so it's for all the agents and one is mine meaning it's assigned to you so as you can imagine this got translated to this like a minor okay I don't know how to say that Chinese word but it's like means minor okay so I just thought that was just really dumb because again imagine you are and you know a business owner all you want to do is talk to your customers talk to your customers on Facebook Messenger for example and then you open this up and you see that there's something that's like asking you a mind something like it's just so stupid so our point is bad translations are just bad you X like you have to care about it and it's such a good example for me of like you you might try so hard and you design something you put so much thought into it you go and research it then your developer codes it out and it's beautiful but then one shitty translation results in a totally broken user experience right I mean you can see how that would be awful so for us it's really important for people to if you're trying to cater for a diverse audience to invest in an IT9 team that not only is good but cares about your product and knows your product well they understand when mine means mine and not mine okay but it doesn't it's not just limited to like language so for example this was an illustration that we did for some collateral in American and European markets and we you know it's very quintessentially San Francisco and you know Chinese takeout but they wanted to use the same collateral for Asian markets it's specifically the Chinese market so at that time I happen to be the only Asian designer on the brand team and immediately I was like no no no you cannot use that because it's really inauspicious a lot of us who live in Singapore would know that's really inauspicious to have like the chopsticks sticking out of your food like that and so immediately they were like oh okay so they took it they didn't really understand but they were like okay let's remove and I just thought it was a good example that I could think of where a diverse team really helps when you are looking at a diverse audience like if you're trying to support a diverse group of people your team it's great if your team is diverse because it really helps to mitigate a lot of that stuff that you may not know like cultural sensitivity who knows okay the last thing I want to talk about in this in this section is all the shades of gray so we know that designers love shades of gray and we know that we love using many many many different shades of gray on top of other shades of gray there are some engineers in the corner who I feel are smirking at me because we are big culprits of this like we will definitely sometimes have bad contrast issues and but we're trying to ask ourselves more and more what does this mean when you're looking at a design on a low quality 12 inch display non retina monitors right how does it work for the colour blind or people with visual impairments are you excluding people just through your design so one way that we've tried to help this is oh okay yes that's really bad okay this is plug in and sketch that we use that's called the colour contrast analyzer and basically the contrast in these two things is so bad you can't even see on the projector but it's like white text on light blue background okay and basically what you do is you select two options and it does the colour contrast for you and it gives you the ratio so we know according to the web content accessibility guidelines the ratio that passes is like 2.7 so this like 1.1 to 1 is like a mega fail obviously um yeah so we put together some resources and we're gonna we're gonna give out the the presentation after the event so hopefully you'll get this in your inbox so you can click around and see but I put a link to like the plug-in that I mentioned as well as the web content accessibility guidelines that we mentioned and some other links that we found really helpful for how to design in a more inclusive way because we really feel that's your responsibility if you have a diverse audience you need to include them so the final way in which Landess has really grown is through our internal design team so we have about 30 plus product designers and distributed across six different countries from Singapore to Copenhagen to San Francisco so we collaborate regularly across the world even though we all work on different products so just one example of the challenge that we face with such a distributor team so this was an actual screenshot of a timetable that we tried to take um to schedule a call across Singapore, Copenhagen, San Francisco and Melbourne as you can see it is almost impossible so one of the main things that we have learned or are still painfully learning is all about communication so with a decentralized team structure we have really learned to embrace asynchronous communication and that means taking an extra time and effort to reach out and stay engaged with other designers in other countries so it's definitely a lot easier to go up to someone and be like hey Jill can I can I borrow your eyes and something sure as compared as compared to writing your thoughts now because that involves crafting the message we have to first set the context over explain and finally wait for a reply which in this came in this case came weeks later so but we have kind of really embrace this process whether it's like sending someone a personal slack message or actually calmenting actively on envision so investing in documentation is also really important so again taking the time to explain why we chose A versus B can few tiresome sometimes but it does go a long way it doesn't just help you it also helps other designers and stakeholders involved to understand why something was designed in a certain way and also to provide a useful point of reference for others who are working on similar projects so the design team in in Zendes uses Basecamp for project updates and progress so the general structure that we have found to be really helpful was to first set the context second highlight your problem third present your solution and explorations and finally any future considerations so we also invest a lot in travel where we proactively go to other offices and talk face to face because in spite all of this nothing really beats face to face communication so I set out my Zendes journey at the creative offsite in San Francisco last year so there were many many presentations made made and was kind of good to see everyone gathering together besides work related staff it is also important for us to get to know our colleagues on a on a personal level and off sites are a great way for a distributed team to do this so this year we went to London and Paris so apart from offsite we also go down to other offices for projects specific needs so this was when I went down to Melbourne for unification project and sharing another designer here just came back from Melbourne last week so but we can so we try to get a lot of FaceTime through video calls as you would imagine so we do a lot of regular syncups and you can see in the photo on the right we're actually literally standing up because we were doing a stand up and we wanted to feel like we were on the same room not really didn't really work but yeah so another way that we have actually found really helpful like Simon was mentioning it's about building relationship and sometimes you can't just keep talking about work so one of the biggest reasons we actually started our instagram page which is super random is really because we felt that if every time I talk to my colleague it's always about work right it's always about a project or a pattern you're never going to really be able to build that relationship that you want to build so we were trying to just kind of give a glimpse into our lives in the office but outside of work to especially to our international colleagues so even if it's something as silly as like drawing on balloons yeah we thought why not let's share that part of of of our team and I'm I'm just saying you can follow us I'm just saying I mean no pressure you can have snacks if you follow us okay so recap so there are three areas where scalable design has really helped a growing platform a growing audience and a growing creative team and throughout the talk we've mentioned a whole bunch of tools that have been helpful to us and hopefully will be helpful to you guys so again I've collated it and this will be in your inboxes hopefully so simin mention brand.ai it's where our design component library lives it's where our design system lives basically a lot of you who use sketch would know that in their latest update they just really sketch libraries which is pretty great so definitely if you've never tried to design a design system go and try it it's we found it really helpful and yeah it's fun to do I think so we also use basecam as simin mention for documentation so we like to yeah just put our thoughts in a place where other people can find it and read it envision is used a lot for prototypes and flows because it's really easy to like click and leave a comment on your own time slack is where we slack Dropbox is where we put our files and we've also we've also found Dropbox paper really helpful for collaborative writing so it's a relatively new product if you've never tried it highly recommend it's really nice to use Trello is useful when you're kind of doing a project that has a lot of parts so if I'm doing a project where I want to put like a Kanban style like oh I'm going to do this and I'm doing this now and I finished this it's very helpful for a colleague especially one who's not in my office to have that Trello Board link and be able to follow me as I'm doing it like on their own time and finally Google slides which we use a lot just because it's so visual and we can take like snapshots of what we're doing and share them with each other in a really easy way so we've talked a lot about scalable design processes tools and even like organisational design and all of us have all of this has enable us to think about design in different ways and hopefully you too so um design can scale however besides all these things that we have talked about we have found that it is all for nothing if we do not have the most important thing we need a great product team so for design to truly scale we absolutely need to collaborate and get the inputs from our product and engineering counterparts so for example in the icons project that I mentioned before it might seem like a really design-centric project but even if all the designers in our mocks it really means nothing if we are an if we are unable to work with our product teams to ensure that consistency actually lives in our product so with that final caveat we're done with our talk and we're happy to answer any questions of your feelings or you want to share about your day or if you want to sing Desmond a birthday song yeah any questions oh yeah so you may have noticed some random people giving out swag design team so if you ask a question you get swag that's simple simple feelings yeah yeah good question so the question is how do we work with our product and engineering teams so our engineers are very difficult now I'm kidding I'm kidding I'm kidding so yeah so we work in scrum teams so we're attached to to usually now it's like maybe one or two scrum teams each and each like um we for engineers with one product manager yeah so we so some teams do things differently some of them have daily stand up some of them have virtual standups um but yeah essentially they work in a sprint style oh some of them also kind of depends on the scrub team but most of them work in a sprint kind of like two week sprint and then we participate in those plannings we try to be as embedded in our in our scrum teams as much as much as we can because it's trying to execute like or you know work on a design that you've done definitely it's super helpful and they can just feel like they can come up to you and be like a can we talk about this yeah so we try to be as close to them as we can yeah and also in terms of sprints usually when we are creating like a feature or something the design usually come before that so that we will kind of do our design our marks then we will share them with the engineers and the product managers and then you'll give us their feedback and then we iterate over and over again until we find a perfect or not perfect find the solution at that is good at that point of time and then that's when the engineering team starts building it yeah we're also really lucky that we work with product managers who really um uh respect and and value the design input so a lot of the time even if we're like talking about a feature I think we're really lucky that we are product managers who um lucky so for those who who may not have had that how do we deal with uh changing design inconsistencies to be consistent especially when there may be like people who are already using our product yeah it's true it can be quite painful um so we do have to be very like mindful of that so definitely especially for our products that are more developed like Zendes support and Zendes chat which have hundreds of thousands of of of existing users we do have to be listening to their feedback really closely a lot of the time we dog food a lot of I mean we use all our own products so for example if we're gonna push out a change in Zendes chat we will a lot of the time test it on our own advocates so we'll we'll push out the change on their dashboards only and we'll quickly get their feedback so that's one way that we have found to be really helpful so because they use it everyday just like our customers so they hate something they're gonna let us know yeah I think we also try to incrementally change this is the product now and then boom then like there's a whole new product so we slowly change like maybe we we change the font then we change a sudden button and then like slowly slowly yeah we are still we are still working on it so we haven't really completely solved our inconsistency problem yet anyone else oh yep so sadly neither of us were here during the acquisition that happened three years ago I joined right after it as well and she joined about a year ago there are the designers here who were around during the acquisition but all of them are not meeting my eye lines so it was I can say it was it was definitely interesting I think that the culture here was really really strong because it was a start up right I mean the the super tighten it and very very strong in that own identity and then I think when the acquisition happened there were a lot of shifts that had to be made we had to get a lot more use to being again super open about all our design thinking documenting why we decide to do something just making sure that if someone is not literally sitting next to me they know what I'm doing all that really painful and sometimes can be tedious stuff but I think the team really had to make that extra effort to put in all those processes yeah that was a major part but I think also we yeah again you know the the global creative team we love to like get together in one country so that also helps yep which teams oh across like the design teams and if we're like working on one project okay so he's asking how do we communicate across the different teams especially globally so that happens that's a great question that happens very often where I'm working on a design pattern someone else is working on a different design pattern and sometimes it's really hard to like communicate and get that resolution so the garden team which Sima mention is actually a big part of that they tend to arbitrate a lot of this so if I'm working on sale like and someone else is working on a different drop down menu and it's more than just UI right it's UX it's like how it works and all the different states and all the different components they can be the ones who really will step in and be like okay give me all your feelings and thoughts and then they'll go and write it down and then they'll go and experiment so having that team dedicated to like components has actually been a huge help do you have anything to add okay is there anyone from like so she's asking was the garden team initially a full-time a full-time job it was I think sort of like maybe 60% of one of the designers in SF's time and then very quickly they started ramping up but yeah it definitely didn't start off it's like okay you know you only do this yeah that's why we have like the 1.5 so still have the 1.5 one of the designers is working half on like another product and half on garden we are we are realizing that the the design system is also quite important so we are trying to build up that team as well yeah maybe we'll take one more question cause it's hot I feel warm do you all feel warm is it just me sorry I think so the design system we use brand.ai so the design library is maintained by the garden team and they are like upload assets and then we're able to drag and drop so they tell us when they've released a new version they're like yay we released version 3 and then we all go and update and then we can just drag and drop and usually they are they are really they're becoming more and more detail in their documentation so if they've released some new component we have all read about it for weeks and we know it's coming yeah sorry come on yeah that's a good question so if we want a new icon do we just create it and send it to them sometimes we do especially if it's very specific right if it's very specific to something that I know only my product is really going to use I'll probably just create it and then like let them know and then let them edit in but if it's a very general one yeah so sometimes we will have designers because we have a select channel sometimes we have designers who will like comment and say that hey guys I need and and thumbs up icon anyone else have it then then people who have those icons will actually reply to that and we try to kind of use the same or align and then if there are more and more people who needs the icon then the garden team will come in and be like okay across many many designer so we will try and build it yeah still very ad hoc we don't have that much process around it yeah okay I feel very warm let's stop okay so feel free to come and talk to us later yeah happy birthday Desmond okay right


Go outside, when you're in Mob 2, go outside with all your stuff to get a sum of 4. Your ADs are optional. Okay. Oh yeah. You're growing after what's going on. You don't have a symbol. No, no. Gas mask on the left-hand side. Put it together. Yeah, I think it's a bit. Oh, that's in there? Yeah, exactly. Alright, go grab those. I haven't put it on. There you go.  Just assemble your weapons. You got to clear it. Turn your name of pool to the rear and rule trigger. You can now click. Select to burst. Let's just say it's right here. This is your piece, the H over the affected limb. You're going to go around? I can make it.


Hello and welcome to an extra special screencast today on how to determine whether a given function is a solution to a differential equation. And I want to give an extra special shout out to Grand Valley State University's I-Dell department for the use of their light board because we couldn't have made this cool screencast without them. All right, today we're going to be looking at a differential equation. So our differential equation is dy dt equals y minus y squared. And we're going to be doing this in two different parts. We're going to look at two different functions and see if they satisfy the differential equation. See if it is or is not a solution. So the first function we're going to look at here is f of t equals 2 plus e to the t. Okay, looking back at our differential equation up here, this notation means dy dt means take the derivative of your function with respect to t. Now the fact that this is a y and this is an f doesn't matter, okay? It just matters that this means take the derivative. Then over here we're going to have to do our function then minus our function squared. Okay, so there's really only just a little bit of calculus involved with these problems. Okay, so our left hand side, so that's looking over here. So let's see what the derivative is of this function with respect to t. Well, this isn't too bad because it's just a sum. The derivative of the 2 goes away so our derivative is just e to the t. Okay, now let's look at the right hand side. So over here we've got y minus y squared. So that means take your function, so that's 2 plus e to the t, and then subtract, and then square your function, 2 plus e to the t squared. Okay, now we gotta do a little bit of algebra, that's all this is, no more calculus. So we've got 2 plus e to the t, and then minus 2 plus e to the t squared means multiply it by itself, okay? So then we've got 2 plus e to the t in the front minus we multiply all this part out, we're gonna end up with 4 plus 4 e to the t plus e to the 2t, okay? This is all properties of exponents, algebra, multiplying stuff out. So hopefully you can look at this and see there's no way we're gonna end up with where we started, but let's just go one more step. Distributing that negative through. So you can see that we're gonna end up with a whole bunch of things in here, and there's no way we're gonna get back to that left hand side. So this is not a solution. All right, we're gonna look at another function next. All right, so we're gonna be working with the same differential equation we did on the last one, but here we're gonna be looking at a different function. Okay, so again following the same idea, let's take a look at that left hand side. And the left hand side means we need to do the derivative of our function with respect to t. Okay, we're looking at this function, it's e to the t over 2 plus e to the t, that is a quotient, okay? So we're gonna have to use the quotient rule, so we gotta go back and remember that. So that means we wanna take our bottom function times the derivative of our top function, and then minus our top function times the derivative for our bottom function, let's see, let's try to go into there. And then all divided by that denominator squared. All right, simplifying this a little bit, so let's go ahead and multiply this numerator out. So we're gonna end up with 2e to the t plus e to the 2t. And then minus e to the 2t all over 2 plus e to the t squared. Okay, e to the 2t is canceled. So we end up with a function that says 2e to the t, all over 2 plus e to the t squared. So that's our left hand side. Now, let's see what our right hand side's gonna look like. That was the calculus, now we got the algebra. So the right hand side says I wanna take my function. So that's this guy in here, and I want to subtract it then from the same function squared. So I'm gonna have e to the t over 2 plus e to the t minus that same thing, e to the t, 2 plus e to the t squared. Now, let's look at the second piece first. So squaring this fraction means I'm gonna be squaring the numerator and the denominator separately. So I'm gonna end up with e to the 2t over 2 plus e to the t squared. Okay, hopefully you guys can all read that, okay? So looking back at our first fraction, we need to find a common denominator then. So I need to multiply this fraction then by 2 plus e to the t over 2 plus e to the t in order to get a common denominator. Okay, so distributing everything through, I'm gonna end up with 2e to the t, so multiplying that there. Miner plus e to the 2t, and then that's gonna end up being over 2 plus e to the t squared. Okay, smashing these two fractions together, you'll notice our e to the 2t's are gonna cancel. So we're gonna end up with 2e to the t, all over 2 plus e to the t squared. Which is exactly the same function we got on the left hand side. So this is a solution. Thank you for watching.


start recording yeah okay well um tonight's presentation is part of our ross pain memorial series on race each year vicki presents a forum on race in honor of ross pain ross was a member of newsreel uh collective that made films about political activists and issues including films about the black panther party she compiled archives and files to chronicle the counterintelligence activities on the part of the fbi against black radical and liberal movements her archives serve as an important record that could have been lost without her dedication she also produced a film called what we want what we believe a tribute to the black panther party and to the black leaders of the 60s and 70s ross died on may 21st in 2019 and upon her death a group of her friends and family arranged for a celebration of her life the funds raised to cover the cost of the event exceeded the cost so the planning group decided to fund this annual series in her honor tonight's forum is focused on reconstruction of the united states and the 13th 14th and 15th amendments and will this i'll turn this over to our moderator sandy baird okay thank you lu um and we all remember ross for her diligent work uh for black people and for the hit and for the black panther party always um and she worked in my office for years compiling files about the black panther party but mainly about count uh co-intel pro it was called those were the fbi efforts against the black panther party and it's really important to remember that these days when all of us seem to be more uh willing to believe anything the fbi almost says that at one point the fbi was devoting its effort to destroy the movements of black people um right and i think some some radicals uh picked the locks of the fbi and and uh uncovered all of these um all of this information that ross uh then picked up on and i remember i remember her collecting these files in my office and i took up the damn office all those files i'll tell you there were a bazillion of them in my in my office that was before i knew you justine way before i knew you all right i remember we did a theater piece a reading of of all of the uh the documents that she found uh that that were released uh as part of a lawsuit and uh a lot of it was redacted but uh a lot of it was very telling and we made a presentation i remember as city hall in burlington where we read those files right i remember that okay and tonight we're going to talk a little bit more about uh the history of the united states and the whole history in connection with race and i'm going to introduce it but please remember that um i would love this to be a discussion group where people should ask me questions the reason that um we all decided to do this talk tonight was because of the current controversy surrounding what uh many people are calling institutional racism i'm not sure of the definition really of institutional racism but i wanted to talk a little bit about that and give a kind of another perspective on that whole idea it would seem to me although the definitions have been very vague that institutional racism at least implies that the that the institutions of the united states have built into them racism that they are built they're part of the warp and woof of all american institutions and i would take a little bit uh of controversy about that i don't share that view totally because the america the united states has rather a different history than is presented by that view twice the united states tried to reconstruct itself um both times a lot in which race was discussed and which it was faced head on that that there was institutional racism certainly in this country and it's founding um but that there have been many efforts to reform those institutions and while racism exists in the united states i think pretty heavy um racism on the part of many people whites and probably a lot of people that there's a racist mentality i'm not certain our institutions are inherently racist as the phrase institutional racism implies and let me tell you why there are to me there is one institutional racist institution in our country and that is i believe the electoral college but short of that i want to talk about why i think that our institutions have been reformed that does not mean that racism is gone in the united states by any means but i do believe that we should take a look at our institutions and see if the current controversy which labels those institutions institutionally racist like in their genes or whether we face a different problem okay twice i think the united states went through efforts to become a nation in which everyone was equal under the laws kurt you already have a question did you yeah i'm sorry and maybe just to clarify do you want questions reserved for the end or no interrupt go ahead okay i mean so uh as a and again this is just my experience and from observation uh over my soon to be almost 50 years uh i've my my experience has been uh in terms of as a person of color and my definition of institutional racism is that there are racists within most institutions in america unfortunately right but uh i don't know that the system because is racist because what i've been in institutions where they were mixed uh you know with mixed races and with people that were not racist and therefore often i found in those again unfortunately rare instances those institutions were not racist right that's what i had when you had the when you had the right people the right with the right heart and the mentality running them those institutions which may have previously been racist uh were not racist anymore right that's that that's my again that's just my experience you know as a person with my shade of color right well i'm i'm also a female as many of these participants are and you could argue that our institutions are also sexist but i don't i think people with as you said within those institutions are sexist our racist our homophobic but the institution itself i believe the institutions themselves are capable of reform and have been reformed in a lot of ways when you have the right people in that right or when you have the proper people that will change the laws about those institutions for instance i believe for instance about the electoral college i believe that is an institution that was based on racism based on slavery as a matter of fact but which has to be eliminated however i don't believe our other institutions are in that status that have to be eliminated for instance like the police i do not believe i would do not believe the police per se are racist although there are racist police right the police as an institution the police as an institution first of all they're a kind of a local institution really rather than a kind of a federal institution but in other words i believe that the system has that we people of the united states and many countries are racist but in this country there has been an attempt through its history to eliminate institutional racism okay and i'll just tell you why i think so first of all in the republic when we were founded as a republic um if you read the definition even of the declaration of independence which is a very important document and then if you also read the united states constitution but if you read the the creation of this republic and remember we were the only republic in the world did you know that people really think that through that in its inception with the overthrow of the british empire which i don't even know how that we did in a way except that we had the french on our side i mean we were this puny little country right 13 puny little colonies overthrowing the strongest empire on earth and when we did that in the beginning we were devoted to a republic with equality before the law was it real was it a huge contradiction yes but those were aspirational documents correct i mean i don't know anybody have a problem with that yeah kurt obviously kurt has problems well i mean so just the you know the the flip side of the argument is uh many of those as i think we all know but i just want to you know bring it to everyone's attention again you know while we had you know folks with amazing oratory skill in writing skill at the time including the declaration of independence that you cited you know that same you know author who has a memorial a giant memorial of himself and in washington dc it wasn't it wasn't uh overthrown jefferson no no i think it's it's still there okay you know he uh you know he had black slaves and he beat black slaves he used black women for his own entertainment so you know he wrote very beautifully but at the same point you know these these were flawed individuals at the same time what we're talking about is the same thing as we just talked about the the institution of the republic at that time had a lot of racists that formed the republic but remember the constitution also right you know about uh you know i don't think they specifically mentioned you know the quote-unquote the peculiar institution of slavery yes it did always yeah yeah however it did reference and make reference to a particular set of individuals they didn't want to use the word slaves right that would you know be counted in a certain manner exactly that's what everyone knew that they were referring to black slaves however you know because the constitution didn't want to be the the font the founders didn't want to taint that constitution with the the specter of slavery painted they didn't use that word per se but everyone knew that's what i think they used the word people in bondage but i'm not sure but what he is referring what kerr is referring to is proves or rather it gives uh a cooperation a bit to my argument the original constitution was deeply flawed because of the of the real institution of slavery that existed at that time if you think about plantation slavery in the south it was a huge part of the building of this economy and the building of this country the northern people the people like the adams for instance in the original constitution they did not they confronted that head on they did not want slavery they always like bent franklin was in his own way an abolitionist there was a deep contradiction in the first writings of the constitution it is more visible if you look at the electoral college that's where racism and slavery played itself out most that's why i'm saying you have to eliminate in my view the electoral college that is an institution that i think is unreformable and it has to go the reason was that the electoral college is the is the numbers of congressmen and senators together the numbers of congressmen was based on population if you think about it the south argued in the in the forming of the electoral college that you had to count every single person in the south so that it could dominate congress and it could dominate the electoral college that meant that the south argued count every black slave as a person don't give them rights count them as people and therefore the south would have bigger population therefore the south would control the house and therefore the south would control the electoral college the north on the other hand understanding what was going on said don't count black slaves at all and if you think about what was the proper position to take the north was right if you counted every slave that meant that the south was going to control the united states of america it would control the house and it would control the presidency through the electoral college on the other hand the north argued don't count black slaves at all only count free people that meant that the north would predominate so it's important to know that several states in the south they had populations close to 50 percent black that were that that were black right exactly all right so what was the compromise though because the south said you don't go our way we won't sign this bloody constitution at all we won't enter the union the north said we have to have the south in the in our union because otherwise we would be taken over again by england what what was the compromise that resulted from that what was it you all know three six three six blacks would count as three fifths only and the north had to accept that why did they have to accept it because the south said we're out of here if you don't right so that's why we have the electoral college to this day it has to go that is the only institution that i know of go that is to me unreformable there might be others especially on the issue of race okay why i have a question why was the electoral college formed to begin with what was the what was the idea behind needing an electoral college well okay i mean since people were voting i mean that was the way it was going to be people were going to elect representatives why did they need an electoral college they weren't going to elect them the electoral the electors in the electoral college elects the president still still i understand that but why was it started well for one thing because this is the 18th century right where our country was founded by more or not all but more or less privileged people more or less not all not all but they were they were also not as privileged as those in england by the way they but it was still a country of elites that didn't trust people to vote they didn't trust the mass they didn't trust people like you and me or poor people or black people or white people or women remember women didn't vote at all until when when did women get the vote 1920 1920 was when women got the vote they didn't trust the masses enough to allow them to vote so their idea was to elect them from the congress and from the house as sort of an indirect what was called an indirect election by the way that's how the senate worked too by the way the senate was voted by the state the senators were put in office by the legislatures by each state legislature because people did not trust the masses i i hate to use that word because to me they didn't trust the ordinary citizens enough to allow us to vote freely and then essentially yeah it was essentially a safety switch yeah and democracy they trust the mob they didn't trust the mob as very few elite governments do anyway i mean you could even see it now nobody trusts people of our country to vote in a way even now in this election people don't trust that anybody has enough sense to vote i guess rightly correctly i don't know how you put it but i think people vote in accordance with their own self-interest and i think that's fine barry is that you barry i can't hear you you're muted you're muted okay i'm gonna go okay okay i'm gonna go on until he gets on no no no i'm okay the reason that they had the electoral college was that the initial constitution gave power of election of the president and it still does in fact yes states right right there's nothing in the constitution about popular vote right exactly the president directly or indirectly right the constitution still allows the state to determine how the electoral college will be exactly good point so it's still to this day the real election of the president occurs in the electoral college not among us and in each state in their electors those electors can vote the way they want which by the way we saw in the bush v gore case in the year 2000 when the state of florida said if you guys don't get your act together to do a recount we're just going to pronounce bush you know the winner which is in if a sense what happened anyway isn't it well in 2020 and 2020 uh trump was trying to get the uh the legislators to say don't pay attention to the voters right a point a point my electors that and that could be legal is the point everybody thought trump was a maniac could have been it's a legal it could be that that would happen and it was legal if it did no we don't know that okay let's go on all right yeah it's not a point that you know that you and i need arguing about for the rest of our lives which we've been doing for most of our lives so anyway um okay so the second time that the country reconstruct really did reconstruct itself and i mean that i mean that from the bottom of my knowledge the the time when this country was busted busted broken in half was in 1861 when the civil war began and then through the civil war it was basically at war with each other right north versus south geographical but also an ideological war geographical because it was the states of the north which were very few i mean do y'all know where the mason dixon line is which defined north and south justin you must know that she lives in the south so where is the job where is it uh virginia yes it's well it's baltimore pennsylvania it's baltimore the mason dixon line so it's pennsylvania maryland yeah but yes i guess so but it runs to baltimore too that's where south of that was the south and north of that were these puny states in in the in the north with the exception i guess of new york new york was probably the biggest one at that time right right we guess okay so you had that those two sections were at war with each other but also it was an ideological struggle and that struggle was over slavery and at the end it was kept as a civil war and this to me is really interesting about the civil war and that it could have been a civil war like most civil wars with foreign intervention and if that had happened if for instance england which wanted to intercede if england had intercede and had a proxy war uh the result would have been what if england had chosen to enter on the side of the north well which side would it have entered you guess and what so so the part of the south because they traded with the south the south had contributed to them the whole cotton um industry and had built the english empire everywhere else through this trade relationship but lincoln was very smart and knew that he had to keep england out because that would have been definitive and then the south probably would have won so in 1863 considering a lot of factions prior to 1863 you could argue that the civil war was about the preservation of the union i'm not certain that those two things are terribly different elimination of slavery and the preservation of the union to me go hand in hand however lincoln knew that if england had intervened um that the union i mean we would have been destroyed as a union and as a republic so he carefully thought about both the morals i think he was a moral man and also the strategies of the emancipation proclamation in 1863 when he issued the emancipation proclamation and said in those rebel states slavery no longer exists and he did it for two reasons what once that happened as one black historian said then the struggle became for most for many black people a struggle for freedom and that eliminated the possibility that england which had a strong anti-slave working class would intervene at that point to protect slavery anyway curt you had another yeah i mean the the other interesting point uh you just talked about the emancipation proclamation and lincoln being a moral man it's it's important to note however that the emancipation proclamation and i think you said it but it's important to focus on the detail that the emancipation proclamation only ended slavery as you said in the rebel states rebel states you're right it did not end slavery right no but it did in those states yeah so if there were neutral states which there were all right there was i think west virginia was neutral yeah you know and i think there were some states that were on the fringe of the north that had slaves they were not liberated right and you know why you know why it occurs absolutely right there were states in the south with slavery that did not join the south or did not join the confederacy and the reason was probably they knew that it was a huge risk or something but one of the reasons was that lincoln said you guys can keep your slaves we're going to eliminate it if in those states that continue this war essentially and those states were kind of the deep south at that time the state it's also it's also a military strategy to wreak havoc right in the south right well it's also a military strategy because a lot of black men to enlist sure and they did in massive numbers which is the whole story of the massachusetts 54th the whole story of the massachusetts 54th was the enlistment of black men usually after the emancipation proclamation okay but let me mention something else because what lincoln said at that point was i hope that god is on my side but i've got to have kentucky and then those and that's what he meant keep those neutral states out because that was a military strategy to win the war all right so in other words after 1863 the tide turned and with the infusion of black troops you all should see the movie glory if you haven't have you how many people have seen glory i just bought a copy of it nobody except me and grand you kid it lou i thought you had where's lou where's yes yes i have i've seen it okay so me and lou and grand that's it glory is the accurate kind of history of the massachusetts 54th division anybody been on the boston common by the way you've seen the big i have a poster of it in my house it's a big uh what kind of material is it brass it's a big uh sculpted piece of the massachusetts 54 going off the fight in the uh civil war anyway so after 1863 it was clear that the union was going to win and they did and um with the surrender of uh i guess robert lee yeah apematics okay so then what after the end of the civil war what was going to happen to the united states at that point the whole southern geographical section was out of the union they were no longer in the union there were four and a half million black people who had been emancipated what the hell was the united states going to do with those people how is it going to reconstruct the united states in a way that recognized that slavery was over how are we going to build this country kind of to fulfill also the aspirations of being a republic where everybody was equal under the law and that's where you get to the constitutional amendments that were made between 1865 and 1877 that period of time is called reconstruction and it's really important when i was in school at umass and i took us history that period of time is never was not even studied it was considered an embarrassment to us history because at that point many many black people led the southern governments at that time they were elected maybe or appointed but they were put in power in many of the states of the south and there was the usual probably politicking and there might have been some corruption but it but the but the southern whites were furious about this and led this campaign and it was called historical revision that these were terrible governments corrupt governments ignorant bunch of x slaves who had taken over all their fair governments in the south however that's what happened black many many black people were appointed or elected to office they led the state legislatures and they and the north not northern states amended this constitution to take into cognizance that this is a brand new country now four and a half million basically refugees if you want to put it that way four and a half million black people with no skills remember that black slaves could not be taught to read or write it was illegal to teach black people to read or write in the south it was illegal that they could get married they could not marry each other that was not a recognized marriage and you might be able to figure out why can you figure out why those people are experts of family law if you recognize a legal marriage between blacks and blacks who do the kids belong to in a legal marriage to the parents the parents they couldn't have that because the slave owner wanted to say they could be sold everywhere and they did so there's no legal recognition of a black slave marriage no legal recognition they did it black people did it so they had no rights to their own family they could not read or write they had no property they had no clothes they had no personal property none of that they were on the road with nowhere to go and nothing to do nothing many of them wanted to and did there were slaves that went to the sea islands and remember they were promised by Lincoln 40 acres in a mule remember that was the big demand they never got it but many ex-slaves did go to sea islands places like um Hilton Island puts the one in Jekyll Island in Georgia where they were able to sort of conduct a peasant kind of life where they they could establish farms self-sufficient farms that's what they wanted it to appear that's what black people wanted was some kind of farming subsistence farm economy many of them came north and participated in the great industrial revolution that was going on in the time in the north with immigration as well however the constitution did I think was reformed amended in order to reconstruct the country the 13th amendment was passed during while Lincoln was alive um the 13th amendment abolished slavery right justine you might justine probably knows all this okay that was the first amendment now is anybody seeing them that was passed in 1865 anybody see the movie Lincoln what did you think most of that's the story of the 13th amendment right I I loved the movie but at the time you know maybe half jokingly I told my friends at lunch at work that Lincoln made a big mistake you should have let him go oh yeah yeah think of it did you mean it uh do you mean now I'm starting to mean it even more uh that south is being resurrected again okay that's that's an opinion that was I don't I don't share that but what about it should the should the north have let them go what would have happened moosa if the north had said okay go your own way what would have happened in 1861 what would have happened England would have come back is that yes yes that's what I think would have happened you know England was being trashed by France and they were busy yeah they're not that busy they were also making huge deals with the south okay they were not that busy well they needed the cotton and they needed you're right they needed the south they had their own industry but they did which we had in the north yeah but they needed the cotton from the south for their mill oh England all of their factories were dependent on the American cotton no I understand right guess where they went after the south was was after the civil war where did they go and find that cotton India that's when they definitely colonized India okay but anyway the English empire was also the strongest empire in the world even though as moosa said they had wasted a lot of their resources on fighting with the French however they still were the strongest empire in the world at that time so the 13th amendment abolished slavery abolished it period the 14th amendment is a little bit more complicated and I wish Jared had been here to talk about it but I will talk a little bit about the 14th amendment but there are any questions of that that the 13th amendment passed to abolish slavery for all time we have not returned to slavery even though a lot of people would say that no progress has been made in this country I believe that that's hugely progressive that we don't have slavery anymore anybody else have a thought about that okay the 14th amendment okay anybody anybody want to mention that because once again I think the argument that this country is institutionally racist is not one that I particularly share because of these important amendments 13th amendment abolished slavery what's the 14th amendment which was passed and remember that that had to take the consent of three quarters of the states or three quarters I believe of the legislatures okay passed Lincoln had to do all kinds of shenanigans to get it passed all kinds if you saw the movie you'll see some of the stuff that he did he got it passed while the southern delegations were out of the congress in the first place he got it passed by lying a bit remember in the movie Thaddeus Stevens who's a big was a big abolitionist said I don't care that he lied we want that we needed that amendment passed I agree with that 100 percent I think he said the southern delegations have not shown up because and it was kind of true it was also true that they were going to show up the next day or something like that okay the 14th amendment so what is it does everybody know what the 14th amendment is it establishes citizenship yep and it gives the congress the authority to enforce equal the equal rights provision of well it had an equal equal rights provision and gave authority to congress the best laws to enforce okay why was that essential and due process right and due process was okay why was the 14th amendment important in every single element of Barry mentions number one citizenship as far as I know had never been defined in the constitution right before that it was there was not a definition of citizen who was a citizen of this country prior to this 14th amendment so what is the 14th this is important by the way in the pro-choice movement too but I don't need to get into that right now but what does the 14th amendment say about citizens when do you become a citizen all persons born in the united states are citizens of the united states and are entitled therefore to the equal protection of the laws all persons born in other words fetuses are not persons that's how that's how robby way was decided by the way but all persons born in the united states are citizens of the united states and entitled to the equal protection of our laws there was one trick not a trick there was one exception which I need to mention because it says all persons born in the united states and subject to the jurisdiction of the united states what group of people at that point was not we're not subject to the jurisdiction of the united state native americans native americans nor did they want to be you got to remember this native americans did not ever want to be citizens of the united states they had their own nations wouldn't have only been those native americans who were on reservations no there were no reservations at that time very reservations in the whole separation comes in with the daws act much later it was i mean the united states in 1861 1865 were still at war with the native americans Lincoln was terrible about continuing the war against native americans and he was the president that wanted them to come under the jurisdiction of the united states you got to remember they didn't want to be under the jurisdiction of the united states they were their own nations they wanted to deal with the united states with treaties as separate nations they did not want to be part of the united states they were made to be part of the united states later and when they were made citizens and i believe that was in the daws act in maybe 1870s quite a bit later they were incorporated against their will what is the language in the 14th amendment that makes children children born overseas of american i don't i don't i don't know if it is i think it's i don't think it is but i think it's in natural immigration laws probably no i think it's the word naturalized is in there somewhere well i don't know i had it in front of me and i yeah i think i think barry's correct i mean because uh the issue came up when john mccain ran for president that's right that's right and the issue came up again when ted cruz who was who was actually physically born in canada uh ran for president in 2016 so what was his argument then what was cruz's argument if he was born in canada that he could still that his father was an american okay um okay so john mccain was born in the uh canal zone of panama and that's why it also came up with gold water who was born prior to was it arizona that he was in arizona yeah at the time it was a territory i'll tell you who else that came up with madeline cunan she wanted to be she was being considered as a vice president once she was born in switzerland uh so she couldn't do it you can't she couldn't but she wasn't born to american uh right right correct correct right she was born i don't know the swiss parents maybe i don't i don't really know okay so i'll tell you the 14th amendment is probably well even today it is very disputed especially during the bush era it was disputed more i believe that it is now when the republican party wanted to argue that um if you were a so-called anchor baby mexican woman comes across the border and has a kid here citizenship in other words who would be this the baby is the citizen automatically mother still isn't the republicans at one point and wanted to amend the 14th amendment to say that that kind of a situation that that kid could not be a citizen of the united states it did not fly it did not go in a parent i haven't heard anything more about that those proposals in the last four years it was a big discussion well i don't i never heard it the last four years i heard it a lot under bush i don't know but we heard it a lot because they wanted to abolish stop people born here to foreign parents not being america i know that was yeah well my point is musa that it's a long debated subject and it's generally a republican demand it's not just trump it's been it existed since uh i remember lindsey graham and and the senate debating it and wanting it wanting to get it calling those baby babies anchor babies because if the baby then gets to be 18 then the parent can come right okay so that's what's let me just say why i believe that that's such an important amendment because most republics in the world are not based on where you were born in order to get citizenship if you are a turk turkish descent born in germany you can't get you're not a citizen of germany most citizenship tests are based on your ancestors whether you're a part of the german community whether your parents were german that's the test of citizenship for germany in many instances in the german example there are people of turkish descent that have been there for two three generations born they only speak german and they they are not german citizens right and nor can they be they cannot even be naturalized as non-german citizens can they get passed for i don't know no probably not i'm not a german probably not a german one not a german one now well then if they if the three generations uh german where are they gonna get a passport maybe they don't maybe they can't from turkey and they can't travel yeah not from turkey they would my assumption is turkey yeah right but it's in the and in other there's only as i uh i guess as i read there's only like 16 percent of the nations of the world which grants citizenship the way we do no actually it's canada and the us what what it looks like it's only canada and the us no not canada because canada doesn't is is uh different because can canada is a commonwealth country so i'm not certain how citizenship is granted in canada i just don't know no if you're correct if you if you're born in canada you do automatically get canadian citizenship like like like here in the united states yeah sure i don't i just don't know if you go to france and in france no in france in france you have to when you are born you have to wait until you are i think 18 to ask for the citizenship you don't automatically get it right if you want and actually uh what i read recently is only the us and canada because there's no other states besides canada and the us that does the uh birthright citizenship you might be right but it is such a good idea i must say that the united states that is a fabulous idea that should be it seems to me practice everywhere i mean it's not true in palestine either i don't know what kind of passport a person can get on that matter we have the same problems in west africa and usually in africa first for example africa has been divided into countries you know uh we've without the will of the people over there so you have like countries that were not countries cousins that are you know separated along some lines so for example in ivory coast uh citizenship has been at the heart of the conflicts over there a huge conflict because uh ivory coast is the pearl the pearl of uh of the past colonial french system which has kept ivory coast the most uh i mean like the us and the surrounding countries and perversion so uh for the us to for the for the ivory coast to be able to produce the good so that transform ivory coast into a huge plantation a huge factory to wish the surrounding countries will flood i mean citizen from the surrounding countries will flood into ivory coast to manpower cheaply manpower the development of ivory coast and all the goods return to france so in the 60s it was okay because there was no land pressure it was almost 25 percent it has always been at least 25 percent of people from foreign country i mean foreign countries will come back to the idea maybe if we give them citizenship there won't be no problem but the problem is uh it's not easy for a country to get like 25 percent of you know people coming from other i mean the uh surrounding countries it has it has broken the equilibrium of natural social you know uh you know uh because if in the ux one morning you had like 25 percent of the citizen from other countries it will raise you know some right some resistance so it's like it's happening now at the border it appears what is going to happen to all those unaccompanied kids they're not they are not eligible for citizenship here they're not so before we end we have one more amendment and then maybe patrick you can you can uh address um this august bunch um the 15th amendment in short granted the vote to black men and so these amendments reconstructed the country legally and that's my point the country was basically reconstructed at that time and it was in many people's eyes and some historians the whole country during the civil war underwent what i think is basically a revolution a second revolution in which the country had to keep up with the fact that that the country was founded in slavery and that slavery built this country but we no longer had slavery and therefore that the country had to be redefined and it was now there are a lot of people who would argue as many do currently that the united states is hopeless hopelessly racist our institutions are hopelessly racist and i guess i would like to see more of a discussion about whether that's true whether we are truly hopeless or whether we can reform ourselves in some ways to catch up with our ideals i guess which i would really like to see but anyway so patrick did anybody have any questions or thoughts yeah i just want to point out that i just googled new zealand and they have if you're born in new zealand you're a citizen yes new zealand is also a commonwealth country or not is it yeah i'm a left government yet it was i don't know if it still is it it still is and the australians even voted to keep the queen can you mention i mean i so you know can i mention something yeah i thought new zealand and australia also all settler colonial systems because they were new they wanted population and i really believe that is one motivator for granting citizenship you know to any born except for the natives obviously you know but that's true but it wasn't true that's not true here the 14th amendment was founded was passed in order to regularize in a lot of ways the status of the freed slaves we had four and a half million people we didn't but then at the same time as the emancipation of those four and a half million people who were then free to travel to the north or freedom to work in factories at the same time you gotta remember that we did do massive amounts of immigration right so you're right in a way we allowed in piles of people at the same time so there was a massive like labor upsurge right at the time of the end of the civil war that's what in this country underwent really the industrial revolution right but those immigrants were not citizens like my father came here in 1923 he became a citizen but he wasn't he didn't and i was born here so i was a citizen but um and anyway the immigrants themselves were not granted immediate citizenship but there was a process of naturalization like kurt you brought up an interesting point in germany there's not a process of naturalization then for turks correct no there there is but i mean it goes by blood lines and you know uh sufficient connections to the country but being born there is not necessarily considered you know uh enough of a connection by itself right to be granted citizenship right um and if you can pour if you're uh can prove you're born in the united states with a simple birth certificate you are a citizen that's it sure walk in get a passport and you can and as long as you came into the country legally and have a green card within five years you can apply yeah you can apply for us citizenship and that's not the case in many countries oh or or three yeah 30 countries if it's through marriage yeah marriage three for parents is it's five yeah yeah yeah okay so while moose is here what's the situation for people in palestine they're not really they're not citizens of israel certainly uh not the right not the not the palestine percent are 20 percent but uh citizenship is a funny thing in israel because as we mentioned citizenship means all of you are citizens you know jews and non-jews but the ultimate uh distinguisher is nationality right it's only for the jews the nation of the jews so first grade is really nationality and that doesn't exist anywhere else by the way that i'm aware of so it's a trick to trick us you know into understanding my question is on the west bank palestinians on the west bank right they were not a citizen of anywhere right because no they are really in limbo absolutely are they citizens of jordan they were they were for example i was born on the west bank i was citizen of jordan my parents were born on the west bank they were citizens of jordan but after israel took over i don't think the jordanians offered citizenship to anybody in the west bank after that so there's what kind of a passport the palestinians they give them the people from gaza is a very very tough situation uh they have like pasay let's say they call it which is not recognized anywhere so it's almost impossible for gazans to travel anywhere including in arab countries in the west bank it's they give them palestinian passport which is worth nothing you know it's palestinians and refugee camps also don't have citizenship anywhere yep hey well um also that's true of refugees here in this country in wanouski too anyway uh kurt yeah uh just uh expand upon what musa was saying except here in the us about 20 years ago i had a pro bono case assigned to me an immigration matter where there was a young gentleman who was uh who was actually born in the palestinian territories and he was here because his father was an american citizen here in the united states then he got into some trouble and wound up in jail so the whole issue was where he was going to be deported to uh right and uh he was deemed stateless because uh the jordanians would not take him back i mean i think the kid was born you know in the in the in the 1980s so it was after 1968 his musa mentioned and uh you know there was just it was a very complex matter because the u.s government at the time our government wanted to deport him because he fell within a class of individuals that can be deported uh for having committed a crime on us soil without being a citizen or a permanent resident at the time but no country would take him back now that's true of the prisoners in guantanamo yeah so i mean israel wouldn't take him back because he was palestinian and they didn't consider him israeli uh and the jordanians wouldn't take him back and you know and and and guys in the west bank didn't want him either so what happened to him stayed in jail oh still still injured yeah several of them i think in that situation oh boy any other questions on any of you any other thoughts about anyway so it leads all this discussion about reconstruction leads me with some kind of a hope for this uh a country so eric did you want to say something to complete your thoughts about ivory coast uh eric muted yeah eric you're muted robin could you tell him he's muted you are a mutant all right in the in the 14 man man is there any reference to for example green card holders no no but didn't exist at that did not exist at that time at that time so uh does it mean that i mean uh the people with green cards don't still have the same rights so i mean no they don't have the same rights because they're not citizens of this country they can't vote they can't vote of they can live here they can enjoy the rule of law whatever exists they have equal protection of the law in certain circumstances they have all the kind of protections that our constitution offers but if they commit taxes right sandy if they commit a crime access yeah what if they commit a crime that's classified as a crime of moral turpitude yeah they can be booted back yeah you can be deported so shoplifting that's considered a crime of moral turpitude uh drunk driving in certain states oh not drunk driving is it certain states yeah you can be deported back to your country even if you've been paying taxes and you've had a green card for 10 15 20 years i'll tell you that's a very tricky thing about what kurt is saying is a very important thing to recognize for lawyers including i bet justine who's a public defender down in florida um because the state's attorney will take that into account for instance if a man is in court who has been convicted of domestic assault he could be if he pleads guilty which many people think he should do he would then pretty much be subject to deportation so often the state's attorney talks to the wife and she doesn't want him deported either she wants him out of her hair and out of her life but she doesn't necessarily want him booted back to some hellhole like you know like most like a lot of the countries are hellholes for people uh that they would be deported to so they're a deal is struck and the domestic assault would be reduced to something like disorderly conduct simple assault a crime as kurt says is not a necessarily a crime of moral turpitude so he is guilty of something it has to pay a penalty but that he won't in turn get shipped back to some country and never be able by the way never be able to come back right kurt is that true uh yeah i mean in practical terms yeah because they can reapply but when the when the application is up for review it can easily be denied at the consular level right by the american consular officer right so immigration is a huge issue in this country right now and has been so yeah what would it mean to uh to my my thought i don't know uh it probably it's a philosophical you know take on the 14th amendment it's just give me the uh the impression that you know citizenship is only or you know uh human rights is only uh uh uh given to the people here by the government just i mean here on the american soul uh like for example can black lives matter only in the u.s when they don't matter elsewhere where the u.s government uh you know uh uh is involved in influencing the policies here uh can it be uh i'm trying to find a you know a universal robe to uh to the 14th amendment in some countries yeah it does not have universal application application it applies to who is a citizen of the united states can it be used as an example to the rest of the world i wish it could be i wish that the principle of born birthright citizenship was everywhere in this stupid world it is a great symbol of what the united states could be this birthright citizenship because that means that you are protected as a citizen of the united states by the law of the united states and by the government a stateless person like musa is arguing stateless people in palestine have no protection of any government or any law correct musa yeah i mean they have no protect they have no place to be you are subject to military law which is not good well in palestine in particular but what about if you're you know not in palestine other people who are stateless without even military rule they're just floating around with no rights to be anywhere think about that a permanently marginalized homeless person very very um it would probably help eliminate a lot of uh u.s. hypocrisy if the rights under the 14th amendment the equal protection applies to people around the world before we bomb the shit out of it yeah thank you that was that was the spirit of my question because you know how can you enforce like i mean you say okay i'm in the the u.s. you black people in the u.s. are human beings but in every course i can have like a tyrant over there killing people over there like can can guess who's business at it no no no i mean i think the spirit yeah i wish i wish i wish to god the french had adopted that when they colonialized ivory coast it's up to the freaking french or algeria they didn't do it or algeria and they didn't do it either or tunisia or all the other french or english colonies you think the indians were a good part of the problem no a good part of the world's problems is the united states uh claiming to assume the role of guaranteeing rights to people in other countries is the excuse that we used to bomb the shit out of those countries i know but those other countries understand that's the i think that's what eric was trying to get at yeah that that the dictatorship in a and this country you know should be should uh should be threatened by the united states because it doesn't give protection to its people and that the united states should be protecting those people um i don't know if the united states should be protecting i'm saying no i don't but i thought that's what eric was getting at right yeah at least if they cannot then they shouldn't meekle into people's business around on the world under just post pretext because like uh the um universal how how would you say declaration of human rights right yes and also uh some in europe for example some some some some some states in europe can prosecute someone no matter they call it universal competency i need to find the right word like legal word which means that a country can uh can can uh prosecute someone from another country doesn't matter if the crime took place in uh in in for example france where such things exist but under the us don't recognize that but under the pretext of going for you know to save the the widow and often sometimes in these countries they go to one country and then they don't go to another country where even the the foreign policy is like uh based has sometimes and it's it's been documented some racial base like the the the blacks in the ivory coast don't have the same right or don't have the same consideration as the black in the us uh like maybe the people in in in in uh in uh in the middle east don't have the same level of i mean it's philosophical yeah yeah it's true eric but i think what you're arguing for is then the united states often uses that argument to intervene militarily in those countries and that's a very slippery awful slope to go down and there are many americans who say it's not our business like me it is not our business to intervene in the affairs of other countries particularly with bombs that's really it i think i think i think it's better to classify it as a cliff rather than a slope yeah anybody else have any final thoughts okay so next week i might have two things i want to announce next week we're going to be talking about what is next one the 17th we're going to be talking about brexit as it applies to ireland and scotland and what's happening in the uk around brexit and especially my homeland scotland and also ireland and how that's going to affect the uk in particular and then eric and me and robin particularly eric and robin are putting together at may a conference on africa and its commonalities between africa and african americans here um and we are going to be doing that what is it may 22 robin where is she she's gone uh yes uh may 22 i think may 22 where and we are we were planning that this afternoon probably we'll be on zoom although we're trying to i know we i don't want to do it on zoom either i'm not doing anything after uh the middle of april fine bye then uh uh but we might have to if we don't have to if people feel comfortable after they get their inoculations they can come out of people who have never felt that we needed to shut down can also come out like me um but we're hoping for that and we're hoping to hold this conference at a alb in the end of may and that'll be sponsored by vicki our little group here and by the caroline fund and by a alb and maybe we produced also a partnership with the attorney general's office which you'll be hearing more about and i really want to thank justine for chiming in today the public defender from florida that i've known for a very long time and it's great to see you again justine and we're going to be doing a podcast or something right justine yes so we will be interviewing sandy for our podcast um a co-worker and i uh just released our first episodes yesterday it's called jinn and justice it's on spotify apple it'll be on google amazon soon um but we talk about the justice system when we interview different people each episode um try to get perspectives kind of across the aisle so we're excited to interview sandy all right well thank you all for tonight and we'll see you next week i hope good discussion thank you yeah thanks merci au revoir merci eric


So I want to take a moment to talk about a man named Rodney Reid who is currently on death row in Texas And he is set to be executed on the 20th of this month Now the problem is that he's innocent. He did not commit the crime That he is going to be executed for and as the Innocence Project explains Texas has scheduled the execution of our client Rodney Reid for this November 20th Despite evidence that exonerates him and implicates the murder victims fiance Jimmy Fennell Reid has been on death row since 1998 for the 1996 murder of Stacey Steitz and he has been repeatedly Denied DNA testing which could prove his innocence furthermore three forensic experts have submitted affidavits Recanting their original testimony and stating that the original time of death is inaccurate Making the timeline for Reid killing Steitz implausible new witnesses including Steitz own cousin have come forward and Corroborated Reid's claim that they knew that Reid and Steitz were romantically involved at this point The state's original case has been completely discredited and deconstructed So that's the simplified version of this story the case against him completely collapsed now I'm gonna link you to a Jacobin article which is incredibly thorough and it goes through the evidence and Really, it's overwhelming. There's no question that this man is innocent, but regardless We are down to The nitty gritty here. He's going to be killed in days If we don't take action So I want to share this tweet from Patricia boozing who says urgent in seven days Innocence Project client Rodney Reid will be executed for a crime. He didn't commit Please contact Governor Greg Abbott plus the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles now to stop his execution 737 to 10 4 8 0 0 not from Texas tag a friend who is so if you are From Texas make that call you could save this man's life if you make that call and On top of that if you're not from Texas reach out to someone you know who is from Texas because this is Incredibly urgent This cannot happen. He cannot be killed for a crime. He didn't commit this is one of the many reasons why we have to abolish the death penalty because There are too many instances where innocent people are put to death and this can't happen in a modern egalitarian society So we have to take a stand here and we have to raise You know awareness about this issue and sound the alarms Rodney Reid will be killed by the state of Texas on November 20th. If we don't make a ton of noise So please we need all hands on deck share any information You have share a petition that I am going to link in the description box from the innocence project please make some noise about this because this is a life and The fact that he served this long in prison in and of itself When he's innocent is an injustice, but for him to be put to death when we know that he's innocent Would be beyond the pale so please spread the word. We have to save Rodney Reid