Good evening, and welcome to the final panel of the convening on creating an anti-racist future. My name is Robert Hampshire, I'm an Associate Professor of Public Policy and Data Science at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. And we're really glad that you decided to stick to the very end and join us on this panel, this final panel, which will be actually a call to action for us as a public interest technology network and community. And how can we actually move forward in proactive ways to create an anti-racist future? You know, throughout the convening, we've seen many researchers in the public interest technology community exploring the intersection of technology, racial equity, and social justice. For this panel, we're going to explore what that means to adopt an explicitly anti-racist framework to inform researchers and practitioners alike in PIT. You'll see that the great guests and experts we have on the panel will make this free flowing, keep it lively here at the end of the conference. But ultimately, we want to challenge us as a community to really move forward to make this anti-racist future. So with that, let me introduce just the great set of panelists that we've have assembled here today. And I'll just do a short introduction to each of them, and then we'll kind of get going to the meat of the panel, okay? First, I'd like to introduce Dr. Jessica Symes. She's an assistant professor of sociology and associate director of research for the Boston University Center for Anti-Racist Research. Her research examines racial and health disparities in criminalizing and punitive experiences and the broader consequences of mass incarceration for communities and neighborhoods of the United States. She received her BA from Occidental College and her PhD in sociology from Harvard University. Welcome, and we're really looking forward to this interaction. Secondly, I'd like to introduce Dr. Fallon Wilson, the co-founder of several organizations but mostly, most recently, the Black Tech Futures Research Institute. Dr. Wilson also was the former research director at Black Tech Mecca. She was awarded many awards, but particularly from the Kauffman Foundation's Open Knowledge Grant that actually helped launch the Black Tech Futures Research Institute. Dr. Wilson's research also includes looking at first-generation college students and alternative pathways within the tech ecosystem. That's some work that we've done at Mission as well to look about the career pathways in tech ecosystems. So, Dr. Wilson, we're really looking forward to gaining more insights about your work. We've got a BA from Spelman College and also an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. As a public interest technologist, I've followed you over the years as you discuss issues in race, gender, faith. I just want to say that again. In faith community, I think also, there's a big role here that I think is potentially untapped, so hopefully we can talk about that, the faith community and civic tech issue. So, welcome. And certainly, last but not least, we have Vitaly Incundo, who's a founder of CEO, founding CEO of AI for the People, a nonprofit communications agency. Throughout her career, she certainly started as a broadcast journalist, producing documentaries or many networks that you know, but also as an AI policy advisor, and who's worked very closely with legislation and Congress people during her time at AI governance, was involved in launching and leading the first legislation around algorithmic bias and deep faiths in the Congress. So deep experience from the broadcasting and journalism, but also legislatively and also from a communication standpoint. And so we're just so fortunate and lucky in many ways to have you on the panel. And so welcome all three. I know that all three of you have biographies that are extensive. And so we just really just scrape the surface so we can kind of jump into what do we mean by creating an anti-racist future, particularly in the role of public interest technology. So let me just teach Jessica up here. And given that you're the co-director and director of research at the Anti-Racist Research Center at Boston University at BU, can you kind of first give us, you know, what does it look like? What does it mean to take anti-racist view on public interest technology, or what does that anti-racist future look like from your view? Thank you, Robert. And thank you all. I am so honored to be on this panel. I truly, yeah, deeply humbled and so excited to share and engage in this wonderful and truly urgent conversation. I want to start with just a quote from, you know, the really powerful quote from Angela Davis, Dr. Angela Davis, in a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist. We must be anti-racist. And I think, you know, for us at the center, but for all of us who are working in public interest technology, being anti-racist is a radical stance and it's an active stance against racism, which is unbearable in our society. And it is a crisis in our society. It is a pandemic in our society.  So from a research perspective, we think that racist research historically asks a question, what is wrong with people, meaning what is wrong with individuals or groups and why aren't they just figuring it out? We ask a different question at the center and I think all of us, which is, what is wrong with policy? And our belief is that framing research on race and racism around anti-racist questions leads to anti-racist narratives, anti-racist policy solutions, and really impactful anti-racist advocacy campaigns that cut to the root of racism, which is racial policy. And in racist policy. So being here today and I'll finish a little bit here is, you know, racial data science, I think, asks sort of two important questions, which is, how do we collect data ethically and in a way that can really shine a light and be an important way for us to share the reality of racism, but also our approach to data can be anti-racist as well. And so I'm going to stop there and let my other panelists jump in, but that's sort of how I would start by answering your question. No, this is great. Great, they sort of lay the framework with the quote from the incomparable Angela Davis and that's just a really great way to start us off, you know, and, you know, when it comes to anti-racist framework for public interest technology, really, I think let me maybe turn to the Fallon to kind of build off of things that Jessica mentioned there. Does that sort of jive with your conception of anti-racist future in the role of public interest technology? Yes, definitely it does, but I probably would add a little bit more to it, particularly through the lens of blackness, right? I think when you think about public interest technology, you really need to think and acknowledge some things, right? We need to first acknowledge that black and brown people have always done technology, that this is not new, just because we're now thinking about it in this new discipline. I think it's really important to think about the history of it, right? And of course, Charlottes and Black software books should be like the foundational reading for all those who are thinking about building an anti-racist framework in this new discipline that we're trying to canonize. I think you also have to acknowledge that data bias and big data and all the things we love to talk about in the network and on the practice side as a practitioner, that's not new either, right? I mean, black and brown bodies have always been tracked in surveillance and have used various technologies to do that over the time, right? I think you also have to acknowledge as we really try to really operationalize what anti-racist framework would look like for public interest technology specifically. You've got to look at some of the research that's out there that's been done by the K-POR Center and their Leakey Tech pipeline that looks at all the structures that tailor and intersect that make it very difficult for black and brown people to co-create this new tech world. And then I think you also then have to interrogate the definition of public interest technology. I know that's something we don't like to talk about because I think there's so many definitions flying out. I can't find the definitive one, right? But of course, most of them deal with the public interest, the public good, but we can problematize public good and what it means for people that look like me. Sometimes it doesn't necessarily intersect. I'll give an example. One of, I guess, a practitioner organization that you can say that does public interest technology work code for America. Many of us are familiar with it, right? I think back in 2016, I was one of 10 African Americans that was at the conference and they did a presentation on how to make drones more efficient in dropping bombs on enemy targets as a public good. I said, they're saying to myself, is this what we mean when we talk about public interest and public good and it's from an anti-war framework and also as a person of color, what does that look like? And you think about how those technologies could also be used here. And so I think you have to acknowledge that black folks and brown folks have been doing technology. You have to interrogate the concept and you also have to interrogate the conception of public interest technology. How did it come about? What spaces was it nested in and how do you really make it open and accessible to people who are not at a research one universities, who are part of various non-academic settings? Because it's always very interesting to me. Of course, I have a PhD. I went to the University of Chicago. I went to Spelman, which I love, shout out Stacey Abrams. But I also realized that we spend so much time doing research on the people that we have not yet figured out how to translate these worlds and these concepts of civic tech, gov tech, public interest technology in a way that people would take it up and join our cause. And lastly, I would say you really, yes, I think you have to interrogate the concepts from the beginning. If it's going to be a true anti-racist framework, you have to talk about the origin of it and how people use it and think about it. Who's at the table and who's not. And I think that's where we begin. So I'm going to pause right there for my other panelists. Yeah. So Dr. Wilson, that's incredible insight about interrogating the public interest. Right? And looking at it from a critical perspective, one of my colleagues at the University of Michigan, Shabita Parthaswarthi, you know, has this term called critical data science. Like, so is there sort of a critical interrogation of what the public interest is? And certainly that hasn't been in the interest of, you know, African Americans and people of color in this country for an incredibly long time. And so I think that's a great point, as a starting point, what is to be critical about that. And so that's really a great insight. And so, Metafly, let me turn you to kind of think about tying together these, you know, definitions of what this anti-racist future might look like. I kind of look at you as a visionary. You've always sort of been ahead of the curve on many things in AI and data science and governance. So like, what's your vision for this? What is, what's your vision for this anti-racist future? And in my, first of all, my fellow panelists, I think have done a really comprehensive job in terms of definition. But where I would take it a step even further is when we're speaking about blackness, what blackness are we speaking about? I'm in the process of writing my first book, Ultimated Anti-Blackness. And I had to acknowledge that as a woman who grew up in the UK, who is an African immigrant, I naturalized in time for the election, y'all.  But many of the people that are prominent and get attention are African immigrants, right? So even when we think about this idea of blackness, we also have to understand that within the tech industry, there is a particular, there is particular pushback for African Americans, those that have been here generationally. And so as we're thinking about justice, there has to be intergroup justice to make sure that if I'm in a room, then I'm in a room with Jamal, Keisha, Tanya and them. Otherwise, I don't know that it's truly reflective of this country. The other thing I would say, and this is where I kind of pitch my star against, is that I do believe that policy is the delivery system for ideology. So if I'm really going to think about an anti-racist future, then the way that those markets are reshaped have to be codified into law and codified in such a way that they don't inadvertently promote white supremacy. Because I think all of us would agree that this racial caste system to use Isabel Wilkinson's phrase was something that was written into law. It was something, you know, this is not naturally, to be racist is not natural, right? To be racist is really the choice of laws, policies, and practices that have been adopted over 500 years that bring us to what we think is natural. So in my speculative view of an anti-racist technical future, which is what I speak about a lot, we would have everything that has been mentioned prior, but we would also have changed our laws to incentivize that type of behavior. So can I give you an example of that? When we were writing the Algorithmic Accountability Act, for example, one of the things that we demanded was a kind of like an FDA type agency that meant if you looked at an algorithm, we can't explain ability isn't there because of IP, but if we see that the algorithm is discriminating against any particular group, it's not allowed to be released into the marketplace versus what happens now.  So that would be the first thing. And then the second thing in terms of my vision for an anti-racist future is that ultimately, I'm a professional communicator. So in the projects we've done, we would use popular culture, we use film, we use journalism, we use all of these delivery systems to make sure that if you are saying deep on the police, you also know that you're talking about facial recognition technology. If you are saying that you want to live in a just society, an anti-racist society, that you're also thinking about the algorithmic decisions that are being made about you and pushing against that. And that's definitely, I'd be happy to speak more as we get into this conversation, but I would say those would be the two major things that would be in my vision. OK, of course, again, you've laid the groundwork for a vision that we can maybe all get behind. Really looking forward to your book when you're finished, by the way, a plug there. But I think you've sort of moved us to sort of synthesize things that Jessica and Fallon have talked about with anti-racist and then kind of what that future looks like, but also then started to move us towards examples of that or what that might look like in practice, like you mentioned, with the algorithmic transparency work in legislation that you kind of worked on. Fallon mentioned that Charles Shelton's book about Black software and how Black people have been involved, particularly in technology for many, many years. I find myself at this intersection. So I'm trained as a, my PhD is in engineering. And also, now I find myself in a public policy school, but I know that my PhD was paid for by Bell Laboratories. And Bell Laboratories has an incredible history of Black scientists going back to the 1930s. They broke the color line before it was Jackie Robinson, some of them named Lincoln Hawkins, who basically invented fiber optics, someone named Dr. Jim West, who created the modern-day microphone. So the microphone that's on all your guys' computers was basically invented by a Black man at Bell Labs. And there's this great history of Black people being involved in technology. And particularly now, I think we accelerate that beyond just involvement to accelerating this, converting that to actually anti-racist technology. Because one thing I have learned is that just having the bodies there in the same structures aren't, that's the first step, that is a step. But it's not, it doesn't convert completely to sort of anti-racist technology or perspective that pushes us forward. And so, I think some of the work that, particularly I'll kind of turn back to Jessica here. Like, are there particular examples of kinds of work, be it in data science, PIT, civic tech, or more broadly, that you would consider we kind of hold up as work that moves us closer to this anti-racist future? Yeah, I mean, first the work of my colleagues on this panel very much. I'm really inspired by data for Black lives. And something that one of my panelists said earlier really has stuck with me, which is I think we can think really expansively about who gets to be involved in data, data collection, data analysis, writing about and narrating the data. And so, I think one of the most powerful things about the movement for Black lives is how much, broadly, not just data for Black lives, but the movement has really shown how much data can drive a whole new narrative and a whole new set of policies. But it comes from the community. And so I think that it's, while there are so many wonderful organizations that are doing this, I also wanna make sure that that is always anchored in the community that is most affected by all of these policies. Yeah, that's just a great point to keep us anchored in the sort of community, the users, the people who actually can kind of co-create these things. So that's really incredible. So speaking of the work of the great people on this panel, the kind of pushes towards this anti-racist future. I don't know, Dr. Fowley. Wilson, can you say a bit about Black Tech futures and how that work fits into what we're talking about? Is it possible for me to build on something Jessica said first and then jump there? Absolutely. I think you're right. I think part of it is that data can be liberatory in a sense of co-creation. But I come to find that when we think about public interest technology research projects, once again, I think we have that, right? Or we have those issues that we're most comfortable with talking about. Buyer's algorithms, having a competitive market with ISPs, interoperability issues, they're just a set of, they're just, we have very privileged conversations and issues we like to have conversations about. And to do research projects on and to mobilize people on. But then I think back, I said, can I just get a broadband data map of those who have access to the internet that look like all of us on this panel? And the FCC has not updated those things, right? And companies will not give that data access. And so we think about developing a pipeline of public interest technologies. And you want it to be as diverse and as varied as the various bodies and minds and spirits that are on this call. But I can't get there because so many of people who look like me lack access to quality, high-speed broadband. The challenge with that is, it is not a sexy topic. It is not talking about biased data. It's not talking about how Facebook algorithms are trying to get, it is not, it is not, it is not, there's something very class specific about it, right? And the assumption is that everybody has internet. That is not true. And what we realize in this new pandemic and this new remote learning world that we all find ourselves in, even if you do have access to broadband and you have five people at home and they're all using the same data, it drags and it creates disparities. I fear to think about the learning laws of black and brown children because we have yet to figure out how to address the broadband issue because I can't get data on who actually has access. And so when you think about a project for PIT, that is a project. Is it sexy? No, but is it needed? Yes. And so part of the work that I do, and I'm excited because, you know, I had the fundraise for this institute to launch and it's launching next week and it's entitled Black Tech Futures Research Institute. And what we believe is that the true answer to policy, my beautiful panelists laid out is at the national level, but you have to start at the municipal level, right? You need to understand at the basis what is going on in the municipalities as it relates to smart cities. And then how do you translate that to everyday black and brown folks? So they can understand it, co-create policy and build an aggregation of conversations across cities in the South in particular. And so I think I'm probably rambling, I'm a little excited, but I just believe that if we really are going to have an anti-racist framework for public interest technology, we will have to broaden the level of issues that we tend to talk about and we really have to start at the local level. And there are a lot of amazing university partners doing great work. And I think that there are a lot of them thinking about these things, but because it is not, once again, I hate to use the term fashionable, exciting, because who wants to look at broadband maps? Nobody. But it's needed when we think about creating a foundation and it's needed when we think about research and it's needed when we think about how do you build a movement? If no one gets on the, if no one can access the internet and we can't hold the companies accountable, we will only be the privileged and the Ivy Leagues and in the spaces having these conversations and it will never be a mass movement or equity in this new technology world we're building. One of my colleagues at Boston University calls it digital redlining. This idea that whole, I mean, another thing I'd layer on too is telehealth and how many people without access to broadband or internet are not accessing very basic diagnostic services because they can't access telehealth. So it's a huge problem and it's absolutely affecting black and brown communities the most. And I would say very quickly that my work is at all levels. My next project is actually city specific, New York City. So I would encourage us to not think about all our work in the terms of a project but there's an expansive universe. Yeah, so Natali, can you kind of say a little bit more about that, particularly some of the work you've AI for the people and what you can maybe tell us about this new project or how examples of the kind of work you're doing? Yeah, sure. So AI for the people started a year ago. I often say that we are a baby of the PIT network in many ways because it was launched through a conference while I was at Harvard called Black in 2020 and we were looking at that point two major questions. How would social media algorithms impact the 2020 election and going down kind of the disinformation road and we chose to follow racially charged disinformation agents and we were looking at three cities, Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee. So research was broadly on the internet. How would these messages following? And then working with Black Lives Matter affiliated groups in each of those three cities and then launching a counter narrative because we are storytellers. So our partner was moveon.org. We were able to launch a campaign called Vote Down COVID because we found in each of those three cities the stories that we were getting particularly from young Black men and the videos that we released spoke specifically to COVID but even that was gendered. Like the guys would talk about losing their jobs, like the women would often talk about their families and life and being a teacher and being at work and our target was a hashtag called Vote Down ballot which was released by a group called the American descendants of slaves and we tracked from, we started the research project in November last year. We're just finishing up doing our last data drive next week and we actually spotted the ice cube was being mentioned and becoming active within this network around July. So I'm really looking forward to kind of following that and we had spotted that Black men were much more susceptible to the disinformation messages. So we're really excited about that work. We outperformed the hashtag and we placed an article in the Harvard Kennedy School misinformation review and what we're hoping is that that will lay the groundwork for disinformation work being done by Black people for Black people looking at Black things because AI for the people is friends with Black people doing stuff about Black people for Black people doing Black things. So we were really proud of that. That was kind of our launch project and we are just transitioning into a project that looks at facial recognition. So the way our agenda is set around the congressional work I was able to do which we're in three broad areas. Algorithmic bias, which I always say is just the idea that computers can be racist, machines can be racist. So we do that work because to Dr. Wilson's point if the old ladies that I go to church with don't know that an algorithm is biased then I haven't done my job. What's the point of having a communications firm in the network if my mother from the church doesn't know that when she goes to get her benefits that there's nonsense afoot. And that's really my audience. Secondly, we look at in deep fakes we were looking at what we call information integrity because we believe that the first disinformation campaign was that Black people are not human. We take it there. We're not waiting for all of these fancy schools and I know you're probably all watching me shout out Ivy League but Black folks knew about disinformation before you wrote your all papers. So the fact that we don't have more experts in that field seems very ludicrous and we're interested in changing that. And then the third thing we look at is biometrics just because what we're in terms of market forecasting technology is moving away from the screen and we're moving really towards ambient technologies. So things like facial recognition, gate recognition, stingray and we were really fascinated with the George Floyd protests and what happened within the context of COVID and racial justice because we saw two things Jessica I am so excited that you're here and I hope that we will get to collaborate going into the future. But Dr. Kendi's book was number one because people had this renewed interest in New York Times say that Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd may be the largest social movement in US history. How did they know that? They scraped social media data and looked where people were uploading and found that 500,000 Americans of all races reported to being a Black Lives Matter protest in June 6th from 50,000 unique places. So from an organizing standpoint that's a lot of white people out there saying Black Lives Matter and we don't live everywhere. So there were places and spaces where we are not at but that message had been found and so we were really interested and well what was the surveillance around that? So we are doing a work, we're doing work with Amnesty International and we are specifically looking at the NYPD and their use of biometric technology on protesters in New York City. So we have all the FOIL requests out, shout out NYPD.  We will shout out Department of Justice. Y'all are about to be out so we will hopefully have someone we can work with but then really looking at where these technologies place much like Dr. Wilson. If we don't have these maps we don't understand the scope of the problem. What do these contracts say? How are they used? And then we're working with activists. We're very much, we're finding that the Black activist community really gravitate towards our work. And I think that's just because all movements have art and we create art around these themes. And we're producing a film that kind of goes through not just the activist story and the COVID story but also the way biometric technology was used to arrest two activists here in New York City. And you can read, if you can't read I will send them to you, shout out. You can contact me. But that's the work that we're doing and our goal is to push for, to create the type of pressure that we'll push for a ban because again AI for the people really does believe that ideology is the delivery, policies the delivery system of ideology. And so we want to change the way stuff looks whether we are working on that project or not. So, we're a baby org but our model seems to be really robust. Yeah, what an incredible set of activities and partnerships and community that you guys are building and leading. I think one thing for the pit you in our network is really embracing this broader notion of one, what technology means, we'll come back to that. But then also the set of stakeholders and people who are involved. You said something that was beautiful. Technology has art. You said you guys are creating art and then there's activists involved and various data scientists and storytellers. I think that broad coalition is something that we can really move forward on not just in some academic way where we're researching and writing papers but in the real world, like on the ground. And I think that's- And policy makers too. We, you and I shared earlier I was surprised when I got an email from the Biden folks being like, we've been following the work that you're doing. This is something that we're interested in. Send us ideas, send us proposals. So this and a policy makers are all levels. In the facial recognition system, we're working with the New York City of the office of the New York City Public Advocate because they want to introduce they're really introduced interested in legislation and the stuff that we had done on the congressional level and they want to see whether it would work on the city because they need art too. Plus, this is fun. Like everything in our work is centered in black joy. If you just want to have some fun and advance some justice. That's not fun. For sure. And I'm going to turn to Dr. Wilson here in a second but this idea of really proactively directly being pro-black and working on turning data on his head for that purpose and had that something that's up front because oftentimes, and rightfully so, we think about like data bias and misinformation and those are issues, but we can also then turn those things into proactively help build social movements, help actually think about outcomes and education and like, but do it in a way that's proactive. And I think that's part of what this anti-racist future sort of looks like, but let me just kind of take a little step back and so we kind of mapped out a little bit of this vision and some of the exciting things that are happening but part of the Pitt University Network aspect is also getting students and others, traditionally and non-traditional students ready to engage in this field and this work. And I know that Dr. Wilson particularly think about career pathways and ways in which people kind of find their way into this kind of work. I mean, I think you have some interesting perspectives on that. You want to tell us a bit about some of your work? Yes, yes, yes. I believe that, I just want to say four years ago, five years ago when public interest technology was coming on the scene, I said and I still will say that first-generation black students, this is like, should be the ultimate career choice for them, primarily because they major in and also tend to work in human service-based careers in government, right? And so social work, anything around relating to impact and community, even first-generation college students who major in STEM and computer science will tell you, the reason why I do this work is not to be the Martin Zuckerbergs of the world in disruption, I want to have community impact. And so for me, it is, I feel like I've preached it to many foundations if you're watching, give me a call. We really should be thinking about how historically black colleges and universities should be nested within Pitt. I know Howard is a part of the network and I want to shout out Endream for working very diligently to get more historically black colleges and universities to be a part of this network, primarily because of what they stand for, right? They are pro-black, let's be clear, and they are about creating black and brown leaders who are committed to justice and creating a integrated narrative of what it means to co-create a future for people who look like me. And so for me, public interest technology was a natural fit for first generation black college students. Even for me, you talked, Robert, you talked about how you were an engineer and now you're in this space. My researchers really looking at, it was in gender studies, it was a black feminist to its core, looking at how to create safe environments for learning for black and brown girls, right? I tell the story, how did you get into technology? I can't, unlike the beautiful, is it Natali? I, Natali, I can't code myself out of a paper box. Literally, I cannot. And matter of fact, when I tell people what is code, it's a bracket, zero, zero slash bracket. That's what I tell them, right? But listen, the reason why I learn about technology, why do I learn about interoperability, why do I learn about bias data is because I want to be able to translate this world for people who look like me. I grew up poor.  He made $24 an hour. When we had crisis, we went to that uncle who had the $24 hour job and benefits to deal with the issues in our family. When I found out that automation is likely to decimate truck driving or other types of low-skill work, it worried me. And I said, I cannot be someone who's committed to the liberation of my people if we cannot figure this out, right? And so I do this work, a translating, and I have been a public interest technologist since 2016 outside of a university setting, right? Telling the story of how we have to better translate this world. I will say it again. We have very privileged conversations with either academics or activists, but then in the middle, there's a whole very different groups of black and brown people who know nothing about this world but who has been pushed into it because of a pandemic. And now everyone is trying to figure out how do I do remote learning? How do I get access to broadband? How do I connect with my church and mosque and my families? How do we do community? And so technology has come and just landed on them and we have not prepared them to figure out how to negotiate it so that they are not taken advantage by Zoom. I'm not saying Zoom is taking advantage, but I'm not saying me and not any studies, I don't know. But I love it that every black church I know is old Zoom. The larger point I'm trying to make here is that if we are really trying to grow a network of additional types of students who will go on, once we canonize public interest technology, we need to ensure that historically black colleges and universities are part of this discussion. We have to think about the frameworks and the issues and they're gonna have to be broader than what we tend to talk about. And lastly, you need to talk to these amazing people on this panel and others like us to access our stories for how did we decide that we would do this work? It is not simply because I wanna disrupt and be a Mark Zuckerberg and have a unicorn tech startup.  And I think that's where I would land on that. Yeah, so Dr. Wilson, I think your story is so powerful and actually an exemplar of many others who are people of color, particularly who are working in this PIT space. So part of our, I was leading a project at the University of Michigan for our PIT year one grant. We interviewed sets of PIT practitioners of color and really to get their stories. You're on, we gotta come back to you guys. I think I've talked to some of you guys already, but to really try to distill out like what are those career pathways look like? And oftentimes, some of them are people coming straight from like STEM and technology pathways, but life can go in many different ways. And so many people are coming from, particularly people of color from non-technical backgrounds, a lot of people from marketing, communications. You get people from the arts who are now working squarely in this space and actually leading. So these pathways that we're finding from our interviews and also from data, it shows that it's a very complex picture of how people get into and move through career paths. And that's something for students and students of all kinds, traditional and non-traditional can really, this is a field that is open, is an interdisciplinary field that's focused on impact. And so anyone who's interested in that impact, engaging with the community can really plug into it. So I think your story is so great. And so let me actually turn a little bit, do we have a couple of questions that are related to this? And so someone asked a question about, particularly for, maybe this is best for Jessica, the question is about students that you see who are interested in anti-racist work and research. Do they make that connection with technology from your experience? Such a good question. And it actually kind of builds on what Dr. Wilson was saying in my view.  Is it relegated to a half of a day in your courses or is it a required course for your computer engineering students, your data science students? Do you prioritize this in your broader curriculum and how do students feel when that isn't a priority? And they don't feel like their experiences are reflected in the broader curriculum, especially in technology. And so something that we want to do at the Center for Anti-racist Research is build a set of curriculum and tools to actually provide whole semesters and years worth of education around what it means to practice anti-racist data science and anti-racist technology broadly. But I push on the idea that, I think we were talking about pipeline and career trajectories, but I have had black students come into my office and say, I've never had a black professor. I've never taken a class on anti-racism. And that to me is a total institutional failure. And we can do better and we must do better. And our courses need to reflect this because frankly, you can't work in technology without the understanding that what we're doing is reproducing inequality unless we interrupt it and stop it. So it's a failure in our education. It's our failure from a justice perspective. It fails our students. And so I think that my students in particular are really eager to learn about these things and find experiences both inside the classroom and beyond. No, that's a good insight about how, particularly building curriculum, because I know many universities in the UN network here, many projects are actually about building curriculum, particularly in computer science and how to really think about revamping the ethics, but now going beyond insane anti-racist content in the computer science work directly, much more directly. So I think many people are probably gonna be reaching out to you Jessica related to curricula for students and technologists to go through, particularly the focus on anti-racism. So that's really strong. I mean, now I wanna still open it up for questions for those who are sticking with us here on the Friday night in the last panel. Please, in the chat window put in your questions and insights and I hope to kind of get to them as a bunch of them that are coming in. And it kind of ties into, the next question ties into something that, Natali, that I think you may be best position to answer. And it's kind of, us academics can sort of, get into curriculum and writing tapers. But like, how do we translate that to practice? I'm a professor in a public policy school. How do we convert that and translate those things to policy action? And I think you touched on it a little bit with some of your experience, but do you have any advice or from your experience of how to translate this PIT research into practice? So my particular case, I had been an active member of the Congressional Caucus of Black Women and Girls for, since about 2013, because they had met me when I was contracting with Google and really doing a lot of kind of community engagement work in the New York city area. And so there was already trust and credibility. So as I built relationships with that particular network, I started to learn what the policy priorities were of folks that were, I was very strategic. I was looking at folks that were looking at committees that were overseeing technology. And I found that they were interested in diversity in hiring in the field, which I thought was kind of a, I thought that was a red herring. That's not really a real problem. I've been in those tech firms, they hire black people all the time.  So I, and I was able to kind of push them towards algorithmic bias, but obviously that was, especially after Kathy O'Neill's book dropped because it was so easily digestible. I then could go to them with something that they could understand, but really aligning their existing priorities and then illustrating how technology was changing that. So biometrics, so for no biometric barriers, I was working with somebody that was interested in housing writ large, right? Had been looking at public housing, long history in public housing. And then here I came and said, facial recognition is gonna change housing for black people, not just as a technology that's in the entrance way, but do you know about ring doorbells? And then that started with the algorithmic bias. I really have to thank Kathy O'Neill's book for even raising that point, the idea that technology wasn't neutral. And then with deep fakes, that became a real issue because I was in the Congressional Caucus of Black Women and Girls. And we were at that point reading Sophia Noble's book about the pornification of black women and girls, algorithms of oppression. And then there was a deep faked video that had been made of Scarlett Johansson at the beginning of 2019. And there was all this press about Scarlett Johansson and what happened to her was terrible, but I was then able to go in because I was in a black feminist space. I was, you know, Kumbahi River Collective was something that we were really interested in. We're reading Audre Lorde, we're reading Bell Hooks. Like I'm with my people, right? And so then it was very easy to make a black feminist case for intervention based on that particular technology. That's my particular story. I think for people in the network that are interested in impacting policy, the first thing that you have to have are real relationships. And no matter how many papers you write and how great you are in the academy, that actually doesn't track outside of the academy. You have to have some type of impact. I mentioned these incredible books that women had written, for example. That was the way of having impact. And then that gives you a platform because often you are speaking to people that have three minutes to hear what you have to say and what you say in those three minutes has to align with existing priorities. So my advice would be the same work that we put into making sure that our papers can be critiqued and the critique is firm because our methodology is good, has to then be applied to the policy space. And we're at this exciting moment in some ways where we're having a new administration that is more interested in science, but let's not joke. This is a neoliberal ticket who are already hiring people from industry. So the next four years, if you are somebody that is interested in racial justice and technology, in racial literacy and technology, which is something I speak about a lot, and anti-racist technology, then we have to build a movement because Eric Schmidt is not it and he is their number one person. But I've been here a while, I've been here, this is what my eighth, my ninth year, they know when I'm coming, I'm about to set it off. So, we'll move it then. Doug, you're bringing up a great point about having, I call it like a dance partner, right? So when you're building those relationships with policymakers, I mean, you need to have a partner on the other side who really can elevate those issues and actually value them, but it's a conversation. You're a communications person, so I mean, those lines of communication and language need to be clear that we're addressing issues of importance to them and their constituents. There's a question here. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. Is that we always partnered with researchers. So the researchers in the pet UN network, for example, end up being great partners for us because if they cannot translate their research, we can. That's our job. And I'm always looking for people to testify on panels. I'm always looking because the people that get to give testimony, you being written into record, whether it's in the state, city, municipal level, is really important and there should be a diverse field. I definitely take an organized stance. If I'm the only person saying this, I've done something wrong. In every city, in every place in this country, there should be somebody saying that. And then if we look at this last election, who delivered for us? It was the hoods of the city. It was people in the hood in Detroit. It was people in Philadelphia. It was people in the hood.  I've taught these classes at Stanford. I'm on another fellowship at Notre Dame where I'm teaching a class around feminism and technology and black feminism and technology. And I'm often the only person that they've ever seen seeing these things that I'm oversubscribed because people don't even believe it's a thing. They act like it's magic. Yeah, I think the role that you and folks in your position play in this public interest technology network is very important to be able to communicate, some of the research and translate that to policymakers or facilitate those connections and interactions. I think part of this as a partnership community is we have to embrace all aspects of it. So this is really great point. We're kind of reaching towards the end here on the panel, but I want to kind of come back to a question that I brought up at the beginning. And it's something that Jessica mentioned, but Dr. Wilson, we kind of touched on just briefly at the beginning, and that's the role of community. And really, you said that many, and I found this that students who want to get into this space, I mean, are really motivated by, again, not necessarily disrupting some technology or wearing a hoodie, but they want to build things for community, their communities and from problems that they've lived through and solve them for people who they love, right? And so that community aspect is something I kind of want to bring us back to because they're bringing back the human element, the person element. And so can you say from your experience something about community, we've touched on communities of faith. What's your perspective on those? I was saying we really did touch on communities of faith, but we really should touch on it. Should, let's touch on it now in the last couple of minutes that we had. Yeah, and I'm gonna be quick because I know Jessica, you got something amazing and added just make that thing beautiful in the sense of community. I would simply say that the personal is political and the political should be public interest technology. And I say that because the whole notion of owning one space, one's narrative requires that you are able to translate it to people who look like you. I think it is one thing to have, once again, a messaging campaign that is impactful for those in the congressional halls. However, it is not sustainable unless you have a movement of people behind it. And the reason why I love faith communities to have these conversations about public interest technology, about civic tech, about gov tech, about activism. And now I'm calling Black Church Futurism, right? If I said it, you heard it here, Black Church Futurism is that they are places outside of historically black colleges and universities where you have, at least even virtually now, congregations of black bodies and minds thinking through concepts. And if they can take deep concepts on death, on life, they can easily take deep fakes and say, no, it is not a Michael Kors knockoff bag. Get it? Deep fakes. They can translate to our communities what this world is, how they can co-create it and why they should matter. We have been very good at creating a vernacular around incarceration and wanted to look like a liberating space against that norm. But we have not done a good job at saying that this new world that we are so excited about on this panel, that I can't figure out how to say, how do you say anti-racist to Mother Montgomery who has been over the church deaconic board for like 15 years, you don't look at you like Fallon, speak a language that is familiar to me. And so that goes back to another script, another code. I think, you know, and I love how we use metaphors. Yes, the new Jim Cole, Dr. Ruhi Benjamin Spellman graduate, right? But also the code, right? What is the code that we need to translate for communities? And Jessica, what you got? What you got? Come on, jump on the assistant. I, it's so hard to follow that. But I, what I want to say is that the community is at the center of what we want to do. The community knows what it needs. It knows how to, how it has survived and it will continue to survive. Data and data science can lead to accountability, but it's also about collective action and it's about voices and it's about stories and it's about the public good that can come from centering the community in our work. And, you know, I think about my work in mass incarceration, you know, people have survived and people have lived through this and we have to listen to them for those solutions because the people who are most affected by racist policy are the people who have the understanding and the knowledge and the ability to solve those problems. We cannot silo them. We cannot, you know, keep them away from this process and this, this, we have to center them. They have to be at, not just at the table, they have to be the table and build the table. They are, they are the whole reason why we are here is for them.  This is the vocation, you know, for us to really go from here, from this convening to our work, to our lives, our communities to help create this anti-racist future. So I just want to thank my three incredible guests and for all of those here at the convening for joining us for this last session. And I want to thank you from my deep of my heart to New America and the Pitt UN community. With that, thank you.


Welcome, I'm Jim Levenson, I'd like to welcome everybody to the Ford School of Public Policy. Thanks for joining us this afternoon. I'm so pleased to be able to introduce Yazar Henry to you. Yazar is the 2007 Harry A. and Margaret D. Towsley Foundation policymaker in residence here at the Ford School. Yazar's official bio reads as follows. Henry is a former anti-apartheid activist and a former officer in the MK, the military wing of the African National Congress. He is a poet, writer, and peace activist. He has written and published on politics, the politics of memory, trauma, identity, and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He currently works with former combatants, political prisoners, and torture survivors, and is the director of the Direct Action Center for Peace and Memory. Well, all of that's right, of course, but it doesn't really provide the context. And one lesson that you learn when you spend much time around Yazar Henry is the context matters. This is a guy after all who was a former combatant and is now a peace activist. I've known Yazar for about eight years, and it seems to me that the official bio that I just read is a bit understated, as is so often the case with Yazar himself. Here's what the official bio doesn't tell you. Yazar entered the military wing of the ANC during the struggle against apartheid at the age of 15. At an age when most of us were in high school, he was training as a combatant in places like Angola and the former Soviet Union. After training, he returned to South Africa. He was captured and imprisoned, accused of terrorism and treason. During his imprisonment, he spent seven months in solitary confinement as a teenager. Upon his release from prison, the apartheid government claimed that Yazar had turned on the ANC and he left prison as a hunted man, both by the apartheid government that he had fought against and by the group in whose service he went to prison. He went into hiding. He returned from exile in 1993. In 1996, Yazar testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and he has since founded the Direct Action Center, an organization that employs many former MK members and is doing amazing, simply amazing community development projects in the Cape Flats, a mostly impoverished area around Cape Town. He's touched the lives of many through his community projects, through his writings and through his lectures around the world. We are truly, truly privileged to have this guy who left high school to fight, and I mean really fight, against that which was so unjust to now be teaching here at the University of Michigan at the Ford School. Please join me in welcoming Yazar Kenner. For about an hour and then we'll take questions from the audience. I'm squinting, not because of anything that you've done. Just the bright lights are pretty bright. Thank you for welcoming me in such a way that you did. My talk here this afternoon is dedicated to the empty chairs in this auditorium. Where I come from, there are no empty chairs, even if no one sits in them. These are my ancestors that have traveled with me. My friends who have died and whose memory and honor I wish to dedicate my words this afternoon. When talking about my or my country's experience, the challenge is always to maintain a strong focus on celebration. The celebration of life, of survival, of resistance, of victory and of hope. And when I speak of hope here, I speak of the hope that drove us beyond what we at times thought was humanly possible. But it won't be that easy for me, I think today, as the focus of my talk is on cost. On what peace really means when it's not the same for everyone. And believe me, I don't always want to be the messenger of bad news. And I'm lucky to be at the Ford School and have sound knowledge that this is not the Middle Ages. So each time that I'm given this privilege to voice, to speak, to share, to feel in my body what it means to have privilege. I hope that the words that I share with you today will give meaning to my experience, but also to the experience of many ordinary men and women, children across the world who do not easily get the opportunity. And who are not easily able to speak about what they live or have lived daily. For this opportunity I want to thank Jim and Rebecca here at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. The Towsley Foundation and the representatives that are here, Jennifer. And to everybody who has worked so hard to make my visit here possible, especially Laura and Jill and Linda. And I know there are many lenders, I mean Kennedy. And I want to acknowledge specifically the public policy economics and social work students who have chosen to have an intellectual conversation with me during the semester. Those of them that are here, thank you for coming. I'm glad that it's, you know, you're not just tired of listening to me every Friday. Eleven years after the beginning of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's public hearings and beyond its institutional life as one of many state commissions, its power continues to define, to reduce, to delimit, to foreclose. The meanings and the modes that individuals and collectives make as a response, both in the material as well as in the symbolic, a response to these long periods of war and resistance on the tip of Africa. I specifically am from Cape Town. This is my city represented on this picture. It's my mountain, both sides of it. It's center, it's core, it's top, and it's bottom. Both it's normalized and it's invisibilized violence that continues, that extends itself from there in the everyday to here right now as I speak. What is this economy of truth, reconciliation, and forgiveness? What is its historical timeline, its categories of the victim and the perpetrator? What does truth mean outside of its context and its history? What does forgiveness mean when it has entrenched itself systematically, when it continues as antecedent of a part of colonization of slavery? What is the working through of mourning, of assimilating trauma, of understanding torture, of reliving economic loss mean in this context? And how do we understand restitution of the self, of the individual, of the community, of those that make up my city and my country? How do we understand this mechanism that excluded the violence and the survival of the everyday? That makes it very difficult for us to understand what social and economic survival, community conflict, trauma, anger, rage, and especially the despair of an existence that is always already negated. What does this mean from the language of the mandating act and its legality to the ways in which human rights violations and its committee yearnings were conducted and mediated by print, electronic, and other forms of media, including us, the academy? What does it mean when selfhood is defined by disempowering passive interiority that only represents the damaged survivor coming to voice and forgets that his or her coming to voice is also about meaningful action and social change and that peace resides inside of this, actively lived in the everyday by those who can afford it and by those who are denied it when the context of language is itself implicated in the history of violence and of repression and victim connotates this reductionist notion and label emptied of all historical agency where we forget that one's life is relational to that that victimizes, destroys, tortures and sometimes makes life that distant in the distance away from the centralized focal point of the beauty that represents our mountain in my city. Absent, yeah, is the label in language that is sometimes articulated inside of these epistemological frameworks of the oppressor, the colonial settler who became the apartheid beneficiary and the oppressed South African people who paid for those benefits. Now post-conflict is not so easily separated from the TRC process, rather it nurtures the possibility for those who benefited, continue to benefit from colonial and apartheid rule to consolidate their social and economic relations of power informed sometimes by direct socio-economic restructuring and in my city particularly it is based on previously race or color or ethnic, clearly defined legislative, judicial categories. The conflict that we have endured, the concept of reconciliation cannot be and should not be easily equated with peace, I want to argue, if peace translates into the wholesale suffering of the majority in my city where the continued protection of white privilege and the benefit under the banner of colonial and enlightenment histories and the destruction in the name of progress and civilization are gradually cast along with ourselves into the obscurity of that side of the picture, where the majority of whites and Africans peace oftentimes translates into an unchallenged entitlement to leisure, pleasure and lifestyles that are secured through economic power and the unquestioning valorization of whiteness, a moral legitimacy that intersects with unlimited access to the neo-global economy. Today, 12 years later, I want to argue that reconciliation requires that those who do not have access to these lifestyles are expected to accept us and to forgive not only those who were the past tormentors but also those white identifying communities who continue to deny their structural role in that system in whose name the torment was perpetuated and to some extent continues to be. Forgiveness comes at a heavy price when it is you, the tortured that is expected to forgive the torturer when it is those who had their lands forcibly taken from them who are expected to forgive those who took it, when it is those who were forced out and from their homes away from their workplaces and in Cape Town specifically also away from our beloved mountain and the ocean that are expected to forgive those and some who still occupy our houses except of course that this is acceptable or understood as acceptable because we have forgiven them to the proxy of the state and its institutional mechanisms with the tacit support of what we think and have come to be told is the international community and the world. The question that echoes and remains not only in my heart and mind but echoes from the distant parts of my city back to its central core and to where people have this type of lifestyle is how does long-term peace come to be served when it is only or mainly the previously oppressed that are held responsible for sustaining it since we have been given only the option to accept the grounds of this type of conditionality what is the benefit of this peace when the poor pays and pays only for that peace to remain as a mirage slowly fading into the distance what is this cost when we say wow you know it's so cool I cannot imagine how someone can forgive a person or people who have done so much harm caused so much damage that it will take generations for the recovery to become visible now central to this idealization of truth and reconciliation is I want to say the international acceptance that are parted as a crime against our peoplehood our humanity has been settled in this idealization we South Africans are reaching out towards one another in forgiveness across these previously policed boundaries that organized our entire existence the idealization of reconciliation as an interpersonal intercultural interracial contact zone belies the persistence of social and economic apartheid that continues the souls of those who have survived have been cast into this rewriting of the memory of the dead and you can see it literally every day on our streets where large sections of the population damned under apartheid continue to be damned today the shiny the bright the new has not faltered through yet except for the promise that someday perhaps it might the obliteration of our humanity the humanity of those who remain impoverished in the name of forgiveness reconciliation and peace has entrenched itself as part of our political economy one that further normalizes the violence that created this city in this way this development this development I want to argue is not in itself problematic it is the violence it is that the violence of this development does not break with the historical patterns of this possession of exclusion and injustice entrenched by the previously state the previous state called apartheid might have taken three decades of war but finally we have arrived at the place where everybody and the world is able to accept black poverty as a logical conclusion we did not fight for this conclusion but of course we are very happy dancing in loincloths beating our drums at the edge of the world the apartheid ideologues could never have imagined this the fulfillment of their dream now the cost borne by those who have suffered needs to be considered more carefully it was stated that one aim of the human rights violation hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was restoration and it meant here the restoration about dignity the dignity of those harmed and there are today many critical voices who say that the commission did not fulfill its promises towards those who testified before it now I agree with these voices but I do not wish to leave it just here for I think that it is very difficult to hold accountable a body for the fulfillment of something it did not have the power to do the Archbishop Desmond Tutu recently so humbly told us at an academic conference whilst we were celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission he said I am sorry I am sorry we have made these recommendations but they have not listened to us and I sat there thinking hearing him and seeing the pain on his face as he made this plea for forgiveness publicly just last year so if it was not the TRC's responsibility to settle what the party did then whose is it? was it a party that we wanted settled? did we want to settle colonialism? did we want it to include slavery? was it a mixture of this historical totality and I sat there searching for answers and finding none why did we start counting in 1960 and not 1652? so who was the Arch as we come to know him? who was he referring to? when he said they, what did the South African government, the South African people, what did the international community, what did all of us sitting here today? was it just me? I think after some consideration that it is particularly the responsibility of those who committed the violence in the first place and who benefit from it now, who benefit from the large scale suffering of the majority of impoverished South Africans mainly black, not only but mainly, it is commonly argued in my country today and accepted globally am I shouting too loud? that all those responsible for a party have disappeared except for those I can count on my one hand who are still in prison who have not been given an amnesty for their condition now this is either true or it has been a grand deception and it happened whilst we were sleeping when we sat poker faced now I want to say that the materiality of witnessing and testimony and recovery exists inside of this history of the enactment of atrocity inside of the history of its survival and the surviving of atrocity but also inside of the history of resisting it actively the struggle for peace and dignity on the African continent and where I come from on the tip did not begin with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996 and nor did it end there witnessing testimony, recovery is not that easily made bereft of political content and historicity violence cannot so easily be simplified, forgiveness has many meanings and it has a cost, a price and at the moment it is being paid forward into the future by ordinary people in South Africa who have sacrificed their lives to it with the hope that it will return a peace in which their children may go to school and the pavements that do not exist right now will come into existence at some point in their lives and that when it comes into existence at some point into their lives it will be safe and they can venture out and walk on it in the same way or in similar ways that those of us who have the privilege to venture to this side of the city can do so right now now this commission is considered a miracle and I agree that it was miraculous but there are many sides to this miracle and all are not easily articulated they do not all filter and find themselves into the imagination of the world into the public imagination of those who live in my country oftentimes what you are familiar with and I think many of you here might be familiar with this is the story, the narrative, the metatruth South Africa, a country divided by race, two sides at war, no clear victory, no clear defeat in sight and there are these two great men, one black, one white and they agree to end the war through settlement the settlement leads to peace and we have this commission, another great man leads it a crime against humanity that has gripped the United Nations, the world and my country, my continent for many decades has ended now this transmission is often and is easily premised on that we all committed atrocity that violence is equal and because of this it can be forgiven and because it can be forgiven we can all reconcile ourselves with each other so like a good Hollywood movie all's well that ends well it remains stuck in me this question do we really start all over again as equals as if nothing happened in this version of reality where peace is beautiful and history is simple and politics has ended and we are all traumatized both the hunter and the lion sitting tired under a tree in the Kruger National Park can there be, can it be when there is such damage and that the damage is to such an extent that it is almost almost unpalatable that it is so embedded in our every day that it defies its own end and our respite it becomes easy to confuse devastation for life in my country we have many sand dunes and many ostriches and in this place you know that you find once you put your head under the sand we begin to reorganize to retell and make atrocity viable inside of our own minds even acceptable now how does one comprehend the scale of harm that one group can apply to another that one nation can commit against another I have been accused of delving going back a little bit too far but I cannot understand how a British officer can boil the head of a Tosa chief I cannot comprehend this I cannot understand that it's okay to imprison our kings I cannot understand how one can build houses on top of thousands of slave bodies we are we are today in my city just 300 meters 500 maybe 700 meters beyond towards that mountain beyond this one of our key tourist attractions and features excavating thousands and thousands of slave bodies how can this type of violence pass for history as development as long as we are silent as civilization as long as we allow it now I cannot understand how a system of law accepted as legal model and godly can be the grounds of the formation of the modern state I cannot comprehend now that it has ended how its legacy lives on especially since it's written in my skin it has found itself attached to deep contours inside of me and I can't remain silent about it even if that is not what everybody wants to hear hear at home because it doesn't fit into this nice narrative this maybe slightly just word ordinary experience where history comes to sitting your throat and throttles you where your words are drowned because you are the subaltern I would like to think that there can exist some reality in understanding these key questions of how these categories of witnessing and testimony and truth and reconciliation and forgiveness have come to be just that something to be studied outside of the complexity of what it means to be human how this narrative and the story can be excavated from inside of me whilst I am alive a fossil living although this commission has allowed us has allowed us to reach back only so far and to find this selective short term notion of peace and forgiveness it is becoming more evident that there is a stronger need to process what it means to live with the knowledge that this mechanism can in no way guarantee its sustainability that it's more than just a sacrifice of 20,000 stories of pain it is also the illusion of this experience of the majority of South Africans who continue to suffer from the persistence of structures of domination, violence and oppression that has been transfixed in the present and will no doubt be transported into the future if we do not do something about it if we are not in some way aware of its possibility it might just come and creep up in those moments when we are sleeping and we'll have to write a book about it afterwards and say how did it happen it is the inequality of this previously oppressive system and its afterlife that is mask and validated as normal bereft of history and political content that has come to sit in our throats like an olive pit with no branch how is it that the new looks and smells and tastes and feels so much like the old why is it that despite this perception that there has been so much talking and so much healing that there is still so much more to say why is it that black people in my country are not yet tired of talking of telling their pain to themselves, their community and to you but white people in my country are tired of listening today people are calling for this commission to come back and be reopened and it's only the beginning of this call and you will hear it in a few years if we are lucky to address what the TRC did not manage to do both within its mandate and what it was not mandated to do to answer this question of what collective recovery really might look like in my country as opposed to this current notion that all is well and I can tell you for sure that all is well, maybe, yeah but it is not well there I wanted to speak a little bit about myself but I'm going to skip the several pages that I spent the last few weeks writing about myself and how I come to stand here and to speak in this way driven by these empty chairs in this auditorium that follow me around when I'm in the lift on my own that make me want to speak this truth even if I don't feel like I want to this truth that made my life turn so radically from the romance of war and inside of the idea that we can and sometimes ordinarily easily play God to the fact that the distance from Heaven's invincibility to the flames of hell is most probably the same now I'm privileged and lucky and I promise you if you speak to my students they'll say that I also laugh and smile because I did not physically have death literalized on my body I survived I speak to you in the voice and with the urgency of the survivor struggling to communicate to convey to pray at this altar that it should stop there and anywhere else I know what it feels like to live in hell but my hell is very specific what it used to be it was a hell that was created by human beings we created it for ourselves with pretty laws and lies that include fair play the Geneva Conventions and the delusion that when we are at war we are somehow able to keep our humanity Jim spoke about it earlier my hell was called section 29 and it was justified because of internal security now when I say this I'm not claiming to be an innocent victim like the TRC created for all of us South Africans no far from it I chose it I chose to go there I chose to put myself in a place where blue eyed men with blonde hair the same age some of them as me shitted my soul and grinded my flesh and they argued they were just doing their jobs they were protecting their families their freedoms and their God I want to say that it is in this moment when the fracture of life the fact that peace is not simple that forgiveness cannot be simplified inserts itself into your world my world in that moment for a moment I've forgotten that I had all of these attachments where life doesn't make any sense where it's not easy to write it onto paper I want to say that it is in these extreme forms of human interaction that is intended to destroy you where your soul is the extended purpose to be shattered where both life can become meaningful or just stay that destroyed now detention came to settle in my soul I physically embodied the prison post prison the war ended except I had stayed alive in my body and as I battered myself the security forces of previous state before 94 and after constantly won daily battles battles that I fought for them the struggle for peace and dignity and forgiveness for us as Africans has not ended the fact that the world is actually not such a good place was hard to accept at first it is what makes me wake up today smiling it's what gives me reason to live and what gives meaning to my life far from the moments when I thought that it was only going to be meaningless the breath of freedom cannot be underrated in all its complexity more people should taste it, feel it and we offered the opportunity to live it in my city there are many less privileged than I the part that has a legacy that has not ended we are still divided by race in an extreme economy where the disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor for anybody who is prepared to open his or her heart who is prepared to look and just to think a little can be devastating we are giving up means at worst death in slow motion outside of this great spotlight that we call the international community it is in this context where everything, every act matters in the face of this type of objection these challenges do not produce any easy victories but it doesn't mean that there are no victories when people choose peace because they have learned that in its moment you can choose and hope that there will not be another war now I found it very hard to do this initially to celebrate life in the context of so much hardship is really hard work but it becomes easier with practice and over time when one celebrates each single victory each single victory no matter how small it is I want to conclude very quickly because of my time and return to this thing this notion of forgiveness what is forgiveness beyond the confessional booth because I'm constantly confronted with this notion wherever I go whether it's at home or elsewhere what is this forgiveness when it is political now how many Hail Marys and how many our fathers do we do for killing someone for stealing their land for structurally ensuring that the economic suffering is brought into the future for several generations how many Hail Marys for torture in the absence of being able to bring these people to justice what do we do how do we come to terms with what peace means if it is not by rebuilding the lives of those who have survived allowing them to mourn to reclaim themselves from this abjection this political economy of globalization and this constant pressure to rush to rush on to a place where those who have inherited the benefits of apartheid and colonization are allowed this benefit unconditionally personally for me it is easier to smell the scent of this type of rose whilst I'm clutching its thorns than to imagine that I can smell it in the absence of it having thorns forgiveness as a political tool if there is such a thing at all possible beyond the understandings of just me and you must grow socially and politically out of a full remembering of what we have done a selected retelling of something that is often times told as amnesia if out of this type of bitterness we are able to derive the necessary understanding strength and wisdom where we are able to put the world to live in peace and at peace first then maybe this peace will forever be stronger than the world to express other emotions of anger and bitterness and rage of hatred and revenge that it must be sustained by real financial and economic commitments that take the policy of redress and repair seriously if we are not to invest ourselves only into a peace that further that furthers and fosters our own imprisonment freedom for me must mean more than starving alive in a township at the edge of our city watching the possibility of peace from inside of the fence as I manicure the garden serve the food feed the baby and walk the dog of my oppressor it has to consider white anger as well forgiveness must include a cost to the apartheid beneficiary and this must become policy we have a responsibility I think as human beings to strive for a moment in time where the words never again or nunca más or ni vida where they mean more than glib words by plasters pasted over festering wounds it must mean that the violence committed as normality that follows this liberal moment of the nation state in our context and in our time just very recently that we should consider it very seriously and act to make it stop and it must stop not just for those who benefit for the forgiveness and the peace but for everyone let us rather not use the words if we do not mean to actively ensure them extended to every stomach in my city that is starving and I take responsibility for this in my own life because of this privilege of having survived alive slightly crazy you know now this idealism this type of globalization and this type of humanity I dreamt of as a 14 year old and I continue to dream of it now despite my experience, in spite of it and maybe this is the miracle because I am not alone in my country for me at least that 12 years after the war we continue in this quest sometimes easily forsaken ideal and belief that humanity will and has to find an alternative an alternative to resolving itself again through war and we pay for this it has a cost just because we easily cannot articulate it doesn't mean that it does not cost it does not have an economy outside of the numbers I have been taught here at the Ford School it seems to be funny so it's okay you can laugh now I want to continue to dream and I want to fight myself despite my personal experience and remember and I've said this before and I want to repeat it because I like the sound of it that butterflies have color and that they will remain beautiful regardless of what we do to ourselves as human beings but also to others and since I've been in an arbor I have decided to add that the squirrels on the dyag are not just rats with pretty tails especially come spring so I want to stop here and thank you for giving me this time and listening to me as I've attempted to give my own life meaning beyond the confines of my skin and my world which is represented on that slide and I want to say to you in thanks that it is okay to laugh with as much intensity as it is to cry and I hope to hold that tension as I search for peace and for a forgiveness that is not without anger so thank you very much Do you want to call people? If you could stand up and tell us who you are and can you start us off please? I did some work as a filmmaker around the role of civil society in the TRC process around the role of civil society in the TRC process and I want to ask you if you think that it was a mistake for South Africa to not go through the Nuremberg route because had we gone through the Nuremberg route because basically what actually happened was that we took the route that we took and in so doing we basically made the oppressor and put the oppressed person on an even plane so you have a situation whereby someone like Ashley Creel or someone like Steve Biko and all of those black freedom fighters who were fighting to protect their communities where they also put on the stand in the same way as you also had oppressors and in that way it nullified and I think that it actually diluted our cause in South Africa so as to give legitimacy to business for instance like Esquam and all of those people who are actually not paying for the wrongs that they did in South Africa and so do you think that maybe if we had gone the other route things might have been different in terms of having a clear cut understanding and definition on who the oppressor was, their responsibility and vis-à-vis that as long as you are aware that that's like several questions okay and maybe I'll just choose one of them and now I'll choose the choosing for me I think the key question that comes out of your questions is around the role of civil society and the route taken I don't think that what happened can be understood outside of its own historical context which I've said already it does require us to understand very particularly what civil society means what citizenship means and how we articulate ourselves as part of that sector of society or not and in our case I don't think everybody often times understands that not everybody is and becomes immediately taken into what it means to be a citizen and a part of the civil sector at the moment of the first cross, the first X that introduces democracy now I don't know whether the route that we have taken would have been any different had we gone the Nuremberg route, I do want to know and I do question often times why we took it I think we have to come to an understanding as to why and how we got there we can't change it, it has happened but to just assume that it was the right way without reflecting on ourselves today and understanding the challenges that stands, that faces us we have to implement a sustainable peace and ensure that the rapture of that picture does not turn into reality we have to ask these questions and for me I mean I ask why not Nuremberg why not Nuremberg in Chile, why not Nuremberg in Guatemala why not Nuremberg in Cape Town, why not Nuremberg anywhere else in the world except Europe is it a coincidence that we did not consider what it meant in order to convert our pressure into the new nation state using a mechanism that allowed those who maimed, tortured and killed to be left to be let off the hook without a policy framework that considers that was that an accident we have to answer that because if we do not find the answer to that as we have seen recently in Cape Town the questions will come and we might not be in a position if we fix ourselves on this side of the picture to answer those questions without the violence of the state silencing the echoes, the shouts, the pleas, the cries for forgiveness coming from those who have been born in the accident of their black skin at the edge of Cape Town Johannesburg, Durban and all the other major cities now we have had a lot of a lot of war we have been fighting for 30 years we have been fighting for hundreds of years the last 30 years is the 30 years that this commission covers but we have been fighting for many years and no, I think it is wrong to equate the violence of the oppressive mechanism with those of us who found ourselves inside of it to go from 14 to 19 in the split second I am lucky, I have said this before I have survived to tell the story the people you mentioned many did not I cannot forget their names I cannot forget those who just died now and those who died 200 years ago for the same reason except that the technology is different so why not Nuremberg I mean, I hope I hope that people will begin to ask this question allow themselves to ask this question we cannot say the archbishop didn't happen the truth commission did not happen we did not choose to resolve our conflict through this mechanism we did but I think we have to ask what the cost of it is at the same time as we do not or we are not able to deny this we are also not able to say for sure that that bloodbath that we are pounded over the head with that it might have come we don't know I think this is much more complexity to this reality than we are often told to study and believe one thing that I'm sure of is that the people who pay with their lives with their souls with the way that they have to live now has to be considered more seriously it is not to be left to accident it must be resolved through policy I don't want you to think that I didn't appreciate your sense of humor it's just very difficult to laugh and cry simultaneously as I heard you speak I always did review the TRC as a miracle a miracle I never expected to occur but as I heard you speak it seems to me that it's more a process of appeasement unless something is done about the right hand side of the picture wherein the abuser is allowed to keep the fruits of his abuse and the victim is euthanized slowly now, not as rapidly and that it is very common to compare this to Nuremberg, at least in my mind because appeasement took place in Czechoslovakia before the Second World War the appeaser was Chamberlain and he sold a bill of goods of peace now Czechoslovakia had no choice in the matter because again the US and Britain did nothing they were faced with an overwhelmingly strong enemy Germany the US is notorious for doing nothing in an age of genocide it still goes on how did this come to be who was the con man that sold the victim a bill of goods and who did nothing to allow this to happen do you want to but it sounds like a question to which you have an answer no, ideally I mean it's a statement of American policy do you want to answer it? because I'm not capable of answering so now I want to continue with this answer I'm not capable either but in fairness and in agreement and I think it is sometimes difficult to name the ghost the hidden hand without implicating oneself in allowing this to occur for me it's more complicated because having lived through that I'm responsible as well but I also know that I watched it happen unable despite wanting to work with unable with an inability to shape it as I thought it might be shaped and I know that is true of people who have less of an ability to extend to voice to act to make real their transformative capacity so yes I think this is a global issue which is very easy for the rest of the world too easy to say this is South Africa's problem and in 10 years time when we become Zimbabwe or 20 years time maybe 20 to say well they tried but they failed so the hope, the beacon that we've come to occupy for the international community will then be extinguished and I cannot allow that to happen because we will live the consequence of this destruction the people who live on this side of the city will have these benefits this ability will come here and there will be your doctors and we will drown in the fire because we don't extend and travel that easily in this global system unless I have the help of Jim for example Rebecca and you and others like you but I do not easily extend myself to that part of the world and I want to claim it I mean this TRC did not just happen South Africans didn't just decide on it where are these experts in conflict resolution that gave us the framework to begin with where are the economists from the World Bank that make us pay for it today still it is in this easy narrative they become, they are allowed they are easily able to shirk their responsibility of selling us arms today still now it's ours to do it, I don't know what but then it was to actually keep us in our place to build who borrowed, where was the money taken to build that and to create that because they come together these are two sides of the same coin of the same economy the one exists in the name of the other not on its know by itself the type of European city that we are told we have and in the way that its excesses are enjoyed cannot happen without that on the periphery I passed it and say ok it's over there and only go inside to look on a tour but I mean how do people imagine that that is normal I don't know but they do, we do so I don't want to just point the simple finger and create some conspiratorial theory of which I'm not also responsible and complicit the times come to stop I'd like to thank Yasir this talk has been everything for the talk of this school please join us for a reception outside