SRCCON:POWER Talks: I’Nasah Crockett on black women and representation in media

Day & Time: Thursday, Dec. 13, 2018, at 10:15am

KIM: Howdy. I’ll promise that there’ll be so much time to talk at lunch. We’re just trying to keep things roughly on time. Now I forgot my cards. It’s cool. All right. So I’Nasah Crockett is our next talk. And she is a special case. Why was I so wonderfully long and beautiful? She’s a blogger, artist, researcher, writer, who has critical commentator theory writer on blackness, anti-blackness, afro-pessimism and other things. She is waiting for… I also am waiting for a Caper movie because the Trolls movie was trash. What was that? They were really creepy, and they were not as cute as [Name] as a child. Anyway. I’m going to use her words to explain her talk. Her promise is: I’m going to run my mouth for 20 minutes on the history of social media, the press, and she’s gonna talk a little bit about her experiences with harassment and what she’s learned from it. And she has plenty of time for questions. So wave when we’re ready.

I’NASAH: Good morning, everyone. I guess I’ve had a good morning so far. I think I had a doughnut that might have been cookie dough. So if I get super excited, please know that’s why. And also the Coke that I drank. Thanks to Erika for the opportunity. Thanks to all the organizers who assisted at this event, who I will try not to make mad during this talk. Can you guys hear me okay now?

[ Applause ]

Okay. Cool. So yeah, my name is I’Nasah Crockett. If you know me from online things, you probably know me as @so_treu. I came come across that name typing as a typo on Yahoo Messenger years ago. So that gives you an idea of how long I’ve been here. I really hate the, “What do you do?” question because I feel like it’s really a question about where are you in the social pecking order. So when I was speaking about my personal bio here existential crisis because I don’t know. I generally describe myself as a professional loudmouth. I have spent a lot of my years doing research on African-American history and culture, African-American performance tradition.

And I just kind of lucked out to be born in an age where you can talk about all these things in sort of a break room the size of the earth basically, and you can meet with other people who are talking about these things. And so basically when people ask me what do you do, or how do I define myself, I define myself as an extremely online nerd at the end of the day. And most of my online life has been nerding out about the things that I’m passionate about. Yes, I have three or four Tumblrs on black life. There’s one dedicated to black performance. There’s one dedicated to afro-pessimism, and black critiques, and one on people of color over the years. I just started to do Instagram, an account about two to three weeks ago that’s entirely about aesthetics because Tumblr isn’t really a place to be anymore even before the most recent development, shall we say, in terms of how they run their sites. A while ago, there have been a mass exodus of us from Tumblr to Twitter. So there’s just, in different ways, over the past few years, acclimated to whatever platform I’m on with the people I’m with and throughout it all, I’ve also kept up a practice of media engagement critique. Some might call it dedicated, some might call it annoying. Some of this engagement looks like contributing to a hashtag campaign that’s dedicated to raise awareness about an aspect of an overlooked black life, or even a crisis in the black community. Bring back our girls, the hashtag #bringbackourgirls, which two men women started in 2013 by a group of Nigerian activists. It’s really weird how it gets to race. I remember looking up a couple of articles. Because I can’t remember the year Bring Back the Girls. And very few mention the name of the girls who ran one of these which is strange, because one of them is running for president of Nigeria. So it becomes erased into this amorphous thing that happens on Twitter which is a pattern with especially things that black women do online. So to bring back the #bringbackourgirls, it culminates with Michelle Obama herself holding up a picture of hashtag, #bringbackourgirls. So I think that’s maybe one of the more wholesome and positive, and the promise of social media kind of narratives of black people engaging in social media, on places like Twitter, and also my engagement. Other times, social media engagement means adding a specific editor, or adding a specific writing, and saying, yo, is you dumb? Is it me? Because this seems like this is a whole bunch of hogwash so I just want to know when you wrote this, did you realize it was hogwash while you were writing it, or you thought, wow, I didn’t realize it was hogwash now it is. And I think you need to realize that I need to tell you that, like they say nowadays, “This ain’t it, fam.” Sometimes there’s curse words in this. Sometimes there’ll be just the rude imagery that was previously mentioned. The potential babysitters, the potential nanniers, and potential caretakers. And as someone who worked previously as a caretaker, there’s absolutely no way. At least with her, she was talking about herself. There’s mine, where I’m calling everything the chocolate god. And not because I felt I was being mean but they were marginalizing people in my community and that’s not a thing that the algorithm takes into account. Long story short. I’ve been involved in different aspects of social media and it’s all kind of been this one world that’s gotten me to where I am today. So I want to talk about — I do want to get into my own personal history. I do want to frame this a bit of my own personal history but I want to get into the larger personal histories that brought us all here. Especially today, the times that we’re living in. Just a constant state of emergency, right? There are constant fires to be putting out.

Constant overwhelm with just events, overwhelming reactions to the overwhelming events, and this is a — especially a fraught time for journalists, right? More so than, I think, any of us living in this room in history living in the West. And I’m not here in the interest of joining the course of, you know, “bad journalists! Bad media! Fake news! You guys all suck!” So forth and so on. I’m not saying if you search my handle, you won’t find that on some days. But I am a fan of a good, strong press. I do think that the press has a very strong and leadership role to play in times of rising fascism. In times of rising violence, in times of rising uncertainty. But I do want to bring attention to the high-risk journalists visiting black communities. There’s still history to sort through, and there’s history in ways that sort of got us to this place, right? The lack of nuanced, compassionate, and historically grounded coverage of black lives is a direct result of exclusionary policies, both formal and informal that have kept black folks out of newsrooms, or has limited our involvement, right?

Yeah, I’ll get to that. Similarly, social media policies that leave marginalized populations the most vulnerable to targeted harassment are a direct result of these populations being absent from positions of influence in these companies. So even though you can be stressed in a lot of ways. I think a lot of the unsatisfactory attitudes towards newspaper coverage that you get from wider audiences outside of media circles, and journalism circles. Sure, there’s the fake news. Sure, there’s the, coming from the right, full-throat attempt to let legitimize media and I think that gets to genuine critiques of how the media has sort of treated our communities. So in the interest of that, I want to delve into this history. I want to talk about how this history kind of underlines our personal experiences, using my experience as an example. And what could be learned from it. I also want to talk about sort of the overlaps between journalism, the history of exclusion in journalism, and how it then rolls over to social media understanding that we live in a space where journalism and social media, while they’re separate, they still have a very symbiotic relationship, and they very much feed off of and influence each other. What I also want to talk about is the ways in which black communities have survived the various violences that the media has brought upon our communities, right?

It’s not just that we’ve taken on the brunt of this, oppression, intellectual, spiritual, hm. But, actually, we’ve managed to create really resilient ways of interacting with each other, really resilient networks that have acted as bulwarks against the violence in media spaces implicating upon us. And I’ll use the media as meaning the press, and also social media. And also believe there are ways in which we learn to interact with each other, or learn to protect ourselves that I think can be extrapolated and taken as lessons for media in general, and to make your newsrooms a more diverse and open place, and just to make our coverage better, and to better our understanding of social media specifically and how we can respond to things we’re seeing there, especially in terms of harassment and trolling.

So personally I was born in ‘87. So I’m a millennial. And in the middle, there’s a really weird category, where a lot of stuff gets put on it. It becomes more about how we’re ruining everything, than oh, hey, if you’re 17, you’re not a millennial anymore, right? But I think it’s more grounded in very specific times and spaces. So sort of my earliest experiences with the Internet is that startup “eeennggchchkkk” kind of sound. My first experience was an AOL chatroom. At least what you would call social media. AOL forums before you had this open Internet. But my first actual what you would call a social media network, like, the one that I was involved in was called Black Planet. Quick show of hands, how many people here have heard of Black Planet here before? That’s what I expected. So Black Planet was founded in 1999 by Omar Owasso. I’m probably pronouncing his name wrong. So I think he’s half African-American and I think it’s Polish. So if someone knows how to pronounce it. He’s an executive professor at Princeton in African-American studies. And Black Planet can be probably best described as a proto-Myspace. You probably had a page. A series of web pages is the best way I can remember it. You put up a series of graphics, and then you have a bio, and then you have a picture, you maybe had a lot of things centered around dating or job hunting in those days. In terms of what you’re looking for dating, and jobs, basic functions. Very quaint by today’s standards. Very — if you kind of want a sense of this. I also think of GeoCities. It’s a very GeoCities-esque kind of experience. I remember it personally as a collection of web pages that form an online parallel of local high school life. So those who introduced me to Black Planet were my closest friends and it became a way for us to extend our networks with the limited technology at the time. Your free minutes don’t kick in until after 8:00, so you can’t call in your friends, but you can get on Black Planet. And at the time, and I grew up in Atlanta, the physical distance… it overcame that. I went to Meridian High School, but I have a friend in Tricities which is 30 minutes away and if I don’t have a driver’s license, that would be a hard thing to do, but Black Planet comes in. So looking back at it, it felt very innocent, and looking back at it, I think I do it purely for nostalgia.

But I think it was an excellent example of black networks under — I mean, forming the foundation of social media in certain ways, right? I say proto-Myspace page. But according to the founder, Myspace looked to Black Planet to model itself part of. The story in me is like, “I want to find the actual source!” But or we wanted to take what they were doing for one specific group of people and wanted to extend to someone else. And this was by Complex. So hopefully they weren’t lying to Complex News. But if you’re single, it made dating totally plausible. It’s the same kind of thing! And to be clear, Black Planet is still around. They currently have, like, 15.8 million registered users. Obviously, a sliver compared to Facebook or Twitter. But they apparently made a Black Planet Barack Obama page. But especially ones that make it a explicitly safe space for us. And how black modes of communication founded early modes of communication both for ourselves and for other users. Specifically… the founder was quoted saying, we took the grapevine, and extended it to other communities. I don’t know if you heard that, other people use the term — I heard it through the grapevine. It’s used to talk about gossip but also the means that the gossip is spread. It’s spread in kitchen tables, hair salons, you know, after-church services. These sort of intimate, inter-communal services, whereas they say, “Spill the tea.” Gather it back up, fill it up back again. So it depends on the individual in the community, and the history of the community in the first place. Me in Atlanta, and being in Atlanta born and bread, and ending up in a prominently black city. And it makes sense then that growing up in a prominently black city that my first introduction to social media would be a social media platform that centers black people on a platform. If I had gone to a prominently white high school, or a prominently white area, because Atlanta is segregated, historically segregated. And I realized that because I went to college, I went to a PWI, historically white college. And most of my friends who were white never heard of Black Planet at the time, and as social media more and more progressed, it was interesting to see in which the ways they were using the platform versus the way that we were using the platform. For example, they would use Myspace, but they were mostly using it to keep in touch with people in college they already knew. We were more of the earlier adopters of Facebook. It was like the end of 2004, beginning of 2005, during my freshman year, Facebook came, and I remember Thanksgiving, everyone came back, and everyone was saying, “Facebook! Facebook! Facebook!” And they were like, “You haven’t heard!” And now they’re destroying the word. Now, it might be weird to add someone you didn’t know. But at the time, my white friends would add people they knew from high school. Oh, I could get in touch with in high school. Black people, we would add people from schools we didn’t go to. Schools like NYU, or Columbia. Or HBUs, ‘cause a lot of us were having cultural stuff around a prominently white institution. And we wanted to build a community in our new college homes.

But also there’s interesting ways in which we were kind of reaching out to new people because we couldn’t reach out to old people because a lot of our friends were going to schools that didn’t have Facebook yet. Facebook didn’t make it a point to start out at Tulu, Facebook didn’t start at Mississippi State, or West Georgia, it took some time for Facebook to get to these spaces. So us reaching out was more for us to build a grapevine, continue a grapevine, even as Facebook, and social media at the time was sort of keeping us a little bit away from our previous grapevine. So I think as you can see this throughout sort of African-American — someone needs to — and I know someone is going to is going to say, you do it! If you look at the African-American literature, I think what you’ll find is prominently, versus technology making us adaptable, how we use their spaces. So you can like this, you can message this, you can do that. So we sort of take that and make it work for us and I’ll circle around back to that in terms of my personal example. And how I noticed that.

So I think these — not “I think” — these networks form a bulwark against how these social media platforms can treat us. And I think that that’s influenced by our experience with older media platforms, specifically the press. The press, you know, the idea of the press as sort of the defender of liberty, the idea of the press as sort of the, you know, finest example of the First Amendment that our constitution has to offer. Not saying that that’s not true; it’s just not always true.

And, really, the press has been central in the denial of liberty to certain American citizens, historically. And I don’t mean to single out the press for that themselves, right? The earliest papers in the U.S. were founded in the context of active chattel slavery and active colonialism. The first continually published newspaper was the Boston Newsletter which was published in 1674. To put into context, the first time slavery was happening in the Caribbean and the Atlanta, but the first group of American slaves was 1619. So the Civil War didn’t start until 1861, right? And after the Civil War, white-owned media outlets frequently took antagonistic tone to the African-Americans. Some of the antagonism took more subtle forms if it can be called that. And I just realized, Lynette, could you, there’s a book in my bag. There’s a book by Brian Wagner, “disturbing the peace.” And it’s a pretty interesting wide-ranging book. His specific point is about the development of the police, again, after emancipation, and after slavery, and how it was a force very interested in keeping black people in place, quote-unquote. And he uses a lot of examples but one of the things he does is talks about newspapers and specifically how there was a practice of police court reporting where they would like to — it was like blotter sheets. This is what happened, this person got arrested. They got taken to the court, and this is what happened in the courtroom. And during like the 1820s, or 1890s, early twentieth century, it became a popular form. So I just wanted to read excerpts of how these columns talked about black people. And to be clear, this was all before emancipation. But after emancipation, it supported whites, who’s in the courtroom today. It increasingly became mostly black people.

Police court reporting made its way into the southern states before emancipation focused on those minor ventures where whites were called to account for smaller crimes but it would not only be stated until after the war. As the inferior course of costs were increased to — the constituency of the new slaves that took their cues from plantation writings as well as black face minstrelsy. They were viciously distorted in the court reporters and the cartoons that eventually accompanied them with oversized eyeballs, distended lips, and black speech patterns were similarly stylized. “Sah, next please, court, I hope, these court, won’t suppose, fo a single moment, I disrespect a lady.” Separate and inherent to the language spoken by the court and the others. Again, there’s that assumption about how we speak here in America.

And, okay. Just like I said, I don’t want to get too deep into this. Emancipation of the slaves, this one’s from the Atlanta Hometown. The emancipation puts the worst vague rants upon us, stressing that nothing more dangerous than these hoards of roughians who were set to infest our land. Blocking up our doorways, indulging miserable talk in back allies, and stealing at night. Making sidewalks nearly impassable for ladies. Sounds familiar. You know, language is a key step in the process of dehumanization. We become receptive to talking about people like this, we become receptive to treating people like this. People would write their local newspapers, oh, there’s going to be a lynching of so-and-so at this time tonight. Be sure to bring your kids. It’ll be fun!

And the Equal Justice Initiative in particular has done a lot of work around lynching these past few years. They’re part of the newly opened, I guess April, this year, the newly opened monument to lynching in Alabama. I really encourage you guys to check out their website because I absolutely cannot get into. Because this is really only a topic that we’re now understanding sort of the depth of. But they’ve documented over 4,000 racial lynching in the southern states between 1877 and 1950 which is at least 800 modern previously recorded and these lynchings were not done in the interest of protecting white lives. They were done in the interest of keeping black people in line. And you could see that from where a lot of the headlines that were used by southern newspapers at the time. But basically the headlines would say things like, “The brute had it coming.” Or someone who has ravished a young white woman, he was hung by his miserable, you know, body parts. Actually, have some headlines I want to read but it’s not coming out.

But, you know, there’s works that have been done around the world in the newspapers on this in the impression of African-Americans. The work of Ida B. Wells is probably one that you should know most about. Long story short: she was a journalist based in Memphis and a friends of hers were lynched. They were owners of a black grocery in Memphis. White power structure at the time did not like the fact that they were independent, they were black owned. So they facilitated a riot, and used the riot as a reason to lynch them. She wrote an editorial about the lynching and then after she wrote the editorial, she actually took a visit to Philadelphia. While she was gone, a white mom destroyed the newspaper she worked for, and she was force today flee. She was never allowed to return to Memphis. And a lot of her writing very much talked a lot about the southern — not only the southern culture but it struck to the heart of what these papers were actually trying to protect, which was the idea of whiteness as pure, as innocent, and as always justified in their violence. She highlighted the roles that white men played in the lives of black women specifically. She talked about how white men rape black women, and that never gets brought to court, and let alone defended. And these women who were being raped by white men were very willing participants in the act, and maybe was something their fathers used to save their honor from their willingness to lay instead of a white woman. But then she goes on and becomes a massive international anti-lynching crusader. Similarly, there were the Pullman Porters who worked in Pullman until the 1950s, trains were the most popular ways travel in the U.S. These men pulled on bags, and turned beds. And a lot of them were ex-slaves. And there’s a lot of talk about mistreatment, the brothers Pullman Porters. But like Ida B. Wells, they were anti-lynching activists, and like Ida B. Wells, they were working to fight against the violence that the mainstream media was putting against them. So you have the white press who, on the one hand making it okay to lynch and then you have a black press that is actively combating against this. Actively combating against the image as black people as criminals, as deviant. And the southern culture that kept black folks completely at the bottom of the rung, saying, hey, come to Chicago, come to New York, come to — you know, there are these cars driving literally all around the country. They go to Chicago, 100 copies of Chicago Defender. At some point during the course of their travels, toss them out to some people, to some men who were waiting, and then those papers, they distributed amongst the community because these communities were not allowed down south. Local white structures were trying to keep these networks out because they were empowering black people in ways that were not conducive either to their economic bottom line or their social bottom line.

How much time do I have? Okay.

KIM: I was trying to be subtle.

I’NASAH: So I’m going to fast forward very quickly and sort of loop this around to a very specific experience I had online and give me, like, three minutes and I swear I can wrap this up. So in 2014, there was something that happened on Twitter called hashtag #hashtag #yourslipisshowing. I guess people have heard about this. Long story short: you guys know what 4chan is. Like /r/poll on Reddit. 4chan for a long time had been putting together harassment campaigns against LGBT people, black people, across Tumblr, across Twitter, across different mediums. So in 2014, they get the bright idea, hey, we’re going to start a campaign called hashtag, #myfathersday. And we’re going to have pictures of black women, Asian women, and we’re going to say, that Father’s Day is patriarchal, and we should end it and it would have worked, and we would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for us meddling kids. Another use at Sassy Crass, her name is Shavika, we were looking at these avatars, and saying, wait, this isn’t how we talk. We don’t know these people, they don’t have any friends with us in common. They don’t have — we don’t understand where this is coming from. And so we basically began this campaign of unmasking, okay, you say you’re a black woman, but your slip is showing, which is supposed to be an idiom for, you’re supposed to be a put-together woman, but your slip is showing, let us show how sloppy you are. In response, they tried to threaten us. They tried to run us off the Internet. One of them threatened my unborn kid. She basically said we’re going to dox this negress, and find out where her little niglet children live. Ultimately, we were able to unmask them because of the black networks over the years of being on social media. They weren’t something that just popped up on Twitter. We had them built on Twitter and Tumblr 2012, and these were black women we had spent time with, broken bread with, and done each other’s hair. And even we haven’t met each other in person, we still knew enough people to look at one another and say if you’re new to me, and that person popped up over there. That’s probably not a thing. Black people were making networks to affirm our humanity, affirm our commitment to each other, and affirm our ways to protect each other is ultimately what foiled 4chan, and the ultimate point that I want you guys to take away from my ramblings and my talk is that I think there’s so much that can be taken from the networks that are not present in these rooms, the networks that are not present on social media boards, the networks that are usually not present on these spaces. I.e. networks that have been built in the shadows of exclusion but have been given so much life like, forms and means of protection, and means for black lives to flourish in these digital spaces and that still provide content, and still provide fathers for social media for black people, and listicles for people, saying, this is what Kim Kardashians is looking at social media appropriation. But what does mean when we look at how we network, and how we network and understand each other, as a way to combat misinformation campaigns, and decontrolling, this anti-press, anti-open-media sort of campaign that we find ourselves in. Because as a people, we know a little bit about something about how to thrive and how to build institutions in a world that has absolutely zero interest in seeing you do that. So that is ultimately what I think I want everyone to take away from this. And that was it.

KIM: Thank you so much. So we have — point of order, number one. We’re going to move sessions 15 minutes back. It’s going to eat up a little bit into lunch because that’s okay. Still plenty of time for lunch. So sessions instead of starting at 11:15, they’re going to start at 11:00. And lunch instead of starting at 12:30 is going to start at 12:45. So that leaves us a little bit of time for I’Nasah. Does anyone have anything they would like to ask I was like, I can ask questions.

AUDIENCE: I think, like, most of journalism, black-owned, and black operated news organizations have seen, like, massive, like, loss of resources. In that environment, can you talk about the interaction between black online communities and black media maybe as an analogue to, like, the Pullman Porters were the disseminators of papers like The Defender.

I’NASAH: Sure. I think that in a certain way, in a digital space, black, sort of, individual users and the platforms they can curate can supplant news sources as these sources have been lost. When I think about black owned, or at least black oriented, or once you go up the chain of media companies, ultimately owned are black outlets that are more so an individual person building creating content and on an individual level people feeling like they can relate versus some amorphous, “This is the Chicago Defender.” This is a particular platform. I think about things like, even things like gossip, or beru (?), or some things coming across my timeline. They are not traditional media outlets. They are not traditional media outlets. They are outlets that have been more proactive about finding out where we are. I think the black media outlets that — and it’s not just them, right? It’s the whole industry sort of struggling with, like, you know, declining sales. Struggling with the digital turn. I think the ones that were able to adapt digitally are the ones that still have relevance. But I do also think that there’s oftentimes a gap between what’s presented online, and then how we’re also living offline. So, for example, a local paper in Atlanta that I grew up reading was called Rolling Out Magazine. And they had a few in different cities. Things like Rolling Out Denver, and so forth and so on. That paper is still going last time I was home. If you search the archives, I think they have my graduation from high school. My high school graduation announcement. So you can’t always extrapolate how it’s going to look online versus how it’s going to look offline especially as the gap between, more and more local newspapers are closing, and Internet access is becoming more and more of an issue. So I think there still can be spaces where there’s vibrant old school newspapers and audiences that are not on social media per se. I’m sure Twilio has a Twitter account, but I don’t see people using that. But I don’t see in terms of the actual people reading it. So…

KIM: Other questions? Gotta reach.

AUDIENCE: Hi, thanks for that. My name is Syvenzy. And I’m from Johannesburg, south Africa. I won a full fellow scholarship at FSU, and I want to make a reference to the hashtag, #bringbackourgirls. Just to give you give you a report of how it was received back home. To see someone powerful as a first lady to support the movement hashtag, #bringbackthegirls. You’re the first lady of the most powerful country in the world. And, yes, you shared solidarity with this movement but there’s more you could have done. So how do we measure hashtagging I wanted to get your perspective on how that was reflected here. But I know there was a lot of cultural appropriation. So, again, in this context, how do you — how do you, I suppose reconcile, right, what that looks like. So, again, in South Africa, black people are the political majority but the economical minority so how we cover our work is very cognizance of that. Here, to what extent do you look at minority issues, because, again, you are the minority, but there’s a strong sense that you can’t speak out on the publications that touched on. How does that compare to, you know, the global outlook?

I’NASAH: Sure. Sure. I’m totally about this. And also I’ve spent some time in South Africa off and on over the years for schools. And I taught there briefly for a few months. And I think that — so I think a lot of it can be boiled down to the — I’ll answer the first question, and then the second question. But the first question, sort of the run up of Michelle Obama holding up the Bring the Girls Back sign. There was this huge explosion of discourse that happened after that moment, right? Because it was so fraught, and because there was sort of multiple immediacy going on at the same time. So on the one hand, you had the first black president, the first black president’s wife, you know, first black first lady holding up the sign that’s very much about black women, African women, you know, para-diaspora going through this thing. So on sort of an effective level, there’s just something about seeing a powerful black person taking a stand. And I would argue coming from a place like Atlanta which has a history of black political power that other places in the U.S. don’t, and that being a more mainstream place, there is a difference between sort of the representation and the actual political power of it. I remember one of the fights that a lot of us got into, was that there were a lot of U.S. leftists saying how could you be happy for that because she’s calling for military intervention? And what does it mean to call for military intervention because it’s like, she’s bringing intervention, but she’s representative of the most powerful and empirically nation in the U.S. So what does that actually look on the ground. And what answers can they answer with more African-American soldiers. What could an alternative movement look like? And how can we even bridge the gap between black America and black political Nigeria, and how does that process look different. And I think that ties into what specifically is an African-American sort of issue being in this country, being from this country, and in this country, being sort of the powerhouse it is, and being able to broadcast the images around the world. We have an extreme amount of hyper-visibility that doesn’t translate into power even when we had a black president for the most part. I think outside of this, I mean, you have a black president, what do you mean you don’t have political power? Well, his cabinet was all white. So I think it was how we came out of in terms of, we’re still more unemployed, we still make less money. We still have these economical and political. You know, we had a black president, and this is who we had after that. Right, I think if anything shows black political power was that we did not have the ability to change the fact that this nation has had, like, a collective, convulsive racist reaction to having the height of a black man at that power, right? I can soapbox about that all day. I think honestly, more into a diaspora conversation-building is called for, and I don’t think it can happen on Twitter. Between surveillance, between trolling, between content scrapers. I think there’s definitely conversations that need to happen in spaces like this, than just like hashtags on Twitter. I’d love to talk to you more about it afterwards but I don’t know that I answered all your questions.

KIM: Thank you so much! Thank you guys! Thank you. Okay. So reminders: sessions start at 11:00. So you have, like, five-ish minutes to stretch your legs, figure out where you’re going, and then we’ll have lunch at 12:45 in that same area where you got breakfast this morning, and you can come back, sit wherever you need to.

Here are where the sessions are. If you’re looking for power to the people of color, you’re here. You’ve made it!

If you’re looking for Puerto Rico — actually, if you’re looking to talk about Puerto Rico at max. I would also like to go to Puerto Rico but that’s in Franklin 1. If you’re looking to talk about tools and power, that’s in Franklin 2. Both of those are upstairs. And Hass, which is also upstairs which is where you will find career matrix. One more reminder… if you are to tweet about anything from the talks or anything that is appropriate and appropriate from the sessions, #srcconpower is our hashtag. All right! Have fun in your sessions!