She also hosts a politics and pop culture podcast called lady dont take no. You have like seven jobs, that is seven fulltime jobs were working at any time. We are thrilled you joined us today. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Lets start by talking about how this summer has been. Obviously, as one of the cofounders of the black lives matter movement, you have been centering some of the issues, all of the issues really, that have taken even a bigger place front and center stage in national politics, the national conversation, more generally. What has how do you feel 3, looking ater the Political Landscape today versus how you felt at the beginning of summer, early june . While, it does feel like time is not a construct, but ever flowing. Ill say that in the beginning of the summer, we saw unprecedented rebellions spread not just across the country, but across the world. I think it has a lot to do with a few things. Number one, at this point black lives matter is kind of in the muscle memory of this nation. Seven years ago, we couldnt get politicians to say black lives matter. We couldnt get a lot of people to say black lives matter. We got a lot of all lives matter, blue lives matter, every life except for black lives matter. So coming into this period, it has been surreal to see the ways in which black lives matter has spread more completely. I think with that being said, we have also seen not just widespred embracing of black lives matter, but i think we are still waiting for the kinds of changes this movement has been demanding for a very long time. And right now on this day, im just reflecting that a lot of what we are seeing is that we are essentially being used as a political football in this election season. And the leader of this country is attacking our organization, he is attacking our movement, while allowing for vigilantes and white nationalists and White Supremacists to go unchecked. I think that really does say a lot about where we are as a nation as it relates to racism, as it relates to addressing issues of safety and what it means to actually be safe in ouR Communities. I think what we found is this movement has progressed in such a way where it is now offering very concrete solutions as to how we address the ongoing epidemic of Police Violence and police brutality, but bigger than that, how we address the systemic dismantling of the kind of infrastructure in ouR Communities that not only keeps us safe, but also allows us to live full and dignified lives. Housing, health care, education, on and on, what we are finding is there is a need for bold and courageous moves. Not just because there is a contest for who will lead this nation, but because our very lives depend on it. Here we are at the intersection of a global pandemic, crisis in our democracy, deepening and worsening climate crisis, and economic recession, and, of course, a crisis of racial terror. Those are things that will need to be addressed. Its interesting you make the point of political football. It strikes me that maybe thats where some of my weariness comes in about this summer. Even the response. Even sometimes the good response. I think it it is amazing and puts into perspective how a few years ago, saying black lives matter was a political death sentence in some communities. It is remarkable to see how much so much has changed. I think i wonder if you think some of the fundamentals and i think this is the political football point that seven years ago it was used as a political football, and it is also still being used as a political football, maybe slightly more in a progressive favor, but still requiring black people, black committees, and black leaders to repeatedly assert not just their dignity, but their good intentions in a way that others dont have to. Absolutely. Ive spent the last week dealing with messages that frankly missed the point. We have seen all kinds of things this week, including a disingenuous call for a ban on nighttime protests. We are seeing people say it with gusto, that they feel they have to condemn rioting or looting, and they are associating that with protests. At the same time, we dont see as quick of action to deal with the fact a 17yearold boy went to a protest in kenosha, killedin and shot and two people who were protesting. He has not been the topic of any conversations as it relates to this president , yet the president is convening taskforces through the department of justice to study allegedly radical extremists. The president has been on television this last week talking about black lives matter and how he believes it is a terrorist organization that he wants to prosecute. So a lot of what we are dealing with in this moment is a reckoning, but i am not quite clear that we have made the choice to actually lean into it. And, you know as black leaders , who just three months ago were lauded for creating the kinds of conditions in this country where people are facing the realities of systemic racism. Today, we are in a moment where the attorney general of this nation literally said he doesnt believe systemic racism exists in policing. So thats the moment we are facing right now. I think it is imperative that for those of us who care about what is going to happen in november, but beyond that, those of us who care about the direction this country is headed in, we have to ask if we will be ifwe have to ask ourselves we will be passive observers while we are being ghastly into believing the real issues today, broken windows as opposed to the dozens of black people who have been murdered just this year alone, and some have been murdered on camera. I think we also have to determine we will make black lives matter more than a slogan, that we will actually make it the governing principle of this nation. Thats the work that is left to do. You know, its interesting thinking about Breonna Taylor, in particular, and how we talk about black deaths at the hand of the state, and i think death is fundamentally the worst thing the state can do to you, they can kill you. They can kill you with impunity, they can kill you without ever being punished, they can kill you because it is a racist system that believes in responding to black people with racist solutions, including not seeing them enough to be alive. Theres another thing, which is had Breonna Taylor lived, that she had been previously injured, lets say, she would be locked up for drug dealing. Her boyfriend would be locked up for attempted murder. And that night would have ruined her life, regardless, death is obviously much worse than any other thing that could have happened to her, but in the spectrum of what we talk about when we talk about Police Violence and racist Police Violence, people come out of the woodwork and say only x amount of people were killed by police, whatever the statistical justification for black death is. But it goes beyond that. I think that is fundamental to what you have always talked about when you talk about black lives matter. I agree. I just read the heartbreaking piece in the New York Times about Breonna Taylor and her life. And what i found so fascinating about it was she really was the story of redemption that this country talks about all the time. The first person in her family to graduate from high school. She took care of her younger sister and her infant godchild. She was an essential worker. She was an emt who worked at two local hospitals. She was somebody who had just fallen in love. She was somebody who frankly resisted every obstacle placed in front of her. She also is the story of america. She is the story of what ouR Communities are grappling with every single day. And it is true that were hearing more recently that the police there had offered a deal to her exboyfriend, trying to him to post posthumously implicate her in his drug dealing practice, which he refused to do. And i think there is the question of who is left behind. We havent asked the question of what happened to her younger sister, her god child. What has happened to her mother . Her partner, who watched asbury who watched as breonna was murdered right next to her. So much of this is couched as individualized and exceptional kinds of cases. But i think we find pattern and practice. The other thing i want to say about this is so often, people dont survive to tell the story. What we found is jacob blake is still alive after being shot seven times in the back in front of his three children. Hes still alive to be able to tell the story. As he is recovering from his too up until just a couple of days ago, he was handcuffed to his bed. That changed of course as a result of public outcry. We have to ask ourselves if this is the kind of safety we are driving toward. Do you feel safer knowing he was shot in his back seven times and who has lost and has lost his ability his functioning from the waist down . Do you feel safer knowing that . Do you feel safer knowing an essential worker was murdered in her home, in her bed while she was sleeping . If this is Public Safety, i think we have to ask ourselves a lot of questions about what about this process, what about this pattern and practice is actually making us safer . I think the answer to that is nothing. There does have to be a different way of approaching this. Thats why im so proud this movement has actually introduced really clear ways to get us closer to the things we purport that we want in our lives. That is what i was going to ask next is bad state factors always want to say what is the solution . I find that a frustrating conversation, anyway, because i dont think you should have to have figured out the solution to identify the problem. I also think there has been so much work, and particularly interesting work this summer, more recent work, around what a solution looks like. Not just what a solution to Police Violence looks like, but what do if we believe in safety and value Public Safety, what does Public Safety look like . Can you talk a little about the breather act . I want to make sure everyone who watches this knows about it, and understands the principles behind it and what it really means. Absolutely. Shout out always to the movement for black lives, a coalition of more than 150 black led organizations. Hundreds of individual hosts who have come together over the last six five or six years to build a movement that can transform the rules that have been rigged against ouR Communities for a very long time. The breathe act is a pivotal milestone in this movements trajectory. The breathe act essentially asks us to reconsider what safety, wellness, and dignity looks like. It is i would say it is this generations version of the civil rights act. It is an identification of where it is we need to divest our resources from, and where we need to invest resources into in order to achieve the goals we have laid out. So one of the things i feel really proud of in relationship to this piece of legislation is for so many years people would say things like whats the solution . Hat do we need to do about it . Now here we are and we have proposed this very comprehensive way to address Public Safety but also Community Wellness with potentially evolved divesting from the punishment economy to a caring economy that takes care of all of us. So you know, intent most of the summer talking about the viability of the demand around defunding police. I always say as an organizer for 20 years, any kind of demand that is out there that makes you uncomfortable is the right kind of demand. Because it forces you to think about where you stand and it also forces you to interrogate how you understand what the roblem is. It forces you to start to articulate how you might address it differently. You know, im not so caught up in language that i dont understand the core problems that were facing in ouR Communities, which is that we have been inaudible] when we want to improve our quality of life, we dont have hospitals. We dont have full Service Grocery stores. We dont have schools where all kids have books and where the first person they see in the morning is not a teacher, but it is a Police Officer. In my community, were one of a few jurisdictions across the country that has its own Police Department in front of the school district. In so many ways, our infrastructure in ouR Communities has been intentionally weakened for decades. And it has caused a set of conditions that result in what we are fighting today and so a very clear call to reinvest our resources in order to reimagine well R Communities can be is i think the call of this generation and i think it ould be the kind of hallmark Pivotal Point that our parents alked about not just for voting right and an end to segregation, but fundamentally, the last period of civil rights was fundamentally about rebuilding infrastructure in ouR Communities so that question could be powerful in every aspect of our lives and i think that the breathe act asks us to reconsider what were prioritizing in terms of how were distributing our resources what happened the impacts of that are on ouR Communities. Such an interesting point because it makes the phrasing makes people uncomfortable. Some people uncomfortable. I have found a document a couple of months ago that said like it was talking about defunding the police kind of as a political goal. And here we are. A couple years later and things are shifting. The timing is moving it is remarkable how quickly it moves and remarkable how quickly it doesnt. It is so important for people to think about the idea that le believe if they had let me figure out how to say this. I do think people think in their head if im auls always i always want to be on the right side of history. There is no way the Civil Rights Movement would have made me feel uncomfortable. Because that was correct. They were doing the right thing. I know what the right thing is inherently but it takes a lot of work by organizers and thinkers and innovators to set Fertile Ground to have the ability to imagine a different world. What i try to tell people, what a blessing and how great it is to be able to open your mind and imagine something different. Where we dont need police. Where we dont use terror to get what we want from people. I think so much of what youre trying do is not just give give black people a voice and ake them serve more of the conversation. So imagine, imagine a future where black people, you know, are valued, supported and have the resources that they need in a country that has never once in its, you know, history, done that adequately. Thats very true. Tell me about your work there. We start from the perspective of what we dream about and what we want to see for our futures. Then we walk ourselves backwards to say what would it take to get there . The black futures lab and the black future action fund is all about making black communities powerful in politics so we can be powerful in the rest of our lives. So much of building power for black communities involves listening to and engaging black communities, and trusting that black folks can be the heroes in our own stories. That we actually dont need to wait for somebody to come and save us. So much of the story of our liberation struggle is centered around unique individuals who we assume had superhuman qualities, like Martin Luther king or like malcolm x. I think what we found is that, frankly, some of the most profound changes in this country have come from regular people who were sick and tired of being sick and tired. And what we are doing at the black futures lab is organizing the seney lou hamers of this country to help us lead in the process of changing rules rigged against ouR Communities for generations, of being new governance structures in this country to help determine how resources are distributed, how economies and democracy function, and to make sure none of ouR Communities are left behind. So our whole institution really began from a listening project called the black census, where it is now the Largest Survey of black people in america in 165 years. We talked to black people in every state in the country, from every demographic, across all kinds of social, economic, and other demographic lines. And what we found from that process is that more often than ot, people said, nobody has ever asked me what i experience every day, and what i want from my future. And that does not bode well for a political system that is healthy and functioning. What we learned were the things keeping the black communities up at night are low wages that are not enough to support a family, the lack of Affordable Quality Health care and housing. And when it comes to what we want to see done about it, a lot of us have said that we want government to take more responsibility for ensuring that all of its citizens are well. So from making sure wealthy individuals are redistributing their wealth, all the way to ensuring that everybody who Needs Housing and health care has it. Black communities have an incredible vision for what can make this country well when it has been very sick for a very long time. For us, the process of listening is what we use to determine the fights we ick. We put together a document called the black agenda 2020, which lays out all of the solutions that our survey respondents talked about, from housing, health care, wages, education, to the legal system. Interestingly, we talked earlier about defunding the olice. In this campaign moment, there is such hesitation to talk about what changes need to happen as it relates to olicing and Public Safety. But i can tell you in a survey of black folks that were not radical activists, that the number one thing people wanted was