I really want to say what an honor it is to be included and to be a part of this conversation and to have this opportunity to talk about the Black Lives Matter movement and the history of protests. I really want to thank the Stanford Alumni Association and the Stanford Alumni Association of Minnesota, and particularly May-Ling Gonzalez, Jeffrey Rainey, Jack Jorgensen, David Bayer, Josh Mathison, and Lexi Bradley for all of their hard work in arranging this talk. Thank you so much for this talk, and thank you so much to all of the participants who are joining us. I'm really eager to hear your questions. I'm going to share my screen with you, and I want to start with an image that a close friend of mine painted right after George Floyd was murdered. My friend's name is Constance Brantley, and she is an artist based in Los Angeles. I found this image so powerful and so moving. I asked her to tell me a little bit about how she decided to paint it and what made her paint it the way that she did, and here's what she said. She said, "I don't like to explain my work too much because it's really about what each person feels when they see it. But I will say that there have been these strong, raw, conflicting emotions about our country that have been bubbling up inside me, and I believe inside of many of us for a long, long time now. Pain, patriotism, outrage, helplessness, empowerment, hope, anger, love, lies, truth. All these feelings reached a boiling point with the murder of George Floyd along with Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many others. George Floyd did not deserve that fate. None of them did. But here we are in America. That's our reality, and we cannot hide from it. I'll also say that I took the painting's title from the Pledge of Allegiance. We all grew up reciting that pledge. We said it so many times that we've still got it memorized. Yet, how often did we ever really think about its words, its meaning? We pledge allegiance to the flag, the emblem of America, which is supposed to provide liberty and justice for all. That liberty, that justice, is supposed to be for all of us. One nation indivisible under God. I can almost guarantee you that every day as a kid in school, George Floyd made that pledge to the flag, and what did he get in return?" I'm so appreciative of Constance's beautiful art and her powerful words. I love the honesty and the depth of feeling that she conveys. I'll be sure to come back to many of the ideas that she's mentioned throughout my talk. Let me say from the beginning that I've chosen to use art rather than to show you images of brutality and violence. I worry about the possibility of contributing to the desensitization of black suffering, and I worry about the possibility of traumatizing my students when I teach classes about African American history. At the same time as a teacher in this particular moment, I can't help but wonder, how do we teach this history without showing the images? How do we do that right now when we're already inundated with so many images of brutality and death? But I'd rather show you other images that might help us to think critically about how we see anti-black violence, and to think about how we can call on ourselves to bear witness to that violence. The most important thing that I hope that you will take away from this talk is a message about the importance of history. History helps us to understand our current moment, no matter how painful or how disorienting it might be. We can turn to history in the same way that we might turn to an old friend or a parent, or an older, wise relative who can comfort us and reassure us that they too have been through wrenching, and heartbreaking, and even cataclysmic moments, and they survived, and we will too. Let's start with a bit of background on our current moment. We are witnessing a crisis multiplied by a crisis, multiplied by a crisis. We are experiencing multiple pandemics occurring simultaneously. We are seeing increasing cases of the Coronavirus around the country and a mortality count that has soared past the grim 150,000 mark, which makes it the largest public health crisis in generations. We are witnessing the highest unemployment rate since The Great Depression, with nearly 43 million Americans seeking unemployment benefits during the pandemic, according to MarketWatch. Then in late May, we witnessed a horrific public lynching that circulated widely on the news and around the Internet. As George Floyd's life escaped so horrifically, we were left in a similarly traumatized state, as the Ex-Colored Man in James Weldon Johnson's 1912 novel, where he stumbled upon a lynching and described himself as, "Fixed to the spot where he stood, powerless to take his eyes from what he did not want to see." Our current moment has left us to wonder, how did so much misery and so much suffering come about so quickly? For African-Americans, these crises are undeniably interconnected. We know that black and brown communities have been disproportionately affected by the Coronavirus, with black people dying at five times the rate of white Americans, according to the CDC. The chaotic, angry, defiant scenes that unfolded in the streets of Minneapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, Chicago, and many other cities, represent a reckoning. One long in the making and ignited not just by a single police killing. In the past five years, the Minneapolis Twin Cities area has seen three other controversial police shootings, and each of these fatal incidents featured a victim of a different racial background from the officers involved, and each was highlighted as an example of police misconduct. In death, George Floyd's name has become a metaphor for the numerous inequalities that have become too stark to ignore. As Dr. Martin Luther King famously said in a speech titled, The Other America, given at Stanford in April 1967, "A riot is the language of the unheard, and what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met, and it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity." King's words sound eerily familiar to the feelings that emerged in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder. A feeling that the state has failed to provide the basic needs for its population. Healthcare, clean water, a quality education, access to employment, decent housing, and environmental justice, just to name a few. In our current moment, race has become a shorthand for a specific set of life probabilities. The inequalities between black and white Americans are documented in rates of morbidity and infant mortality, wealth and unemployment, which attest to the ways that race shapes our everyday lives. Jelani Cobb recently wrote in The New Yorker that for the more than 40 million black people who live in the United States, there is a clear recognition of this reality, but it's largely invisible to the lives of white Americans. As with men who upon seeing the scroll of me too testimonies ask their wives, daughters, sisters, and coworkers, "Is it really that bad?" The shock of revelation that attended the video of George Floyd's death is itself a kind of inequality, a barometer of the extent to which one group of Americans have moved through life, largely free from the burden of such terrible knowledge. At a congressional hearing, George Floyd's brother said that he hoped that George would become "More than a face on a t-shirt, more than a name on a list that will stop growing". The Reverend Al Sharpton cited that list of the wrongfully dead in a eulogy that he delivered at Floyd's funeral, naming Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin. He could have gone on, Jordan Davis, Rekia Boyd, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Pearlie Golden. A lineage that goes back decades in our American story. I want to just pause for a minute here to give everyone the chance to think about this. Pearlie Golden lived in a small town in central Texas with less than 6,000 people. She was shot and killed in her own home by a police officer, and she was 93 years old. A sentiment common among many African Americans is that these people lived and died in black America, which is a different place from America at large. That their deaths, most of which came at the hands of law enforcement, represent a broader reality even though a significant number of white Americans were skeptical of his existence. For black people, there has been an enduring sense that they are not getting the benefit of their humanity. This idea of black people as being seen as less than human has a long history. It's not just the idea, it's the constant repetition of seeing black people being treated as less than human, literally as animals who are hunted and killed. The scenes of subjection, as literary scholar Saidiya Hartman has termed them, have a long history. It's the terrible spectacle that introduced Frederick Douglass to slavery. The beating of his Aunt Hester, which is one of the most well-known scenes of torture in the literature of slavery. The horrible exhibition, as Douglas called it, appeared in the first chapter of his narrative, published in 1845, and establish the centrality of violence to the making of an enslaved person. These scenes continue to haunt American history, especially scenes of black children being the victims of such brutality. Emmett Till, a 14-year-old child from Chicago was doing what many children do over the summer, especially during and after the Great Migration, which was returning to the South to visit relatives. His gruesome lynching in 1955, and his mother's unimaginably brave decision to have an open-casket funeral so that the whole world could see what they did to her boy that her child's death belong to all of us and that her very private grief could make a profound and powerful public statement. Over 100,000 mourners stood outside of the AA Rayner Funeral Home in Chicago to view Emmett Till's broken and ruined body, to see the futile but best efforts of the funeral director to try to sow his body back together. The gentle way that the funeral director had tried to comb the hair that framed his bloated and unrecognizable face. A staff photographer was allowed to photograph Emmett Till's body and those images were published in Jet magazine as well as other African American owned magazines and newspapers. The photographs were too graphic for television and the mainstream press did not print them. So few white Americans would see Emmett Till's gustily face until the 1980s when the documentary Eyes on the Prize opened with Emmett Till's story. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of African Americans had seen Emmett Till's face in these magazines which were passed around at churches, barbershops, beauty parlors, on street corners, and really anywhere that black people might gather. Many civil rights activists including Anne Moody, have talked about Emmett Till murder as a formative moment in their lives. Some scholars have described these activists as the Emmett Till generation. Anne Moody in her memo, coming of age in Mississippi, wrote "Before Emmett Till murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the devil. But now there was a new fear known to me. The fear of being killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears. I knew once I got food, the fear of starving to death with leaves. I was also told that if I were a good girl, I wouldn't have to fear the devil or hell, but what I didn't know was what one had to do or not do as a Negro, not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period, was enough, I thought". In the 1960's, more Americans owned televisions. By this time they watched these dramatic scenes of peaceful black protesters, dressed in their Sunday best, being brutalized by white mobs. This national news coverage, shocked the conscience of many white Americans. It inspired many people to get involved, to protest, to change their minds about civil rights, all in a very similar way as the coverage of George Floyd's murder did. Public grief becomes a particular labor, that enables black Americans humanity to be recognized. While most people are able to grieve privately, this is often not the case for black Americans. As we've seen recently, it's often the mothers of children who had been killed by the police, who have been thrust into a national spotlight, and have allowed their grief to be publicly consumed in order to bring more attention to this crisis. We've also seen mothers like Lucy McBath and Sybrina Fulton, who have gotten involved in politics after the murders of their sons. I want to go back now to children again, and talk about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham in 1963 that killed four young girls. Now across the street from the church in Birmingham, is Kelly Ingram Park, which is a public park that contains emotionally powerful sculptures that depict the civil rights struggle in Birmingham. The park served as an assembly spot for activities for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and other groups in the movement. The church was a target in 1963 because it had been a Center for civil rights activities, when civil rights activists were involved in a campaign to register African Americans to vote in Birmingham. I want to share these two pictures that I took when I was in Birmingham, because I was so moved by this sculpture, in honor of the four girls who were killed in the bombing. It's called the force spirits statue, and it was unveiled in 2013 on the 50th anniversary of the bombing. The four girls are depicted with life-sized figures, while six dubs fly above. The doves represent the four bombing victims, and two others who died on the same day in Birmingham. I love this particular detail of one girl tying a bow, on the back of another girl's dress. You can imagine them getting ready for church that morning excitedly, and I feel like this sculpture really captures their child like joy and innocence. Now if we move forward to the 1990's, we encounter another unforgettable image of Rodney King, which brings us to a different type of image, one that still is repeated over and over, which is that of black people in somewhat of a gladiatorial ring fighting for their lives. This is another image that we've become very accustomed to seeing, whether it be in the boxing ring, or in struggles with the police. We are used to watching black bodies get beaten, finding almost a kind of sport in that, believing myths of black outsized ability to bear pain and suppress grief. More recently, we can remember the graphic images of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old child being shot in two seconds, and how that image was played over and over on television. Tamir Rice reminds us of the research that has been done that tells us that black boys and white boys of the same age do not look the same to the police. That black boys are often aged or perceived as at least four years older than they actually are. Elizabeth Alexander has recently written an essay called The Trayvon Generation, and she talks about how this generation of children are seeing images on their phones with no filter or warning and outside of the presence of the adults who love them. She worries about what effect this will have on young people. What about the 14-year-old girl who videotaped George Floyd's murder? How will she be affected by bearing witness to his death? In many ways, her bravery in filming that monstrous scene has changed the world, but how does that scene affect her on a much more personal and intimate level? So in conclusion, I want to underscore that what we are seeing now is real change. It's an inflection point. These are not just repeats of past events but rather the consequences of the failures of the government and the economic establishment to resolve crises that have accumulated over time. After George Floyd's death and the agonizing protracted manner in which it occurred, we saw a much more multi-racial group of protesters than in previous years. Seventy-one percent of white Americans now say that racial discrimination is a big problem, they too rushed into the streets. The New York Times reported that the Black Lives Matter movement may be the largest movement in American history and protests, and expressions of solidarity are occurring all around the world. So this is an undeniably different moment. Officers in Atlanta, New York City, Buffalo in Philadelphia have been charged with assault for their actions against protesters. Calls to defund the police, stripping them of all but their core law enforcement functions and allocating resources to other community institutions are being taken seriously. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti has proposed cutting up to $150 million from the police budget. Recently, Democrats in the House of Representatives announced the justice in policing act, which would ban choke holds, mandate body cameras, establish a national registry of police conduct. The Louisville City Council passed Brianna's Law for Breonna Taylor, banning the no knock warrants that enabled the police to shoot her while she was sleeping in her bed. In Minnesota, Governor Tim Walz endorsed a package of comprehensive police reforms. Here's a very important point, things change. If there's one lesson that history teaches us, it's that history is always changing. Now of course, there is a kind of spiritual fatigue. As James Baldwin said in 1978, ''To look around the United States today, is enough to make prophets and angels weep.'' The same could be said of our moment, but this moment has also been deeply inspiring. When the state fails, when there is an utter lack of moral leadership. People of all backgrounds come together to fill that gap. Many scholars have referred to this period as the third reconstruction. The first being the period that immediately followed the civil war, the second being the Civil Rights Movement and this being the third. This reminds us that America is unfinished, it is an ongoing project. These are certainly the lessons that we have learned from civil rights leaders like CT Vivian and Congressman John Lewis. This reminds us of how hard and how long people have fought for freedom. The fate of our democracy is in our hands, we have to work at it, and luckily, we don't work alone. We need the moral courage of civil rights leaders like Reverend CT Vivian and Congressman John Lewis, to protect our democracy. This is what American citizenship requires. Our democracy is contradictory, and it is fragile. It must be cared for and fought for. Perhaps the gentle and determined care-taking of our democracy is our most important job. Thank you so much, and I would be more than happy to take questions. Thanks, Allyson. I'm going to jump right into questions from alumni. What actions do you recommend to counteract voter suppression? That's a really great question and such an important issue. I'm a big fan of Stacy Abrams and of her organization, Fair Fight Georgia. She has spoken extensively and has really tried to get people to think about the ways that voter suppression occurs. The ways that often someone may go to the same voting place for decades and then at the last minute, it might be changed and it might be someplace that's much farther than the place that they had been going to, but that voter suppression takes place in many forms. I think one way of counteracting it, is being very prepared and being very knowledgeable about voting deadlines, about making sure that you're registered to vote, about double-checking and triple checking to make sure that your registration is current, making sure that your address is current, making sure that your name is spelled correctly. We've seen all of these ways, that voting has been suppressed based on very minor things like someone's name that's on their driver's license doesn't match exactly with their name as it's written in the voting books, like for example, maybe my name is spelled with two Ls on my driver's license, but then it's only spelled with one L in the voting books, and that could be a reason for me not being able to vote. I think it's very important, that people really spend a lot of time preparing for the election, getting their ballots, researching the issues, and making sure that they know where to vote or they know when the deadlines are for the mail-in ballot, and that they submit the ballots earlier. They do everything in advance, so that we don't end up in a situation where polling places close early or people are standing on extremely long lines. Of course we recognize that just the very fact that people have to stand on line is an impediment to voting, particularly for people who may not have child care, who may not have flexible jobs where they can get away from their work to vote. I think it really requires a huge effort on the part of voters, which of course it's shouldn't. I mean it should be easy to vote. There should be a national holiday, I think on election day so that everyone can vote. But since we're not at that point, I think it is imperative that voters really do the research and make sure that they are prepared. I'm going to ask you this question and also encourage other lamps to answer in the chat too if you have suggestions. From Tim Miller, I was recently shocked when gathering with alumni friends last year, to hear two of them completely deny the existence of institutional racism. Do you have any advice on how to handle these situations? I think that those are very difficult conversations. I applaud the alumni who was in that conversation, because I think that it's a lot easier to walkaway or not want to engage in an uncomfortable conversation. Also it takes a lot of information to be able to explain institutional racism and to explain how it still exists. I think that the way we think about American history, is as a story of forward progress. That we went from one period to the next, and in each period things were getting better and better. That is true to a certain extent. I certainly would not want to suggest that we haven't made a ton of progress and that we aren't incredibly grateful for the unbelievable sacrifices that the generations before us have made. But I also think that it is really important for us to recognize just how flexible racism is, and how it is able to adapt and reshape itself and re-form itself to fit different situations. One thing is that I think that people are used to thinking about racism as German Shepherds attacking peaceful protestors like in the 1960s or thinking about the image, if we think about Congressman John Lewis, who I think is on many of our hearts and minds right now. Thinking about him getting beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge or thinking about laws, thinking about actual legal measures that were taken to prevent black people from voting. Or restrictions around employments that did not allow black people to have access to certain jobs. Or if we think about housing discrimination and the ways that they were restrictive covenants. I think that often when we think about systemic racism or institutionalized racism, we think about it in terms of the law. But what we really need to think about now is the way that even without those laws, there are multiple ways that racism continues to perpetuate itself. There are multiple ways that even without a restrictive covenant, it can be impossible for a black family to get a loan from a bank to move into a neighborhood that is perhaps all white. There are many ways that even though schools are no longer segregated by law, that a school that a black child goes to may be far more under resourced and may have far more students in the classroom than a school that a white child goes to. Again, going back to voting. We may not have poll taxes anymore, we may not have grandfather clauses, we may not have these laws on the books about voting, but that still doesn't mean that access to voting is open to all people equally. It's important that we think about, yes, there's been major progress. Yes, it is wonderful, it is great that the incredibly discriminatory laws have been challenged. But it's really important that we think about the ways that even without the laws, there are just endless possibilities for how discrimination and inequality can still occur. Another thing to just thinking about the moment that we're in right now is, if we think about the coronavirus. If we think about the ways that the racial disparities in our country have been really brought to light. I think the coronavirus for many people really revealed in a way that's unmistakable how different the lives that many black and brown people live are different from the lives that many white people live. We see that in terms of the racial disparities when it comes to the incidence of the virus, when it comes to the mortality rate. That has to do with factors like black and brown people being more likely to have jobs as essential workers, as being more likely to live in multigenerational homes, as being more likely to have to take public transportation. There are all of these ways that we see these inequalities. We see these ways that black and brown people can lack access, which are not necessarily written into a law, or they're not necessarily part of a law, but they're still part of a society that in many ways is still based on those discriminatory laws. A lot of questions have come in around protests. As a historian in particular, how do you think the current time and wide ranging protests are similar or different in the past? I'm going to ask a few questions and you can take what you like. Also, are peaceful protests more impactful than violent protests. What do you think needs to happen moving forward to make these protests influential for policy changes? Those are great questions, those are really great questions. I think one thing that's really happening right now is, I would say probably the most stunning or the most obvious difference now compared to the 1960s, a lot of people like to compare this moment to 1968. I would see the difference between now and 1968, but even now and 2013, 2014 when Black Lives Matter was first beginning, would be the multi-racial composition of the protesters. There was a really interesting article in The New York Times about Portland, and the article said that there are more Black Lives Matter signs in Portland than there are black people. The idea that this is a really new moment in terms of the composition of the protesters, and I think that's a really important point to pause on, because what that says in addition to the outrage, the shock of seeing George Floyd's death, the solidarity with Black Lives Matter, and in understanding that police violence is something that needs to be addressed. I think we're also seeing the ways that many white people, and particularly young white people are also experiencing a form of dispossession, a form of uncertainty, a form of disillusionment and frustration with our government, with a kind of uncertainty about their own futures. I think there's a way that given all of these crisis that we've experienced over the last many years, but certainly over the last 10 or 15 years when we think about schools shootings, when we think about the rise in rates of suicide, when we think about the opioid crisis, when we think about the fact that the life expectancy age has decreased, when we think about climate change issues. There's just been so many issues, so many things that are happening right now that are affecting black people, white people, Latinx people, Asian-Americans, indigenous people. There's so many issues right now, and there have been a lot of interesting reports about how between 15 and 26 million people have protested during the pandemic, and that the number of people who have protested since the women's marches is extraordinarily high. We're in this period of massive protests. Unprecedented numbers of Americans have protested, and I think that that definitely does speak to particular concerns, like police brutality, reproductive rights. I think it also speaks to a more general feeling of dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, and dissatisfaction that some white people are feeling about their own lives and their own futures. I think all of that is coming together to make these protests so sustained. The fact that these protests are lasting for months, and really if we think about it, we could almost think about this as a particular era from the women's marches, which at that time was perceived as being the largest protest movement in American history. Now to the Black Lives Matter protests, which are now believed to be the largest protests in American history. These last years have been extraordinary in terms of the number of people who have protested. I can't help but be deeply influenced and moved by Dr. Martin Luther King, by Congressman John Lewis, I definitely believe in non-violence. I think that there's nothing more powerful, there's nothing more moving, that nonviolence as a principle I think is just an extraordinary principle. I would certainly say that I think nonviolent protests are always going to be more successful. I think they're going to bring more people together. I also just think that there's something really important about the moral courage and moral leadership that it takes to protest non-violently. I think that's something that we desperately need in our country. I think that's why we are seeing so much involvement in the protests, because I think that comes back to this idea of America as being unfinished and America as being a country that has these incredible ideals and principles, and that there's a deep sense that many Americans feel that it's our job to force the country to live up to those ideals. In order for that to happen, a non-violent protest is the tool through which that happens. That's the tool, that's the message that needs to be sent in order to say America has disappointed us many times and we don't live up to our principals many times. But we still believe in them, we still think that they are possible and it's our job as citizens to realize them through non-violent protest. Did I answer all the questions? There was a question about policy, which is a fantastic question. I mean if we look back at history, this is a cycle in terms of there's protest and then in 1964, LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, in 1965, he signed the Voting Rights Act. Now, he did supposedly, and historians debate whether or not he actually said this or not. But that after he signed the Voting Rights Act, he turned to give his pen back to an aid that was standing next to him and he said, we've just lost the South for our generation, and he was right. It's actually been much longer than a generation that the Democratic Party has lost the South. But I think that in most cases, once there has been such an outpouring of protest, policy does change. I think that one thing that's really exciting about this moment is the creativity of this moment that people are having conversations, they're debating things that I don't think we would've really debated like 10 years ago. I don't know if would we have had a conversation about defunding the police, or would we have had a conversation about alternative forms of policing. Yes. Those conversations are always happening, but I don't know if they would be happening on the national level, the way that they're happening. I don't know if we would be thinking about, let's think about how we handle mental health and how we can help our police officers to be better able to handle situations that are more about a mental health issue. I just think that one thing that's exciting and inspiring about this moment is the way that there's a real creativity and a real dynamism around the conversations that we're having. I feel hopeful that those will lead to policy changes, as they did in the late 60's. Great. Then just for the last question. I just wonder how you've seen the Stanford community rally around Black Lives Matter, if you have, because we're all sheltering in place. Then also, for those Alumni group as Alumni, how can we ensure that we're holding Stanford accountable and pushing the need forward? There's a clear need for more diversity and professorships and greater support for students of color. That's a fantastic question. Can I just say one thing, I'm just looking at the chat and I love, it looks like S. Gorovoy wrote that the LBJ statement that I cited with correct, but it was made to one of his staff members. The next day and that staffer was journalists Bill Moyers. That's so great. I just had a conversation with a political scientist who said that story may not actually be true, but I like the idea that it is true and I love that it's Bill Moyers that he said that to. I'm just going to run with that and not ever question or doubt that story isn't true. I really appreciate this question because I think that this is something that we are all thinking about. What do we do in our own lives? How do we make change? I think that the best way for us to make change is to look at ourselves and to look at our own lives, to be introspective, to be reflective, to think about. Our friendships, our relationships, the conversations we have at the dinner table, the conversations we have at Thanksgiving, the schools that our children go to, the places where we work. Whether those places have policies and practices that are racially equitable, and I think that Stanford has work to do, to be honest. Obviously, I have deep love for Stanford, and I think that Stanford definitely wants to support students. I do think that it would be fantastic for African and African-American studies to become a department. It's been a program for 50 years. There are probably alums who are on this call who will remember the very famous Take Back the Mic moment and Assembly in 1968, which we just recently commemorated two years ago, the 50th anniversary, and we are pushing very hard, and it's a student-led movement which is fantastic. We're pushing very hard to make African and African-American studies a department. It's something that all of our peer institutions have, and I think Stanford, of course, wants to be a national leader, and we are a national leader in many ways, and we should be a national leader when it comes to issues around race and racial justice and social justice, and one way that we can do that is by at least joining our peers and making African and African-American studies a department. We have 47 majors, so there's a lot of interest in African-American studies. We have no dedicated faculty. We are drawing on faculty who teach in other departments who are often very overcommitted or have many responsibilities, and our students deserve better, and I think that one thing that I'm always struck by is that, I often get students who are seniors, who are engineers and computer scientists, who take a class on African-American life, African-American history, and they say to me, "I wish I had had this class when I was a freshman because maybe I would have wanted to study African-American studies," or they say, "This would have given me a better opportunity to really engage with the humanities at Stanford." I think that there's also a way that improving, and strengthening, and better resourcing African-American studies at Stanford also boosts our humanities. So again, going back to the point about us being on the same level as our peer institutions, that's another way that we can work towards that, and it also is a way that then allows and benefits all of our students. It's not just black students who are interested and who take classes in African-American studies. It's students of all backgrounds as it should be, and I think that Stanford has a responsibility as a university to provide those classes and to make sure that there's more than two percent. Right now, the black faculty at Stanford is two percent. So it's urgent that we change that, it's urgent that we create more opportunities for students of all backgrounds to take classes in African-American studies so that they can better understand the world that they live in. I mean, that's what students really want, they want to understand the world that they live in, they want to have a deeper knowledge of it, they want to be able to go out into the world and make a contribution, and in order to do that, they need that training, they need that education, that history, and so I think it's imperative. I think it's been urgent for over 50 years, and it's never been more urgent than now. Thanks so much for sharing your expertise on this important topic. Thank you so much for inviting me, and thank you so much for the fantastic comments and questions, this was a real pleasure.
