Look at we look at our schools and education, at our communities, at the environment. So talk will focus on that. I will ask a series of questions and then each speaker will, after answering the questions, youll have an opportunity to ask questions of them. But first, let me begin by introducing our speakers. Begin with. Emily rapp of propofol, whos here on my left, Emily Raboteau writes at the intersection of social and Environmental Justice, race, Climate Change and parenthood. Her most recent work is lessons for survival. Mother ring against the apocalypse, a memoir on race, climate and Environmental Justice. Her previous books are searching for zion, the winner of an american book award and a finalist for the Hurston Wright legacy award and the cult classic novel, the professors daughter. She is a contributing editor at orion magazine and a regular contributor to the new york review of books, where apatows essays have appeared and been anthologized in the new yorker, the New York Times, new york magazine, the nation best American Science writing. Thats American Travel writing and elsewhere. Her distinctions include an inaugural climate narrative prize from arizona. Arizona state university. The Deadline Club award and feature reporting from the society of professional journalist journalists, new york chapter. And grants and fellowships from the new york foundations for the arts. The Bronx Council on the arts. The Robert B Silvers foundation and the lane art foundation. And yaddo. She is a full professor at the city college. Sister college of new york and cuny, and she lives in the bronx with her husband, the novelist victor laval, and her two children. Welcome, Emily Raboteau. Thank you, dr. Greene. Thank you. We next have Christine Anna greer. Im sure that you have seen her in on our news. Thats were news networks. Christina greer. She is an associate professor of Political Science at Fordham University lincoln center. Her research and teaching focus on american politics. Black ethnic politics, urban politics, and quantitative methods, as well as new york city and congress. Im sorry. As well as new york city politics. Professor greers book, black ethnic ethnics race, immigration and the pursuit of the american dream, investigates the increasingly ethnically diverse populations in the United States from africa and the caribbean. She finds that both ethnicity and a shared racial identity matter and also affect the policy choices and preferences for black groups. Professor greer is currently working on a manuscript researching the history of all africanamericans who have run for executive office in the United States. Her interests also include mayors and Public Policies in urban centers. And her previous work has compared criminal activity and political response in boston and both baltimore. She is the host and producer of the aftermath, where Christina Greer here and she she is received her b. A. From tufts and her m. A. And ph. D. In Political Science from columbia university. Welcome, Christina Greer. And dr. Bettina love. Dr. Bettina love is the william f russell. Professor at teachers college, columbia university, ph. D. , and the author of the New York Times bestseller punished for dreaming how School Reform harms black children and how we heal. And 2022, the Kennedy Center name dr. Love, one of the next 50 leaders in making the world more inspired and inclusive and compassionate. A cofounder of the Abolitionist Teaching NetworkWhose Mission is to develop and support teachers and parents fighting injustice within their schools and communities. She has overseen over 250,000 and grants to abolitionists around the country. She is also the Founding Member of the task force that launched the probe. , in her hands, one of the largest guaranteed income pilot programs in the United States, which has distributed ready more than 15 million to black women living in georgia. Dr. Love is a sought after public speaker on a range of topics, including abolitionist teaching, antiracism, hip hop, education, black girlhood, queer youth, educational reparations and art based education and to youth, civic engagement. She is also the author of the seller. We want to do more than survive. Dr. Love has provided comments for various news outlets, including npr, pbs. Washington. The washington post. The daily beast, the guardian, and the atlantic journal. Reconstitute. L. A. Journalconstitution. Welcome, dr. Love. Okay. Are these some powerful women . Yes. And leaders. Okay. So lets begin. Now, id like to begin by we always say the personal is political. So if you can just spend a few moments reflecting on how your personal background and experiences engaged you in the work you do around racial and social justice. And lets begin with you and emily. Thank you. Its an honor to be here on the stage with all of you. Im. I guess i would begin to speak as a mother. Im the mother of two black sons, their age 11. And 12 years old. I had back to back babies. And this has been a a very, uh, trying decade in which to raise children. I have a new book out. Its called lessons for survival mothering against the apostle. Its, as you mentioned and. I want to say, you know, because this panel is also focusing on technology, social media and the fight for for racial and social justice. When my boys were two and four years old, im. Trayvon martins killer was acquitted and there was an explosive moment of anger that felt cyclical. I was reminded of. The l. A. Uprisings that happened when i was in high school. The sort of cyclical anger. My own grandfather was lynched in 1943 when my father was in utero. This happened in bay saint louis, mississippi. So that kind of anger that came up again, that felt both historical and personal was so overwhelming. I remember talking to my husband about how we would and when we would talk to our boys about how to protect them from the police, when to give them the talk they were still so little and around this time, the writer jesmyn ward was so angry herself that she decided to collect a number of writers, essayists in particular in a volume in an anthology. She wanted it to feel like thinkers that she admired, sitting around a dinner table. She wanted to gather people who could help her be in community, be in this moment of anger. And so she extended a few of us an invitation to write for an anthology some of you may be familiar with called the fire. The fire this time. An extension of james baldwins seminal essay collection from 1963, the fire. Next time i. I was so thankful to receive that invitation. I felt honored. And i also felt like i dont know how i dont know what to say. I dont know what to write. And in the midst of that feeling of writers block, walking my boys to their daycare in Washington Heights, i encountered a mural around 175th street. Its no longer there, but it was part of a series of murals called the know your rights murals. And i had never noticed it before, but it was as if it were had been gifted to me in a moment where i didnt know. I didnt know what to say or do. And it was a beautiful mural. It was it was painted in in all shades of blue. And it had bits of the fourth amendment, and it was painted for the people of our neighborhood where there is inordinate Police Brutality to kind of educate us about how to protect ourselves from from police. And as it turned out, it was one of a series of murals across neighborhoods in new york, most plagued by Police Brutality. And so i decided im going to photograph all of them because i know this is street art. Its going to get painted over. It wont it wont always be here. Im going to document it. Im going to witness it. Im going to use that art to work through my feelings. And so i wrote this photo essay that became a pattern of. Kind of walking and thinking through social justice and eventually Environmental Justice issues in the city affecting my kids. So writing from a very personal place of motherhood about issues that are so large, its almost hard to address without doing so intimately. And in terms of community. Thats kind of how i started writing about justice issues as a as a as a concerned mom who wants her sons to thrive in the world. Thank you, professor. Professor crear. Thank you for having us. Am i on . Okay. I always tell people im pretty basic. I like to things. Cities and black people and. And those are the two things i really care about. Ive lived in cities almost my entire life, except for three years of high school during my fathers. I call them the Norman Rockwell years when we were in northern illinois, near the border, wisconsin in illinois, the great time for me is difficult. It is it may have been because i make this argument as a political scientist that all states are red states. Its just whether or not you live in the blue city, in your red state. And that was three years of very formative years, living in the red part of the state. And i think im a better political scientist because of that. I started grad school at columbia. September 10th, 2001. I was in class of timber 11th, had class september 12th, and we never talked about 911. Hmm. One class we talked about for a few minutes. Never. So that was the first time i realized that Political Science and politics arent the same thing. And im interested in politics. But i was in grad school to get a Political Science degree, so id have to have a tight wire for both of those in that first week of grad school, i met with the dga, which is the director of graduate studies, and i told him i had done this amazing work in boston, baltimore, baltimores my favorite u. S. City. All my students have to have two favorite cities one u. S. , one international. Baltimore is my favorite u. S. City. We can get into another panel. And he says cities are dead. We dont do cities here. So i said, well, first of all, you just said 911. Second of all, how can cities be dead if millions of black people live in cities and there are only two things that you need to know about me. I love cities and i love black people. So maybe it wasnt the best fit, but we we endure. So i realized my professional work would this institution would not be able to focus on cities. I have to go through a back door and that back doors brazen an obviously i wanted to use cities to talk about race in a in sort of a trojan horse. I was a classics minor in college so i want to do like a trojan horse type dissertation. So instead i just did a dissertation head on, which was my entire life. People had always said, oh, youre so smart. Which one of your parents is caribbean . You know, oh, your sisters at harvard. So youre caribbean. That was it. No. And so was like, maybe just black. And so, you know, its like, oh, you know, youre so well traveled. Youre so wellspoken, right . Youre so articulate. Where are you from . From. And so it led me on this path to talk about Coalition Building amongst black americans, caribbeans and africans in the United States and not in a capacity of whos better, whos smarter, but in how do we focus on White Supremacy and Work Together to move policy forward. So thats that was the book. But i still care about cities and i live in one of the most dynamic cities in the world. Even if it isnt my favorite city. So which has led me to the work where i talk about new york city because in so many ways, new york city is the canary in the mine for what happens to other cities in the country. In so many ways, black women are the canaries in the mine too. What happens to the rest of this country . And if i care about black people, i have to know whats going on in cities. And so this is where my personal and professional intersect. But cities arent just people and buildings and transportation, which is my favorite thing. They talk about. Its also a lot of nature which weve talked about. And so how do we incorporate our landscape and work with our parks and our waterways and our birds . And so really think about a city and a holistic way is kind of the direction that im going in and writing about these days. Its interesting how these are all related. Yes, professor love or dr. Love, not degree. Whats up . Everybody is really wonderful to be here. I guess my story starts having this city. I apologize, but im an upstate new yorker and youre right there you go. Right. So im saying thats why we got a lot. Thats how we got you know, we walk around with a chip on our shoulder upstate new york, because you dont know where were from. Right. When you say upstate, the furthest you can go is like westchester west. And then if you push albany. So im from rochester, new york, born and raised. Its thank you. And so i tell people all the time, canada. Just to be clear, so they know we coming from and the two stories i will tell that really got me into thinking about education in educational policy is i think it started when i was 17 years old. So i went to a Large High School in upstate new york. I went to Vocational High School so big we had a plane inside our high school, electricians, cosmetology, masonry, you name it. We had all you know, we were coming out with jobs and its about 2000 kids at my high school, my freshman class was about 800 kids. Wow. And we graduated 80 oh oh. So i means we had a Graduation Rate of almost like 10 . And i remember being 17 years old, walking across that stage and asking myself, where is everybody . I remember us i remember us at 14. I remember us being loud and young and rambunctious and thinking. We knew every thing and we were kids and we were doing what kids running around getting trouble, skipping class. What youre supposed to do, you 40. And ive been always been curious about what happened to my generation, what happened to those 700 kids that were my friends. I go off on a basketball scholarship to one of the top schools in the country to play basketball. Let me be very clear. I love to write books, but i can play. I can i can do that. Thank god. Basketball. Okay, thats my love. You put that book to the side. But right now, right now, like its march right now and womens basketball, the best womens basketball, the best ticket in town, baby. And so i go and im at the Number Two School in the country. You cant tell me nothing. The wnba is just happening. So im thinking to myself, wnba is cute. Im probably going to the nba. Like thats how cocky i was at this. And by my sophomore four year i realized im not going to play. I put on a pound weight. Im staying on the ground every day. Every time they said a pick, im falling down. I said, i conflict. So had this epiphany and i realized that all my classes that i was with all the male athletes and i had never i had never understood that. I just thought thats what it was. And so i went back and i asked my other teammates, what classes are you in . Oh, journalism, premed, chemistry. I cant like well, they got all these other classes. You ask, what was i taking . Okay, i was taking first day in college. I was taking indoor recreation and then i took outdoor recreation. Like, what are we doing here . How many ways can you put on a bandaid . I was just confused. First Generation College student parents, you know, didnt go to college. So im trying to figure things out. So i go to my Athletic Director whos in charge of academics and i tell him, you know, i want to do something else. I dont think i want to take these classes. I would like to take the class that the other girls are taking on the basketball team. And he simply turns to me and said, you are from the inner city. You went to an Inner City School and you are here to play basketball. Oh, i said, well, make it play. I say, what you just at that from what i knew walking across that stage to where i was now, two years later in college, i kept saying to myself, i did everything you all asked me to do. How am i in this situation . How am i being pigeonholed that i cannot even major in what i wanted to major in . And you told me i was going to college for free. You told me that i had made it that this was the dream. And so it really put me on a path of trying to understand education and education policies and reform when it comes to black and brown children, it really put me on a path of trying to understand what happened to eighties and nineties babies, right . We are the generation, what you would call the postcivil rights generation. We are the hip hop generation. And we were a generation of young folks that were labeled thugs, super predators and crack babies. And so my work really looks at the last 40 years of education reform and how these labels of class morality and criminality not only was in our streets, but also became parts of our schools. And so my book, punisher a dream in, i think is a book ive been trying to write since i was 17 years old, really trying to understand how educational policy is the root cause of many of educational outcomes that we see for black and brown children today. Thank you, professor. Thank you. So, so just continuing with that thread youve identified what you see as the most pressing issue for you to write about. Why dont we continue with you, professor rap for what is the most pressing issue when you look at whats happening around social