Troy Harden: Race, violence, public policy and social trauma

>> Yazier Henry: Good afternoon. And welcome to the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy here at the University of Michigan. Before I introduce our guest and speaker for today, I just want to say a quick thanks to the Communications Department, Cliff Martin who just recently brought a new life into the world, which to some extent is the reason why we have talks like this to celebrate and understand what happens to life in this world when they come and when they go. So, a shout out to Cliff Martin who is not here, without whom this talk wouldn't be what it will be today. I want to thank Laura Lee, Erin Flores, Nick Pfost, Thomas Cook, Chris Myers, all from different parts of the Ford School, and then Carl Cole [assumed spelling] will be walking around taking photographs for part of it or sitting down taking photographs. Part of it, who had recently made at the secretary of state taking photographs. He followed me and I was like, "Why are you following me here?" He said, "Now that Ford School has got him covered in faculty at the secretary of state." Now, that was supposed to be a joke. I agree with you. It wasn't funny. Those of you who know me, it's not my strongest suit, is to be funny. I'm normally pretty serious that's why my students, some of them at least call me Yazierious. So, doctor-- Professor Harden, I have known for over a decade and met in South Africa on a wilderness program with young and older men, talking about and engaging some of the more difficult issues that face our society, both-- especially at the edges of our society. And this was shortly after we parted, our government in South Africa had been removed, and Dr. Harden at that time and several others from different parts of the United States were visiting South Africa in order to see what type of lessons, what type of support, networks we could establish in terms of understanding some of the very difficult intellectual issues that face us as intellectuals. So it's been a conversation for over a decade, it's the first time that I've managed to bring you to the University of Michigan, so thank you for accepting. Dr. Harden-- Professor, my bad. Harden, I met you before you became [inaudible]. Has 25 years of experience in serving-- serving and consulting in social services and in community settings. Dr. Harden currently serves as the director for North Eastern Illinois University's Master of Social Work Program. He specializes in trauma-- trauma work, both traditional and non-traditional interventions within community settings. He's worked as a clinician, administrator, and educator, and intellectual, and advocate-- and activist. I nearly thought I had invent a new word, an advoquist [phonetic], but I don't think that exists yet, community practitioner in the USA and many parts of the world. He has served as a consultant with a range of institutions, the City of Chicago, Chicago Public Schools, the Illinois Department of Human Services, and the Illinois African-American Coalition for Prevention. His research and work currently, as a principal-- co-principal investigator with DePaul's University's Multifaith Veterans Support Project, an initiative in the state of Illinois to build capacity in support of veteran communities and their families. Now, before I welcome Dr. Harden to the table, I want to say two more things. The first thing is another thanks to Dean Collins who has worked hard to make spaces available for us here at the Ford School to speak about some of the difficult issues that will subject of the talk today. I also want to add that-- -- engaging with these issues at institutions of higher learning, whether it'd be in the United States or elsewhere is an important task in my opinion, not only for those of us who identify and recognize ourselves as intellectuals but also those of us who identify and recognize ourselves as willing and prepared to lead in the process of holding such hard conversations and dialogs in society. And I want to thank you for coming and I want to acknowledge many of the-- of you in the room whom I know in multiple capacities at the Ford School as being prepared to take up and to put in the time and effort that it requires when we have this type of privilege to sit in a classroom or in an auditorium to engage with these issues. So, I want to thank you for taking the time out of your very heavy schedules and your busy days at the end of the semester to engage with what Professor Harden has to say. And I'm going to call him Troy now because that's how I got to know him pre-- some of these institutional badges that had set me sometimes, where as a human being and as a person who comes from Chicago and who cares about some of these issues, that will be the intellectual subject matter of his talk beyond its intellectual paradigm, to include also his life and his cares and concerns which he has carried with him for-- and this is based on many of our conversations, for most probably most of his life. So, thank you very much for accepting our invitation. I would like to welcome you to the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy. I think it's the first time I've said it so many times in one hour, but that is my responsibility, so I will say it. Please, without anymore of my words, please join us and be welcomed by some amazing minds and hearts that I-- that exist in this particular building.

[ Applause ]

>> Troy Harden: I'm tired of checking, let me know the time--

>> Yazier Henry: OK.

>> Troy Harden: Good afternoon.

>> [Simultaneously] Good afternoon.

>> Troy Harden: Or early evening. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. First, I just want to say thank you to Professor Henry who I now know as Yazierous, right, which you all gave. Just for really opening up the space and inviting me here, it's really a treat. As Professor Henry mentioned, I had the opportunity to meet him in South Africa, engaging in some difficult dialog, if you will. And I was struck by his seriousness and his intensity and his intellectual mind but more importantly by his heart and by his passion and his compassion, and I view him as a mentor, a peer, a friend, and an ongoing struggle and as a comrade, an ongoing struggle to combine the two, you know, that of some mind and analysis alone with a caring heart, so as these things that are happening out here in our community, so thank you for the invitation. And also to the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, it's truly an honor and a privilege to be here as well, just thinking it could be a the Woodrow Wilson School talking about these issues, right, and to be in a completely different conversation, correct, you know? So I'm really glad to be here today and engaging in this-- at this distinguished institution. So whenever I start any conversation, I always first like to just thanks to those who come before me, my ancestors, my mother, Bertha Harden, father, Brady Harden who instilled in me the desire and curiosity and thirst for knowledge but then also the idea of being akin with a common, such, understanding what it meant to be able to have some form of analysis but also connect with what's happening on the ground, as well as those who come before me who you don't see behind me, a community and wealth of people who support me. And as Yazier shared, I really try to engage in these ideas in part because a very personal for me as an educator and also as administrator in higher education. I believe that in education, we create transformational spaces. And much like what I try to do in the trauma working community, here, these things can happen in a very profound ways, but I'm also really privileged to have an eight-year-old and a four-year-old, I got an eight-year-old daughter and a four-year-old son, and they help me and constantly remind me of how to keep that transformational space going on at home. And so, just Saturday, I had a conversation with my daughter and-- well, we were actually at a family function and we were getting ready to leave and one of the family members asked, "What do you guys getting ready to do?" And I say, "We're getting ready to go see a movie." And so, they turned the attention to my children and asked, "Well, what movie are you guys going to see?" And they said, "We're going to see Zootopia," right? And I don't know if anybody has heard about the movie "Zootopia", it's a really, you know, cool movie that's out theaters and we hadn't seen it yet. And so, one of the family members asked my daughter, "What's the movie about?" And my daughter responded-- well, Claire [assumed spelling] said that one of the characters is racist, right? And I'm like, "Whoa," right, because we hadn't talked about the movie and of course, Claire said-- what Claire said, right, you know, is been an ongoing thing in the household, right? And I'm sure Claire household is what's nice, that is my daughter. So, I was interested to see everybody's reaction because we were all shocked, I hadn't heard my daughter use the term before and so I was curious of what she's going say, so of course they asked her, you know, "What is-- what does that mean? What does racism mean? What does racist mean?" And she paused and stopped and-- I'm on pins and needles like what's-- what she has to say out her mouth and she says, "Uhm, well, I'm not really sure, but I heard somebody say that Donald Trump was racist," and so I'm thinking it's not such a good thing, right, you know? So, I was like, well, she didn't hear that from me, but ultimately I thought that was interesting in posing [inaudible]. But what-- bringing that up and bringing all that conversation is to say that whenever we talk about race, whenever we have this discourse in dialogue, depending on who's in the room and how things are happening, how the conversation is happening, it can go a lot of different ways. And so, the invitation here, is that as we begin to have-- and have this discussion and talk about this and have this conversation, is that we look at it as challenge but also an opening to conversation and an ongoing conversation that we have to have in this country, in particular, we bring in the spectrum of violence it becomes very critical as well. So, I want to start here with this young man. His name is Demarius Reed, I received a phone call in 2013. It was actually approximately a month before my last time that I was up in this area. And the phone call was from one of my former students who asked me, had I heard the news, and should know Demarius as the son of one of my former students also, a colleague and someone who is a very dear friend Carl Reed. And they said that Demarius had been killed. Demarius-- so as some of you may remember, was an Eastern Michigan University student football player and was killed in a robbery attempt at his apartment and in Ypsilanti, right outside the university. And naturally, needless to say, we were all heartbroken. And, of course, my attention at that moment, turned to Carl and his wife and figuring out ways that we could support them. About a month later, I ran into a colleague from Eastern Michigan University in Department of Social Work who invited us up to engage the University in a larger conversation around trauma and community violence, and we came up. And so, as I was saying, that was the last time I was here. And so, one of the things that was on our minds while we were here was what was the response to Demarius's death, right? It was getting a lot of national attention, it hit ESPN because Demarius was athlete, but it was also really big news in Chicago. And I know it was part of the new cycle up in this area as well. Well, at that time they hadn't found Demarius's killers, and maybe about two months later, they finally caught up with him and arrested him and began the process of having a trial. But I really want it to bring up a statement that I heard one of the detective say at the trial. And that was that, he didn't believed they would have done the due diligence in the work to capture the killers. As a matter of fact, he stated it. He said, "We didn't put much of an effort in it until we found out how big a celebrity he was," right? Until the media attention was gone and on, on this particular case. And so, of course, that was heartbreaking but the other part of it is, and this is where I go to in this issue is, it's really thinking about the value of black life, right? And without the specter of the camera, without the media gaze, Demarius's killers wouldn't have been found. As a matter fact, they would argue that even the attention, the new cycle about his death, would have been marginalized and probably put to the wayside. And even as we engage in this critical conversation around race and violence at this time in our country, in particularly, trauma, I also think about Laquan McDonald and the Michael Browns and regardless of the world and even if somebody arises, that again without the specter of media attention, these lives might have gone on without people paying a lot of attention to it and without a due diligence and a conversations around the value of black life. So, it's here that I want to problematize [phonetic] and look at this issue in a very clear and clear ad nuance way to bring up that it's not an either or in our community, whereas that we focus on one hand on the police brutality or we focus on the homicides and even though in a personal violence that we see it's at both end. And so that's the specter of the conversation that I want to have here today, is in that both end and then how do we-- within this moment in this place in time, begin the process of thinking about how we address those issues, particularly in the policy and even in the human rights framework. So, as interventionist at heart, our design-- our research design, plan, evaluate different types of programs that consult, let's just say with different people, both in public and private world around a lot of these different programs that we see out here. I think it's critical that we bring this rights lay and sit in that conversation and talk about this. So, I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about some of the work that we've done in Chicago to give you a little context and background. I'd like to do that. And then, you know, bring in some of these other part of this conversation, when we talk about this idea of social trauma and then talk about some of our work that we're doing, if that's OK. So, this is an intervention that we designed a few years ago, it's called Full Circle, and Full Circle was designed for young men, primarily young men on the West Side of Chicago. If you know anything about Chicago, the African-American community is largely situated on the south and the West Side of the city. People are dispersed to different parts of the city but the largest group, the largest population of African-American exists in these rims. Anybody in-- from Chicago in the house? Got a few Chicago folks. Excellent, excellent, excellent. Thank you for my home team being here, right? So, on the West Side there is this street organization called the Vice Lords, many of the young men who were a part of our particular group were a part of that street organization, not all of them but many of them were. And so, our job was simply to construct a anti-violence effort in that community by engaging with these young people. So we did a host of different interventions and supporting these young men around, you know, moving through some of the tougher issues in their life to a different place. And you can see me somewhere in that picture trying to be hard, right? But that's what we did. And the billboard, so we did a lot of things, we did a lot of group work and what we call cognitive behavior interventions with them. But that picture is a social marketing platform, so they design-- one of the things they were very concerned about was imaging and the different images that was presented about them in their community that they weren't all gang banging thugs as some people try to portray. And so, they wanted to rebrand themselves in a sense. And so, they created it and designed this billboard, set up the plan for it. And if you were near Chicago in Pulaski which is a street on the West Side, a corner on the West Side, you would have seen this billboard up there as well as they engage in, you know, other things like participatory action research. So, over 18-month time period, as many of the young people were involved in the criminal justice system, we only had one person who actually reoffended, got arrested again doing that process. And we found it to be a successful program. I bring up that one person because even-- his story, I think, is very valuable. He was a young man who was very bright. We developed a participatory action research project, I'm sure some of you know what that is, where we taught those young people research methods and engage them in constructing the research question and the research study of their design. They were curious. They were actually curious and wanted to know how, you know, which side of the town might be more violent, right? That was the South Side more violent than the West Side? And so they did focus groups and conducted surveys around that and analyze the data and even presented it at some point. But one of the interesting thing happen. At some point, this young man, this particular young man, he actually got arrested and was sentenced to do a period of time in detention. And before he went in, he was engaged in the research aspect of thing, so we gave him a small stipend as a part of the research team, right? And so, they were supposed to receive a check as being a part of that team. Something happened in the bureaucratic structure of giving stipends to university and there was a delay on them receiving their payments. As a matter of fact, it was a three day delay, but the day they're supposed to pick up the checks, it coincided almost with the time that he was supposed to go in. He was supposed to go in and report for detention about two days after the checks were received. And so then when they came to pick up the checks, he was notified that he wouldn't receive the check and he broke into tears. And so-- and we were left with, you know, having to explain for this young man, you know, what happened and so we were like, "Well, is there anything we can do to help?" And he said, "No, you don't understand." He said, "I know I'm going to detention but what this program has done is it taught me accountability, it taught me responsibility. And I believe it's important, you know, for me to earn my-- keep in my households, so I was going to take this check and I was going to pay a light bill at my household because they need the money. And that was the one thing that I could contribute, but now I can't do that. And so, I'm just you know, fluid by it," right? Needless to say, you know, we were all heartbroken by that incident and issue, so we did what we need to do. But I really want to point out just, you know, as we have this narrative often of young people in community, you know, who are heartless and cold and they don't want to take care of responsibility to do all these things, here is an example that even the one young man who we did-- who reoffended, he still was actively engaged in really trying to do something better for himself. And I could tell you a story after story about young people like that we disregard, that we write-off and they end up doing-- or they are a transformation of young people who do and can do great things. My better half tells another story. My wife is a researcher and professor at Loyola University in Chicago, and she was conducting a focus group with a group of young men who were in the 8th grade of a school and it was about some of the same context of violence. When she went to conduct the focus group at the school, the teachers were sharing with her, "OK, this, you take this young man, this young man, that young man, but you want to be careful about that particularly young guy. As a matter of fact, we need to go in the room with you with this young man." My wife is like, "No, I got," and they were like, "You sure? We need somebody to protect you," that kind of thing. She said, "No, I can handle it," and so she went on to go in the room with this young man who was supposedly a young man who's caused a lot of problems, causing all the issues in the school. As she went through the focus group, one of the things she asked about is, how they were dealing with stress, how they were coping with some of the stressful issues that they were dealing within their community, particularly around the violence. And she mentioned about physiological symptom sometimes of how we deal with stress. And the young man, in question talked about, "You mean like, how I've been biting my nails," right? And he went on to give this wonderful analysis about how he deals with stress, right, and how he deals with violence and his ability to cope, you know, around some of these things happening. Now, this was a young man that they didn't want my wife to talk to, right, because they was afraid that his behavior would be so challenging, but partly because who she is but ultimately because she gave him a chance to be able to be intelligent-- the intelligent self that he was. She was-- she was able to demonstrate-- he was able to demonstrate who he was as a leader within that group. So I'm pointing all these out to say that, again we turn our backs often to young people but they amaze us if we give them the opportunity and the space to do that work. I might be preaching to the choir in some ways in this, but I-- but because of what I see consistently in the city, I know that this kind of attention is rare and how we do it. So another intervention we did is Project MENTOR. Project MENTOR was a health-mentoring program, I'm not going to spend a lot of time here, but this intervention we set up academic enhancement, one on one mentoring. I did it partnership with Dr. David Dubois who's done a lot of the work, evaluating and doing research on the Better Boys Foundation-- Better Boys and Better Girls Foundation and their mentoring program. And so, we used a lot of what we consider to be evidence-based strategies and practices and designed intervention. It worked fabulous, particularly with those higher risk group. So why am I talking about these interventions, is I'm not trying to sell you on my programs per se, because the reality is, is that there are many evidence-based interventions that exist out here. There are many different programs that are doing fabulous work and there's a lot of design that can make a difference, but then why do we still have this, right? Why do we still have the mass shootings that take place? This is a map that was from 2013 over a six-month time span in Chicago in terms of the number of shootings. And it's been consistent, probably for the last, maybe five years, maybe with the exception to this year. And as you can see, much of the violence is concentrated towards the South Side and the West Side. Chicago really doesn't have an East Side, for those who don't know much about it. The East Side is probably the Southeast Side, but as you can look and see in this particular map, it's all over, right? So it's not just concentrating on the south. Maybe one little section right of white up there in the map and that's probably Lincoln Park, which is arguably the wealthiest neighborhood in Chicago but every place else. You have that. So as we designed our intervention and as we looked at Project MENTOR, we start thinking about other types of interventions that we are supporting and consulting with, but these-- these other thing going on too, right? You had the shootings and the young people in Project MENTOR, the young people in Full Circle constantly talked about the stress that they were dealing with associated with the shootings. We also had some other stuff going on. In 2012, we had a mass amount of school closing, some of you may know about this by now, right, that over 50 schools were closed in one swoop in Chicago. It was unprecedented activity designed to save money, save funds within schools, right? Now we could-- we can make a case that it did some savings for a while, but we also saw over the last few years that there's been a lot of problems with the follow-up to that, particularly with administrators who have been stealing money. Our superintendent just got indicted, I think, just last year, right? And so, we've got a lot of problems. And so, even these mixed messages that go out and the impact on the lives of people around the school closing, and as you can see there in the similar neighborhoods. But we also have here, too, some issues associated with housing, right? And some of the larger areas where we have the most foreclosures, they're also some of the areas where we have the shootings, right? So-- and which a lot of us know. You know, we see some of the similar indicators, you know, in some of the same spaces. But I argue here that when we often deal with trauma, particularly in my discipline in social work or in the clinical world and mental health, we often regulate it to interpersonal aspect, and we don't look at these larger issues and how they move across a span, how our people who we work with are impacted, you know, by these particular issues. This is actually from this year. So from January 1st, and this is actually-- I think, I downloaded it yesterday. So as of April 5th, we had 814 shootings which is well ahead of the rate of last year and even the one from 2013. So over a three-month time period, about once every two and a half hours, someone gets shot in Chicago and that's the specter, you know, of the violence. And as you can see, whereas that, maybe in other maps, it did-- it wasn't spread as much, it's all over the city. And so whether you are downtown, you hear about somebody getting shot. In Hyde Park where the University of Chicago is, a few blocks from President Obama's home, folks get shot, right? And so this is the specter. So within this, in terms of my work, I've decidedly turn more around the trauma focus but then also really thinking about capacity. I just want to show you one more intervention that we designed, but let me just touch on this first. So this is just another layer, you know, of thinking about some of these issues we deal with. This was-- comes from a report done by the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Great Cities Institute thinking about and looking at jobs and joblessness in the city. And so, the-- as you can see in the red, those are the places where young people, the most young people are out of work currently between age of 20 and 24. Right now, black youth, there's a 39.5% clip black youth in Cook County that are currently unemployed compared to 7.9% of white youth, right, at 14.7% of Latino youth. And so here, again, we have a specter of issues happening, from housing, to schooling, to work, right? And we're not even talking about other health crisis in context that lay out this specter of violence. And so, we are at the place where we can't just have a one-stop approach to it, that we have to be multifaceted in terms of how we deal with it. Currently, Commissioner Richard Boykin in Chicago and Cook County commissioner, has proposed a $15 million plan that would increase the job support because the common thing that you hear a lot of people say is, nothing stops a bullet better than a job, right? And that's an important mantra. But again, this is what we're dealing with. We designed another intervention called Truth n' Trauma or TNT. And this one, we took some of the evidence-informed strategies that we had looked at around some of the CBT work. But we thought that it's important to take our work now and actually train young people on being-- becoming what we call trauma-informed out in the community, out in the world in order to do work, right? And so, that-- it had a lot of trouble in trauma recovery components, what we call restorative practice, restorative justice work, life skill work. But it was a decidedly leadership and advocacy component, where we begin the process of looking at this larger specter of issues out here in terms of how we look at trauma, because they were coming in and they were talking about the issues with the school closing. They were talking about not just the violence and the shooting, but they were talking about the job issue. They were talking about the housing issues. And they were saying that nobody is addressing all of them and the stress that they're feeling and experiencing because of that. And so we wanted to be able to not only support that and train but then also get them out and engage in some advocacy associated with that work. And again, it turned out to be a dynamic program. Of course, we used positive youth development principles within that, and what we consider to be youth/adult partnerships work. But we decidedly take-- we took what I consider to be a trauma-informed lens in our work and what we did and how we did it and as they moved into that. So, I do want to stop here and talk a little bit about trauma, right, and define it because as we go on, I think it would be important to, again, have some of this context. So here is the definition from NIMH, National Institute of Mental Health. "The experience of an event that is mostly painful or distressful which often results in lasting and mental effects," right? And I bring in that keyword here, the experience. How we interpret it, how we pull it in. That you can have two people have the same event and experience that same event and have two completely different responses, right? I do exercise sometime where I might have two people stand up in a room, and if you look that way you see one thing and if you look that way, you see another thing and you just-- you would describe something but you're in the same room. So it's similar as we look at this trauma event, right? So, going forth. The traumatic event is one in which a person experiences, witnesses or is confronted with an actual or threatened death, serious injury, threats to the physical integrity of self, responses to a traumatic event can include intense fear, helplessness, horror, et cetera, right? And so, we know that-- we know how the experience of a violent event occurs often in our world and we know that as a result, you know, you can have these different experiences associated with that. Perception as I mentioned, in terms of experience, becomes a critical part of that. Perception of trauma varies vastly among individuals. It's something that overwhelms our coping capacity, right? And so how we deal with it, how do we take in that event freezes us, if you will, right? And it ends up impacting the entire self, right? Physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. As I mentioned, much of our work, in terms of in trauma-informed practice and in trauma recovery, often deals with, you know, the inner person and individual context. And so we're just beginning to understand, you know, what a lot of this means, you know, around this idea of community violence. Other impacts of trauma. Prolonged exposure to trauma and/or repetitive trauma events may cause an individual's natural alarm system to no longer function as it should. And so often, in these spaces when a person has experienced something, if they have experienced and witnessed a gunshot, for example. Now, when they are in a different environment and somebody drops a book, suddenly they either overreact or, again, maybe it's-- they become desensitized. But how they respond to that changes and transforms. Often, those emotional, physical responses to stress change and transform in terms of how we operate. People become emotional numb or they have psychological avoidance of issues or triggers that often may remind them of that particular event. It also impacts how a person might see safety, how they might have the sense of safety in terms of how they operate and naturally diminishes their trust in others. In this talk, I am focusing a little bit more on the specter of community violence, right? But not to disregard some of the other things that we see that are often gender violence as well as some of the things that happen which shows in our world. Other things that we experience as an impact of trauma and injury, sometimes, people have difficulty accessing their emotions. The idea of healing becomes hard to actually internalize, so it's hard to really take it in and move into that process of recovery. And what we do know and recognize is that often when people experience a traumatic event, they lose their voice, right? They can't talk about it but they also have a difficulty even expressing about other issues and things they're dealing with. So, we often refer to the three E's associated with trauma. The three E's being the actual event, what happens, right? The experience of the event, again how I'm taking in that particular event. And then the effects of the even, right? And so again, how the situation happens? I was in a car, the car crashed. I thought my life was over. I thought I got a second chance at life in terms of my experience. But then, now how I deal with that in terms of the ongoing effects, whether those effects are short-term or long-term. You know, every time I see a similar car, my hands get sweaty, right? It gets really intense for me. So, trauma/recovery largely focuses on with the short-term or long-term, you know, how you recover from that. Some of you may be familiar with the ACE Study, the Adverse Childhood Experience Study, which was a study that looked at 17,000 participants longitudinally over a long period of time. And what they saw-- what we knew was that an adverse childhood experience could impact people, you know, down the road, right? So if something happens, you witnessed a violence in the household, somebody has an addiction problem in the household, there's an abandonment or neglect issue in the household, and then how a person grows up. We knew that there might be some impact to that. We just didn't know how much, right? How much it was and how many people might be exposed to some form of violence in terms of their work. And so, this study really opened a door to really begin the process of looking and seeing how traumatic experiences are more prevalent. This is the basic framework and a conceptual framework around ACEs that starts with-- as you could see at the bottom, these adverse childhood experiences and how they might disrupt what we call neurodevelopment. What we've been able to see over the last 20, 30 years is just how traumatic events impact the brain, right, and ultimately how that ends up impacting how we operate and the choices that we make and even recovery to some degree. And from that, we have social, emotional and cognitive impairment that also may lead to some of these other things in life, from disease, disability, other social problems, other-- what we consider to be risk behaviors and then ultimately it leads to early death. So those participants within that study demonstrated particularly if they had a certain score, right, with two or more findings on there that it may lead to a particular early death. So what we know about trauma/recovery is that it's important to have what we consider to be a reliable support system, friends and family around, access to safe and stable housing, and then of course, timely and appropriate care from those people in the front line. And that if those are in place in the beginning and ongoing, then people have a better chance of recovering from these particular issues as they take place. So I thought it'd be important to begin with a little bit of that lens as we, you know, begin to move because as we talk about Trauma-Informed Care, right, these three things become very critical. Making sure that the place is safe, making sure the connections are happening, and then also doing what we call managing emotional impulses, particularly for young people or even adults who may have demonstrated some dynamics associated with trauma, right? And I would argue those first two become very critical, safety and connections and the relationships, we see make all the difference. Building community makes all the difference. Trauma-Informed Care also avoids revictimization, right? And so, whereas that we are not-- we don't re-traumatize the person in doing the work with them, appreciates, many problem behaviors begin as to understand what [inaudible]. So a lot of people who show up, who might demonstrate some level of violence might have had some of these dynamics happen to them before that we need to understand. Strive to maximize choices for the survival and control of the healing process. So we think about how a person may heal and how we support that healing and that it is important to engage that person in some leadership of-- associated with that and not as a continued victim. [Inaudible] competent, we think about what a trauma/recovery plan might look like for a military veteran versus a person of color versus somebody who's male versus somebody who's female or man or woman. And also understands the surviving the context of his or her life experiences, right, with all of those mean. And so that's what I want to transition here, you know, back to some of the themes of our conversation. Because what does all this mean in this spectrum of this idea of, again, valuing black life, right, in the community. What does all these things mean when we bring in some of these issues of how we see what happens with police brutality but also what we see in an ongoing community. I had an interesting ride with the car company that brought me to the airport in Chicago. There was a young man driving and-- drive me to the airport and I've been just loosely asking people lately, you know, what they you think about some of the issues in-- with police, right? What do they you think about some of the issues around violence and in the community? What about the spike in violence, right? And so I ask them. "Why do you think there are so many more shootings this year than last year?" And, you know, he talked about, you know, "I think, you know, we're still dealing with some of the drugs issues, some of the neighborhood conflicts." He talked a little bit about that. And he talked about them very matter-of-factly. You know, that these things are happening. We need to have a deeper understanding, addressing, you know, what are some of the different substances that people are using in the community. So he talked a lot about-- a lot of those kind of things. And then I said, "Well, the police said, right, that it's the ACLU effect," right? And I don't know if you have heard about this before. But the police have said, this idea that because the ACLU is paying more attention to how they operate, the reinforcement of body cameras, the filling up more reports once they stop people, they stopped stopping people basically, right? And so I told him that that's what they say and he just rolled his eyes, right, and said what? You know, like, oh no. And then he went into a story. He said, "Listen man. Just a couple of years ago, I was walking down the street. I had a warrant because I lost my job and ended up writing a bad check and I got arrested for it but they dropped the charges. And so I'm walking down the street. Across the street from me, there are people standing on the stoops selling drugs, right, I see this. So I'm headed to my house which is maybe a half of block down. The police rolled up on me and asked me where I'm going. I said I'm going home. They asked to see my ID. I gave it to them. They pull up my ID and they see the warrant. And I tell them the warrant is for a couple of years ago," right. And so, and mind you, why he's talking this is he's becoming very elevated, you know. He started to talk louder. I'm watching the road because now he's driving a little bit different. And he says, well, his mother came out the house and asked what the question, you know, what's going on and the police yelled at his mother, told her to get back in the house. He yelled at them and said, "That's my mother. Why would you disrespect her? She's just trying to help," right? Of course, they threw him in the car and they took him down and they booked him, you know, for the warrant. But when they came up on the system, they found out that it-- that he had been processed for a dismissal. They still kept him and shipped him to the county jail where he spent the next three weeks in the county jail, right, until finally they let him out, right? And so by this time, he was so elevated and angry as he was talking, right? And I would argue that that's a typical response, both of those responses. And when you ask someone about the violence, right, they have a lot of different theories on it. But you also talk about the police, right? It becomes a very passion plea, right? So it's a both-end experience that people are dealing with in the community, you know, around these issues. It's the spectrum of the institutions and the failure of the institutions and it's also some of these things that have happened. So I argue that you almost can't separate them in our conversation as we begin to have and do this work. So when we look at the things that have happened on Trayvon and Oscar Grant, you know, Rekia Boyd and Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald and I can keep going on and on, right? And again, these are very visible media. I would argue that these things have happened almost every day in the community. And people are experiencing that, but we haven't been listening. Our inherit human rights work, I believe within the context of this larger conversation is our ability to bring in that voice and the ability to listen and hear and then lift it out. Channel here Janella Dance [assumed spelling], a sociologist from the East Coast, who talks about this idea in policy of, you know, seeing things big and seeing things small. Is that often as policy makers we see things small, we see the numbers, we see the analysis and that's important work, but we also have to invite and engage the ability to be able to see things big. In other words, lift up the stories and listen to the stories and validate the stories that we hear out there. Whether he was completely telling the truth or fabricating a piece of his story, the emotions were very real, right, and his perception, again, was very real and how he was experiencing, right? So I would argue that we needed, again, a trauma-informed response. So we count any conversation that we have around trauma, I believe, in this piece. And we also have to count it in what I call historical trauma and thinking about those structural trauma and structural violence and how it operates. And if we do that, we also have to count it in resistance. So here's a definition by Gatung that many people are familiar with from a while ago. He said, "Denotes a form of violence which corresponds with the systemic-- systematic ways in which a given social structure or social institution kills people slowly by preventing them from meeting their basic needs," right? Almost a slow onslaught, if you will, right? Guidelines, laws and practices driven by institutions that harm communities of color, and I'll pose this as more questions, right, and what might be happening in Flint, right? Ferguson, Missouri, I don't know if anybody seen the Department of Justice report that was done about Ferguson and what was happening in that area. But if you haven't seen it, I really recommend just go on and take a look at it. You can access it online. I think they had a book copy of it. But I think it's one of the more comprehensive reports done about a particular police department and a city looking at the spectra of how the police were operating. And I think it gives one of the best analyses of this systemic racism that may have been happening in this city, from both those bigger issues in terms of what was happening and leadership all the way to what was happening small, which prompted the larger Missouri panel, you know, to really begin the process and ultimately the president's response around being able to deal with. We know there are issues that are happening in Chicago Police Department as well as in our school. So we can make the case that-- that this definition could apply to somebody. I also bring in Paul Farmers to definition. I know there's a lot of worries up there, but I'm in trouble a little bit because I think it's very important. Now, Paul Farmer who some of you may know about who does medical anthropology, medical work in Haiti and different parts of Africa, who's often brought at this issue about structural violence and how it operates in the human rights question associated with that. So he says that structural violence is one way of describing social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harm's way. The arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organizations of our social world. They are violent because they cause injury to people. Neither culture nor pure individual will is at fault, rather historically given and often economically driven, processes and forces conspire to constrain individual agency. Structural violence is visited upon all those whose social status denies them access to the fruits of scientific and social progress. So when we see what we saw earlier, the school issues, the housing issues, the educational-- I mean, and the jobs pieces, right, along with this large community violence pieces, right? We can see elements of what brother Farmer has position which is largely a public health response, right? And so, those of you know who I'm thinking and do community violence work and know about the literature right now is that we are looking at violence as a public health piece. Even Gary Slutkin who is the Director and Founder of Cure Violence what we know to be ceasefire, right? And some of you saw the Interruptions movie and things like that. So, we should even just take the public out of it and just say health, right, because it's a very specter. And Slutkin and I had a conversation about some of this and we decided, looking at that. So when we say resistance, right, and how people have resisted in historical pieces, I want to go back in Chicago to 1990. And some of you may know about the race riots in 1990s. And just a quick story, a young man decided in a segregated all white beach, 31st street beach wanted to go for a swim. And when he went out for the swim, of course, the whites opposed, they attacked him, killed him and right and sue. And so, again, we can't look at the spectrum of community violence in our city without being able to look at this historical context, you know, and as well, again, how folks have resisted particularly black people in this case have resisted, right? And the 1950s and '60s, the movement to address segregation was met with white terror and white violence. Again, another example of how we've seen this spectrum of violence persist and happen in our communities in response to just access and thinking about just rights, right? The swimming incident was an issue of rights, right? They're not necessarily thinking about privilege, right, but in the sense of rights. And rights invites us to the conversation of equity and access. How I have the ability to be able to access certain things, not that I want another group to not have it, but how do we access it, right? And so, the housing issue became another piece around that. Lorraine Hansberry when she wrote "Raisin in the Sun" really troubled this issue, you know, from the '50s and '60s around the housing spectrum, right? And certainly, we can argue and look in it younger and even that family's response that that is traumatic for them to experience it. I invite you to go back and either read the play, watch the film if you have an opportunity. Natalie Moore in her new book "South Side" which I'll highly recommend you check out really talks about this issue of segregation. And she references the Hansberry story as well as about how segregation plays into this larger spectrum, you know, of the city. King in 1965 and '66 came to Chicago to address the specter, right, of violence around the segregation, right? And, of course, was met with violence. In Marquette Park, this is a scene from Marquette Park where he had just had a rock thrown at this head. And making stands and offering that, you know, something need to be different and pushing the conversation. So I would argue that Chicago has been met with this historical violence, you know, and the structure violence in a very, very real way for some particular time. I'll bring up another person, Fred Hampton who some of you know about who was the arguably the Leader the Black Panther Party in Chicago and was very active in a peoples movement to begin the process of address. So for those who don't know, Fred Hampton was killed by a police in his apartment. There was a raid setup in part by the FBI and the police to raid Fred Hampton. And they entered his apartment, shot this-- it was one shot. They came out of the apartment. There was 92 that went in, right? And that's where Fred Hampton was killed. And so, I say all that is to say that, you know, our memory isn't that short. And so, people in Chicago remembered these things. And we hear stories about these things. We hear about the continued issues of, you know, with the police, right? And so, within that, it fractures the very trust that happens. The current-- we just [inaudible] just named a new police superintendent just last week. And that's a whole another set of controversy associated with that, but the first thing he said is that we need to focus on one word, trust, and we establish in that within the context of our work which because very critical. I was in a peace circle somebody you may know about the peace circle I was taught of justice work with some police a few months ago. Actually the weekend before the Laquan McDonald video was released. I had the privilege of being in the circle right? And so, it was one of those spaces created where the police came together with some young people and we we're talking about, you know, some of these issues that we're dealing with community and they had a very worried look on their face. And I asked them what was that about and they said "Well, we just got a phone call just a few minutes before we walked in the circle that the videos coming out." And every body is concerned about the reaction how people are going to react associated with that particular video. And so, I asked, I said "Well, what do you think is going to happen?" "And, you know, did you all see the video?" "Have you heard about it?" They said, "Yeah. We heard about it. We heard it was pretty ugly." And you know they went on to talk about, you know, kind of on the defense a little bit about how they were bad cops and you know they hurt the good cops and they kind of went in to that discourse dialogue. And I was like, "Yeah, that's good." And, you know, I said and offered what, you know, King quoted and said, you know, "The greatest evil in the world is not done by bad people, it's by good people to see evil when they do nothing about it," right? So what do you say about these issues that you see? And they offered, well, it's complicated because, you know, this happens and these people might get mad. And so, this whole blue code that operates blue code of silence permeates and nothing gets resolved, right? And so, I challenged them at that point that maybe what we need is, you know, a new form of speaking god about these issues. But as of right now, I still haven't heard anybody from police department say anything, right, around these issues. So it possess. We saw what happened after Laquan. The video came out. We saw happened. OK. We saw happened after that that we had a strong level of resistance that came out in community in Chicago on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, protesters march down town on what we call the Gold Coast in Chicago which is prime shopping location and basically shut everything down on that particular day. And as-- And there was a transformation of moment in the city, but I also think a strong response to the traumatic grief that many people experienced associated with Laquan's death. I thought this was very interesting picture, right, the one from 1919 and one from 2015, right? We still haven't faced off with the police right? So many years later some of these things are still happening. So, what do we do and how do we operate and how do we bring all of these up together? One of my beliefs is that within the context of restorative justice work. We are able to frame this, bring this conversation together in a very real way. Some of you may know a little bit about restorative justice. That movement in Chicago has largely come out of some of the larger movements of both looking at criminal justice reform here, but then also abroad and places like South Africa in some ways and its strengths and also its challenges, right? But as a response at the fine-- response to criminal justice, what we have in often is a very real response to criminal justice that we call street justice in a lot of ways, right? People take justice in their own hands when they don't trust the institutions of upholding what this is supposed to uphold, right? You're not going to uphold your deal, I can't trust that you're going to follow through in this particular way in a good way, so thus we make every stats. And so, how do we build that within the practice of our work? And how do we frame that? What more of us, is a lot of big movement around the circle keep us-- peace keeping circles things like that, but I'll argue that we have to move again beyond the interpersonal level to deal with these issues and organizational level. Part of our challenges is that I mentioned that Cook Counties bill, work with the city, work with some other folks. Many of these institutions aren't talking with each other, right? And so, we need a greater degree of accountability and transparency between institutions. And restorative practices if you will, you know, in that way. One way we've been going about doing this is this is an initiative to some of my colleagues at the Poly University, urban center where they had been training and working with police as well as community organizations and neighbors about coming together to really talk about a deal with and come up with some new practices from-- and probably use in-- what we considered to be asset based community development framework, but ultimately in a restorative way with the restorative lands, a partnership development, you know, around the work. So engaging and training of police, citizens and organizations to really build capacity in community to be able to deal with. Another one, I think Yazier mentioned this earlier. We've been working on what we call this Multi-Faith Veteran's project. And we're funded largely in response to the some 22 veteran suicides a day that are occurring, you know, throughout our country and maybe even throughout the globe. And another-- in order to be a capacity in community around this. Now, many believe that many of our soldiers are coming back, you know, with a lot of war wounds if you will, not physically, but also emotionally and mentally as well. But many of them fall through the cracks. We have a large amount of homeless population. Our federal government has done a lot of response to that but we still have it. And so, we partner with some of those institutions, VA, DAT centers and community to really be able to build that piece. So, why am I mentioning this? Why am I talking about all the stuff? So, our lands is in looking at this idea of moral injury. If you haven't heard it before, this is the definition, disruption in an individual's confidence and expectations about his or her own moral behavior, or other's capacity to behave in a just and ethical manner. So largely, you know, associated with veterans, so people in military, right? I go out and I'm in war and I do something against my moral ethic and I come back and I can't deal with it. And I'm struggling with dealing with it. And as a consequence, you know, basically eve myself a lot, right, and self destruct. You know, similar to PTSD, but different, right? Whereas PTSD is traumatic response, you know, reference society of trauma and how to respond to it. Let's look at depressive lengths, right, the sorrow, grief, regret, shame, alienation. And that there's some of both in terms of the work. Well, why is it relevant here? Why is it relevant for our work? Because what a lot of people believe including our funders, right, the McCormick Foundation in Chicago. And a larger national conversation is that it gets dealt within community that you can't deal with this issue in isolation. And although I have a lot of problems about our military industrial complex and how it operates and how it runs, you know, the other part of that is that often because of some of the things that happened in the context of war, we begin to see, you know, different ways of understanding, you know, human behavior so that-- So PTSD and how we think about trauma came from, you know, how we were dealing with, survival to war 56 years ago. So we're argue here this lengths of moral injury that is we've taken a look at in the context of how injury happens in community. 0Patricia Whims [assumed spelling] talked about this idea of spirit injury, right? That when you experience something, you know, based on discrimination, based on uttering or justification, right, that it caused an injury to the soul and to the spirit. And so that on some level, you know, how we engage and transform society has to be around, again, that human rights conversation because ultimately when we move the conversation from objectification to subject, to other as subject, to other as person, as human being, then we begin the process of having that transformation of lands. And so, I argue that our investment has to be in capacity development in community, you know, around the services that our existence on just social service, but also an engagement of training and support, development of advocacy as well as development of increase in infrastructure and community to be able to address these particular issues. I think my time is up, but I do want to offer this one last quote. This was a quote from King, Martin Luther King Jr. in-- I believe in 1960s, 7 or 8, but he was speaking to the American Psychological Association and he quote Victor Hugo, he said, "If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness," right? And so, as we being to look at and think about again this response to violence in response to community, you know, I invite us to begin the process of looking at not just those who are those perpetrators. Whether those perpetrators be the individuals who commit homicides we might be parts of street organizations or the police, but we begin to think about those institutions and how we pushed institutions in our society. Thank you very much. Bye.

[ Applause ]

>> Yazier Henry: Thank you Troy. We don't have much time. And when Troy said his time was up it was. But I think some of the points that he was making at the time, I decided to let go because I think they're important for us to discuss. I'm going to open up the floor, if you want to make any comments on what Troy has said especially for me the two points that's stood out and I hope that we will continue this conversation later even when Troy has left us on small moment when we show and focus our lens on some of the more simple things when it-- concerns itself with violence, just that there are things that often times it's easily taken for granted. But once we show-- nonce we take a care and our concern of that point much change can happen, the simple things. When one human is just open to space to speak, you know, and we can yell the pain that lives inside of those wounds that stick shouldn't reach sound that finds itself lost in the bigger picture. So, I'm going to open it up now, this mic. Try not to just ask questions. If you want to make a comment because there's not a lot of time, respond, you know. And if you want to just ask a question, do so. Yeah. I think there's mics. Is the mics around? So if anybody wants to make a comment and respond or ask a question please feel free to do so.

>> Could you say a little more about restorative justice and its restorative justice opportunities for that and what do you think it has much promise?

>> Troy Harden: Sure.

>> Yazier Henry: I'm going to take-- is it OK with you if I follow up two more questions given the time?

>> Troy Harden: Yeah. Yeah.

>> Yazier Henry: OK, let's- we've marked that. If there's any more-- Does anybody else want to ask a question? Sometimes these questions can be engaged with simultaneously. move mic that if there's anymore--does anybody else want to offer question sometimes these questions can be engage with simultaneously.

>> Yes. I've really enjoyed your talk and I think it was very good in outlining some of the troubles maybe from Chicago have a harder time explain to our broader audience, but we're talking in a room of people that at least are interested in public policy or know of public policy. Can you better address methods to communicate some of the messages in your slides to people who aren't in these rooms, people that in their daily lives don't have an access to this information and may not be concerned with it or somewhat apathetic to it or may not know that they're to it? Thank you.

>> Troy Harden: Anything else? So I'll go ahead? I just want to write those down that's right. So I would get-- ready? All right. Yeah, so, first, let's think about the restorative of justice question. So, and I'm thinking wraps in to both of those, right? Both questions. When I think about the word restorative, it's the big word there for me, right? And then, of course, justice, right? And restoring something, right? And this idea of restoration means I am bringing back something, I am pulling back something, right? And I think in a lot of ways is voice, right? It's voice of victim, it's voice of even perpetrators to some degree. It's bringing the human back in to this element, right? And even as we think about the term justice, right, and how would operates, you know, there is a level of equity, fairness and hearing, you know, with in, you know, that meaning. I think that's what's been absent often in terms of-- of we talk about these things that happen in the community, so, the possibilities I believe are endless in terms of engaging in that framework around restorative justice. How it can-- it's implemented I think is harder. We started doing community panels for youth back in the late '90s in Chicago, where as a point of diversion, a young person we get an opportunity to do something else as opposed to we see punitive practice. And it went so-so, all right. I even have one experience where I heard some person, "No, just lock me up," right? Versus-- Then, you know, going to this process of-- but when I see it worked, you know, it has tremendous possibilities and opportunity because it brings out this trauma-informed lens and it brings out this other narrative voice within it. So, and people no longer get silenced, they no longer get marginalized and that everybody gets a process or a challenge and a chance to be heard, and then a new understanding and a new way of being gets offered. In some of the circles, in some of the places I have the opportunity to sit in, I don't often see and hear those voices, right? Those people who are greatly impacted, that young man who was I was in the cab with, you know, I don't hear-- I don't see him at those meetings, right? And it's-- understand would be so-- because that languaging, sometimes it's too distance, right? And even when that person comes, because his language might not match in some of the language in the discourse that we are comfortable engaging with, we don't want to hear it, right? And so, he or she gets shut out of that conversation. And so part of our work and I mentioned that training lens, right? It is in training, it is in educating, it is in bringing some of these more complex issues down on the ground, you know, to everyday conversation. I believe that that young man hadn't been asked both of those questions at the same time, right? In other words, this issue about, you know, how he's experiencing violence, right? First of all, I doubt that he's had an opportunity to engage with someone like myself. He may have but the reality is that's not always accessible, right? People from the ivory tower don't always go down to the hood. You don't have these conversations. Knowing when we do, we don't often bring it again in a language in their framework that they can engage in. But they have critical analysis, right? And they have understanding. It's just a different language. And so knowing that, as a friend of mine said, it is my obligation, you know, to be able to bring that information to folks. You know, without having-- in a way to let them know that I haven't left them, right, in a sense, you know, without loosing my identity, you know, in that process, if this makes sense. And so that when we have those conversations and save them, we are able to break down on this concept. I sat in a classroom, I remember the way back 25 years ago at University of Chicago. And I was the young man from, you know, 47th Street. And as I was sitting in the classroom, and some of the concepts, at first the professor was talking about, I was like "What is he saying?" Right? And everybody was having this conversation. In the end, I asked the professor, "Well, are you really talking about XYZ?" And he said, "Yes" and I realized then the smoke and mirrors, right? Is that that's part of the-- to borrow from Bourdieu, right around a cultural capital, right? You know, I didn't have the lexicon at that time, you know, to engage, but then it was just a matter of flipping a switch to be able to transform that piece. And so, I think that's across the board. I see it happened again, and again, and again. I hadn't seen many people engaged street-- street involved youth in participatory action research, teaching them research methods. My guess is because nobody they can handle it, right? But once we broke down the process, you know, they did a lot better than some of those folks who are highly trained, right, you know, in doing that. Because they had a different nuance and understanding about-- and they have been thinking about a lot of these issues, you know, in a very rare way. So, I hope that answered some of the question. Yeah.

>> Yazier Henry: So this-- we have a couple of more minutes, if there's anybody else that want to add comment, well make it, you know, ask a question.

>> Thank you. From what I've heard that you walked us through a path, so this is part comment part question, and maybe a chance for you to reflect for a moment longer on what I have heard and what you've shown us, that you've walked through historical violence and the historical trauma-- structural trauma, structural violence, resistance. And then into street criminal restorative and transformative justice, in a space-- that space that is very tenuous between resistance and justice, what message would you want those of us here in the room to take as we try to live our lives in that space?

>> Yazier Henry: Anybody else? I know that was very complicated space question. But I will take one more.

>> To kind of go off that, are there any programs that you know where specifically white people are working with other people on addressing our own history? I mean obviously we have all of the opportunity in the world to look at things, but restorative justice practices where people are kind of discussing, you know, what it means to be white and what our legacy is and, you know, doing work together around that.

>> Troy Harden: Good question. Well, I'll go back wards, right? There is an organization in Chicago that I think they're creating that space. I can connect with Professor Henry and maybe get it to you or I give you my email. But I think the space is of few and far between. And in part because, there is the, you know, the question around, can I learn as white about these issues with just us, right, with just whites? Do I need a black people in the room or somebody of color, you now, in order to engage that? And I think, no, you know, I think you're right to think about, you know, how that happens and how that formulates. But I think those spaces can be created anywhere, right? I know folks who, you know, just started it through different conversations. We're going to do forecalls, we're going to discuss. Actually, I know group right now, the discussion of Ta-Nehisi Coates's book, right, between two worlds, where they meet every two weeks on the phone, you know, and just have that conversation around and the other reading I think Just Mercy, right, by Bryan Stevenson. So, you know, those kinds of-- and then, thinking about what those things mean and, you know, in terms of the actual work, in terms of the policy platforms, so with the programs, right, and in terms of pushing that. So, I think it's possible, and I think it's important because in those spaces, I think there is permission to make greater mistakes, right, greater errors in terms of thinking to ask deeper questions, you know. As long as there is that spectrum of analysis, right, around, you know, some of this historical white supremacy and kind of there's man saying that. And so, part of my work is being in some ways around men, right? Working around gender equity, and dealing with men, you know, where they feel like I can say some of these off the wall things but they're going to get challenged. But, you know, we educate in order to be able to be in a space across gender. You know, they have some very real conversation, you know, in that way. So, I think it's very critical, you know, to make that happen. So, if I can leave you with something, you know, about this piece, this was-- this idea is that begin the process of having that deeper conversation about who we aren't not listening to. You know, and as oppose to learning about who aren't we learning from, right? And if we are learning from, then, you know, what's the black is and the barrier between that. And I think that cuts across race, class and gender. Because certainly, I can't make a case that even in amongst class, right, we often silence, you know, these other voices that come up through to remind us and let us know about suffering, you know, about choice, and about even resistance and resilience, right? And so-- so and I think with in that, the invitation is then to bring that voice to the table in a very active way. At the point of decision, at the point of policy decision, at the point of funding, right? And if anything in I'll revert back Paul Farmer's word, right, that that Farmer is very active, right, in making sure, you know, that he is bringing a diverse set of voices to that table, in that conversation but also in the training, in that engagement of lifting up people and supporting people into leadership positions. And so that's the other question that I would offer or, you know, it's to think about that when we find ourselves in leadership positions, right, is it with those who we are most comfortable with, you know, or are those who would want to do the great work, right? And that maybe the idea is to figure out how to bring those people who are going to the great work to the table, you know, even if it's going to make me a little comfortable at times, right? If we have the same ethical mandate, if we have the same communicative sense, you know, and same love. And I think we too often sell each other's short, we sell organization short and we sell people. So, part of the reason I-- I mentioned the whole thing about some of the government institutions aren't talking because people don't like each other, right? And there's history there and they haven't dealt with their own trauma around that and they don't go and so they always torn at piece associated with that and so therefore, it gets very fractured and you have one person spending a million dollars on this and another person spending a million dollars on that and they're the same types program and then they compete and then they give it to the same institutions over and over again because they're not bringing that other voice to that particular table, right? So watch the voices that you're bringing to the table. All right. That would be it.

>> Yazier Henry: I don't know, is there-- if there's any comment that's really burning because we've-- we're out of institutional time because when we play Michigan time, we only lose 10 minutes, we never gain 10 minutes. So, I'm always, you know, so does anybody has got something burning, show me your hand and we'll consider it, if not, I'm going to conclude now because I know we have schedules. But I want to say one thing in conclusion before I thank Professor Harden, is that, you know, this is a beginning and a contribution and a part of the conversation, a conversation not only in the United States but across the world that many responsible intellectuals are having and hopefully more will have many leaders especially in this policy world and need to have-- and tomorrow evening, we will continue it, yeah, we will be having a conversation at-- it will be less lecture form and more conversational, so if any of you are inspired to deal with some of-- to engage some of these issues more deeply especially the question of spirit injury which I was hoping to ask Professor Harden to address more. But the next is the inter-- the space between large system and everyday breath really, what it means to walk in the faith and, you know, from here to the union or from here to the Corner of Liberty and what it means and how it means as--as different experience for each and every person depending on our-- we are and you are apprehended social culturally, social structurally and social institutionally inside of this larger system that globalize us all as human beings. So, thank you Professor Harden for making the trip out there from Chicago and for talking so softly on this issue. And kindly and caringly on this issue and I'm looking forward to continuing this conversation and I hope some of the questions that you asked will be engage thoroughly. And I also-- in conclusion, which to wish to stay that the challenge restoratively in holding such conversation, such dialogic possibility is always already continuous. There is-- what's about is you choose to do, so choose. Do it as we can. What is important is not it needs to be head and needs to-- to be spoken. OK. So I want to acknowledge all of those students here who in their own work, in their own lives are already continuing to have these conversations and they are many, I can't mention you, it's probably half this class right now as far as I know. Some-- Half of you, I don't know. So the other half that I know, know, I know that you are having these conversations in different ways in the spaces that you occupied in gray of tomorrow. Yeah. We-- And the gray of today or tomorrow might appear-- if I want to continue playing with Victor Hugo. So thank you and thank you all for coming and taking this time of your schedule and I hope that you will think about some of the issues made here and continue the conversation with yourselves, your families, in this community, at the Ford School n and beyond. Thank you.

[ Applause ]