Week 4 | Freedom Dreams and Black Radical Imagination Have a question? Email us at [email protected] and share about your experience using the hashtag #BLACKPOWER and tagging @svplosangeles on Twitter and Instagram. All materials and resources can be found on our Hub: svpla.org/blackpower-hub [Dr. Melina Abdullah] Wasn't turning on the chat when it was saying turn on my video, so I turned my video on like, [Alli Simon] Nice, awesome, well, I'll go ahead. We don't have any announcements here, but I'll go ahead and hand it over to you. It looks like folks are already starting to join us. [Dr. Melina Abdullah] Great, great. Well hello, everybody, Eid Mubarak, today is Eid, so those who've been fasting for Ramadan, we think this is the absolute best holiday ever, because you were forbidden from fasting today, we're required to eat and eat heartedly on Eid, so it's a very happy day, I can't wipe the smile o of my face, so Eid Mubarak for everyone who observes. I can't believe we're halfway through this class, and last class, if you remember, we talked about freedom dreaming, we engaged in some radical imagining and some visioning work, and we're gonna pick up on some of that work, but rst as we have done with every class, we're going to, oops! Did I hit the wrong thing? We're gonna ground ourselves, and so you all think about who wants to read our land labor and life acknowledgement, so we need three readers to read through these slides. And we can start with the rst slide. Is there someone who's willing to read the rst slide? And if you're willing to read just come o mute and go ahead. [Julie] Shall I begin? Black Power | Week 4 | Page 1 [Dr. Melina Abdullah] Yes please. [Julie] Yes, "Land labor and life acknowledgement, breath. "This land that we inhabit." [Dr. Melina Abdullah] So can we pause for one second? So that means for all of us to take a breath if we can take a deep breath and, [Julie] I did not just read the word breath, let me try again. So yes, as we all take a deep breath, and then a slow deep exhale, "This land that we inhabit is physically situated "in the original ancestral homelands of the Tongva people. "We pay respect to the Tongva, "and all the Indigenous people, past, present "and future and their continuing presence in the homeland "and throughout their historical diaspora." [Dr. Melina Abdullah] Great, and do we have someone who can read the next slide? Thank you for reading that. Who can read the next slide? [Chasity] This is Chasity, so another deep breath in and a slow exhale out. "We pay homage to those who were stolen from Africa, placed in bondage, falsely named as chattel, and forced into labor, who were called “slaves,” but never submitted as such, who have always been fully human, with an unbroken connection to the Divine and to each other. We honor our African Ancestors for the still-unpaid labor which built what is now the Americas." [Dr. Melina Abdullah] Thank you. And who can read our last slide? [Nicole] I can, and let's take another breath together, deep inhale and deep exhale. "To both our Indigenous and African forebears, "we commit to the continued struggle for liberation "and reparations, for it is only through freedom "and justice that we truly give honor. "Aho! Ashe!." [Dr. Melina Abdullah] Thank you so much. So what we started doing two weeks ago, is making sure that we open with victories of the week, and so this week I thought about ve victories, and then we'll invite you to reect on your own victories. So ve victories, movement victories and personal victories. We presented People's Budget LA to City Council. I hope that some of you watched, it was an absolutely moving presentation, we had seven city council members, which was actually in excess of the legal limit, they're only supposed to gather six at a time, but seven of them joined the People's Budget LA presentation, that's still online on our Facebook page, and we presented at People's Budget where 3000 Angelenos completed the People's Budget survey, and wanted to invest in things like housing and healthcare and mental health resources, and the only area for divestment was policing, prosecutions and trac enforcement, and so, again, what we saw is kind of a mirror to what had been presented last year, and most people thought or had tried to pretend as if last year was an aberration, when last year was actually the norm, it wasn't just George Floyd that made people realize that we have to defund the police, it's the lived experiences of the people that make us realize that we have to defund the police. Also on Monday, we won an injunction on less lethal munitions used by it's not versus LAPD. No, we won an injunction against LAPD for the use of less lethal munitions, so you know that over the course of the last year, LAPD has been shooting righteous protestors with rubber bullets, beating us with batons, tear gassing us, pepper spraying us, holding us illegally, zip tying us and putting us on buses and empty elds at UCLA, and we won an injunction against them, so Black Power | Week 4 | Page 2 initially we won a restraining order, which is really kind of crazy when we think about it, nobody wins a restraining order against LAPD or against the police. We got a restraining order against the police. Well, on Monday, that restraining order was made more permanent through an injunction that restricts their use of rubber bullets against righteous protestors. And then yesterday, we stood with a young man, Jamal Shakir who's 23 years old, and when he was 22, he was shot by an LAPD or on the orders of an LAPD commanding ocer, shot with a rubber bullet. Jamal recognized this commanding ocer as his uncle, his mother's brother, Eric Anderson, and he called out to Eric Anderson and said, "Why are you doing this?" As Eric Anderson was moving the police force against righteous protesters, just days after the murder of George Floyd. Jamal called out to Eric Anderson and said, "What would your ancestors say? "What would Grandma say? "What would your father say if he saw you moving this way?" And when Eric Anderson heard his nephew say this to him, he directed a rank and le ocer to shoot Jamal with a rubber bullet, and it rst in his hand, and then, as his phone was shot out of his hand, Jamal reached down to pick up the phone and he was shot in the backside, a second time on the order of his own uncle. So yesterday we stood with Jamal Shakir as he led a lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles and LAPD and his uncle. And then personally, I'm celebrating a victory for me is that I fasted every eligible day for Ramadan, so sometimes I have to break fast early and this year I did not, and I fasted every eligible day, so Eid Mubarak to all of those who fasted, and congratulations on your fast and we're grateful for your fast, and then nally I celebrated Mother's Day, and celebrated my mom and all of the other mothers in my life, and I was celebrated by my children and gathered with, we always have something that we call "Single Momma's Mother's Day," and so we gathered in my living room and backyard, and celebrated what it is to be a mother. And so those are my victories, and I want to just invite you all to share any victories that you've had over the last week. Anybody have a victory that we need to acknowledge from the last week? [Alli] I have a victory, oh, sorry Heather, yeah I have a victory, two actually, again to celebrate my mother for Mother's Day as well as her birthday yesterday, so that felt really lovely, just honoring her, she's been dealing with a lot of health things for the last couple of months, so that was nice, and the second thing is I have a new meditation class that happened, so that was very nerve-racking a little bit, considering that it's on this new app platform, so a victory in that, so thank you... [Dr. Melina Abdullah] You're teaching the meditation class? [Alli] Yeah, I teach meditation outside of SVP work like four times a week, so yeah, it's on a platform called Open, so yeah, so I started with them, which was a little nerve wracking and exciting, so, [Dr. Melina Abdullah] So can we all look up your ? So when we were meditating last week, you were like, ah, I could have taught this. [Alli] No, I anticipated it. Yeah, no, no, no, I denitely am. [Dr. Melina Abdullah] But we can look up your meditation class. Yeah, if you, yeah. Black Power | Week 4 | Page 3 [Dr. Melina Abdullah] "She's amazing at it," Yolanda says. Yeah, so just look you up on, how do we look up your class? [Alli] On Instagram, well, if you will, on Instagram, I do date like often meditation, many of the folks in here who are in my work, they denitely know I do a lot of my like meditation work on my Instagram live with a couple of nonprots, like The Underground Museum and then another museum place, and then I'm on Open and I have a bunch of like recordings on my own Instagram @omgirlalli there.