Today is #ShutDownSTEM (or #ShutDownAcademia) and I spent a little time attending two webinars and hanging out in a Slack channel called #fighting-antiblackness.

Someone linked to Police: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. It was funny and interesting but I kept thinking that I should be listening to what black people have to say. Thankfully, at the very end, he played a speech by Kimberly Jones, author of I'm Not Dying with You Tonight. I found a partial transcript online and cleaned it up. I recommend watching it first to get the emotional tone, but here's what she had to say.

So when they say, “Why do you burn down the community, why do you burn down your own neighborhood?”

It's not ours. We don't own anything. We don't own anything.

Trevor Noah said it so beautifully last night. There's a social contract that we all have that if you steal or if I steal then the person who is the authority comes in and they fix the situation. But the person who fixes the situation is killing us. So the social contract is broken.

And if the social contract is broken then why the fuck do I give a shit about burning the fucking Football Hall of Fame, about burning the fucking Target.

You broke the contract when you killed us in the streets and didn't give a fuck.

You broke the contract room where for 400 years we played your game and built your wealth.

You broke the contract when we built our wealth again on our own by our bootstraps in Tulsa and you dropped bombs on us.

When we built it in Rosewood and you came in and you slaughtered us.

You broke the contract so fuck your Target, fuck your Hall of Fame. As far as I'm concerned they can burn this bitch to the ground. And it still wouldn't be enough.

And they are lucky that what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.

I wasn't aware of the Tulsa massacre or the Rosewood massacre.

I have a lot of listening and learning to do.

Next on my list is reading This Week Has Happened Before which was recommended by Ella Washington on the HBR IdeaCast.