I'm here to talk to you about something important that may be new to you. The governments of the world are about to conduct an unintentional experiment on our climate. In 2020, new rules will require ships to lower their sulfur emissions by scrubbing their dirty exhaust or switching to cleaner fuels. For human health, this is really good, but sulfur particles in the emission of ships also have an effect on clouds. This is a satellite image of marine clouds off the Pacific West Coast of the United States. The streaks in the clouds are created by the exhaust from ships. Ships' emissions include both greenhouse gases, which trap heat over long periods of time, and particulates like sulfates that mix with clouds and temporarily make them brighter. Brighter clouds reflect more sunlight back to space, cooling the climate. So in fact, humans are currently running two unintentional experiments on our climate. In the first one, we're increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases and gradually warming the earth system. This works something like a fever in the human body. If the fever remains low, its effects are mild, but as the fever rises, damage grows more severe and eventually devastating. We're seeing a little of this now. In our other experiment, we're planning to remove a layer of particles that brighten clouds and shield us from some of this warming. The effect is strongest in ocean clouds like these, and scientists expect the reduction of sulfur emissions from ships next year to produce a measurable increase in global warming. Bit of a shocker? In fact, most emissions contain sulfates that brighten clouds: coal, diesel exhaust, forest fires. Scientists estimate that the total cooling effect from emission particles, which they call aerosols when they're in the climate, may be as much as all of the warming we've experienced up until now. There's a lot of uncertainty around this effect, and it's one of the major reasons why we have difficulty predicting climate, but this is cooling that we'll lose as emissions fall. So to be clear, humans are currently cooling the planet by dispersing particles into the atmosphere at massive scale. We just don't know how much, and we're doing it accidentally. That's worrying, but it could mean that we have a fast-acting way to reduce warming, emergency medicine for our climate fever if we needed it, and it's a medicine with origins in nature. This is a NASA simulation of earth's atmosphere, showing clouds and particles moving over the planet. The brightness is the Sun's light reflecting from particles in clouds, and this reflective shield is one of the primary ways that nature keeps the planet cool enough for humans and all of the life that we know. In 2015, scientists assessed possibilities for rapidly cooling climate. They discounted things like mirrors in space, ping-pong balls in the ocean, plastic sheets on the Arctic, and they found that the most viable approaches involved slightly increasing this atmospheric reflectivity. In fact, it's possible that reflecting just one or two percent more sunlight from the atmosphere could offset two degrees Celsius or more of warming. Now, I'm a technology executive, not a scientist. About a decade ago, concerned about climate, I started to talk with scientists about potential countermeasures to warming. These conversations grew into collaborations that became the Marine Cloud Brightening Project, which I'll talk about momentarily, and the nonprofit policy organization SilverLining, where I am today. I work with politicians, researchers, members of the tech industry and others to talk about some of these ideas. Early on, I met British atmospheric scientist John Latham, who proposed cooling the climate the way that the ships do, but with a natural source of particles: sea-salt mist from seawater sprayed from ships into areas of susceptible clouds over the ocean. The approach became known by the name I gave it then, "marine cloud brightening." Early modeling studies suggested that by deploying marine cloud brightening in just 10 to 20 percent of susceptible ocean clouds, it might be possible to offset as much as two degrees Celsius's warming. It might even be possible to brighten clouds in local regions to reduce the impacts caused by warming ocean surface temperatures. For example, regions such as the Gulf Atlantic might be cooled in the months before a hurricane season to reduce the force of storms. Or, it might be possible to cool waters flowing onto coral reefs overwhelmed by heat stress, like Australia's Great Barrier Reef. But these ideas are only theoretical, and brightening marine clouds is not the only way to increase the reflection of the sunlight from the atmosphere. Another occurs when large volcanoes release material with enough force to reach the upper layer of the atmosphere, the stratosphere. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it released material into the stratosphere, including sulfates that mix with the atmosphere to reflect sunlight. This material remained and circulated around the planet. It was enough to cool the climate by over half a degree Celsius for about two years. This cooling led to a striking increase in Arctic ice cover in 1992, which dropped in subsequent years as the particles fell back to earth. But the volcanic phenomenon led Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen to propose the idea that dispersing particles into the stratosphere in a controlled way might be a way to counter global warming. Now, this has risks that we don't understand, including things like heating up the stratosphere or damage to the ozone layer. Scientists think that there could be safe approaches to this, but is this really where we are? Is this really worth considering? This is a simulation from the US National Center for Atmospheric Research global climate model showing, earth surface temperatures through 2100. The globe on the left visualizes our current trajectory, and on the right, a world where particles are introduced into the stratosphere gradually in 2020, and maintained through 2100. Intervention keeps surface temperatures near those of today, while without it, temperatures rise well over three degrees. This could be the difference between a safe and an unsafe world. So, if there's even a chance that this could be close to reality, is this something we should consider seriously? Today, there are no capabilities, and scientific knowledge is extremely limited. We don't know whether these types of interventions are even feasible, or how to characterize their risks. Researchers hope to explore some basic questions that might help us know whether or not these might be real options or whether we should rule them out. It requires multiple ways of studying the climate system, including computer models to forecast changes, analytic techniques like machine learning, and many types of observations. And though it's controversial, it's also critical that researchers develop core technologies and perform small-scale, real-world experiments. There are two research programs proposing experiments like this. At Harvard, the SCoPEx experiment would release very small amounts of sulfates, calcium carbonate and water into the stratosphere with a balloon, to study chemistry and physics effects. How much material? Less than the amount released in one minute of flight from a commercial aircraft. So this is definitely not dangerous, and it may not even be scary. At the University of Washington, scientists hope to spray a fine mist of salt water into clouds in a series of land and ocean tests. If those are successful, this would culminate in experiments to measurably brighten an area of clouds over the ocean. The marine cloud brightening effort is the first to develop any technology for generating aerosols for atmospheric sunlight reflection in this way. It requires producing very tiny particles -- think about the mist that comes out of an asthma inhaler -- at massive scale -- so think of looking up at a cloud. It's a tricky engineering problem. So this one nozzle they developed generates three trillion particles per second, 80 nanometers in size, from very corrosive saltwater. It was developed by a team of retired engineers in Silicon Valley -- here they are -- working full-time for six years, without pay, for their grandchildren. It will take a few million dollars and another year or two to develop the full spray system they need to do these experiments. In other parts of the world, research efforts are emerging, including small modeling programs at Beijing Normal University in China, the Indian Institute of Science, a proposed center for climate repair at Cambridge University in the UK and the DECIMALS Fund, which sponsors researchers in global South countries to study the potential impacts of these sunlight interventions in their part of the world. But all of these programs, including the experimental ones, lack significant funding. And understanding these interventions is a hard problem. The earth is a vast, complex system and we need major investments in climate models, observations and basic science to be able to predict climate much better than we can today and manage both our accidental and any intentional interventions. And it could be urgent. Recent scientific reports predict that in the next few decades, earth's fever is on a path to devastation: extreme heat and fires, major loss of ocean life, collapse of Arctic ice, displacement and suffering for hundreds of millions of people. The fever could even reach tipping points where warming takes over and human efforts are no longer enough to counter accelerating changes in natural systems. To prevent this circumstance, the UN's International Panel on Climate Change predicts that we need to stop and even reverse emissions by 2050. How? We have to quickly and radically transform major economic sectors, including energy, construction, agriculture, transportation and others. And it is imperative that we do this as fast as we can. But our fever is now so high that climate experts say we also have to remove massive quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere, possibly 10 times all of the world's annual emissions, in ways that aren't proven yet. Right now, we have slow-moving solutions to a fast-moving problem. Even with the most optimistic assumptions, our exposure to risk in the next 10 to 30 years is unacceptably high, in my opinion. Could interventions like these provide fast-acting medicine if we need it to reduce the earth's fever while we address its underlying causes? There are real concerns about this idea. Some people are very worried that even researching these interventions could provide an excuse to delay efforts to reduce emissions. This is also known as a moral hazard. But, like most medicines, interventions are more dangerous the more that you do, so research actually tends to draw out the fact that we absolutely, positively cannot continue to fill up the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, that these kinds of alternatives are risky and if we were to use them, we would need to use as little as possible. But even so, could we ever learn enough about these interventions to manage the risk? Who would make decisions about when and how to intervene? What if some people are worse off, or they just think they are? These are really hard problems. But what really worries me is that as climate impacts worsen, leaders will be called on to respond by any means available. I for one don't want them to act without real information and much better options. Scientists think it will take a decade of research just to assess these interventions, before we ever were to develop or use them. Yet today, the global level of investment in these interventions is effectively zero. So, we need to move quickly if we want policymakers to have real information on this kind of emergency medicine. There is hope! The world has solved these kinds of problems before. In the 1970s, we identified an existential threat to our protective ozone layer. In the 1980s, scientists, politicians and industry came together in a solution to replace the chemicals causing the problem. They achieved this with the only legally binding environmental agreement signed by all countries in the world, the Montreal Protocol. Still in force today, it has resulted in a recovery of the ozone layer and is the most successful environmental protection effort in human history. We have a far greater threat now, but we do have the ability to develop and agree on solutions to protect people and restore our climate to health. This could mean that to remain safe, we reflect sunlight for a few decades, while we green our industries and remove CO2. It definitely means we must work now to understand our options for this kind of emergency medicine. Thank you, (Applause) Chris Anderson: Hello, TED community, welcome back for another live conversation. It's a big one today, as big as they get. You know, when we created this "Build Back Better" series our thought was how could we address issues arising out of the pandemic, how could we imagine building back from that. But the events of this past week, the horrific death of George Floyd and the daily protests that have followed, I mean, they provided a new urgency which we, of course, simply have to address. I mean, can we build back better from this? I think before we can even start to answer that question, we just have to seek to understand the immensity of this moment. Whitney Pennington Rodgers: That's right, Chris. Right now, so many people in the United States and beyond are grappling with feelings of anger and frustration, deep, deep sadness and really helplessness. No matter who you are, you have questions about what to do now, how to make things better. And as we've seen, violence like this unfolds for many, many years. What is the path forward? CA: So -- We're joined today by a group of activists, organizers and leaders known for their crucial work in social justice and civil rights. We're so grateful to have them here to engage in a discussion about racial injustice in America, the unbearable acts of violence that we've -- Acts of violence against the black community that we've witnessed, the dangers to a nation riven by anger and fear. And how on earth we can move forward from this to something better. So first, each of our four guests will share their thoughts on how we move forward from this moment. And then we'll engage as a group, including you, the TED community. WPR: And we'd like to thank our partner, the Project Management Institute. Their generous support has helped make today's interviews possible, and of course, as Chris mentioned, we want you to take part in the conversation, so please share your questions using our Ask a question feature and continue to share your thoughts in the discussion thread. CA: Thanks, Whitney. OK, let's get this moving. Our first guest. Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff is the founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity. They work with police departments across America, including in Minneapolis, to seek measurable responses to racial bias. Phil, I can scarcely imagine how the stress in the last week must have been for you. Welcome, and over to you for your opening comments. Phillip Atiba Goff: Thanks, Chris. Yeah, this week has been a gut punch to anybody who felt like we could be making progress in the way that we put forward public safety that empowers particularly vulnerable communities. We started working in Minneapolis about five years ago. At the time, it was, like most major cities in the United States, a department that had a long history of unaccounted for violence from law enforcement, targeting the most vulnerable black communities. And we tried to put into place a number of things that we know work. Change the culture, so that the culture can be accountable to the values of the community. And what we saw was small but measurable progress. We always knew, with small and measurable progress, that you're one tragic incident from going back to ground zero. But the events of the last week and a half haven't brought us back to ground zero, they've torched ground zero, and we've dug a hole that we have to dig ourselves out of. What I hear from police chiefs who call me, from activists I talk to, from folks in the communities that are literally on fire right now, I hear folks saying, I had one activist say to me that the pain that he was feeling was too large to fit into his body. And without thinking about it, I said right back, "That's because it's too large to fit into a lifetime." What we're seeing isn't just the response to one gruesome, cruel, public execution. A lynching. It's not just the reaction to three of them: Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and then George Floyd. What we're seeing is the bill come due for the unpaid debts that this country owes to its black residents. And it comes due usually every 20 to 30 years. It was Ferguson just six years ago, but about 30 years before that, it was in the streets of Los Angeles, after the verdict that exonerated the police that beat Rodney King on video. It was Newark, it was Watts, it was Chicago, it was Tulsa, it was Chicago again. If we don't take a full accounting of these debts that are owed, then we're going to keep paying it. Part of what I've been experiencing in the last week and a half, and what I've been sharing with the people who do this work, who are serious about it, is the acknowledgment, the soul-crushing reality that at some point, when things stop being on fire, the cameras are going to turn to something else. And the history that we have in this country is not just a history of vicious neglect and a targeted abuse of black communities, it's also one where we lose our attention for it. And what that means for communities like in Baton Rouge, for those who still grieve Alton Sterling, and in Baltimore, for those who are still grieving Freddie Gray, is that there is not just a chance, there's a likelihood that we are a month or two months out from this with no more to show for it than what we had to show after Michael Brown Jr. And holding the weight of that, individually and collectively, is just too much. It's just too heavy a load for a person or a people, or a generation to hold up. What we're seeing is the unrepentant sins, the unpaid debts. And so the solution can't just be that we fix policing. It can't be only incremental reform. It can't be only systems of accountability to catch cops after they've killed somebody. Because there's no such thing as justice for George Floyd. There's maybe accountability. There's maybe some relief from the people who are still around, who loved him, for his daughter who spoke out yesterday and said, "My Daddy changed the world." There won't be justice for a man who's dead when he didn't have to be. But we're not going to get to where we need to go just by reforming police. So in addition to the work that CPE is known for with the data, we have been encouraging departments and cities to take the money that should be going to invest in communities, and take it from police budgets, bring it to the communities. People ask, "Well, what could it possibly look like? How could we imagine it?" And I tell people, there is a place where we do this in the United States right now. We've all heard about it, whispered, some of us have even been there, some of us live there. The place is called the suburbs, where we already have enough resources to give to people, so they don't need the police for public safety in the first place. If someone has a substance abuse issue, they can go to a clinic. If somebody has a medical issue, they've got insurance, they can go to a hospital. If there's a domestic dispute, they have friends, they have support. You don't need to enter a badge and a gun into it. If we hadn't disinvested from all the public resources that were available in communities that most needed those, we wouldn't need police in the first place, and many have been arguing, even more loudly recently, that we don't. If we would just take the money that we use to punish, and instead invest it in the promise and the genius of the community that could be there. So I don't know all the ways we're going to get there. I know it's going to take everything and. It's going to need the kind of systemic change and the management tools that we traditionally offer. It's also going to need a quantum change in the way that we think about public safety. But mostly, this isn't just a policing problem. This is the unpaid debts that are owed to black America. The bill is coming due. And we need to start getting an accounting together, so we're not just paying off the interest of the damn thing. WPR: Thank you, Phil. Rashad Robinson is the president of Color Of Change, a civil rights organization that advocates for racial justice for the black community. To date, more than four million people have signed their petition to arrest the officers involved in the murder of George Floyd. And of course, one was arrested last week. Thank you so much for being with us, Rashad, welcome. Rashad Robinson: Thank you. And thank you for having me. It's an opportunity that I'm taking today to just tell you about how you can get involved. How you can take action, because right now, strategic action is critical for all of us to do the work to change the rules that far too often keep the systems in place that hold us back. Make no mistake, the criminal justice system is not broken. It is operating exactly the way it was designed. At every single level, the criminal justice system is not about providing justice, but about ensuring that certain people, certain communities are protected, while other communities are violated. And so I wan to talk a little bit today about Color Of Change, about activism, about the work that's happening on the ground from other organizations all around the country, and the way that you can channel this energy. What we talk about at Color Of Change is how do you channel presence into power. Far too often we mistake presence and visibility for power, presence retweets the stories of the movement, people feeling passion about change could sometimes make us feel like change is inevitable, but power is actually the ability to change the rules. And right now, every day, people are taking action, and what we're trying to channel that energy into is a couple of things. First is a whole set of demands at the federal level and at the local level. As Phil described, policing operates on many different channels. And what we need to recognize is that while there are a lot of things that can happen at the federal level, locally all around the country there are decisions that are being made in communities around how policing is executed, where community needs to hold a deeper level of accountability, at the state level we need new laws. So at Color Of Change, we've built a whole platform around a set of demands and are working to build more energy for everyday people to take action. We're fighting for justice for Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, we're also fighting for justice for other folks whose names you haven't heard, Nina Pop and others, whose stories of injustice and the relationship to the criminal justice system represent all the ways in which fighting right now is important. Over the last couple of years, we have worked to build a movement, to hold district attorneys accountable and to change the role of district attorneys in our country. And through the Winning Justice platform at Color Of Change, www.winningjustice.org, what we have worked to do is channel the energy of everyday people to take action. So, for folks who are watching what's happening on TV, seeing it on their social media feeds and are outraged about what's happening in Georgia, what's happening in Tennessee, what's happening in Minnesota, you yourself, probably, most likely, live in a place, in a community where you have a district attorney that will not hold police accountable, that will not prosecute police when they harm, hurt black folks, when they violate the laws, you live in a community where police are part of the structure that is racking up mass incarceration, but many other aspects of our system are racking up mass incarceration, and district attorneys are at the center of it. You live in those communities and you need to do something about it. And madeline68@example.org, we've created the only searchable, national database on the 2,400 prosecutors around the country. We're building local squads and communities for folks to be able to engage around efforts that hold DAs accountable. We've worked with our partners across the movement, from our friends in Black Lives Matter, to folks who do policy work, to our friends at local ACLU chapters around the country, to build six demands. Six demands that folks can get behind in terms of pushing for reform, and then we've built public education material. But the only way that we work to change the way that prosecution happens in this country is that if people get involved. If people raise their voice, if people join us in pushing for real change. At the end of the day, I want people to recognize though, and Phillip talked a little bit about this, is that people don't experience issues, they experience life. That the forces that hold us back are deeply interrelated, a racist criminal justice system requires a racist media culture to survive, a political inequality follows economic inequality, they all go hand in hand. And so I also want us to not take ourselves out of the equation. We likely work inside of corporations that may post symbols for Black Lives Matter one day, and then support politicians that work to destroy Black Lives Matter the next day. We oftentimes are engaged in practices inside of our companies or in our daily lives supporting media properties and others that are harming our communities, are telling stories. Recently, we produced a report at Color Of Change with the Norman Lear madeline68@example.org. It's called "Normalizing Injustice," and it can be madeline68@example.org. And "Normalizing Injustice" looks at the 22 crime procedurals, those crime shows on TV. And looks at all of the ways in which they, sort of, create a warped perception about our view of justice. They create sort of an incentive for the type of policing we see on the country, and actually serve as a PR arm for law enforcement. We've been working in writers rooms around the country to work to push folks to tell better stories, but we need folks to be both active listeners, and we need folks in the industry to push back and challenge those, not only the structures that lead to that content coming on the air, but the proliferation across our airwaves. At the end of the day, we have an opportunity in this moment to make change. Inflection points are those moments where we have an opportunity to make huge leaps forward, or the real, real threat of falling backwards. In our hands is the ability to do some incredible things about undoing so many of the injustices that have stood in the way of progress for far too long. But everyday people must get involved. We must channel that presence into power, and we must build the type of power that changes the rules. Racism in so many ways is like water pouring over a floor with holes in it. Every single -- In every single way, it will find the holes. And so for us, we cannot simply accept charitable solutions to structural problems, but we actually have to work for structural change. And so I want to end by saying one thing about how we talk about black people and how we talk about black communities in this moment. Because we have to say what we mean, and we have to build the narrative that gets us to where we want to go. So far too often, we talk about black communities as vulnerable, we talk about black people as vulnerable, but vulnerability is a personal trait, black communities have been under attack. Black communities have been exploited, black communities have been targeted, and we need to say that, so we don't put the onus on fixing black families and communities, but we put the onus on fixing the structures that have harmed us. We will say things like, "Black people are less likely to get loans from banks," instead of saying that banks are less likely to give loans to black people. This is our opportunity to build the type of progress that makes real change, and at the center of this story, we need to show and elevate the images not just of the pain that we are facing, but of the joy, the brilliance and the creativity that black people have brought to this country. Black people are the protagonist of this story, and we need to make sure that as we work to build a new tomorrow, we ensure that the heroes are at the center of the liberation that we all need. Thank you. CA: Thank you, Rashad. Dr. Bernice King is the CEO of the King Center in Atlanta, Georgia. The center is a living memorial to her father, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It's dedicated to inspiring new generations to carry his work forward. In this moment, when so many are hurting, how can we better approach unity and collective healing? Dr. King, over to you. Bernice King: My heart is a little heavy right now, because I was that six-year-old. I was five years old when my father was assassinated. And he did change the world. But the tragedy is that we didn't hear what he was saying to us as a prophet to this nation. And his words are now reverberating back to us. Change, we all know, is necessary right now. And yet, it's not easy. We know that there has to be changes in policing in this nation of ours. But I want to talk about America's choice at a greater level. The prophet said to us, "We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence, or violent coannihilation." What we have witnessed over the last eight days has placed that choice before us. We have seen literally in the streets of our nation people who have been following the path of nonviolent protest, and people who have been hell-bent on destruction. Those choices are now looking at us, and we have to make a choice. The history of this nation was founded in violence. In fact, my father said America is the greatest purveyor of violence. And the only way forward is if we repent for being a nation built on violence. And I'm not just talking about physical violence. I'm talking about systemic violence, I'm talking about policy violence, I'm talking about what he spoke of are the triple evils of poverty, racism and militarism. All violent. Albert Einstein said something to us. He said we cannot solve problems on the same level of thinking in which they were created. And so if we are going to move forward, we are going to have to deconstruct these systems of violence that we have set in America. And we're going to have to reconstruct on another foundation. That foundation happens to be love and nonviolence. And so, as we move forward, we can correct course if we make that choice that Daddy said, nonviolent coexistence. And not continue on the pathway of violent coannihilation. So what does that look like? That looks like some deconstruction work in order to get to the construction. We have to deconstruct our thinking. We've got to deconstruct the way in which we see people and deconstruct the way in which we operate, practice and engage and set policy. And so I believe that there's a lot of heart, h-e-a-r-t work to do, in the midst of all the h-a-r-d, hard work to do. Because heart work is hard work. One of the things we have to do is we have to ensure that everyone, especially my white brothers and sisters, have to engage in the heart work, the antiracism work, in our hearts. No one is exempt from this, especially in my white community. We must do that work in our hearts, the antiracism work. The second thing is that I encourage people to look at the nonviolence training that we [have] at the King Center, thekingcenter.org, so that we learn the foundation of understanding our interrelatedness and interconnectedness. That we understand our loyalties and our commitments and our policy-making can no longer be devoted to one group of people, but has to be devoted to the greater good of all people. And so I'm inviting people to even join us on our own line of protest that's happening every night at seven o'clock pm on the King Center Facebook page, because so many people have things that they want to express and contribute to this. We all have to change and have to make a choice. It is a choice to change the direction that we have been going. We need a revolution of values in this country. That's what my Daddy said. He changed the world, he changed hearts, and now, what has happened over the last seven, eight years and through history, we have to change course. And we all have to participate in changing America with the true revolution of values, where people are at the center, and not profit. Where morality is at the center, and not our military might. America does have a choice. We can either choose to go down continually that path of destruction, or we can choose nonviolent coexistence. And as my mother said, struggle is a never-ending process, freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation. Every generation is called to this freedom struggle. You as a person may want to exempt yourself, but every generation is called. And so I encourage corporations in America to start doing antiracism work within corporate America. I encourage every industry to start doing antiracism work, and pick up the banner of understanding nonviolent change, personally, and from a social change perspective. We can do this. We can make the right choice to ultimately build the beloved community. Thank you. WPR: Thank you, Dr. King. Anthony Romero is the executive director of American Civil Liberties Union. As one of the nation's oldest social justice organizations, the ACLU has advocated for racial equality and shown deep support to the black community in moments of crisis. And in moments like these, black voices are almost always the loudest and at times the silence from our nonblack brothers and sisters can feel deafening. How we can bring our allies into the mix, to better support ending systemic violence and racism against the black communities, is a question top of mind for a lot of us. Anthony, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for being with us. Anthony Romero: Great. Thank you, thank you Whitney, thank you, Chris, for inviting me to join this TED community. I think community is really important right now. With so many of us feeling trepidation, the weariness, the anger, the fear, the frustration, the terrorism that we've experienced in our communities. This is a time to huddle around a virtual campfire, with your posse, with your family, with your loved ones, with your network. It's not a time to be isolated or alone. And I think for allies in this struggle, those of us who don't live this experience every day, it is time for us to lean in. You can't change the channel, you can't tune out, you can't say, "This is too hard." It is not that hard for us to listen and learn and heed. It is the only way we're going to build out of this, by hearing the voices of Rashad, and Phil and Dr. King. By hearing the voices of our neighbors and loved ones, by hearing the voices on Twitter of people who we don't know. And so white communities and allied organizations need to pay even closer attention. This is the test of your character. How willing are you to lean in and to engage. For me, I have -- These have been really hard couple of weeks. I feel like this is really a test of whether or not we really believe in the American experiment. Do we really believe it? Do we really believe that out of many, one, a country with no unifying language, no unifying culture, no unifying religion, can we really become one people? All equal before the law? All bound together with a belief in the rule of law? Do we really believe that or do we just think it's a nice saying to see on the back of a paper dollar? And for me, this is a referendum on the American experiment. On whether we really believe, and ... the future is in our hands. And this is not like other crises, I've been the head of the ACLU for almost 20 years, I feel like I've seen it all. This is different. And this is different because it is cumulative, like Phil and Rashad and Dr. King told us, this is centuries of systemic discrimination, and the bill has come due. And it will continue to be due, and we will pay. Unless we really do something quite different. I have been scratching my head at the ACLU for the last week. We've been at this for 100 years. My organization has been working on this from its inception. In 1931, we were involved with this report about lawlessness in law enforcement. That was our first report that we got behind in 1931. We opened up our first door fronts after the riots in Watts, so that we can bring legal services and lawyers to the communities so they could demand justice from the police departments. You know, we brought Miranda, you know, the right to remain silent, and we brought Gideon, the right to a court-appointed attorney if you can't afford one. We fought Bloomberg on "stop-and-frisk," it took him years and he lost in front of our litigation to finally apologize. We've been at this for 100 years. And for the communities that have lived this for 400 years, God. I've been scratching my head, thinking. It ain't working. We don't need another pattern and practice lawsuit. We don't need another training program on racial bias or implicit bias in police departments, we don't need to file another lawsuit on qualified immunity, we don't need to, kind of, bring another race discrimination or gender discrimination lawsuit to integrate the police department. Yeah, we've done that and we will continue to do that. For me, where I've come, is that we need to defund the budgets of these police departments. It's the only way we're going to take the power back. And the more I read over the last couple of weeks about where this country is, the more I'm clear that that is my North star at the moment. We will continue to bring the litigation on qualified immunity, we will do the efforts to hold unaccountable law enforcement officials accountable, we will bring pattern and practice lawsuits, because the justice department is not doing that, so we will continue to do all that good work. But the real thing is, we're going to go after those budgets. When you look at the fact that we spend 100 million dollars on policing, more than incarceration, that the city of Minneapolis spent 30 percent of their budget on policing. The city of Oakland, 41 percent on policing. That when you have New York City police department spend more money on policing than it does on housing and preservation development, community youth services, homelessness. We're going after the money. And that's hard-core advocacy. Bills drop in local legislatures to cut the funding for police, to stop these programs that give the federal military surplus to police departments, so they become, like, little mini armies, these don't look like police officers, these look like standing armies. And the enemy are communities of color. So we need to take away their toys. We need to cut their budgets. We need to shrink the police infrastructure, so that we can get police out of the quotidian lives of people of color and communities of color. The ubiquitousness of police enforcement on things that the police do not have a role, should not have a role to play. People should not lose their lives over whether or not a cigarette pack has a proper tax stamp, or whether a 20-dollar bill was forged or not. That's not worthy of spending our dollars on police. Get them out of that business, let's focus on the most important and the most serious of crimes, and that's it. That's it. We're going to depolice our communities. Shrink those budgets. We're going to reinvest those moneys in local communities, it will be like water on stone campaigns, local legislatures, local city counsels, lab report cards, for people who talk out of both sides of their mouths and say, "We believe in police reform," and yet, they're still going to vote for 30 or 40 percent for the police? We're going to put that right to the public. And I think we just have to stay at it, because I think that's the only way we can get at this in a different way. Because much of what we tried to do is just simply not working. You know, with that, I struggle with, how do you find the optimism in this moment, because you have to find the optimism. You have to find the way to still think that even though on the face of so many setbacks, there's been change. It's been too little, too slow, not enough. We need to kind of, rock it, boost it. But you can't lose sight of the optimism. And you know, I've been thinking about who are the folks inspiring me, and Dr. King's father, of course, and the words of Rashad and Patrisse Cullors and others have inspired me. But I find inspiration in the words of a scholar I really don't like bringing up, Sam Huntington, kind of often criticized as being a conservative, a racist. But sometimes you can find inspiration even in your enemy's words. And in one of his books, which I pulled off the shelf I have, he writes about how America is a disappointment, because it failed to live up to its aspirations. And he actually started talking about, America is a failure because it doesn't live up to its ideals. But it's not a failure, it's not a bunch of lies. It's a disappointment. And in the disappointment also is the fact that there's hope. I'm paraphrasing it, but I think we have to kind of, wrap all of that together, and think about the disappointment and the hope and the resolve to do better. And we need to listen and lean in, and I thank the TED community, I thank Dr. King, I thank Rashad, I thank Phil. Thank you. CA: Wow. Thank you to all four of you, that was astonishing. I guess we're bringing everyone back now to have a conversation among us, to answer questions from our community, I hope you're entering those questions. So I don't know whether we can bring back our guests onto the screen at this point. Welcome back. Let me start with a question to you, Dr. King, I was so inspired by what you said. Your father, of course, also deeply understood the anger that leads to protest. I think he said that protests are the language of the unheard. And I'm wondering what you would say to someone right now who is angered beyond measure by what's happened, and also sees this could be the moment, you know, like, someone who believes the system is so fundamentally broken, that our best choice is to tear it down, that that is actually -- This may be a once-in-a-generation moment to do that. And so to actually believe that protest, including violent protest, actually is the way right now. What would you say to someone who felt that? BK: First, I just wanted to make just a slight correction, he said riots are the language of the unheard. CA: I apologize, I apologize. But that is the point even more powerfully, yeah. BK: Yes. Protest we must, and we must continue to always protest, to keep the issues in the awareness before people, but you know, when a person is angry, sometimes it's hard to reach them. I've been on that journey, I was at a stage of my life where I was so angry, I wanted to destroy, and I'm the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., and grew up in a household of love and nonviolence and forgiveness, and I had to go through that journey I was surrounded by the right kind of influences, fortunately. Because that would have been a sad story. But I think it's really allowing ourselves to hear the anger and allowing the space for the anger, but also trying to help young people rechannel that energy. And we've got to start ensuring that we connect them to some of the work that has been and now is elevated to another place. Color Of Change, the work that you're doing, the ACLU, the work that they're doing, because sometimes, there's this disconnection that intensifies the emotion and makes you feel helpless. But if you can channel that anger, connect it with action that is toward creating the social and economic change, then it begins to build you up, and then you can begin to become more constructive with the anger. WPR: We have some questions that are coming in from our community, but before we do that, you all shared such powerful, meaningful statements right now, and many of you touched on the fact that this is not the first time that we're experiencing this. The murder of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, this is one of -- these are three of many, many instances just like this, and I'd love to hear you all address was has, sort of, brought us to this boiling point, what has contributed to this moment where we're now experiencing things, Anthony, as you said, that feels so much worse than other moments? And that's it, anyone who feels comfortable to take that question. AR: Rashad, I want to hear you. BK: I wanted to say something. I think we've always been at that moment. But this moment is different, because of the void in leadership. There's no real moral voice in our country, and the person who sits in the office of the presidency is not, you know, leading in the right way. And has kind of -- no, not kind of, has given license to certain things. And so now it's, you know, he's lit the fires. WPR: Yeah. RR: The thing I'll add ... The thing I'll add here is, you know, a couple of things. For the last couple of months, we have been both seeing and experiencing all of the ways that this country's decisions of underinvestment, of targeting black communities, has been killing black people through COVID. And while we've been in our homes, we have also been watching how the media has blamed us as we have been the essential workers in so many places and trying to ensure that this country keeps going. We've watched white men with guns show up to capitols demanding, basically, black and brown people go back to work. And then we see this eight-minute video with a police officer, with his knee on someone's neck, after seeing that video of Ahmaud Arbery and hearing the story of Breonna Taylor, and we see him looking in the camera, basically knowing that America was not going to punish him. And what I think it is is that