I feel that I have come full circle tonight coming back virtually to give this prestigious lecture. History is not the past it is the present. W.E.B. Dubois said that the cost of liberty less than the price of repression. We are now 11 months into a global pandemic. The economy appears to be crashing down around us we are on the brink of an eviction crisis. The Supreme Court is now six-three right leaning. The President has yet to concede. Mitch McConnell was going back to DC, and we are close to having 10 million people infected with COVID-19. My topic tonight, which I believe could not be more appropriate, is Black COVID stories, Black Lives Matter and Protest: a Conversation About the Ongoing Struggle for Justice and Change. My hope is to address some of these issues and open up the space to continue to think deeply about what type of world we want to live in, and what type of world we want to leave our children. I think when you talk about the enormity of this moment, and you recognize it in the midst of a global pandemic, for black people, we are in the midst of a syndemic, and a syndemic talks about multiple points of oppression coming at you at one time. It's not just COVID-19 impacting the black community. It's also the history of redlining. It's also living in a food desert. It's also what's happening in our schools. It's also what happened with the economy. It's the fact that we are unable to live and be free in this country. And it is impacting us. So we are in a syndemic. In this moment, we have to understand that in order for oppression and racism and white supremacy to end, then we're talking about the hearts and minds of people. When we look across the landscape of this country, there are days when I feel that this syndemic, which is a term that was introduced by Merrill Singer, which talks about those multiple points of oppression and hostility that I pointed out, that it just might break us all that there are days when I feel that when there's nothing left to take from us that they're going to take our soul. These are the days when I get so frustrated, and I feel tired in my spirit because I know that America will survive this pandemic. America at large. A vaccine will come. Life will move on, and things will go back to whatever the new normal is. I wonder though, what will happen to the most economically challenged black and brown communities in America, communities that never actually came back after the 1968 riots. Communities that have never actually survived and move forward from Black Lives Matter, communities that are still trying to find places to get fresh fruits and vegetables in their community, communities when you can't walk in those neighborhoods and be completely safe, what will happen to them once a vaccine happens. And given the fact that we have a history of medical racism and medical apartheid in this country, not just with the HeLa cells with Henrietta Lacks, we can go back to the Tuskegee experiment, and the ways in which they experimented on black women during slavery to figure out the ways in which they can then heal white bodies. We are the descendants of men and women who chose to survive and they did it by gathering together. I was thinking a lot as I was looking at the Maya Angelou quote that the need for change bulldoze a road, down the center of my mind, we were at 52-51%. And then to put that in context out of 35, developing or developed nations in terms of voting, we ranked number 30 out of 35, in terms of voter turnout, I think there was a sense that democracy was not something you had to protect, that we have seen this country work, what we thought were laws written in stone, it was really social norms. And what we found over the last four years is that it woke people up. You saw more women, more people of color, voted into office, Democracy is something that we have to shape. We were trying to understand when it comes to not just police brutality, but to COVID-19, that you live at a time when you have to balance both. And I'm not saying we haven't done it before. Black COVID Stories means Black Lives Matter shows that we are strong willed and stubborn people. It shows that we understand every time we have a struggle that we have nothing to lose but our chains. I'm the daughter of a native South Carolinian. My dad grew up in the Jim Crow South, and he remembers the days when they called him boy, even when he was a man. He remembers being dismissed and overlooked even when he followed the rules and of hearing his mother cry when she realized that he had decided to fight back and not give way. These are the type of decisions he would say that are best made once you realize that you're willing to die to be free. Growing up, it was hard for me to understand how someone could be arrested for being black and for how someone could be lynched because they didn't step off the sidewalk quick enough. How is it that someone could go to jail because they look somebody else in the eye of a different race. I thought these were just longtime stories, until of course, between Black Lives Matter 1.0, which is what I call the first Black Lives Matter to happen in this country, which many people did not recognize that momen,t to what was happening just two years ago, when every time black people moved in this country, somebody was calling the cops on us for simply living our lives. Now back in 1965 President Lyndon Baines Johnson, in response to the violent racial attacks that were happening throughout the country, stated that the problem that this country was facing was neither a negro problem, nor a southern problem. LBJ said it was an American problem. And speaking before a joint session of Congress, he argued that the nation had to work together to overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry, and injustice. Now, he was preparing Congress and the world to receive his bill, which would later become the 1965 Voting Rights Act that was designed to eliminate illegal barriers that prevented black people from exercising their legal right to vote. It was that, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that open up the ways for the black women and Hispanic women and Asian American women and indigenous women can get to the ballot, that we don't celebrate completely the 19th amendment for black woman in the vote, we celebrate the 1965 voting rights. We cannot overlook the fact that the courts right now are stacked against us. And it's the court that's going to determine what is going to look like. They determine how long you go away from. I believe that we're in the midst of some dark days, and we have more dark days to come before we get to the light. I believe the morning is going to come. I believe we're at just a day away from tomorrow. But in order for us to get there, we have to recognize that when we show up to vote, when we show up to do the work that we may not benefit from that. We're doing it for our children. And we fight white complicity and privilege and we fight white nationalism, white supremacy. We're doing it because we recognize that this country is going to change. If we're going to come through the storm, one small step at a time, we will all grab our weapons, whether that's your pen, your paper, whether it's the book you're writing, or the voice, you're speaking with, and we're going to be well trained and brilliant, and we're going to be the hope and the dreams of our ancestors and doing that, that I believe we will win to transform the society, maybe not for us, for the children of our children. It's who I think we should fight. Thank you so much. You can follow me on twitter at @KayeWhitehead. I'm sorry, I'm all over social media. I'm not hard to find. You can find me every day from 3-5 on the radio. So give me a call. We have these conversations every day. And we struggle through the important questions together.