Transcript

Welcome to The Free Ranger, a podcast about telling the stories that matter. On this podcast, we’ll be learning about storytelling from the people who turn important issues into stories: the writers, filmmakers, marketers, academics, and other professionals who weave together the facts to create compelling narratives that make a difference.
On this episode, we’re diverting from our usual format a bit to talk about an important issue: DEI. We’re happy to welcome Taonga Leslie, Director of Policy and Program for Racial Justice at the American Constitution Society. A graduate of Yale Law School and Harvard University, Taonga was previously a senior consultant with Public Equity Group, a boutique consulting firm that helps nonprofits, foundations and other social impact groups develop strategic plans to advance racial and economic justice. He has also served as an associate with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, where he represented asylum seekers, survivors of domestic violence, nonprofit arts organizations, and police accountability groups.
Together, we talked about the long history of debates around equity in the US; where DEI stands today; and how institutions can stand by their DEI commitments in the coming years… 

Myles  
We are on with Taonga Leslie. Taonga, thank you so much for joining us on the Free Ranger Podcast. I'm glad to have you here. 

Taonga  
Thanks so much for having me. 

Myles  
What can you tell us about your background? What do you do? What's going on for you lately? What are you all about? 

Taonga  
So I direct the Racial Justice Program at the American Constitution Society, or ACS. ACS is the largest progressive legal network in the country. You've got about 200 chapters, almost every law school, most big community states, and basically, what my role is is trying to help progressive lawyers understand and think about racial justice and equity issues. Think about how they can get involved and and plug in and hopefully make some progress. 

Myles  
You've been doing a lot of work, putting out a lot of content around DEI lately. What first got you interested in racial justice work more broadly, and DEI in particular?

Taonga  
So depends how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go, but I'll take it back to childhood. 

Myles  
Go for it.

Taonga  
So I grew up in a town called Gainesville, Florida. Lovely, lovely place to grow up. So my favorite people on earth live there, but Gainesville is also, or was, when I was growing up, coming out of age, a very black-white, segregated town that has improved somewhat, but I lived on the west side of town, which was the more white, also more affluent area. Would go to middle school and high school on the east side, and you could, pretty clearly just track as you drive along the main avenue that you know, you see the wealth going down, you see the black population rising, and it's quite straightforward. And in school as well, you'd have those experiences of it being almost shorthand, of like, okay, well, that's the east side. That's quote, unquote “ghetto”, that's everything negative, right? So many other canon experiences that seemed normal, like there's the richest neighborhood is still called Haile Plantation, which I think is wild and crazy. There used to be a Confederate soldier in the town square and that has been removed. So there's been progress made. But, you know, growing up and then getting the deeper context of, oh, right, this is because of slavery and civil rights and segregation and so many things that the promise has not been completely fulfilled on. Like we made some progress, but certainly a lot of those vestiges are still there. So that's what made me want to get into racial justice work. Just that big disparity between what the Constitution says, what civil rights law says, and then what is actually going on, and many other things have happened throughout my career, but then coming to ACS, that was my charge, was trying to build this movement. And of course, since the 2023 opinion on affirmative action, we've just seen a huge onslaught on DEI, on Critical Race Theory, on basically racial equity in all its different forms. 

Myles  
Tell us a little bit about that decision, the SFFA, what's going on there?

Taonga  
Yes, so students preferred missions brought a case against Harvard and against UNC, challenging affirmative action in those schools, and this has been a long running legal challenge going back to the 70s. The question of to what degree can schools consider race in their admissions processes? And of course, that goes back to there's a time in the 60s, 70s, where there were just huge barriers for students of color, and so to get any kind of meaningful representation, school began to consider that. So in the 70s, 90s, even in 2016 we have the Supreme Court upholding by pretty narrow margins, the consideration of race among other factors. They were saying, basically, we know that these elite schools have far fewer seats than candidates, so choosing among the qualified pool, is it permissible to consider race as a plus factor so that you can get the benefits of a diverse learning experience, so people can experience that? Finally, what happened is the Supreme Court shifted right? There's some resignations new folks are placed on and this newly empowered conservative majority had different votes, and you need five votes to get to a decision. So in that ruling, it was narrowly defined to whether colleges can use affirmative action, and the answer is now largely no, but some exceptions for military academies. West Point actually seems courts have been upholding so far the use in that context, because diversity is so important in the military to have a fighting force that works. But essentially that death now also lifted up this theory of the Constitution as a colorblind Document. And that's where we've seen this wave come out of like, Okay, finally, this conservative court has been secured. Now is the time to basically require color blindness throughout our economy, throughout schools. Now it's up to the executive with the new Trump administration. So that's sort of the evolution that we've seen. 

Myles  
Yeah speaking of color blindness, you wrote an article with your colleague called The Promise of Lived Experience: Assessing Race and Merit after SFFA in the Journal of Law and Social Policy, where you use the phrase colorblind constitutionalism. I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit what is, what's constitutionalism in general, and what's the colorblind version of that? 

Taonga  
Soo there's this debate about the 14th Amendment most specifically, what does it mean? What was it meant to do? The 14th amendment basically declares that we'll have equal protection of the laws. And so there's a theory of, well, the underlying ethos of the 14th Amendment is color blindness, right? We should, we should not be able to see people's color that should make no difference, play no role in our society. And that is the currently dominant view on the Supreme Court. There's others, historians, especially, who have looked into the 14th Amendment and said, you know, really at the time, they did not think that, because the 14th Amendment, by the way, came out of the Civil War, the end of slavery, black codes, and the idea of what would it take to basically dismantle all the forms of oppression that existed during slavery. So there's people who take an anti-oppression lens on the 14th Amendment. They're like, actually, what this was about was banning forms of oppression against other people. And where this plays out, sometimes there's interesting ironies. There's a civil rights law that's also being more litigated now that they passed to protect black Fulton contracting, and it said, Everybody shall enjoy the same rights as a white citizen. So it was definitely not colorblind. On its face, they were saying, you know, some people are not white. They don't have those rights, and they will have them. Now, the Supreme Court and some of the lower circuits have now interpreted that as it means that there will be no racial considerations in contracting now, actually, during the Reconstruction Era and after slavery, there were all sorts of considerations of color that the federal government absolutely did. They said, We've got to make schools and programs for formerly enslaved people. It was that that was not thought of but, but regardless, that fight has been lost for now at the Supreme Court, and so this, I think, somewhat invented colorblind ideal, I think, now, is being used to mask very real inequalities that we still have, because you can't, can't talk about anymore, so now you can't talk about, well, some people have had other opportunities. Some have not faced systemic racism, others have not, etc.

Myles  
In that same article, you and your colleague propose a different approach to assuring diversity in higher education that goes beyond and is a bit different from the affirmative action models that had existed before you mentioned considering race as a plus factor. Can you tell us a bit more about that framework that you've put forward?

Taonga  
Sure, so in the affirmative action decision, there was a lot of issue taken with basically box checking approaches to diversity, like the idea that by checking off the box for Latino or black or Asian, that means that you know what this person's experience has been. And the court nevertheless said, nothing of this opinion should stop you from considering how a person's experiences with race have shaped their identity, what they've gone through, inspiration, etc. And so this article was really intended to delve deeper into that, basically to understand the background of looking at racial experiences, and also just assess how that's been looked at in the law and how can be used going forward. And it may seem subtle, but I think what the court really wants to see is an assessment, right? So if you personally overcame racial discrimination, now that's something that you can write about in your essay and be used as a qualification. The major point that I was trying to make with the article is shifting how we think about mirror and what can be a qualification. And so lived experience is this concept that actually has come out in social movements as well. You know, people say that there's wisdom, not just in going to school and getting, say a PhD in, for example, immigration. That teaches you a lot, certainly a qualification, but there's also qualification you came from growing up in an undocumented family. You know things about how the system actually works, how people navigate it, that are also a qualification in certain regards, and that if we shift the way we think about how we admit people generally, then we might think about our applicant pools differently, like, what kinds of experiences do you want people to bring to college? And I think the results could be useful in ways that may benefit both some conservative critics and some liberal critics of what happened with affirmative action. So briefly under affirmative action, some folks notice that often it would be the most privileged black people, say, who would get slots? Right? You check the box, but you might be a black immigrant. This is just, you know, the worst, their worst case scenario. But like a black immigrant from a billionaire Nigerian family, why should they get in over this working class, say, white person from Appalachia, right, which I think has had some some traction, but if you look at racialized experience, then there's a huge difference in racial experience between that and a black person who's come up from an extremely concentrated poverty situation, perhaps in The Deep South. And giving that individual assessment also still allows you to look at the structural but to be that individual lens if that that makes sense.

Myles  
The concept of merit comes into play a lot in these discussions. How would you define merit in the context of this lived experience approach to admissions, and what role does it play?

Taonga  
I don't know if you've seen there's a new acronym that they I think they're kind of trolling, but there's MEI as opposed to DEI. And merit is supposed to be Merit Excellence, something else, this idea that these two are at odds, and I think so, merit is our idea as a society of what makes you deserve one of these limited resources, right? We know that there's not enough slots to go around. So how should we divvy up the, say, 2000 slots in the Harvard Law class? And I think what the conservative side has put forward is, you know, it's just a winner takes all system you should have whoever has just the highest score, if those people are tied, test them again, because it's really just deciding who gets the prize, and that's fine, and that's what we should base it on. There's other concepts of merit that look at, what does this limited opportunity serve societally, right? Like if we're putting out this class of 2000 lawyers, and we know that those people are going to become our judges, and our prosecutors, and our regulators. What does that class need to have to serve us as a society? Right? What trace do they need to have? And I think one important thing is, can they serve all of society? Do we have a class of the elite lawyers and judges. Do we have a Supreme Court that can understand gender issues? And I don't think that will happen if it's nine men, or not in the same way. Do we have a Supreme Court that can understand racial issues and so thinking about merit in this social way of: Okay, since we only have so many slots, what do we as a society want out of it? And that being how we choose, I think maybe gets us a little bit further, because at the end of the day, it can look like we're kind of squabbling over pennies, right? Like, especially the way affirmative action fights come up, it's often most people do not go to an elite school to begin with. Like, most people do not even go to a highly selective institution. Less than a 10th of a percent of people will go to Harvard or any of these schools that you see in these bites. So to me, what's important about Harvard is, not necessarily who gets it, but what that means and its implications for our society more broadly. 

Myles  
Yeah you referred to that as Democratic Merit in the article. Can you say any more about that particular choice of words?

Taonga  
This actually came from Lani Gunier, so I have to cite her, but I think it's a really fascinating concept, especially for institutions that have missions. So in my article, I especially focus on the helping professions, the medicine, law, these have such a huge outsized impact. And so if we're looking democratically, and we all have a say in what merit is and who deserves these things, it's just a little bit more collective and less individualized, and I think can get us past that. So wouldn't call that the shrinking pie equation. 

Myles  
So, bearing in mind that the goal of an institution might not be simply to pull in the students with the highest SAT scores in any particular year, but those who stand the greatest chance of doing something with their degree that is in line with the goals of the institution. So what's the intersection there? How do these ideas of democratic merit and lived experience play off of each other and inform each other?

Taonga  
It's interesting, we ended up on this diversity path of racial consideration in the 70s, just because of how litigation turned out. But in the 1978 case, Bakke the controlling Justice had also looked at, well, what if the purpose of getting diverse medical students is to have more people who are able to serve those communities. We know communities of color are underserved. So what if admitting more candidates of color meant that you would end up with better service in those communities? And I think the lived experience approach kind of weaves that a little bit more closely, because the reason that Justice did not ultimately go down that line is he said, Well, just because a, you know, say a black candidate comes in, that doesn't necessarily mean that he's going to serve in a black, low income community, right? A a white candidate could have that same motivation, and maybe he wants to even more. And maybe the black candidate wants to do something high, high income. He wants to become a heart surgeon or a plastic surgeon in Miami, right? So check, boxing does not really get you there, but lived experience remains relevant, right? So who's even equipped to serve in those communities, and what do they bring to that? And I think that does become more case by case, right? And many medical schools are grappling with this questions, because there's huge disparities that people of color receive from the medical system. They've worked on cultural competency training, which, which gets you part of the way, exposure, etc, but we still have questions of okay, is a person who has maybe a PhD, has learned Spanish and now is going to work in undocumented communities? How does that qualification compare to somebody who has all of that and also has experience of growing up with undocumented communities? Right? Is that a plus factor that makes sense. And I think logically, most people would understand that it does. It still becomes very case by case, because, of course, there are some people who grew up in those communities were like, I absolutely don't want to go back and bring more power to them. But if you're looking at the pipeline and looking at, okay, these are the things our institution is failing at that drives you in a different direction, like, why is it that we've had class after class of lawyers graduated, and yet we have such huge disparities in low income folks getting access to legal care? Right? I think it does have to do something, but the experiences, orientation of the people you come in and the products that you get out. And if you want to become the best law school or medical school for pro bono or for closing equities, you might want to look at that.

Myles  
So we've got this framework. We've got this way that Higher Ed institutions, other institutions that are taking applications may be able to bring in structural considerations without relying on some of the old affirmative action frameworks. We're calling it Lived Experience. What are the chances of this approach in court? How likely is it, in your opinion, to succeed? What's some of the maybe a bit of the legal footing that we stand on at the moment.

Taonga  
I actually am pretty optimistic about it. I think one early test case that we've seen is many law firms previously had diversity fellowships where they would say, basically, we are looking for folks from underrepresented backgrounds for these, these few slots that we have available to you, and those have been challenged since FFA, most of them have now settled and for the ones that have continued to have those programs, the small tweak that they said was what folks who are able to advance, or have a commitment to advancing diversity and equity, And one of the factors that we're including is lived experience. We're also considering demonstrated commitment, and it may seem light, but it truly is a substantive change. Right now, those programs are open to people of all backgrounds. It's a little bit clearer, I think, also and maybe helpful to get over some of the tokenism that can be experienced in a mainly box checking program, like, are you here just because they needed that person? Are you here because you actually have experience and wisdom to add to this firm going forward? And what's remarkable is, you know, the conservative litigators, they accepted those settlements right? Like they knew that was the change, and they said, Okay, well, that's good enough, at least for now. And they are, you know, moving on from it. I will caveat that with there is a deeper legal battle going on with some folks who just want to see less representation. So one thing that's been unsettling is that schools that have gotten rid of affirmative action. Some of the schools have had a sharp drop in Latinx and Black admissions. Some schools have not, and the litigators are now sounding the alarm that, well, this means something's wrong, which to me, signals the main purpose of you bringing this litigation is that you wanted to see less right? That the fact that diversity still exists could not possibly mean that all these students deserve to be here in their eyes, right? So now it must mean something nefarious, and that that kind of underlying purpose and underlying worldview, I don't think it has a majority, at least a majority, that's ready to do so on the court yet, but I think that's, that's something that we have to look at and and also, you know, what's really behind this broader DEI conversation, right? Is it, is it just about fairness, or you just not like the idea of diversity, because that's not something that we're going to be able to work our way around, find a technical fix or a negotiation point. That's just a real values battle. 

Myles  
Speaking of, let's go broad for a little while. Here you've got a blog post out called What History Teaches Us About Critical Race Theory Bans published in the American Constitution Society's expert forum blog. This is a conversation that did not start in January of this year or on the campaign trail. This has been going on for a long time in the United States, in particular. From that blog, I wanted to ask you about this idea of divisive concepts. What is the history of divisive concepts in US legal discourse, and how does it relate to the suppression of speech around racial oppression here in the US?

Taonga  
I'm glad you asked. I had thought about calling that piece The Plantation Playbook, because some of the biggest, and I'd argue, the biggest battles over free speech and expression in the US have been related to racial justice and oppression more generally. Like, I think it's unfortunate that now sometimes people think free speech is about, you know, your right to wave a Nazi flag, like going back some of the biggest actual censorship pre-Civil War was about any conversation related to slavery that was divisive. So because abolitionists started publishing tracks, and because those tracks started gaining traction for an unfortunate fun, southern states became scared. First, they banned publication of divisive concepts or abolitionist concepts, they had a pretty broad umbrella, and then they moved into literacy bands more generally, right, like enslaved people cannot be taught to read, it was also primed to teach enslaved people to read, and they even tried to take it federal with a ban on circulating abolitionist literature. So I think some lessons we can learn are, number one demands happen because the speech is effective, right? Nobody's trying to ban ineffective speech. It was after the abolitionist movement grew that people started to bring out censorship. And after the Civil War, one of the biggest reasons that the Civil War is one of the main consequences was that the Bill of Rights had only applied to the federal government, and they realized it needed to apply to the states too. And one of the reasons was they realized actually, your state can be a huge barrier to liberty and the freedom of speech as well. So how does that align to today? One more milestone I think is worth bringing out is folks also don't know the Civil Rights Movement was a big reason for the free speech law we have today. So in a case called New York Times v Sullivan, they had taken out an op ed in the New York Times criticizing police brutality in the south, and a commissioner found a very small technical error. He tried to sue them for defamation, the Supreme Court made a wonderful decision, basically held that the bar for defamation and libel is extremely high in the United States, and that's one of the reasons people have freedom of this press to say whatever we want today. But it really came out of an anti-oppression lens like people are trying to use the law to keep you from speaking. So fast forward, however many years there was the initial Trump wave of trying to use this list of divisive concepts in an executive order. He put that out in his first term, and it was pretty vague. It was anything from the idea that America might be founded on slavery, it was intentionally vague, right? To keep people from talking about any of these concepts. And that happened shortly after the George Floyd protests. Then the states picked it up and started to bring these bills to ban divisive concepts in their schools, to ban divisive concepts and DEI trainings, and thankfully, we are seeing a good number of successful challenges to those but now we're in the 3.0, 4.0 whatever it wants to be, of the Trump administration, banning any use of these terms through anybody getting federal funding right, like they literally stopped funding nonprofits so that they could scrutinize reports and take out mentions of the word "equit"y or "race" or "racial" or "discrimination", because the very knowledge existing is deemed to be a threat to the status quo. So I think there's a few things that we can learn from this history. Number one, the First Amendment, I don't think is values neutral. There is an anti-oppression lens in it, because the speech that is most important to preserve is speech that actually has the potential to disrupt right? If you're just saying something that many people feel that will not challenge the status quo, I mean, great and good for you, but like, that's not really the way laws are set up. But the other thing, I think, is heartening, is to continue talking right? Like the purpose of these laws is the chilling effect is to chill more speech than is possible. But I think the fact that this has been hugely the priority, or one of the main priorities of Trump's term really shows that people are very worried about what's essentially just people with signs and discourse right? Folks might not have billionaire backing, but clearly this speech is disturbing, and I think and so I'm grateful for platforms like this, one of continuing the discourse because it's obviously doing something, or else they wouldn't want to stop it so badly. 

Myles  
Well, we're happy to have you here. So speaking of that chilling effect, yeah, there's been a lot of activity at the federal level just in the last handful of weeks. As you mentioned, it's the culmination of a long history of attempts to suppress speech here in the United States. What's the prognosis is DEI cooked? Is it going anywhere in the near future? What do you think is on the horizon for us?

Taonga  
I think that it's important for people to distinguish between politics and laws and values, because I think those all operate at different levels. So what's going on right now is mainly political right like that. The Trump administration has decided they aren't going to use the federal government's power to advance diversity. They're not going to be enforcing certain civil rights laws. DOJ is stepping back on traditional civil rights enforcement. The EOC currently doesn't have, that's the Employment Opportunity Commission, doesn't have a quorum right now, which I think is intentional and very unfortunate, right? And these have real big and sometimes devastating long term side effects, and that's the result of who won the election, right? But that is politics. The law has not changed. Actually, legally, even prior to SFFA, actually having a racial preference in hiring has been illegal. That's not hugely new. Sometimes folks were maybe getting away with it before more, people were less likely to sue. But that law has not changed the vast majority of people's practices. Yeah, there might be more political people against you, but nothing that you're doing now is illegal if it wasn't illegal before. I think that's important for people to know. The level under that is values, which is probably even more important, right? Like, regardless of what changes in the law, regardless of what courts decide, I know where I stand on diversity and inclusion, and I will be working to advance those values, how I can in my community, and my work, and the work might change depending on what your company is, where you get your funding from, what the legal risks are, but if you have your value set, that's not going to change, right? And I think that also is where we have to look for the deeper work like, you know, in prior times, maybe there were prior times, there might have been more political support for something like, say, affirmative action, and there might have even been a better legal framework for it. But affirmative action had not won the battle of hearts and minds of being like a deeply rooted and accepted practice, and so it was always vulnerable. And so thinking about the conversations that we have, how we structure programs to build that deeper buy-in to really instill those values is, I think, the longer-term work that will outlast, you know, whoever wins the next election or what the next person on the court is.

Myles  
So in the long term, building up values, building up a deeper appreciation for diversity and equity and inclusion in society. In the short term, for organizations in general and in particular, for nonprofits, foundations, similar types of organizations, how can people respond to immediate attacks on DEI that are affecting their workflow on a day-to-day basis?  What are some steps they should take right away, some midterm things that they should be looking towards in the next few months to years?

Taonga 
I do think in the near term we have to be, I think, very, very clear about where we are. And there is a, there is just a large legal threat, or primarily the kinds of programs that are doing any kind of racial or gender set aside or preference, those are going to be heavily scrutinized and probably legally questionable before, to be honest, if you know that the law firm cases I mentioned, it was really just waiting for a plaintiff to bring them, and it was a different era politically. But those cases are now being brought, and we have more than 100 federal cases out now on challenging DEI programs. So if your organization is doing anything like that, I would very strongly reconsider. There's a few loopholes. And if you, if it's really something that seems so important, perhaps see a lawyer and see if this is legally defensible. But I think in this legal and political climate, those are not something I would recommend. I think one thing that people should really look to is lived experience and experience-based hiring, and seeing that as a credential and value, and you know, to the extent that goes into hiring other inclusive practices on an individual basis like, what is this person bringing to the table? And how can we see that as a strength and also connecting it really to your mission? I also think that work tends to be deeper, because it really reflects in the ethos, right? Like, okay, got it, this person has this experience. The reason that we brought them in is because we know it connects to our outer mission. Those are now aligned. That's something that I think folks should explore right like, are we working in the specific videography? Are we working in this neighborhood? But we have nobody from that neighborhood on staff? Are we seeing that we keep failing X kind of client, and we don't know why those are things I would continue to look at. But I think another category of things is lowering barriers, generally, forms of DEI those will, I think, always be quite popular and also can be very effective. There was the conversation about unnecessary criminal background checks. Now those certainly affect people of color more, but they can affect everybody, and if it's really not something that's relevant to your workplace, taking down that barrier is something that can help everybody right, like it still has an equity lens, but it's a little bit, it's more structural, it's less, you know, focused on, okay, now we're just gonna provide this preference. I'm thinking about this as well with the lived experience article. Like, it is an important conversation, as long as we have selective, elite colleges. But there's also this broader question of, like, what about universal programs that would actually help people get what they want? Like, what if we had universal access to community college at least, so like that automatically has an equity lens, because people of all backgrounds are no longer concerned about that, right? So what the areas where we can think a little bit differently about just beyond expanding the pie, just getting rid of some of the barriers at all, like some, some colleges thought about this now, like getting rid of legacy. Do we need to charge tuition in some cases? And some get the colleges that really have it like that. I love that for them, there's, I think, a really big opportunity in this time to think universally about, okay, what do we want the workplace to be like for everybody, and I think that still has an equity lens, because some people face more barriers than other, but I think there's also have the chance for wider buy in, because I think, you know, there will probably always be some cap on, even if you know the most liberal moment of your life, there's always going To be some cap on, like, by the way, we're giving 20% of these seats to X person, right? Like, that's not the most compelling argument for a long-term solution, but we, you know, now, have opened this up. Now we have really full and equitable access to this for all people, so we can get out of this kind of crabs-in-a-barrel mindset. I think that's what I'd like to see long term. And I think for better or worse, this moment, you have to think creatively, like I think, if nothing else, I would tell people that we are at this moment because some of the things we were doing before did not work like they might have been well thought of and well envisioned, but they failed, right like and we have to know that. We have to adapt and Now's the chance to do so that the moment requires it.

Myles 
You mentioned up at the start of the call, something to the effect of noticing when you were younger, the difference between what the Constitution said and what you saw happening in front of you on a daily basis. For anyone who's hoping to continue walking down this path, continue to learn about these sorts of things, is there a book or a movie or a podcast, any piece of something that you recommend for someone who wants to learn more and maybe follow you in some of the steps that you took. 

Taonga 
One thing that I read that was just really instrumental for me and my journey currently was Just Mercy. It concerns the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama and his journey to becoming a civil rights lawyer, but he also includes lots of the cases that shaped him, people who did not have access to, you know, a lot of basic civil rights and he's built a wonderful organization that now brings them, I think it's just beautiful and very compelling. And others, there's a movie out which I haven't seen yet. The other book that I really love for folks who are at all interested in history, is The Second Founding and it's, you know, it's a little bit of a throwback, but it's a fascinating period of history, and people really did that in terms of. Transforming this country to go from, you know, enslaved populations of millions to having several formerly enslaved people in Congress. I found out the first governor of my state, Florida was actually in the 1870s, I was like, Oh, right. People have done this. From, like, pretty things looking extremely dicey, to say the least 5 -10 years earlier, to, like, making very significant progress. And of course, it's, it's a back and forth. But I think looking at those things can be really grounding, like it's, this is not the first time that folks have engaged in these debates and struggles, and unfortunately, won't be the last either, but there's a lot to learn from the past.

Myles 
Taonga, where should people find you if they're looking to connect and read more of your work as it comes out? 

Taonga 
You can definitely find me at ACS, the Expert Forum. I publish in there, but also just find me on LinkedIn. Oh, and I should plug I do some advising for nonprofits and foundations, one to one. So if you look at Countercurrent, countercurrent.io that's my consulting firm, and folks who need a little guidance, feel free give me a shout.

Myles 
Taonga. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your experience and wisdom with us today. It was lovely to have you.

Taonga 
Thanks so much Myles.