00:00I decided, something inside me decided that I needed to figure out the way to dismantle the types of systems that literally destroy, decimate, and eventually kill our people.
00:18So, I was young, I was 16 years old, and deeply impacted by the community that I was being raised in, in Los Angeles.
00:26I, you know, LAPD was circling the block often, helicopter policing, lots of surveillance, and it, and when I talk about it, it seems hyperbolic, but it wasn't.
00:38It was real-time trauma on a daily basis, and by the time the incident happened with my brother, that sort of was the tipping point for me.
00:48For the first time I ever, ever remember the idea that you could do something larger, advocate for something bigger, was the very first time she took me to a U2 concert.
01:01I went to a U2 concert, it was for Amnesty International.
01:05I was like, what's Amnesty International?
01:06Like, there's groups of people that help each other, that I remember just putting that into, together in my head, thinking like, wow.
01:13And I don't really think that I put the, like, NAACP, it was so sad in our family that I didn't really know what it was,
01:20but there was something about the Amnesty International, and the concert, and the music, and all of it that made me think, wow, art and activism can come together in a powerful way.
01:29It made me feel something in that moment.
01:31So for a while, I thought I was going to be a rock star.
01:34That didn't work out.
01:35You are a rock star.
01:36She's a rock star.
01:37Right, right, right.
01:39But, yeah, that was my first example of any kind of activism, and it was linked to art.
01:44So I kind of think back as I unpack things and say maybe that was an important moment.
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