This is kind of surreal. Don’t start that ticker yet, because this is not my talk. Before I became a filmmaker, I was in advertising, and I used to work for Tankeray. Tankeray was one of the sponsors of Dan Pilata’s AIDS Rides. The reason I became a filmmaker is that I was hired to make the three first fundraising documentaries for the AIDS rides, and I realized I could no longer sell liquor to children in various things. Anyway, Cheryl, if you’re here at some point, I have a very different take on why Dan Pilata’s organization collapsed. That’s another huddle. Anyway, so I guess I kind of have to make the case for why I’m here, why is a filmmaker here? And I looked at the list of attendees, and everybody has organizations, and they have missions and all these things, and I feel really kind of out of place, because I don’t have a constituency, I don’t have an organization, I work in a basement with an assistant. But I do have the same interest in all of you, is that I have ideas that I’m really interested in, things I really care about that I’m trying to communicate to the largest group audience possible. And how I got to the Whiteness Project is interesting, because when I left selling Tankeray, about 18 years ago there was a man named James Burr Jr. who was murdered in Jasper, Texas. He was chained to the back of a truck and dragged down the road till his body disintegrated. And I flew down there and I wanted to make a film about it, and I drove down the road where he had been dragged, and I came to where they found his body, and you could see the outline still on the ground because he had bled so much. And it fundamentally transformed my experiences. It shook me to the core, and I felt like if I can make something that can communicate what I’m feeling here to a large group of people, it will have some sort of value. Now that started a journey that has now lasted 18 years. I have a black producing partner, Marco Williams. We’ve made almost a dozen films on somehow related to race, racial issues over the last 18 years, mostly for PBS, other networks, things that have been shown at different around the world. And that led me to a talk. We were one day, we were invited to be the keynote speakers at an organization called Facing History and Ourselves. We’ve done a lot of work with them with our films, and they set it up by having us being interviewed by these middle schoolers. And this middle school girl turned to me and she said, Whitney, what did you learn about your ethnic, your racial identity working with Marco? I had a very weird experience where I realized at that moment, I was like, well, I don’t really have a racial identity. You know, I’m Whitney Dow. I’m sort of fighting for truth and justice on these issues. I’ve worked so much. And I realized that despite all my work in the racial arena, working with Marco on these things, I fundamentally had never understood how that my race was an active dynamic component of every moment, of every day, of any, every interaction I had, and that I had the most powerful racial identity in America. I’m a white male. And I had the same concept. I said, well, how can I take that experience and give that to other people? I wanted other people to have that same experience. I thought I’d be doing something of value. So I set out what I do. I’m a filmmaker and I started to make a film. I started filming people and going to where they were selling, having baked sales where they gave, they have baked goods to white people for more than black people on college campuses and interviewing people. And a couple of things happened to me. I started to feel that narrative was not working for me. It was getting in the way of the conceptual ideas because I would have to edit and essentially a film is an organization of my understanding of an idea I’ve investigated. And so after numerous starts, I said, well, as the internet started to take off, I said, can I approach it differently? And I started to think about how do I take narrative and turn it into an interactive space, taking the same things I learned as a filmmaker and put them into something that’s fundamentally different. Now, after a number of years, and you can imagine the project was originally called for whites only, I had a tough time getting it funded. And I ultimately came around and I worked on this project and finally POV, PBS, gave me this small grant to do a pilot project. I sat down with this great designer and programmer that I’ve been working with a long time and we came up with some ideas that had to create. So October of 2014, I launched this. And what this is, it’s right now, it’s a website and we launched it and nobody looked at it. And I don’t have all the fancy graphics that Anastasia has, but I went to coffee actually with Ross in the room, still he’s the other filmmaker. I went to coffee with Ross and I came back because this filmmaker is going to be talking tomorrow and I was bitching about how this wasn’t working and I got home and 40,000 people had been on the site in about an hour. And it just started building and building and when the next few weeks, the videos were watched over a million and a half times, they’d been shared on Facebook close to 40,000 times. In the next couple of months, about 300 articles are written about it. I was on the morning shows. Every country in the world except for Syria has been across the site and it’s very strange. It completely transformed my thought process about narrative. How do you create effective narrative? How do you create narrative that people can interact with and can people can take what your ideas, the things that you care about and tell a story that actually has value to them and they can really connect with? And that’s what I’m going to be talking about downstairs. You’re going to find out whether he really thinks he owes black people anything because slavery happened, but you’re going to find other things. And I also want to talk about the idea between internal functionality and external functionality because I’ve had this very transformation of how I think about I want to stop making things but I’m really concerned about how the things that I make function in the world. And so I hope you’ll join me. I’ll be showing some stuff, talking about it and I look forward to seeing you. Thank you.