For me, curiosity begins with a question that eats you up. A little over six years ago, I was the senior director of programs and advocacy at GLAAD. The game led me in alliance against defamation. Shortly after my niece Camden was born, I went to visit my brother and sister-in-law to do a little babysitting. And she is now adorable. I know, my cheeks. But then she was just a few months old. She didn’t do much beyond sleeping, which gave me a lot of time to work and catch up on daytime television. Sitting there as an uncle and not an activist, I quickly became horrified. Local news, the racial scare tactics, I looked down at my niece in fear. Daytime talk shows, black folks fighting, literally portrayed as undeserving of any empathy. All while corporations cashed in, I looked down at my niece, I looked down at her, and I was angry. National news, social conditions in this country all blamed on black people in some way. Events involving people of color reported with no perspective or analysis whatsoever. Stories where black people were implicated but had no real voice. I looked down at my niece with growing anxiety. Question one, what world was she crawling into? A world where no one is accountable. I’ve always known or I’ve known since I’ve been doing this work that the research is clear about these images. They affect how doctors, teachers, judges, employers, the police, how everyone treats us. Even how we think about ourselves as black people. Given my time at GLAAD, I just knew this also to be true intuitively. And television was just a trigger for my questions. I thought about how people are doing things in Washington and on Wall Street. They are going to have a huge impact on my niece’s life. But none of those people have to care about her. No one is nervous about disappointing her. Question two, who is going to do something to make them accountable? At GLAAD, we were part of changing the landscape of accountability for LGBTQ people. Not just in terms of representation, but in terms of all the progress that changing norms and attitudes can make possible. What laws get passed? Who gets hired? How doctors and teachers and corporations treat people? How neighbors treat neighbors? Looking at my beautiful niece, this beautiful black child, and feeling the lack of black power, the lack of leverage and accountability, it became personal to me in a whole new way. Question three, the one that ate me up, what am I doing if I’m not doing this? It’s the question with the eye in it, at least for me, that really eats you up. The curiosity that motivates, that leads to action. It led me to a color of change, to become executive director and help build a new movement to effectively respond and help black people respond to the injustices in the world around us. And then the strategic question. Not the question that comes from an analysis of where we are right now, but the questions that come from looking at how we got here and realize it, we have to do more. How can I help build a country with possibilities for black people and for our success open up every day rather than close for all people of color? Right now people have a lot of questions, especially after the selection. I need to do something. What can I do that matters? How can I translate this pain into power? It’s a constant challenge for all of us who create platforms for action to help make powerful political lives possible. Our true purpose at color change is creating an incredible, viable set of strategies that will transform our presence into power. That is the question that guides us. How to convert our presence in society into our power to change it. It’s what we’re endlessly curious about every day. The presence that our issues have or we have as people does not translate into our power to people right now. That is, it does not translate into the leverage required to make the change we all need. We have to do more. And so often we mistake our presence in the world. The symbolism of a pop star that can stop the internet when she announced that she’s pregnant. The symbolism of a black president. We can mistake that president for the presence for power. And so many questions have driven us forward once we look at this central question. For instance, we all know we live in an integrated world. People don’t experience so-called issues they experience life. It is interconnectedness. So the question is, are we looking at life in the right way to understand how to intervene and deconstruct all the connections among all the experiences that together keep racism going. Racist policing requires racist media to keep going. So is our strategy on ending police violence and the abuse of the bail system to mass incarceration? Is it working to change the media at the level we need to? I’m glad to say that that’s what we’re working on now. Through our not-to-be-trusted work with local news stations to hold them to standards of accuracy in their reporting around crime, or through our work in Hollywood to take on the crime procedures that show police as infallible, and that paradoxically show the most vulnerable people in our society as a threat, as the problem rather than the solution. It’s like our media culture in general, which shows poverty as being caused in an almost laughable way to say out loud, but caused by poor people. Rather than showing the truth that poverty is created and sustained by wealthy, by the wealthy, by people in power. So I’ve got some questions that we run through and that we think about. What makes a target tech? The folks that we want to do things, the decision makers that we want to move. What makes a target tech? ALEC in this case, where curiosity expressed through research, got us to new answers to break through. The answers and understanding that 98% of ALEC’s money came from corporations. Corporations who every single day came to black folks to say buy our products or use our services while at the same time supporting things like stand your ground and voter ID. We could cut off ALEC’s funding by being curious about the research we needed and asking the right questions about how ALEC did its work. We could get to the right answers and make real change. What motivates people? This past election cycle, we engage really deeply in district attorney races. We not only engage with our partners on the ground in places like Chicago and Houston and Orlando, but we also tested. We tested the myth that issues don’t motivate people at the local level. That you just need to pressure people into voting and it really doesn’t matter what candidates you put up. We proved that wrong and shown that black people will turn out for local elections if the candidates actually speak to their issues, have a track record and a platform that speaks to them. And in the process, we can change our communities, but if we ask the right questions, more broadly, how can we leverage district attorneys to take our country back? Understanding where power exists in the system, even if it’s not the most apparent places, and get the answers that we need. There are so many fights of our time, but the freedom fight of our time, I believe, at this point, is voting. It’s what’s really going on in our democracy right now, and clearly leads to the realization that we’ve been missing the core strategy of the right to make less people able to vote and therefore able to vote than out. We cannot win if we cannot vote, and they know that they cannot win if we can. All of their strategies line up around that simple principle and unfortunately our strategies don’t. And what is the central question for the opposition? Everyone is obsessed with narrative. What the narrative should be. But the brand we need to build, the way to become not just the voice of the dissent, but actually the preferred alternative, the choice for new leadership in people’s minds, will be built on actions, not words. This past election cycle, we ran up against a big budget Hollywood movie. How many people voted for those movies in the summertime? They make a lot of money, so I know people in this industry that it’s okay. It’s okay. I’m not going to play pretty sad at this point. So that big budget Hollywood movie with all the plot twists, with all the explosions, you walk out and you know that a lot of those plot twists probably couldn’t happen in real life. But you really don’t want to sit and have dicks with the person that debates every single piece of those plot twists. That’s what we ran up against. And we were the documentary on our side. And I like documentaries. But the challenge with the documentary is that if one fact or two facts are off, we throw the whole thing out because it violates the genre. So we cannot just be a brand of our words. We have to be a brand of our actions. That picture there to me when my hat store is having a sale. We just can’t say that we are cool. We have to be cool. We can’t just say that we care about working class people. We have to show up to Thanksgiving dinner with Walmart workers and hear people’s concerns. We have to have candidates that are willing to give back campaign donations to polluters or people who fire pregnant women for being pregnant in the workplace. We have to be not just about words, but about action. All of these questions led me to the same conclusion. That I am here to change the rules. Both the written and unwritten rules that govern our society. Rules that draw the line between what’s okay and what’s not okay. Color of change started 11 years ago in the aftermath of a flood caused by bad decision makers. That turned into a life altering disaster by bad decision makers, Perikin, Katrina. Black folks were literally on their roofs demanding the government do something and they were left to die. And while it illustrated everything we know about generational poverty, geographic segregation, the impacts of climate change, and criminal justice at the heart of it, no one was nervous about disappointing the people. Donald Trump is also changing the rules. And it’s dangerous. He wasn’t just a change candidate like President Obama, George W. Bush, or Bill Clinton. He’s a change the rules candidate. Which means that no morality is higher than taking down the rules, the status quo at any cost. That is what I believe progressives are missing as we develop our response to him. We are in many ways on the roof hoping someone shows up. And at some point hoping that institutions are nervous about disappointing us. And as we move forward with lots of questions, we must also move forward with conviction. And the one thing that’s always been a conviction for me, beyond any point of curiosity, it’s that when oppressed people win, we win for everyone. Everybody’s wins when racism gets weaker, when we change the rules that keep it going. When feminists win victories, they just don’t open up new opportunities for little girls to dream bigger dreams, but they make it possible for little boys to dream bigger dreams as well. And for our questions and our moments of curiosity to lead us back to back, no matter what we work on, is how we become part of the whole that allows us to take our country back. Thank you all very much.