The trauma of systematic racism is killing Black women. A first step toward change...

137,688 views ・ 2017-06-12

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00:14
Vanessa Garrison: I am Vanessa,
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daughter of Annette,
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daughter of Olympia,
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daughter of Melvina,
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daughter of Katie, born 1878,
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Parish County, Louisiana.
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T. Morgan Dixon: And my name is Morgan,
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daughter of Carol, daughter of Letha, daughter of Willie,
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daughter of Sarah, born 1849 in Bardstown, Kentucky.
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VG: And in the tradition of our families,
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the great oral tradition of almost every Black church we know
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honoring the culture from which we draw so much power,
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we're gonna start the way our mommas and grandmas would want us to start.
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TMD: In prayer. Let the words of my mouth,
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the meditation of our hearts, be acceptable in thy sight,
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oh Lord, my strength and my redeemer.
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VG: We call the names and rituals of our ancestors into this room today
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because from them we received a powerful blueprint for survival,
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strategies and tactics for healing carried across oceans by African women,
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passed down to generations of Black women in America
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who used those skills to navigate institutions of slavery
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and state-sponsored discrimination
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in order that we might stand on this stage.
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We walk in the footsteps of those women,
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our foremothers, legends
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like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer,
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from whom we learned the power of organizing
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after she would had single-handedly registered
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60,000 voters in Jim Crow Mississippi.
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TMD: 60,000 is a lot of people, so if you can imagine
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me and Vanessa inspiring 60,000 women to walk with us last year,
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we were fired up.
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But today, 100,000 Black women and girls stand on this stage with us.
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We are committed to healing ourselves,
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to lacing up our sneakers, to walking out of our front door
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every single day for total healing and transformation in our communities,
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because we understand
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that we are in the footsteps of a civil rights legacy
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like no other time before,
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and that we are facing a health crisis like never ever before.
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And so we've had a lot of moments, great moments,
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including the time we had on our pajamas, we were working on our computer
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and Michelle Obama emailed us and invited us to the White House,
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and we thought it was spam.
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But this moment here is an opportunity.
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It is an opportunity that we don't take for granted,
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and so we thought long and hard about how we would use it.
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Would we talk to the women we hope to inspire,
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a million in the next year,
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or would we talk to you?
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We decided to talk to you,
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and to talk to you about a question that we get all the time,
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so that the millions of women who hopefully will watch this
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will never have to answer it again.
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It is: Why are Black women dying
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faster and at higher rates
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than any other group of people in America
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from preventable, obesity-related diseases?
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The question hurts me.
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I'm shaking a little bit.
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It feels value-laden.
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It hurts my body because the weight represents so much.
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But we're going to talk about it
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and invite you into an inside conversation today
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because it is necessary, and because we need you.
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VG: Each night, before the first day of school,
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my grandmother would sit me next to the stove
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and with expert precision use a hot comb to press my hair.
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My grandmother was legendary, big, loud.
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She filled up a room with laughter and oftentimes curse words.
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She cooked a mean peach cobbler,
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had 11 children, a house full of grandchildren,
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and like every Black woman I know,
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like most all women I know,
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she had prioritized the care of others over caring for herself.
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We measured her strength by her capacity to endure pain and suffering.
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We celebrated her for it, and our choice would prove to be deadly.
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One night after pressing my hair before the first day of eighth grade,
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my grandmother went to bed and never woke up,
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dead at 66 years old from a heart attack.
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By the time I would graduate college,
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I would lose two more beloved family members to chronic disease:
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my aunt Diane, dead at 55, my aunt Tricia, dead at 63.
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After living with these losses, the hole that they left,
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I decided to calculate the life expectancy of the women in my family.
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Staring back at me, the number 65.
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I knew I could not sit by
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and watch another woman I loved die an early death.
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TMD: So we don't usually put our business in the streets.
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Let's just put that out there.
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But I have to tell you the statistics.
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Black women are dying at alarming rates,
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and I used to be a classroom teacher,
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and I was at South Atlanta High School,
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and I remember standing in front of my classroom,
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and I remember a statistic that half of Black girls will get diabetes
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unless diet and levels of activity change.
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Half of the girls in my classroom. So I couldn't teach anymore.
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So I started taking girls hiking, which is why we're called GirlTrek,
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but Vanessa was like,
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that is not going to move the dial on the health crisis; it's cute.
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She was like, it's a cute hiking club.
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So what we thought
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is if we could rally a million of their mothers ...
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82 percent of Black women are over a healthy weight right now.
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53 percent of us are obese.
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But the number that I cannot,
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that I cannot get out of my head
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is that every single day in America,
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137 Black women
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die from a preventable disease,
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heart disease.
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That's every 11 minutes.
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137 is more than gun violence,
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cigarette smoking and HIV combined,
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every day.
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It is roughly the amount of people
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that were on my plane from New Jersey to Vancouver.
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Can you imagine that?
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A plane filled with Black women crashing to the ground every day,
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and no one is talking about it.
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VG: So the question that you're all asking yourselves right now is why?
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Why are Black women dying? We asked ourselves that same question.
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Why is what's out there not working for them?
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Private weight loss companies, government interventions,
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public health campaigns.
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I'm going to tell you why:
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because they focus on weight loss
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or looking good in skinny jeans
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without acknowledging the trauma
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that Black women hold in our bellies and bones,
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that has been embedded in our very DNA.
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The best advice from hospitals and doctors,
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the best medications from pharmaceutical companies
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to treat the congestive heart failure of my grandmother didn't work
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because they didn't acknowledge the systemic racism
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that she had dealt with since birth.
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(Applause)
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A divestment in schools, discriminatory housing practices,
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predatory lending, a crack cocaine epidemic,
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mass incarceration putting more Black bodies behind bars
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than were owned at the height of slavery.
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But GirlTrek does.
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For Black women whose bodies are buckling under the weight
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of systems never designed to support them,
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GirlTrek is a lifeline.
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August 16, 2015, Danita Kimball, a member of GirlTrek in Detroit,
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received the news that too many Black mothers have received.
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Her son Norman, 23 years old, a father of two,
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was gunned down while on an afternoon drive.
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Imagine the grief
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that overcomes your body in that moment,
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the immobilizing fear.
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Now, know this, that just days after laying her son to rest,
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Danita Kimball posted online,
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"I don't know what to do or how to move forward,
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but my sisters keep telling me I need to walk, so I will."
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And then just days after that,
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"I got my steps in today for my baby Norm.
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It felt good to be out there, to walk."
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TMD: Walking through pain is what we have always done.
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My mom, she's in the middle right there,
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my mom desegregated her high school in 1955.
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Her mom walked down the steps of an abandoned school bus
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where she raised 11 kids as a sharecropper.
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And her mom stepped onto Indian territory
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fleeing the terrors of the Jim Crow South.
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And her mom walked her man to the door
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as he went off to fight in the Kentucky Colored Regiment,
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the Civil War.
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They were born slaves but they wouldn't die slaves.
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Change-making, it's in my blood.
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It's what I do,
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and this health crisis ain't nothing compared to the road we have traveled.
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(Applause)
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So it's like James Cleveland.
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I don't feel no ways tired, so we got to work.
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We started looking at models of change.
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We looked all over the world.
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We needed something
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not only that was a part of our cultural inheritance like walking,
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but something that was scalable, something that was high-impact,
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something that we could replicate across this country.
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So we studied models like Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize
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for inspiring women to plant 50 million trees in Kenya.
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She brought Kenya back from the brink of environmental devastation.
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We studied these systems of change, and we looked at walking scientifically.
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And what we learned is that walking just 30 minutes a day
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can single-handedly decrease 50 percent of your risk of diabetes,
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heart disease, stroke, even Alzheimer's and dementia.
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We know that walking is the single most powerful thing
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that a woman can do for her health,
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so we knew we were on to something,
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because from Harriet Tubman to the women in Montgomery,
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when Black women walk, things change.
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(Applause)
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VG: So how did we take this simple idea of walking
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and start a revolution that would catch a fire
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in neighborhoods across America?
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We used the best practices of the Civil Rights Movement.
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We huddled up in church basements.
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We did grapevine information sharing through beauty salons.
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We empowered and trained mothers to stand on the front lines.
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We took our message directly to the streets,
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and women responded.
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Women like LaKeisha in Chattanooga,
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Chrysantha in Detroit,
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Onika in New Orleans,
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women with difficult names and difficult stories
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join GirlTrek every day and commit to walking as a practice of self-care.
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Once walking, those women get to organizing,
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first their families, then their communities,
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to walk and talk and solve problems together.
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They walk and notice the abandoned building.
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They walk and notice the lack of sidewalks,
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the lack of green space,
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and they say, "No more."
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Women like Susie Paige in Philadelphia,
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who after walking daily past an abandoned building in her neighborhood,
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decided, "I'm not waiting.
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Let me rally my team. Let me grab some supplies.
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Let me do what no one else has done for me and my community."
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TMD: We know one woman can make a difference,
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because one woman has already changed the world,
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and her name is Harriet Tubman.
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And trust me, I love Harriet Tubman.
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I'm obsessed with her, and I used to be a history teacher.
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I will not tell you the whole history.
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I will tell you four things.
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So I used to have an old Saab --
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the kind of canvas top that drips on your head when it rains --
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and I drove all the way down to the eastern shore of Maryland,
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and when I stepped on the dirt
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that Harriet Tubman made her first escape,
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I knew she was a woman just like we are
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and that we could do what she had done,
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and we learned four things from Harriet Tubman.
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The first one: do not wait.
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Walk right now in the direction of your healthiest, most fulfilled life,
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because self-care is a revolutionary act.
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Number two:
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when you learn the way forward, come back and get a sister.
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So in our case, start a team with your friends --
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your friends, your family, your church.
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Number three:
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rally your allies.
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Every single person in this room
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is complicit in a Tubman-inspired takeover.
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And number four:
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find joy.
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The most underreported fact of Harriet Tubman
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is that she lived to be 93 years old,
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and she didn't live just an ordinary life; uh-uh.
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She was standing up for the good guys. She married a younger man.
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She adopted a child. I'm not kidding. She lived.
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And I drove up to her house of freedom in upstate New York,
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and she had planted apple trees,
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and when I was there on a Sunday, they were blooming.
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Do you call it -- do they bloom?
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The apples were in season,
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and I was thinking, she left fruit for us,
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the legacy of Harriet Tubman, every single year.
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And we know that we are Harriet,
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and we know that there is a Harriet in every community in America.
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VG: We also know that there's a Harriet in every community across the globe,
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and that they could learn from our Tubman Doctrine,
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as we call it, the four steps.
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Imagine the possibilities
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beyond the neighborhoods of Oakland and Newark,
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to the women working rice fields in Vietnam,
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tea fields in Sri Lanka,
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the women on the mountainsides in Guatemala,
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the indigenous reservations throughout the vast plains of the Dakotas.
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We believe that women walking
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and talking together to solve their problems
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is a global solution.
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TMD: And I'll leave you with this,
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because we also believe it can become the center of social justice again.
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Vanessa and I were in Fort Lauderdale.
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We had an organizer training,
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and I was leaving and I got on the airplane,
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and I saw someone I knew, so I waved,
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and as I'm waiting in that long line that you guys know,
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waiting for people to put their stuff away,
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I looked back and I realized I didn't know the woman but I recognized her.
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And so I blew her a kiss because it was Sybrina Fulton,
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Trayvon Martin's mom,
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and she whispered "thank you" back to me.
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And I can't help but wonder what would happen
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if there were groups of women walking on Trayvon's block that day,
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or what would happen in the South Side of Chicago every day
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if there were groups of women and mothers and aunts and cousins
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walking,
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or along the polluted rivers of Flint, Michigan.
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I believe that walking can transform our communities,
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because it's already starting to.
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VG: We believe that the personal is political.
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Our walking is for healing, for joy, for fresh air,
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quiet time, to connect and disconnect, to worship.
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But it's also walking so we can be healthy enough
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to stand on the front lines for change in our communities,
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and it is our call to action to every Black woman listening,
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every Black woman in earshot of our voice,
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every Black woman who you know.
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Think about it: the woman working front desk reception at your job,
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the woman who delivers your mail, your neighbor --
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our call to action to them, to join us on the front lines
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for change in your community.
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TMD: And I'll bring us back to this moment
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and why it's so important for my dear, dear friend Vanessa and I.
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It's because it's not always easy for us,
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and in fact, we have both seen really, really dark days,
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from the hate speech to the summer of police brutality and violence
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that we saw last year,
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to even losing one of our walkers,
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Sandy Bland, who died in police custody.
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But the most courageous thing we do every day is we practice faith
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that goes beyond the facts,
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and we put feet to our prayers every single day,
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and when we get overwhelmed,
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we think of the words of people like Sonia Sanchez, a poet laureate,
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who says, "Morgan, where is your fire?
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Where is the fire that burned holes through slave ships
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to make us breathe?
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Where is the fire that turned guts into chitlins,
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that took rhythms and make jazz,
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that took sit-ins and marches and made us jump boundaries and barriers?
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You've got to find it and pass it on."
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So this is us finding our fire and passing it on to you.
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So please, stand with us,
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walk with us as we rally a million women
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to reclaim the streets of the 50 highest need communities
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in this country.
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We thank you so much for this opportunity.
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(Applause)
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1920
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