Street Hustling as a Site of Resilience with Dr. Yasser Payne

This episode challenges pretty much everything we know and think about the concept of resilience. Dr. Payne explains how resilience is traditionally a value-laden construct that is seen as synonymous with “goodness” or “morality.” Dr. Payne makes the argument that resilience is simply action that serves to perpetuate an individuals survivability, and cites gun violence, drug dealing, pimping and other street hustles as examples of resilience. We discuss how Black oppression is a requirement for white wealth and how notions of resilience, particularly when used to describe marginalized communities, and capitalism are intrinsically tied. Listeners are encouraged to keep an open mind throughout the discussion as it turns most pre-existing definitions and beliefs about racial and social politics on their head.

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Transcript

Abbie: [00:00:00] Welcome to critical conversations. My name is Abbie Henson and I'll be the one conversing with our guests. And I also serve as an assistant professor in the school of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona state university. After the killing of George Floyd, my social media blew up. I kept seeing posts and reposts as stories, all about criminal and social justice issues.

However, much of what I was seeing were just flat words that lacked voice and depth and nuance. And so I wanted to create a space where those words could come alive. I wanted to engage in dialogues with people who had actually been impacted by the criminal justice system, whether through their own experience research or both, I felt this was the moment to think critically to examine the complexities of our system in place today.

And to figure out how to move forward in a way that allows for equity and true justice. So I started hosting live webinars, both in an attempt to have the audience be active participants either by raising their hand and joining the conversation, or by contributing a question to the chat box and to also build a sense of community and togetherness in a time when we were.

So isolated through quarantine. So all of the, so is that you're about to hear on this podcast are converted from those lives. And while it can be really overwhelming to think about how to change a map passive system, that seems so ingrained in the fabric of our society by participating in these conversations.

And yes. You just listening to this podcast is participating. That is where we see true change beginning. Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining me in this critical conversation with Dr. Yasser Arafat Payne and associate professor in the department of sociology and criminal justice at the university of Delaware.

Today's episode challenges, pretty much everything we think and know about the concept of resilience. Dr. Payne explains how resilience is traditionally a value Laden construct that is seen as synonymous with goodness or morality. Dr. Payne makes the argument that resilience is simply action that perpetuates an individual survivability and includes gun violence, drug dealing, pimping, and other street hustles as examples of resilience.

I encourage you to keep an open mind throughout this conversation and ask that you be willing to take in the complexities exposed throughout. Ultimately, I hope that you enjoy this episode feeling engaged and please as always continue the conversation. Once the episode is up. 

Yasser: [00:03:00] My name is Dr. Yasser Arafat Payne.

I'm on faculty, the department of sociology and criminal justice at the university of Delaware. I'm also on faculty in the department of Africana studies. I have a PhD in social psychology, very interested in the social psychology, particularly of street identified black populations, but how they think how they live their culture, right street culture, the context of their lives, structurally socially.

And also personally, a lot of my work also, you know, I'm a street photographer, so I'm immersed inside communities and our neighborhoods where you have a large concentration of men and women, boys, and girls in the streets. And I would say a lot of my work, a lot of it actually focuses around violence, particularly gun violence.

And my ultimate argument is that crime and or the streets and, or in this instance, gun violence, that is a site of resilience. 

Abbie: [00:03:55] So just to get. Some definitions. When you say the streets put us there, what does that look like? What does that mean? Who's involved 

Yasser: [00:04:07] for me, right? If I'm moving this analysis through their perspective, right?

There's a couple of things that I'm doing, but one of which is not only am I identifying their assumptions, their thoughts, their basic logic. In this instance around gun violence, but we're also drawing off of their language. Um, right. So if you really sit around with a bunch of guys who sell crack cocaine or who were part of the bloods or Crips, rarely do they use our labels, labels like deviancy, uh, or labels like delinquency.

You know, just, we have a whole bunch of labels that we use to categorize them, right. That are in other words, um, the language that we would use to describe them as opposed to the streets. So, so, so from my work, I asked them, what do you call yourselves? You don't understand yourself as, um, A criminal per se.

You know, they don't like that language, neither. They don't, they don't like sociopath. They don't, they don't like a lot of the language that I've used to describe them. Right. And for them they feel a fair description of their, of their, of their identity. Their social identity is the streets, right. And, or street life.

And, or as I often describe it, a street identity. So sites resiliency theory in essence is really a conceptual model that gets underneath a street identity from a sites of resiliency perspective, a street identity. Is resilience. We argue that right there. First of all, we argue striking them. I come from the field of psychology.

Resilience is huge as a topic. And it's with this construct of resilience that a lot of policies or regulations ultimately are born out of it. Right? So if I can argue that your group is non resilient, which most scholars liberal and conservative black, white, Brown, and otherwise argue that men and women, boys, and girls, the industries are not resilient.

Right. And resiliency literature evolves in the 1970s. Right? And they're making this argument that this group or groups are vulnerable and inherently non resilient. And as a consequence of them, of that, we have to regulate these populations or establish certain guidelines depending on what sector or what group we're talking about, right.

To, to control their attitudes and their behavior. So, as you might imagine, straight identified black population guys and women who may sell crack. For instance, they are deemed non resilient. They're in jail. When I graduated high school, marriage stability rates is another way to look at resilience, employment and all of that.

Right. So my guys are non resilient across the board. Well, our argument is right at the end of the day. And, and, and there's another burgeoning of literature in terms of this alternative argument. It just not me, but a bunch of younger folk are now arguing. There is no example of any organism, but definitely in this instance, a human population.

That will actively move against its own survivability. That's impossible. It's like a law of nature, right? Even if a person smokes crack cocaine over another of a person puts themselves in quote-unquote risky behavior of a person who even is suicidal in that person's mind. Rightly or wrongly good or bad.

Those are all relative constructs, which we also chucked as well. And that person is mine. That is the way to enhance their survivability. All organisms are moving to improve their standing, um, in whatever environment or context that the existing, including the crack cocaine dealer. So really quickly to answer your question.

What is the streets? The streets is an ideology. It's a value system. It's a belief system. It's a worldview. It's not, it's not random, neither my life, like a lot of the earlier creme our literature, but also a lot of people are writing about these populations in other fields, sues psychology, sociology, anthropology, right.

And they're writing about these folk is usually younger. And we don't have their bearings and a lot of it, their behavior and our attitudes are random. Right. And they're just in, and then we have this argument. Well, when they get older age out, wow. That's deep. Keep in mind. I really come from the streets.

Right. And that's saying that as a badge of honor, but I really, the fact that I'm here to tell you professor getting ready to go from full. I mean, I look at my I'm like, Oh my God, right? I come from Harlem. I come from one of. The toughest that's most established street families. My mother and my father street, my mother would have you killed.

Right. My parents have passed away so I can share a little bit more these days. Um, my brothers, I mean the, where I grew up at, I mean the rappers, I mean, even then, and now when I go back home, it's, it's, there's a certain right. So I come from that reality, right. I come from a very violent background. And I'm only sharing all of that because I never met a person in this lifestyle, my family, my friends, or otherwise that met their definition in the literature, like their conceptualization of street life.

You know, nothing. It wasn't random. It was intergenerational. You had older folks. That's why my dissertation, a lot of my work is intergenerational. It's responding to the critique because when I started out, I mean, I got my PhD in early two thousands. I got my PhD in 2005 and postdoc in 2006. Right. So then it was being argued that older people as you age, that, that, that didn't exist.

I was kind of making it up. Like, why aren't you doing, you know, at that time, I wasn't talking about my parents and all that. I was just like, what are you talking about? So my first, my dissertation and my project there, there, I look at three or four generations from 16 to two, two, I think the latest study.

Now we can go up to 54. We look at four generations of folk in the streets. We have a survey sample of 800 people because we're making the argument. There's nothing random about any of this. These are people that are extremely poor. Right. And, and for right or for wrong, you have a slice of the community, particularly those who live in impoverished conditions that have identified a social identity.

We all have social identities. The social identity is what is what materializes our resilience in this instance is a street identity. And then with an extra day, the need, there becomes an ideology instead of rules, values, or perspective set of priorities. Right. That gets passed on from one street generation to the next and all.

And I'm looking at these, these, these popular or established social scientists who study crime, whether you're a photographer or not. They lack that kind of complexity that I was actually living. I'm really running around as a PhD student in the streets studying under myself. Fine. Go to class or making a phone call.

Hey, we need those guns now. So this is my life. I don't even know how I graduated. I mean, all of it, two guy at the end of the day, I got saved as an old man. I got it. I don't know what saved me because my friends and my family, right. I mean, I did work hard and I did do all of that. But my point is I always had one foot in that world and I still, you know where I'm from.

From, from in New York, you get caught with a gun that's five years, the first charge. That's the first charge. Now at Wilmington Delaware, everybody walks around with a gun. You don't even need a license or permit, you know, it's the easiest state to purchase a gun. Everybody's like, Oh my God. I mean, former felons to the white guy lives in a really nice house.

You go to Dunkin donuts. Everybody got a gun on him. I mean, I'm not, I don't mean to exaggerate, but buying guns here is a different reality than where I'm from. And I know, so my point is I never got tripped up in ways that hampered me professionally, but I know now I'm in. I'm a, I'm an academic. I really like it.

I want to do this thing around the streets and now I really want to get into it. I need this thing. I'm close to identity. History. Identity is resilience. It's an ideology. It's a value system. It's a code. That code is, is passed on from generation to generation, sometimes passed on from peer to peer and sometimes need pass it on from younger generation to older generation.

But code is, is operationalized more so within the primary hustles. Right. Again, the complexity that just missing all in the literature, right? So the streets are organized around hustles. They're not a random bunch of guys just running all over the place. Now, younger guys can be more random like street youth, like those coming in the game, 11, 12, 13.

Right. But they are under people for the most part. And there are finding their way. Right. But when they age late teens, early twenties, they will identify a bread and butter hustle. They will identify their primary hustle, whether it's pimping, whether it's armed robbery, whether it's selling guns, whether it was crack cocaine, can't do it all.

You got to do one thing really well. And maybe you dibble and dabble elsewhere to get your money, but you gotta do one thing really well. It's like an academic. We don't, we don't have PhDs in all disciplines. We have a PhD in what we do, even though we're tangibly, we're connected to history, to psychology, to wherever.

Right. And it's the same thing in the streets. Right. And once you hone your craft, Do you have an overarching, we have an overarching set of rules for street life. What I often referred to in theory, as a generalized code, but then you have localized ideologies, which manifest in smaller neighborhoods. So you can have streetlights black America, right.

But then you have street life, Wilmington, Delaware. That's more localized. So I talk about general life versus localized. Street ideologies or values or codes that's this is how deep and complicated it gets for a guy that's running around in the streets. That's to the outside of, they don't see all of that.

They see a guy that's struggling and who, and for him to survive for him to be resilient in that moment for him to not get knocked off, he has to be aware like this. But this is how streets of Harlem. This is our oldest. She's actually organized. And I kept saying to myself, why all the scholars writing about this?

Okay, well, why did, at the very least the street ethnography is writing about this. Okay. Well, and say they're from the streets writing about this. And this is what motivated me. I said, okay, cool. Right. So, so, so you got this ideology and this ideology manifest through the primary hustles or primary hustles, right?

Because crack cocaine dealer, he organizes his life in a certain way, a way he sells crack, how he sells crack the art of selling crack. And then as a consequence, there are rules and principles that guide that particular lifestyle in the streets, which is different than a PEM. Then those sell crack, you know, has to do what he has to do and he's in the streets, but right.

So we have like these, you have, you have, you have like these different planets, if you will, in the galaxy of the street. The other thing is this. We talk a lot about space, physical space as a, well, the guys going to work as phenomenological. So you have the ideology, but the ideology is tied to physical space.

But it's not an ideology in the abstract 

Abbie: [00:15:16] a lot to unpack here.

Yasser: [00:15:21] So, 

Abbie: [00:15:22] all right. First of all, I think everything you're saying is so valid, but is so dramatically different. Then the ways that so many see the world and define resilience. And I think there's going to be some pushback, which I'm sure you've experienced on this. And I think what's important. Is that we put, and I'm curious, I'm going to say something and I'm curious how you would respond.

We put a value system on the idea of resilience, right? We view resilience as good as, as moral as all of these things, when really what resilience is, is what you're saying. It's a. Uh, an attitude and a behavior to perpetuate your survivability, right? Like we need to remove the value system away from resilience because when we have a value system on resilience, that's where we then demonize those who we don't view as quote, unquote good in my research.

And I just wrote a paper on this and. So Yasser was on my dissertation committee and much of his theory guided my work and continues to guide my work. And so what I've found in my interviews with young black fathers living in a particularly high crime, highly surveilled community by police, those who were in the streets.

Expressed how they didn't necessarily want to be in the streets, but, and if they had the opportunity to be in the mainstream, they would, but because of the intersection of their race, their gender, and for many their criminal background, it was incredibly difficult. To break into the mainstream workforce.

And so rather than just sit back and do nothing, they took it upon themselves to hustle. And whether that was legally by cutting grass or illegally by selling drugs, whatever they did, it was for the purpose of supporting their family. And they knew it was dangerous. And they knew they were putting their family in danger and they didn't necessarily want to do that, but they felt like they needed to make this a agentic action to choose, to resist the employer discrimination and systemic racism.

And. Act in a way that they could then support themselves and their families. And so when you talk about this ideology, do you think that it's that different? Like, I think what's an important distinction and maybe it's not a distinction at all, but. When you're saying that it's, it's kind of passed from generation to generation.

Is this ideology, is there an underlying desire to not be in the streets or is, is it just accepted at a young age that this is my path. And I'm curious, at what point does the main stream become unattainable or undesirable? 

Yasser: [00:18:48] Yeah. Yeah. This is a man powerful question. So the best way for me to answer, right?

So critical race theory is one of them about spot on theories that we have to explain what's going on. Um, in terms of crime and the black community in the 21st century, Derek bell. He got this one, he knocked around with the ballpark too. So Derek bell helps us understand, like, so in my recent training with one of my teams, right, we were going over critical race theory.

We're going over Derek bell. I'm showing him the cover, his books. And we're talking about critical race theory, but I'm also showing them and underscoring the point that the racism is permanent field. Right? So the team by my team in Brooklyn, which are heavily bloods, um, for what it's worth, they looked at, they looked at the PowerPoint slide.

And they were like, for real, like, this is permanently. Your poverty inequality. This is also intergenerational. In fact, there's never been a time in American history where it didn't look the way that it looks like right now for black folks, our schools jobs for the men criminal justice system. The first instance of the hyper incarceration of black men outside of slavery is 1868 with a convict lease system.

When we started with the vagrancy laws, right. And one generation after the next we found after the next, we found one way, another way to. To, to constrain to right. To keep, to keep this group out of opportunity, critical race theorists like Michelle on Zander, their bell, like she said, Michelle Xander says, right, we have a racial cast system.

I'm gonna just say it out flat. We are a bottom cast. Black Americans descended the slave South in particular. So not black folk from Ghana, not Caribbean immigrants, right? Those are all of our brothers and sisters too, but they're only about seven, 8 million of them first and second generation black Americans.

Instead of the slave South, we are the bottom cast in this capitalistic system where the folk realized our economy with Gilmore also argues this a lot of homework, the poverty is required to quote her. The idea that you and I and others like us can have our nice professional positions and jobs and in our homes and all of that without millions of black folks, somewhere suffering.

That that is the idea that you can, that idea that you can have this kind of experience with privilege without millions of people suffering is naive. You cannot have one. Without the other, which is my other beef, particularly with the liberal scholars, particularly with the ones who are street prefers and from the streets and the community, whatever it is, they know this, this is how we talk inside the communities.

So white wealth is heavily depended on black poverty isn't habit without black poverty, somebody has to be the economic outgroup. And that's our job. That's what local Kwant writes in one of his papers that I use in my class in 2001. And he does for a period of time period, uh, analysis, where he starts in slavery and he moves up to the contemporary mass incarceration.

You cannot have one without the other. So when I hear analysis or arguments, when I hear that, that, that, that, that lack, this fundamental understanding, then I realized, Oh, okay. I realize what room I'm in. Right? So even that person is being deceptive. Or they're being manipulative and it might be both.

Right. But they don't realize. Right. So, so, so, so these guys, right. So I often give this talk in my, um, some of my speeches, right? I told about my friend little Wayne, right? Not the rapper. I really had a friend called little Wayne. We grew up together. We called him little Wayne. Right? Cause there was big Wayne there's no, they were not related.

Right. But a little way. My friend in Harlem, they both, his parents were strung out on heroin. And at that time, the 1980s and a lot of people say crack, crack, crack, but growing up as a child in the eighties, I didn't see crap. I saw a bunch of heroin or what we call Delphine's that's pejorative language, or we refer to them that way at that time.

Um, but heroin addicts everywhere. And then there, you had unclean syringes. And so you have people with swollen arms and slowly legs. And they were here even in downtown Harlem. So downtown Harlem was good. It wasn't like now. And that was all right. So in every place in Harlem was rough. Right. And my little, my friend's little way, but his parents were both heroin addicts and they both were leaning and nod.

And then they have big arms and big legs. And even as little kids, right. Because we didn't, this is how we make, we would make fun of his parents. Look at you. You're your mom. Look at the father. I didn't realize what I was doing and what we were doing at that time. We were little kids, but as I got older, I'm like, Oh my God.

Right. But my point is I bring a little Wayne and I show that story in my speeches. And now in this podcast, because I always then ask the question. At what point did little Wayne have a chance? Because when I'm around my liberal friends, they said he got no resilience and personal responsibility and accountability.

Okay. Well, Wayne probably dropped out of school by the time he was in fifth to sixth grade, nobody ever made him go. Wayne was selling crack. By the time he was 12 years old, he had a young grandmother, she had to be in her forties and she had other kids to take care of. Wayne always had to take care of themselves.

So what was he supposed to get it? Right? Feed himself, close himself, go to school, make sure to get back home, do homework. When are we expecting children to be able to do all of that by the time they're in seventh or eighth or ninth or 10th grade? When was he supposed to figure this out? Right. So when he now wanting to do a whole bunch of time in the Georgia prison, but my point is when he, when the little Wayne's of the world inevitably failed because of structural violence.

Because this community was structurally sabotage because he never had a chink. In fact, in fact, in fact, right, every generation, the powers that be, make sure that are more little wanes in the world. Right. So my point is, I don't know anybody that works and the science says this too. Then poor people, they save more money per capita.

They work longer hours. They work harder. Right. But it wouldn't matter how hard they work from the economic models they're in. Right. Meaning what meaning does the financial models meaning it wouldn't matter how hard they worked. It's a statistical impossibility to break themselves through sheer hard work out of this massive poverty.

Three quarters, three quarters, three quarters of black America lives at or near the poverty line. White America owns 90% of the wealth. The average black family in Boston has $8 liquid in Miami. They have $11 liquid. The average white family in Boston has so much in 40,000 

Abbie: [00:25:30] liquid. So what would you say then to people who would challenge you, even people from the black community who would challenge you and say, well, I grew up poor and I got out and you grew up in the streets and you got out.

So where's the distinction there. 

Yasser: [00:25:49] When a statistical anomaly, most black America, 50 to 60% of black Americans. I have $0 in wealth. I wish I was making that up. Zero dash $0 in wealth, over half of my community. Right. That means these are I sit around black professionals, particularly if they're poor black folk in the room, or even if they're not giving up their white folk in the room, we are a statistical anomaly.

Would you, the black folk you see on CNN, the black folk you see at the university, including the college students, we are by no stretch of the imagination, representative of the typical black experience at all. Neither. Those folks that you interviewed for your dissertation? They are far more representative of most black people in this country than somebody like me.

Right? Keep in mind, keep in mind, keep in mind at my university black faculty accounts for 4% of all faculty, black students account for 4% of all students. Right. And I always get these interviews from reporters and they're saying, we know why what's going on with the diversity in black and this, that, and the third, well, white wealth is born out of black poverty.

And I mean, literally, right. So what does that mean in terms of the university? Well, as I say, in my, in, in the news reporting accounts, as I say, I'm at the end of the day, a place like university of Delaware, like a lot of other PWS, they can not afford. To bring too many black faculty or too many black students at any one time, what would happen?

It would be the value would drop of the degree. When you're in any market, keep that in mind, any market. When I first bought my home, right, my welcome to work out my house. I live in a really nice neighborhood. This is a big deal for me, a big achievement for me, given where I've come from. Right. Nice back yard and just everything, man.

Wow. I was really happy. Right. And my realtor knew I was naive I'm first generation everything. And seeing that we were kind of queer. Cool. And she's like, she just put in my ear a little bit when you live in a mixed neighborhood, but it's mostly white people here. Now when your neighborhood becomes too black, when you're at that tipping point, usually somewhere between five and 10%, the value of your home is going to drop most people's wealth is tied to the home.

She says, this is true for any market, including the university. First of all, if too many black people started coming to UV. And I said this to my speeches, if so many black folks that are coming in UDS faculty or students, black parents would take their children out of the school. Right, because what they'll say well, um, even though you're right, I got to do what I have to do for my children.

That's that's the logic. That's what white liberals say about their children too. I got to do what I gotta do. It's wrong. It's unfair. But we got to do what we have to do, right? So it doesn't matter what the market is. You have to have a minimal amount of black Americans, too many black Americans, then you're going to inflate the value.

And, or the value is just going to drop. And Abbie, I promise you, I haven't found one university president or professor or Dean right there publishing what I say, even in the university newspapers. Right. And I haven't found anybody yet because I'm waiting for the person that says you're wrong. No, at the end of the, so my point is with regard to those black professionals, I would say they respectfully.

Like our naive, you can't use my example as a frame of re in fact, a lot of me and my guys who I worked with in the streets, right. They've done great things and gotten degrees, college degrees bachelor's and he's easily at the top, whatever in the streets. And now they've made such, such, such a beautiful transition.

Right. And, and one of the things, one of the questions we reject when we give public presentations during a Q and a, we always get asked that question. What if, you know, and we think that's a horrible way. To think about transformation. The problem is deeply. Structure, 

Abbie: [00:29:35] right. We, we force individuals to prove their resilience by somehow getting out of a racist structure that we won't change.

You have to change, right? You have to navigate this maze, this obstacle course that those empower have created. And then we applaud you if you somehow made it out. Right. 

Yasser: [00:30:02] And you're not going to make it out whole. I got to read that book, blacks and the white establishment. I think it's in his second or third edition.

It's a hell of a book swag and half and Dom hot two white Jewish scholars. And they look at all a bunch of black kids beginning of the 1960s. They interviewed them when they were adults, though, who become a part of the ABC program. They're taking kids out of these different hoes, Detroit Philly, Harlem, and they're putting them in these private schools, high schools, middle schools.

And then in these private colleges like Harvard, And by the time that these, these, these children become adults and professionals, they are mangled professionally persons. Socially, many of us are not married, no kids we're by ourselves. We have a material standing. We have, uh, we have, uh, we have a record.

We have meaning a professional record that looks outstanding. We're always going to have to work harder now to get half the credit if you're going to hell. So, so, so, so, so professionally man, some point, but at the end of the day, most of our people. Are not here. I'm the only tenured professor in my department.

I have a pretty big department, excuse me, only tenured black professor in my department. And I have a pretty big department. Right. That's normal actually for a tier one, you know, really good department in social and creme or psychology or any of the other departments too. Right. That's normal. Right. And, and again, uh, too many black faculty will inflate the value.

So they always keep it being vulnerable and it takes you a long time, right? Even for those black professionals who I would say naive. And I, and I'm saying that respectfully, it actually takes you a long time for you to put shit for you to wrap your head around. Because there's nobody I can go to, to offer me guidance or to talk me through this.

I don't have parents who are professors that can. You got to learn in real time, 

Abbie: [00:31:52] right? Yeah. I think something that I've been thinking a lot about and what I'm writing a new paper on is, so we're talking about what to invest in the community, uh, when we defund different racist structures. And so in the interviews with the men that I spoke to in my dissertation, one of the things that they spoke about repeatedly is yes, we need employment.

Yes. We need housing. Yes. We need access to clean food and water and all of these, his basic necessities. But the thing that they wanted most for their children were the things that we see in privileged communities. They wanted them to be able to network with people outside of the community. They wanted them to learn the violin or, you know, fencing or whatever it was that was.

What we would quote unquote, may be calling an elective rather than a requirement, because those electives are where you expand your mind. You gain opportunities, you touch people who are different than you, who you, your worldview expands. And so I think that's so important when we think about what to invest in is not just giving people the basic necessities.

It's giving people opportunities to. Expand and grow and then socially mobilized because of that again, with, with the value system of resilience. Someone might say that you were just a black professional is just more resilient than someone who's street oriented. And so that's where the value system comes in place.

And so I think the important thing to, to recognize when we talk about street oriented individuals and we label them as bad or criminal. We have to know that that, which is deemed criminal, that which is punishable is malleable and changes over time. These aren't necessarily inherently Lee immoral acts, but rather reflections of trending social narratives and the interest of those empower at the time when you are.

Thinking about resilience. And you just said before we started recording that you're framing your new work with gun violence as resilience. There are things that I would say are inherently immoral, right? Like killing or raping or these things that are tied to some hustles. And so how do you navigate.

Deeming those as sites 

Yasser: [00:34:41] of resilience. Yeah. Great question. Great question. I do get these questions a lot too. Um, and I think they're fair. I really do. So resilience underscore your point with regard to the morality that's inherent in the understanding of it, the assumption of resilience, right? So a lot of scholars, particularly early on in the resilience literature, I would say didn't realize, right?

Keep that in mind that the assumption of morality within their understanding of their, of resilience as a construct, they almost were understanding this construct as being objective and without realizing it. Now that's a certain kind of arrogance and professional aggregates, academic arrogance. Right.

But for them, resilience was an objective construct. Like. You know, how many people you killed as a variable in the study, or how many people did you shoot or how many times were you shot? Right. That's that can be a variable ended up itself. Right. So they were seeing it almost as one of the same, um, right.

Some probably weren't, but for the most part, at least that's, you know, I'm going to side on, on that. When that part of the argument. And, and, and what began to happen, particularly in my generation, in the early two thousands, you had a burgeon and probably a little earlier, but, but we were definitely, I would say, I would say the pendulum was definitely swinging by the early two thousands.

You had a younger set of scholars that began to understand it, not being an objective construct. This is, and then what they would write is this is a value Laden and you see that all over the literature, particularly with this new, proper resilience scholars, this is a value-laden construct. Meaning your understanding of resilience, your argument with resilience is just how you feel, even though you're passing it off as an objective construct.

If you, if you rate high on this resilience, if you score highly on this resilience measure, right? A higher score, positive, more positive attitudes, or more positive experiences of resilience. And then, then you would, the psychometrician or, or the scholar would see that as well. They just rated some of this objective way.

No, this is, this scale was based on this scholars, understanding or belief of resilience. And really, if you look at any of these resilience models, these are just models that scholars are putting out that is putting these models with just based on their own personal lives and many instances. I mean, I literally.

But I, I wish I was making that up. So if you're saying, in other words, if I only lived life like you, then I can be resilient. That is basically what your theory of resilience is. Argument is a value laid in construct for you. Resilience means good, but you wouldn't mean positive, but you would means all of these kinds of attributes and characteristics that are not necessarily scientific.

So for us, Resilience is not a value-laden construct sites of resilience, the way theory, the way we argue resilience. Right. If you're to be resilient, you don't have to be a good or a, it has nothing to do with any of that language good or bad, right. Or wrong, none of that right. And wrong, right. Yes.

Including, right. And even though this is part of my wrong, right. But even including killing someone or raping somebody, right. Crime is cultural in the 17 and 18 hundreds, you can kill somebody and do no jail time. That happened all the time. Matter of fact, we didn't really start locking folk up for long periods of time behind the homicide.

I mean, some could argue by the 1980s was really by 1994 crime bill, particularly with the three strikes short. But, but, but th the idea you can go away for life for killings. Now, now you can lose your life in the 17 hundreds for stealing that happened all the time. In fact, stealing was seen as so low, so immoral, so wrong.

And you could, you could really be killed or, or whipped or flagged or, right. So, so crime is cultural. You have more black men that are incarcerated in this country than all women in the world combined. Right? That's cultural. The idea that women are running around committing crimes, or the idea that mostly black men are committing them and white people.

Aren't right. So, so, so all of these things are cultural now for us. Resilience there there's a holistic conceptualization around it. Everyone's resilience is trapped in their social identity. Me as a professor, you as professor, this guy is a crack cocaine dealer, right? That is how your resilience is operationalized.

Your identity becomes a harbinger it's it's, it's how it's carried out and, and your social identity manifest out of your larger context. Right. So, so, so, so, so I never met a crack cocaine dealer that thought selling crack was good. Never met one yet. And I'm interviewed hundreds and I've surveyed thousands.

I never met someone who was killed. Someone who thought killing somebody was a good thing, right? This is how complex the psychology becomes. Right. But this complexity is not reflected in that theories. Right. So, so, so we learned a psychology early site attitudes are not predictive of behavior. So I'm always in my non-profits.

I'm always trying to tell them this. Like, you're trying to tell him to stop smoking cigarettes. You already know cigarettes is bad. It's that smoking crack. He knows no crack ain't bad. He trusts me to stop overeating. Well, they already know McDonald's is bad. Don't don't sell crack. Don't kill. No, no, that's bad.

What are you talking about? Good and bad. My guy asked me this too, in the training the other day. Good and bad. No, it's, it's very cultural. That is. I agree with you killing someone, me personally, killing someone and raping someone. It's abominable, but there are many people on this planet that have no problems with that, including in our religious communities 

Abbie: [00:40:15] as well.

Well, it's also, it's the context of the crime, right? Like we, when we think about doctors who, uh, black women in the medical community who are affected by the medical community, or when we think about those who. Corporate crime, right? People who are, you know, destroy white collar crime and destroying forests and pumping out ammonia into neighborhoods and making the water undrinkable and.

Thinking about police officers who justify their homicides, right. It's all within the context and cultural definitions of what we deemed criminal. And so I think again, right and wrong is. Often a racialized, uh, value system. Yeah. A taking the value system out of the concept of resilience is important.

And B understanding that the definitions of crime are malleable and what we deemed criminal is dependent on who is engaging in the act. And so I think when. You're talking about how these street crimes dealing drugs, engaging in gun gun violence are acts of resilience. I think an important point that you make.

That we haven't necessarily touched on is how, not only are they points of resilience, but that's operationalized as acts of resistance. Absolutely. So I, I think it would be helpful for you to unpack. What do you feel like these men and women are resisting against? 

Yasser: [00:42:08] They're resisting their poverty, they're resisting their demonization.

They're, they're, they're resisting how their communities are being sabotage. Now, a lot of this resistance, right? And Victor Rios writes about this and talks about this. Um, but a lot of their resistance is more in the short term. Right. Um, so these are not acts or strategies that will lead to some kind of long-term solution.

These are usually short-term solutions. So Victor Rios writes a lot about acts of resistance and how the youth, particularly in Oakland and his first study, how they did and how they would fight back police, how they would do certain things, even if they lost. So even if they got kicked out of school, even if right, what, what they, what they actually won in the moment, although in the short term was their dignity.

Right. And, and in a world where, where, where poor black and Brown children have great difficulty experiencing dignity, any instance of it, you will, you will, you will fight for, right. I think for those of us who experience a kind of general dignity, I'll tell you for granted in some sense, like, just to imagine as if you never felt someone respected you or listened to you.

So in my interviews, as I'm sure in your interviews, right? Some of these guys can talk. Forever like long and long and long and longer and longer same thing with the prison. And they spent a lot of time and they come out and some of these guys can be very quiet on the surface, but once you kind of get them warmed up and they kind of trust you, man, they can speak.

Right. And, and, and, and, and I said, in one of my trainings recently, we're going to experience that in a number of our interviews, let them go, let them speak, let them talk. But, but a lot of these guys were speaking like this. Because they never actually been around someone in their life. Um, at least from their perspective where they felt like they were really being 

Abbie: [00:43:53] yes, that was something.

Yeah, that was something that I heard numerous times in my interviews. And it actually, it became somewhat problematic where, or I guess, problematic to the sciences where these men started thinking of me and I had to kind of. You know, deal with it and navigate it and work through it with them. But they started thinking of me, even though I wasn't giving advice as their counselor, because this was the first time that they were being listened to and, and they would talk about their friends and how, you know, They could speak on some level, but it was, there was always distraction.

There were always people on their phones and things like that. This was the first time that they got undivided attention and genuine interest, genuine interest. And I think that is a quality that we need to figure out how to hone. For particularly qualitative researchers who are doing interviews, who are in the field to learn how to genuinely listen, because I think so often, and just in general, I think so often people are out of the present moment considering what am I going to say next?

How do I, what they make it about them? Right. How am I being seen right now? How can I seem smart? How can I seem. Interested, what can I say to validate rather than validating through silence and genuine interest. And so I think when you talk about respect and that was the thing that, Oh man, respect was like, well, you know, one of the number one codes in my analysis was talking about, especially when it came to their relationship with the police, they were like, If you respect me, I will respect you if this is a, an exchange, respect is an exchange, right?

And that's, that's an important note. And I think the way that you gain respect also is by familiarity. I think when we talk about street oriented individuals for so many who are not. Familiar with that. These are incredibly complex and difficult concepts to wrap their heads around. We love a black and white story.

Love categories. We love categories oriented or it's decent, right? It's it's, it's all of these dualisms that we want to ingest because they're easy. So we know that we are more complex than that. So why would we not expect others to be more complex 

Yasser: [00:46:49] than that? That's right. That's right. Um, man, um, you know, I just think at the end of the day, I think one of the best ways to get at this perspective that you're pointing out right.

In terms of the resiliency literature, right? So you have this area of the literature that describes itself as subjective wellbeing. This is a whole area. Now that is, that has exploded, you know, more or less any response to the traditional friends of resilience. So now that we know that resilience is not morality in it of self, now that we know at the end of the day resilience because of the nature of the construct, um, it's inherently a subjective construct, constructs like a steam self-concept at the end of the day, right?

Scholars are so used to. Determining if you are resilient or if you have high self-esteem like we get to, we get to say when that is and when that isn't right. So you have the subjective well-being literature that is responding and saying, if you really want to understand them from their perspective, how do they preserve dignity, how they're willing to even die for a degree that they can see how they is willing to rescue.

Right. Just imagine if no one listens to you before. Or you felt like in your whole life, nobody really listened or respected your opinion, your perspective. Right. And it's kind of hard for us to imagine that given what we do, but just imagine, right? Keep in mind approval. You learn psychology, developmental, psych approval is biological, personal familial, social, and professional levels of approval.

If you do not have these levels of approval, these four levels, you will experience some form of disequilibrium. Right? And we're talking about in this instance, black men from the streets who the hell is listening to them. But the subjective wellbeing literature is saying resilience esteem. Those kinds of concepts of constructs are now in the hands of the people being studied.

And that's what being truly phenomenological, um, is I think it will be difficult, is difficult for us to give up that power and or for us to give up our God's eye view. 

Abbie: [00:48:53] How do you ask how they define resilience and what are some of the common threads that you're hearing in their definitions? 

Yasser: [00:49:02] Right. So keep in mind, resilience is a word that we hear a lot in the black community.

This is why, one of the reasons why I gravitate it. Two it's so fast when I learned how many people study it in the field of psychology. Right? So when you grow up in a place like Harlem, I mean, virtually you hear a lot of things, but one of the things you hear is black folk are resilient people. That's a pretty common statement.

Abbie: [00:49:24] God, you've done so well with the trauma we've imposed on you.

Right.

Yasser: [00:49:35] That's deep. That's so deep. So what you hear that you hear that, and then I'll be honest with you ad it wasn't until I became a PhD student that I first learned that poor black people were not resilient. And so when I read the literature, when I began to hear particularly other black scholars write and speak about poor black people, that that really pissed me off.

Because most black folk, including black professionals are one generation out of poverty. Right. We got our first black middle-class in 1965. And, um, and again, 50 to 60% of all black folk today have $0 in wealth. Right? So when I began to year black folk describe poor black, black scholars got mad at me.

They're mad at me for, for, for, for willing, for being so willing to fail three identified folk as, um, resilient, you know, um, Because I said to my guys yesterday in the training, I said, Hey, they want to know how to poor black. How do black professionals think of poor black? Well, they embarrassed or ashamed of you and they don't.

And they keep in mind places like black studies at temple or U D they don't, they don't study. No, not like that. That's what white liberals do. Right. My Michelle fine. My, my doctoral advisor, she told me I didn't because I was so naive. And she started trying to tell me this, particularly as I began transitioning from New York to Delaware.

And, um, she says, you know, just keep in mind, you have a wing of black scholars that will. Thank which is tied to write about and say a very problematic white liberals, rightly or wrongly. And as said, I remember her saying, and I'd say white people are all good people. I get it. But your largest audience will probably be white liberals, not black scholars, right.

Because they're going to see what you're doing as. Sue ghetto. Why would you try and develop an argument that, um, supports them or makes them resilient? You know, I need to be demonizing them too. And I found that so long story short, I found that experience in the Academy. I found that at UT I found that all over, right.

Even about some black criminals. I mean, these are not, I'll be like, Oh my God. Like, you know, and I was shocked. He'll to be, to, to hear, um, some of the things that I've, that I've heard, but, but in any event, the answer to your question would directly, they are looking at resilience as more of a way of life, right?

Hence, or I E. Social identity street. Life is broader than deviance or delinquency or crime. Meaning that word, that language, they said that language right there. It speaks to our lifestyle. Why does street life or street? Co-op because they said words like deviants and Lincoln Muncie. They actually just underscore or just focus on the negative experiences in the street, right.

Crime. And all I did this and I did that. Right. And that's actually a narrow perspective of street life. Right. The crime. Now, Victor reels also writes this in his book, punished violence is actually accounts for a minimal amount of time in the streets. Most the vast majority of their time as we write about it.

Right? Meaning in the theory is really centered and anchored around bonding, social events. It has nothing to do with illegal activity, even though they're in a gang, even though 

Abbie: [00:52:42] I think something that is so important to note is that anytime that we. Frame anything that's quote unquote, bad as potentially resilient or what any term that's deemed morally good.

If we're placing that on something that is characterized as bad traditionally, we're. Knocked for romanticizing the experience yet. So we get knocked for romanticizing, but it's okay to blanketly demonize. Right. And that's, that's the issue is that neither is okay. We shouldn't just romanticize or just demonize, but there needs to be.

Uh, if we're going to knock romantization, we need to knock demonization. And so often we just demonize, we just look at the wrong, we just look at the bad, but. To bring the two together and see that there is complexity, that there are social bonds, there's support in the streets. This is a place like we are social creatures.

When we talk about resilience, as operationalized, as our perpetuation of survivability, these are places where people go. For social support to perpetuate their survivability. If they're being rejected from all of these other support systems that we place on pedestals, then where the hell do we expect them to go to what's available 

Yasser: [00:54:14] to them.

So like delinquents, those terms just speaks. It doesn't speak to the, to the totality of their social identity life. Does it underscores no doubt the illegal activity, which you're not denying, but also it underscores, like you said, well, we call what they described, what we write about as street love.

Right. That's the social support. Yes, the bonding that's and they conceptualize it. We write about it though. Uh, or you have individual levels, group levels and community levels of street love, I mean, and that actually represents most of their experience and the streets. So to just reduce it to one of those negative terms is, is, you know, there there's a lot of.

There's a lot going on with that approach. And some of it is intentional. Some of it's not, but when it becomes a way to demonize a group and so street life for them, their social identity, right. Their way of life, that is the, the complexity, the holistic, the totality of their identity that is resilience and, or that's how they talked about it.

So it's not necessarily one act, one phrase necessarily. It is. A lifestyle, how are they enhancing from their perspective, their survivability? How are they also acquiring Asia? Franklin writes a lot about this through indivisibility syndrome, his theory. Right. But he's looking at black men, but, but he says, right, so you have subjective wellbeing, but he talks a lot about personal meaning.

He writes a lot about resilience to AGA Franklin and a Boston college. And he goes about personal meaning. Right. And how we have to value the personal meaning. How they are describing themselves, like what they value, what they're living for. Right. So like with things like children, right. Which I'm sure you found in your study, but so in Western culture, children are almost kind of, and you would literally have to have all your ducks in a row.

You would have to have a million dollars in the bank for it to be socially acceptable for you to have a child, which is crazy. Right now having children is also biological and for black men in the street now, most black scholars, in addition to other folks, other professionals would say, these men don't deserve any children, but children to them.

They are a part of their resilience. They, they, they, they all are part of their totality. They are a part of what they are living for, right. That helps them to create and establish and sustain meaning real, real meaning in their lives as well. You know, and I often say because of my next book project, I'm gonna take this on, but, but these men and the women too, right there, if you're like poor, you shouldn't want to have kids.

Right. And, but the children and our family is the way that even the crack cocaine dealer thinks about resilience. Right. So it becomes, so again, resilience, I mean, it becomes a way of life. It becomes like, keep in mind, it's not even about us and the resiliency literature, which I write about too is so individualistic.

It's about the individual bouncing back from some trauma, right? And now they're getting on equal footing into where they were before and now they are quote unquote thriving. Right. And I go out all those little theories. Right. And I say, right, at the end of the day, if you're a black man in the streets and you run around and you probably have multiple traumas, right.

And they're stopping and they're starting and they're coming in, they're going. Right. So maybe in the middle class, the middle class lifestyle, you have one big issue. You kind of go through it, you get over it. And then that's not like what other folk work? They don't experience trauma like that resiliency isn't simply experienced on an individual level.

If you look at these resiliency models, this is really for a person and the models create to understand the person and also how to repair. Right. And these folks look at resiliency, right? So you have some discussions. Let's talk about community levels of resilience. Family notions of resilience. So contextual kinds of resilience, meaning, meaning for me to be in good standing with my, uh, from my perspective, it actually, or to be resilient for many poor black folk, that would have to mean that I'm also not just in good standing with myself, but I'm in good standing with my family and my community.

And that my resilience cannot be established in any fair way. At least from my perspective, my subjective perspective on my personal meaning, unless those three levels of life are complete. Most theories that grapple with like dominant ones do not grapple with it. They don't even want to entertain any discussion of resilience like that.

Well, 

Abbie: [00:58:50] because it takes hard work, you know, it, it takes when we look at the dominant theories in criminology, they're predominantly done by white men. They're conceptualized by white men. And if we're going to get into such a nuanced argument and have to do the intellectual work to figure out how to properly describe all of the complexity.

I mean, it just, I think a lot of people aren't willing to do that and that's the privilege that they don't have to and it's accepted. And so I think the fact that you're moving the needle in theory to really complicate these dualisms, that so exist in so many of our theories is so important and. I look to that always when I'm doing my own work is to.

Really complicate and crystallize these notions that we've seen for decades accepted for face value and that not only does it demonstrate privilege, but it demonstrates the distance between those in these positions to conceptualize and those who they're conceptualizing about 

Yasser: [01:00:11] that's right. That's right.

That's right. I say my street of not graphy class, I think, um, Anytime you're doing ethnography, you're really studying culture to some extent. And the only way you can study culture is you have to immerse yourself in that group for a period of time or that community. You have to be a part of it in some real way.

And that's the only way you can really understand. A value system or belief system, because the values and belief system is not linear. It's a not that's inherently non-linear belief systems and how it operates and emerges. Right. So yeah, that distance, I love that language, that this is what you speak about in terms of the research and the research keep in mind.

Right. Our research is ultimately designed to support the mainstream economy. In some way you do have some breakout scholars or some French scholars or some non-traditional star was like you and I pushed the margins, but in general, the role of the Academy is to legitimize the main stream. Right. Um, so theories like grit, you know, um, these are essentially resiliency periods, um, were really popular.

Well-funded lots of schools use them. Also. They find to socialize children in this instance to acquire. There's this value around individualized notions, right. Of making it and or if you don't make it, whatever that means, even though our society requires the poverty, it requires the bad schools. It requires what we're seeing.

Right. But even an ed Gordon's right. Writes about this with regard to resilience he's out at teacher's college. He's saying how he always talks about the enter the intersection. You can't have a real conversation about resiliency unless you really to talk, unless you're willing to talk about the intersection of capitalism and resilience.

Well, if you live in a society, ed Gordon says that requires all of these things, bad schools, poverty's no jobs, right? So when they, when that person or that group inevitably, you know, dropped out of school, gets kicked out, becomes unemployed, right? Because we require that. Then we're going to say that they're non resilient.

Right, but what's really going on here. Are the folk really just missing the boat? No. Well, really what our charge is as academicians is to establish theories, ideas, arguments that legitimize the social schizophrenia that we are experiencing. Right. Keep in mind during the period of slavery, right. Slaves that were, um, that ran away from the slave plantation that they were caught and brought back those doctors in the South would label them.

As suffering from drapetomania, which was a real term, it was a real medical diagnosis. Right. That means they were crazy. Why would you want to run away from the slain plants? And so they literally were diagnosed with drapetomania and we have scores of examples of this. Throughout throughout, throughout the Academy.

Uh, so medical apartheid, um, by Harriet Washington, right? You got to check out that book app. Oh my goodness. That book by corn balloon, uh, acres of skin. Oh my God. You're from temple. So yeah, I just ran into it. Yeah. It's crazy. Well, in any event, right? How scholars, right? What were all of these scholars doing?

Right. All of these works that they were trying to, again, socially and socially schizophrenia ways. They were organizing research programs that spoke to the aims or the priorities or the goals right. Of the powers that 

Abbie: [01:03:42] be. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, the way that we've conceptualized resilience put it on a pedestal is because if you are resilient, then we don't have to deal with the forces that make you resilient.

Force you to be resilient, right? You're no longer the problem you've dealt with the trauma in some way that we can accept, right. That you've had a positive trauma response. And now we don't have to turn the critical gaze to the issues that are creating the trauma. Just be resilient. Let's teach you how to be resilient so that we don't have to go to the root cause of the trauma.

And I think that's the issue. There is. There are layers to this, right? Like there are layers to the ways that we conceptualize these things that perpetuate racist systems beyond just in the Academy, beyond just in the sciences. It's deeper than that. And so I think for our listeners, this has been a lot too.

Challenge their preconceived ideas. I mean, it took me a while to, to see the light in this way. And again, that shows my privilege, but I think for many people, this is gonna take time to say yes. Yes. And so. I'm really glad that we were able to speak on complexity in such an honest way, because it's not that our research is a lie.

But it's the framing that has been deceptive. And so I think we have to think about how we frame things and understand that every single thing is anything from the social sciences is a social construct and social constructs are not capital F fact. Fact in social sciences fluid. And that doesn't mean that what is considered truth today is not legitimate, but we have to constantly challenge it because objectivity is not real.

It doesn't exist, it doesn't exist. And so. When we accept or look at theories, it is intrinsically tied to who created it. We have to know who it is. And so often it gets divorced. It becomes isolated and that's not okay. We need to contextualize theory the inception and conception of theory and. There's a lot, a lot here, but I'm really excited by this conversation.

I feel like I need to go write like 10 papers. I 

Yasser: [01:06:32] hear you down actually. But, um, yeah. It's, you know, in regard to reflexivity, I think that's something that more than ethnography is needed to be doing. And we used to do a better job at it and media to get more systematic around reflectivity or researcher.

Right. Because a lot of times, or when Michelle fine says taught us, your research is biographical. Whoever it is something about your background is motivating you to do that work and you need to get in touch with whoever you want. 

Abbie: [01:06:58] This has been great. I am so appreciative of you coming on and speaking about your work and your perspective.

I think it is so incredibly important and so critical in all the ways that we need, especially right now. So thank you so much. 

Yasser: [01:07:16] Thank you, Abbie. It was an honor to be with you. Um, you know, these, this is like one of the few times that I get to have. Like a real conversation about what it means to be in the Academy.

We're so politically correct. And we have to do what we have to do when it's just a breath of fresh air to be around an academic that's really willing to talk shop. So thank you for the opportunity today.

Abbie: [01:07:40] Thank you so much for participating in my critical conversation with Dr. Yasser pain. There is a lot to unpack from this episode. First. I think it's important to internalize. That resilience is not synonymous with morality. The ways that we typically categorize individuals as resilient most often draws from white middle and upper-class values, and therefore rejects the resilience of those who do not fit into these cultural definitions.

It's also important to realize that resilience sits within the personal responsibility narrative that is so pervasive in American culture. The idea that we praise those who have positive trauma responses without taking a critical look at the systems and environments that cause trauma. The concept of resilience is inherently othering and demonizes those from similar backgrounds who instead took on a street identity, or simply did not go the mainstream route.

The danger of exceptionalism tropes is something that Whitney Hollands discusses in episode two, if you want to get more into that. We must stop taking social constructions and definitions on face value. We have to challenge why certain actions and beliefs are defined as good or bad, and to understand who those definitions benefit.

I appreciated the dialogue around the malleability of that, which is deemed criminal and how even the most quote, unquote immoral acts we can think of such as murder and rape are framed as excusable or even acceptable, depending upon the individual or corporations, power and privilege. It's a lot to take in these complex concepts, but it's imperative to get into the weeds.

If we want to see change on multiple levels. Next episode, I'll be speaking with Malique Jackson, a previously incarcerated Philadelphia based boxing trainer and gym owners. Malique speaks on mentorship and how programming that focuses on providing individuals with positive messaging is not strong enough to overpower the chaos.

Imposed on many communities. He explains how structural level change is. What's necessary to increase public safety and opportunities for success. I hope you'll tune in, expect new episodes every other Monday. And don't forget to subscribe, rate, leave a review. I'm Abbie Henson, and this was critical conversations.