Thread about not going backwards: I was born in 1971. This means I was in high school in the 80s and college in the early 90s. I joined the Border Patrol in 1995. Back then, equality for me meant joining institutions that had previously shut me out bc I am a woman and gay.

2) Progress meant becoming a part of those institutions and the systems that run them. The hope was that we could make changes. The hope is that with more women, LGBTQ and people of color, we could change the systems. These systems and institutions were made by and for white men.

3) What you see today with the openness of white supremacy, police brutality, Trump...this is the result of us trying to change the system. It is the backlash. It’s their response. Every time we made changes, they corrupted those changes. A good example is how the

4) Equal Employment Opportunity agency was used by us to show the biases and unequal treatment of women, LGBTQ, people of color and disabled communities. There response? They put a serial sexual harasser, Clarence Thomas, in charge of it. Then they made him a Supreme Court

5) Justice. The EEO system takes forever to resolve. Most often, their idea of justice to right the wrongs is to make victims settle, take a cash payment, sign NDAs and move on. The system never changes. The system is designed to allow it to continue, to never change.

6) What we say today, and what younger Americans are saying, is that we will no longer tolerate these systems and institutions that do little to actually address equality. These institutions must change. We do intend to merely join and mold institutions based in white supremacy.

7) We want to reimagine institutions & systems that work for us, not just for white men.We intend to replace old patriarchal institutions that only pay lip service to our needs. This is what is meant by defund the police. It’s the system, the institutions that are the problem.