So Danielle, Khalil mentioned to me that you have a three year old son. That's great. Congratulations. How do you talk to him about restorative justice? I'm really interested to know how you're raising him with these values. So there are few things. Like one is that we've been doing the restorative justice steps in my house since he was like a year and a half. You

know, so, and those steps are you acknowledge what you did, acknowledge its impact, express remorse, make things as right as possible, ideally in a way defined by those harmed and commit to not doing it again. And so when he's tiny, it's like he throws a cherry up my head. I'm like, that made me sad because I asked you not to do that. He said, you're sad. I say, yeah, he says, I'm sorry. I say, give me a kiss on my forehead. He kisses me. He said, I'll try not to do it again. Done. Right. It's a eight second process. I mean, one of the things I love about restorative justice is it's just fiercely proportionate. Right. And so he does this all the time and is used to it. He has come to expect it from his three year old peers who are not all used to it. And then we also, you know, I talked to him about my work is getting people free

and what does that mean to a three year old? How are you explaining it?

So for a while, we talked about freedom as people being able to be with the people they loved. And so again, on Andrea James's wisdom that freedom is mostly about connection, not about getting to do stuff. And for a while, for I would say, you know, six months or a year of him being able to talk about getting people free in some vague way. He never asked this question that he finally asked a couple, maybe a month ago, where he said, Mama, where are people when they're not free? Interesting.

Right.

And so I said, in jail, and we had had someone we know and love who was recently incarcerated, and he'd heard us talking about, I think that's part of what brought this into focus for him. And he said, you know, did the police take him from his home? And I said, yeah. And he said, how do people get to jail? And I said, usually they drive people there in a bus. And he said, could he get off the bus? And I said, no. And he said, is jail inside or outside? And I said, it's inside, baby. It's like a lot of rooms and people are in that either by themselves or with some other people and they lock the doors. And he said, do they lock the doors from the inside or the outside? And I said, from the outside. And he said, is there a window in that room? And I said, sometimes there's a window. And he said, well, if there's a window, even if he can't see, he could call out and say, I love you, and they could yell, I love you, Papa back. Wow. And, you know, first, I'm like, there's something about his instinct to find, like, the place, the crack in the structure where love can get through. Right? He's like, it's not going to be the bus. It's not the lock. It opens. He's like, the window is going to be the thing. Right? There's something in us,

I think, as people. It's so literal, right? It's such a crystal clear expression of, of like hope and light and connection as you described. And none

of what I described about prison is disputable. Like, I didn't say, baby, it's the grandchild of slavery, it's white supremacy, culture of writ large, you know, I'm just like, it was just

literal stuff. And to him,

it's horrifying because it's not been normalized yet. Right? And just the logistics of it, I think, remind us of, like, who we've allowed ourselves to become. That anybody who is not raising their child to fight this has to raise their child to accept this. Like, those are the choices. And to become a people where mostly what we have to do is raise our children to accept this, I think is devastating for all of us.