Interview: Black August

As DSA has grown to become the largest socialist organization in U.S. history and shocked the leadership of both major U.S. parties, the Democratic Party has trotted out its tired critique of DSA and the left as out of touch with its multiracial base, particularly Black Americans. The party recently reorganized its 2028 presidential primary schedule, putting heavily-Black South Carolina first in an attempt to moderate DSA’s potential influence in the upcoming presidential election.

At the same time, how to approach multiracial organizing and the racial class question in the U.S. continues to be hotly debated within DSA and on the left. In observation of Black August, Christina W. interviewed fellow Red Star members John (NPC, New Orleans) and Craig (Metro Atlanta) about liberal and socialist understandings of racism and anti-racism, how social inquiry can help DSA chapters build alliances in communities of color, the fight for abolition, and making DSA an anti-racist organization in practice. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Watch this interview on YouTube or listen to it on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Christina: Thank you guys for joining me today. In honor of Black August, we are going to talk some about multiracial organizing within DSA. I have John and Craig with me, and I'd love to hear brief introductions from you about what you're working on in your chapters right now. My name is Christina, I use she/her pronouns. I'm organizing in the San Francisco chapter, and a lot of my focus recently has been around anti-imperialist work.

John: Hey, my name is John. I use he/him pronouns. I serve on DSA's [National Political Committee and NPC] Steering Committee, and I am based out of New Orleans. Locally right now I'm helping mentor our local AfroSocialists and Socialists of Color (AFROSOC) into existence, and we're scheming on some more things to take on. The chapter is thinking about doing an active recruitment campaign specifically targeting non-white folks for the upcoming fall drive. 

Craig: What's up, y'all? My name is Craig. I'm based in the Atlanta chapter, serving on its Steering Committee this year, also the chair of our mutual aid committee, and also very active in our AfroSocialist and Socialists of Color section. Main thing I've been working on is AFROSOC political education. Since the summer, we've been working on a few zines. One was Juneteenth-focused. The other was all about Black August, talking about political prisoners. And we just wrapped up the launch of a breakfast program pilot within our mutual aid committee that went very well, we have heard nothing but good feedback about it. The church we hosted it at really loved it. The organizers and participants were grateful or happy for the chance to connect to other organizers and community members. We are looking forward to keeping that drive going.

Christina: To start us off here, John, in the piece you wrote recently for Democratic Left (part one, part two) one thing that you talked a lot about is the varying definitions of anti racism and how they differ in the liberal view versus the socialist view. What are your thoughts on what that distinction is, what socialist anti-racism looks like, and how those different definitions might create some divisions or conflicts within how we see our multiracial organizing?

Craig: Firstly, I think of how the comparison between a socialist view of anti-racism and then a more liberal view, [is that a liberal view] has a lot to do with identity politics. It’s not just identity politics – understanding backgrounds, understanding the different conditions that people come from. But when we talk about these liberal politics, we’re talking in the form of representation, where a change in demographics is representative of a larger shift in politics, which may or may not be true.

But it really gets away from the core of what I believe a socialist position on anti racism is, which is really based in the idea of intersectionality. You see this coming out of thinkers going all the way back to Claudia Jones, you see it pop up in the works of Angela Davis, in the works of bell hooks, and other more contemporary thinkers. And this is something that's developed even within, you know, male thinkers, within male socialist, Black socialist thought. 

So when we talk about [socialist] anti-racism, it's really about that practice of engaging with anti racism, in terms of how racism is not just above or below class, but links directly to class, linking that to imperialism and linking it to the material conditions that affect everyday people. So, that's the big difference for me is understanding how exactly race plays into the battle that we as socialists are fighting.

John: Craig really hit on it with a couple of different points that he brought up. And I'll roll right off that last one. If we look at race from a non-materialist sense, we look at it as something that people describe upon others or push upon others or examine upon others. But if we go through it from a materialist lens, we can see how this also shapes the way in which class oppression and all these other things affect you. You can see how these different social issues come up, and race can be a modality through which they can be experienced.

When we work through it, the liberal perspective is going to put everything on hyper-individualism, it’s going to make it hyper-competitive. It's going to not look at it from a structural or root-oriented sense. It's going to try to reduce it down to hide and shy away from capitalism. That's the whole political game behind liberalism and neoliberalism is to point you at everything but class oppression, everything but capitalism. And of course, in the US, we have capitalism that also has, that also has aspects of racism that participate and flow throughout it. You can look at this even throughout the long history of how our country targeted both socialists and black people and other folks seeking civil rights. These were done simultaneously. And it was even more horrifically and ironically done by the same department that was set up to protect them from white domestic terrorism after the Confederacy fell.

So when you look at it from that perspective, then you can kind of work through how about these issues being solely highlighted or solely pushed upon as bigotry or solely pushed upon as prejudice or solely pushed upon as stereotyping. And note: solely, solely, solely, solely. We know that it is not just that: we know about the redlining, the loss of the Black communities in San Francisco where Christina lives. We know about the interracial [and intraracial] class struggle in Atlanta where Craig is. And then we also know about the differences with what I often call plantation politics that are here in Louisiana, where you have all of these black rural towns that exist along the areas where the plantations and the cane fields and the cotton fields and everything used to be. And these are also the places that are most heavily industrialized; Cancer Alley cuts and runs right up through there.

And this gets even worse, because this ties right back into the imperialism that Craig was talking about, because about 68% of Europe's liquid natural gas comes from Cancer Alley (ed. Note: this figure refers to imports from the U.S. as a whole, the majority of which come through the Gulf.) So, with all of the illnesses and things that are being pushed onto the people in the area, in Cancer Alley, especially along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana, all of these folks are also carrying the opportunity cost for other people across the planet to use and reap the economic rewards from the pollution that is literally harming their bodies.

And it's beyond cancer, right? You could talk about dopamine deficiencies, you could talk about ATP and mitochondrial deficiencies. There are all of these things that show up in these populations. The things that are happening to them, and the pollution that is being pushed on to them is being pushed on to them, not just by American capital. It is being pushed onto them by the world. They are in the sacrifice zone. 

Those are some of those things in which we talk about [racism] from a higher level, from a materialist frame, from a frame of looking not just at the individual instances of bigotry and prejudice, but how these systems of oppression, just like Craig noted, interlock and take on a form of simultaneity that Barbara Smith specifically talked about from the Combahee River Collective. I just wanted to shout her out as well, and also get into the root of it. It's not just these things that happen between individuals. It is the entire way that these things shape our lives, our bodies, our genes, even. There are things that come from these issues, from the lack of, from the pollution, from the stress, from all of these different things that affect our bodies for the rest of our lives. So it's a much deeper thing, and if you talk about the deeper things, you're going to talk about capitalism, you're going to talk about poverty, so you can see the issue.

Christina: I want to talk a little bit about some of the organizing that you're engaged with in your local chapters. Specifically within Red Star, we've talked a lot recently about social investigation and how that plays into organizing our local communities. Can you talk about how you see social investigation, what role it plays in organizing, especially in communities of color, and how we can engage with and learn from the organizing that's already present in those communities?

Craig: Social investigation and class analysis have actually been a pretty big focus for me personally this year. For context, I'm also a member of Black Alliance for Peace. That's been a conversation there as well. Within BAP we have our own exercise of engaging strangers and engaging family members to talk to them about politics, talk about our conditions as working-class people, talk about how they view civic governance, how they view civic engagement, and leading down further conversations of what can get them more interested in organizing. We also put this in practice with the breakfast program that we launched. Leading up to it, we went into the neighborhoods of Southwest Atlanta, organized at the church, and we just divvied up the surrounding area around the church, and we just went door to door, we went to public spaces to both canvass the neighborhood and also talk to people there. And that creates a very interesting dynamic because, as much as we're going there to promote a specific thing that we're doing to engage people, we, as people who may or may not be from this area, are also getting direct feedback, getting a little taste of what people in that area are dealing with.

So, what we may perceive as the important politics to focus on as DSA may not be how someone in this neighborhood, where food insecurity is a major issue, is looking at politics. We might look at things from the position of civic engagement, town halls, city councils, and whatnot. But folks on the ground are just saying, hey, I'm struggling right now. What can your organization do for me in terms of helping me find a job? What can you do for me in terms of helping me get connected to resources? You really get a sense for how people understand their own conditions. People, everyday people, understand what they need, what is required for them to get through the day.

And a lot of that comes down to not a position of privilege, but a position of what should be basic human rights. So, we're talking about food, we're talking about housing, we're talking about clothing. Even walking through this neighborhood, members would come back saying, ‘Wow, this business that was open two months ago was now closed. And I was talking to someone in the neighborhood about how they no longer have access to this easy place to get food. It may not be fresh fruit, but this is a place that they were relying on to be fed.’ Another thing you'd hear is that walking down these neighborhoods, like every other door is boarded up. These places are foreclosed. It looks like this place is being prepared for gentrification.

So when it comes to social investigation, for me, it really speaks to why we as socialists are even organizing in the first place. We need to be engaged with everyday people. We need to be talking to them. We need to be seeing what they view as important because if we're not there supporting them, if we're not there empathizing with their needs, how can we expect them to show up for us? So, for me, it really speaks to the basics, the fundamentals of how we even begin to build a project. It has to start with the people that we serve.

John: When we talk to these people, when we engage with them, we're doing this with the point of trying to help make these things actionable, right? We're not just gathering data. We're not just doing surveys. We're not just talking to people for talking to people's sake. We're talking to them to really get into what the root of their issues are and then figuring out how we can agitate, organize and affect those conditions and also engage them in the process of this. This also gets at one of the core things for what we talked about within Red Star, which is protagonism. Protagonism is a concept that was identified by a Latin American socialist, Marta Harnecker. She picked this up a little bit from the Bolivarian Revolution with Hugo Chávez, where you talked about how socialism in Latin America, in the Americas or Latin America has to be a heroic effort.

And so if you hear the term protagonist, this is not a situation in which we’re making organizers like ourselves the sole main characters. This is a situation in which we're talking about making everybody else the main characters, able to take on these tests. So if we're talking about a single protagonist, you're trying to make other people protagonists so that way they can become political organizers and take on those things, so that way they can lead their own path to liberation based on their experiences and grounded in their material conditions. 

There's also another connection here: that term political organizer that I used, I got from Jim Forman with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a disciple of Ella Baker. Ella Baker's conceptualization of organizing and how she saw the point of engaging with this and engaging with people lines up exactly with what we're talking about here. There's a convergence of these things because organizing, and how we go about organizing, is a science.

For us, this means that we want to do social investigation for the point of trying to change social conditions. We want to engage people in this process so that they can become the political organizers or the protagonists. And there's a really, really strong intersection between these two organizing thoughts and strategies where I think that they overlap more than they don't overlap, where they have similar conclusions in it.And so these are things that kind of fit into and are a part of this broader process of how we go about doing this.

Christina: One topic of discussion that has come up a lot in DSA recently, especially, is around abolition, especially as it relates to DSA's platform and the obligation of our organization and our members to uphold abolition as a plank. How do you see the importance of abolition in relation to our organizing within communities of color?

John: I'll take a clear example, and I'll work through some of the stuff that we just talked about.

Let’s say I am talking to somebody in Atlanta, or I am talking to one of my neighbors, and they're telling me about how their nephew is on a $500-a-month ankle monitor, and he's been on his ankle monitor for two to three years. He can only go to work, and go home, and he cannot leave the city of Atlanta. And so they are paying $500 a month for him to not be in jail while he sits and waits for a potential court date. And even then, these court dates are all dates where he could not potentially get free. And this could be for something as simple as selling weed or anything else like that, right? Like very, very simple crimes, because most things that people call crime here are nonviolent. 

Let's go back to that core thing that Marx brought up in his critique of Hegel, where he was like, “to be radical is to grasp things by the root.” So if I'm talking to people, because we know this is an issue in [Atlanta,] (sic.) because people have reported on this and have reported on how extractionary this is and how judges are getting paid by the companies who own the ankle monitors, then you could kind of see that there's a root issue that we can go after here, in which they're literally charging people a per diem to just be outside. This is outside of a bond. This is outside of bail. Anything else that you've had, you've taken care of that, and now you're still paying this every month for years. When you go into the root of that, you see that this company is making these things, and they're using these materials, and they have these connections, and they're buying these politicians, and they're participating in these things because all of this is public knowledge, and they're doing it.

And so when you approach [the issue,] you can see that, well, we could reduce the price of the ankle monitor, that can maybe make things a little smoother. We could maybe try to have a cap of the amount of time on the ankle monitor. You know, these nice little reforms that don't address the issues at hand here. I'm starting with this example because this is one where you're not in jail, but still in the carceral system. One of these “nicer, kinder” forms, where you're essentially in a form of open-air debtors' prison […] OK, well, why don't we just address the issues that approach the ankle monitor, right? Why don't we address the issues of why this happens in the first place? Why don't we address the things that are trying to push people into this loop where people are stuck in poverty, they commit crimes of poverty and then they get the thing that is attached to them that furthers them being in poverty, pushing them to do more crimes of poverty to try to stay out while they're trying to take care of these things.

You see the loop here? If you're a socialist and you're a radical, then you know that we have to grasp things by the root. And so we're going to go with the root and say, this is something that is literally set up to make money and [exploit and] extract from these people even harder. And then we know that when you go to jail or when you get locked up or you get put into a forced work release program, that you're being put into slavery. So we’re either going to make money off of you via forced labor or are we going to make you even poorer. There's not really many other options. Or if you can't pay for this because you're poor, then we're still going to enslave you. And then we're going to get a per diem off you nightly, right?

You can just break it down with that simple example. Maybe the issue is how this entire system is set up, and having nicer ankle monitors, limiting the amount of time that we can put people on ankle monitors, or even the ankle monitors themselves are all reforms that don't actually address the core issues here of why somebody is in poverty, which people have no issue making universal demands about but we know that that is something that would have to be addressed by a workers’ state.

And – how do we go about the process of questioning how we deal with this carceral system that exists because it is still going to be part of our economy? There are jobs, wages, all of these things locked up in it. So how do you deal with that? And that gets at the question of what types of things we are doing towards an abolitionist perspective. I just wanted to give a high[-level] view and an overview of a single situation, and one of the lighter situations too.

Craig: The thing with abolition for me is that there are just so many ways you can tackle this argument. There's a historical perspective, how radicals within the United States have been imprisoned on trumped-up charges. How, you know, even people who may be locked up for justifiable reasons are denied medical relief. They're deprived of their basic human rights and dignity. There's the idea of recidivism, how going into jail just puts you into a system that you can never escape because this type of thing just compounds. It compounds and compounds until you yourself are trapped and with no other options. And when you have no other options, what are you going to do besides crime? 

Now, when progressives typically engage in this conversation of abolition, the common thing we hear is, “Oh, but if someone breaks into my car, I'm going to want cops to be there to help out with it.” Even that is giving away the narrative because research has been [done into how many crimes go unreported and unsolved.] We understand how police, as an arm of the state, interact with the average person. We understand that police officers are not there to protect and serve; they're there to protect capital. So even in a very theoretical breakdown of how the state and the carceral system interacts with the average person, there are immediate contradictions that have yet to be solved even within the supposed solutions of reforms and the supposed solutions of training police officers in terms of advocating for people who've been imprisoned.

Another interesting thing about this conversation is that it's never based around the people who are actually imprisoned. The conversation always is framed around these hypothetical situations of what happens outside of jail, when the reasons we talk about abolition is because of what's happening in these prisons. You read these stories of radicals of the past, such as a Huey Newton, a George Jackson. This isn't just about being locked away because you did something wrong; this is about how you as a human are treated within the system, how you can be denied access to food, how you can be denied access to medicine.

There's just so many [reasons] why we as socialists should be advocating for people in prison because they represent some of the most deprived people in this country. Once you go into the carceral state, you are functionally isolated in a way that not many people are in the sense of community. We're taking fathers away from children; we're taking mothers away from their families. We're using this system to start locking up teenagers and put them in the system where they may never escape.

When you do come from this background, when you come from the background of a BIPOC person, one thing you come to understand is that like everyone knows someone who's been affected by the system. When we were writing up our Juneteenth piece earlier this year, we were doing research on how the prison system interacts with the populace. One stat that's really stuck with me is that 74% of African-Americans, of Black people, have an immediate or extended family member that has been in prison. That's not a product of a working system. That's not a product of every Black person doing something wrong that they deserve to be locked up for. That is the system targeting people.

So when we have this conversation about abolition, we're not just talking about contemporary politics when it comes to people who have done a crime, someone who's robbed a store, someone who's assaulted someone. We're talking about a 100-year running complex that goes back to slave patrols, that goes back to the Pinkertons, that goes back to corralling and keeping people locked up. That revolves around and profits off keeping people in prison. So when we talk about abolition, we're not just talking about closing up a single jail. We're not just talking about telling police officers to behave. We are talking about a centuries-running system that keeps people of color, people from marginalized backgrounds locked up. And then the larger conversation is, how does this complex then relate to ICE? Everyone's out here saying abolish ICE, but that same respect is never given back to where the system started from.

John: There's another question in here when we get into the current events around public safety and how you engage with these things or people saying that, ‘Oh, well, you know, Black neighborhoods have a lot of crime. So, a lot of Black people don't mind the police because they're the only ones who protect them from crime and other things of that nature.’ And the core of this, when we talk about public safety, is that we have police departments. We do not have public safety departments. Other countries have public safety departments. Like when we talk about the process of thinking through and examining an institution, then you can work your way through the process of how you can give institutions different tasks.

Depending on where you live, If you lived in a majority of this country at one point in time, the only ambulance you had was a police paddy wagon or a hearse, until we passed the Federal EMS Act, which actually funded and put things out there and created the infrastructure for us to have nationwide ambulance services. They defunded the police to make your ambulance service. Yeah, they took a role from them that they were getting money to do and created a new service for it.

So I wonder how many 911 calls are calls that are mostly nonviolent crime. We can think about mental health incidents, because when we talk about murder rate or death encounter rate, when we're talking about a 911 call, the group that far exceeds any racial demographic category is people who are having a mental health episode. And I don't really know if that's the call that they're supposed to be on. And people can't even say that. We had an entire policy pushed around to create a new emergency, a new 4th or 5th emergency response service at the federal level to take those calls away from police. This isn’t something that someone in Congress can't talk about, because this was a policy that was put forward, that was crafted and shared even before 2020.

So when people laugh about it and say that the moment [2020] created opportunities for rhetoric that isn't available now, or that people would throw out any possible thing that existed or people would throw out all types of ideas or we would say that we would do these things for black and brown children's futures, and then nothing has changed six years later and we still have more people being killed by the police now that we had then, then we ask the question, are you serious about this? Do you care? Or is this something that you don't actually care to research, looking to examine and investigate? Are you actually doing a social investigation around these issues to actually attack the root of them? 

That's why when I look at the idea of when we talk about abolition, when we talk about public safety – of course public safety is a necessary thing that we have to do. When we talk about the things that we have to engage with around this, we are talking about changing institutions or removing institutions and replacing them with something else, and that is the core of it. If you're against that, then you're against the policy that crafted the ambulance system that you probably use today, because that's exactly what happened.

And [the purpose of putting] all of these duties and all of this clumping up of roles and things into these [police] jobs is literally to reduce public funding, is literally to legitimize them, is literally to put everything into there. That is the point of it. And if someone tells you, oh, this job sucks because I'm doing this and this and this and this and this, I would agree with you. I think we probably need to get rid of or adjust that job, wouldn't you say so? 

Christina: The last thing I'd like to hear from both of you is a more general question of how you have actually been organizing in Black communities and in communities of color. What takeaways do you have for other people looking to figure out how they can help in their own chapters to do more effective and more engaging multiracial organizing?

Craig: This is about my [experience] in Atlanta more than anything, because despite the fact that we exist in a very Black city, our chapter is predominantly white. And I don't see that as a cause of anything other than the fact that people are going to organize where they're most comfortable. I can't fault anyone for doing that. I 100% understand and empathize. But the reality is that no amount of resolutions, no amount of discussions, no amount of advocacy is truly going to put you in community with the whole of the working class. The reality is only action will do that. We have to be smart, we have to be targeted, we need to approach these communities with the understanding that we may not 100% understand their circumstances, but we understand who their enemy is. We understand who our enemy is. So really, truthfully, the only thing we can do is take steps to be present within these communities. 

And I say this because within DSA, within our chapter, we've seen this explosion of diversity specifically because of our AFROSOC section. When we go into these communities, with this core of Black organizers that people can identify with, putting together this breakfast program, working with other organizations and study groups and events like this, what happens is just by proxy of us being within the same space, we, as black organizers are able to chat with other people like us, and then by us bringing DSA into that space, guess what? Now we have some of our white comrades talking with other Black organizers they may have not before. Now DSA navigates in a space like the abolitionist scene because of the work that AFROSOC puts in. But that doesn't have to just start with AFROSOC. It doesn't just have to be a BIPOC person's job to bring diversity to DSA. Anyone is capable of doing that. And what that requires is, I say it with love and respect, for us to drop that insecurity, drop some of that ego, and really be willing to learn from other people. Working-class people of all stripes have something that they can contribute to this movement.

And what I personally see out of a lot of folks within DSA is not a true understanding [of] anything on that. There's not a true understanding of the black radical tradition and how that, you know, it has inherently been linked to socialism for years now. There's not an understanding that the Civil Rights movement wasn't just liberal identity politics looking for a black person's rights to vote. Someone like Ella Baker was a socialist, someone like MLK did start to understand and embody a wider consciousness of politics. This is not a new trend. This is something that's always existed. This is something that's fundamental to the community. So what we need to do is take steps to, to be involved and not just be involved, but learn. We have to learn from the entirety of our community as much as they can learn from us.

John: The thing about the points that Craig brought up specifically about organizing in these communities and social investigation is that you have the answer right there, right? The way that the organization gathers legitimacy is going to come through our ability to effect change in working class people's lives, period. That is it. We are a political organization. If we are not able to affect the political terrain, then people won't care about us. That is the truth of it. That is the fact of the matter of it.

We are still extremely new on the scene for a lot of these folks. We are still extremely fresh faces in relation to this. People want to know if you can deliver. In any type of facet; if I'm talking about labor organizing, if I'm talking about housing organizing, if I'm talking about elections, if I'm talking about policy, if I'm talking about survival programs, if I'm talking about eco socialist work, if I'm talking about disability justice, if I'm talking about queer and trans rights, if I'm talking about any of these things, if I'm talking about bodily autonomy, right, then people are going to care about if you can deliver. It is that simple. If we continue to organize, we continue to struggle around these things, we continue to try to take up these fights, we will build the relationships, build the connections, and build the legitimacy that we need because that is the way that we go about the process of organizing working-class people. Our primary directive as a political organization is to engage in political activity. 

So we know what our ends are, we know what we have to do. We know what the things that we have to do are, but the difficulty will often come up in that people don't want to go through the process of considering that, yes, you have been socialized a certain way. That is how our country works. That is the society that we are in, the society that we are trying to change. If you are going to try to change the society, you have to change yourself. It is that simple. You have to change yourself. You may do hard things now, I'm going to have to ask you to do even harder things, even more uncomfortable things. That is literally exactly how. 

[In its early years,] CPUSA had about one in six of their members being Black from their recruitment effort. They went to the Communist International, and they said, ‘yeah, we don't really have an answer for Negroes and colored people.’ And they [the Comintern] were like, well, you already do hard things. We're going to have to ask you to do even harder things. We're going to have to ask you to get uncomfortable, and we're going to have to ask you to organize. 

And so they went out and recruited people. They recruited people like Harry Haywood. Whenever we talk about the colony in the nation, wherever we talk about the idea of New Afrika, whenever we talk about those things that came from a political decision to go out, recruit and engage these people in political consciousness development. And then from their conditions, from their experiences and from their analysis, we got new analysis. We got new political theory. We got new political ideas. We talked about Claudia Jones, we've mentioned triple oppression, we've mentioned all of these lineages. Those things do not happen without people, without comrades, without socialists coming together and saying, hey, we need to go out there to the masses and make sure that our organization looks like the masses. We know it works, we know what to do. The answers are there. We just have to do hard things.

Craig: That really does loop back around to the original question about, you know, anti racism, and how it is about that practice of it. It's not enough to just say we're anti-racist. We have to show we are anti-racist. And a part of that is, again, you have to humble yourself. You have to demonstrate that principle of being willing to learn from people.

One thing I always talk about within the chapter is the idea that, you know, the people cannot support the party if the party does not support the people. It has to be a true working relationship where we show up for each other, and we have to show up for each other within [the] community. It's not enough just to show up in votes. It's not enough to just show up in terms of advocacy or policy; we have to be out here creating actual lasting relationships. Firstly, because that's how you [we] get people to trust us, but also [because] we are in this together. We are in this together, and there is only one way through this.

Christina: Thank you both so much. Appreciate your time.