I won't tell you that it's gonna be okay.

I won't tell you that it's going to be okay.

And welcome to another episode of Bakari Sellers podcast today.

Like I told you, one of the things I pride myself on about this show is that we have like smart guests. And today is a day

similar to the rest where we have a brilliant guest on none other than Mr. Andre Perry. How you feeling today?

Doing well, pleasure to be with you and on this wonderful podcast.

Thank you so much. You know, my show is unique in that we ask all of our guests regardless of who they are the same first question which is to walk us through the arc of their career.

And so you've been a professor, you've been in higher education administration and, and now the work you're doing at Brookings.

Can you walk us through each of the stops in your career and talk about what you do now for Brookings?

Yeah, you know, as the story was told me, I'll start from the beginning, as a story was told to me as a child, when I was born, there was a deal made between my maternal grandmother and a woman by the name of Elsie Boyd, I call her mom.

At the time my biological mother, she had already had a child at 15 at me when she was 17. She probably abused, we don't know that, but we do know that my

father was a heroin addict, he was in another prison and he was murdered inside a state prison outside of

Detroit, Jackson State Penitent Treaty outside of Detroit. And so I grew up I

was informally adopted raised by a bunch of with alongside a number of other brothers and sisters some biological some not and it really informs a lot of the work that I do today. I went on to a place called Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania.

And my first job, I actually led a camp that would expose the children of migrant workers to college.

So I worked with a lot of immigrants and I worked, I developed an affinity for the issue.

I then did a career towards undocumented immigrant educational rights.

So I worked on the Dream Act early on.

It got my PhD analyzing the subject. I remember a day that Orrin Hatch Republican

actually was a sponsor of the Dream Act.

Yeah, so I did a lot of that work.

And then after 9-11, I was actually in DC, people came in

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