Hey, it's Alicia. I don't need to tell you about the moment we're in. You're living it. A series of tragic events, the killings of Amad Arbery, Brianna Taylor, and George Floyd. Deaths that continue a long history of violence against black people have set off protests in this country and around the world.

People are taking to the streets to demand justice, accountability, and sweeping change.

We are all figuring out how to show up in this moment. So we start with our own. I ask two Latinas who

are doing the work, Rosa Clemente, an organizer and scholar of Afro-Latinax identity, and Marisa Franco, the director

and co-founder of Mejente, to talk to us about confronting anti-blackness in Latino

culture.

So, Rosa, we were supposed to do this 30 minutes ago, and I got an email from you late last night saying that we needed to push it back because this was the one chance you had to go to the doctor because you had pepper spray on your hands.

Yeah, I live in Albany, New York. That's two and a half hours out of New York City,

it's the state capital. I went to cover the protests, you know, and let me just say I'm not

a trained journalist, so I go to cover these things and I end up getting involved, you know.

But what happened is there were maybe 30 people left from the march, but there were 50 police officers. Right down the street,

I went to cover it. And definitely, you know, first and foremost, they were definitely, I don't

call them instigators, I call them infiltrators. And they were really rallying up the crowd

in a very negative way. And at one point, the officers on the roof

started throwing rocks at us.

So as maybe young people were throwing rocks,

they were throwing them back at us.

All of a sudden, I could just see the crowd change.

And the pepper spray got deployed.

I put my hands up, you know, which is something you're not

supposed to do, but you instinctively do. I didn't really realize until Sunday how bad my hands

were burned. They were really swollen. So I had very, very mild degree, first degree burns.

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