They were the actual people there teaching you about their culture.

Well, and here's the thing, is that, I mean, there's a lot of ways we could sort of spin out on this conversation in a good way, because there's the difference between lived experience and learned experience.

And in a predominantly white society, and certainly hegemonic structure, right, like the sort of dominant structure, to live as a little girl and grow up in community of both international and also local Mexican community, African American community.

In the Bay Area, there's a lot of African Americans that came out of Louisiana and Texas, so you get a lot of kinda Old South culture.

And it's a gift beyond measure for me as a young white child who might not have ever seen beyond the circumference of that sort of whiteness and white privilege.

And because my mother was such an intellectual and so profoundly committed to wide open, expansive thinking, she allowed me to read every book in her library without censorship.

And I could read at college level by nine, so I had already read Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson and Che Guevara and Shakespeare and Marquis de Sade.

[laughs] Brilliant.