Dr. Lucas Wilson: Professor of Economics and Chair, African and African-American Studies, Mount Holyoke College
Slavery and its Legacy
The Five Colleges Learning in Retirement (5CLIR) 2005 Memorial Series
Session #1 – February 16, 2005 – Amherst College
Introduction
GILLIES: Now, I want to introduce to you June Guild, a member of Five College Learning in Retirement, who will introduce Professor Wilson.
GUILD: Well, I have the very special privilege of introducing our next speaker, Lucas Wilson, and of course everybody who ever introduced somebody says that, but I can say it because it is very special, that he is my own son-in-law. … He graduated from Morehouse in economics. He has an MA in comparative religion from Union Theological Seminary and he actually is an ordained minister. He came to the University of Massachusetts, where he has his Ph.D. in economics, and he’s been at Mount Holyoke College since 1988, where he is associate professor of economics and chair of the African and African American Studies Department, and in 2004 he added the title Director of Academic Development at Mount Holyoke. … [M]ost recently his research has focused on the political economy of higher education in the United States, leading into today’s talk, titled “Challenges on the Road to Racial Justice in Higher Education.”
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
WILSON: I have to straighten out now. Thank you, Mr. Gillies, Mr. Romer and the other organizers and the steering committee for giving me the opportunity to participate in the Slavery and its Legacy series. And thank you June, for your introduction.
Let me say just before I start that I’ve lived in this part of the country now for twenty or so years and I see in the room a couple of elders. I see Professor Bracey over here and Representative Swan. I used to listen to Representative Swan every Friday morning on the radio during the ’80s and in fact it got me through a lot of the tough times, living in western Massachusetts, and so I’m honored. There’s one other person, Dean Moss, who’s been an enormous positive influence in my life. I want to thank the three of you for being here along with everyone else and please email me if I say anything that disturbs you.
Since April 2004, we’ve had several occasions to mark the half century that has passed since the Supreme Court of the United States determined that segregated access to public accommodations on the basis of race alone fails to provide the full equality guaranteed by the Constitution. The Brown decision signaled the beginning of the end of formal race-based segregation. The court insisted that race-based segregation in the nation’s public schools, rooted in and serving the interests of White supremacy, harmed Black children. Relying on a body of social scientific research on the psychology of the human personality, the court acknowledged being impressed by the idea that to be separated from Whites because of membership in the Black race produced feelings of inferiority, especially as relates to community status. The court worried that those feelings of inferiority might negatively influence the capacities for citizenship of Black children and adults in irreversible ways.
After fifty years, what is the legacy of Brown? What in fact is the current state of desegregation? What is the current state of integration? What progress have we made and what work remains if we are to achieve racial justice for all children, regardless of race or creed, means or desires? Given the current state of affairs in our country, how can institutions of higher education further the dream of racial justice at the core of the complaint filed by the plaintiffs in Brown?
In a 1988 talk given to the American Association of Colleges, the late Ernest Boyer described the two principal missions of a college of quality. The first was to prepare students to live independent, self-sufficient lives, giving them the skills they need to become vocationally competent. The second mission Boyer claimed was to facilitate the undergraduate students’ search for identity and meaning. To encourage students to go beyond their private interests, to learn about the world around them, to develop a sense of civic and social responsibility, and to discover how they can contribute to the common good. This second, more worldly mission, cuts against the careerism and the hard-edged fragmented world of intellectual specialization and ideological narrowness that is characteristic of our current period. It calls our students to a more integrative view of themselves, of the world and of their place in it.
I believe that this is what liberal arts colleges do well, and so my review of the challenges facing higher education institutions, as those institutions work to achieve a measure of racial justice for the children of Brown, will focus on predominantly White, small liberal arts colleges, mostly high selective.
Both senses of mission outlined by Boyer are present in the Brown decision, providing all children with the quality of education needed to secure jobs and a modest quality of life was the easy part. It has been true for some time that children who go to college, seventy-one percent in a recent study, say they’re there so that they can get a better and better paying job. Justice Warren even suggested that it might be possible under Plessey’s Doctrine of Segregation to achieve equality of tangible factors or equality of access to the things that money can buy. It’s easy for us, isn’t it, to imagine racially segmented neighborhoods, labor markets, shopping malls, primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities, professional and graduate schools. Such a world, segmented or segregated by race is conceivable to us.
Further, imagining ourselves as residents of these two worlds, separated on the basis of race and increasingly socio-economic status alone, we have stories that we tell each other and tell ourselves about how good we are as we dwell in these separate worlds. How well meaning and virtuous we are in our liberalism, our charity, our concern for our fellows. We’re friendly about race relations. We may even be persuaded that the two worlds derived from natural preferences and the tendencies of groups to seek out their own. Like Representative Swan, I hardly think we would be gathered here today around this topic, if all that mattered in Brown was closing the earnings gap. Certainly, a society governed by separation on the basis of race, was not enough to satisfy the concerns of the justices in Brown. Certainly not enough to satisfy the plaintiffs and their lawyers.
The court rejected the doctrine of separate but equal because more was at stake than a racial wage gap. Access to and meaningful control over resources matters, sure, but the Brown decision called citizens of this country, particularly White citizens of this country, to a more integrative version of American education. At its best, Brown challenged the people of this nation to imagine the citizenry as more integrated, more coherent.
Starting with children, Brown challenged us to consider the oppressive work of race and racism and to reject that work on moral, legal and economic grounds. It said that if we were going to achieve the noblest ideals of this country, the dominant majority and everyone else would have to reject the basic inequality of educational opportunities that had prevailed after the enslavement of mostly Black people was abolished.
There’s another reason why it was necessary to reject the doctrine of separate and equal. Brown was an attempt by courageous parents and their lawyers to force state governments to provide educational opportunities for Black children that were equal in quality and expenditure to that of White children. Had states been willing to equalize per student expenditures for all school age children without the added requirement that those living within the same districts go to the same schools, the cases might not have been brought. There might have been sufficient empirical evidence to convince the justices or the appellate court that separate was or could be in some respects equal.
But there were two problems that the court recognized. First, part of the social significance of being raised Black, or Negro, as the term was in those days, involved subordinate social and economic and political status. The intent of Plessey was to institutionalize White supremacy. Not to erect a border between Black and White, on either side of which there was relative equanimity and warm feeling. Separate not only was unequal – it meant unequal. Second, allowing for one moment the possibility that school finance reform might have satisfied the plaintiffs, the legacies of enslavement and Jim Crow were such that the substantive equality of funding for Black and White students would have required greater initial start up funding for Black students. Without extra or compensatory funds to modernize facilities, better train teachers, provide books, pencils and other learning materials for Black students, they would still not enjoy substantively equal educational opportunity.
The court saw no evidence either of separate and equal, or the willingness to invest heavily in impoverished communities, so that differences in opportunities and outcomes that were traceable to the first one hundred or so after Black enslavement might be redressed. So before educational achievement could be viewed in terms of individual merit, which I’ll come to in a moment, the playing field on which groups assembled first had to be leveled. Only then would we be able to trust that schooling outcomes reflected a random, nondiscriminatory distribution of talent, hard work and resilience. Only then could we be confident that we were free in our choosing and responsible in the consequences of those choices.
The Supreme Court recognized in the arguments before it that Constitutional liberties and the real and potential individual capacities implied by them required that separation on the basis of race existed to subjugate one race in favor of another. To their credit, the court found this principle of White racial superiority objectionable and unacceptable.
By the way, I’m aware that the mean age in this room is probably above my own, and so I know many of you lived through the Brown case and you have your own stories and perspectives about the impact of Brown on your life and I hope that some of that will find its way into our discussion.
Brown’s larger vision of a racially integrated society as opposed to a merely desegregated one, was an astonishing opportunity for the United States in 1954. Happily, it’s an opportunity that we face today in 2005. What do we know from the examination of data on Black-White differences in the years of schooling and educational attainment, test scores, etcetera during the 20th Century? We know that at the beginning of the 20th Century, the educational attainment of Black people lagged behind that of Whites. The reasons for this include the obvious ones. The fact that at the end of the Civil War and owing to their enslavement, the vast majority of Black adults had attained only low levels of education. We also know that nine in ten Blacks lived in the American South in 1990 and this region lagged behind the north and northeast in providing steady schooling. Even White children in the south received less per student on schooling and were less likely to complete high school than their White counterparts across the United States. So there was an educational attainment gap, which is measured or estimated by using years of formal schooling between Blacks and Whites at the beginning of the 20th Century.
We also know that at the time of the Brown decision, there was simply a large difference between the human capital owned by Blacks and that owned by Whites. Again, you can make certain inferences drawing on years of schooling to estimate what occupations were, what wages people earned and so on. Even so, from 1960 to 1990 the skill gap-and the achievement gap and the skill gap refers to kind of years of schooling or differences between Blacks and Whites in the skills acquired through schooling or work experience, and the achievement gap, which is test scores, between Blacks and Whites narrowed. So during the period 1960 to 1990, both gaps tended to narrow. In a 2003 paper by William Collins and Robert Margo, we find evidence that for each decade between 1960 and 1990, the skill gap closed by about one-third during each decade. So we saw significant progress during that thirty year period.
Derrick Neal has data suggesting that the test score gap between Whites and Asians on one hand and African American and Latinos on the other-and by the way, the achievement gap has always been quantitatively significant, but even the achievement gap narrowed in the period after Brown up to about 1988-89. We have pretty good evidence that since 1990 both gaps in skills and in achievement have stopped narrowing and remained constant or in some cases widened. Professor Gary Orfield and his colleagues at the Harvard Civil Rights Project, and I mention it because it’s downloadable. It’s right online. You can find it at the website. They have several papers documenting the recent trends in resegregation in the United States throughout the 1990s and they discuss both housing and education markets.
Explanations for the persistence of the achievement gap are varied, but I want to try to pull all that evidence together in a stylized chronology of how the achievement gap emerges, in some instances pre-K, pre kindergarten and then how it evolves through high school and this stylized chronology is in Ron Fergusson’s work, I know if any of you are associated with the Amherst Public Schools or on the school committee there, they’re looking at a couple of essays by Fergusson to try and get a handle on some of the things going on at Amherst High. Amherst is part of the minority student achievement network and the minority student achievement network is a collection of so-called high resourced, high ability schools where we should expect to see Black-White differences on tests, either narrow or eliminated because you have Black-White students going to school together, good quality instruction, adequate resources. All of the socio-economic or background characteristics are supposed to be similar and so on. So we would expect that any differences that are attributable to background characteristics or attributable to school quality or attributable to available resources, including teacher instruction, all of those explanations should leave us with a negligible achievement gap. But that’s not the case. Right, there is a significant achievement gap, even in the minority student achievement network schools and so this puzzles us.
Fergusson has gone through psychological education literature and come up with the following summary. “Black, Brown, Yellow, Red and White students of different socio-economic backgrounds arrive at kindergarten with different types and levels of preparation for school. These differences are not more or less well-suited for success in school, though they become so as students continue to go to school. That is, it is not the case that unexplainable readiness to learn differences exist upon entering school,” and that’s controversial. There are some people who say that in fact there are some readiness to learn differences and they are, they do explain a pre-K and then first through third grade achievement gap.
Fergusson argues that the patterns are routine enough, so the group patterns are routine enough that teachers and principals form expectations about groups. Again, we’re talking kindergarten. Given the culture of schools and school curriculum and because of at home characteristics-again differences in background material-Black and Brown children, the evidence says, tend to rank behind White and Yellow children on achievement tests, by some reports first grade, some reports second or third grade. That gap does not go away through high school graduation. On average parents and teachers have limited resources or repertoires to help the less well-prepared students catch up. In a class of twenty something or more students, they have to service a wide range of abilities. It’s also the case that teachers are guilty at times of even exacerbating the problem, especially when they’re unfamiliar with the home cultures and languages of some of their students.
I read one story in a collection by Belinda Williams called, “Closing the Achievement Gap.” There’s one story of a pre-K classroom in Los Angeles where the teacher was doing a segment on chicken eggs and she asked her students to describe eggs by thinking about the times they had cooked and eaten them. One child, the story goes, tried three times, according to the observer who published this report, to talk about how she cooked eggs with her grandmother and who her grandmother was and so on. But the teacher disregarded these comments in favor of a student who explained that the insides of eggs, when cooked, are white and yellow. That’s the information that the teacher was after.
One of the researcher’s noted that the first child’s answer was typical of the associations that her invisible, at school anyway, home culture encourages. That is objects are meaningful in her cultural context, her home cultural context, when they mediate social relations, but the teacher had an expectation, unstated, that students be able to describe the inside of an egg as an isolated physical entity. Her expectation about how to talk about an egg in pre-K was naturalized to the extent that she behaved as if the packaging of the correct answer was obvious or transparent.
Now, the point here is not to plead for multicultural education or even to suggest that any answer to an analytic question will do. I think what the teacher was after is important for children to learn to know, to be able to understand and say. My point is to register that the first child quite possibly knew. It is reasonable for us to infer that of course the first child knew that two properties of a cooked egg are their white and yellow color, right, and that the first child was on her way to this statement of fact, but she was taking a different route. That’s my point. That she began by talking about the time spent with her grandmother was a manifestation of an invisible or other culture that she brought with her to school, but by not recognizing what the first child was doing, speaking through an invisible culture about an egg, the teacher unintentionally missed the opportunity to value the first child’s contribution to the class and, two, she threatened to devalue the child’s at home orientation. That participates, shapes the achievement gap or disengagement of conditions that we find later on in children as they go through primary and then into secondary school. The teacher also failed to recognize, I should add, that her question was not as unambiguous as she may have thought.
Fergusson continues that as children advance through school, they begin to figure out that achievement differences correlate with group characteristics and they tend to accept stereotypical assumptions and assertions about the sources and implications of these differences. Young people begin to fulfill the expectations of their group as expectations of themselves individually. In fact, it becomes a language for membership, verifying, affirming, reinforcing membership in the group is how they show their [unclear]. Teachers also form and fix expectations in the high ability high achievers begin to matriculate grade after grade in different courses than the average to low achievers. Sorting by ability becomes a way of sorting by race and ethnicity and again, increasingly, socio-economic status.
Acting Black by underperforming becomes part of the socially acceptable culture of schools. Acting White by excelling becomes part of the socially acceptable culture of schools, and those who don’t fit, those who fall in between, those who are other, must wage often lonely battles for self-esteem and support, both from their peers and their teachers. Even children who do poorly or face low expectations from peers and teachers, may eventually come to de-emphasize academic performance in favor of other domains – sports, athletics, social scene. Domains where they find acceptance, admiration and a greater sense of self worth, where acceptance is being mirrored back to them. The end result is that by the time students start thinking about whether or not they want to apply to a highly selective college like Mount Holyoke or Amherst, the supply of admissible students for students of color has been severely restricted.
Notice, as I describe an average or typical experience fifty years after Brown, notice that there are no signs separating us, telling us where to go given our racial designation, our racial identity. Notice that there are no coercive or legal threats in place to discipline us. We are governed without the Jim Crow regime. It happens, as I said earlier, almost naturally. It happens without any vicious racial intent on the part of anyone. In fact, most of us are violently opposed to what’s going on and we casually participate. All right, we watch it. We sit passively by as it happens. So places like Amherst and Mount Holyoke compete fiercely for a very limited number of admissible students of color. I should also add that Amherst wins impressively in that competition. [laughs] But that’s for another series.
There are two effects that are noteworthy for the Black population at highly selective schools. First, fewer and fewer Black students with four Black grandparents are now admitted to the top schools. In Lexus Nexus you can find news coverage of a study that Lani Guinier and Skip Gates did in the fall of ’03. Maybe it was ’04, I don’t remember. Second, the second noteworthy effect is that more and more colleges fulfill their diversity quota, and I’m talking about the top schools again, fill their diversity quota by enrolling children who are themselves immigrants from Africa or the Afro-Caribbean, or children whose parents migrated here. By and large the direct descendants of Brown still struggle to receive a rigorous college preparatory education during the K-12 years. They, we, are still likely to go to schools that are overwhelmingly same race and same socio-economic status. Again, the signs are gone. Segregation remains.
What must schools do to finish the work of Brown? That is how can predominantly White small liberal arts schools work to achieve racial justice particularly for students who enroll? Bowen and Bok argued in The Shape of the River, that small predominantly white liberal arts schools may have a comparative advantage in cultivating the talent of students of color because they offer relatively small and intimate learning environments. Students have much more opportunity to be mentored by faculty, work in research labs or do substantial independent research with a faculty member. The importance of a connection with faculty mentors almost from the beginning of college may be the single most important variable in a Black or Latino student’s engagement with college. It may be the thing that has the most significant effect on her high academic performance.
Fergusson has another study of North Carolina central schools, in which it’s a really exhaustive survey of both student expectations and student outcomes and in fact, in connection with the teacher, turns out to be what matters most, it’s more significant than whether or not you understood, or the percentage of the teacher’s lesson that you understood. It’s more significant than hours spent on homework. It’s more significant than books in the home. It’s more significant than all of the typical kinds of things that we look at to try and gauge a student’s preparation and achievement in school.
Strong and genuine connection with a faculty member is important for another reason. In the Cole-Barber study that came out about a year ago, it’s a study looking at-used the College and Beyond Database to look at how we might increase the number of minority Ph.D.s and they found that the small predominantly White liberal arts schools might be the worst place to look to cultivate Black, Brown Ph.D.s because of the very characteristic that Bowen and Bok found their greatest asset, which is the small, intimate learning environment. So a connection with the teacher is important, or the professor now is important because you are as likely to be profoundly isolated at a place like Amherst if you don’t find a network, find an intellectual support system, find intellectual mentoring early on.
The culture of places like this can more quickly alienate people who are different, people who come to Amherst with different cultural material than the large state schools, where there tend to be-it’s more likely that there’s a critical mass so there are enough Latinos, there are enough African Americans and administrators that you can in essence find your own support system outside of your relationship with a professor and so how tight your connection is with the professor becomes less important to your likelihood of success. All right? So at Amherst, at Mount Holyoke it is that much more important for the professor and the student, the minority student to connect because of the very advantage that Amherst and Mount Holyoke have. If students cannot trust faculty and administrators, and if they aren’t aggressive about registering their dissatisfaction, they can easily float through, paying a lot of money and getting very, very little.
There are a couple of other suggestions, maybe they’ll come up during the Q&A, I have for schools. Let me just mention one more. Through the leadership of colleges and well-women’s colleges and predominantly White small liberal arts colleges generally, through the leadership of the administration, there needs to be an awareness, even in institutional practice of the fact that students of color are not really all that different from White students. They’re hungry to learn. They just come from different circumstances. So you’re not dealing with-you’re not dealing with a young person who is so other that you can’t reach them. They want to learn as much as the White student who you presume is sitting in your office because she or he has been engaged by something you said in the classroom. That is also true for the African American or Latino student. They just have different backgrounds and so they bring different historical material, they bring different ideas about the purposes of education with them to school. And faculty awareness of this, and led by the administration, I think can only help in persuading students that in fact they are valued, particularly African American and Latino students that they are valued at institutions like this.
Let me stop by saying a few things about what students must to do finish the work of Brown. How can they commit themselves to achievement? How can they trust in the value of academic excellence when they’ve seen our society fail to reward them so frequently. Theresa Perry has reframed the question of academic achievement for African American students in a way that I find very provocative and very healthy. She argues that the task of high academic achievement for Black students is in one important respect fundamentally different than it is for others, and again, recall that I said that students are not different. They just bring different circumstances to college with them, and that’s what she relies on.
Where so many of us see lack or insufficiency or the legacy of slavery, Professor Perry sees resilience in the face of adversity. That is, she sees that to get here that student has already distinguished herself. Where so many see fixed intelligence, fixed at birth, Professor Perry sees malleable intelligence. Intelligence that expanded necessarily in complex sophisticated ways through experience and perseverance. Where so many see Black or Brown student failure, Professor Perry sees young people who are deeply personally responsible, so much so-and this has been my experience-that they often don’t ask for help, when help is exactly what they need to ask for. They feel, so you’re African American and Latino student not coming to you and just taking the C or D and drifting out of the classroom is a reflection of that student feeling completely responsible for not acing your class without having to come to you for help. That’s responsibility. Faculty can work with that. That seems to me to be material for success.
Where so many see an inability to focus and sustain attention long enough to absorb a lesson, Professor Perry sees young people who invest themselves fully. That is, all of their cultural formation, including their walk, language, physicality and so on, in the tasks of learning and skill acquisition. Where so many see people who do not value schooling, Professor Perry sees a whole history of struggle, in which the choices of oppressed people swung back and forth between literacy and freedom.
Why should the children of Brown from P-K to college strive for high academic achievement, even in adverse or hostile circumstances? Because the pursuit of schooling and learning is how slaves asserted their worth as free. Let me say it again. The reason the children of Brown-and I’m going to correct myself this time. The reason the children of Brown from pre-K to college ought to strive for high academic achievement, even in adverse or hostile circumstances is because the pursuit of schooling and learning is how the enslaved asserted their worth as free human persons.
Because the literature of Black people, as well as their history of struggle in this country has centered on freedom for literacy and literacy for freedom. These are lessons that were part of my K-12 years and I fear-and again, it’s people like Representative Swan, Dean Moss, and Professor Bracey, a little bit younger than, who were in the air in the community talking about Black freedom struggle, talking about the importance of education as a frontline of battle. I feel that we’ve moved a little bit away from that. Academic excellence, as I was taught, and I got four full years of it at Morehouse, was a fundamental part of Black cultural striving. Under achievement was not.
Brown was simply a high moment in that struggle and so I would say to African American Latino students politicize your education. Claim a different legacy for your education at Amherst by knowing more and still more about the sacrifices of those who struggled to make it possible for you to attend this school. Understand that you are in a pipeline and when you look around you, you have to find someone who can help you get through-who you can help to get through. School, college has never been just about closing the wage gap. It’s never been just about getting paid. It has been about freedom. It has been about racial justice.
Fifty years after Brown, we have made important gains, again in that thirty year period where we saw a narrowing in employment and earnings, and also in educational achievement, but we still have a long way to go, and I can think of few better places to become wise about Black freedom struggle than in school. [applause]
***
Questions and Answers
(questions not recorded – must be inferred from answer)
Q1 … LW: My answer to you is it may fall short of the principle that I hear in your question. Simply put, there are too many African American students who are just not admissible at the elite, highly selective schools. And so there is – I am relying on a bit of the mismatch hypothesis that opponents of affirmative action use here, but I think there is an important educational function served by HBCU’s [historically black colleges and universities] which is that they educate late bloomers, diamonds-in-the-rough. They educate students who, owing to K – 12 schooling or standardized test scores, can’t, don’t get into the elite schools and I don’t see that changing significantly in the near term. That’s not to say that that’s the kind of student or the only kind of student you find at HBCU’s. It is to acknowledge that the mean SAT scores or board scores are significantly lower, so take the SAT for a high school senior in this country – a Black high school senior – I think it is about 200 points – Black White difference – and the mean SAT at Amherst versus Morehouse is probably larger than 200 points. I went to Morehouse – here is another response – I went to Morehouse largely because we moved out of the city of Philadelphia into a white suburb. We were one of the first Black families to integrate that suburb and it again was all about schooling or school quality. And my mother wanted us to go back – she was a graduate of an HBCU – and so there was that cultural legacy stuff that she wanted my brother and I plugged into.
Q2 … LW: The hip-hoppers. I even put this on the syllabus sometimes because it has been difficult for me to make peace with it. I don’t think they are wrong, I guess – I’m trying to keep this brief. I think their presence is systemic, so I don’t find this hip-hop phenomenon, bling-bling, its all about me and entrepreneurial success. I don’t find that to be explainable by the characteristics of the individual. I think it’s the way the culture wants to deal with race now or racial inequality now, so I don’t have a sense that Puffy or Conye West are in fact the best to emerge from competition somehow. I think their presence is manufactured. Black culture is implicated in it as well, the community is implicated in it as well. It is more about let me try and put it this way: Snoop was a particularly interesting moment – Snoop Dog – and still is. I thought that the way in which he appropriated the most negative, despised ideas about Black men, I thought the way he appropriated that he was unapologetic – he was very, very nice sounding nice to dance to nice, nice to listen to. I thought the way he did that complicated for Black people at least the degree to which we were beat down by that racist image. And so, it’s that kind of using the cultural symbols in ways that both reflect where you come from, but also reflect the white racial interest and you’re not choosing one over the other, you’re refusing to resolve that contradiction. That’s how I put it to my students. Allowing, accepting a degree of exploitation and getting paid and so on and at the same time you will talk back, to you’re being exploited, you will comment on your being exploited you’ll comment on… and now again the lyrics are largely unreconstructed – the gender stuff is really bad… Sure… My worry is I don’t think those guys are going to have the impact on Black educational performance, say, that some of the stuff that is going on in the schools itself is going to have. We can get to that but I think there are probably more other things that we can look at first.