The North Star

Rewriting the Narrative: Dr. Aldon Morris on Uncovering Marginalized Voices in Social Science

• JeffriAnne Wilder, Ph.D. • Season 2 • Episode 5

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In this landmark episode, JeffriAnne Wilder, Ph.D.  welcomes Dr. Aldon Morris, professor emeritus, influential sociologist, and author of The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement and The Scholar Denied, to discuss how disruption and bottom-up leadership reshape our understanding of history, social movements, and American sociology. Morris shares the journey that led him to recover W. E. B. Du Bois as the true founder of scientific sociology and challenges listeners to confront systemic omissions and embrace scholarship from the margins. Drawing on Civil Rights history, Black intellectual tradition, and his personal activism, Dr. Morris demonstrates the power of ordinary people, everyday agency, and building new generations of scholars—illuminating why diversity, equity, and truth-telling are central to transforming institutions and creating lasting social change.

🔗 Find out more about Dr. JeffriAnne Wilder.
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🌎Visit Oberlin College's website.
Podcast Produced by: Paradigm Media Group

SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to the North Star, a space for conversation on leadership, equity, and justice. This season we're exploring disruption. There's pivotal moments when scholars, leaders, and communities challenge systems and reimagine the future. Today's guest is none other than Dr. Alden Morris, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Northwestern University, and one of the most influential sociologists of my time, one of my favorite sociologists, author of The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, and the scholar denied W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology. Dr. Morris has spent a lifetime discovering and uncovering how social movements transform societies and how institutions, including academia itself, especially sociology, must confront their own inequalities. So, Dr. Morris, welcome so much to the North Start Podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, thank you for having me and thanks for all of those generous uh remarks. And so it's a pleasure to meet you.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. Now I've already shared you're one of my favorite sociologists, and I'd like to kind of share more with you why. So I I kind of grew up in sociology uh as someone who has folks in my family who are professors and also sociologists who have folks who are civil rights activists in their own right every day, folks who are scholars, as it were. But as someone who finished, I finished my my my PhD in sociology in 2008. It was a much, much different time in 2008. I think we all know why. Um, but my story is a little bit different. When I was doing my doctoral work, especially my master's work, I felt that I didn't have a lot of mentors and folks that I could look up to who encouraged me on a regular basis to think about exploring sociologists who look like me. And I am very encouraged and have always been encouraged about your work and your career as a sociologist because it has been very, very important to you to bring up the rear, if you will. You have, of course, you were the 2021 president of the American Sociological Association, and your work and your life has been about committing to building a pipeline of scholars. So can you tell us about what that has been like to you and why you have been so intent on bringing up the rear, building that next generation of sociologists, particularly scholars of color?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. I think I try to influence other young scholars, not just in sociology, but in social science and in the humanities. When I was in graduate school, there were hardly any black professors that I knew. There were very, very few black graduate students even in sociology. And I had been active even at the undergraduate level in trying to bring in more scholars of color, students of color, so that they could get degrees and build careers and so forth. So when I went to grad school, I continued my activism. I went to State University of New York in Stony Brook, and we immediately started agitating to bring in more students of color and to bring in faculty of color. So it's been one of the things that I've just been dedicated to. I'm a child of the civil rights movement, just a few years younger than your cousin, George Latin, whom I love and whose work I deeply respect, both as an activist and as a scholar. And so then while I was studying for my PhD, I recognized that we hardly read any scholars of color. Never took an exam on any of them and so forth. And but I had I had already started to read Scholars of Color even before I went to grad school. So I knew about W.B. Du Bois, I knew about E. Franklin Frazier, I knew about Oliver Cox, I knew about France Fanon. And but we had none of that assigned to us. And so one of the things is that I said, you know, that this needs to be different. There's a whole history, a whole body of scholarship that's being omitted. And so then I decided in grad school, I asked my mentor or my advisor why we didn't study W.B. Du Bois. And he essentially told me that Du Bois was not a sociologist. And so I argued a little bit, but I was a grad student, and so I knew not to get too far out of place. But I did it, but I I made him made up my mind then that I was going to set the record straight, that I was going to bring Du Bois to the world of scholarship, especially in sociology and the social sciences. And that's how my quote, the scholar denied, came about. But to conclude, in terms of your question, I think that it is very important for scholars in academia and even outside of academia to bring different voices to the table. Not just black, not just other people of color, but scholars from different kinds of backgrounds, from poor backgrounds, women, and so on, because it enriches the academy. And so I've been dedicated to try to make this happen as far as I can as an individual. But I don't, let me not hesitate to say that I'm I haven't done this by myself. There have been other scholars like me who had the same mission. And I can say to you, since you just described what it was like when you went to grad school in 2008, I can tell you that it's a hundred times better now. And there are many scholars of color. There are far more women scholars, and they have brought new paradigms to the academy. They brought new sense of understanding the world to the academy. And so, yes, I'm very dedicated to diversifying the academy.

SPEAKER_01:

I love that. Now, you were told in the 60s that Du Bois was not a sociologist. Your professor told you this, right? Du Bois is not a sociologist.

SPEAKER_00:

Though I'm old, that that did not happen in 60s. That was in the 70s. That was in the 70s. I'm so sorry. Yeah, then this stuff. Early 70s. This was about 76. 76. I knew. When I had begun, it's not a problem. When I had begun to work on my dissertation, and I discussed it with my dissertation advisor, and I was told that Du Bois was not a sociologist. Now, I also want you to know that many of my colleagues, black colleagues who were at other universities, they were told the same thing. And the reason was that this was just out of their ignorance. They had not read Du Bois. They had not studied Du Bois. They were fixated on the scholars whom they admired, especially European scholars like Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emil Durkheim.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, we'll talk more in a second, but you point out in your book, The Scholar Denonic, right? How Du Bois had influenced some of those folks. So this was in 1976 that you were told Du Bois was not a sociologist. Let's fast forward to 2000, when I was a graduate student working on my master's in sociology. I won't share the name of the institution, but it was in my hometown of Cleveland. And I wanted to, I was sharing with my major professor that I wanted to write my dissertation. Excuse me, I wanted to write my master's thesis on colorism. And I wanted to write my master's thesis on colorism because I had did my undergraduate thesis on that. And I had all these, I had done the readings, I had everything ready. And my my advisor said, No, you can't write your your thesis on that. That's not sociological. And I said, What are you talking about? Yeah, of course it is. Du Bois wrote about it. Drake and Caden wrote about it. Frazier, all I had written all the I had my lit review ready. And my advisor said, No, you can't write Du Bois, that's not sociological. Right? And I couldn't believe it. So in 2000, I was told I couldn't study X because at the time I was I didn't realize that my advisor hadn't studied these same people. She just simply didn't know, right? She she turned me down because I didn't know. Thankfully, it's 2025 thanks to your work. And by the way, I would I I taught sociological theory for many, many years. And um the work that I the books that I taught my students, we taught Scholar Denied, we taught Death of Black Sociology, we taught a a huge canon, a breath of things. We also taught DERCON and Labor, but we also taught all of the things, right? And we're at a a place now. I went to ASA, the meetings in Chicago in August, and you're absolutely right, right? You've got sociology of Cardi B, you have all these different things now, because you have this huge critical mass of scholars who are studying all of the things, right? Did you envision that sociology not that it's perfect, but did you imagine a discipline that would look like this back in 1976? So here we are almost 50 years later. Did you see a sociology, a discipline looking like this in 50 years' time?

SPEAKER_00:

At that time, I would describe myself as more of a fighter who knew that change was necessary. I did not envision that there would be a sociology like what we have today. By the way, there's still many, many limitations and exclusions and stuff. So we are not in the promised land. But we have definitely come a very, very long way. And so the thing that I did know, almost intuitive, is that if you get people into the academy who's never been there, if you increase those numbers because we come from backgrounds of poverty, of oppression, of exclusion. So when we come into the academy, we want to understand how that happened, how it persists, and how it can be changed. And so I did have this sense that we could shake things up. Now, in uh, of course, I did envision the possibility of an academy like today. I researched and wrote The Scholar Denied because I thought that it could have a large impact. I knew that it was going to disrupt the origin story of sociology to some degree. You can never know what impact a work will have. And I have been pleasantly surprised at the enormous impact that the scholar denied has had. Now there are what we call DuBorzian scholars who are building, who are building a whole different kind of sociology who's shaked the canon. And I can say, I think without any bragging, that I played a big part in bringing this, making this change happen. However, there were others, and I think a crucial point to be made. There are many younger scholars, many of them of color, who now are just doing all kinds of fantastic work as Duborsian scholars, bringing in voices that we've never heard. And so right now, if you look at the syllabi, you taught theory.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. Let's unpack that a little bit because you know, you and I know Du Bois, you and I understand how huge it is for people now, because of your work, your life's work, for people to say that Du Bois is the father of American sociology. For folks who may not know, a lot of people know W.E.B. Du Bois as a civil rights activist in his own right. Absolutely. But let's talk more about the folks who may not know Du Bois as a scholar, as a sociologist. Can we just spend a little bit of time talking about the pioneer scholar that Du Bois was? Let's let's boil that down a little bit.

SPEAKER_00:

First of all, from the late 19th century up to the mid-20th century, Du Bois was probably the most prodigious sociologist and scholar in the United States. From the age of about 15 to the age of 92, 93, Du Bois published something on average every 15th day of his life. And so if you talked about his CV, if you talked about his resume, it's just staggering how much scholarship that he produced. We, even the unpublished works that are very important, those works are just staggering in terms of the volume of them. Now, I want to make what I think is a key point. Many scholars have argued that you don't mix activism and scholarship. Du Bois' career is one that demonstrates that that is a false dichotomy. Du Bois, we gotta remember he was a prodigious activist and a prolific scholar, and he was doing all those things at the same time. And so the major movements of the period, the Niagara movement, the NAACP, the Pan-African movement, all of those DuBoris was either founder or a major leader in. At the same time, he was writing all of these profound books, like The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, like The Souls of Black Folks, like Black Reconstruction, and on and on and on. And in these books, he was presenting unique analysis. That is, in contrast to the mainstream, he was studying poor people, oppressed people from the bottom up. And he was showing, showing the big difference that they made. And so even before I wrote the scholar denied, my first book was Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. And that work was also very much inspired by Du Bois' perspective because I looked at the civil rights movement from the bottom up. I showed how local people, ordinary people, generated that movement, sustained that movement, came up with the strategies for that movement. And so the origins of the civil rights movement is a very Du Boisean type of text. And so what I'm saying then is that in contrast to the mainstream sociology by white sociologists, they looked at society from the perspective of elites. They looked at society from the perspective of the white dominant group. And Du Bois turned all of that upside down and looked at it from the perspective of people who were colonized, from the perspective of women, from the perspective of black people. And it just brought in a whole new way to see the world. And I would also add that the sociology before Du Bois and during the period in which he was marginalized, did not document the agency of people at the bottom and the extent to which they have changed society. So one key example is that in Black Reconstruction, which Du Bois published in 1935, I believe, what he showed is that the slaves themselves, who were actually responsible for the Union winning the Civil War. And in that case, what he's arguing with in and presenting data is that the slaves freed themselves through their own agency. And so that is the profunity of Du Bois' scholarship. And as I said, there's never been a scholar, well, certainly on the American landscape, that has produced more scholarship than Du Bois. And our job now is to discover that scholarship, to read that scholarship, to dissect that scholarship, because there's still so much we don't yet understand.

SPEAKER_01:

So the main difference between Du Bois and other sociologists is that sort of the traditional, and I'm putting that in quotes, the traditional academic was someone who is stuck in the ivory tower, peering out of the ivory tower, looking at sort of the people, you know, from a distance, sort of gazing on the people and sort of pontificating about what they think is happening in society, in culture, without necessarily really asking people what's happening. Whereas Du Bois was among the people. Du Bois was the people, Du Bois was on the ground. And you know, by the way, you you kind of you hit me with something that I need to sort of r repeat back just to make sure I understand. He was writing to me the time he was 15 years old, and the time he was 92 years old, and he was essentially the math works out to where he was putting something out every two weeks, essentially.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, that's exactly right.

SPEAKER_01:

He was writing for 80 years of his life, and he put something out every two weeks.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. When Du Bois was when Du Bois was in was in high school, he was writing articles for black newspapers. So he even started writing and publishing before he went to Fisk as an undergraduate. So yes, he he not only that, we can talk about Du Bois as a historian, we can talk about him as a sociologist, we can talk about him as a philosopher. But Du Bois was a novelist, he wrote novels. Du Bois was a poet, he wrote poetry. Uh, he was a photographer, he was a journalist. His magazine that he created, The Crisis, was the most important magazine, especially for black people, in the early 20th century. And the Crisis magazine is legendary. Another major scholarly journal that Du Bois founded was Phylon. And so Du Bois was a, he was a he was an institutional builder. He was an activist and he was a scholar. From my standpoint, I'm pretty prolific. I have no understanding of how Du Bois did all of this. I do not understand how you are founder and a leader of the major movements of your era, and that you are constantly writing all kinds of scholarship, and then you are creating magazines and you're writing poetry and you're writing novels. And by the way, he also was clear that he was having a lot of fun at the same time. And so I don't, I don't, so I don't, I don't, I don't clearly understand how he did all of this. But you know, there are geniuses that that come along. And I think another thing that is very important for me is that I was pissed off in grad school that I couldn't study anybody who looked like me. That scholars who looked like me were being totally ignored. I mean, even E. Franklin Fraser and Drake and Caden and Oliver Cox and all of them, they weren't really being taught either. And and this is a generation of black scholars that Du Bois had really seriously influenced. And so, yes, I think that it is so here's the thing. Martin Luther King, this is what he said about Du Bois. He said, you cannot understand where Du Bois' scholarship began and where his activism ended, that they were blended all together as one piece. And so for me to, I've never, I've never just been an academic. I've always been an activist. I've always been involved in movements. By the way, one of the things I want to echo what you said a moment ago, what made Du Bois so special at the beginning of American sociology is that, like you said, he was out in the communities studying people. He was in their homes, studying them, asking them questions. He was in their churches, studying their churches. He was inside of their voluntary associations, like the lodges and the sororities and the fraternities and so forth. And so in his first his first book, The Philadelphia Negro, he, for that study, he studied the black people in Philadelphia, segment of the black community in Philadelphia. He literally went to every home and interviewed those people, went to all of their churches, went to all of the clubs, he would hang out where people were dancing and everything. And so what we see then is this work from the ground up, where Du Bois was made clear. I know from where I speak, because he has studied these people on the ground. Whereas white sociologists at the University of Chicago, at Yale, at Columbia, they were much more ivory towers, sort of sociologists. And this is why I say and make the argument that Du Bois was the first empirical theoretical sociologist in the country and built a great sociology department, a great social science department at an HBCU, Atlanta University, which is Clark, Atlanta now. And so what the scholar did not did was I entered into a big fight. It was assumed, and had been documented, that the University of Chicago was a place where American sociology was founded. And so what I've done is turn it upside down and documented the fact no, no, no, no. It was actually a black scholar at an HBCU that is in the vanguard of American sociology as a founder of American scientific sociology.

SPEAKER_01:

So, you know, I have always wondered this. So I'm gonna pose this question to you. I I was upset as a grad student too. I wanted to study more sociologists who look like me. Because if I found them as a grad student, why hadn't my professors found them? So was Du Bois sort of casually omitted, or was it a systematic exclusion? So in other words, did did they know about Du Bois and his contributions? Or did folks did just didn't, or was it just, oh I didn't, oh I had no idea about Du Bois? Or was it just a or was it really a carefully strategic exclusion from the broader canon because of the greatness and how special this black sociologist was?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I I I think that we have to understand that black people have been considered from the very beginning as inferior. It is very important for us to understand that the society at large, as well as the academy, thought that black people were inferior. They argued it. They claimed that science proved it. And so if you think that people are inferior, then there's nothing of worth for them to study. There's no reason for them to study black scholars. They did not think, by any stretch of the imagination, that there was somebody black that equaled Marx, equal Durkheim, equal Max Vabe. It just didn't come into their minds. And so what I argued is that it was a profound ignorance in the mainstream about scholars like Du Bois. They did not bother to read them. And so it was not like they got together and said, let's exclude Du Bois, let's marginalize Du Bois, let's exclude France Fernand, let's exclude E. Franklin Frazier, let's exclude Oliver Cox, let's exclude Ida B. Wells, let's exclude Anna Cooper. They did not, they did not do that. They did not know their work, they did not consider them important. And so, even as E. Franklin Frazier, for example, think about this. He got his PhD in sociology at the University of Chicago. His advisor was considered one of the founders of American sociology. And his name was Robert Park. But when E. Franklin Frazier finished at Chicago with his PhD, he could not work in a predominantly white institution. He could not work at the University of Chicago. He could not work at Harvard. He could not work at Yale. He could not work at Northwestern. And so, of course, then he had to work in HBCUs. By the way, Du Bois, who was the first black person to get a PhD at Harvard, he could not work at Harvard. And so one of the things that Du Bois said about all of it, he said, you know, I went to Harvard, but I was not of Harvard. And he said, if anything, it's a great honor for Harvard to claim me, not the other way around, right? And so I'm just, so what I'm, what I'm, what I'm saying to you is that when I wrote the scholar denied my colleagues at Northwestern and elsewhere, many of them were very open to what I had to say because they realized, God, have we been ignorant? God, we've we we never we never thought of Du Bois. Now I will add this. Du Bois was portrayed as a propagandist. He was portrayed as a political activist who attacked Booker T Washington. Even within the black community, many of us, that was the only story we knew. WE B versus Booker T. That was a story that we knew. So many of us didn't know the scholarship of Du Bois. There were many profound black scholars at HBCUs, like Benjamin Mays and others, who knew all about Du Bois. But for the most part, his scholarship was not known. And so what what I would say to this is that we must forever think about our ignorance. We must never think that somehow we are the enlightened ones. We must know that there are large bodies of work out there now that have not been unearthed and studied. And it is our poverty because we cannot understand the world the way we should understand it, because we don't have all of these perspectives. And so the thing about the scholar denied, my daughter, who was relatively young while I was finishing up the scholar denied, and we had a conversation about it, and she said, Dad, why is it not the scholars denied? And I said, You really have a great point there, because there have been And many scholars in that. In fact, somebody like Patricia Hill Collins, I'm sure you know her work. I mean, she showed exactly what it meant to be ignorant about the experiences and the knowledge of black women, for example. That's right. The knowledge of black women had been excluded from the academy as well. And so, what us Du Boisia scholars, or scholars coming from different places in the world, what we've done is that we have brought great insight to not only understanding us, but understanding the world. And I think that is one of the key contributions of Du Bois and many scholars like him.

SPEAKER_01:

I love it. So I mentioned before when this book came out, and you know, there was so much buzz about this before it even was published. You and I never met. Like I said, you're one of my favorite sociologists. And I could not wait for this book to come out because at the time I was at the University of North Florida teaching. I was there for a decade. And I started teaching sociological theory because I never, never, ever, ever in a million years thought I would teach theory because it was something that I was always, you know, taught to be afraid of. But I remember a couple of my colleagues talking about how many of the students of color who were failing theory and having to repeat theory. And I said, mm-mm, not on my watch. Let me teach theory. And I knew why they kept failing theory because nobody was really speaking to them. And so I started teaching theory and I started teaching a diverse canon of scholars, and people started enjoying theory.

SPEAKER_02:

Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

And so I started teaching your work. I started teaching Joyce Latiner, my cousin's work, The Death of Black Sociology, and people started really enjoying theory.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

And so this work has, of course, been received so many accolades and so much has been so very, very well received in the discipline and beyond because it is, to your point, filled such a massive gap in the discipline and beyond. So here's my question to you. Du Bois is sitting here with us in the Zoom. What would he say about this book?

SPEAKER_00:

There are a few individuals in history that anticipate that many of their insights will be discovered long after they are gone. Du Bois said in his last message to the world that there will be others who will come along and complete work I did not finish. And he said, perhaps they will even do it better than I. And he said, in that discovery, that will be my applause. I think that Du Bois definitely anticipated this Zoom visit. The thing that's very, very interesting is that he left such an organized trail behind. I mean, when you go into the archives and start reading Du Bois' work, you're going to see a letter to his grandmother when he was 13 years old. So all of these papers, millions of papers of his, correspondence, manuscripts, and all, they're all organized and easily discoverable. Who does that? And so I think that he was well aware, he was well aware that I have done something important in this world. And that though it is not recognized now the way that it should be, but like Dr. King said, truth crushed earth, shall rise again. And I think that Du Bois would say, Well, Dr. Morris, uh, pretty well done, but uh you've only just begun. And we push all of us to carry on in this tradition that is studying the agency of the oppressed, trying to figure out how can all humanity be liberated. I I think it's very important for me to say right now, Du Bois was very interested in the liberation of African Americans. He was very concerned about the liberation of black people in Africa and all over the world. But what is not that clearly understood is that Du Bois was a master humanitarian. He cared about the uplift, the liberation of people globally. And so he studied Asians. He studied Africans, he studied people all over the world, India. He was corresponding with leaders and scholars, Brazil, Cuba, all over the world. And he was one of the first black men, Frederick Douglass, of course, was the first, but who championed women's liberation, who studied women and argued about their importance in the agency. And so it is not just important to discover Du Bois to find out what he had to say about black people and their oppression, but what he had to say about the liberation of all humanity. He um almost went to jail because he was a peace activist, because he opposed nuclear weapons. And he had to go to trial. He was handcuffed as an ordinary criminal and so forth, hurt him deeply. So I just want to point out that Du Bois is a treasure to the world and not to any one group of people or segment of people. But if we wish to move forward in terms of civilization and humanity, people like Du Bois need to be studied.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And this is the true promise of sociology, right?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_01:

Du Bois is the epitome, the essence of true sociology.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

We're doing our jobs as sociologists.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. You know, one of the things we have the, we haven't, we haven't talked about it very much, but I first kind of came on the scene with my first book, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. Origins had a, I would say, has a great imp a great impact as a scholar denied. You know why? Because almost all of the scholarship on the civil rights movement had argued that that movement came about because of what presidents did, because of what Congress people did, because of what the Supreme Court did, because of what white liberals did, because of what the media did, and because I grew up in Mississippi under Jim Crow, because I went to the black church, because I knew how black women worked in their power. And when I read all of this scholarship on the civil rights movement, I said, I don't believe that these external forces were the driving force of the civil rights movement. And so when I started going out, originally the origins of the civil rights movement was my dissertation research. And so I had the very privilege of going and interviewing many of the major activists of the civil rights movement. Those interviews, some of them are in the origins of the civil rights movement. And what I was able to show is that, no, if you really want to understand the civil rights movement, you got to get in those black communities. You got to study these black women who participated. You got to study these black students who participated. You got to study these black lawyers. You got to study Rosa Parks and so forth from a different kind of perspective. They, I call it the indigenous power of the civil rights movement. They were the people who drove that movement and made it one of the pivotal movements, not just in America, but in the 20th century. And so once again, it's because I had a kind of Du Boissian approach, study the world from the bottom up and see what we discover.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. Ah, Dr. Morris, I could talk to you for the next week. Oh my gosh. Well, you have to promise me something. The next conference that you're at, you have to let me know so I can come up to you and meet you in person because it would be just my pleasure. I have really enjoyed being in conversation with you today. It has just been so, so amazing. I know that everyone is gonna learn so much from hearing from you and that everyone is gonna be truly, truly inspired. And after hearing this, everyone is gonna want to know as much as they can about WEB Du Bois. So thank you so much for joining us on the North Star. And uh, I'll give you the last word.

SPEAKER_00:

What is very meaningful to my life at this stage of my life is that when I go to conferences, I meet so many young scholars like you who come up to me and they first tell me about how important I've been to them, and of course I love it. But then, but then, far more importantly, they start telling me about the work that they're doing. And I feel very, very comfortable now that there are so many young scholars, the new generation of scholars across all colors, across all social classes, that is the hope in these dark times. And so I just want to say to you that it will be as great a pleasure for me to meet you as for you to meet me. And thanks for having me on.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. Thank you so much.