In 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act passed.

You probably know it as the crime bill.

It was a terrible law.

It ushered in an era of mass incarceration

that allowed mandatory minimums,

three-strikes laws,

the expansion of the death penalty --

it was terrible.

But it passed with bipartisan support.

GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich,

architect of the Republican Revolution,

led the way --

signed into law by Democratic President, Bill Clinton.

Also in 1994,

I was a senior in high school when this bill got passed,

and you were likely to find me

on the streets protesting any number of causes ...

including the crime bill.

So that's what makes this picture all the more surprising.

Newt was not on the top of my "Favorite Person in this Country" list.

But this picture was taken in 2015.

This was the start of a movement

that would pass a bill called the First Step Act.

The "New York Times" called it the most significant reform

in criminal justice in a generation.

You know, 1994 Nisha --

on-the-streets activist --

might be disappointed in this photo --

some of you might be too.

But standing here today I'm not.

This is what I'm here to talk to you about today.

This is radical common ground.

And I'm not talking about the kind of common ground where --

you know, we can talk about how much we love springtime

or "puppies are super cute."

And it's not, you know, compromised common ground.

This is common ground that's hard.

It hurts.

It's the type of common ground where you will be ridiculed and judged.

But it's the type of common ground that can secure human freedom.

It can save lives.

And it's the type of common ground I was born to find.

It's in my DNA.

My dad was born during the partition in India.

After the Indian independence movement, the country was really divided

between people who wanted to keep the country together

and those who wanted different independent nations.

And when the British left,

they just decided to draw a line, the partition and make a new country.

This started the largest forced mass migration in human history.

Fifteen million people trapped on the wrong side of these new borders.

Two million people dead during the partition.

And my dad was the youngest baby in a Hindu family

on the wrong side of the border.

and like families all around the border on both sides,

they went into hiding.

And I was told when I was little about the story of my family in hiding,

and one day when armed men came into the house that they were hiding in,

searching for families, my dad started crying.

And my grandma started shaking him.

And my grandfather, in that moment,

he made the choice that he'd sacrifice his son in order to save the family.

But luckily, in that moment he stopped crying.

My grandma, she shook him and he stopped crying

and I'm here today because he stopped crying.

But I'm also here today

because of that Muslim family that took us in.

They also were held at gunpoint

and an armed man asked if they were hiding anyone,

and they swore on the Quran that nobody was in that house.

They chose in that moment when the entire country --

everybody in the region,

you could hate people who had different politics than you,

different religion,

you could kill people.

That was what was happening.

but they swore on their Holy book,

they chose the shared humanity

over politics of that day, and we lived.

And we survived.

And I start with this story because often people tell me

that my mission for common ground is the weak position.

But I ask how was that Muslims family's actions weak?

Because of that, my dad did grow up healthy in India

and he emigrated to this country,

and I was born here in the late '70s,

and like most first-generation kids I was born to build bridges.

I was a bridge between the old country and the new.

And just growing up, that's what I did.

I was a brown girl in the Black and white South in Atlanta, Georgia.

I was like, on one hand,

the perfect Indian daughter --

straight As,

captain of the debate team --

but on the other hand,

I was also this radical feminist,

punk-rock activist sneaking out of the house for concerts

and, you know, getting arrested like, all the time for causes.

I was a mix of a lot things.

But they all live harmoniously in me.

Building bridges was just natural,

and I think all of us represent a mix of a bunch of things.

I think we have that ability to find the common ground.

But that's not how I was living my life ...

at all.

I moved to the Bay Area in 2001,

and this was kind of a turning point for me;

it was the start of the second Iraq War.

And I was organizing with a bunch of activists --

of course --

and we were thinking that probably we needed to expand our circle

a little bit,

that we weren't going to successfully stop the war if, you know --

just amongst us.

So we decided we'd build bridges,

expand our circle,

and so the great, anarchist versus communist soccer tournament

of 2001 was born.

(Laughter)

That's it.

That's how large my circle was allowed to expand.

Building bridges with liberal Democrats?

Oh, no way, that was a bridge too far.

Local electeds?

That was a bridge too far.

And that was in 2001.

And I think you'll agree with me now.

In 2020 it's gotten even worse --

that division, that tribalism.

We won't sit down at dinner

with people who voted differently than us.

We, like, see a mean tweet from our best friend --

a tweet that, like, doesn't fit with our worldview,

and all of a sudden they're canceled.

The purity politics of the moment gone.

I sometimes wake up --

I don't know what we're going to do.

And people ask me "how do we do that?"

But I know about common ground.

I feel like we can build those bridges.

But it's not easy.

I have a concept that I go back to,

and it's a concept that should be familiar to everybody

since the beginning of human history.

It's the idea of the commons.

This shared place in the center of town --

town square,

the quad --

but it's the place where you come together,

your community,

and you can listen to people on soapboxes with different ideas,

and you can be very different,

but you come together because you know together we're stronger than being apart.

And today when I think of the commons,

I extend it to the resources we all share --

collectively owned,

like the air we breathe.

I think of schools,

parks.

I think of the intelligence we share.

We can share in libraries or the internet.

And I think the internet's important.

In this digital age,

that shared humanity,

that access to be together in the commons,

is at our fingertips.

But we're not using it that way.

We're not coming together.

To choose that path towards the commons and to be with each other,

you also have to choose love.

That's a hard thing.

But I know you can't go to the town square

filled with hate for the town.

You can't lead a people you don't love.

You can't lead a country you don't love.

And --

I don't think you can change the world

and say, "I'm only changing it for the people like me,

my own circle of friends,

not for the people I hate, not for them."

It doesn't work.

It's a terrible strategy, it doesn't work,

but that's what we keep doing.

I see it every single day.

These silos are just getting stronger.

And you know,

your corner of the internet,

like Instagram or Twitter,

we're just in an echo chamber talking to each other.

So I can be really comfortable in my Berkeley Democratic Socialist commons

and talk to all of you.

And my dad can be in his bootstrappy immigrant Republican commons,

and I can watch MSNBC

and he can watch Fox News

and we will not know the same things.

We won't have the same --

I mean, we won't live in the same world.

We may never know each other or be with each other again.

And I don't want to keep going down that path.

And I know we can get back to a better path.

I know we can find our way to the commons,

and I know that because I had a first, like, front-row, firsthand look

at the ability to do it

and do it on a large scale.

And so I want to get you back to the First Step Act

and the criminal justice reform.

I interviewed for a job with Van Jones about seven years ago.

And he's been a mentor and my boss,

and he's actually an inspiration behind a lot of this in the speech.

And he told me that we were going to pass bipartisan criminal justice reform,

and I laughed because I thought that was an oxymoron.

I was in the streets --

go figure --

at the Republican National Convention in 2000

in Philadelphia,

and we were protesting the criminal justice system.

And there were no Republicans on the streets with me at that protest.

I remembered the crime bill;

I lived through the tough-on-crime era;

I didn't see it.

But he saw it and he walked me through it.

He saw me and people like him on the Left,

who it's always been and issue of dignity and justice,

that this system has been racist since the start

and discriminating against poor people and people of color

and it's an issue of justice and dignity.

So there we were.

But he also saw something different from our colleagues on the Right.

The fiscal Conservatives,

they had an economic incentive to do it:

they saw a system that cost the taxpayers a whole lot of money

and was getting terrible results

and it wasn't making the communities any safer.

The Libertarian Right,

who believe in less government,

saw an expansion of government control,

an expansion of the police state,

mass incarceration is like, antithetical to who they are.

And the religious Right:

second chances --

redemption.

These are values that they hold dear,

and the criminal justice system can't see those anywhere.

And so there was common ground to be had.

And that's what we set out to do.

And under the leadership of the formerly incarcerated folks

who have been leading this forever,

we built this bipartisan coalition to pass criminal justice reform.

Eighty-seven senators voted in favor of the First Step Act,