 Welcome to the Brooklyn Museum, and thank you for joining us this evening. My name is Margo Cohen-Ristorucci, and I'm the coordinator of public programs here at the museum. It is our honor to present this evening's program in partnership with Penn America, an organization whose impact becomes more urgent each day. In this spirit, I am pleased to introduce poet and pen trustee, Gregory Partlow, who will share more about the World Voices Festival in tonight's important conversation. Thank you. Hello. So I have this handy guide to the comments, but I've read them in advance, and I approve entirely of everything that's here. I'm a trustee of Penn America. On behalf of over 7,000 writers, translators, editors, and other members of the literary community who belong to Penn, it's our great pleasure to welcome you to the 14th annual Penn World Voices Festival of International Literature. Penn America is an organization that stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect open expression at home and abroad. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible. With offices in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. and with members in all 50 states, Penn America is the largest of the more than 100 organizations worldwide that make up the Penn International Network. We work to ensure that people everywhere have the freedom to write, to convey information and ideas, to express their views and to access the views, ideas, and literatures of others. And I wanted to add just to have it in the air a quote from Baldwin that I think is pretty important from the fire next time. You write in order to change the world. If you alter even by a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it. And I don't, I think we tend to forget how writers are very often idealistic but certainly speaking from myself, very idealistic people. I actually believe in the power of language to change the world. In the face of unprecedented threats to basic human rights at home and abroad, your support is more important than ever in protecting freedom of expression and a free press. You know how important that is. Please consider becoming a member of Penn America, giving an annual gift or attending our literary gala on May 22nd, which will honor Stephen King and campaign for two journalists imprisoned in Myanmar for exposing a massacre in a Rohingya village. For more information about the ways you can get involved with Penn, take a look at our website, penn.org. The lineup for this year's festival is extraordinary. Hillary Rodden Clinton, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Roxane Gaye, Masha Gessen, Hassan Minaj, Colson Whitehead, the list goes on. The subjects that, the subjects address could not be more pressing. Where do we go from here, for example? Us too, handmade in America, art and activism, borders of our imagination, reflections on violence, and more. I'd like to thank the sponsors, supporters and volunteers who make the Penn World Voices Festival possible. Thank you all for coming today, and thank you to our guests for agreeing to take part in what promises to be a wonderful event. And it says here, do not congratulate Putin. I'm on now, seriously. So again, you're gonna make me work tonight, I can see. Let's try that again. Good evening. All right, good. Good to see you all. I see some familiar faces, even some people that I know from way back, like five years ago when I was in college. And we are very fortunate to have two really dynamic guests here for this conversation. And so, what will happen is I'm going to introduce them, and then I'm going to contextualize the conversation a little bit, and then we will get into our discussion. Here's the rub, though. So I left Nicole's bio in the green room. So, this is going from memory, what I know about Nicole's, almost like. Oh, gosh. I could get wrong. I will not tell anything about that party that night when we like to liquor with all that. Now, I won't tell that story. Gregory Pardlow's collection, Digest, published by Four Way Books, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. His other honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His first collection, Totem, was selected by Brenda Hillman for the APR Hanukman Prize in 2007. He's also the author of Air Traffic, a memoir in essays. Is that forthcoming, actually? It's out, it's out now, yeah. And Nicole Hannah-Jones is a journalist and an award-winning journalist, and one of the most insightful minds of her generation, as journalists and thinkers. She has been a writer at the New York Times Magazine for three years. I see, I got it right, three years. She's originally from Waterloo, Iowa, which I was in Iowa. It's okay, I'm good now. I was in Iowa, and somehow I tweeted about it, and Nicole immediately was texting me, like, go to Waterloo. And I was like, I can't go to Waterloo, I have to go somewhere else. But, and more pressingly, the more crucially her work has really been groundbreaking and inspiring to her peers in changing the conversation around the issue of segregation. And almost single-handedly, she's changed the way that this conversation is being had now. And she's also a 2017 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Is that good? Okay. My name is Jelani, and I write some stuff too, so. Wait, wait, wait. Pulitzer Prize finalist. Oh, yeah, yeah, Pulitzer Prize finalist. So, Dr. King published this book in 1967. And where do we go from here? Chaos or community? And it's, it was published at a very particular moment. The book came about at a particular moment. And so I thought that I would start by explaining what he meant by here. And that is the modern civil rights movement, the idea we have of this tremendous moment of social reform in the middle of the 20th century. Is typically told with the Montgomery bus boycott as the beginning, or the spark that ignites it. Sometimes people will see Brown versus Board of Education in that decision as the spark that really begins the modern civil rights movement. But historians dispute that. And there are lots of different ideas about when the movement began. But reasonably, we would say that this started with the tectonic shifts that came with the end of World War II. And when we see the kind of staggering and catastrophic consequences of this war, this global conflagration, it changed the social order internationally. It hastened the demise of the system of colonialism. It inspired the onset of the Cold War. And the demise of the system of colonialism in the beginning of the Cold War had everything to do with the relationship of black people to the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. In addition to creating a second wave of the Great Migration, which brought millions of African Americans from the deep South into the North, the Midwest, and the West, and particularly into industrial centers and cities there, it changed the political polarities because the democratic strongholds of the North, which had largely relied on the support of white ethnics in the North and Southern segregationists, were all of a sudden confused about what to do with the growing numbers of black people who were living in what had traditionally been democratic voting blocks. And so it has all these kinds of implications, even from locally, when we see Jackie Robinson integrate the Dodgers, it's because that Branch Rickey is looking around and saying, you know, there are a whole lot of Negroes in Brooklyn and none of them are coming to these games and it has everything to do with demographics. And so in addition to this, we see the dynamics of people being clear, becoming increasingly clear, that you cannot ask the hundreds of thousands of black men who fought in World War II to do so and then return to a Jim Crow society that is always a very difficult thing. And so the onset of the civil rights movement and what happens the context in which Dr. King emerges in Montgomery, specifically hastened by the existence of largely female leadership in Montgomery, which is the other part that we don't talk about from Joanne Robinson to Rosa Parks who had been arrested previously for refusing to give a proceed on the back of a bus, on a bus to a white person, that women were instrumental in creating the context in which Dr. King operated and emerged as a 26-year-old. And so in a really stunning period of time, the United States begins to reform the kind of bolt that had been rusted in place by calcified prejudice, racism, white supremacy and capitalism. And it does so aware that everything that happens in Mississippi is used by the Soviet Union to embarrass the United States and the UN. And King, when he writes in his book in 1967 talking about questions of communism and emerging states and the end of colonialism, he is one of the people who actually recognizes the United States' vulnerabilities and really uses that Achilles heel against political power. There's a reason why a southerner like Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Some of this was about Johnson's own understanding of the issues. The other part of it was that Johnson was also keenly aware of the global context that the United States was in and that for the first time in the middle of the 20th century, racism became too expensive a habit for Americans to afford at least the most overt forms of it. But as we know, the rapid pace of the reforms in 1957, Civil Rights Act, the 64, the 65 acts and the momentum that the movement created had also created a backlash. And by 1967, King was very clearly aware of the headwinds that they were facing. As a matter of fact, just two weeks ago when Jesse Jackson was talking in Memphis about Dr. King's assassination, he talked about the private conversations that they had where King would tell Jesse that he felt like maybe he had done everything that he could do, that this was the summation that those Civil Rights advances were the summation of what he would be able to achieve in his life. And Jesse would try to say, no, we need you to keep going. There's more that can be done. But King was very attuned to the political tides. And by 1967, he saw the beginnings of what came to full fruition with the populist political candidacy of George Wallace with the emergence of Richard Nixon and the law and order politics. In 1966 in Chicago, when they marched in these segregated suburbs, they were protested against by Nazis. And many of the local whites sided with the Nazis. This is just two decades after the end of World War II. And so when we saw Charlottesville, this was not, it was kind of a replay. It wasn't something that didn't have any precedent at all. And King looked at all these things and said, what does this all add up to? And how does the movement go? Where does the movement go from here? Internally, he was criticized by the younger generation of activists, almost all of whom had been born after World War II. There's a real stark divide between the generation of leadership that was born prior to the war and those who were born after the war. And they were much more overtly radical and militant by some definitions and critical of King and people who thought that King was too moderate for the moment that he was living in. And so besieged by a growing white backlash and criticized internally within the movement for being the belief that he was too moderate. And even at 39 years old, believing that he was too old to effectively lead the movement, King finds himself at a crossroads. And it's at that point that he goes to Jamaica for six weeks, some of the time with Coretta Scott, some of the time he's there alone and begins to try to elucidate his ideas on where the movement is and what the prerogatives are and what it must do next. So I wanna begin with you by asking a simple question. So Dr. King said, where do we go from here? Where did we go from there? Well, thinking about it from the perspective of literature, as you're pointing out, he was wary of the younger generations. And I think there was a kind of where he had this integrationist mindset. I think the black arts movement, which came of age, so to speak, in that round 67, 72, I think the value system of the black arts movement was much more interior, was much more, they thought about blackness in a way that was more essential. And that was to the exclusion of white writers and so the integrationist way of thinking, I think it lost a lot of ground in that moment. Yeah. That was succinct. I mean, where we went from there, I think is where if you look at history, we always go after periods of civil and social unrest, at least a racial progress, is there immediately followed by a period of retrenchment, which I would say it's been ongoing since the election of Nixon until now, really. So Nixon, who runs earlier and gets the shit kicked out of him because he runs really as a moderate, learns the oldest lesson in American history, which is if you really want to win, you run on race. So he comes back and he runs on his law and order platform, he creates the Southern strategy, but the Southern strategy is kind of based on what, or at least people say, George Wallace said, when he also ran as a moderate, he got his kick, which he found out that the whole country was the South, that white racism was an American thing and not a Southern thing, and so you run on racism, you can win the entire country, and that's what Nixon does. So the Southern strategy, of course, is a coalition between Southern white people and ethnic white people in the North who supported the civil rights movement as long as it was targeting the South and then quickly turned their backs on King and the movement once the movement starts to address racial inequality in the North. And so you see him, I mean, I've looked at his papers, he promises them that he will stop forward progress on integration, particularly in schools and housing, which of course are the most important areas of integration, that's where life is most intimate, that's where opportunities are had, and you start to see resegregation, you start to see the end of integration efforts, particularly they never really start in the North, he stops the progress. Michigan votes for George Wallace in the presidential primary. So I think that's what you saw. What's interesting when we think about the movement is as we are passing the most far sweet being civil rights legislation since the 1860 civil rights acts, Watts goes up in flames, right? You start to see Northern communities combusting as Black people are getting rights that they had never had, but these aren't touching any of the cities in the North because segregation and inequality in the North was not done by law, it was done through housing, it was done through other policy, and that's when you really started to see the backlash against King, when he comes North, when he starts to lose his white support, it's because he's no longer talking, I think you really saw the limitations of the civil rights movement, which was trying to challenge laws, and once you've changed the laws, if you don't have forced them, you haven't actually changed the fundamental way that white people think and interact with Black people. You can see this all across the South as you see the Voting Rights Act leading to elections of large numbers of Black folks, but it hasn't fundamentally changed that the economic condition of Black people, which King is now arguing for economic redistribution of wealth, and I think we lead up to, so you go from Nixon, then you get to Reagan, who is further rolling back many of the gains of the civil rights movement, both in housing and schools and across other areas, Clinton who... Yeah. Right? And then you see the same thing with the election of Obama, is that you see this idea at least of progress where you have a Black person in the highest office of the land that's immediately then followed by another backlash, which I think right now we're in a period that I would probably call the second to dear, I think we're very close to that. So that's what we saw, we certainly didn't see community, and if you read King's Later Works, I've been looking at a speech he gave in Gross Point, Michigan in 1968, one of the last speeches that he gave. He's come to believe that you actually aren't gonna be able to change white people, and so fundamentally where does a movement go for civil rights when you have white Americans who don't really want equality? There's an interesting point about that because in a few places in this book, King actually comes as close as he ever comes to saying, look, I'm the good alternative, that the people, he actually says that nonviolence is not an infinite reservoir of nonviolence and that people will change when he's talking about black power, but the other part of it is that he seems weary and not pessimistic, but certainly is a very weathered optimism. He's skeptical about what will actually be achieved, and what was notable to me about this was that it reminded me of Du Bois who, Du Bois at age 25 writes that he is going to spend the rest of his life fighting on behalf of black people. He writes that in his diary. He's spent seven decades doing that, and by 93, he's just like, are we being live streams? All right, well, whatever. By 93, he's like, fuck it, these people are never gonna change. I mean, that's why he goes to Ghana. You know, he's just, like, white America is terminally addicted to white supremacy, and I think that was the kind of depressing part of it, but I think the one thing that I think that is probably noteworthy is that he does present, King does present one possible hope here, and he talks about the idea of there being economic reform, of there being blacks and whites who gather together around the common ways that the system is exploiting them, that there has to be the seeds of what we see in the Poor People's Campaign come out of this book, and I guess I wonder, having looked at the reemergence of this idea in 2016, like, how does that play itself out? Like, how did that work out for him? Let's look to history again. This shit never works out for us in the end. I mean, you know this, you see these movements throughout history, I mean, I can't tell you how many Bernie bros I still get in my timeline who want to talk about, like, the class, you know, if we can just, if we can just stop talking about race and just work on the class issue, but when you're a poor white person, if we're a white person period, like, whiteness is your greatest asset, and there have been times, I mean, I wrote about this right after the election of Trump where, like, all these white journalists were saying, see, it couldn't have been about race because, look at all, these white people voted for Obama at one point. But there's always been a, you know, white people have always been willing to, like, vote or put their lot with black folks when they saw it as their vested interests, and then as soon as it's no longer their vested interests, they no longer do. And I think that's always been the problem. You can look at this all through history. You can look at, you know, the fusion party in North Carolina, right? Which is, which is, right. Which leads to the, like, the only coup known to have happened on, like, American soil. So it's- It's a kind of quick historical aside. In the 1890s in North Carolina, blacks and whites united to create a political movement that swept all of the seats in North Carolina. They won all these seats in the 1894 election and put the segregationist white nationalist democratic party, they had, I think, 27 seats in the legislature to, like, 140 to this interracial coalition. And the result of that was a mass riot in 1898 that physically removed the fusionist party from power. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, it's literally the only known coup on American soil. Right. Right. And then it's not that afterwards the white people are, like, know that's wrong. We're going to take this back. They quickly fall into line and race becomes, once again, you know, the priority. So I think it would be nice to believe that we could form this coalition where we believe that white people are voting in their best interests for economic reasons. But whiteness, voting for whiteness is in the best interest of white people and that's why they continue to do it. And I just don't know how that changes. I mentioned that writers are idealistic and we believe in that the language can actually change the world. What do you think about the idea that we can challenge the fundamental belief in race, like the discursive structure of race? That's not going to... I'm listening to, you know, we talk about white people do this and black people do that. And, yeah, and sociology is not literature, but I think one of the things that King was interested in is that was just the, as I say, discursive structure of race, the idea that there is this categorizing, this organizing principle, these do you still look at it? Yeah. That there is this organizing principle and that maybe there is another Achilles heel, there is another way of dismantling this rhetorical structure through language. To Gregory's point, this is Dr. King's exact phrasing of what you were saying, says, racism is a tenacious evil, but it is not immutable. Millions of underprivileged whites are in the process of considering the contradiction between segregation and economic progress. White supremacy can feed their egos, but not their stomachs. They will not go hungry or forego the affluent society to remain racially ascendant. And how has that worked out? I'm the moderate, I don't have to answer. So one, I think we should distinguish between writers and like, I'm a journalist, right? So I take a very practical view of things. I think that you definitely need people who have optimism because without optimism, I guess we don't fight for better. But I don't know how you study the history of this country and have optimism that we will ever fix this, right? Like race is both not real and utterly real. I say I write about race from 1619 because it only takes 12 years after the English landed Jamestown for us to import Africans to be enslaved and to be a cast of citizens on their own, which is 140 years before we even decide we're going to become a country. So how we believe that we can purge ourselves of this through literature or any other means outside of probably violent revolution, which I'm not necessarily advocating for. I don't know, and then it's like, it's not saying we cannot make forward progress, but to me that black people always have to be expected to be happy with progress and not actually expecting right. I'm just not satisfied with that. I'm just saying there's a Fox News headline. Oh, my God. And at that point, and at that point, Nicole encouraged the black people in the audience. Okay, wait. For the record, I'm not advocating violent resurrection, resurrection, revolution. Did y'all hear that? Should I say that one more time? I'm not advocating anything. I'm Nicole Hanna-Jones and I support this message. I'm sorry, Gregor, you were going to say something. Well, I think about kings prioritizing labor and we can't talk about labor without talking about race. And so when we look back to, we harkened to 1619, we harkened to the sort of foundations, where does this idea of race take hold? And well, okay, so two things. One, slavery was, if many things, but not the least of which, was the organizing of labor. And race was a name for the theft of labor. So we call, we identify this group of workers whose labor we can steal. And then the idea of that group of disposable labor or exploitable labor becomes ingrained and we start to believe that there's something natural about their subjectivity, their being subject. And the other part of this that I was thinking about is the demonization in the question, what is racism? There's the demonization of blackness. At some point, we lynched women just as often as, or maybe not as often, but in the same, we demonize women in this very same way through the witch hunts. And I think that the demonizing... I was with you for a second. I thought you were talking about lynching black women. You're comparing the Salem witch hunts to lynching of black folks. So... It's about to get good now. Again, I'm thinking about the mentality, how this discourse is situated in the mind, not its practical ramifications. Can I jump in and rephrase this actually before violence breaks out? But on the other side of this, Nicole, in 1955, King was put in charge of this burgeoning bus boycott precisely because they expected it to fail. You know, when they say, oh, he was 26 when they put him in charge, I was like, yeah, exactly. We were like, the new guy, let's put the new guy in charge of this. It was new in town, didn't have deep economic ties. They couldn't intimidate his extended family and so on. But he succeeded far, far, or they succeeded, far beyond their expectations. And in subsequent years confronted the intransigent forces of white supremacy again and again and outmaneuvered them, pushed for the Democratic Party to have to sign a civil rights act, which was suicide, political suicide, then further suicide in 1965, electoral suicide, at least as far as white voters were concerned. And was pushing harder for this fair housing act toward the end of his life. Had he taken that standpoint, that view, he would never have, when they said to Montgomery, you should take the leadership of this bus boycott. He would say, no, thank you. I'm just going to sit over here and raise donations for the building fund. Y'all know about the building fund. The black folk know about the building fund. So. How'd they take on what standpoint? If you had thought that white supremacy was immutable and intransigent. That question? Yeah, that's a question. What's the question? Well, the question is, he saw the possibility of change in 1955. I'm not arguing that there's not a possibility for change. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying, will we see equality? Will it ever be made right? And I say, no. But those are two different things. I mean, clearly, my dad was born in Greenwood, Mississippi in 1946. I don't live his life, right? And my dad didn't live the life of his ancestors who were enslaved. But we can look at the masses of black people in this country and anything that you can measure, we're at the bottom. So I would never argue that change is impossible. I wouldn't argue that you don't need optimists who believe that we can bring about a different world. But I'm just the one standing on the sideline saying, we're not going to bring around that world. I just think we need to be, I think hope has a place, but I also think being realistic about what can be accomplished, at least as far as I see. That's all that I'm trying to do. My job as a reporter is to report and excavate the world as it is. And it's other people's jobs to dream about a world that can be better, but I just see the world as it is. I'm not only dreaming about a world that can be better. I'm thinking about how we can alter the ways and the Baldwin quote, how we can alter the ways that we perceive our world. And I think the point about the whole demonizing witches thing was at some point, we just gave it, people just gave it up. And is it possible that, that wasn't, there wasn't a political movement to facilitate that change. Is it possible? And I think one of the things that King was very successful at was debate that much of what he, much of his skill was in his ability to communicate ideas that altered the space in which people operated. I mean, clearly he did, but you also have to look at, so there's a reason the Fair Housing Act is the very last of the civil rights laws to get passed. It doesn't get passed. He has to die for it to be passed. It's the longest filibuster in the history of our country. You couldn't get Northern congressmen who supported every civil rights measure in the South to actually agree to it. 100 cities are burning. There's literally national guards standing outside guarding the Capitol building. That is the only reason because they felt the country was on the brink of revolution that we passed the Fair Housing Act, which is immediately gutted from any enforcement measures because that was actually racial equality and segregation or integration made intimate, right? You don't want to eat with black people. You don't want to go to parks with black people. You just keep black people in a ghetto neighborhood and you live in your white neighborhood and your schools are white and your neighborhood, everything is white, but housing changes, all of that. So he had to die. Like he was assassinated when he tried to do that. So I guess it's like, you just have to have, and when you look at, I gave a speech on King a couple months ago, and I was just reading from like all of his writings where he's fed up with white people at the end, right? Like he's not, that writing is not very hopeful at that point. White people start walking out. I'm literally just reading his words. And I'm like, you came to hear about Dr. King, but apparently not that King. Not that version, right? I mean, the majority of white Americans were opposed to him by the time he died. Right, that poll in 1966, two thirds of white Americans were opposed. There's this great image of his funeral, and somebody did like one of these racial dot images of the funeral to show you what were the color of the people who attended his funeral. And it was nary a white person in sight, right? And then they looked at like, what were white people saying at the time? They were, not all of them clearly, but lots of them were fine with the fact. They didn't like that he was assassinated, but they were fine with the fact that he was gone. That is the America at the end of King's life. So yes, he brought about great changes in the law, but fundamentally, as we know, having legal rights does not necessarily bring about equality, which is why we still struggle with the things that we do today. And when he tried to not just to go beyond legal equality to actual equality, is when he loses his support, and we're still dealing with all of those issues right now, I mean, schools today are as segregated as they were four years after he was killed, right? Housing segregation in the North, 90% of black people would have to move in order to be integrated with white people in this city right now, right? I mean, the progress has been great in some areas. Look at the wealth gap between black and white folks. Look at the incarceration rate, like yes, there was progress, but again, it's this feeling that we should always just be happy with a couple of crumbs of progress instead of expecting and demanding the full citizenship in the country of our birth, in the country of our grandparents' birth, our great-grandparents' birth, our great-great-grandparents' birth, and like a white American whose family came here last year, right? Whose family came here last year can enjoy more equality than we do. So that's not, it's just, I'm not saying anybody here is saying it's okay, but it's like I think always there's no, like this desire to focus so much on progress. It is important, but what's more important are, you know, the kids that I'm seeing in Detroit who aren't getting an education at all. That's what's important because their conditions look like 1953 America, honestly. I spoke at Lakeland University in Wisconsin last week, and very often institutions, especially institutions of higher education, there's this big conversation around diversity and inclusion and et cetera, et cetera, but very rarely do people want to actually grapple with the institutional histories as to why you don't have diversity in the first place. And so I was there, and people were very polite to me. I should say I was very polite, very welcoming, and I then stepped on some toes because I said I have a father of a good friend who is an alum of this university. He told me about a defining experience in his education and in his life, which is that he was from Chicago, from South Side of Chicago, went to school in very rural Wisconsin. It's very rural now, you know, back then I'm just imagining what it was. And this is a brother in the middle of Lucker area where there are not very many black people. And he says his spring break of his sophomore year, he is preparing to go home and there's a big kind of roar and there's like a party or something going on in the lobby of his building. He's a little irritated by it but wants to know what's going on and he comes down. And it's all white students and they have just found out that Martin Luther King is dead. And that was how he learned that King had died. Now, the conversation that we have about King now, it's the kind of shrouded in national grief that people immediately recognized the kind of gargantuan loss, you know, America's moral conscience and so on. But it wasn't like that at all. And I wonder if there is a kind of similar effect now wherein we've looked at, I mean, King is thought of as, you know, is essentially deified because we don't have to talk about the political aspects of him. And I wonder about that now about the parameters of acceptance. Have we generally shied away from the things that will actually bring change? Those of us who are in positions of influence, those of us who have, you know, some platform who could actually do something to change, to make change. Well, I think just as the language around King has calcified, the language that we use to talk about race has calcified. And the responsibility that I take, the charge that I embrace is to expand the language, to expand the way, to expand what is actually sayable. And I think there are viewpoints, there are questions that can be asked about not only how we look at King, but how we look at black history, how we look at American history as, you know, the sort of separated sections of our history as if they're not the same history. There are questions that we can ask about these things that take them out essentially from what I think of as being under glass, you know, so this kind of museum feel to the way we talk about race. And I wanna expand how we can talk about it. And that necessitates making people uncomfortable. You asked earlier about King as a writer, and I thought immediately about his letter from Birmingham. And in that letter he talks about a creating a productive disturbance in the mind. This is kind of, I don't remember the quote, but it's necessary to make people uncomfortable if there is going to be any progress. And like I said, I absolutely get on the one hand that there is this world of practical, you know, boots on the ground experience. But the platform that I have, the opportunity that I have is on the page. And I'm asking how I can get this history out from under glass and make it less sensitive, I guess. I think, you know what I'm just saying. I'm just, I wanna change gears a little bit for a second, I wanna change gears a little bit for a second, though, just something you mentioned, which is that we have three writers who will say, three people who write, Nicole, who like our jobs entail us, you know, putting words on a page or on a screen. And there's a part of King that we don't really engage as much as maybe we should, and that is King as a writer. And when we look at, even, well, Letter from Birmingham is a classic example of it, but even his letters to Coretta, which are amazing, you know, and when he talks about, when he's being, he's away from her and he writes a letter that says, being away from you is like enduring a year in which there is no spring. I'm just saying, he was smooth, I'm just saying. I was like, man, I'ma steal that. But I think, what do you take from King, the writer and the literary aspect of it, as somebody who, if he never stepped into a pulpit, he would still be someone who we would read and be impressed by? I think him, like Baldwin, it's very important that he did step into a pulpit because the logic, the arguments, very often take on the contours of a sermon. I mean, there is a setup, he's very patient about creating the context in which his point can be heard. And I think that's, the pulpit is the important part of it. It's not just that he has this incredible Mac that he can turn to, it's that he has the, he can think through the anticipating a reader's objections, responses, perceptions. He's very sensitive to how his words are going to land. And I think that's his greatest quality as a writer. Nicole, like Kings, you've read, I know you've read tons of Kings work in other contexts. You've read lots of Kings work that most people don't read. And I wonder if you ever, kind of like the analysis of it, his use of rhetoric, just the skill he deploys in presenting his arguments. Yeah, I mean, I think what I have always found amazing about his work is one, like how deeply historical, like you can tell this was a scholarly man, but also, while his writing is beautiful and you're right, he does, he's not just writing, like he's paying attention. Like you look at the way all good writer study writing, what's the, when is he, where is he providing tension? When is he writing long sentences versus short sentences? Like all of the things, how is he building the arc of the story that he's trying to tell? But also that his language was a type of language where whether you are very highly educated or you're the sharecropper coming in to like join the movement, you could relate to all of it. It was not basic language, but it was language that was relatable, which is hard to do when you're writing, right? I mean, when you're someone who has studied, great reformation and like you have gone to like, Boston College and have these degrees, but also are able to write in a way where you never feel, of course, that is dumbed down, but anyone could understand it. I think that was what is most amazing and that's what like any good writer should strive to do is that your writing is inclusive versus exclusive, which it was. Was it, I'm trying to remember, I think it might have been something I read of yours where you were praising King's soundbite, his ability to, I have a dream and then there was somebody else's and I'm not, you don't remember what I'm talking about. I might have, I mean. Honestly, the thing about writing on deadlines is that, seriously, I don't know if this happens in Nicole, but it stays, what you actually said stays in your head for approximately 12 minutes. And I've had people come up to me and like, brother, you wrote this thing and I was like, I was just really feeling like what you had to say. I was like, really, what did I say? Oh, okay, all I know is like I filed and I sent it to my editor. But I do think that is something about King's succinct ability to convey complicated thoughts in these ways. Even when we looked at the, I have a dream speech which is almost threadbare because it's referenced so much, but you don't get the entirety of what he was doing. One, the part that he basically freestyled when he was reading the speech and nobody is feeling it. And then it's like when he departs, we all know this, right? But so the first half of I have a dream speech is terrible. It's like unreadable. And I was thinking that King wrote this like the night before. It literally did. And then it's at the point where Odetta shouts, tell them about the dream. And that's when it's like a freestyle rapper you put on his beat. And King just goes from there, but he is going off the top of his head. And so when he crafts that metaphor about the check and the check having come due, he's doing that off the top of his head. And that's when I was like, okay, this dude is, there are a lot of things, like one of the things I think with historical figures is that we often praise them for the wrong reasons. And with King, like we praise that speech but not for the right reasons. I think that was the point at which you solidify that you're dealing with a genius. So there's one other thing I'll ask before we kind of turn to the audience, which is the question that King, I started with, where did we go from there? And it's the question that King put to himself in 1967. And your estimation, where do we go or where should we go from here? You don't want me giving you the side eye? Just playing. So where do we go and where should we go are two different things. I think we're going to hell. No, I'm playing. The thing I love about Nicole is her optimism. No one ever invites me to anything to be optimistic. I mean, I just think it's gonna be more of the same. I mean, I think we're gonna go through some very hard times, particularly for black folks, but for people of color and low income people and a lot of folks. Hopefully we will then see a period where we see some forward progress again and then we'll just do what we do in America and we'll go backwards again. That's what I think. I think it's interesting because I remember, I don't know when it was, but it was after the election and it was you, me, Tana Hazi, we were at Columbia. And at that point I was like, Trump's election doesn't mean that much. Shit's always been bad, still gonna be bad. I don't believe that to be true anymore. I think that what you're seeing with the Justice Department, with the EPA, with HUD, there are gonna be some very long term effects for what may or may not be a short presidency. And sometimes taking the long view of history is great where I can be like, shit's always been bad, but it can clearly be worse. And I think that's what I see in the future is that it is going to take a considerable amount of time to undo the harm that is going to be done in a country that doesn't appear to have much will to do that. I think something that Tana Hazi said to me, the night, the morning after the election, which I thought was sobering and probably true, is that he said, we will spend the rest of our lives undoing what they're about to do now. You know, it's not too optimistic over there yourself, buddy. I'm the moderator. Optimism is not required of the moderator. I just ask questions. It's quite good that you go after me. Now you could bring us back to some hopeful center. I'm just depressed now. Broke my spirit. My job here is done. Teaching, well, so that I write and I teach and the reward that I have, what keeps me optimistic, is having writers, having students, encouraging students to think about race in more expansive ways. So I teach writing, obviously, primarily. And one thing I, the example I often give is if I'm in real life encountering a police officer and it's just me and the officer, it is important that I understand that with the history and what can very likely occur and to be sensitive to the possibilities of the reality that I am actually in danger. If I'm writing a poem, for example, and the only outcome of that poem that I can imagine is that I got my ass beat by the cop, then that's a failure of imagination. So I think about the future, the ongoing history of our country as a text that we have the full range, the full possibility of imagination in crafting. One of the criticisms I have, you bring up Trump, is that this guy doesn't take responsibility for anything. He never says, yeah, I screwed up. Is that the point? Is that the point? Wasn't that his appeal? Right, well, so here- The people who he's appealing to don't want to take responsibility for anything either. Exactly, and this is the problem that I'm getting at. I think I want to look at that in a classroom setting. So not saying go out into the streets and talk about the literary theoretical ramifications of these problems. But if we think about it on paper, Trump is just a bad character. He's a poorly written character, right? And he's two-dimensional. He doesn't have any flaws. He believes himself to be infallible. And no one, if I'm writing a character, that would just be boring. And I think that what he encourages is this view of, and we hear it all the time, this view of history wherein, my family didn't know any slaves or my family just got here and worked hard. And y'all are fucked up in one way or another and y'all did this. So those of you who are keeping track, there are now two shits and two fights on this panel, especially. A third, as I was quoting. Paper, imagine the metaphor of the page now. If we are writing our own characters, if we're writing ourselves and the future of where do we go from here, I would like to see a national character that embraces all of its flaws, right? That is messed up, that is fallible, that recognizes the full range of its own humanity. And that takes full responsibility for a past that is messy and shameful and painful to look at, but there's also a lot of good shit, too, right? I mean, there's a lot to be proud of. I think there's a lot to be proud of. And I think that if we look at it as, again, as a national character, how can we make the national character more than two-dimensional, more than just somebody who wants to deny their past and not take responsibility for anything? So I approach it as a- More literary. More literary as a craft issue. So, we have time for some questions. For those of you who have not climbed to the balcony to hurl yourself off and despair, there is a microphone on either side where you can come ask a question. There's a reason I'm the only one on stage drinking wine. In fairness, we did convince you not to bring the bottle. That's true. Yes. Are you ready for me? Yes. We seldomly come to hear intelligent people speak anymore, particularly if they are of color. For this reason, handy-pandy, in many ways, it's like with Gregory here. He has a lot to say, but he's afraid. He speaks in terms of language. And what I wanna ask or say is, I don't think I've heard the phrase African-American tonight. Have I? Possibly. He said it, I don't use it personally. Yeah, because it is one of the ties, as far as I am concerned, that keep us separated from whatever is next to be white in my life. I argue with people that tell me that if the Irish can say they're Irish Americans and the this can say, and I say that does not make us, if you say, go forward. If we are going to use our numbers as black people, I didn't get to hear that, I think, then we need to start looking at the advertisements that are commonly on TV. There is hardly a white, totally a black, totally couple that you're going to see often. I am a published author. Can we get to your question? Yeah, my question is this. When are we going to let go of those of us that can of terms that keep us separated from people by our own volition? So, are you saying that the term African American keeps us separated from other people? Okay, does anyone want to respond to that? Somebody was clapping in the back. Okay, I guess the fundamental question was, does America feel that same way about you? So, okay, we appreciate that, I appreciate that. Okay, so does anyone want to respond to that? Well, I will say that I am wary of how deeply ingrained the forms of discourse around, and I said this a little while ago, the forms of discourse are, and that any attempt to expand or move beyond the terms that we use, we're very committed to the ways that we talk about race and the ways that we think about race. And to suggest that there are other ways to think about it, people tend to respond to that aggressively, because it seems like you're asking them to give something a part of their identity up. But I think you're absolutely right that, and again, I look at the page, the one-page place where we can experiment with the ways that we think about ourselves, collectively and individually, is through revision and multiple drafts and being creative in how we imagine possibilities, and what we think is the capacity of the language, what we think is possible through the language. Okay, okay, okay, thank you. Okay, ma'am, I appreciate that, but there are other people who want to ask questions. You had a question, do you want to sign? I would just say with all due respect that if we stopped using the word African-American or black and we never uttered that word for a single day, it would not change for one, nothing, the experience of being black in this country. It just wouldn't, that somehow it is an identity that was placed upon us that somehow if we just no longer said we were black, people wouldn't treat us like we were black. I just, it's, I mean, I don't want to be disrespectful to you, but it's naive, it just doesn't make sense. We were called Negro, we were called color, we were called black, we were called African-American, but what was always true was if you were descended from Africa and they could prove that you had one drop of that, you were discriminated against, you were not allowed to have your dignity, your rights as a citizenship, and that doesn't change with language. I'm not gonna say language doesn't matter. Okay, ma'am. There's nobody in this country more than black people who wish that being called black didn't mean that your life didn't fucking get treated like shit, right? There's no one who would love that to be true more than black people, but we didn't create this and to somehow say that we acknowledge the existence of these facts and that if we stopped acknowledging this term would change our condition, we're not the ones who are putting us in this condition and clearly black people don't enjoy being second-class citizens in the country or their birth, so it's not just about the language. And I don't know that you actually believe that to be true, I don't know that you think that if we just called ourselves Americans suddenly, white people would be like, they're just Americans, like we are, like that. I don't think that's what she's saying. But come on, like. I do wanna make sure we can get to, good. Plus you were scared anyway to say what you really think, so. She already checked you, so. It was at that point that Nicole encouraged the black people to rise up and commit acts of violence against the white people in the audience. That's why I do not get invited into polite places, like I'm, the pen is like, we will never invite this woman, sorry, pen, sorry, sorry. We have another question. Clearly haven't seen it before. So anyway, let's, I should, I almost will always say this. When you have a question, please have your internal timer going, but I think a question should be asked in about 30 seconds. And a question is a sentence that has an inflection at the end. You know, it was an interrogative sentence. So there should be a request for a response at the end of your 30 second time. Thank you so much for this incredible panel. I'm wondering if, to the question, what do we do next, or what should we do next? Whether there, whether you think there might be too much focus on trying to create reasons to basically convince the white population that they have economic interests shared with people of color and with black people and with African-American people. And rather we need to think, or whether maybe in addition to that, we need to be talking more about white and also as a biracialist person, I would say like everyone who's non-black just like introspection about anti-blackness and in, you know, yeah, like, whether that's through literature or that's through more integrated spaces. And I mean that like meaningful integration, not just like having black and white children in a classroom, but having discussion about race in a classroom. Whether we need to move in that direction of having more honest conversations about race. He was just talking about this backstage. Which part? What did I say? I'll make him bust you out. Go ahead, no, you can't, it's cool. Oh my God. Which part? We have long conversation backstage. Which part? I really talked about why. I gotta say it, I thought you were gonna say it. So my question backstage was, here representing Pan, right? Why are three black people sitting on stage responsible for having this conversation? Yeah. Yeah. Right? Yeah. The onus is not on. And, you know, I keep going back. There's nothing that can't be answered by James Baldwin, right? And his letter to his nephew, he says, you don't have the problem. No matter what anybody tries to tell you, you don't have the problem. And so, I like your gesture toward introspection. And what I would recommend, and I think, the one thing that I do bristle at, Nicole, is the, we and them. And I think there is a, back to this idea of, and I'm absolutely sensitive to the practical, you know, the reality of the situation. But back to this idea of responsibility, taking responsibility, introspection. I think we are, everybody in this room is complicit in all of the things that we are talking about. And I don't think that, just as an, in terms of economy, you can't separate out, you know, my gap shirt from the people across the world who made it, right? We are all interdependent. And so to your point, I think, yeah, there's a way of talking about who we are that allows for, that doesn't beg apology, that doesn't demand apology, and that doesn't necessarily, doesn't point fingers or blame. It says, you know, this is what we're dealing with. How do we address our problem? So, I mean, let me ask this though, right? Good. If you have a slave plantation, and you have an overseer, and you have a slave holder, and you have a slave population, do they have the same fucking problem? You are cussing too now. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but like, do we look at this and go like, we all have the same problem? Well, let's go back to- But the person who called the police in Starbucks does not have the same problem as the dudes who were on the receiving end of that call. And this is why I'm trying to distinguish. The question is, where do we go from here? Right? And there is the, I'm not saying we should not protest, I'm not saying any of the things that we're doing should stop, we should stop doing them. I'm saying there are other avenues of possibility that I don't think we are making productive use of. And so, absolutely, and you're right, I'm trying to distinguish between what is sociology and what is literary. And again, I keep saying my platform, where I feel I can be influential is in the classroom, as we're sitting over a text, as we're thinking about the language. And that sounds Pollyanna-ish, but I started out saying I believe as far as we can change the world. I'm just raising that question. Actually, I don't wanna go through this whole thing, I wanna make sure that people, the other person has a chance to ask her question. But yeah, that was just all I had to ask. Hi, thank you. I have drafted my question, so hopefully it comes out as I intended to. Okay, so. Go. Thinking about progress and about changing the hearts and minds of white people, I've heard a concept that I can't remember who to attribute it to, but that it's hard to hate somebody up close. So the answer to hate is to move closer to get more intimately acquainted. So with the popularity of diverse authors. I'm sorry? We know who to attribute it to. Brunet Brown. Brunet Brown, thank you very much. So with the popularity of diverse authors in the recent commercial successes of movies like Moonlight and Get Out in Black Panther, I wonder if you think these are bringing us closer and if they're helping us make perceptible progress? The one thing that I'm still, I'm steady trying to carve out my little space here. The one thing I wanna push four to five my position. The one thing I do wanna push back on is the idea that, again, that we have to change the hearts and minds of white people. I'm not interested in changing the hearts and minds of white people. I'm interested in the conversation that you and I can have right now about who we are. And if we're thinking about, I do get very pessimistic and not so idealistic when I think about how if I consider the problem to be, or the challenge to be, changing the hearts and minds of people who I know are reluctant at best to change their hearts and minds, I'm not looking forward to that job, but I do think that there's something that we can do in the one on one, not on the macro scale. So to her question, is, I guess you're saying yes, that culture actually does allow people to come closer? If we talk about it. So no, and I'm actually hearing Nicole in the back of my head now. I'm ready, I'm ready for this. I think there's a way that we go to see Black Panther and it remains at a remove, it remains in a distance. And back to Baldwin, everybody's protest novel. There's a way that we talk about the atrocities that happen to Black people that just gets absorbed. Like, yeah, that's messed up. Oh, let's complain, no, we use the word complain. Let's say how screwed up it is and feel like there's some progress. I don't think that element is productive. So let me make a devil's advocate argument for optimism. Like, isn't part of the whole, like the problem of perspective and art that people of color and women spend huge amounts of time consuming art that shows what it's like to be white and male in the world. But people who are white and male, white and or male, are required to spend almost no time consuming art that shows how people of other backgrounds move through the world. But if you have a character like Killmonger or a character like T'Challa or the characters in Moonlight whose names I don't recall, but in their audiences that are willing to sit down and say, okay, I'm going to engage with the world from the perspective of this Black queer person or this person who lives in this fictional kingdom that has all this fantastic technology, isn't that progress? So, yes, but who cares? So, this is my problem, right? I don't know a white person in my circle who has not seen Get Out with no irony whatsoever, but what do they send their kids to school, right? So, we don't have a problem of white people in New York City who enjoy Black culture, who are willing to buy a movie ticket and or will come to an event like this so that they can feel a little uncomfortable and a little bad for a few minutes and then go home and they have their absolution. But when it comes down to, I actually, I don't care about hearts and minds, I care about actions, right? So, we have the most segregated school system of a large school system in the entire country in the most progressive, liberal, we love the melting pot of New York, but I won't damn sure put my child in the school with those kids in this neighborhood that I just moved into, right? So, it's not enough. Listen, when King talks about integration, what he says is integration is not about some kumbaya, I have United Nations dinner at my house on Saturday, it is about the sharing of power. And the sharing of power means white people who have had an inordinate amount of power and inordinate amount of resources have to give something up. And if you are not willing to give something up, whether you earned it, didn't earn it, think you earned it, don't think you earned it, is really irrelevant, right? Segregation occurred because segregation was beneficial to white folks and you didn't have to implement the law to have benefited from that law. So you make a choice, either you will continue to benefit from it or you would disrupt it and say, I'm going to give some of this unearned privilege back. So, no, it's not, art is important. But, you know, Frederick Douglass was walking around giving speeches and dining with fine white people while most black people were enslaved. It's not good enough to have a black friend or enjoy black art. Are you gonna fundamentally do something to make the society more equal? Will you allow your child in the classroom with all the black and brown poor kids that my daughter sits in a classroom with every day? And the answer, as most of you know, is no, you will not. You will leave here and you may live in a black neighborhood, but there's not black people from your neighborhood sitting at your kitchen table. There's not black people from your neighborhood working at your business and you certainly aren't putting your kids in those schools. So, we have to think well beyond the superficial. We just do. And like, the whole mission of my work and it's interesting, because on the one hand, I'm like, I don't think my work would change anything. But I also feel like why I write is I'm not gonna be comfortable, let us be comfortable with our decisions. I want us to every day have to look at the hypocrisy of who we really are and to say, I say I believe in equality, but I actually do all kinds of things that sustain inequality and I want us to have to confront that. That's what I see in my writing. I don't think we're gonna change. I think you're gonna confront it and be like, damn, I am a hypocrite, but I'm gonna keep on being a hypocrite. I do believe that, but I think it is my role as a writer and a journalist is to hold up this mirror and force us to actually look and say we are making a choice. And our choice is that we don't actually believe or want equality for black people in this country and so we don't have it. I'm gonna go to this side and so we're gonna try to do like a speed round so we can get the questions and we'll stop here for anybody who's online and we'll try to get maybe one person to respond to your question and so we can get through all of them before we run out of time. Good evening and I thoroughly enjoyed this evening, but to follow up on a point that you touched on about the incident at Starbucks and just recently the one that happened to LA Fitness. You would think in today's world that you would not have these things still happening and while I commend the CEO for Starbucks where he's gonna shut down his business for that one day to give that training to his employees, but what does it say in today's world when you have to shut down your business for one day to give your employees training to treat black people just as human beings? That's a rhetorical question. It kinda is, but I think you get my point. What does it say about today's world? I mean, just in the fact like take LA Fitness which I'm a member of, I go there two to three times a week, play racquetball and my directive would go sometimes. All he would have to do is change into his gym clothes while we were at work and walk right into LA Fitness and walk past and they didn't ask him to swipe his badge or anything. I go there two to three times a week. If I try walking past that front desk and not swipe my badge, I get stopped, but someone who rarely even goes in there just because of the color of his skin, he can just walk right in and don't even question them. That's what? I think there are serious sociological problems and I agree completely, I identify with that experience but I also tell myself, these are very middle class problems. These are not the problems. The day of the Starbucks, so we describe the people who are gonna go home and feel the same way and do the same things. Honestly, that's exactly what I do. I'm no, that story doesn't. But okay, Sandra Bland had a degree. When the Starbucks the same day. It was going to a job interview. To me, Rice lived in a gated community. Again. But wait, there are these instances of James Blake, the tennis player who was above middle class, who was tackled and thrown to the ground. The fact that your middle class doesn't insulate you from the fact that those cops could just as easily have killed them. No, but we're talking about, I'm talking about personal responsibility. I can't prevent anybody from doing anything to me. I can't change any circumstance out in the world practically, as I say, boots on the ground. But I can, if there's anything that I do have power over, it is how I carry myself in the world and how I think about my place in the world. Eric Holder, Eric Holder, right? Got like racially profiled by the police and he was like the top law enforcement man in the land. I have been beat up by cops. So you didn't just carry yourself? What's that? You didn't carry yourself well enough in that circumstance? No, let's see. I'm not saying it's a matter of carrying oneself well enough. Okay, so, sir. I'm just trying to understand. I believe you have a question. Thank you. So, thank you for the conversation. I have a question around, you know, what are we gonna do? Right? I mean, I think there is a centrality, what? Yes, I agree. So, I mean, there is something about the centrality of blackness in American history, right? And centrality of the black African-American experience here. Equally important are the experience and I actually disagree to a certain extent that blackness is the only oppressed history in the United States, right? Certainly not. But let me go into it because I think that in our own, as we encounter our own humanities as we work together, it's actually the liberation of this country. And I wanna hear a little bit about either two questions about what is, I mean, you guys are writers. What is the narrative that we should be, you know, in your best dream to think about, right? What is the role of BLM in this work? What is the role of Rashad Robinson and others that are doing incredible work, right, in this arena? At the same time, what is, how do we should think about shifting power, right? And what do you think is happening on the ground in terms of organizing and changing power dynamic? Which I think is essentially the need that is to change. So, what is the narrative? The narrative question and you either can think about a narrative conversation or are we tilting the power dynamics in this country or how to do it? So, in terms of narrative, I guess, what is the narrative we should be telling about this, about where we are and where we should go? I guess, what is the narrative that's empowering to us if we're our liberation, right? Okay, so how about this? I'll take moderator's prerogative here. I think that there are groups and organizations in terms of shifting the power dynamic that are attempting to do really important work and one of the most interesting things that's happening right now is the poor people's movement that Reverend William Barber has spearheaded, they've organized that they may be around at this point 40 states where they have people who are engaged in some sort of response and it is attempt to change the narrative, to get to your point, of there being one group that is at the bottom and that is like white people and that they are being besieged by Muslims, by Latinos, by blacks, by all these other groups and that their shortcomings in life are a reflection of the wrongful deeds of other people. I think that they have been attempting to change that narrative to say that there are, there's a vast area of common ground in which people can say, well, if we're looking at the minimum wage or the fight for 15 or healthcare or what is happening with the flight of employment options and all these things, there's a place in Alabama where there are black people and white people who are suffering ill effects of environmental deregulation that has allowed sewage to wind up in their yards and they're the places where they live and so they're trying to create that narrative that says there are some areas where we can work together to achieve change that's mutually beneficial and you have the last question. Since only one person can answer my question, I really want to ask Nicole this and I ask it from the perspective of a white South African woman of a particular age, last generation benefited explicitly from apartheid. Can we go anywhere without justice and reparations? Can I just add, in South Africa, I mean I think we've seen 25 years after the end of apartheid the failure of the narrative of reconciliation and what the Truth Commission did was certainly create a narrative and an understanding of the historical abuses. It's failed to change economic power, it's failed to change the reality of black people in the country so I'm really interested to find out what you think about sort of reparations and particularly justice and accountability. Great question. Um, yeah, I think clearly you have to have some sort of economic redistribution because it just makes sense, like the example I give sometimes is like if a drug company makes a drug and it kills my loved one and people always say like if you get a check from that drug company it won't bring your loved one back. Clearly it won't, but it can wanna replace the economic loss but also it's about making things right, right? We understand that you have to make things right. When you look at what Dr. King was, what he was doing leading up to his death it was a conversation about economic redistribution. After for Freedom Summer I went, the anniversary of Freedom Summer I went down to Mississippi. Mississippi has more black elected officials than any place in the country and the black people there live in abject poverty. It is also the poorest state in the country and so having political empowerment has not done anything to change the economic condition of black people and who was it that said like, it was Dr. King right, it doesn't matter if you have the right to go into a cafe if you can't purchase the meal. Having the right doesn't matter without money and in America we have had neither reconciliation, truth, justice or reparations but to believe that one, the way that we're taught slavery, not understanding that the entire reason we have the one of the wealthiest economies in the country was because of the stolen labor of enslaved people that black bodies in this country were the largest commodity in the country that the system of banking, the system of labor, the cotton that supplies the textile mills that leads to the industrial revolution is all being done on black bodies. We come up with a system of insurance because black people are a commodity that needs to be insured. Our regional banking system comes up to allow people to borrow money to be able to purchase and use enslaved people as collateral and so when we don't understand that the economy of this country that we would not be a United States and we would have no industrial revolution, we would not even have, I mean Thomas Jefferson studied the system of how can you derive more labor and outcome out of enslaved people and that's how we get our modern day factory system. We don't understand any of that. So, and then that is then followed up by 100 years of quasi-slavery system of peonage that forced my relatives to work basically in slavery on plantations in the South where they were not paid for their labor. And then say, in 1968, we've given you all your rights, now you're free to compete with the rest of the world. It's illogical. It has produced exactly what we expected it to produce. We were denied, I mean, when you look at Tana Hazi's the case for reparations, what's brilliant about it is he's not even going back to slavery. He's going back to the denial for black Americans of the ability to obtain wealth in the way that most white Americans obtain wealth which is through housing. So that we can't even have one a discussion about slavery that we cannot acknowledge the harm that was done not just to people 100 years ago but the fact that my father was born into a Jim Crow country that we actually, the black people on this stage are the first black people in the history of this country who were born into an America where we had full rights. I'm 42 years old. This is not ancient history. So there will never, and I guess this is part of the reason why I say, like we will never have equality because we will never make up for the loss of wealth and the continuing loss of wealth and the continuing ability to take part in the fruits of this country because we are never going to be willing to make payment for what was done. I want to thank Gregory Pardlow and thank Nicole Hanna-Jones. We are out of time and I want to thank you all for your participation. Thank you for coming out.