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This groundbreaking panel gathers together pioneering authors who are reshaping the landscape of speculative fiction with their bold narratives and innovative storytelling. From dystopian worlds to intergalactic adventures, these authors are at the forefront of pushing the boundaries of Black imagination in literature. Join us for an enlightening discussion as they share their inspirations, challenges, and visions for the future of speculative fiction.
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00:00First is our moderator. Please welcome Shaheen Williams of Conjuring Literacy.
00:04He's an English professor and book content creator from Oxford, North
00:08Carolina who centers black speculative fiction in his work and content as he
00:12explores the depth of black imagination. Give it up for my friend y'all. Up next
00:19we have fiction author who wrote the short story collection Friday Black and
00:23his debut novel Chain Gang All-Stars named one of five under 35 authors by
00:28the National Book Foundation in 2018 and won the P.E.N. slash Gene Stein Book
00:33Award in 2019. Nana Kwame Ajay Brynja then we have Canadian author of epic
00:42fantasy his first novel The Rage of Dragons was originally self-published in
00:472017 and 2020 time named it one of the 100 best fantasy books of all time. Give
00:54it up for Evan Winter. And lastly, storyteller, teaching artist, and community
01:02organizer organizer from Atlanta. He's also the winner of several indie book awards
01:07for multicultural fiction, H.G. Hunter.
01:10Woo!
01:19What's up SFS? How y'all doing tonight?
01:21Yo!
01:26I want to first thank y'all for having me. Thank y'all for showing up and thank y'all for joining
01:29me on the stage today. And we're just going to kick it off. So I want to start
01:33off by evoking an ancestor whose name is actually on one of these walls. In what white publishers
01:40want print, Zora Neale Hurston states white publishers hardly engage with the interesting
01:45problem of race as they are not in the business to educate but to make money. What is an aspect
01:51of your book that you really had to advocate for to include with your publishers and editors?
01:54I can start. And first off, thank y'all for being here. This is my first Essence Fest, so
02:02I'm feeling really grateful. Yeah. I think when you think about publishing, the whiteness
02:10of publishing, and it goes from like, it's very hard to get a black agent, it's very hard
02:14to get a black publisher, all through the spectrum of publishing, this whiteness is sort
02:18of prevalent. I've been lucky, though, that my team has been very, they kind of know who
02:26I am. I'm kind of, I guess, black issues have been a part of my project from the beginning,
02:31so they've been pretty much, they've been pretty accommodating for me. But there's been periods
02:37where I want to write something in a different language, for example, and I don't feel like
02:41I want to explain it or like try to translate it to make it more legible to whiteness. And
02:45I had to sort of explain to my editor, like, sometimes it's okay for whiteness to be on
02:50the outside, as opposed to being the center. And so on a line level, just being willing
02:54to know that, thinking of myself and how I see the world as the center, not sort of like
02:59translating or like white translating, you know, not being willing to do that has been
03:04probably the most prevalent example I can think of.
03:06Yeah, what's up, y'all? I write for kids exclusively. And so I think there's a lot of
03:19complexity when you're doing narratives about people who are in a formative stage of life.
03:24And I thought so long about this question, Shaheem, I was like, it was like so many things that I was
03:29going to pick out, like, they hate on this, and they hate on this, and they hate on this.
03:32But the thing that really, I think, is prevalent across all of my projects is like the inner life
03:38of the young black male, because that's who's at the center of my stories. I have an adventure series
03:44where there's fun things happening, and there's danger, and there's action. And in a lot of ways,
03:51my publisher is like, that's cool. That's enough. And for me, it's not quite the same. I'm thinking
03:58about what would it feel like to be a black boy going through these situations that are fun and
04:03perilous to a degree, but also have real life implications, right? We have like a young kid,
04:08and they're trying to save the world and fighting for their life. And does that not have an impact
04:12on their mental health, right? And so I want to take up space so that they can have time to reflect,
04:17so that they can make friends, so that they can experience some of the joy. And I feel like
04:21a lot of times in publishing, not understanding how complex it is to live in these bodies with
04:28this skin in this world, it'll be like, well, that's not really an important part of the story.
04:33Get back to the plot, get back to the narrative. But to me, it's just as important as everything
04:37else that's going on. So that complexity is the main thing that I think is hard to convey,
04:44and something that I really had to stand on business about when folks want to minimize it.
04:50Okay, can everybody hear me? All right, cool, cool, cool. So yeah, I think the question's about,
04:59if you pick me up with that one more time.
05:01What is the aspect of your book that you had to advocate for to include with your publisher and
05:07editor?
05:07Okay, so what aspect of my books did I have to advocate so that the publisher would leave
05:12it in, as opposed to trying to exclude it or push it to the side? I think I've been pretty
05:16fortunate in that the publisher, and my editor specifically, didn't try to exclude anything
05:21or push my story in any direction other than the direction I was trying to take it into.
05:26I think that's also when the job is being done the best by the publisher or the editor,
05:30because they're there, in my opinion, to help support our vision as writers to the best of their
05:36ability. Their job is to help us tell the story that we're already trying to tell as best we can
05:42tell it. So if anybody out here wants to be a writer or plans to, or does any sort of creative work,
05:46the most important thing that you have is your voice, your specific perspective on life and on
05:51the world that comes through your experiences. Don't let that be diluted, because it's easy to say,
05:57especially for big corporations or companies that want to make money, right? They want to push
06:01everything to the middle, to make everything as palatable as possible for everybody.
06:05But the power of story, the power comes through your personal experience. It comes through your
06:10voice. So when you speak with your own voice as clearly and as loudly as you can, that's when you
06:16have the best chance to touch other people, to make them see what you see and to make them feel what
06:21you feel. We are all different. We are all unique. But at the same time, the human experience overlaps
06:26enough that we can find points of connection when we speak as clearly and as powerfully and as loudly as
06:32we can about who we are. So no matter what publishers say or anybody else tells you, if you are a
06:38creative, speak with your own voice, tell your story as loudly and as clearly as possible.
06:43Thank you all. So my first individual question is going to you, Evan. So Tao is one of the first main
06:51characters who was a black boy, who I felt like had the right to be angry, and we were able to see his
06:56rage without like a commodification of it. So my question is, how can Tao simultaneous attempts to turn
07:06pain to power, and his descent to madness serve as a lesson for black boys in oppressive environments
07:11for more sustainable black futures?
07:14So it's a good question. Why is my main character so, so angry?
07:21I think that as I look around this room, it's not, it shouldn't ever be that hard to understand
07:26frustration and anger at the way the world is. In my book, the world is not how it should be. It is not
07:31equitable. The status quo is not a positive thing. And he is angry because he feels the weight of that
07:38society. He feels the weight that it puts on his shoulders. He feels the limits that it places on
07:43his possibilities. And he wants to resist that and break free of that and become as human as everybody
07:49else on the top claims that they are and tries to deny him. They try to deny him his full humanity.
07:54So he fights against that. And so that rage, that frustration, that anger is a natural,
07:59and I would actually argue it is a righteous outcome from being treated as less than.
08:06So yeah, I guess that's it. It's, it's, it is righteous. It is right. And when the world puts a
08:12weight on your shoulders, when a world tries to oppress you, it wants you to say, it wants you to come
08:16to terms with that or to resist ultimately, peacefully and calmly. And that almost always is an excuse to
08:23maintain that same level of oppression on you. So I would say, you know, it, oftentimes it feels like
08:29that main character is going mad with the anger and the rage. But I would say that, that, that look
08:34at madness is what the oppressor says when they are looking at the actions you take to free yourself.
08:39It's not madness. It's righteousness.
08:44All right. HD.
08:45So across your three book series, Future Land, we get to meet Cam and his interactions with his
08:52parents and his uncle. So my question is what things, lessons and values can adult readers gain
08:58from co-reading with kids to discuss generational gaps and efforts to bridge communication and
09:03mitigate generational toxic practices between families?
09:06You really did your thing with these questions, boy.
09:09Yeah. I was like, that's a good question.
09:11Yeah. Why? Okay. So I love kids. I just, I always have, I was a camp counselor for the first time
09:19in my life when I was 15 and looking back, my campers were like 12. So I don't know who put me in
09:25charge. It definitely was a liability, but that's how they did it. And so my whole life, I've just been
09:30like so invested in the lives of young people. And as I've gotten older, I don't have any kids of my own,
09:35but through visits to schools. And I actually sub at a school in Atlanta where I live, I get a chance
09:41to be around young people all the time. And they tell me stuff that they don't tell some of y'all
09:46because it's not the same level of intimacy. It's not the same boundaries. Right. And so I have a
09:51chance to get to know them in ways that feel so precious to me. And so as I was creating this,
09:57this series, this narrative, I wrote the first book for the kids. I want to make it interesting.
10:02I want to make it fun. And the second book and the third book are obviously for them too,
10:06but I tried to do a little something different with each installment. And the second installment
10:11is really for parents. If you think about what we have going on, there's this kid, his parents are
10:17the foremost technologists and engineers in the world. They've created a theme park that you don't
10:23have to go visit because the entire park will lift up and travel from city to city to city to city.
10:29So it will visit you. His parents have built this empire. And of course they want their only child,
10:35their only son to be the person who inherits it and keeps it going. Right. But he has a different
10:40dream and that unfolds. Right. He finds out what he really likes to do and he wants to follow that
10:46path. In addition to that, he's trying to solve all these mysteries and face all these social ills
10:52that Evan is talking about and see how he can make a difference in the world. And that's not an easy
10:58thing for parents to come to terms with. Right. You have a vision for your young person and they have
11:03a separate vision for themselves. They're acting in ways that you feel like might be dangerous
11:07or might not might go against your better wisdom. But to them, it's what I need to do to
11:13self-actualize. It's what I need to do to feel like I'm my own person. And so I think there's a
11:18beautiful journey for our main character, this 11 and 12 year old boy who starts to grow up and
11:24starts to come into himself. But there's also a really beautiful journey for the parents to learn
11:28what it means to support a child, to guide a child, to be there for a child and not to
11:35pull them up out of the ground right as they grow, but to raise them and to nurture them and to accept
11:41some things that might need to be accepted, even though they're tough. And so, yeah, it's a story about
11:46like just this familial love when when we pitched the idea. That was one of my that was one of my
11:54deal breakers. I was like, I don't want any black family drama like the family got to be exactly
11:58what I want it to be because we know enough of the rest of the stories. Right. And it can be
12:03challenging without it being troublesome. And so that's what I wanted to put into the story. I
12:07wanted to put into a look of how a family really loves each other throughout everything that they
12:12make a face. Thank you. All right, Nana. So as y'all know, America has been going through some very
12:20interesting things lately. And in Chain Gang All Star, we kind of see a reality that can happen
12:26based off what's going on. So my question is, what does the text say about human behavior in a time of
12:33crisis, specifically in a dystopia? I like how you put that interesting things.
12:37So just real quick, the novel Chain Gang All Stars is about an imagined future where convicted
12:44wards of state can opt out of a sentence of at least 25 years and participate in death
12:49matches. The book ends up thinking a lot about incarceration and how inequitable and sort
12:55of violent the prison system is. And to answer your question, I think the interesting things
13:01in America are, we are becoming more and more aware of sort of the myriad and endless inequities
13:09that exist. We're sort of getting more and more aware and attuned of the inherent racism and the
13:14project of America. We're starting to get more in tune to just the wealth disparities that are sort of
13:21built into our systems. And we're like struggling to negotiate against that because a lot of these
13:29ills are really built and baked right into the heart of all of our most sort of essential
13:36institutions. And so anyways, all I have to say, we have a lot of problems. A lot of bad shit is
13:41happening. And sometimes you hit crisis points. And I think the book is thinking about how when
13:51violent systems arise, there's a lot of different things that can happen. Sometimes the pressure that
13:57we're all under makes us look at each other as enemies, as competition. But another thing can
14:03also happen is that we get the pressure that these systems are putting on us could sometimes force us
14:09or ask us or push us towards holding each other with a little bit more compassion, thinking about
14:15wait, maybe there isn't a difference between your well-being and my well-being. I think the pandemic
14:19gave a good example that your health care is my health care in a very literal way. And so I think
14:25the book is reminding us that we have a choice of how we respond to the difficulties, which are
14:32everywhere. And compassion might be a way that we can respond and sort of hold each other just
14:45a little bit better in a way that can sustain us for longer in a real way. It's a great question.
14:52Thank you. Thank you. Evan, Tao is bombarded by an everything, everywhere, all at once level of
14:59conflict. What critique on human life in the midst of war and imperialism do we get from reading the
15:05series? Okay. What critique on human life do we get from the series? I think basically the series does
15:16talk a lot about imperialism and war. And for me, a key aspect of imperialism is its attempt to say
15:25that, yeah, we're all human, but some of us are more human than the rest. And that's a large part of
15:30what it does and what it tries to do to separate and to also be able to justify sort of to justify
15:37the exploitation of others. And so the book is trying to sort of take a long lingering look at
15:43that and to say, what does this mean? Who gets to do that defining of humanness? Okay. Why are they
15:50doing it? And what are most often the outcomes from doing that? And again, most often the outcomes
15:55are exploitation, mass murder, violence. And then the book tries to say and explore how we move
16:05through that. How can we maybe break out of a system that does that to us that says that some
16:09people are more people than other people, right? And I think that's a key and very important thing that
16:15it's a big question for me even. Like, how do we move beyond the idea of, you know, either an explicit
16:21or an implicit caste system? Sort of, you know, nationally, globally, in all those kind of ways
16:29where some people, their wants, their desires, their dreams, their goals are looked at as having
16:35more value, more importance, and treated with more respect than the dreams, wants, goals, desires of a
16:42whole other groups of people, right? Who gets the benefit of the doubt in things, right? And who doesn't?
16:47So the book talks about all that stuff, tries to explore it, and then tries to figure out, at least
16:53through the perspective of one character and the group of people around that character, what a path,
16:58what one path forward might look like. Yeah. Thank you. Hugh, in your books, in the Futureland series,
17:07each book has a different sub-genre, and all three attack like a different social justice issue.
17:13So in book one, you pay homage to the Atlanta child murders, and the ambivalence and apathy to missing black
17:19children. What are some of the issues that you talk about in book two and book three?
17:24Yeah. Wow.
17:28So like you said, every book has sort of a different focus, and the first one started with the Atlanta
17:33child murders. I was born and raised in Atlanta, west side. In the 70s and 80s, there were,
17:39depending on how you count it, about 30-some-odd black children that disappeared from the west side
17:45of Atlanta. And, I mean, there's a lot of shows about this. If anybody's ever seen Mindhunter,
17:51or I can't think of it, but there's a bunch of podcasts and shows that reference this occurrence
17:57in the city of Atlanta. Basically, local law enforcement took too long, didn't take it seriously,
18:03because these are people in every city that people don't, that the powers that be don't think too
18:08highly of, right? They're not too concerned with. So a year of black kids disappearing,
18:13finally, they're like, okay, well, maybe we should do something about it. The FBI had to get called in.
18:17It was a whole deal. And Future Land One was actually my first time writing about Atlanta. I had
18:25never written anything about home, so I was really excited to put all of this history and all of these
18:30references inside the text, kind of as like my respect to the place that brought me forth to the rest of
18:37the world. In the second book, I don't know if anybody's ever heard of Trump City before. Trump
18:46City was a project, I think in the late 80s, where Donald Trump was basically trying to like create
18:52his own miniature city within New York, and invite different corporations to come there, and invite
19:02very wealthy people to come live there. But it was supposed to be this small like enclave of elitism,
19:08super duper elitism, like within New York City and be sort of walled off from the rest of the city.
19:13And so I'm talking a lot about gentrification in book two, which I know is happening to all of our
19:20neighborhoods all across the nation and the world. But I'm also talking about these actors that would
19:28decide our fate for us if they could, right, that are talking in these back channels sort of
19:33communications and making plans for our land, our bodies, our futures, without us being privy to it
19:39sometimes and without our consent. And that is heavily explored in book two. The team actually
19:45travels from Atlanta to New York for the second book. So we get to be there and kind of understand
19:52place in a different way and understand who's in charge versus who they tell us is in charge,
19:59all of those sorts of things. The third book is a little bit of a departure from the first two.
20:04We got two mysteries and then we have just a pure adventure novel. The kids and their teammates go to
20:12Cairo, Egypt for like the final showdown. And I think that one is less issues focused, but at least
20:18for our main character, he's grown up in this theme park his whole life. And it's the best thing in the
20:24world, right? Like not just to him, but to everybody else. There's nothing outside future land that is
20:30better than is inside the park because it's a view at what the world could be. At least he thinks so.
20:37My project with the last book was to really show how a kid can grow up and be super resourced and be
20:44super loved and super well taken care of. But there's no substitute for having the opportunity
20:50to go out into the world and meet people and explore things and experience things. And when Cam gets to
20:57Cairo, Egypt and he meets the local people there and he starts to learn about a different culture and it's
21:02not so much about what's going on in his park with his family and his friends, that's a big part of him
21:07growing up too. It's just the exposure to other magic, other magic and other futuristic things,
21:14other things beyond belief that aren't just contrived by his parents. So yeah, each one kind
21:19of has its own different flavor, but I hope they all work together to create this really beautiful
21:24story about not just things going wrong, but things going right. Thank you. Thank you. And Nana.
21:32So for y'all who don't know, I'm a PhD student and my dissertation is looking at
21:36using archival material and like factual data and speculative fiction and like what's the
21:41implications of that. Of course, your book does that amazingly. I read it and I fell in love like
21:45I need to add this to my dissertation. But my question is, what was your process in weaving
21:50historical anecdotes, facts and statistical data into the text and why was that important to the
21:55narrative? I appreciate the question and I'll be honored to be in your dissertation. That'd be dope.
22:01And listen to all the answers. I see why we're on the same panel together. So like I see what y'all did there.
22:05Good job. So my book has footnotes, even though it has like that very speculative, almost sci-fi
22:12premise. I have a lot of footnotes. Some of the footnotes are about issues in the world of the book
22:18and some of them are like case law from a specific court case in real life. Some of the footnotes cite
22:25the American Constitution. Some of the footnotes think about the lives of people like Albert Woodfox who
22:33spent over 40 years in solitary confinement in Parchment Farms, Mississippi.
22:38Um, what I, um, what I was thinking about when I did that was I didn't know what the, I didn't want, I
22:45didn't want, I wanted it to be impossible to read the book as just about some woman hitting someone over
22:50the head with a hammer. I wanted to like really ground the work in, in something real in a real text.
22:57I've, for my, the example I sometimes give is I don't know if you ever seen the show Squid Game.
23:02Squid Game was thinking a lot, as you might know, about sort of our economic disparities and like
23:08capitalism at large. One time I was talking to, it was actually my PT and he started bringing, he brought
23:13up Squid Game and I was like, oh bet, we're about to talk bad about capitalism, which is one of my
23:18pastimes. And when I started talking about capitalism, he was like, wait, why are you talking about that?
23:23And essentially he had watched the whole Squid Game and never thought about what Squid Game is
23:27really about one time. And that is very scary to me. And so when I put the, when I wove those things
23:34in, I wanted to remind the reader that even though this book is sort of entertaining and it's sort of
23:41a thrilling aspect, the premise is built on a very real and sad reality, which is that we have a system
23:48that totally destroys our ability to respond compassionately to the disease of
23:53addiction. We have a system that currently individualizes and criminalizes systemic issues
23:59like poverty. We have a system that totally, totally cuts at the, cuts at the knees our ability
24:05to respond with true heart or compassion to mental health crises. And all these things are true in so
24:13many ways. I couldn't even name them all, but I wanted that like sad truth to be really unforgettable.
24:20And I think the footnotes and the weaving of the actual found text ground that book in a familiar
24:28reality that makes the quote unquote fun of the book a little more damning. It's a great question again.
24:34Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So this panel was amazing. I, when I found out about who
24:40my panelists were, I immediately fell in love because each one of these books did something
24:44special for me. HD, you gave me an opportunity to read a black boy who was able to dream and
24:49persevere through his dreams. Evan, you gave me an example of a black boy who was anger and who was
24:54able to turn his anger into power and move up through the ranks. And Nana, as a child of the
24:59incarcerated person, you really wrote a book that kind of spoke to incarcerated people and
25:05their families and how they impact their lives and like the advocates for them. Like you have
25:09so many perspectives of what like incarceration does to the American system. These are very powerful
25:14books. If you haven't gotten to pick them up yet, please go pick them up. But my final question for
25:18you all in a genre that's dominated by black women, especially when we think about like Octavia
25:25Butler and all of these other like black women who have dominated speculative fiction, y'all are black
25:30men who are doing the thing. So I wonder what is your experience as a black male speculative writer
25:36and what are some of your hopes and visions for the future within your work in the genre at large?
25:41I'm going to tell a real quick story about going to DC earlier this year. I was in like maybe eight or nine
25:53public schools over the course of a few days and we were doing writing workshops. And I was asking young
26:00black kids mostly to think about what they see in their neighborhood that they don't like and then to use a
26:07magical premise or a scientific premise to change it. One boy came up with the idea. He said that
26:14there's a lot of theft. There's a lot of theft from corner stores and other things going on. And he has
26:20friends that get in trouble and he has friends that get hurt because of the responses to this sort of
26:26dynamic. And he said, what if everything in the store was a hologram? So you filled up your holographic cart,
26:33you checked out, you walked out of the store with nothing. But when you got home, your items were
26:38either there or got delivered. We'll work on that part later. But he had the premise of this story
26:43and it came so fast. And I was like, have you thought of this already? And he was like, no,
26:47I never thought about this until you asked. And so when I think about like the question that you're
26:53asking about black men and our place in spec and the future of what it can be and what it should be,
26:58the dearth of that till now or the lack of that till now to me just really means that there are
27:04even more stories and even more visions for our collective black future that aren't necessarily
27:10integrated all the way yet. And that's my vision. That's what I want. I want as many young black
27:16boys to feel like this is a space that they belong in and that they deserve and have, you know, a part of
27:23cooperative ownership in so that as we continue to dream out and to vision out what they think is
27:30included too. And they can contribute, you know, their amount, their ideas, their love to the vision
27:36of all of our future. I love that answer. And it speaks to like how I think about speculative fiction
27:43and any sort of kind of fiction in general. Because there's some men who I know, I've seen in real life
27:48who are like, I don't read fiction. I just read nonfiction. It's like a way for them to feel better
27:53feel better than other people. And I think it's a sad, I'm laughing about it, but it's kind of sad
27:58because I think the most important human power is imagination. And not just like in like imagination
28:04fun way, but in a genuine, how can this be something different? Because if you only rely on what's in
28:10front of you to inform what could be, you're just going to be in a circle all the time. You can't really
28:14make real progress. And so I think the speculative space is a chance for both the reader and writer
28:21to stretch that essential human power, which is imagination, and do exactly what that young
28:26person just did. And you have to be able to do that. If you can't do that, you can't build new
28:32systems. You can't build new institutions. You can't build a new, better life. And so when these
28:36people, particularly men, say that, I actually get genuinely sad about it because men are allowed
28:42to exist in this very narrow space. They can't be too angry. They can't ever be sad, God forbid.
28:48They can't read fiction somehow that fits into like, almost like loftiness or whatever.
28:54They got to wear this certain kind of boring shit over here. Like it's a very lame, small,
28:59boring lane for men to exist. And I think speculative fiction and speculative fiction authors are
29:03reminding, are sort of reminding us that like we can push past that.
29:06Yeah, I absolutely agree with everything that everyone's saying up here. And I guess
29:13for me, I think that stories have an incredible, incredible amount of power. Perhaps it's a little
29:20bit self-serving, but I really do feel that in the same way that, you know, the pantheon of the gods
29:26and the big myths were what were told in ancient Greece or ancient Rome to help people understand
29:31and make sense of the world around them and their connections with each other. I think that that's
29:36what stories do nowadays. One of the biggest, one of the biggest sources of soft power that,
29:41for example, America has is the cultural export of its stories. It helps tell the world what to think
29:48about how things are, how things should be. And an important part of that is that we, I think,
29:53especially like the people in this room, if any of you want to be storytellers, we need to tell
29:57more of our stories as part of that overall fabric so that people can see us more clearly
30:03so that we can let the rest of the world experience the world as we see it. Because if we don't do
30:10that, then all the stories that get, all the stories that get told, all the myths that are made are not
30:16myths that are being told with us in their favor. So like, again, I don't know if anybody out here
30:21wants to be a storyteller, but if you do, your voice is needed and your voice is important.
30:27I think that if we tell all these stories, we get a chance to maybe make it so that we start to see
30:33each other more clearly as human beings of equal merit, value, and worth. And if we can get that to
30:40happen well enough, we can maybe start to take out one of the load-bearing pillars of inhumanity,
30:46which is that, which is that lie that some people are worth more than others. So by telling our
30:52stories, we can maybe eliminate that. And if we can eliminate that, the world changes, and I believe
30:56it changes for the better.
30:57All right. Thank y'all so much. Make some noise for the panelists.
31:02Thank y'all so much. Thank y'all.
31:04Thank y'all.
31:04Thank y'all.
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