Poured Over: Caleb Gayle on We Refuse to Forget
“But there is joy in advocating for changing of the world for the better, for not allowing the world to tell you who you shall be, but rather reimagining a world in which you can be anything.”
Award-winning journalist and professor at Northeastern University Caleb Gayle delivers a stunningly original story of America in his first book, We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power. Caleb joins us on the show to talk about growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the aftermath of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, the untold stories of marginalized communities, his hopeful outlook for the future of the country, and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Becky.
Featured Books (Episode):
We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power by Caleb Gayle
Featured Books (TBR Topoff):
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead
Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.
Full transcript for this episode:
B&N: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I am so excited to have Caleb Gayle, here with us. He has a Master’s in Public Policy and an MBA. He’s a Radcliffe fellow. He’s a professor of journalism at Northeastern University, he’s done a bunch of other things, too. But more importantly, he’s now the author of We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power. And it’s a story that not a lot of folks know, outside of Oklahoma, and outside of the community, but I can guarantee you that once you have read this book, and once you’ve heard Caleb, you will not forget this story in any way, shape, or form. So Caleb, thank you so much for making the time because I know you’ve got 8 million projects happening. So we’re really, really happy you could be here today.
Caleb Gayle: Oh I know. I mean, it’s a pleasure to be here. I feel I feel honored. And it’s just so dope to be in conversation with you about about this book. And it means a lot.
B&N: Yeah, this book is really, I think there are going to be some folks who were very surprised about this book. So I want to talk about you for a second before we get to the floor. Because when you and I first met, you mentioned that your parents picked you all up and moved to Tulsa from New York. Suddenly, you were living in Oklahoma, and that does sort of start your entry into the story. Can we start there? And can we talk about your family?
CG: Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think to make it more strange, is that my family is not only black, as your listeners won’t, well will avail maybe, maybe they will know, maybe they won’t know. But my family is also Jamaican, right? So talk about fish out of water. Right. But I think that all of the things that usually attract people of all ages to New York, right, the excitement, the extreme levels of diversity, its relative unpredictability. Its cosmopolitan nature. All read, I think, for my parents, especially raising young children, as you know, all of the ingredients to make Sodom and Gomorrah, right. And I think that to some extent, the flatness, the predictability, the brown grass of Oklahoma just attracted my parents, I think there are a host of other reasons. But if I were to whittle it down to those, that I think we’d be pretty close, right? I think that they wanted to some extent to kind of put their children a bit in the bubble wrap of Oklahoma, right. Which I think is part of what attracted them. And as a kid, you know, who I wouldn’t have known. I mean, it was, there’s more grass to play football and other sports, right? That’s all that I knew. But as I became older, I realize both how strange it was for us to make that move. But then even more than that, not only how strange it was, but perhaps what sort of universe it put me into, and what sort of kind of questions of identity would be you know, smacking me in the face every time I woke up and walked around that city, that state.
B&N: Okay, is that how your work started? Because I mean, here you are, you’ve got multiple degrees I just listed off you know, only a tiny bit of your CV. But you’re the smartest guy in the room. And I say that literally. But here’s the thing, you know how important story is this is about the people this is about the situations. This isn’t just a history book where like, and then this happened on this day on the …. you have latched on to a community that isn’t necessarily directly yours, but it is because it’s an Oklahoma story. This is an it’s a story of Black families that have been kicked out of their community, and we’re gonna go in depth there. But how do you end up with this love story that teaches you how to get in and do the work?
CG: Growing up in the tradition I grew up in, right in church, specifically Black church, everything is a meshed. In the story, right? A sermon is really, you know, recounting stories or not sort of recounting what people might count as facts from the Bible or any other sort of religious text is not enough usually in a Black church, right? You have to leave it into stories, the crescendo of the fall, the intrigue, the tension, the productive tension. And so when, when interacting even as a kid with other kids who look just like me, and hearing them say that they themselves were not in their words, just Black, but that they would say again, in their words, I got Indian in me. It haunted me, right. It told me that the kind of simple categories that I ordinarily would go with, were not enough and then when I found that I as the as the son of Jamaican immigrants, who’s also Black, who hailed from New York, but then came to Oklahoma. My story couldn’t fit neatly within the box of blackness as its conventionally understood, and so to me this story of the Black creeks would it be complete without tying it more clearly to a family, a set of people who once called the Creek Nation home, and to be honest, their story is as American as anyone else’s, the story of Oklahoma and the forgotten nature of its Black history is as American as American gets. So to me I couldn’t maybe is the churchyness of my upbringing, but also kind of the haunting nature of the statement said in passing by kids who look just like me, but told me they weren’t, that fills me with a curiosity to uncover how this history could be wedded to a story that didn’t go in a straight line that didn’t have natural resolve, or resolution. That’s what got me here.
B&N: Yeah, I’m gonna quote you for a second, we often forget who we are you right? Because we’ve never been given a chance to remember properly. That’s a lot of Americans. History that’s, you know, for individuals and for regions and for our country and in general. So, you started this book as a piece for The Guardian when you were on staff there, right? Were you still in school?
CG: I was I did not like business school. That was not my zone. So I busied myself with, with, with the right the craft of writing and writing also for The Guardian.
B&N: Okay, so here you are learning how to tell a story for an audience in a different way. Through newspaper you find if I’m correct, you find the Simmons family first, right? And you sort of start working your way backwards from them. So would you introduce listeners to the Simmons family?
CG: Sure. They’re likely the most curious group of people that your your readers probably have not heard about? Right, I found out about then, in part because the person filing the suit the attorney filing the suit, bore the last name Simmons. DeMario Solomon-Simmons who in Tulsa is kind of your, he’s the guy you call when there’s an egregious violation of civil rights, regardless of what you look like. And so Demario was filing suit, in part because his family had to present it. The progenitor of that family guy named Tao Tom was a human in the eyes of some a slave in the eyes of his family, a free man who was Black, who they claim had jet Black skin, but also was not just a citizen of the Creek Nation, who at one point during the Civil War was, was the chief of the Creek Nation, and especially as an of this most arduous and difficult times. But this family because of the work of cow town with negotiating treaties, on behalf of the Creek Nation with the US government, not only created an opportunity for Black people who were formerly enslaved by the Creek Nation, to become emancipated, but also to find a home there, citizenship, when that same type of citizenship proved elusive in the United States. So, that’s where the family comes from. And that foundation of citizenship kind of catapulted that family beyond where many Black people could imagine being but in 1979, that family’s citizenship was lost, it was broken. And so Demario Salomon-Simmons was this guy on the cover of the Tulsa World who stole my attention in that moment, such that we had to interrogate why, where do they come from? And how does this family’s identity, perhaps a representation of a much more messy picture of identity than we’re willing to admit.
B&N: And you also mentioned in the book that this is the first time for you, as an American as an I’m not entirely sure how old you were at this point. But that here was a Black family that had intergenerational wealth that their ancestors had, you know, their previous family had done things for them that set them up in a way that was very different from your experience, and your friends’ experience of the world. And I think that’s a really important point to make. And you even talk about being in graduate school. And it might have been a public policy class, because I think you referenced the Kennedy School where you’re saying it would take you learned in a 2016 study that it would take 228 years for a Black family to make up the difference between their resources and a white family of a similar standard. And I think it’s really important for people to understand the context of the Simmons, too, I mean, there’s oil money involved. There is land. I mean, Oklahoma is part of that big land grab that happened, excuse me, land rush. That happened. And yet the Creeks who had been there before many other people were left out.
CG: Yeah, so the way in which I would kind of think about this is that imagine for a second, if Black people had gotten some form of reparations. Imagine if well over 100 plus years ago, we got the very same thing that white people got, which was the standing of citizenship regard with all of its benefits, regardless of race, regardless of cultural background, regardless of ethnicity. Right, and what, oftentimes, if I were to ask you to imagine it would be nearly impossible. But the story of the Simmons family it is right so you know, Jake Simmons senior who married into a family later on, he married Kyle Tom’s granddaughter ended up becoming a significant cattle rancher, you can look back in the annals of the Southern Workman, Booker T. Washington, seem to hear this man talk about his 10 room house, right? I cannot imagine, I don’t know, admittedly, aside from incredible celebrities or people who have done incredibly well for themselves financially. I can’t think of many Black families who can boast of the same today that was back in like 1915. And then his son, right, because he was entitled to the land because he had he had been deeded by by virtue of birthright land because of his citizenship. He became a significant oilman right became kind of a jack of all trades when it came to the oil and land leasing business that made him exorbitantly wealthy and made him the target of Jonathan Greenberg. And then Forbes writer who was helping to develop the Forbes richest Americans list, that is unimaginable. Now, I still can’t really imagine it. Oftentimes, unless I had done this research and reporting it would have felt something of a fiction. And that fact that that family lived that way, because of that citizenship, is the very indictment of American citizenship as it approaches Black people who are not part of the Creek Nation. It serves as a reminder of what could have been, if we were more imaginative about the ways in which we construct identity in America, if we had if we were more imagined about how we constructed citizenship, and how we constructed recompense for those who had been left out of the American Dream for the start.
B&N: And the Creek community and the creek culture was very sort of, if you’re not doing well, your neighbor is going to step in and help you and plant your crops because you’re sick, no one is going to leave you behind, because you can’t participate in the community that everyone sort of thinking of themselves as, in some ways, a unit, let’s call it, you know, they’re functioning in a very specific way. It’s also partially because it’s an agrarian society. And you know, you can’t really leave someone behind if everyone has to plant their crops, because guess what, if you don’t have enough food, you will die. So there is that piece of it. But all of a sudden, here’s Benjamin Hawkins of the United States government. And we got to talk about Benjamin for a second because he’s the one who has been tasked, and he’s a confidant of George Washington. And, you know, it’s He’s very much a part of what is becoming the US federal government. And he has been tasked with bringing colonisation and culture and civility, which is a word that makes me roll my eyes to the Creek community. And it’s not necessarily what the Creek community would ask for. But it’s also how the Simmons family and other folks like them are ultimately kicked out of their community. So can we talk about Benjamin for a second and his sort of ideas for the world? And can we define civility?
CG: For sure, can we define civility? That feels like a podcast in many episodes and seasons. So let’s see how well I can synthesize the myriad of responses is kind of running around in my head at the moment. Yeah, so look, Benjamin Hawkins was at that time, during the dawn of the American republic as we kind of understand it today, was a bit of a wunderkind, right. He had been a senator. He had served on constitutional conventions. He had been attached to George Washington before he became president. That he advised four presidents as the agent set and dispatched to primarily the southeast United States to administer, really, how do we know the way in which they said civilized or civilization is already loaded with a lot of racism, and anti indigenous behavior and policy. But it’s also a cover for something more blatant, which is just how do we relegate these people who were here first, to as little to nothing as possible, right? We teach them that, you know, the communitarian approach that they have, to the way in which they administer their possessions, their land, is rife with problems. And instead, we introduce them to a greater level of rugged individualism that oftentimes split people and split their land, that taught them ways of working the land, that were completely antithetical to the ways in which they had in the name of efficiency. And though he was heralded as a friend, oftentimes, history is littered with people who were once considered friends of those who eventually then became marginalized friendship was the pathway to marginalization, for this person. And so, as such, when you create scarcity, where it didn’t formally exist, when you introduce that, that brand of individualism, you relegate and divide people, whether you intended to do so or not. Now, my contention in this story is that it was very intentional. I don’t want to let these historical figures who we revere off the hook, it was incredibly intentional. So to some extent, the analysis of someone like Benjamin Hawkins really unlocks the opportunity to kind of think about how do we today, right, try and apply our perspective on civilization and efficiency? To divide people today to to diminish kind of their imprint on society, and how do we marginalize people even further today by superimposing our perspectives on what is civility or what is civilized? Does that make sense?
B&N: Totally. And the other thing that Hawkins sets up for the creeks and the rest of us is the idea of creating a race where there wasn’t one before. I mean, he lays that groundwork, so that suddenly the Creek Nation says, Wait a minute, there’s this part of our nation, and there’s this part of our nation, and we’re not good combining everything into one. And so essentially, an outsider comes in and says, Hey, I have a better plan for you. And I’m going to help you execute it. And ultimately, it is, as you said, not great for the communities. So I want to take a minute because there’s some phrases that you use, sort of in the middle of the book, as we’re, as we’re sitting in the Civil War. And there’s, you know, the Indian Territory, there’s the north, there’s the South, and Oklahoma is still Indian territory at this point. But I’m not sure everyone knows the exact definition of chattel slavery. And this is important because again, as you mentioned earlier, the whole idea of a freedmen versus an enslaved person and but chattel slavery does come into the picture because capitalism in a way that maybe not everyone is expecting. So can we talk about that for a minute?
CG: Yeah. So look, as you point out, it’s really important, just to kind of define a few of those. So let’s start with child slavery, right? So child slavery is just enslaving human beings. But not just that, you relegate them to property squarely, but not only that, you kind of, can conscript all of their offspring for the same fate, right, that they can be bought and sold and forced to work without wages completely, you know, distinguish that form of labor from any form of labor, even if it’s a low wage, and we can have a very significant conversation about how, perhaps, aren’t certain forms of low wage labor even today, forms of slavery, perhaps, but they’re not chattel slavery was someone’s humanity is compressed into output that they can produce, right, oftentimes all the time for people who are not like them, or in other words for people who are often white, so that’s chattel slavery. And it’s important to understand in part because the mere sight of that if you look kind of the history of the Creek Nation was appalling to most of the priests, if not all of them. It was kind of it was, it was disgusting, right, and they didn’t want any parts of it. But what was pretty common was kinship slavery, where people still have their humanity, you would work on their land, you would still break bread with them, you would have your full autonomy and differently in the Creek Nation, even when they started to hold slaves, right? Your children weren’t conscripted to be bought and sold or forced to work. Without wages without compensation, those children could very well be free. If you married someone who was Creek, you all of a sudden lost the vestiges of that slavery that so decided, and so you know, muddy your pathway for freedom. So that’s really an important difference between kind of the America that was being constructed all around the Creek Nation and the Creek Nation itself, especially its experience of slavery. And to be clear, slavery of all types is evil and wrong. But we must at least kind of attach our understanding these definitions of slavery with nuance to understand the difference.
B&N: But also, part of what you’re doing in this book is acknowledging that this happened.
CG: Yeah, exactly.
B&N: That the intersectionality just failed. Essentially, one marginalized group turned on another because they were fed a bill of goods by someone from outside of the community. And if we don’t look at these stories, and if we don’t say, oh, whoa, wait a minute, this happened, and this is bad. And where, what if we don’t interrogate and ask these questions, then we’re going to keep probably making the same mistake over again.
CG: Yeah, I think it was like fed a bill of goods. Right? It’s not just that, right. It was, you know, I think if you’re again, looking at it from the perspective of the Creek Nation, at that time, historically, and the US government, the US government was offering a bit of a false choice, right, you can either negotiate a front with us, and kind of be part of slowing what they saw as the inevitable decline, right? Or you can resist us and be met with the full force of the government. That was a threat, that numerous American leaders that we Herald today, leveled against the Creek Nation, all of its inhabits black or not, right. And I think that that part of it is very clear is that the bill of goods was more stick than it was carried. And that’s kind of how the US has always dealt with those who are marginalized, right is with more stigma carried. And if we don’t remember that history, as you’re mentioning, we’re not just doomed to potentially repeat it, we’re doomed to ignore it and see it for what it really is today.
B&N: You know, again, race is a construct. Many of us know this. You also define racist and racism in ways that might be new for some folks. So I do you want to take a minute and talk about how you use them in the book, because I think it’s a really important distinction to make. And again, you know, we’re going from point A, to point B, with some stops in the middle, but it is a direct line. It’s a direct line from chattel slavery to where we are in our conversations about racist and racism.
CG: For sure, yeah, I think that even growing up, I was so hesitant to assign racist and racism, because it came with every ounce of pejorative sentiment that one could identify. And it also came with a certain level of not being able to be redeemed from it. It came with that sentiment as well. And so I am, you know, borrowing a great deal from Dr. Ibram Kendi, right, who kind of helps the reader understand. Let’s first of all, not assign the sort of pejorative value to the term, let’s use it as a way to assess outcomes and outputs. And so quite frankly, I’m not in the game of reading the minds of people, right. I’m not there to ascertain or assess anyone’s intent. I am here to be very clear that if our policy aims today or historically in the case of the Creek Nation, and its Black citizens, or the United States and how it treated the Creek Nation and vice versa, right, I’m only here to say that the outcomes had divisive, painful and quite inequitable impacts on certain people. And it was almost always on account of the racism that they demonstrated. So, I think oftentimes we can’t really get past conversations because we’re so hung up on feeling bad and kind of individualizing the term racism or racist as opposed to identifying the actions as racist and as the outward of racism. I think the other thing I’d say also is that we’re denying the humanity of people the fullness of people’s humanity, who have done racist things. We have the capacity for extraordinary good, and incredible evil. Racism being one of those evils. And so, if we all of a sudden kind of remove and extract and choose to forget these stories, these narratives, these histories, we’re then stripping away so many people’s humanity of the opportunity set for them to be remembered both for their good and their bad.
B&N: And, you know, I want to go back to something you said slightly earlier about nuance, right? I mean, we’re back in the Civil War. You can find 90 different people with 90 different opinions about the American Civil War, depending on where you’re standing in a room, right? I mean, ultimately, what we’re looking at is a piece of lost American history. And it’s centered on anti blackness, which is something that we still wrestle with as a country today. And you would think that we would be able to make some progress on some fronts. And wow, we are not showing such things. And how is it for you, though, as a writer, I mean, you’re a journalist, you are trained to look for facts, you were trained to listen to your interviewees and put together the details. I mean, if you wanted to write fiction, you could. That’s not what you’re doing here. So what’s it like for you, as a Black reporter, and, you know, a student of America? I mean, you have a Master’s in Public Policy and the MBA still? You have that too. But what does it mean for you as Caleb Gayle, as the writer, as the American man, who’s also Black?
CG: Yeah, in this work, I did inject myself into it, probably breaking some old school journalist rules, and pursuing more of the gates elite strategy of inserting myself into it, right. I think part of the reason I inserted myself into it is because both A, I was experiencing it. B, because this feels like a lost portion of American history, which to be clear, has been, you know, not maybe this particular family’s story. But generally, this history has been studied so diligently by a collection of historians that I revere, that it’s gonna be hard for a reader to find their way to the story, if I don’t offer up my story as a way of getting there. So how does it feel as a Black man to kind of read this? I mean, somewhat traumatic, but also, there’s a joy that I have gotten, exploring the beautiful complexity of identity, especially for me, because I again, not only did I grew up in Oklahoma, not only did I grow up in Tulsa, not knowing about what happened just miles away from where I live. In Black Wall Street in Greenwood, which we’re recording today, a day after the 101st anniversary, you know, not only did I grew up not knowing any of that, I also grew up going to a school where identity, race, in particular, was just not a matter of discussion, right? I grew up hearing that the Civil War was the war of Northern aggression, not so much on behalf of slaves, but rather against states rights and individuality. Right, I grew up with an incredibly warped perspective on this world. So maybe that’s the reason I got all of these degrees was because I really, really desperately wanted to figure myself out, right to figure out how I can touch and understand this world. And as I’ve come to learn, I’m not the only one who’s been deprived of the opportunity to really understand the roots of this country, the history of this world, the history of this republic. And so, I think to some extent, I owed it to the reader to give them a life raft to kind of cross that Rubicon into this world that they were otherwise just never know.
B&N: Did you have to leave Oklahoma to write about it?
CG: Yes, yeah. Ya know, without a doubt, I don’t think it would have been possible to remain in Oklahoma and I think be a strident kind of litigating the case and kind of extricating excavating rather all of the facts necessary to put this together, I think I had to leave Oklahoma also, to kind of give myself the opportunity to view Oklahoma as what it is, which is probably the most imminent expression of what America does to people. Right? In every in every single way America does a few things to marginalize people. And Oklahoma is perhaps the most imminent expression of that for sure.
B&N: What do you mean?
CG: Sure, you know, I mean, Oklahoma, formerly Indian Territory was supposed to be the end of the United States government interfering in the lives of the various tribes that then compose what they then called, they being the US government, five Civilized Tribes, right. But still, you saw the inventiveness, the creativity, the willingness to constantly survive, the willingness to take on the burden of your own liberation by marginalized people, right, whether they were Black or indigenous or what have you. And then the ability to craft for themselves nations that would be accommodating of people who ordinarily would not get their fair shake in the United States. That’s what Oklahoma was. And yet and still, the United States government sent people like Henry Dawes to create roles that would divide people based on fictitious blood quantum and scientific racism to ensure that certain people would get certain allotments of land all to ensure that white people who were cravenly looking at Indian territory, now Oklahoma, as an opportunity to expand their capitalism to expand their empire. That’s what America does. And so, by understanding Oklahoma’s history, we can better understand exactly what it is that America does that oftentimes is so very painful to remember. But in understanding how it produces that pain, we can remember what was there before the pain, which was the decision to survive and not just survive, but to live abundantly, even if living abundantly meant living on the margins of society.
B&N: What did you learn about you? What did you learn about America? What did you not know you needed to know?
CG: Mm hmm. What did I know that? What did I learned that I didn’t really need? Didn’t realize I needed to know. That’s a tough question. I’m going to kind of avoid it. No, no, no, no, no, no, I realized about myself that I still have work to do. Right?
B&N: Don’t we all though? I mean, honestly, all like, I’m not sitting here in some perch, and I grew up outside of Boston. So I mean, I grew up with a lot of this sort of, yeah. And, you know, integrated the town that I lived in.
CG: Hmm, right. So to tear up to that very point, there is work yet to be done. I think, think about it this way, as you mentioned, that study that talks about 220 years would be needed, or that’s like how long it would take for us Black folks to kind of catch up. And that’s assuming a lot of things go well, that policies don’t get in the way that we’ve seen since the founding of this country. But I think that all goes to say that, like the enormity of the challenge cannot be solved for through a couple of pieces of legislation passed decades ago, can’t be solved for despite what so many people thought is election signal for the election of a Black president, it cannot be solved for through police reform, isolated in certain parts of the country, that this is an ongoing work that we’re we’re signing up for. And so for me, hearing the story of the Simmons family kind of leading in many cases without really trying to lead, without begging, leading the charge, even today, it demonstrates that the work is no longer is not finished, and the enormity of the challenges which exists and not just for Black people, not just for Black Creeks. But for so many marginalized groups around this country and world, the work is in no way finished. In order to repair the world in order to fix the place in which we live, we are signing ourselves up for an ongoing labor, but that labor is beautiful. That last part right? Which is there’s something amazing and talking to people like DeMario, he enjoys telling you his family story. He’s not won this case, right? His case has been dismissed more than once. But there is joy in advocating for the changing of the world for the better, for not allowing the world to tell you who you shall be, but rather reimagining a world in which you can be anything. And so to me, I think, for me, all of this story represents is that the work in no way is finished, I think, you know, to quote Nipsey Hussle, who you can not like the marathon continues, right? It continues in an ongoing fashion. And we must commit ourselves to that work in all of its beauty.
B&N: And you teach at the college level, and part of that makes me think that you’ve got to be a hopeful guy, because you can’t show up and teach a bunch of young people how to do this kind of work and how to ask these kinds of questions and how to chase a story. And in some cases, that means chasing people. Yeah, you can’t do that unless you actually believe that there is something at a further point, whatever that something is, and sometimes it’s the story. Sometimes it’s the community, sometimes it’s actual change. Let’s hope that there is a genuine possibility for change. But for you are hopeful guy, yeah?
CG: On what day? No.
B&N: Okay, that’s fair. That’s fair.
CG: No, I think that look, it’s very hard to stare at the face of American history and say, I’m incredibly optimistic. I think a lot about, you know, all of the huge accomplishments this country has had, save for some. It’s often been us correcting ourselves after making egregious mistakes, right. But at the same time, like, I mean, I will take issue and any person who understands the history of quite a few, if not all of our founders, whose whose income came from slaves, right, not not their part time jobs, not their moonlighting gigs, but the way in which they ate was based on whipping people and subjugating them to chattel slavery. The words they wrote, are not their words, right? They did not invent liberty, right, they did not invent freedom of the press, they did not come up with, those are not their words. And so to some extent, I take great cheer, and find great hope in reclaiming those words, realizing that, quite frankly, it is the activity, oftentimes of marginalized people that demonstrate the greatest level of patriotism, that, in fact, oftentimes, it’s the dissent and the expectation that this country that this republic can be better, or that it must be better, even if it doesn’t feel like it can, that often comes from those who have not held power that had been on the periphery of decision making in this country. That then gives me hope, that those words are not theirs, that those ideas are not theirs. And that quite frankly, we can wrestle them back and use them for our own means, which would be for the purposes of achieving greater levels of equity in this country. So that’s what provides me hope.
B&N: And hope is a muscle. Hope is something we can build. It’s not easy every day. I am not going to pretend for a second, but it is it is something that you can add on to. Caleb Gayle, thank you so much for joining us. I’m really, really looking forward to having people read We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power. It’s out now. Thanks so much.
CG: Thank you.