so i had a residency at yaddo and i had a big wall and so i made my art and i put it up on my wall and. you'll see it. the process of putting together the essays was one, and the process making and putting together the illustrations was another. so i used a wall to put up the pieces that i was not of the ones on the wall made it into this book think. i am curious about what you said about afro pessimism and why you think it's so widespread. why do you think it's so durable? and if there's an antidote, oh, those are hard questions to answer. one reason i think it's so attracted is that there is so much it. i mean, we keep having police brutality, we keep having discrimination, we keep having white supremacy. we keep having all the bad things that happen to black people. those things keep happening. so for instance, when when i say to people i don't think we're going to get to to have to deal with the trump presidency. they said, oh, i'm so relieved you're an optimist. i said, no, i'm not an optimist. i've lived too long, black in the united states to be an optimist i cannot be an optimi

fellowships from macdowell, yaddo virginia center for the creative arts hedge brook and the cabins at martha moca. won't you all join me in welcoming our panelists. well, first i want to say thank you to all of you sharing such beautifully written, engaging and compelling books that push readers to reckon with the causes, contours and legacies of trauma inflicted on african by white americans. for well over 400 years. can you each share with the audience a little more about the topic of your book, why you decided to write it? and we will go in the order of the right. thank you very much, rebecca and chris and everybody that brought us out here. this is an amazing festival and i've really been glad be here and to get to talk the white bonus is really special to me because one of the chapters of the book is reported in hattiesburg, mississippi. so the book is a little unusual. it is half memoir and half narrative journalism, all of it infused with the tools of investigative journalism, which is my background training. so it's very much a narrative book that then seeks to tally the cash