First Draft Episode #265: Christina Hammonds-Reed and Jason Reynolds
August 6, 2020
Listen to the episode
Christina Hammonds-Reed, debut author of The Black Kids, is in conversation with 2020–2021 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Jason Reynolds, whose many books include All American Boys (cowritten with Brendan Kiely [listen to his First Draft interview here]), As Brave as You, For Every One, the Track series, Look Both Ways, Stamped: Racism, Anti-Racism, and You and Long Way Down, which received a Newbery Honor, a Printz Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Honor.
Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm trying something new, having two authors join me to be in conversation with each other. Today, the two authors are Christina Hammonds-Reed, debut author of The Black Kids out now, and National Ambassador for Young People's Literature Jason Reynolds. Whose many books include All American Boys (co-written with Brendan Kiely), the Track Series, Look Both Ways, Stamped: Racism, Anti-Racism and You, and Long Way Down, which received a Newbery Honor, a Printz Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Honor.
I was inspired and moved by hearing Christina and Jason discuss how knowing history empowers you to be an advocate for yourself, the primacy of Top 40 when radio was king, how their existence as Black authors in publishing is inherently political, and stay tuned to the end for a can't miss analogy for all the perfectionists out there who are terrified of releasing their art into the world. It was very soothing to me.
Everything Christina and Jason and I talk about in today's episode can be found in the show notes. First Draft participates in affiliate programs specifically with bookshop.org. So that means that if you shop through the links on FirstDraftPod.com it helps to support the podcast and independent bookstores at no additional cost to you. If you'd like to donate directly to First Draft either on a one-time or monthly basis, you can do that at paypal.me/FirstDraftPod.
If you are an aspiring writer with questions about the business, or a seasoned vet who still has questions about the business, make sure you're listening to the Track Changes episodes that have been appearing in your First Draft feed for the last few months. The most recent episode that came out last Thursday is a bonus episode that spotlights Inequality in Publishing. How did we get here? How bad is it? And what can be done?
I've also created the Track Changes newsletter where every Thursday, and sometimes Friday, I share more of the information that I gathered in researching for the Track Changes project. It's a great way to get behind the scenes and learn a lot more about the industry. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial of the newsletter and learn more about both Track Changes projects @FirstDraftPod.com/TrackChanges.
Okay, now please sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversation with Christina Hammonds-Reed and Jason Reynolds.
Sarah Enni: Thank you guys, both for being here. I'm so excited to talk. And let's dive in. Jason, you've appeared on First Draft before. Listeners can go back and listen to your first episode to get a little bit of your background and hear a long conversation between the two of us. But Christina, I haven't been able to meet you before so I'm excited to chat and I want to get a little bit of background info so listeners can get more familiar with you. And I always start with where were you born and raised?
Christina Hammonds-Reed: So I was born and raised in LA County, specifically in the small suburb called Hacienda Heights. So I am very much an Angeleno through and through.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, reading The Black Kids was such a love letter to the city. And I live there now too, but I'm not a native. So I was like, "Ah! I have homework to do to go out and learn a lot more about my city." I loved it. And I do want to ask about creative writing and how you came to creative writing. When did you start expressing yourself that way Christina?
Christina Hammonds-Reed: So it's funny cause I feel like I've always been doing it ever since I was a really little kid. I have a mom who is an educator and so we were always fully immersed in books. And from as soon as I can remember, or the earliest I can remember rather, I was writing in journals. And the teacher would say like, "Write a short story." And then I'd turn in like a 20 page short story as opposed to a five page short story.
And I loved it, but as I got through school, there was this idea that like the smart kids went into medicine or they went into law or they went into engineering. And so I entered college premed, which was an absolute disaster cause I took an honors Chem class and it just like obliterated me. And I was like, "What am I doing? I don't like this. I'm not great at it. I want to study English."
And I actually studied English with a creative writing emphasis in political science because I kind of liked meshing those two worlds together. How the political process operates and how government does or does not serve the people and writing. Which kind of is how The Black Kids came together in some ways too. And then after that, my senior year of college, I was kind of like, "I don't know, should I go to an MFA program? Maybe that's not practical." And I think I was still kind of struggling. Should I do something practical or not so practical?
So I took a year off and I worked at this law firm that was just horrendous in Beverly Hills. It was not the most pleasant experience, but on my lunch breaks I would go and write. And through that, I actually wrote a short story that wound up getting published. I think it was that year, or the year after that. And then I went and decided, "Okay, I really love writing, but maybe film in LA is more practical." Because LA is such a film industry. And I was like, "Well, that's the industry that's around us." And there's like a way where you can go and connect to so many different kinds of people with film.
So I was like, "Okay, I'll go to film school and study that and see if that's an avenue I want to pursue." And I loved screenwriting. I loved film school. I worked in the industry for a little bit after I got out, but then I grew really, really frustrated with it. I think it's a really difficult industry to be, especially a young Black woman when I was doing it, cause this was about a decade ago or so.
And so I was like, "I don't want to deal with this right now. Let me just take a break and go back to my first love." Which was fiction. And I wrote the short story that ended up being The Black Kids and that wound up in one teen story. And then that's how I connected with my agent who was like, "Have you thought about crafting this as a novel?" And I was like, "I don't know." And here we are.
Sarah Enni: And it obviously took.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: Yeah, it worked out okay.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And I have to say Christina, I'm a big researcher before I do these interviews. It was a little bit, you made it a challenge for me to find stuff about your background. You are admirably offline.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: I am such a private person. This is a new thing for me not being like a super duper private person. But yeah, there's a few things here and there on the internet, but for the most part, I try to shy away from social media for a while just for my own mental health. I was like, "I don't need that." But, I can say that I found it to be such a welcoming place now that I've joined it in very specific ways. I think Instagram is the way I can handle. Twitter, maybe not so much. But I think certain formats are a little bit more toxic than others. Am I allowed to say that?
Sarah Enni: Yes. I agree. Well, I feel, yes. I'm very much with you on that. I was like, "Oh, good, she's not subjecting herself to all this madness." But I was gonna ask about screenwriting and whether that had come before prose. So that is great to hear that you were able to go back to your first love.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: Yeah, it's funny cause it's such a different mechanism in terms of how you write a screenplay versus how you write a short story, or even a novel. And I love aspects of all of it. Like screenplay is very much about the visual and capturing that. Whereas novels and short stories are obviously much more about the interior. So there's beautiful things about both, although novels obviously should be able to capture both. But I like both styles of writing. They both provide like different challenges.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I love that. And I think The Black Kids, the interiority was so present and really palpable, but it was also so beautiful. I mean the descriptions... of course, I love LA and I know what I'm picturing, but it was like, "Ah! This is just..." Like I said, a love letter. I was totally absorbed in it. So I loved it.
So I love that it started as a short story. When was that short story? When did that come out? When did you start developing it as a novel?
Christina Hammonds-Reed: That came out in 2016, I believe it came out. I feel like the years are getting fuzzy. But 2016 I published the short story and then I started working on it maybe like late 2016, early 2017. So that took about two years or so before it was crafted and ready to go and then we sold it.
So it wasn't actually that long, but the story's definitely been sitting in my head for a while. And even the germs of it, I was thinking of as my graduate thesis film for USC, for film school. But at that point I was ready to be done with grad school. I was ready to be done and it's so expensive. So I was just like, "Do I want to spend that much more money on doing this film, which might be slightly expensive?" Cause it is technically a period piece. So I decided to let it sit and marinate. And then it came out as a short story. And now here we are with it as a novel.
Sarah Enni: Amazing, I love that. So we're gonna come back and ask more specific questions about The Black Kids, but I do want to catch up with Jason. Since we last spoke Jason, as you mentioned, you were renamed National Ambassador for Young People's Literature of the Library of Congress. No big deal.
And you also published Stamped, a young adult remix of Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning. I want to first ask about becoming the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. I would love to just have you explain what does that mean, besides sounding very cool, what does it actually mean for your responsibilities?
Jason Reynolds: It's basically a part of the Laureate system. So everyone knows the Poet Laureate. Right now, Joy Harjo is a Poet Laureate. Her job is to basically advocate and proliferate poetry nationally. If there's any kind of event that requires poetry, she's the one they call. She has a platform that she's built and that platform she'll carry out over, well Joy, this is her second term. She got back-to-back terms. So a four year term for her, which I don't think has ever happened.
And she'll carry that out over the course of her term. It's no different from me. I have a platform. I'm the person that is speaking on behalf of the literature being written for young people. It's complicated in certain ways, just because part of that gig is me wanting to also speak about the authors who are making that work. But that gets a little dicey in terms of the red tape.
It's interesting. It's all this weird... I don't know, it's interesting. But my platform is one that I am very, very connected to. And it's all about making sure that young [pauses], we speak ad nauseam about encouraging young people to read, encouraging diversity and inclusion. I mean, I have nothing to add to that conversation. I also know that telling young people to read doesn't actually work. It's not a thing, right?
To tell a kid, "Hey, you're not reading and you should read." Yields no results except for frustration and resentment and sometimes even laughter from the child. My goal is to come through the back door. I think young people have to know that the books that exist on the inside of their bodies are just as valuable, if not more valuable, as the books that exist on the outside of themselves.
And we don't push for that. We want them to go and buy up all of our books when really we should be trying to figure out ways to get them to tap into the stories that are dwelling within. Because it is those stories that are gonna fortify them more than anything we could write. And it's those stories that will help our stories become more feasible and accessible, and possible, right? Like, "Maybe I'll give your story a shot if I know that I have one to offer."
As I said, it's a human thing. And so that's my whole platform in a nutshell, I mean, there's a lot of intricacies with it, but that's what it was supposed to be. And then coronavirus happened and things sort of shifted, but it's still the platform.
Sarah Enni: You totally led me to my next question. I know that you are, you've already sort of been in the practice of going and being with kids, going to schools and detention centers and making yourself kind of available to young minds. And then this platform kind of gives you this whole other level of boosts. And I'd love to hear kind of what you had imagined doing with that and what you're able to do now. I mean, I for one, am on Instagram seeing you be on Instagram Live with kids every day, just about. Which is incredible. But I'd love to hear about how you've adapted.
Jason Reynolds: I mean the original goal I was supposed to do a bunch of traveling, like I'm always doing, as you know. But we were gonna do a tour and we were gonna tour every season. And I was gonna do all of this middle of America work. Cause I wanted to focus on the middle of America and rural towns, small town America. Cause I think city folk, those who had the least among us in the city have twice as much as those who have the same amount in the middle of Arkansas. And that's just the reality, right? City life can be brutal. Don't get me wrong. Those of us who grew up, or live in cities, we know that city life can be brutal. But we also know, especially East coasters, we also can walk to the YMCA.
We can walk to the library, we can walk to the corner store. You know what I mean? But if you're living the middle of nowhere, it's a lot. Destitution is different. And I think city folk and coastal folk can be a little arrogant when it comes to the way that we talk about the lives of our fellow brothers and sisters who are living in smaller towns, especially smaller towns in the middle of the country. The quote-unquote fly-over, which in and of itself is the most derogatory condescending term for anyone to ever say.
That being said, because of the Corona virus that can't happen right now. I mean, it's a two year term, so hopefully next year I can still do all the traveling and make it happen. I have wonderful partners on board and all kinds of cool things that I had planned that we will make happen one way or another. But for now it's just utilizing what we have. And what we have is the internet. And I ain't never been scared of no kids, and I'm with it. You know what I mean?
So if it's logging on Instagram and going live with the shorties then that's what it's gonna be. And I'll do that as often as I can and I'll create whatever platforms and new sort of archetypes and things to use to engage with them, whatever it takes. We gotta remember that in these kinds of moments, we gotta stretch out. If you say you are who you are, if you say you bought what you bought, let's see. Right? We got to stretch out. And that's what this is.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I love that. And I can't think of anyone better equipped to kind of roll with all the changes. You've always been single-minded about this kind of thing. So I was like, "Okay, well, if anyone's gonna handle this, it's gonna be Jason."
I want to ask about, I want, Christina, to bring you into this conversation and ask a little bit about Stamped and The Black Kids, especially because reading them both back to back, it was just so interesting, it's full of history, right? Both of your books are full of history and yet they're not, they're really the stories that they are. Let me phrase this as a question.
I'd love to hear how you both balanced history and needing to contextualize things and explain what's going on while also having this sort of authorial larger message, like an emotional message that you wanted to convey. How did you kind of balance what you needed to do with history versus what you were trying to achieve as an artist in those books?
Jason Reynolds: Hmm. That's a good question Sarah. Christina, since your new here, you get the honors.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: Oh man. So I think, for me, when I first started the book, I was thinking of history as a mirror, holding up a mirror to the present. I really thought that this particular moment in history spoke to the present in a meaningful way. And it was part of an ongoing longer conversation that we should always be having about how the events of the past impact our present. And then of course now we're finding that history is our present.
But as somebody who has always loved history, I think there's so much to be mined there and understanding the Black experience in our country. And I think so many people don't know that history because that history isn't taught in schools. A lot of stuff that I learned wasn't until I was in college or I had to seek it out on my own. And I think that's a real problem when the history of the Black American struggle is only civil rights and slavery and everything else kind of gets glossed over.
And its origin points sort of get glossed over in terms of, like, everything about even the LA riots, is very reductive. It's always like, "Oh, Rodney King was beaten and then people rioted after the verdicts." And that's not even true. There's so many things that build towards that point that have to do with economic and political disenfranchisement, which have to do with the economy, which has to do with the eighties and the crack era.
And then also building upon the history of riots prior to that, in terms of all of the different riots in the sixties. We know most notably the Watts riots, but there are different riots throughout like Detroit and different cities in the country where it builds upon that. And then going back even further, which I do in the book towards the very end with the Tulsa massacre essentially, and those race riots. And there's a history in the earliest part of, I guess it's not this century anymore, the early part of last century of these race riots that get ignored. And they're riots where there's violence perpetuated on Black communities, but that's never taught. So it's only taught as like, "Oh, Black people get mad about a thing, and then they riot."
As opposed to, "This is an ongoing conversation throughout our history." Like we've had these struggles throughout this entire time. So then how do we reckon with that in our present? And so for actually the protagonist of my novel, I wanted her to be in a very specific moment where the country was just sort of on the verge of starting to have this conversation. Because the LA riots and the Rodney King beatings are really the first time where you get that on camera in a significant way from just a bystander.
So a dude has a big old camcorder recording this thing in 1992. And because he then goes and submits that to the local news, that's in people's homes. And they're able to visually see, "Hey, wait, this isn't just something people say happens. We are seeing it happen." And so for me that has a direct parallel, or a direct line, to what's happening now. Or what has happened over the course of the last 10 years as smartphones have made that super accessible in terms of people being able to capture police brutality in a way that we were not able to before. And the reckoning that's happening with people being forced to confront it. And like, "Here's visual evidence of what we've been saying has been happening all along."
So I wanted to tie all of that history together in this one package and explore what that is, and also how Ashley comes to terms with her history in a space that isn't necessarily a predominantly Black space. So I think that's sort of how it all came together. Does that answer my very hazing question?
Sarah Enni: It does, it does. And I'm gonna get into more specifics as we go here. But Jason, your question of how to incorporate history while not being a history book, was a very essential kind of thing you addressed within Stamped. Do you mind telling us how you kind of balanced that.
Jason Reynolds: I think every generation has the moment where they say that history is repeating itself. Every generation has this weird moment where they're like, "Oh!" It's like this strange sort of epiphanic moment where they're like, "Oh, turns out this is still a thing!" We can look at, as Christina said, Rodney King... by the way Christina, in the book, I laughed hysterically in the moment where they're explaining how this was caught on film. And they called the camcorder small. They're like, "Yeah, man, things are getting smaller. Technology's making it so that..." And I remember it. And I'm like, "The camcorder was huge!"
Christina Hammonds-Reed: It was nonsense!
Jason Reynolds: It's like, "Yeah, technologies making it so that these things can happen now because they're getting smaller and smaller." You know? And I'm like, "You have no idea speaker." But I think if we could track back... it's a really fascinating thing to think about all the moments that shift the psyche around anything, political uprising, or political violence, or any of this stuff. We can look at George Floyd. We can look at Rodney King. Before Rodney King, Rodney King was the first filmed, right? Technically, it's the first filmed singular instance because we have film of Bloody Sunday, right? We have film of Selma. We have the magazine covers of Emmett Till, and every time this happens, there is a spike, there's an upheaval, right? So we've watched it happen and it tiks up. And even before Emmet Till, we can go all the way back to the beginnings of war, and war photography.
You know, the truth of the matter is that America always thought that war was valiant, right? That it was an honorable thing. And we would get the photographs of the president, or the commander-in-chief, on the horse with the outfit on, the uniform. And his soldiers gallantly standing behind him as the bravest humans on the face of the earth. But the only reason that we got those images is because of the camera. The photographic camera had not been up-to-date enough to take photographs of moving images. And so what the photographer eventually would do, is he realized that, "I can't take pictures of them fighting the war, but I can take pictures of things not moving." And what doesn't move? Dead bodies. And so he started to photograph the bodies on the ground and then the image of war shifted.
Again, it's like, "Wait a minute. You mean to tell me this is war? I thought war was trotting into, you know, with the staff and the hats, and this that and the third. You mean to tell me that war is hell?" And it shifted. And so we've seen it happen over and over again. And so when I say it's not a history book, I mean, this is perennial. This is a part of our bloodline, right? It's genetic, it's in the genetics of the country. So to call it history is to call it something of the past. To call it something that is perhaps defunct. But really it's as American as racism. And that's sort of what it is.
And in terms of the other part of your question, which is how do you talk about history without sort of inserting oneself or pushing a certain kind of thing? That's also not new. The truth of the matter is that all history is pushing a specific thing. That's the problem. And so really what I'm doing is trying to self-correct. This is sort of saying like, "Look, I'm trying to push the pendulum back towards the middle." All the history we've ever read has been filtered through a particular POV.
This idea that it's been like this objective history and that we're just stating the facts has always been fallacy. That's not true. That's not true. And so now what I'm saying is, "Look. I'm gonna go ahead and tell you some truth and yeah, there's going to be some of me in there." Basically saying, "Look, I hope that I'm pushing you toward this way." Right? I'm not even going to pretend like I don't want that. I do. The stakes are too high to even pretend that that's an option. Or that it's not an option. "I'm pushing you toward this way intentionally." And I don't feel no way about it. I hope they teach it in every school in the world.
Sarah Enni: It was also, fun might not be the right word, but it was fun to read. You know?
Jason Reynolds: Sure!
Sarah Enni: I was hearing your voice saying it. And it was like hearing history told by a friend. Which after hearing you talk about kids don't want to be told to read, kids don't want to be told, like, "Learn your history." You know, it just felt like an appropriate Jason approach to history.
Jason Reynolds: You know what I hope? I hope honestly, like the success of Stamped is awesome and I hope it gets kids talking and thinking about these things. I really do. More so than that though, I hope it changes the entire paradigm of what it is be a textbook. I really, really think that we have missed the boat in terms of engaging young people when it comes to learning. Because young people have changed, their stimuli has changed. So we're gonna have to do something else to actually keep them rooted and grounded in the educational learning process. Right?
So the textbooks giving out flat information, flat knowledge, right? Like this equals this, this equals this, here goes your worksheet. Here goes your review questions, answer these questions based on... It's gonna require something else. And I'm hoping that people will see perhaps Stamped could be leading the charge to revamp what a textbook is. Could you imagine? It really might be an incredible, revolutionary thing when it comes to the educational system?
Sarah Enni: Well, it was certainly easier to remember things when I was hearing it like someone was telling me a story. Everyone learns differently, but I was like, "I think I'll remember more from this book than I remember from the books that I read in high school."
I want to ask Christina about the other way that you incorporated history in The Black Kids was music. Oh my gosh, a playlist of this book would be like a dream. I'd love to hear about how you decided to incorporate the music or what was the impulse to weave it through the story so intimately?
Christina Hammonds-Reed: I feel like music is such an important part of our childhood. Specifically because we're taking in so much at that time. Like, as you get older, perhaps you've settled into the artists that you really love. And you try new things, but not as much as when you're younger. Where you were just like absorbing everything and listening to everything.
And so I wanted to capture what that's like when you're a teenager and all of that is always around you, but also it's so important to setting. Like as soon as you hear certain songs? It bears you back to wherever you were when you first heard that song, or whatever really crazy moment you had with that song in the background. So I wanted to have that for Ashley's progression. And a lot of the songs actually do reflect that in certain ways, in terms of how she views the world and how her friends are viewing the world and then how that shifts.
And I also wanted to incorporate the music of our parents' generation. Cause I think that like, for my childhood, there were so many different sounds from previous generations and Black music really builds upon those sounds. Like hip-hop is sampling music from the seventies, sixties whenever. Right? And so that's building off the tradition before that. And so I think it's very similar to what I wanted to do narratively with building upon the riots and the race wars, or the race massacre rather, in Tulsa. And what it means to have that history of music throughout this book too. But also it's just really fun.
I really love incorporating music just cause I feel like it's so important to setting, and I think of things as almost a soundtrack while I'm writing. So I wanted to sort of play with that and have fun with that and just sort of reflect on the music that I enjoyed when I was younger. I was significantly younger than Ashley is, cause I was eight in 1992. I had just turned eight actually when the riots happened. So obviously my musical cues were a little different than hers, but there's still so much love for that era in my heart. And I wanted to reflect that in the pages.
Jason Reynolds: It was super cool. I remember when I was reading, it was so interesting to think back about, and I have a little brother who is 18. And so he's having a very different experience than my older siblings and I. We laugh a lot about how one, back then, Top 40 was everything. So those 40 songs, they were all over the place. And you could hear something like A Tribe Called Quest on the radio and then the next song could be Sinead O'Connor, it could be Madonna, it could be Sir Mix A Lot. It was cool.
And then the other thing was in thinking about our parents' music. It's so interesting to think back. And my little brother, I was telling him, he's a musician and we were having this conversation. And I was saying like, we had Walkman and stuff like that, but there wasn't anything to shut out the world. There was nothing that existed to shut out the world. You couldn't put ear buds in. So if you were in the car, whatever your mama was listening to is what you were listening to. Because you couldn't say nothing, at least to my mama. That was not a thing. Right? And I think because of that, we were able to get a broader view and could kind of merge the generations in terms of our musical tastes, which, I'm so glad she put that in the book.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: Yeah. It's so funny when you say that, like sitting in your parents' car, I think that was a lot of what generated the music there. Where you are stuck with whatever mom and dad are listening to and you grow to love it as you get older, or sometimes you appreciate it then. But there was, for me, a real sense of like enjoying it as I got older and being like, "This is really incredible music."
Jason Reynolds: And Black folks, you know, Black folks we got, you know, and maybe Sarah, I don't know, y'all might have it too, but I know Black folks we got house cleaning... Sunday, it's house cleaning music. And it's specific. It's like somewhere around the seventies, your momma gonna put on... either you listening to Earth Wind and Fire, Anita Baker, Frankie Beverly. And it's just like, that's how you know this is the day you cleaning the house. You wake up and you're like, "The house cleaning music is on, we cleaning the house today." That's what it is. And when the music goes off, then we're done. But if the music is on, we supposed to still be cleaning. It's like a thing. I don't know who started that but it's a thing. And this is a broad brush, but a lot of us grew up in houses where it was house cleaning music.
Sarah Enni: My dad listened to like John Fogerty in the garage and it was like, "Leave dad alone. He's working on the car until it's over."
I want to ask about, and I want to ask this in a broad way. In reading your books, thinking so much about history, not only history of America, history of the Black community, but also history within Black families. You know, I had the good fortune of speaking to Morgan Jerkins (author of New York Times bestselling essay collection This Will Be My Undoing, about her recent history and memoir, Wandering in Strange Lands (listen to her First Draft interview here) about her upcoming book in which she dives into her own family history. Because sort of like Ashley in The Black Kids, she wasn't presented with much about her grandparents or beyond, and her journey of discovering her past. It's a beautiful book and it was fascinating and she discovered so much about herself in the process.
I would just love to hear you talk about that aspect of history and diving into history and bringing that out in your creative work. And how you've experienced that in your own life with your personal histories as well.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: Well, I think that part of Ashley's journey very much stems from me sort of trying to understand my elders and not quite knowing how to place them within our personal family history. Cause there are a lot of things that I feel like in Black families we don't speak about, or in certain kinds of Black families, we don't speak about. And so growing up, I got sort of like the outline of this is who we are, this is where we come from, but never like the details filled in.
And I suspect that a lot of that is due to some of the pain of what it has meant traditionally to be Black in this country. And I think that there is this tendency to say, "Let's move past it and not dwell on it." But to a certain extent, that leaves us with these little mini voids in terms of not really understanding as much as we could about where we come from and how that shapes us as people.
Like, if we don't understand what our grandparents experienced, then maybe we don't understand our parents as much as we could understand our parents. And they don't understand us cause we're feeling like they're not opening up to us. So I wanted to sort of examine inter-generational trauma as it relates to that, because I think that there is, throughout Black families on a regular basis, inter-generational trauma due to what it means to be a Black person in America at any point in history, no matter what your economic class is or isn't.
So I wanted to really dive into that and see what that could mean for Ashley specifically. And I think how young people can reflect on what it means to them. Cause I think that's still something that's ongoing where there's just stuff that we don't talk about. And I think that's very common in Black and Brown communities. That there's just sort of histories that we don't dive into because of the pain of those histories.
Jason Reynolds: And I think there's shame. Attached to that pain, there's shame. I think the Black community lives in it. So much of our elders, I think they live in this interesting space where their lives have fortified them in certain ways and petrified them in others. And knowing when and how much to give up is a constant sort of teetering. It's a constant conversation, internal conversation, I feel like with a lot of our elders.
And for me, even with thinking about Stamped, my mom read Stamped and it was painful for her. Not painful because of what she did know, but painful because of what she had to become in order to survive. And what I mean is, Stamped sort of outlines... and it's interesting cause actually Christina touches on this a little bit in the first third of the book. Stamped outlines this idea that there's only one option, there's only one healthy option, and there's the option of anti-racism.
But the safest option over the history for Black people historically, has been assimilation-ism, to keep us alive. But the issue with assimilation-ism is that it's poisonous. So it's an interesting thing. It's like taking ibuprofen even though it's killing your liver. Right? So it kills the headache and it killed the joint pain, but it also is literally devastating your liver. But what do you do? What are the options? So when my mom read it and realized that she had lived an assimilation-ism life, and felt bad about that. And then me having to sort of talk about, "Well, what were your options at the time?" It was a matter of life or death.
The only issue with assimilation-ism is that it doesn't actually work. It's not actually sustainable. And there's a part in The Black Kids when they're dealing with the intersection of race and class, and how the mom doesn't quite get how harmful it is to see people who are living on the other side of the tracks. And those scenes in that book, I think, are so realistic and Black folk hate to talk about it, right?
That there are Black people who are terrified of Black people. Black people who only like to love Black people when it's convenient, right. We like to love the good Black people, right? The quote, unquote exceptional Black folks. But all of that's rooted in the history of race in this country. It's rooted in those things, right.
That if I can align myself as closely as possible to whiteness and whatever whiteness feels like and whatever it is, and however it presents itself politically and socially and economically in this country, then it will afford me the opportunity to live a freer life. And one that is distant from those who are further away from whiteness, even though that Black and my Black are the same Black.
But all of that's rooted in history. And so I think when it comes to the family dynamic, that's been interesting for my mom to sort of suss through. And even for me, right. Gut checks. Where it's like, "All right, I know who I am. I am who I am every day of my life." And then there are moments where I got to ask myself, "How much of it is you and how much of it is performative to fight against the thing that they think you are?" Or the thing that they think you should be for that matter.
So we're always in this constant struggle and battle of like, "How can I just be myself all the time?" White folk come in a room and I got to let them know that I don't care that they in the room. Well, the moment I do that, I played into the game. I just got to be me all the time, no matter what. And that's really difficult when you're a Black person in this country. It's fascinating.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: It's the constant code-switching, right?
Jason Reynolds: Even the codes. Right? And excuse me, I don't mean to cut you off, but even thinking about codes, right? Cause your book made me think about this too, that there are Black people who are code-switching into whatever they think Blackness is. Not just into what they think whiteness is.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: Yes. And that's what I was navigating when I was younger. I feel like I grew up a certain way. I speak a certain way. And so I would go into like a beauty shop and feel like I sound, what at the time would be like called, a white girl. And there was like navigating this like, "I don't feel Black enough in this space. And yet I identify with you. But I feel like perhaps you are not viewing me as one of you, because of whatever bullshit." Am I allowed to say bullshit?
Sarah Enni: Yeah.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: But because of whatever I've internalized about what Blackness is or isn't, and then it was a lot of de-colonizing my own thought process as I got to college. And I went to USC, which is in South LA and there's a big Black community at USC that is also still trying to navigate what it means to be in a predominantly white institution, but meeting different kinds of Black people who came from various socioeconomic backgrounds or backgrounds closer to mine, and seeing that there was not one way to be Black.
And it was so counter to what my experience was growing up, where it was like, "This is Black and this is not Black. And Black people listen to this kind of music and Black people don't listen to this." And it was never necessarily Black people saying this to me. It was always white people, or other people of color saying this, because so much of our idea of Blackness was governed by the media and by what people saw on television and said that that is what Black people are. So when you don't have that context, other people's opinions of what Blackness is kind of seeps into what your opinion of Blackness is. No matter how much your parents try to counter-program. Cause my parents did try to counter-program. My parents went out of their way to try to counter-program.
But I think also they are of a generation that was assimilationist. And so they were sort of battling against two different things themselves. And so I think that was also part of Ashley's journey. Because I don't know that I'd ever really read anything like that, which was sort of a coming into your own Blackness in that way, and celebrating it, as opposed to being the Black person in a space where you felt... It's almost like Ashley is a fish, out of water in her own pond. And so I wanted to explore what that means and how she comes to really love Blackness throughout the course of the book. And what it then means to her to be one of The Black kids, as opposed to thinking of Black kids as "they" and "them".
Sarah Enni: Right. And even towards the end of the book, when she does hang with the Black kids and they call her Lisa Turtle, which was a reference that I enjoyed.
Jason Reynolds: Nailed it.
Sarah Enni: It's like, "I know that one." I mean, it was very poignant. There was never a time when she wasn't on some kind of tightrope, and you really feel for her in all those moments of trying to find that balance. I thought it was really well done.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: Thank you.
Sarah Enni: I want to ask, again, I've said history so many times over this conversation, but I'm interested in, you know, Jason, you came out with All American Boys with Brendan Kiley in 2015.
Jason Reynolds: Geesh, that long ago!
Sarah Enni: I know! And Christina, your book is about 1992. And as you just said, you've been writing it in some way, shape, or form, since 2016 or so. Yet these books, and Stamped for you Jason, have come out and are happening in this moment that is so present. And we are talking about protests and we are having systemic racism conversations.
And this is a tough question because like, it's wonderful to be able to speak so openly about your work and all the feelings and emotions and history behind them, but it's also tragic and so upsetting to have it be so present. It's a tough question. It's hard to even form a question, but whatever you guys have to say about the fact that your work is so immediate right now. I'd love to hear.
Jason Reynolds: The truth is, is I wish I could tell you that I'm surprised. When we wrote All American Boys, I remember Brendan and I having a conversation and he was like, "You know, this book is gonna do okay, because it's topical." And at the time, it was sort of the first of that lot coming out. And I remember it was all this controversy, yada yada, yada, yada, yada.
And then Angie (Angie Thomas, author of The Hate U Give and On the Come Up) came out and changed the world. Right? And Nic (Nic Stone, author of Dear Martin and its sequel, Dear Justyce, Odd One Out, Clean Getaway, and more (listen to her First Draft interview here). All this stuff started happening.
But I remember, I was talking about having conversations, and Brendan being like, "You know, there'll be something else. The book will do okay, and hopefully it'll make a wave. But there'll always be another topic to talk about." And I was like, "Hmm, I don't know where you've been living, but this is not going
away bro. This has never gone away. This has been going on since America been America." So this is always gonna be. It's evergreen in that way.
And yes, that is a misfortune. It's a misfortune because of the lives that are being affected by it. But we have to just be honest about what it is America is and who it is. We had to really look at America in the face, right? It's like, if you go into a jungle and you happened upon a lion and you're like, "Man, I did not know there was gonna be a lion here." It's like, "Well, clearly you know nothing about the jungle." So the emotional sort of bubbling that you're asking about, I don't have. I live in this body every day, every single day.
And it doesn't mean that it doesn't affect me. It doesn't mean that the deaths and the abuse, and the way people talk about it, it affects me. Does it affect me the same? No. No, it's been my life forever. I've been through it with police officers. I know what it is to be handcuffed on the ground and have your car torn apart. I know what it is to see your friends get locked up for things that they didn't do. I know what it is to see your friends get their teeth kicked in. I've seen it over and over again since I was a young person. So I don't really feel no way. Right?
But the pain that I feel, I feel because I got to live in this body for the rest of my life. And there are people out there being hurt, but please believe that I am fully aware of what lurks in the jungle. I've been educated since I was a child.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: I think it's exactly what Jason said where, to be a Black person in this country is to grow up with this awareness. And I think that that transcends where you live. It transcends class. Like I said, there is always a sense of the danger in inhabiting the skin because of systemic and institutional racism and an awareness of the fact that the people who other people think are supposed to protect them are not there to protect and serve you.
I've been talking about it a lot with my parents and it's funny cause they're like, "I don't know. I think this is just gonna be maybe a moment, and then that's it." And I think that a lot of us and our elders are kind of looking at this moment within the context of history, as we've been talking about a lot. There are so many of these blips where throughout history, we've seen that there has been a peak of activity and perhaps things have changed, but very incrementally.
So like we see that post-reconstruction, you have this horrible era of lynching after emancipation. Or you see that like with the civil rights era, then we have the assassination, literally and figuratively, of leadership and of demonization of organizations trying to make things better. And after 1992, we see these small little changes being made within LA policing, but nothing substantive. So I think those of us who are students of history know that this is always our present. It's not ever really our past. It's an ongoing thing. And hopefully every time something happens, we push the needle forward just a little bit more.
But I think what is interesting now is that hopefully we're seeing more people come to that understanding, is what I'm hoping. I think for a long time we have lived with this and we are starting to see people who have been willfully ignorant in some ways come to this realization that like, "Oh, this is a major problem." Like of course it's been a major problem, our entire lives, your entire life, but people are just now waking up to it. And as cynical as that may sound, it's also like something positive, I hope, for future generations.
I hope that these conversations that we're having now and the fact that we're seeing an international reckoning is something that moves the needle even more forward. And that we have young people who live in a world where things are a little bit easier for them than they were for us growing up, or than they are for us now. So I'm hopeful, but I also know my history. I think that's how I would phrase it. Like I'm hopeful, but I know history. And I think also one of the reasons why Stamped is so important is because you need everybody to understand that history. When you're armed with history, it makes you more powerful an advocate for yourself and for other people.
I think that knowledge is really one of the most powerful things that we can arm ourselves with in the struggle for equality. So I'm hoping that more people reading anti-racist literature and more people reading these narratives and fictional narratives of what it means to be Black in this country is hopefully building empathy and awareness and also an understanding of how far we still need to go.
But also just humanizing us. Like it's awful that you even need to say that. It is so disgusting that we need to feel humanized and that fiction has to do that in some ways, or that reading history has to do that. Like we should inherently be. It's like the signs in the civil rights, "I am a man." And yet I feel like we are still needing to walk around with these signs saying like, "We are people."
Jason Reynolds: Interesting. Can I ask you something Sarah? Can I ask you a hard question?
Sarah Enni: Sure. That's only fair.
Jason Reynolds: Don't worry, it's not a gotcha question, but it is an honest question. So right now we're seeing, more than we've ever seen before, white folks in the streets, yada, yada yada, right? Everybody's marching and fighting so on and so on. What exactly is the self-interest? What exactly do white people have to gain? I'm very curious about this. What do white people have to gain in this moment?
And the reason I'm asking is because typically we don't do anything unless there is something for us on the other side. Right. I know why Black people are in the street. I know exactly what we're fighting for, right? Like it's obvious. My question is what exactly is the self-interest of white people in this moment? And you can't speak for all white people obviously.
Sarah Enni: No, but, I mean, that's a really good question. What comes to mind, for me at least, is what you said at the top, Jason. It's a lot of like, "If I am who I say I am, if I believe in the things that I say I believe in, then I can't just sit behind a screen and click donate." Although, you know, I'm doing that. But, if I don't prove myself to myself, then I'm lost, you know? And I think that we've all experienced seeing people that we admire in our lives, be faced with choices and not make them. And that's really disappointing. I don't know [pauses].
Jason Reynolds: It's an interesting question.
Sarah Enni: It's a really interesting question. And I think it's, I mean, listen, white people have a lot of self-reflection to do, right? I think that we can agree on that. And it's odd that white people who have spent so much time listening to their own stories still have like such little sense of who we are or what we're about. So there's a lot of conversations happening. I can only speak for me and my family, but there's a lot of conversations happening and a lot of books being bought and read and discussed. And yeah, I don't know. For me, it factors into class and feminism and all that stuff. It's like, if I want the world to be different than I need to participate in how it's becoming different.
Jason Reynolds: Interesting, I asked you cause I'm actually really curious about it. I'm honestly, this is all I've been thinking about over the last three months. I'm kind of like, "What is really...?" And the reason why is because if you [pauses], here's my fear. So first of all, I want to say, it's good to see, right? This is awesome. Like, "Let's get it! Let's do it!" We can't... a unified front is always gonna be the way, right? It's just human, right? The more of us there are the better chance we have, period. Whatever your skin color is, as long as there's more bodies then we have more pressure on the people to make the changes in the laws and policies.
My fear is that what I've seen happen, and because of history, my fear is that if your self-interest is only in this moment to somehow absolve yourself of shaming guilt, then we are setting ourselves up for a far more harmful moment than we know.
And this is something that I think we're gonna have to really kind of grapple with. If the only self-interest, the only, I want to make sure this is the caveat, cause that's what we do as humans, right? Sympathy only serves the ego of the sympathizer. It does nothing for the person that they're sympathizing with. It only serves the ego of the sympathizer. So if the self-interest is just to feel better, because it is a self-interest right? So if the self-interest is for you to be able to better sleep at night knowing that today you've done a thing. I don't know how sustainable it is when it comes to actual shifting.
And if we are talking about the love of our fellow man, the love of our fellow woman, the love of our fellow human, I don't know if sustainability can come without risk and sacrifice. And that's the part of the conversation we never want to have. In order for there to be equity there's gonna have to be a shifting to balance that thing out. Which means there's gonna be boardrooms where some white men are gonna have to get up out of their seat.
And that's a very different conversation. You can put your slogan up on your TV screen. You can put your slogan up for your companies, but if you ain't willing to give up... because change comes through power. It don't matter if y'all like, "Nah, we love Black stories!" Until we get Black publishers... until there's Black people in the C Suite at Simon and Schuster and Random House divvying out them checks. This is a very real thing.
And this isn't about you Sarah. I just was asking you because you're the white representative in this moment. But I didn't want to let the podcast end without saying that, if you can hear me and Christina have these comments about what it means to be Black and how we have to wear this, and how we have to walk that line every single day, there's a line that y'all been walking too. And it's this line, right? The line that says either we gonna go all the way and lay our bodies down, right? Complicate our lives a little bit. Or, it's all lip service. And then that begs the question, what human chooses to complicate their lives?
Christina Hammonds-Reed: Right.
Jason Reynolds: This is a tough, tough thing. And this is why Christina and I have to say, we hope for the best, but we know history.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. No. And I appreciate the question. I appreciate laying that out and I'll be thinking about it and processing it.
Jason Reynolds: That's all I ask.
Sarah Enni: And you know what? That's not a lot to ask.
We are a little bit over an hour. Is it okay if I ask a little bit about advice, and then we can wrap up after that?
Jason Reynolds: It's good with me.
Sarah Enni: Well, I mean, to be honest, I kind of wanted to give each of you the chance to perhaps ask each other a little bit. Christina, I know this is your debut novel, which is so exciting, but also terrifying. I did that last year and it was a lot. And Jason's been around a bit and is a very experienced person in publishing. So I just wanted to give you the chance, Christina, if you had any questions for Jason about...
Jason Reynolds: Sarah, I thought you was gonna ask us to give advice to white people!
Christina Hammonds-Reed: I was like, "Where is she going with this? Oh, no!"
Sarah Enni: No, no, we're bringing it back to publishing and books. I promise.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: I guess one question I have for Jason is how do you manage being the Black voice in the room and feeling like you have to be an ambassador for Blackness when sometimes you just want to tell a specific story? Do you know what I mean? That's something I'm so curious about. Cause we're not a monolith. Like we are not a monolith. Nobody asks one white person like, "What do white people think about, whatever?" But that is not how we get to experience the world. We're always representative of an entire community of people that are made up with very different kinds of people. How have you found navigating that?
Jason Reynolds: I actually think that we put that burden upon ourselves gratuitously. Here's the thing, right? For instance, maybe people say like, "Oh, what do you think it is?" Or, "What do you think your work is attaching itself to kids in whatever ways. Why do you think that is?" And I always tell people, I was lucky to grow up in the eighties and early nineties, the language that I grew up speaking based on the music that was brand new at the time, ended up becoming the language of youth around the world. Because the music became the music of youth around the world. And so I had the ultimate cheat code, right?
Black. And what I mean is, it don't matter. You ain't gottta write nothing political. You political.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: Yeah, that's true.
Jason Reynolds: Our existence in this space is political, right.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: It's inherently political.
Jason Reynolds: Look Both Ways, they got nothing to do with being Black. But Look Both Ways, in and of itself, is a political thing to show Black children being just Black children, just being children. And that is a political statement. So it don't even matter. You ain't gotta worry about it. Just tell your stories. Think about James Baldwin. James Baldwin's second book, he's got a gay white protagonist from another country. And that, in and of itself, a Black man at that time, writing that story, was a political statement. So it don't matter. It's going to be politicized, whether you want it to or not.
So do what you want. So do what you want.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: Yeah. Do you!
Jason Reynolds: How does it feel for you? How does it feel... so I'm gonna ask you a question. So here you are, there's a lot of buzz. There's a lot of buzz. And not to put the pressure on, but there's a lot of buzz. And I have five of these books in my house, by the way, cause everyone sends them to me. They keep sending me ARC after ARC, after ARC. One came two days ago. They get sent to me all the time. And so there's all this stuff. And so how do you feel? I mean, here it comes! Like, here you go. How do you feel?
So here's what I know. I know it's not a joy. Because I remember this feeling. It ain't joy.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: No, it's so many different things. I want to say overwhelmed and terrified are the accurate words to use. I think in terms of... you write stories, and especially with this first thing, you write it. For me, I wrote it in coffee shops or in my house, and there was no expectation on it, whatsoever. I had zero expectation. I was just writing a story that I wanted to tell. And then you send it out into the world and you're like, "Oh crap. It's like a real thing now." And especially since I've had, like you said, there's a lot of buzz. So there's a lot of expectation that comes with that buzz. When I wrote it, I wasn't anticipating... you hope for the best, but also you're like, "Oh, it's just like this itty-bitty thing that comes out and maybe I sell a few copies. At least I've written a book."
And so with the expectation comes this fear of, to a certain extent, being misunderstood. I'm a little afraid of the story being misunderstood. I think because the story is, in a lot of ways, about an experience that isn't necessarily one that we've seen a lot of in books so far, people expect it to be something it's not. It takes place during the LA riots, but Ashley is not, she's not necessarily the one who's having any sort of violence inflicted on her. She's not out there protesting in the way that her sister is. It's really just about her coming into her sense of self.
And so for me, it's a little terrifying to navigate the comparisons that happened with other major books that have come out where people expect a very active Black protagonist who is fighting the system. And I wanted to write a book that was just very much a coming of age story. Of her trying to navigate herself, first and foremost, with the backdrop of all of this going on. Cause I think that's how a lot of people process things, right? Like a lot of people, initially, are not out there in the streets. A lot of people are just sort of, "Huh, let me see who I am. Let me see how I fit into this overall struggle."
And that, to me, was what I really wanted to explore with her. Her sister goes out there and does it, but she doesn't, and she's also a kid. Not to say that kids haven't participated in every single civil rights struggle over the course of this time. But mostly I'm terrified and anxious and I'm also kind of a perfectionist. So I'm like, "Please like me and like this and get this." And I've had to stop reading Goodreads. Cause I'm like, "No, but you didn't understand!"
Jason Reynolds: Don't do that. Here's what I'll tell you. Here's what I'll tell you. This would be my last piece of advice. It's something that I live by and have lived by for a very long time. When my first novel came out I was in Brooklyn. And my buddy used to own a restaurant across the street from my apartment. And I went to the restaurant and I was stressed. It was about to come out, it was coming out like the next day. And I was so stressed out and I was going to basically get drunk. Right? And I sat at the bar and my buddy who owns the place says, "Yo, what's wrong with you? You look wild."
And I was like, "Well, my book comes out tomorrow and I'm so nervous that they're not gonna get it. They're not gonna understand what I'm trying to say and I'm gonna be misunderstood." All the things you just told me. And his response was something that I have held dear forever and I hope it works for you. And this is what he said.
He said, "If somebody were to come into my restaurant and ask me to cook them the perfect meal, and gave me a day or two to do so, I would run up to the Bronx and I'd go to the butcher and I would get the perfect piece of cow cut, a perfect steak. And I would come back and I'd go to the garden, and I'd pick the perfect vegetables, maybe root vegetables to go with my steak. You know, some carrots, maybe a potato or two." He said, "And I'd go in the kitchen and I'd tenderize, and I'd do all the things that one does with a steak. I'd season the steak and I'd season the vegetables and I'd make sure everything was good. And then I cooked the steak to the perfect temperature and I'd plate the food beautifully with a tablecloth and a candle. And if that person then cut into the steak and took a bite and did not like it? It's because they preferred fish, but not because I didn't cook a perfect steak."
And then I said, "Well, how do you know that you cooked a perfect steak?" And he said, "If it is what you intended it to be, then it is a perfect steak." All right? So if they don't get it, it's not because you didn't do your job. It's because their expectations were, they wanted a different story. It ain't got nothing to do with you. They wanted a different story and those stories exist for them to find. But what you made, if it is what you wanted to make, then you cooked the perfect steak and you gotta be okay with that. That's it.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: Wow, that's really good advice. That is such good advice.
Sarah Enni: I love that. And I felt the same way, Christina. Last year when my book was coming out, it was like three months of a very long therapy session of like, "What the heck is gonna happen?" So I don't know if it makes it better, but it is a universal experience. So that helps too, I think.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: It's like being a part of the club, right?
Jason Reynolds: And your second and third and fourth books too. It never goes away.
Sarah Enni: Oh no! I can't tell you what a pleasure it was to talk to you guys this morning. I so appreciate your time. I loved both of your... I mean, Jason, I've read all your stuff for years.
Jason Reynolds: Thanks Sarah.
Sarah Enni: But I loved reading, Christina, The Black Kids was so incredible. I'm thrilled for it to come out. I am not nervous at all about The Black Kids. I think it's wonderful. I can't wait to shout it out.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: Jason, can I just tell you my mother texted me to be like, "How was your conversation with Jason?" I don't know if you saw that conversation with Nic, where my mom and I were watching you on, was it Kimmel or Fallon? Several years ago.
Jason Reynolds: Seth Meyer's probably.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: Yeah. I think that's what it was. And we were in New York at the time for one of my grandparents' funerals, but we were watching your interview and she's like, "Who's that kid? You should read all of his works. You should do what he's doing." So, she's so excited. She's so excited that I'm talking to you.
Jason Reynolds: Tell mom I said, "You made it. You did it." You know what I mean?
Christina Hammonds-Reed: I'll tell her that. She's delighted.
Jason Reynolds: I'm gonna come out to one of your signings, if we can have signings at some point, and I'll make sure I can give mom a hug, you know?
Christina Hammonds-Reed: I'd love that.
Jason Reynolds: For sure. That'd be good, man.
Sarah Enni: Thank you guys so much. Have a wonderful rest of your day.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: Thank you.
Jason Reynolds: Thanks Sarah. Good to see you, Sarah.
Sarah Enni: Absolutely. You too.
Christina Hammonds-Reed: Thank you so much. Bye you guys.
Thank you so much to Christina and Jason. Follow Christina on Instagram @ChristinaHammonsReed and follow Jason on Twitter and Instagram @JasonReynolds83. You can follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram), and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).
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Thanks again!