Oral History Interview with Hooper Markert

Title

Oral History Interview with Hooper Markert

Interviewee

Hooper Markert

Interviewer

Naeem Mangum

Description

Hooper Markert of New York City, New York was interviewed by Hooper Markert, a Sewanee student, on November 28th, 2023 on Zoom. While their conversation was primarily on the Black Lives Matter Movement, other topics included Markert’s membership in the Baha’i faith and Markert’s exposure to the diversity of New York City. We hope that this conversation will assist scholars with a further understanding of race in the United States during the early twenty-first century. Please click on the link to see the full interview.

Transcript

0:03 Naeem Mangum: This is Naeem Mangum from Sewanee, the University of the South. It is Tuesday, November 28th at 12:14 PM and I'm with if you could state your name and where you are.

0:19 Hooper Markert: Hi, my name is Hooper Markert. I'm in New York City right now and it's 1:14 PM Eastern Time here. Thank you for having me

0:31 Naeem Mangum: Thank you for being here. Yeah,

0:33 Hooper Markert: Of course.

0:36 Naeem Mangum: So I'm going to start off with some introductory questions before we move into, just to get to know you better before we move into the Black Lives Matter questions. So where are you originally from, Hooper?

0:51 Hooper Markert: So I'm originally from Birmingham, Alabama. I grew up, I spent my first 18 years there, born and raised in Alabama, and then I went to college when I was 18 in New York City. So I've been here for the past three-ish years.

1:10 Naeem Mangum: What school?

1:13 Hooper Markert: So I grew up going to my elementary school actually, and this is, we'll get to why this is important I think later in the interview, but I went to Advent Episcopal School. It's a Christian school in downtown Birmingham, and then I went to high school at a school called Indian Springs. It's a little bit like 30, 45 minutes outside of the actual city limits of Birmingham. And now I go to school at Columbia University in New York City.

1:43 Naeem Mangum: That's impressive. It's a good school.

1:47 Hooper Markert: Thanks.

1:53 Naeem Mangum: How is where you currently live different from where you were raised?

1:59 Hooper Markert: That's a good question. So where I was raised, Birmingham is a very segregated city, I would say, and it's not necessarily in the way that maybe it used to be. Birmingham is a very historic city with the civil rights movement, and I think we will touch on that later in the interview also. But it's like a lot of cities in America, very, you have patches of where groups of people live, so Birmingham is divided. So in North Birmingham it's predominantly African-American and south Birmingham is mostly white. And so I was born and raised in southern Birmingham, and then in the middle of downtown is kind of the marker of in between those two. So I was born in the southern Birmingham, and I think because my family was wealthier, we spent more time in the southern Birmingham, the group of people there. So there wasn't a lot of diversity actually where I was from originally.
3:11 And then when I moved to New York, it is like night and day. It's like I think one of the most diverse cities in the world. Somebody was telling me recently actually that there are more languages spoken here than any other city in the world, which I thought was very interesting. And it's kind of crazy how diverse it is here, how so many people of different racial backgrounds, different ethnic backgrounds, different socioeconomic backgrounds, all kind of intermingle here. So it's a very cool place to live personally. And I think in that way it's pretty different from where I grew up.

4:00 Naeem Mangum: So living in Birmingham, where did you find community as a child?

4:11 Hooper Markert: That's a good question. I think I mostly found community with the Baha'i community in Birmingham. So I'm a Baha'i, I'm a member of the Baha'i Faith, and essentially for people who may not know what the Baha'i faith is, it's a small kind of minority religion that believes in the unity of all people, the unity of all religions. And so there was a small Baha'i community in Birmingham, but we spent a lot of time around those people. And so I grew up in a very loving Baha'i community with not only my family, but then also the surrounding Birmingham Baha'i's, which I think to this day still have a big impact on me. And so I found a lot of community there. I found community also just in my day-to-day kind of life. I had good friends at my elementary school and my high school. So yeah, I would say those are the communities that I made, especially in my early childhood. I would say those have grown and evolved as I've gotten older. But yeah, that's where I would say I started.

5:26 Naeem Mangum: And going off that, now that you live in New York, where do you find community today?

5:38 Hooper Markert: So I find community a lot in, I think still in the Baha'i community, but in a very different way. I grew up in Birmingham. The Baha'i community was a lot older. It was a really cool Baha'i community with a lot of just really lovely human beings, but they were all a lot older than I was. It was my brother and my siblings were the youngest kind of kids my age around there. And then there were a significant portion of 60, 70, 80 year olds. And however, those baha'i's back home were hugely influential. I would say for me, I think again in that this is a Black Lives Matter interview, I think it's worthy to say that. So some of these Baha'i's were trailblazers in the civil rights movement. They have since gone to the next World and passed away, but they were holding the first interracial meetings in the city of Birmingham. And some of these Baha'i's were like, oh my gosh, they would have crosses burned into their yards by the Kuku Klux Klan and because obviously it was such a radical thing to do back then. So it was really cool, I think, to grow around these people. But coming to New York, I've found also community in the Baha'i community, but in a very different way. I think there are a lot of much, there's much more young people here in New York, and so I didn't have that growing up and I found a lot of community in the young Baha'i's here who I can form really good friendships with. And then also we do a lot of community building service activities here. So particularly, so I live in... Columbia universities in the West Harlem area, which is a historically black neighborhood, and we do a lot of community oriented programs for adolescent children with the idea of focusing on growing their intellectual and spiritual capacity.
8:26 So there's idea of having them grow intellectually, help them with their reading and writing skills with homework, which is hugely important I think also given the education disparities here in New York, but that's a whole nother story. And then also developing qualities like compassion and kindness and service so that I have also found a big community here in New York. From there, I think also I found a lot of community with just the interesting people that I've met on campus at Columbia. There's a lot of brilliant people who are all trying to make the world a better place. And so I found good friends here that have taught me a lot. So yeah, I would say those are maybe the two main communities that I've found in college, but there are many, many more.

9:24 Naeem Mangum: So I have two things. Can you touch more on, or the first one's a shorter question, or would you say that most of the younger Baha'i's in New York are also studying there, or do they live there or did they grow up there? And I guess what differences do you see in that where they grew up versus where you grew up and how that shaped you and them and then how that shapes your community?

10:02 Hooper Markert: That's a very great question. I would say that most of the young people here are not necessarily people who grew up in New York. There's a lot of students here and a lot of people who have just graduated from school and are now starting working, which is I think not necessarily good nor bad, it's just provides a different set of experiences. Kind of like what you were saying is that a lot of these people come from all over, not only America, but all over the world. And so being able to find community with a diverse set of people who all have their own experiences and cultural experiences and experiences and how they were raised has been really cool. And I think it's something that so many people don't get these days because they just confine themselves to people who grew up like them or who look like them or who share their same identities, which is not necessarily bad, but I think you need to have both. And there is something to say about surrounding yourself with a diversity of people who have so many different experiences.

11:21 Naeem Mangum: Also, could you touch on, you said that that you're doing these community or you're working on these community building efforts in order to help junior youth and children with their intellectual education and spiritual education. What exactly are you doing?

11:48 Hooper Markert: That's a great question. Yeah, so I can give a little bit of backstory into what the program is and then also how it started here in West Harlem. So basically this program that we do is a chapter or a section of the Junior Youth spiritual empowerment program. And so this is a worldwide program that works with young people between the ages of 12 to 15 that works in inspiring them to better their communities and take on serving their own communities themselves. And so we started this program in I'd say six or seven years ago in a middle school as an afterschool program. And the middle school is on hundred 37th Street and Broadway, which is now, it's in West Harlem, it's colloquially referred to as Hamilton Heights, which is a predominantly Hispanic and African-American neighborhood. And so these kids have very different upbringings than I had, which is also cool to see and don't have necessarily the same resources that I had growing up.
13:24 And so I see that a lot in terms of the education that they get from the school. For instance, like I referred to this earlier, but that the New York City Department of Education, it is pretty good in that it leaves no child behind, but it's far from perfect. And you see a big disparity in the types of educations people receive based on where they live, what kind of school they go to, if it's a private or a public school. And so these kids, I would say compared to my reading level when I was their age, are significantly behind or they're struggling with maybe easy concepts, like the differences between "ARE" are and "OUR" our or they're their and there, they cannot get these concepts. So that's a way that we develop their intellectual abilities of helping them with reading comprehension. A lot of these kids also don't speak English as their first language.
14:33 And so we work with them to try to better their English skills, help them get an education better, further their education. And then we also work with them to develop what I referred to earlier as their spiritual qualities, their ability to discern spiritual emotional concepts. For instance. We try to have them identify forms of injustice. It's not necessarily a material thing that you can point to and say, here's what justice is, here's what injustice is. But it's a way that we kind of work with them to develop an understanding of what is fair, why do we believe that all people should be treated the same way? Where do we not see that in the world? How can these kids identify these areas where they don't see justice necessarily? And then work to try to better the world and make it a more just place. So that's maybe one example, but we try to do both of those things.

15:38 Naeem Mangum: That's amazing. Who inspires you and what traits do these individuals have?

15:52 Hooper Markert: It's a good question. Thank you. I keep saying it's a good question. Sorry. They're just all good

15:56 Naeem Mangum: Questions. No, don't apologize.

16:00 Hooper Markert: I think I have lots of people who inspire me, and I don't think I can label it to just one person, but I would start by saying my dad, he is such a hard worker and he is very selfless and he works crazy hours and spends a lot of time in his career so that he can provide money and food and support for his family. And I really admire that. I would say there are people, there's a friend of ours of both him also Misha Rahimi. I would just say he has a good spirit to him. And I think, again, kind of in the same line as my dad, he is able to approach a lot of life in a selfless manner where he's not thinking so much about how does this affect me, but just doing acting. So I mean, there's tons of other people. My mom, I think her compassionate, she's so caring and loving, and I try to emulate that in all of the people that I interact with. Yeah, there's so many, but those are just a few to start maybe.

17:37 Naeem Mangum: What's your favorite type of food?

17:40 Hooper Markert: I like this one. My favorite type of food. I like peanut butter. Silly answer, but I like peanut butter and I like milk, and I like Reese's cups. Yeah, all good together, I would say.

18:06 Naeem Mangum: And then our final introductory question, how have you experienced international cultures in your life?

18:19 Hooper Markert: How have I experienced international cultures in my life? I think coming to New York has been a big factor for that. For me, like I was saying earlier, that's the city where the most languages are spoken, and I think you see that in certain places. When I was talking earlier about how a lot of cities in America are segregated based on racial identity or ethnic identity, New York is, I would say, much better than the majority of cities. Definitely it still has certain areas that are more predominantly one ethnicity than another. But there are places like I'm thinking specifically in a place called Jackson Heights, Queens. There are a lot of similar kind of Baha'i behind community building activities, and it's one of the most diverse places I've ever seen. It's crazy. It's like you walk in and there, there's one block that's just immigrants who came from India and they only speak Hindi there. And then the next block, you have the best Ethiopian food you've ever had in your life. And it's that on and on and on. I mean, seriously, it's one of the best places for food I think I've ever been because you have that kind of intermix of so many cultures there.
19:54 Yeah, I think another kind of exposure that I've had is I grew up in a Persian family, and so I saw not only this American culture, but also I grew up around a Persian culture. I speak a little bit of Farsi, and I grew up also taking French classes, so I was exposed to French culture. And then here now I'm trying to learn Spanish also because there's so many Spanish speakers in New York from so many Latin American countries, particularly the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, but there's some Ecuador, there's the list goes on. So I would say, honestly, to sum up though that living in New York has probably one of the most formative experiences for me in exposing myself to different culture.

20:53 Naeem Mangum: Nice. Sounds like an amazing opportunity.

20:58 Hooper Markert: Yeah, it's been really lovely.

21:02 Naeem Mangum: All right. So now sort of segueing into our Black Lives Matter questions. How do you receive the news?

21:17 Hooper Markert: Sorry, give me one moment.

21:19 Naeem Mangum: Take your time. Of course.

21:27 Hooper Markert: How do I receive the news? Okay. Well, first off, I've been thinking recently about how so much of the news that we see and the media that we see wants to get us to think a certain way. And so I think you see that a lot with very polarized news outlets like Fox News or CNN that serve as echo chambers for their listeners, where they hear what they want to hear. And so they only listen to those news sources that tell 'em that. So I try to listen to more non-biased, less biased news sources. So every morning I listen to a 10 podcast from AP News and from The Economist, which are kind of two generally more center leaning news sources. I've recently also been into Al Jazeera. I think it's a Saudi, or it might be Qatari based news source or BBC or some of these international news sources are maybe a little bit better for that. Yeah, I would say that those are the primary ways that I get my news.

22:53 Naeem Mangum: Nice. What's your overall experience with social media?

23:02 Hooper Markert: Generally Poor. I grew up on social media. I think so many people around me, I was on Instagram at a very young age, and I think I've seen as I've gotten older, just how bad it is for people's mental health and also just for their in general. It's very addicting, and I think people see that much more so now with TikTok and things that are meant to be addicting. So I grew up with Instagram and I was on TikTok for a little while, but I think I had to quickly stop that just because I could tell how, I mean, again, it's one of those echo chambers where you just get fed kind of the same information that you want to see over and over again. So I've recently kind of been on a cleanse for the past few months that's been going really well, where I haven't really been interacting with anything like TikTok or Instagram reels or any sort of those addicting kind of things. And then even when I do go on Instagram, I try to do it on the browser version so that it's less addicting and it won't kind of impact my head as much

24:27:00 Naeem Mangum: Less accessible as well.

24:29:00 Hooper Markert: Yes, no, definitely.

24:33:00 Naeem Mangum: How has the cleanse, your Instagram cleanse, how has that, or how have you seen that affecting you? How is it working? What's your overall experience with that?

24:49:00 Hooper Markert: I mean, it's been really nice. I was worried about it for a while that, well, all of my friends use Instagram. How am I going to keep up with them? I'm going to miss out on so much. And I think really the benefits far outweigh the cons. I'm not one to say that there are no benefits to social media, I think there are, but just the way that it operates right now is so, there's just so much bad stuff out there that actually, for me, taking a break has been really helpful. It's like, now this is kind of a silly thing, but recently, every time I've wanted to go onto YouTube or Instagram or something like that, instead I've opened Duolingo, which I just told myself every time you get an itch to do it, like Open Duolingo instead. And it's been really cool. I've been getting better at Spanish, and I don't know, it's maybe a more productive way to spend my time. So I would say it's been going really well. I would recommend it for as many people as I can.

25:57:00 Naeem Mangum: Yeah. I need to take notes from you. How did you first encounter with the Black Lives Matter movement?

26:08:00 Hooper Markert: I think my first real encounter with Black Lives Matter was after George Floyd. I think there was, I so much attention on Black Lives Matter rightfully so, and I think since then, black Lives Matter has been, I wouldn't say that I have been centrally involved in BLM, but I think it's always operating in the background. So for instance, I was talking a little bit about some of the lessons that we do with these junior youth, the kids at the middle school that we work with. And one of the lessons that we do that we talked a lot about was when Trump was in office, how the amount of injustice that was everywhere. We talked a lot about BLM and the role of Black Lives Matter, and I think it's really good that these young kids are being able to think so critically about concepts such as racial injustice at such a young age. So I think I first was exposed to it maybe after George Floyd, but since then it's always, yeah, it's been around.

27:44:00 Naeem Mangum: And what is your opinion of the Black Lives Matter movement?

27:50:00 Hooper Markert: I think it is a really great, I think, way to have people think critically about concepts like racial injustice. I think generally BLM kind of takes after the root of Dr. King's kind of movement, I think. So for instance, for me, growing up in Alabama and in Birmingham particularly, which is a city with so much racial history and civil rights history, I was surrounded a lot by that history. So for instance, I went to elementary school three or four blocks away from the 16th Street Baptist Church that was bombed, and we would make regular trips to the Civil Rights Museum. We would frequently go to the park where the Children's Crusade was. So these were all kind of things that I grew up around, which I think is offered me a unique perspective.
29:03:00 And so I do think that growing up around that, seeing the influence of Dr. King, and especially in the city of Birmingham, which has changed so much since then, I think it's really cool to see those ideas still being passed down into activism today. I think when those ideas become too polarized, that becomes a little bit of a problem when it becomes more of a kind of us versus them. I was talking to somebody about this concept the other day, but that when you're advocating for something like Unity and you say, come on guys, you're blaming somebody else for not being unified. It's inherently not unified. You can't be like, come on guys, why are we being,

30:01:00 Naeem Mangum: Yeah, that's disunifying. Yeah,

30:04:00 Hooper Markert: It doesn't really work that way. So I think Black Lives Matter is, it's a big concept, a big movement, and so there are parts of it that I find so important that the need to think critically about racial injustice is really important, and BLM has done that for a lot of people. I think especially after George Floyd, a lot of people who maybe weren't so exposed to racial injustice now had the chance to see it and to think more critically than they had before about it. Now, I wouldn't say there are also kind of portions of BLM that are more so focused on the, I don't know, maybe I think the end goal is unity, but the way to go about it, maybe there's a lot of clash between BLM and hard right supporters. And I think personally, I think that if we're trying to all move forward together, that we have to figure out a way to do it all unified and together. But I don't necessarily think that that detracts from the goal or the movement of BLM, that there are certain people or certain parts of it who think maybe the route to getting there should be one way and other people who think a different way.

31:44:00 Naeem Mangum: Was your, well, where were you? You were in Birmingham in 2020, right?

31:55:00 Hooper Markert: Right. It was during Covid, yeah.

31:57:00 Naeem Mangum: Yeah. So what was your community's reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement, especially in such an important city? For the Civil Rights Movement,

32:09:00 Hooper Markert: There was a lot of commotion. I think emotions were very high, so we had a lot of protests. There was one protest in particular of a Confederate statue that was in downtown Birmingham. It was like an obelisk, so it didn't actually depict any Confederate soldiers. I think there may be worse statues out there.

32:37:00 Naeem Mangum: Yeah, for sure.

32:39:00 Hooper Markert: But there was a big protest after George Floyd's murder, and the protesters ended up tearing down this monument physically. And then there was, in response to that, there was a big outcry from the KKK, which I didn't, honestly, I didn't even know existed still. But they were threatening to bomb these protests, and so people were afraid to go outside. It was very scary. And I think, yeah, that was very terrifying, kind of high emotional time. But I think also something that's cool about being in Alabama is that, I don't remember exactly when this was formed. It might've been before George Floyd, but I've been both before and after, and there's a monument called the, what is it called? The National Center. National Monument for Peace and Justice, I'm pretty sure is what it's called. It's in Montgomery, Alabama. And I think coming from generally a spiritual person, this monument is one of the most spiritual places that I've ever been in my life.
34:03:00 And I think especially going back there after George Floyd was really influential to me. It's for you Naim, if you aren't aware of it or for anybody who might be listening. It's essentially like a monument that was created by this guy, Brian Stevenson is his name. He is the author of Just Mercy. There's that Michael B. Jordan movie, but he is a lawyer who, I think he's from Alabama or the South somewhere. And he focused on freeing incarcerated people who were on death row. That was his life's work. And he also put together this civil rights museum and this monument also in Montgomery. And the museum is one of the most well done museums I think I've ever been to. It's really transformative, and I would recommend it seriously to anybody. I think for me, it's only a two hour drive from my home, but if it's far, people should fly to Montgomery and go to this museum because it's phenomenally done. And the memorial has these huge rock kind of rectangular prisms that are about the size of a coffin, I would say. And I think they're that size for a reason. And it has these huge, there's one for every single county in America where somebody was lynched. And so they have, for instance, I'm from Jefferson County in Birmingham is in Jefferson County. So they have Jefferson County as one of these massive, taller than me, probably 500 pounds slab of stones.

36:02:00 Naeem Mangum: Oh! I think I've seen, yeah, we talked about this before.

36:05:00 Hooper Markert: I might've talked to you about it before. And they have the name of every single person who is lynched, carved into these stones, which are essentially grave sites or memorials for these people. And they'll be hanging from the ceiling. And there's thousands of counties represented from thousands of these stones. And people just are completely silent as they walk through this. And it's a very moving experience, one that I would recommend for everyone. That was a little bit of a tangent, but I wanted to share that also.

36:53:00 Naeem Mangum: Which generation do you think was most affected by the Black Lives Matter movement?

37:06:00 Hooper Markert: I like that question. I think it affected probably every generation, but if I had to pick, I would say that this younger generation, the Gen Z, has been probably most affected by BLM in that, I think, like I was saying earlier, that there are now 11-year-old kids who are thinking critically about racism. And it's not something that you just learn in school as this was the history of Alabama, this was the history of the South, and then after the Civil War, like check, we cured racism. And I think it's really given people something to think about, which is really powerful, that the children are able to think critically about prejudice, about racism and how their interactions can be one of love and unity regardless of race, which I think is very powerful and very beneficial.

38:22:00 Naeem Mangum: How has the Black Lives Matter movement changed how you interact with people of other races?

38:31:00 Hooper Markert: That's a, I think Black Lives Matter has, I don't think it's necessarily changed the way I interact with people of other races hugely, but I think so many other people, it gave me more of experience to the emotional or more so just the reality of Black Americans. So for instance, after George Floyd passed away, I was able to recognize, okay, maybe my friends who are African-American need to be checked up on and see how they're doing. Are they emotionally okay? Because this is a very turbulent time for them. And I think it gave me a little bit more of exposure. So maybe what that life is like. I mean, by no means it was comprehensive, but I think it was a taste that I think so many Americans who maybe weren't living that life got or were exposed to a little bit through BLM

39:53:00 Naeem Mangum: How do you think the Black Lives Matter movement succeeded?

40:00:00 Hooper Markert: I think, like we were saying earlier, I think it really has succeeded in getting people to think critically and to recognize that racism is one of the most systemic problems in American history to this day. I think, like I was saying earlier, it's kind of crazy to think that people actually thought that after slavery ended, racism was fixed, or after Obama was elected, racism was fixed. That was not an uncommon thing to hear is Obama's president, the US cured racism. And I think having that constant reminder that, no, we're still figuring this out and we need to figure this out. It's a impaired that this needs to happen quickly because this is one of the biggest problems, if not the biggest problem of America right now. So I would say in that way, it definitely succeeded.

41:02:00 Naeem Mangum: Sorry, we have our windows open. We have our windows open. There's a fly that just, sorry about that. And going off that, how do you think, or I guess not going off that, but sort of opposite to that, how do you think the Black Lives Matter movement failed if you think it failed in any way?

41:29:00 Hooper Markert: I would say the only way it failed is that it became kind of a politicized agenda rather than a humanitarian kind of agenda, because I think it's, yeah, it became very politicized very quickly, and so it gave people the opportunity to say, well, I believe that Blue Lives Matter. And the fact that that even existed was probably because it got involved in politics pretty quickly, and it became partisan. And I think deep down, everyone knows that, that Black Lives Matter, that all lives matter. I think even the people who say All Lives Matter is an antagonist kind of opposite response to Black Lives Matter is pretty crazy because the fact is all lives do matter, and that includes Black Lives.
42:33:00 But those are all kind of politicized agendas, I guess, that feel like they're going after one another when they're all sort of saying the same thing. So I would say that that's maybe the only way that I could see Black Lives Matter having failed, is that it maybe didn't create the response necessarily. That was the goal was to acknowledge that Black Lives do matter. It was received in a way such that other, I don't know. I think because it became politicized, people interpreted as this person's life doesn't matter, that person's, and there was pushback to that.

43:19:00 Naeem Mangum: What do you think is the state of race relations in the United States? Just based on what you've seen, not, it doesn't have to be, I guess, correct or objective, but in your experience, what is a state of race relations?

43:41:00 Hooper Markert: I think in my experience, it's generally people are,
43:51:00 I think it's easy to feel comfortable, and I think America, like Americans like to feel comfortable. And so it's uncomfortable to acknowledge that racism exists and that prejudice exists, and that we all may have some sort of prejudice and to confront those prejudices. And I think, and people like to spend time with people who look like them or who have the same amount of money as them or who live the same lives as them, because it's easy and it's comfortable. And so I think that's where I see America in is that maybe we're not necessarily recognizing the extent to which prejudice impacts our own personal lives. And then also we don't feel like we need to do anything about it necessarily. And so I think that is a way that Black Lives Matter was helpful and that it reminded people you can't just stick to the status quo because prejudice and racism are ever present in every one of our lives.

45:06:00 Naeem Mangum: That was well put.

45:08:00 Hooper Markert: Thank you.

45:11:00 Naeem Mangum: And our final question here, what do you think is the future of the Black Lives Matter movement?

45:22:00 Hooper Markert: I think the future of Black Lives Matter is one that is maybe more so out of the political spotlight, but working behind the scenes. I think if there are more people who are exposed to, for instance, like civil rights museums or making policy and law adjustments from behind the scenes rather than in the media space because the media can skew things so quickly or working and sort of making educational programs where they can teach young people the importance of treating everyone equally and the presence of racism and how to confront racism. I think if that does happen, then it would be a tremendous success going forward.

46:25:00 Naeem Mangum: All right. Well, that's all I have for you. Thank you for your time, Hooper.

46:28:00 Hooper Markert: Thank you so much. This was really nice, Naeem.