Hello everybody and welcome to Books Unbound Podcast, the podcast where we unbind

books to get to their hearts with your host's me. It's Ariel and me, Raylene.

Gosh, where to begin.

As I'm sure everyone is aware, we are in the midst of a very turbulent and crazy, stressful, and difficult time politically.

It's not even just politically, though, soul-wise, I guess.

The first thing we want to talk about on the podcast and address is absolutely what

is happening predominantly in the United States, but worldwide with the Black Lives Matter

movement.

The first and most important thing is for Relina and I to say that this podcast fully supports the Black Lives Matter

movement, fully unabashedly, we are here to support, oh God, just I honestly, I'm really,

we talked about this beforehand, but I'm just so overwhelmed with wanting to say everything

and not knowing how to say anything.

Exactly. That's the problem is we don't want to say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing.

Yeah. So like we've even been grappling all day. I'm like, should we even be doing this? Like should we be recording? And it's hard to know the right answer.

Absolutely. The two of us aren't black people.

You don't necessarily need to be sharing our voices right now.

You can, if it helps you just to listen to us for an hour, then that's kind of what we think matters at this moment for in terms of the podcast. Yeah, for us, right?

Yeah.

There are, I think that there are two things that you and I can do. The first is to amplify black voices and give our support.

And so in that vein, we absolutely encourage you to check out so many of the black creators

who are making podcasts and booktube videos and bookstagram photos, et cetera,

other bookish content, to be listening to what they're reading right now, what they're

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