Hey, this is Durey and welcome to 5th of the People in this episode we have the news

as usual with me, Brittany Clinton, Sam, and then we have two interviews.

The first one we're joined by Kay Washington ahead of the release of her new Netflix show,

American Sun, and then we have a quick check in with President of Canada, Julien Castro,

talking about his plans or on criminal justice reform.

And the inspirational word this week is actually a poem by our own Clint Smith, that they're

let's go. What's going on, y'all? This is Clint and as many of you know, a few months ago I had

the incredible privilege of being able to be a part of the 1619 project, which was a issue of New

York Times magazine curated by Nicole Hanna-Jones that explored the 400-year history and legacy of

slavery in this country on the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans coming to the

British colonies. And I had two poems in that issue and I figured that I would start the podcast

off by reading those poems for you today. So this is the first one and it is about the middle

passage. Over the course of 350 years, 36,000 slave ships crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

I walk over to the globe and move my finger back and forth between the fragile continents.

I try to keep count of how many times I drag my hand across the bristled hemisphere,

but grow weary of chasing a history that swallowed me. For every hundred people who were captured

and enslaved, forty died before they ever reached the new world. I pull my index finger from

Angola to Brazil and feel the bodies jumping from the ship. I drag my thumb from Ghana to Jamaica

and feel the weight of dysentery making an anvil of my touch. I slide my ring finger from Senegal

to South Carolina and feel the ocean separate a million families. The soft hum of history spins

on its tilted axis, a cavalcade of ghost ships, wash their hands of all they carried.

And this poem is about Hurricane Katrina and those left in the super dome after the storm.

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