Quarantine Session #27: Mychal Denzel Smith + Brit Bennett

Summary

Set squarely in the context of an America ravaged by a pandemic and racial and political violence, Mychal Denzel Smith's discussion of his book Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream with novelist Brit Bennett is a fierce, brilliant and unapologetic conversation, leavened with gallows humor. Mychal delineates the distinction between being forgetful of history and being intentionally committed to delusions, discusses selective ideas of American identity, and describes struggling against the futility of writing in the face of injustice, while noting "it's important that we leave a record of the alternative to what has been the dominant discourse."