Oral History Interview with Carmel Mangum

Title: Oral History Interview with Carmel Mangum
Interviewee: Carmel Mangum
Interviewer: Naeem Mangum
Description: Akwanza Mangum of Dunwoody, Georgia was interviewed by Naeem Mangum, a Sewanee student, on November 26th, 2023 in person. While their conversation was primarily on the Black Lives Matter Movement, other topics included: discussing Mangum’s upbringing and being Black and Baha'i. 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 11:07 AM Central Time. And I'm with if you could state your name and where you are

0:18 Carmel Mangum: You are with Carmel Mangum I am currently in Macon, Georgia at Mercer University, and it is 12:07 PM Eastern Time.

0:32 Naeem Mangum: Alright, thank you Carmel for being here.

0:35 Carmel Mangum: Of course. Thank you for having me.

0:37 Naeem Mangum: Of course. So I kind of want to start off with some introductory questions just to get to know you a bit. Where are you originally from Carmel?

0:49 Carmel Mangum: I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in a hospital called Northside. And after that I lived in Johns Creek for maybe two years. I don't really remember much of that. No, I think it was like three or four years probably. But anyways, the primitive years I spent kind of growing up in Cumming, Georgia, Forsyth County, and I lived there until summer between fourth and fifth grade. Then I moved in with my grandparents and Dunwoody, Georgia from fifth grade onwards. But we moved into our own house about a year after, since we were building our house. And my parents wanted us to be in the school district so we could kind of get acclimated. And now I live in Macon, not full-time, but while I'm in college I go to Mercer and Macon.

1:51 Naeem Mangum: Nice. How is where you currently live different from where you were raised?

2:01 Carmel Mangum: I guess I'll talk about Mercer versus Dunwoody and Cumming. I would say Macon area is a lot more diverse, especially when considering white versus black. There are a lot more black people in Macon than there were in coming, especially coming. They had a lot of white people there. In Dunwoody, it was more diverse, but again, it was not a lot of people who were black. And I would say now I'm seeing a lot more people of color, especially Mercer University. I feel like they do a good job of reaching out to people from different countries and different ethnic backgrounds. So you see a lot of people of color here. And then in the Macon surrounding area, it's a heavily African-American population in total.

3:11 Naeem Mangum: So mainly you would say the big differences are diversity.

3:17 Carmel Mangum: Yeah.

3:19 Naeem Mangum: And what about culture do you see with that diversity? Do you see big culture differences or is it kind of the same?

3:28 Carmel Mangum: I would say in Macon there's a lot less, it feels less together than Dunwoody and Cumming did because I feel like in Dunwoody and Cumming, I lived in areas that were more family oriented just because we were living near school districts and we were just kind of in the middle of where most people with children would live. So it was more community based. But here I don't see a lot of families because Mercer, it is very separate from Macon, but when you enter Macon, it's very, you do your thing and you get in and you get out of the stores. And if you want to go to Target, it's 20 minutes away. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done here to make Macon more like Dunwoody and Cumming. However, I would say Dunwoody, I would say people were friendliest there. When you walk into the stores you're like, hi, how are you? And people don't really look at you funny. But in Macon, I feel like they kind of look at you funny. They're just like, Hey, how are you? But they don't, yeah,

5:01 Naeem Mangum: just going about their day.

5:03 Carmel Mangum: Yeah, it's more like get in, get out, do your thing, do your job, do what you need to do and leave. So it's more, I don't want to use the word segregated, but

5:13 Naeem Mangum: Less of a tight knit community.

5:15 Carmel Mangum: Yes. Yeah.

5:17 Naeem Mangum: Interesting. Do you think that the college town aspect has an effect on that?

5:26 Carmel Mangum: I would definitely say that it does. I think the fact that there's a college town in the middle of Macon and then the outside of Macon is just a completely different area, definitely has a big effect on it because we don't really go out of Mercer
5:47 Just to hang out. And when we see people who live in Macon, it's not really to just hang with them when we go out on the town or whatever, to bars and stuff or clubs or whatever, we don't really go there to interact with everyone. I feel like there's like at UGA, it's very much college community, and then once you leave the college, then there's different communities around it. But Mercer, because it's such a small school, I feel like makes that difference a lot easier to see and a lot bigger and more defined because it's just like it takes, I don't know what I'm trying to say, but what I'm trying to say is it definitely does have a great impact because having a small school with a lot of people from a lot of different places, while it can impact the surroundings a lot in good or bad ways, I feel like it just really, Mercer just really doesn't have much of an impact on the Macon community, whether that's good or bad, it's just very much two separate places.
7:18 Even though you walk outside of Mercer and you're in Macon, you're in Mercer, you're in Macon, but it feels like it's two different worlds. It's kind of like you're in a bubble when you're at Mercer. So I feel like that definitely, I feel like there's definitely a lot of culture and if we would venture out of our own personal feel good space or whatever it's called, personal comfort. If we got out of our personal comfort and we did something enjoyable or not enjoyable, sorry, something different than what is enjoyable, we would be able to see how that culture has developed. And I say all of this as if I am going to go do that, but I haven't. So I feel like that's definitely something that I could have a better answer for you if I wasn't so scared to exit my comfort zone of Mercer and go out into Macon. But that's what I have noticed as of now.

8:24 Naeem Mangum: Interesting. Okay. And I guess it's a good segue, that's a good segue into our next question. Where do you find community today?

8:44 Carmel Mangum: I would say the biggest community I find is religious and I personal. So religious community, I'm a Baha'i. So I would say that that's a big place where I feel like there's community because we talk a lot about oneness of humankind and of all races, religions, genders, livelihoods, everything like that. And so I feel like there's a lot of community there because you'll go to a Baha'i conference and you'll make friends if you choose to exit your comfort zone. And in those spaces, I feel like even when I'm exiting my comfort zone, it doesn't feel super uncomfortable. So I feel like I've found a big community there. There's never been a point where I feel overly uncomfortable in a Baha'i space.
9:49 And it's kind of given me the freedom to feel like at home in a place where I don't look the same as everyone else, but no one looks the same as everyone else. It's very diverse, but very community central, which was very, it's very different from what I have learned from my friends and the communities that they see. A lot of my friends' communities consist of people who look like them. And so the white people will hang out with the white people, black people will hang out with black people. But I realized in the Bahai community, there is no white Baha'i's or Black Baha'i's or Brown Baha'i's or male Baha'i's female Baha'i's, no, everyone is kind of intermingled and we're all a community together. We treat each other with the same respect and love and generosity. And so it gives you the real feel of what communities should be.
10:55 And it's not just people with families. It has been in the past with the communities I've been a part of. It's not just people in college. It's not just the people that I enjoy hanging out with. It's people who feel and believe the same things and are here to learn and spread this love and peace and joy and tranquility in the world. So that's my biggest community and my second biggest community, I'm saying biggest not, but in my heart and my soul, the one that I feel most connected to. So second biggest connection wise would be the community that I've picked, which is my friends and my family. But I know you can't really pick family, but you can pick whether or not you want to be involved with speaking to them and being engaged with them. So I would say the people that I've chosen to surround myself with have been very helpful to the community that I've built in my own surrounding.
12:15 So I've built a community within my home here at Mercer where me and my roommates, we take turns cleaning, we speak to each other about our problems. If someone seems sad and wants to go to their room, that's okay, but they're going to have to talk about it later. We know each other well and we care about each other. We're not just roommates, we're friends. We're a community. And I would say that the community feel of the dorm in general has definitely decreased from my freshman year. Freshman year, I would knock on people's doors, ask them for help with stuff. The entire right side of the hall, which is the side that I lived on, I knew everyone down that hall and I could tell you where they lived. So definitely there has been a shift from that freshman year where your community was the people who lived on your hall because you didn't have any friends.
13:18 Because this is a private school and not a lot of people come here. It's not like UGA or I don't know, UGA is just the best example I have in my head. A lot of people from my high school went to UGA, so they're able to fall back into that same community feel that they had in high school. Whereas in the college that I came to, I knew one person from my high school and we had never really spoken. So it was definitely like it forced you to kind of get out there and create your own community. And I did, and I really, really enjoyed it. And yeah, it's shifted and it's changed, but I have continued to build, expand, decrease, and kind of just allow my community at, I guess I would say my personal community to fluctuate as I grow and as I change. And the one constant in that would be my family, especially my nuclear family, my mom, my dad, my brother. They're pretty cool. Sorry. Yeah, and I would say even growing up, I would say my extended family was part of that community, but they've definitely grown into a bigger part of my community than they were when I was younger because we started seeing them more often. And I feel like the more I interact with people, the more they become a part of my permanent community. So you can be related to people, but they don't have to be a part of your community. So sorry, I got off on a tangent.

15:11 Naeem Mangum: No, no, It's all good.

15:13 Carmel Mangum: Those are my two major communities. It's like friends and family and the Baha'i Faith, and they do overlap, but those are my separate communities that create a big community. But I thought that they should be separated for this because it kind of makes more sense that way so that I can explain the differences. But

15:37 Naeem Mangum: What is your occupation and what was your journey to this role?

15:43 Carmel Mangum: So I am currently a student. I do have a job. I currently am teaching two to eight year olds soccer. Bless you.

15:57 Naeem Mangum: Thank you.

15:59 Carmel Mangum: So this is not really where I want to be in my life. I don't want to be a soccer coach. I don't want to be a coach. But what's kind of led me to this is a lifetime of kind of serving and we're working with children, working with junior youth, working with youth. I have worked a lot with a lot of different people, a lot of different ages. I've had a lot of different jobs in healthcare, in volunteering, in childcare, in a lot of different areas, but they all kind of fall under the same sort of umbrella, which is service for those who need it. And even if I'm being paid, I still feel like I'm doing a service by coming out there every day and teaching these kids soccer even when they're annoying me, even when I'm tired, even when I threw up right before I still go out there and I still help these kids because it's something that I want to do because I feel like I'm helping them, even if they're not really learning what punting a ball is, they are learning their big kicks and they are TikTok tiny kicks and they're pullbacks and stuff like that.
17:13 So it's little things, but it's making me feel like I'm making kind of a bigger difference, which is the overall theme in my life. I've been very much, I focus a lot on what I can do for other people because I guess it kind of makes me look away from myself so I can focus on them and not on me, but I don't really like to have a large focus on myself. I like to have a focus on other people. So that's my job currently. But what I want to do when I graduate is I want to serve in Haifa Israel for religious reasons. And after that, instead of coming home and getting a job here, I want to apply for the Peace Corps and spend two to two and a half years abroad, hopefully working in the health sector. I'm already in a pre Peace Corps program.
18:16 It's called Peace Corps Prep Program, PPEP or PCPP. But basically what they're doing is they're kind of preparing me for the Peace Corps intellectually, I guess throughout my schooling. They're like, okay, you need to make sure you get this done, this done, this, done 50, no, it's a hundred hours of service and 50 hours of abroad and this many hours of this. And so I've gotten a lot of it finished and once I leave, it's going to look even better because I knew that I wanted to go on this path to the Peace Corps and I want to go onto this path of service. And I'm hoping that after Haifa and after the Peace Corps, that I can continue on the path that I'm hoping to be on, which is to become part of an NGO, which is a non-government organization where whether or not I get paid, I want to be kind of in the field and I want to be out there helping people who need help and giving to those who can't receive the help that they need in whatever country, whatever state, whatever city, whatever, Providence. I don't care where I am. I just want to make a difference and to help people who need that help.

19:51 Naeem Mangum: Yeah, thats good... Please.

19:57 Carmel Mangum: I was just going to say that my degree has also kind of gone into that a lot. I'm a global health major with a French and psychology double minor, so I focus a lot on other people, especially within global health and psychology. French, obviously I focus on French, but even through my French class, we actually went to the border of San Diego between San Diego and Tijuana, and we actually saw what goes on in the border. And so I've been able to kind of see how it would work if I were to do work like this. And it can be in the us, it can be across the seas, it can be wherever. As long as I'm helping, I feel like I will have fulfilled my lifelong goal of just doing things for other people coming into, as I was growing up, I always wanted to be in healthcare, but I realized that what I really wanted once I got to college was to know enough about healthcare to go out and help people.
21:19 I didn't want to be a surgeon, I didn't want to be a vet, I didn't want to be a doctor, I didn't want to be a nurse. Those were all things that I thought I wanted to be up until this point. And once I realized that I could take my global health degree and interope it with service, I was like, wait a minute, this is perfect. The Peace Corps has a health sector, the Peace Corps has an education sector, they have all of these different sectors, but the health sector was what I was focused on because I was like, this is what I said I wanted to do since I was seven. And I can actually do it, and I don't have to be a surgeon and work in a fancy place and just be rich beyond compare. I can be in another country and do something as little as bring them some vaccines from America or something like that where I can actually help them or just educate them about how to stay safe from certain diseases or what they can do with a smaller budget or what they can do with a larger budget and less access to certain medications in certain places and certain things.
22:38 So sorry, I got off on another tangent, but that's basically, hopefully I will be able to take all of that, wrap it all up into a beautiful little box and tie a bow and yeah.

23:02 Naeem Mangum: Good. Okay. So from here we're going to segue into our Black Lives Matter questions. So how do you receive the news?

23:20 Carmel Mangum: Most of my news used to come from TikTok, but since I deleted it, I've started paying more attention to the news app on my phone. Just literally, oh, hello. This app right here. Why is it, sorry? It's

23:39 Naeem Mangum: Because you have the blurred background. Yeah,

23:41 Carmel Mangum: But basically it's just the news app. So I don't have CNN Fox or Times New York Times Magazine or anything like that. I used to have the New York Times magazine, but it's expensive to keep paying every month to receive news. So I'm just using the news app and I get news from a lot of different places. There's the Guardian, NBC news, CBS News, wall Street Journal, Yahoo, apple News podcast. So there's a lot of different parts of it. So I receive most of, sorry, of my news from that news app. And outside of that, it's just basically when I speak to my family, if they mention anything, I kind of look into it more or my friends who have TikTok will be like, oh, did you hear about this? And then I'll look into it through that news website. Yeah.

24:49:00 Naeem Mangum: Alright.

24:50:00 Carmel Mangum: I don't really watch the news often.

24:55:00 Naeem Mangum: What is your experience with social media?

25:00:00 Carmel Mangum: Social media can be good. It can be bad if we used it in moderation with anything. If you use it in moderation, it's not bad. And like I said, I got a lot of my news from TikTok. I would receive a lot of information from TikTok. I learned a lot from TikTok and Instagram. But the problem is, is that people also use social media to spread negative things and to be super silly and whatever, and you do your own things. But the problem is, is that it's not always beneficial, which is fine. It can also be silly and just be a way for you to decompress, but there's also a lot of negative things that come with that. There's negative body image, there's a negative kind of feeling around the fact that you spend so much time on social media. So overall, I would say that social media as of right now has been very negative in my opinion.
26:23:00 It doesn't spark a lot of positives unless you kind of consciously are making very, very conscious decisions to only pay attention to certain things on TikTok or only go on TikTok for 30 minutes and it's just to get some news. So I think it takes a lot of effort for you to get a lot of beneficial things from TikTok. That's how my dad does his tik toks. He follows the people that he follows and his algorithm is just completely workouts healthy things and motivational talks. But the way that I did mine was just, I just liked the funny toss and I liked the tos that I liked. And so now I'm at a point where I had to just delete it because I was scrolling for hours doing nothing. So I would say overall social media has the opportunity to be good but chooses not to. Overall,

27:33:00 Naeem Mangum: How did you first encounter with the Black Lives Matter movement?

27:40:00 Carmel Mangum: So I would say I first encounter with the Black Lives Matter movement was when it wasn't very popular. It was just people marching. It was before George Floyd passed, it was before everything. And I had just heard about it on Instagram or TikTok or something and I didn't know much about it. I thought it was a great movement. I didn't personally join anything. Maybe I liked a post or two that I saw, but there weren't a lot of posts on it, so I didn't really pay much attention to it. So that was my first experience. I didn't really know much about it. I kind of researched a little bit and found out that it was just kind of, they wanted to protest the treatment of people of color, especially black people. And I agreed that Black Lives do matter. I agreed that every life matters, and that was my first experience. I was like, I think this is really awesome. I think that we need more people standing up, but then I also didn't stand up and say anything.

29:01:00 Naeem Mangum: So you'd say that you have a pretty positive opinion on the Black Lives Matter movement?

29:08:00 Carmel Mangum: I would say my first impression was very positive. As it kind of grew and developed, I would say it stayed positive, but once it kind of got all the traction that it got, it also brought a lot of hate and divide from people in the movement, people outside of the movement. There was the All Lives Matter movement, a lot of misplaced anger and hate, which was frustrating for me because I wanted to support the Black Lives Matter movement. But I also didn't understand why All Lives Matter was being an opposing force, which frustrated me because I was like, correct, all lives do matter, but they're not using it in that way. What they're saying is something different than All Lives Matter. So I would say, Sorry,
30:09:00 Got off on another tangent, but I would say that I've had a pretty positive outlook on Black Lives Matter, but I think that with anything, once you make it like a fad, it becomes less of what it needs to be and more of just something that if you're good, you'll post a black screen on Instagram, or if you care about black people, you'll put a black fist in your Instagram bio. It doesn't really do anything to say that. What does things is showing that you want to make a change and actually going out and making a change and talking to people. And so again, I would say kind of coming back to my first, or one of the answers to one of my first questions, everything is great in moderation, but once you kind of extend that to being the whole thing that you focus on, it's not as amazing and incredible as it once was.

31:24:00 Naeem Mangum: Which generation do you think was most affected by the Black Lives Matter movement?

31:32:00 Carmel Mangum: I would say Gen Z. It was around a time when a lot of us were struggling. We were in quarantine and we were kind of in our primitive years of becoming adults and stuff like that. And I would say it affected and was affected by mostly Gen Z because we feel like there's so much going down that we as a generation need to fix that it kind of is... I guess it felt like this is a way that we can do it and this is a way we can change. So I feel like it was definitely mostly generation Z.

32:36:00 Naeem Mangum: How has the Black Lives Matter movement impacted your life?

32:46:00 Carmel Mangum: I would say the Black Lives Matter movement has affected my life. That's kind of a difficult question. It has affected my life, but I chose to not let it affect my life as much because as a Baha'i, we don't like to get involved in political things. So once the Black Lives Matter movement became a political weapon almost, I kind of pulled away and was like, I don't know if I should be supporting this anymore. And as much as I wanted to kind of, sorry, one of my plants died... as much as I wanted to give and talk and post about the Black Lives Matter movement because it's an important movement, I couldn't in good conscience continue to support it when there's so much hatred on both sides and so much anger and so much adversity. Because once something becomes political, whether or not it should be made political, it immediately becomes not as important as it used to be.
34:30:00 And then now it's all about democratic versus Republican. It's racist versus not racist or liberals versus conservatives or whatever. And it becomes this charged issue of who's good, who's evil, and that's not what we should be focusing on. What we should be focusing on is that we need to change our society and we need to not focus on black or white or black lives or all lives or Republican or Democrat or Trump or Biden or anything politically charged. We don't need to be focusing on that. What we need to be focusing on is making a difference and thinking about how we can change our society together as a group and as a society and as a community. I shouldn't be talking about when you ask me about community, I should have been able to say, the world is my community, or everyone around me is my community.
35:48:00 I should know enough about Macon to tell you whether or not their family community. I should know enough about the people around me to tell you about them as my community. But we isolate ourselves and we force ourselves to choose sides and to decide whether or not we agree with something or disagree with something just because our parents feel that way or just because the people around us feel that way. And that becomes our community. Republican becomes our community. Democrat becomes our community liberal becomes our community. Conservative becomes our community. And that's not the way it's supposed to be. We should all be a community, we should be a human family, and we should not be focusing on this.
36:43:00 We shouldn't be focusing on degrading each other and degrading other communities or groups of people. We should be focusing on bringing each other up. And I saw this post the other day, and it was from the Happiness Project, and it was saying this guy put balloons all over the floor with people's names in it from his class. There were 30 kids in the class, so there were 30 balloons just laying in the hallway. And he's like, okay, you have five minutes. Go find your balloon. Go, go, go. And no one found their balloon. Maybe three or four kids found their balloon in the five minutes and he was like, okay, now I'm going to give you five minutes and you grab a balloon and whoever's name on it, whoever's name is on it, you go give it to that person. So each person grabbed a balloon and everyone at the end of the five minutes had their balloon.
37:35:00 And he said, this is like happiness. If you try to find your own happiness, you won't be able to find it. But if you go and give someone else their happiness or you help someone else that gives you and them happiness, because the way that the world is supposed to work is you're supposed to give what goes around comes back around. Treat people how you want to be treated, give and get. It's not not supposed to be one-sided. Everything is supposed to be a two-way street. You give you love, get loved, and yeah, there are hardships and it's not going to be easy. But if you truly just serve other people, love other people, give to other people, think about other people, talk to other people, give a smile to another person, something as little as that can help change their day, which will help change someone else's day, who in turn might be the same person who comes back and helps change your day.
38:48:00 And so that's why every time I go into the story weird looks, I'm like, hi, good morning. How are you? And they're like, Hey, maybe they thought it was weird. Or maybe they'll turn around and they'll be like, that was really nice. I'm going to give money to a homeless man today. And then that homeless man is like, wow, I'm a secret billionaire and I'm going to go give money to all the poor people today. And that's an extreme example. But what goes around comes around. And even if it's not coming straight to me, I'll eventually get that good karma back. Even if you don't believe in karma, which I don't even know if I believe in karma, it is real that what goes around comes around. If you continue to be a good kind person and give to others and give your time and your energy and your love to others, then people will see that and they'll be like, wow, she's such a good person. You know what? Let me help her with that thing that she needs help with. She never asks for help. She's always helping other people. She's always making sure I'm okay, let me offer to drive her to California. I don't know, I am trying to fully round out my ideas, but that's basically what I'm saying is maybe karma's not real, maybe it is. But long story short, people notice things. They notice how you act towards other people. So it makes a difference what you do and who you are.
40:31:00 So yes, I'm going to be completely honest. I don't know what the original question was, but I hope that that helped.

40:39:00 Naeem Mangum: No, it's okay. Yeah, I appreciate it. What do you think is the future of the Black Lives Matter movement?

40:53:00 Carmel Mangum: There's a difference between what I think and what I hope

40:57:00 Naeem Mangum: Say what you think.

40:59:00 Carmel Mangum: I think that the future of the Black Lives Matter movement is that it is going to kind of dwindle as it already has begun doing, and it might disappear or it might continue and try to make small differences here and there until people actually realize what needs to be done. What I hope happens is that the Black Lives Matter movement becomes kind of just like a switch flipped in people's heads to realize why are we talking about good and bad versus whether or not Black Lives Matter is good or bad. I hope that what we do is we realize, wait a minute, why don't we just work together and love everyone? And what I hope that would happen is that by the end of
42:04:00 Everything, we have realized that we don't need movements like Black Lives Matter, all Lives matter or anything in between. We need to just be one family and one community, and we need to work together to make these differences. So hopefully we don't even need the Black Lives Matter movement anymore because we have learned that we don't need movements to make a change. But looking at what everything is looking like right now, I'm thinking that the movement is either going to be small and still there, or it's going to dissipate completely until we are ready as a society to embrace the thinking of people's lives mattering seriously.

43:15:00 Naeem Mangum: How do you think the Black Lives Matter movement succeeded, and how do you think it failed?

43:24:00 Carmel Mangum: I think it succeeded in getting a lot of word out about the inequality of police brutality on people of color, and the issues within people not being persecuted for things that they've done that are murder and they are illegal. And so I would say they succeeded a lot in outreach and being kind of, what's the word? Being informative. That's the word I was looking for. I would say that they failed in kind of trying to be impartial. And the whole point of the Black Lives Matter movement was to just help people realize that there is inequality. So I think that they did a good job with that, but they failed to keep it impartial and they failed to keep it out of politics. I think once it became very charged, it's not really it, the people who started the movement's fault, but once something becomes popular and charged and political, there's not much you can do. You have gotten to the point where there is not much you can do and you either fight back or you let it die down and they fought back. And I think that that's another place where they went wrong. But yeah.

45:34:00 Naeem Mangum: How has the Black Lives Matter movement affected how you interact with people of other races?

45:44:00 Carmel Mangum: I think it's definitely affected the way
45:50:00 How many people of color I'm friends with now. I feel like I had a lot more white friends before the Black Lives Matter movement, and I don't know if that's just where I grew up or what, but I've had a lot more people of color as my friends and my community members now than I did before the movement. And I see police and even more negative light than I did before the movement. I already knew that there was a lot of inequality and unfairness surrounding police brutality and people of color, especially black people. I mean, I was taught from a young age to when I get pulled over, put my hands on the steering wheel like this and say, I'm not holding a weapon. I'm not doing anything. And to announce what you're doing, which is insane, I shouldn't be learning that. But I was already scared of police, and now I'm still scared of police and I hate them, and I feel anger towards them and frustration. And so I would say that the Black Lives Matter movement definitely kind of exacerbated my fear and distrust in the police,
47:20:00 Which is not a good thing because again, it's once you kind of pool all people into one thing, you're no longer looking at it as individuals. You're looking at it as an entity. And police are not an entity. They're each individual people. So there are bad police. True, just like there are bad moms and there are bad dads, and there are bad people, and there are bad doctors, but that doesn't mean that you need to distrust all of them. So I would say that it had a big impact on me kind of having a biased view of certain things and certain people that I needed to work a lot to kind of adjust that way of thinking and to fix that so that I don't continue to be the people that I kind of talk about not wanting to be like... those people who judge people based off what they do or who they are.

48:41:00 Naeem Mangum: All right. Well, that just about wraps up our interview. Thank you so much for your time.

48:46:00 Carmel Mangum: Of course. Thank you. Those were very interesting questions.

48:51:00 Naeem Mangum: Thanks.

Part of Carmel Mangum