It was almost 8pm, and I was nearing my 10^th hour in the library. I had a probability theory exam that was stressing me out and had been occupying most of my thoughts the past few weeks. But it was time to walk down to the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College for Random House’s Big Idea Night featuring Ta-Nahisi Coates, Gloria Steinem, and Bryan Stevenson. As someone who is currently in the process of writing his MA thesis about racial biases, I should have been excited. Instead, I was worrying about my exam and even contemplated heading home to study instead of going to the event. However, in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, as well as the Movement for Black Lives (#BlackLivesMatter), the Baltimore Uprising, and the day-to-day reality of racial inequality in America, I find Coates to be a voice of clarity and reason. I had to go.

While I go to a lot of book talks and panel discussions throughout the city, I have never been to an event on race that didn’t feature a panel made up of a majority of white males, so the minute an actual diverse panel stepped on stage, I knew it would be an amazing evening. The sincere and funny Jacqueline Woodson led the discussion, giving the event the tone as if the panel were a group of (very smart) friends sitting in a living room and debating. Gloria Steinem, activist and author of My Life on the Road, started the evening with her remarks on history, “our history books lead us to think that hierarchy is human nature, it is not.” Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me, joined in the conversation on history, “we have to take a less opportunistic view on history,” remarking on the way we deal with the darker sides of our stories. From history the conversation shifted to social change, “there are very few sprints to justice, it is almost always a marathon,” remarked Bryan Stevenson on the duration of the process to achieve real change.

The conversation, with the unbelievable brain power that was on the stage, continued to flow from one topic to another – reproductive rights, abortion, the need of joint struggles, empathy, proximity, slavery, and mass incarceration. When it came to education, Coates didn’t hold back any punches. Coates talked about the difference in the way we talk about education for populations we perceive as ‘under-privileged’ versus those that are affluent (and, most often, white). “It’s not about curiosity, it is about obedience,” Coates said. We all viewed the images of the black female teenager dragged by a police officer violently out of class because she was speaking on the phone. “Why? Why was the cop there?” Coates asked, connecting the story to his experience as a child in West Baltimore. When the conversation moved to the death penalty, Stevenson put it quite simply, “We do not deserve to kill,” explaining that as a country with a long history of an unjust justice system –  from slavery to Jim Crow, from lynching to mass incarceration – what should lead us to believe that the death penalty is in anyway just? “The death penalty is the child of lynching, they just brought it in,” Stevenson said.

While these were heavy topics, by the time the discussion ended, I felt renewed. Toward the end of the conversation, Coates answered Woodson’s question about what people can do to promote justice, saying, “Find the labor you love and angle it toward justice.” For a long time I had been forgetting to think about that, about the angle. When I decided to write my thesis about racial bias in the Stop and Frisk program it was because I believed that it was my way to angle my labor toward justice. But lately it has become so technical, academic, and far-removed. Somehow, I allowed myself to worry about one exam, forgetting the important fact that the exams, the grades, the degree, and the training are instruments toward a bigger goal of creating a truly just society.

I had the opportunity to thank Coates in person after the event, in the lobby of Hunter College. I was excited and a bit nervous, since I am a huge fan. He was kind and asked a couple of questions about my research, and I even got a snazzy photo for Facebook.

Was losing a couple of additional hours to study for an exam for this experience worth it? I am pretty sure I made the right decision.