journal. and at eight thanks 30 during the program, meet the students who made them and for a preview of all of the winners, visit studentcam.org. jon jeter and robert pierre are the co-authors of "a day

late and a dollar short" high hopes and deferred dreams and obama as opposed racial america. facebook recently in washington for a little more than an hour. >> okay. my name is terry michael from the center of politics and journalism which is a very pleased to co-sponsor this event tonight. i have the honor of having brought robert pierre to washington under the politics and journalism semester program he was in the inaugural class and fall of 1989. we are now in the 22nd year with about 500 alumni and robert represents all of the alumni on the board of directors. he joined judy woodruff and mike mccurry and juan williams and a number of others who run why have to answer to the board of directors of the center. robert king to the program from louisiana state university. he was a junior and he went back

to school and entered the school paper and then for a while he thought about getting a master's in business education, but the "washington post" saved him from the fate of personal wealth by recruiting him as a reporter for the post and now she labors under the slave wages of journalism. what's left of journalism. thank goodness the "washington post" owns caplin testing or there might be more problems here in washington, d.c. with journalism. on the model lee am pleased to introduced robert and jon jeter but i am now jealous because i haven't written a book, and i am pleased that he has done so. the only thing i ask is i get to ask the first question after they make their presentations. by the way with a few exceptions i will represent all white people here tonight. [laughter] i know that you're always asked

what do black people think about this, so you can ask me what white people think about this. robert, jon. [applause] [laughter] >> good evening. first of all, jon and i wrote this book because we've known each other for about 20 years or so. we started together to post in january of '93 and we didn't know each other at that time. we were both coming to the post and both of us were a little skeptical of the other because like what kind of brother wants to work for the washington post. [laughter] so we were -- that's how we start off with each other. but we became friends, and we've covered politics, we've covered a number of things. i started off as a terry setup the washington xin center for

politics and journalism and got to cover the washington, people like ron brown and others got to go to attend the white house events and see what the defense of washington look like. and terry's goal was to have thus become political journalists who would not be so one of ideology or another but sort of look to cut through that to say here is what the democrats say and what republicans say and introduce you to keep folks at the same time. i did some political reporting but then i got -- i gravitated away from it because not a lot of it felt real because our political leaders a lot of times i didn't know whether i was talking -- it almost didn't matter what durham was

one of the things they were talking about, when we start talking about black people the discussion was black people think this and it was one black people terry talked about with him representing white people and black people think this. this book was meant to turn the camera the other way and look at the crowd and say who are these folks and what do they think and what they came up with a lot of different things. and so we've talked to union

workers. we've talked to offenders and people who were business owners who don't want their taxes cut and so a lot of people have a lot of different opinions about the world. one of the chapters -- the chapter i will read from we both did personal shoppers. my personal chapter was about my own family. it was about my family centered around my grandmother, daisy mae francis. and my family moved off the plantation of 1975 and that is not a mistake. that was 1975. i was 7-years-old when we moved away from the plantation and so we talked about that whole -- that is meant to sort of serve as the connection from slavery to the presidency and i will read a little bit from that chapter. for most of the zinni's life

expression was not an option. on the plantation everyone understood the rules. white people talked, black people did what they were told. the plantation was named for alice colder the wife of the man who once owned the property in the black slaves who worked on the fields. the main plantation big house is and 1850's revival style structure with a grand foyer. at the rear was a sweeping lawn that runs of. stately oaks stricken with moss, oaks that she did my grandmother, my mother and me as we played as children. we had from the sun, ran up the steps and ruled in the dewar debate could dirt oblivious to what had gone before. this is the deep south, between black leaders and white wealth. of 1860 st. mary parish was home of the machine tells of 57 sleeve's more than just about any other parish in the state. my grandmother was born there november 22nd, 1929. there are no records of her birth but she knows that to be

her birthday because the family friend remembered her own daughter had been born on the same day. when she was two months of my grandmother was given away by her mother who worked for a family moving in new orleans and for made the young woman to take the child along daisy mae in the put her mom who died when my grandmother was five. my brother was a faint memory but paabo's second wife remained a source of content more than half a century later. she was no devil, daisy mae said of her stepmother, she was mean. she never had any children of her own. i was something she felt like she wanted to beat on she did it. poppa didn't know about all of that. i never told him. i don't blame him. he was a good souls. poppa's alstom the quarters in a vernacular pass from slavery referring to the original slave quarters. the house had two rooms, it could run and catch all rumors people slept on the sofa bed and the family ate meals and socialized. they raised a little bit of

everything. mustard greens, turnips and okra, chicken, hogs and turkey my grandmother said most of the time we had agreed to go along with royce and gravy. big families were the norm. school children walked half an hour each way to attend school in franklin, the closest town. my grandmother wanted to be a nurse but quit school in the eighth grade to help on the plantation. add the sugar ground mill turned nonstop october through january until it was dismantled in the 1950's. during the grinding every hand was needed to bring in the crop. slavery might have been outlawed after the civil war with life on the plantation move to the same cyclical rhythm that the ancestors had known. in the plantation long after slavery had ended blacks were treated like children, their wives or guardians. orders paid no rent or utility ve got sick and went to a doctor the bill was sent to the manager of the plantation to to get out a little at a time. at the company store, the store clerk decided when the unannounced credit limit had

been reached. discrepancies and pay or store charges went unchallenged and workers are not expected to know or care about politics. it was not until 19683 years after the voting rights act that a majority of black citizens for dissipated in the national election but participating for daisy mae did not necessarily mean free choice. the overseer was safe. there's an election coming up and this is you're supposed to vote for, she told me. so, fast forward to 1975 and one of my uncles was drafted to the nfl and he got a contract in the plea in my years, but two years after he was drafted, to put a downpayment on a house in town and this is my grandmother's reaction to moving from the farm to town. it was great, she said, it was a joy. the one thing i appreciated about that was that you could have hot water before you have

to heat up the water was different way of life. she was no longer isolated. she still didn't drive but now she could walk places. one of those places just across the street was the elementary, the former negro school she attended as a child. she was hired as a cook. her boss was a black woman and never dreamed of that. so anyway, i will stop there. so that is sort of to represent one of the sort of where we came from in this country that so why there was euphoria about the election of a black president, and as an aside my grandmother who i talked about here had been battling a very in cancer for 40 years and she died on wednesday and we just buried her today actually. but she was the reason this book came about because she was the reason how we sold this book was

with her chapter to the publishers. >> first for women to thank everyone for coming especially with the rain. robert and i were in new york and had this note so we were thinking about naming this the biblical book tour or the fire next time book tour with a locust or whatever. but let me say robert gives you a glimpse of the turks are he read from. his grandmother was the inspiration for this book. and it's the first chapter because it is where we are. it's where black america begins and america begins. it's rooted in the south, the deep south on this plantation. one of the things when i first met robert he's right we were suspicious of each other because we work for "the washington post". but one of the things, one of the first conversations i remember having is he told me was born in basically the slave quarters on the bayou in

louisiana and i just couldn't -- i was raised in indianapolis in the midwest and i just couldn't believe that. i thought he was lying but i couldn't conceptualize being born a slave quarters. but any way what you can hear from robert reading is this book is not come to be honest it's not particularly preoccupied with barack obama. in some ways it is bad marketing but we want to tell the story of us, who are we, what does it need to be black in the age of obama, and obama becomes peripheral to the process of asking, we are, what is black or what is race. and i came upon this recently. this is just my second book but i swear every book i have written so far, the weak actor published. texas act quote that sums up the books away fred does quote from

a european, black european british sociologist who said race is not biological. it's more of language than anything and that is exactly what we are trying to capture is the language of black america, the language of black america in the age of obama and if you think about the language of the most molecular for my id is identity, and identity of nothing more than the memory, and that is a narrative that we feature experienced or it's been passed down from people who in the tribe have experienced, and that's sort of the root of this book is who we are. and then why do we need from the leadership if we identify who we are. so that idea of identity and memory making who we are provides a distinct political

character, and i think that is one of the things we identify in this book both for through anecdotes and the numbers that show this very clearly. so the first thing is african-americans are the most liberal voting bloc in the country and you can see that in poll laughter polls. there was a poll done by the california group in 2003 that showed that basically if you sort of just looked at city by city the most liberal city in the country is detroit and the most conservative city is somewhere in utah. so it's a function of the language of race is one of liberation. we want to be freed. so you see that sort of the political consciousness. now, one of the first things we see and we talk about this in the book the economic policy of black people this keynesian

which means we see that government -- we see the government plays a role in economics. i haven't seen a pulled yet but i'd sure if there was one order is one out there you would see that african americans really want the government to play a very central robust role in procreation, wpa, new deal like a job creation program. the second thing that is equally important is that we are distinctly pro union and there's a chapter in the book we talk about the factory in chicago that went on strike. shortly after barack obama was elected. they made on a sit-down strike because they were not getting their wages, and basically the plant closed, the public windows and doors, and they were not going to give the factory workers their wages. this was mostly latinos but also

blacks, latinos and blacks basically band together and in the 1930's style strike and demanded their wages. it was on television, and obama to his credit played a big role in urging them on because he came on television and said he supported the strikers, and one of the things, one of the july of reporting this book is one of the things i discovered is that one of the earliest forms of union organizing was black women on the plantation, sleeve plantations, and they would organize a sit-down strike or just stop work in order to get a sunday of four to be able to visit their relatives on another plantation. and this is one of the four earliest forms of the union and to the end to this day of course if you talk to the sort of union avoidance boyers, they will tell you the person they fear the

most, the people they fear the most are black when because black women are most likely to join a union suite is always the women. this is true with every demographic but it is especially with us it's always the women. so the other thing that we identify as we are very pro-military but antiwar and you can see this going back since world war ii. every war african-americans had been steadfastly against even though we support the military as a means of sort of rising and social mobility. the first iraq aboard the one exception of the kind of support, there was propaganda around that and then we sort of turned against. so, i suppose that to say understanding who we are is the basis for what france called mom consciousness or steven called black consciousness. and this is not to beon