to this day, think about how i have never cried about that. >> host: i was thinking about your parents and thinking of your story of humiliation and how you had to negotiate with the professor to give you a higher grade so you could graduate because your life would be humiliation and much more of your life would be lost. but then a friend of yours was very bright, called and said i andrew -- andrew breitbart i have a perfect job for you. >> guest: he was from havard. he was in astrophysics major, seth jacobs in astrophysics major who always cared for me. he always doing preps guard i wasn't going to be the a student but that i met well. even though, that was how i skirted around my add and was able to maintain my place in an elite prep academy where everybody was havard, stanford

princeton bound. i knew i was not going to be going to an elite academy. seth knew my burden. seth made that -- >> host: but you would visit him. >> guest: he visited me and he said i need to take you on a walk. just sit down. he took me on a walk around the street in santa monica and he said, and this is when i was utterly wayward. he said i have seen your future. it is this thing called the internet. it works the way your brain works and at that point i had been diagnosed with adult add and i had tried ritalin for about a month and i hated it. i felt hideous about it. ..

>> coming up next, booktv spent the day at the literary festival in illinois. watch our coverage from the university center.

>> welcome to the 27 annual chicago tribune. before we begin today's program, please turn off your cell phone and all other electronic devices. photography is not permitted. today's program is grued cast live on c-span2's booktv.

we ask you use the microphone if you have a question so that the home viewing audience can hear your question. if you want to watch the program again, note the program is reaired tonight beginning at 11 p.m. central time. please welcome the moderator, gary johnson, and the author of indian voices. >> thank you very much. i'm gary johnson, president of the history museum, and with us today is our guest author, alson owinings. we meet a wide array of native people, and we hear them discussing their own lives. please begin the conversation. >> thank you very much, gary, and thank you very much for the chicago lit fest. i'm very happy to be herement i

think i wrote this book initially because i was so appalled about theignorance of nonenative people about native people including myself. i set out to find out what i could to help destereotype as what i find as a bad problem for centuries and cooptses today, and initially my idea was well, i will just talk to a few native people and find out what they had to say about their own lives, and then the book became stronger and stronger really, far reaching, and i ended up interviewing the indians of maine to the last chapter in hawaii chanter, and my object at the time was to destereo type people and i thought this would be helpful because i think

native americans are stilled harmed by the stereo types about them, but on the other hand, the book became an extended family reunion for native people who sometimes might live in one part of the country, like here in chicago, and maybe not know about native people in another part of the country, so that was kind of a trick actually in the writing to write for people who knew nothing about native people, and then to write for native people who already know a lot certainly about themselves. >> well, yeah, you talk about different individuals. we want to hear from those individuals. why don't we start with someone who lives right here in chicago, an nsil deuan. >> okay. the reason i interviewed ansil, when i started my research, i

learned anything i could, i learned about three quarters of native people live off reservation and including a group of people generally termed urban indians, and so that quest led me to the chicago american indian center and to this really wonderful guy, ansil who is a cultural coordinator there, a volunteer there at this point. i'll read you a little bit about what he said to 2ndnd graders. he said, once your teachers told you you're going to come here to the american indian center, how many of you expected to see an old man to long hair, probably braided with a head dress wearing a outfit? how many expected to see that.

a few hands rose slowly. those who raised their hands and the ones who haven't, are you disappointed in seeing me how i am now? no child asked. this is who we are, ordinary people in ordinary clothing, not the people you see in cartoons or movies or tv, what you read about or what people might say about us. we are not these people. indians, we go to school, we go to work. you might have met an indian teacher in your school or an indian principal, indian cop, indian lawyer. this is who we are and who we want to be, okay? receiving enough nods to satisfy himself, ansil picked up his hand drums and stopped. what does the beat remind them off? the child replied, a heart beat. he praised him. you hear drums at a pow wow.

everyone had good guesses as to what a pow wow was. it's a celebration where we sing and dance, make friendships. it's made up of four circles. the first circle is the drum representing the heart beat. the heart beat of mother earth and her chirp, all of us in this room and outside this room. without this heart beat, there will be no powwow. >> there we are right away, an individual who lives in this very city who if you saw on the street it may not occur to you you're seeing a native american, but when you scratch the surface and talk to the individualings you learn about his own culture, so we're not in the world of either/or. this book is not about either/or. with regard to ansil, let me ask

you something else. my understanding is one of the reasons why he wore ordinary clothing in the museum center setting was because of certain individuals who came, who might have a secret. >> well, that's part of it. he never said, and some of you might be innative child or indian child too. he never said that. he was the only native child in his high school, and he was discriminated against a lot. kids made fun of him. this is the story of many native people who live in a non-native setting, so he tries very hard to not put any children on the spot in case they were indian, and maybe wanted to come up to him privately afterwords and tell them, and that happened often, but he said that also the reason he wore ordinary clothing was just to show that this is how people dress. this is how native people dress

generally, they dress like everybody else. i made a joke in the book saying they don't usually wear feathers, especially not on casual fridays. [laughter] >> well, we're laughing now, and i have to say that one of the most striking points in the book is made beginning with the cover. when you look at the cover of "indian voices," you see a huge group of people with the biggest smiles you'll ever see. it may not be a stereotype to think of native americans as laughing and smiling, but the fact is, humor is something that is shot right through almost every chapter in the book. >> uh-huh. i didn't realize when i started this book how funny native people are and how many jokes they make on themselves and other people. there's a whole string of books of jokes, including, for

instance, what are the ten things you say when you meet a white person? the last one is may i touch your hair? [laughter] they are # very, very funny. ansil, himself, is pretty follow-upny. i met him in november, native american awareness month, and ansil calls it rent an indian month. [laughter] he calls himself the represented indian. >> who was it who referred to the definition of innative american family -- innative american family? >> as it's an old native joke. how many people are in an average native american family? the answer is five, a four, mother, two children, and an anthropology.

[laughter] >> why am i surprised there's so much humor? the reason why someone not part of that culture might ask is you don't think of it on the outside as a culture with much to laugh about. we focus on the difficulties that native americans have so is this humor in spite of difficulties or woven into the culture itself? >> i think it's both. native americans are not the only one to have humor of the situation. part of it, i could way off here, but native americans are american americans too, and america in general, i think, is a humorous country often. i mean, that's what people say. that's the reputation of americanss in other countries that we're follow-upny. why wouldn't native americans be funny too? some are just hysterical.

this one woman i interviewed, oh, she's so funny. every time i tell her a joke, she's already heard it. she asked have you lived on a reservation all your life? she'll say, not yet. [laughter] it's a take off from other jokes, but in general i found that native people laugh at each other, certainly at non-native people, and at some of the assumptions, and sometimes they are just absolutely outraged at the rudeness of non-native people towards them, and they make that into a joke. for instance, i interviewed an osage woman lawyer who is very sophisticated, works in washington, d.c., has her own law firm there, goes home to oklahoma to the reservation, but she said sometimes people come up to her and say you don't look like a real indian, and her

mother's non-native, and she said, well, you don't look rude, but you are. [laughter] so there are lots and lots and lots of comebacks, and i think it was one of the most wonderful surprises in the almost ten years it took me to write this book that i laughed so much. >> wait a minute. let me pause there. ten years to write this book? >> yeah. >> when you read the book chapter-to-chapter, it has a freshness and contemporary feeling. it doesn't seem like the product of the ten years, but what were those ten years like for you? >> well, i'm very slow of the that's part of the reason, and also i'm a freelance editor, so i was doing work on the side to help fund this. i'm a terrible fundraiser. i refer to myself as de facto non-profit, but i also started from zero. i mean, i really knew very, very little, and when i began this

book, i knew -- you know, i knew all the cliches. i knew all the parts of the buffalo. that's not even necessarily true. i knew cliches, but i also knew in my heart i knew these are human beings, individual human beings with stories, and i wanted to help destereotype them, but i ewe so limit i really had to read and read and read, so i read nonstop. i wrote a lot of tony hillerman's, everything i could, and then i started doing interviewed and finding the people to be interviewed was a whole process itself. virtually everybody was very willing, more willing than i expected, although it was hard nut to crk to get under the nations in upstate new york because this one woman told me is we don't trust white

journalists because they get everything wrong. my background is journalism. it took me four years to convince her i'm an okay person. i made a lot of compromises along the way, but i knew more then too. i always tried to say more or less i'm an everyone thetic ear. you know, say what you want, and i'll listen, and virtually everyone talked and talked and talked, and i have to say it was ironic because if there's anything one knows about native traditions is that they have a great oral history, and for me to be in a way the oral historian to some people was kind of strange. it was also, i felt very honored that they would talk to me. >> well, you mentioned the ashawnee in new york. that struck me as an interesting story of a tribe because this is

a tribe that's very, you know, near big east coast population centers, but they work hard at staying off the grid when it comes to official involvement with the united states government and the administration. maybe you'd like to tell us a little bit about that? >> sure. well, i think it was 1934, there was an act that essentially the federal government took over tribes to say this is how you can run your government, and idea was meant to be helpful, but it wasn't in all cases, and it was including a tribal chairman or chairwoman to vote and have a counsel so that literally when someone from washington said take me to your leader. they said, okay, this is the leader. this is not necessarily how native people operated at all. different nations had different systems in place that worked for them, but this is another overlay of the federal

government saying we want you to do it this way. it's better for you, and so many tribal nations did this and some in the tribe, took up the tribal chairman system, and some didn't, and among those who didn't are the towandasynca outside buffalo. they have nothing to do with the u.s. federal government. they use their own passports. they don't vote. they don't let census workers on their land. this is where i did my interviews. they consider themselveses a separate country, and one that predated this upstart in the united states of america and canada so -- >> which is correct, of course. >> of course, yeah.

the onendaga are the same way and two or three others the same way. they are self-supporting, and they don't take social security. now, if somebody needed food stamps individually, some people do that, and some people on the reservation, i think half of them do go to churches, and the others go to traditional long houses so this is their decision, and it's fascinating to me. they absolutely won't vote. they don't take any federal money for anything. they are just -- and they don't have a lot of money. these are the controversial people who sell cigarettes to get some money, and i did notice that everyone in the -- all the leaders of the tribal reservation, of them, none of them smokes, but they do get their money from cigarettes so

and they fight tooth and nail to keep it because it's their only source of income. does another surprising -- >> another surprising group i never heard of in a way wants recognition, the lumbys of north carolina, the largest unrecognized tribe. they are reaching out in a different direction. >> uh-huh. they are so unknown to most people who are not in north carolina. there are an estimated 56,000lumby indians, and they have state recognition, but not federal reck nation. they say it's because the eastern band in cherokees in north carolina don't want them too because they have to split the federal pie for funding, but they are thought to be the descendents of the lost colony at ronoheke.

they are interesting. they are part anglo and african-american. you see the strands in them when you meet them, and they are very christian. they don't have any native religion left because that was lost aloping with their language -- along with their language. they are enthuseism and they are trying to get recognition. i live in california, and nobody i met have heard of lumbys, and there's 56,000 of them. that's quite a few. >> when we talk about tribes, there's a word that sort of the operative word for legal and other purposes which is enrollment in tribes and that becomes sort of a choice. i mean, i don't enroll as a nor

wee january american who is this and that. i think st. patrick's day, the whole city enrolls as irish, but there's nothing formal about it, but here's this operative word with a legal significance. >> it does, and it varies tribe to tribe to tribe. i think it's almost impossible to say anything in general about native americans because there's so many differences and so many tribal nations. there's 565 tribal nations federally recognized tribal nations in this country now, and this excludes, of course, the lumbys. every tribe can say whether or not they want to manage their affairs, who is enrolled in the tribe, and who not. the advantages of being enrolled often have to do with just basic

rights like being able to collect firewood on reservation land or sometimes it gets to be more financially important especially if a tribe has a casino and them people might get casinos per capitas, income from casinos to vote in tribal elections. every tribal nation i should say has its own distinctions, and it's also very controversial when people disenroll members, questions about whether they should or should not be in the tribe, and it's controversial across the board. it's controversial within the tribes themselves. some native people are very upset that other tribes are disenrolling people, and this oftentimes has to do with money. >> now, in terms of another

stereo type, i think americans as a whole understand that there are many native americans who live outside the reservation, and i understand the word that's used in the communities is usually "the res," not the reservation. they are not 100% enrolled members of a particular tribe. there's more diversity there than people expect. >> yeah, this is true. i should say, gary, i never say res because i'm non-native, and i think that's innative word to use. i say "reservation" even though it's longer. it seems appropriate to me as an outsider. i don't know if i'm being overly -- >> i'll follow your lead. >> but what happens sometimes too is that i didn't realize that so many non-native people

lived on reservations, and mostly nonnative white people because they bought their property in the homestead act and other federal policies that basically decimated native lands or there could be today situations where a non-white person -- a non-native marries innative background and they have children so there's a non-native person on the land. things are more complex than i think i can say in roughly every aspect of native american life, but that's one of many things i didn't know either. >> well, let's get back to particular individuals. let me start with darrell newel, and in a sentence he is someone who manages the blueberry

harvest, but low and behold, it's not necessarily an organic harvest. >> i know. i was so disappointed. i had this stereotype of all the ceremonies and there's some tribal chairman picking the first blueberry and there'd be prayers and maybe a drum circle, and he said, no, we just go pick them when they are # ripe. [laughter] that's it. he said, and then i thought, of course, they are organic because they are native people. well, that's completely wrong. he said, they're commercial. they probably go into the cake mixes. that was an early interview, and it was very interesting. this is a man much like many people i interviewed who were sort of bemused by these questions of the naive outsider with this view that everything has to be organic and close to

nature. that's just ridiculous. >> and he also, since, had difficulties to overcome in his life with the abandonment in his family. again, a theme that runs through many american families, but it especially runs through the native american families that you portrayed. >> he had a horrible time. well, his mother essentially, not exactly abandoned him, but gave him to her parents to raise up, and he considers them his parents and to me, a poignant moment, he was trying to figure out who his alcoholic father was, and she didn't know the father. they did dna testing. he went to one man, you could be my dad. you were with my mom before i

was born, and the guy said, well, sure, i'll do the testing and i'll tell you what, if it's positive, i'll take you fishing. [laughter] it wasn't positive so he never did find out who his father was, but the abandonment issue is a -- is part of the a larger story and the story is the efforts by the federal government to send native children off to boarding schools when they were young and sometimes thousands miles away sometimes for years with the idea to civilize them, you know, and make them non-native people, and this is where the expression came from, the expression that kill the indian to save the man, and they -- these children would come back home and they could no longer speak the language of their families, and there was huge disruption. it was just an awful, awful

program, and it's again one of these things that i think the federal government didn't necessarily mean to do something awful. it wasn't -- it is called today cultural genocide, but it wasn't concentration camps per se and gas chambers, but a lot of people did die and the whole culture really came apart at the seams in many instances. >> again, when you hear that history, it's one thing, but when you hear the stories of individuals and how that plays out in their lives, it's shocking, and you see how over time it continues to play out in individual lives, but then, you know, a surprise, you find that

another trait that is shot through the native american community is a kind of superpatriotism and a dedication for example, to military service. you ask yourself with all the things done to those communities by the official government in the united states, how does this happen? >> it's often talked about. it's -- it puzzles me to some extent although i heard many, many explanations. what gary is referring to in part is that there is a larger percentage of native enrollment in the military than in any other ethnic group in this country, and i think this is true. i'm not sure, but i think this is what i've been told, and so then the question is why do you want to support this country that has messed up your own country so much, and there are many given explanations, and the

main one is that native people are very patriotic about their country and are now fighting to defend it. i mean, all kinds of ironies come into play. native men fought in world war i and were not even allowed to vote until they came back from world war i. i think native people were not allowed to vote in front of elections until 1924 and so -- >> and certain states, longer. >> in certain states longer. in maine, natives couldn't vote until the 1960s. yiesm, it's -- i mean, it's staggering. sometimes people say native people joined the military because this is the last chance to be a warrior. i don't know if that's true or not. that says a lot. i talked to one woman running a women's shelter on pine ridge reservation, and she said something very controversial in

the book, and that is that she thinks that native people joining the military in such numbers is an aspect of the stockholm effect, meaning you are with your depress sore. >> another story that comes up in different places, and maybe you want to talk about one of them is struggling against the abuse the women suffer in certain settings. >> uh-huh. there's a statistic that i think is true that one in three native women will be abused in her lifetime, sexually abused and physically abused. the women i interviewed thinks that's low. in some alaskan native villages it's thought to be 100%.

i did an interview in alaska with a woman, and much later asked her, by the way, after i had been hearing about the 100%. i asked if her husband abused her, and she said yes. that could be true, and often it's linked to alcohol. often it's linked to meth. there's more meth than alcohol on some reservations now i'm told, and it's, i think it's linked to whatever makes men abuse women in other societies too. it's dispair, rage, alcoholism, whatever the reasons are that it just seems to be intransigent in some native communities. in pine riming, for instance, unemployment is about at least 75% now, and alcoholism is 85%, and alcohol is not allowed on the reservation, but there's some crummy places in nebraska that sell it, and there's all

kinds of attempts to monitor it and to get it unsold, i mean, to ban it again, but nobody seems to be able to do that, and another problem besides alcohol and meth is gangs, so there's a lot of -- there's a lot of gang activity in them on a number of reservations, but i should say, actually, gary, the -- i sometimes think of native america as being in a fulcrum that all these awful things have been happening, are happening, displacement, dispair, all kinds of problems. poverty is awful. many places don't have running water or electricity too, and on the other hand, some people feel that this is a renaissance what's going on in native america today because of casinos, for instance, that

people now are able to -- reservations and tribal governments are able to buy new fire engines and health centers and help people and have language emersion problems, trying to bring back the languages that were basically stripped from people decades and decades and decades ago, so some people think it's an extremely exciting time. if you go on the web, powwows.com, they list hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. there really is a cultural renaissance on the one hand, but i never know quite which side is winning because the problems are so intractable. one ojagwe woman i met in minnesota thinks two and a half generations of families have been lost because of federal policies with the boarding schools. >> well, there's a number of

very successful role model assertive women. for example, there's a lawyer in washington who you mentioned before, but i'd also like to bring up another one who goes under the name the former president in one of your chapter titles. this is someone who actually suffered an impeachment in her job. why don't you tell us about her. >> her name was claudia, and she had been president of the hickory apache in northern new mexico, and she was very troubled, very intense, and very difficult to interview because i could never find out what she was impeached for. i met her at a women's gathering called we win. women empowering women of indian nations is the group, and this woman was very upset, and she

said you can't just say all women are great because women helped kick me out of my job, and she was very, very upset, and i went to see her years later and said, well, what happened? what she said was that well, there were -- she just spoke in generality and never said what was the matterment finally, i had to go to the website. the story is that the tribal police on the reservation were raping inmates, and they were raping them frequently, and this was a big, big problem, and it was reported to her, and she tried to get help for it. she wrote this then vice president cheney to say we need help. she tried to get the fbi in, and

the reaction was pretty much what happens in other communities i think when your own is attacked. they attack back, and she got a public service officer to testify this was going on, but instead of solving the problem, they got rid of her so that's why she was impeached. she's very bitter, and oddly enough, maybe not so oddly, but when this is your whole home and you live on a reservation, and this your place of identity, there's nowhere else to go unless you're going to make a clean break. she has to live with these people who impeached her, and it is very difficult. she's an unhappy person, and this is one of those tribal governments that the federal government put in place itself in the 20th century, and it had be another century, they would not have this same kind of

government that they have now that allowed all this, so she -- yeah, an unhappy story, that's for sure. >> well, why don't i, before we begin to take questions, why don't i ask you about one other individual, a medicine man in two senses of the word, a traditional medicine man as well as someone who, i believe, is involved in the health care industry in a wider sense. >> uh-huh. this is a man named -- navajo, and he lives in phoenix, and he's a systems operator for an indian health service, and one of the sad parts of the job is that he has to wyden doorways in the hospital so more and more obese people can get through

with bigger and bigger and wider wheelchairs. this is another big problem in indian country. poverty, diabetes, and people who are horribly obese. he is typical of other people i met in that he was in different religions for awhile. sometimes he was trying -- he was a mormon for a little while or sent to a mormon school for some training, and then he was back and forth. many people back and forth with different religions until thigh find -- they come back to their own native religion, and he learned to be a medicine man through a woman which is pretty unusual, and he is very sought after. he never advertises. medicine people do not advertise what they do.

i mean, they are not supposed to he said. people come to him, and he invited me to a three day blessing ceremony which was really one of the high points of the last decade of work, and i was the only perp there who did not speak navajo, and i found that what was so wonderful about it in part was that it was so case -- casual speaking navajo and there were specific steps he took to help a young man who was emotionally troubled, and at the same time, people say can you hand me a coke over there? it's just part of life, and it was tear risk, and i asked the young man who was being cured whether or not he felt any different, and he did, and he said he felt more grounded and really enjoyed the ceremony, and

wop other thing about -- one other thing about the ceremony and i didn't know this about him until the read the patient's facebook page and found out that he's homosexual. this was such a nonconcern to navajo people, and mostly in my experience to virtually every tribe. homosexuality is not a big deal, and what does happen is sometimes the people are hop norred. i know a woman who has a lesbian friend and mothers want her to hold the baby for good luck, so that's pretty -- that's pretty up usual in mainstream society. >> well, are there any questions? i think we have time for one or two. if you go to the microphone, right there so that we can pick

it up for the television audience. >> you said you didn't have any problems per se interviewing people, but i'm wondering you being notary non-indian, if that was a problem at all getting published. you're in the business so maybe you didn't have problems, but if you were native american, do you think you would have had an easier time in the interview process and getting the book accepted? >> well, that's a really good question. i always have trouble getting published, so i don't know. i think maybe had i been native, maybe i'd had have a slightly easier time and people maybe would have thought that i had more of an insight track. i hadn't really thought of that because not being native i haven't thought about what if, what if, but i think that i had an advantage in a way of not

being native because i would ask stupid questions. i mean, i was always very respectful, and i think people picked up on that. i wasn't trying to be dumb or talk about myself, but i found that sometimes the very fact i was nonnative, i asked questions about like the blueberry harvest, and also there seemed to be quite a wonderful propensity of native people to explain things to a non-native person, and in some groups this is called indians 101 because nay are so sick of talking to federal officials and other officials and so forth and explaning, okay, this happened, this happened. this one woman, the osage lawyer says we have to start at 1492

and bring them up to speed, and they are used to doing that. maybe in my case they told me more because they assumed correctly there was so much i didn't know. >> another question, if you can go to the microphone. yes, thanks. >> hi, i was just wondering with there being so many different indian tribes, how you went about the process of deciding what tribes you wanted to interview people at. >> i decided to try to find the greatest variety i could in terms of many criteria. for instance, i wanted to go to maine because these are called people of the dawn, and the pasamaquadees were there. it took me awhile to go to the event, but i went mainly to see a person. i wanted to represent the country as much as i could so i

really went to areas of the country because they had an interesting tribe there. i mean, there's no tribe that is not interesting, but i wanted to be in new england and be in upstate new york, and i had to go to oak, of course, and -- oklahoma, of course, and i wanted to be in the northwest and interview innative alaskan, and i decided to end with a hawaiian, and i interviewed a few people in california where i live, but they are all actually from other places, not from my immediate neighborhood, and i wanted to go to the southwest, navajo because it's well known, but i wanted a combination of tribes that were well known and unknown, and men and women and different ages so it went from 26-84 years of age, and i just wanted as much variety as i could, people who lived on

reservations, people who did not, sophisticated people, people who were very rural. i put those all in the mix. >> well, i would like to thank alison ownings, and if you have a opportunity to read the book, it's true history, and i thank you for being our guest today. >> do you have time for one more question? >> afterwards. >> thank thank you for attending today's discussion and contributing to the dedication of literacy. a book signing will take place, and we ask you exit the room at this time unless you have a ticket for the next program. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> alison ownings on her book, "indian voices, and we'll be back shortly with more at the chicago tribune american lit fest after this. >> we're at the national press club book and author night talking about dissint gracious. can you tell me how you came to form four groups? >> it just seemed to work out that way. you know, four seemed like an arbitrary number. it just seemed to be the way it worked out. it was clear there was a, you know, one group was a mainstream, a middle class black

america. it was clear that one group was the abandoned, nonmiddle class black america, and then the other groups were, you know, i did think that the existence of a small, but very powerful elite was something new, and so i call that the tran sen transcendent group, and then i needed a category to deal with other groups that didn't fit the other categories like imgrants, for example, from the caribbean and africa, and also biracial americas, and i thought that they would kind of fit into an umbrella group called the emergence. that's how i got to four. >> i noticed new immigrants and biracials were grouped together. you were comfortable putting them under the same umbrella? >> well, i was mostly comfortable with that. it was not precise, and it

didn't make for as clean of a category as the other category. however, i thought that the similarities were -- the concept of emergence of groups that were becoming more prominent that had not been around in larger numbers before were at least acknowledged in numbers before and i thought were at least beginning to be more important in the future. i was comfortable with that aspect of it. i wish it worked out exactly four and then -- but i didn't think they stood alone either as separate groups. >> and can you tell me which of the four groups do you think has expanded the most in recent years? >> has what? >> expanded the most in recent years? >> well, in knew numerical terms probably the mainstream just

because the numbers are so great that relative to really any of the others that i would say it has expanded. depending on what you consider recent years, you know? in the middle of this recession -- >> let's say the last decade. >> in the last decade, i would say the mainstream group expanded the most in real terms, and the e jeer janet group -- emergent group expanded in numbers. >> what's the most surprising find you came upon in writing the book? >> there was tons of them. an amazing figure from a research study showing that 37% of african-americans didn't believe black americans could still be thought of as a single race. i thought that was a striking figure. after a certain age, there's

a -- there's only -- there's something like a 40% chance that a black woman i believe in her early 20s would never marry opposed to a 20% chance for white women. i thought that was an interesting figure so there's lots of these things i stumbled across, uh-huh. >> were there any stark comparisons to white americans in similar groups? >> well, yes, there are some. one is even if you compare middle class to middle class, there's a stark difference in wealth opposed to income. middle class and middle class income is really close now, but wealth is a huge gap, and that's something some people have been talking and thinking about, including bob johnson, a billionaire with a project on it. >> do you tap into any solutions for kind of stopping the splintering? >> you know, i think it may be a

process that kind of happens. a lot of it is organic. what i do hope i identified some possible solutions for the plight of this abandoned group which i think is really the group that is needing our urgent attention right now, and so if it's calling attention to that, then i think it's been a success. >> thank you very much for your time. >> we asked, what are you reading this summer? here's what you had to say. ♪

>> called eye of the hurricane, my path from darkness to freedom with a forward by nelson mandela, and your co-author is ken clarksy? >> guest: that is correct. >> host: you said the purpose of the book is to discover the truth? >> guest: to be the truth. >> host: given where i was and for how long i was there, this is incredible, i have no business at all being here now. >> guest: that is absolutely correct. >> host: now, you say you were in jail 40-something years. what do you mean by that? >> guest: well, i was in jail 47 years. the fact that we are born into a

prison actually -- when we are born, we are born as perfect beings, complete with all of our possibilities in tact, but we're also born into a world of sleeping people, the level of inconscious human insanity where hate and wars and death and destruction and inequality reign supreme so we are actually born into a prison, so i was in that prison for the first 40 years of my life until i was able to wake up and get out of that prison and realize who i really am. >> host: let's come to who you are in a second, but for the viewers' sake say your were incarcerated in prison for about 20 years. 1964 or 1965? >> guest: 66 to 1985. >> host: the charge was having murdered three people and wounded one in a bar.

>> guest: yes, it's just not having murdered somebody. i mean, to be accused of murder is bad enough, but to to be accused of being a racist murders is doubly bad, and that's what i was accused of being, a tripled racist murder. >> host: why racist? >> guest: all white people were killed. >> host: the charge was you targeted because of their race? >> guest: because a black bartender was killed by a white man earlier that night. they thought it was a racially easier avenged motives. you also have to realize these were early 60s when the country was still segregated and black folks were not allowed to eat in restaurants or go to school or ride on certain parts of busses or drink out of the water

fountain or even have equal voting right the at the time. that was what was going on in this country at that time which is a terrible thing, and so that's what i was accused of being, a triple racist murder. >> host: in the book you write about growing up in a household that really was violent and difficult, facing your father across the living room with a shotgun? >> guest: yeah, my family life was not violent. the violence was outside of family life, but you have to realize in may, this may, i will be 74 years old, and so my mother and father come from a generation where they thought that if a child put his hands on his parents or even threatened their parents, since they brought you into the world, they will take you out of this world as realm. that was the type of society that i grew up in. >> host: describe to the

people who are watching who might want to read the book why you would be facing your father with a shotgun and he with a shotgun facing you. >> guest: well, because i was a very angry young man at the time, very angry, and i confronted my brother, my brother, james, who was a highly successful academic. i mean, he was going to harvard. he was one the youngest to graduate from harvard university with a ph.d.. he later became the superintendent of schools in boston, and i was in and out of reformatory schools during my youth. you know, so my father had to sort of choose between which one he's going to support, and i confronted my brother because when i came home from the military in 1956, i heard that my brother was