>> good afternoon. hi, everybody. thank you for coming out this afternoon. i'm gwen ifill. this is my best friend, meschelle norris. >> i'm meschelle norris. [applause] >> i feel like i should say and you're listening to. >> the response you hear robert

seeing and will melissa block so it takes a second. we're so thrilled not only to talk to you today but also to talk with each other and share with you the things we talk about all the time among ourselves and then some. so we're just going to get started. because we want to make the best use of our time and hopefully we'll be joined in a few minutes by other dear friend, mary wolf, who has been getting us involved at this episode that we're here for today. meschelle and i set out a couple years ago to write out books both knowing we were insane to try it because we were writing books and working full time about stories that kept slipping away from our fingers. in my case it was stories in politics and breakthroughs in the 2008 elections and -- here's mary wolf, our dear friend. come up and join us. yay! [applause]

>> anyway, we'll settle that in a moment. >> hi, sweetie. >> i'll dance until you're ready in meschelle's case it was book about her family and her life and ancestry and in the past we talk about how they were received. >> i don't have much to say except that i wanted to introduce you to them but i guess that's already happened. [laughter] >> and i just wanted to say that yes, these are the books. oh, microphone. anyway, we're so happy to have both gwen and meschelle here today. you know, does race still matter? it's an issue that here at key school is an issue that we deal with on a regular basis. it's a dialog that we talk about with our students. and i think it's fair to say that both meschelle and gwen have elevated and amplified this

issue with their wonderful book. and i just want to give you a brief -- probably movie you -- most of you don't need this. gwen and meschelle's background. both of them are really what we call the real mccoys. you know, they both started out in newspapers. gwen started at the "boston herald" and went on to the baltimore evening sun where she covered annapolis, she's proud to say and she went on to the "washington post" and to the "new york times." and then was very wisely and beloved tim russert came along and snatched her up and brought her to nbc news and where she was the chief political and congressional correspondent. and then gwen was the moderator, as some of you might remember, as the vice presidential debate. in 2004 and again, in 2008 where she stoically walked on to the

stage with a broken leg. >> carried if i can say. by two strapping football players. >> yes. [applause] >> it was quite a sight. >> the best part of the night. [laughter] >> and, of course, she's gone on to win many awards and not went on to the pbs where she is the editor and monitor of "washington week" and the senior chief correspondent as newshour with jim lehrer and cohost at times. and then meschelle has the same kind of background which is really just extraordinary. she, too, started in newspapers. and she ended up -- first she was -- is it the "l.a. times"? and then to the "chicago tribune." and then "the washington post." and then she went on to work for abc news. and from there she won many awards, dupont, emmys and peabodies and she wisely went on to npr and has been the cohost

of all things considered. and both of them have written about race but from very different perspectives. and meschelle's beautifully gifted-written storytelling of her own memoir and from gwen's political vantage point and i think it's really fair to say that it's a really riveting conversation. and so i totally turn this over to them and really hope that you all so enjoy what is an extraordinary thing because not only are they extraordinary journalists but they are friends. and so this is a conversation that we get to witness between the two of them and also i know they would love to have you join in as well. so enjoy and i'm sorry. l[laughter] >> enjoy. >> it's wonderful to be on the stage with gwen on a saturday

afternoon because if we weren't here we might be at a garden store together or shoe shopping or talking together because our career paths have followed each other in part because of our friendship. and the books that we wrote grew out of in some way our friendship. i would not have not been the end of the book-writing process if not the encouragement and fortitude i would give to gwen and gwen would probably say the same thing. the interesting thing about this for both of us, we ended up having the most interesting conversation about race because we wrote these books. both of us had the good fortune of embarking on fairly large bookstores and we're fortunate and not everybody had the opportunity to do and as we traveled we found that people would read our books and read our stories and come forward and

tell us their stories and come forward with their own questions and as a result of that, we wound up having a very intense and very intimate and very personal and always interesting conversations about race. and the title of this panel discussion is, does race still matter? i think we could probably have a very quick discussion and just say yes. [laughter] >> you know, and then move on because it's been my experience in talking to people about my book. i set out to write a very different book than the one i wrote. i was planning to write a book that i thought in some ways would sort of be a complement that gwen was writing and it still is but in a different way. my book was originally going to be a book that examined the hidden conversation of race in america based on my experience in studio 2a at all things considered. i always thought that we were getting to the conversation but something was left unsaid. so i wanted to go out and put an ear to this conversation in school buildings and office buildings and college campuses

and -- and in the prison industrial complex and come back and write a book about race. what happened i wound up listening to the hidden conversation of my family and that conversation pulled me off-course and i instead up writing a very personal memoir. so in the end we wound up writing very different books but every time we talked to each other, we realized we were often fielding the same questions, questions such as -- >> questions such as, why do we care about race anymore? aren't we past that anymore? and whenever i got those questions -- now, understand when i traveled my book tour, my roughly was in thirds it was one-third pbs viewers, which i assume you all to be. [laughter] >> which is to say incredibly literate and brilliant. [laughter] >> yeah, right. cheap, i know, but it works. one-third african-american book buyers who are happy to have someone write a book that was not telling them what they ought to do now. and one-third young people from college campuses who basically

thought they were coming out to see queen latifah. [laughter] >> but for whatever reason they were people who live in their own silos who don't talk to each other and don't cross paths and certainly don't talk about race and it's a great no, no and because i was being a safe person someone would ask this question. why are you writing about african-americans specifically? aren't we over that? and my answer would always be if -- why would we want to be over it unless we think it's a bad thing? unless we have a negative reaction to it, why would you want to be colorblind. why would you not to see part of who i am? which in many cases was the first time in a public setting where people got to say, well, that's the good point. i hadn't thought of it that way. in an intraracial way. so we started having -- so i would come home from having had these interesting conversations, and i would bounce them off meschelle who was in the point of writing book-writing and roughly a year later we would

get questions like -- >> why is everyone insist on calling barack obama black if his mother's white? and this was -- you know, to talk about the audience that i got, it was roughly one-third, one-third, one-third but maybe not one-third, one-third, one-third because there was another cohort that would show up in my book talks and there were people who wanted to show up and say, to find out what does she look like? [laughter] >> i hear her on the radio all the time. i just wonder what she looked like. >> it's not what i imagined and i just leave that question alone. you don't look anything like i thought, i know to just leave that there. don't ask them -- >> it means she does not have a face for radio? because she also worked in television for abc news for a while. so she got -- she got some looks. >> but i got that question, i would say, 70% of the book talks that i did. and it was interesting 'cause i anticipated it based on talking to gwen because you often got that question also.

>> right. >> and you could see the -- the interesting thing when the question came up the different reactions in the audience. some people would be kind of looking out of the corner of the eye, i can't believe that person would ask -- why would you the ask that question and there's other people someone would ask this question i've been wondering the same thing? and i always relish this opportunity to have these kinds of discussions because this president and this presidency is in many cases like a rorschach test on. on so many issues not on race but identity and how we define ourselves and what we call ourselves. and the conversation -- the questions were always the same but the conversations were often were very different. it would depend on the person who would ask the question. who were mixed race and why they felt they had to be choose. why couldn't they both be both at the same time. sometimes it was someone who just wanted to be provocative. we got that sometimes and sometimes it was who really june

genuinely wondered why it was barack obama's maternal heritage was not honored in some way? and what i realized is when we started to have this conversation with people, well, it's in part because that's the way he defines himself, you know, we choose to define him this way but sometimes i -- we just -- we in the media choose to define thhim this way. and i would say play a little game and i would turn the question on the audience 'cause genuinely that's what i do and i ask questions. and i would ask people, well, imagine this. imagine if he was running for president and identified himself as someone who was of mixed race. imagine if he had followed the path that let's say tiger woods had followed. tiger woods who called himself -- i think the word was cablination which was an interesting way to honor the various parts of his heritage and i would ask people that question and we would be off with the races with this very interesting conversation about how people identified themselves and core questions, do we get to

identify themselves or is that decided by someone else? do people choose to call themselves black, white, multiethnic based on their own experience or is that because they're given a series of boxes that they have to choose from on a census or is that something that's decided for them at the dinner table or in the school yard, in a place like this when they're very young and they remain in that proverbial box for the rest of their lives because someone else decided who they should be and how they should identify themselves. >> it helps to understand how we came to our thinking which isn't always in lockstep but we feed on each other's thoughts and ideas because we respect and basically like each other but also we've discovered as we become friends and closer and closer over the years how similar but different our upbringings were that allowed us to think about how we define ourselves. i was -- we're both raised by strong men first of all who in interesting ways defined us. my father i called the accidental feminist. he was not really a great, you know, you go girl kind of guy. he was -- he was an ordained

minister who wasn't so crazy about women being ordained ministers and we were six kids and we had immigrants to this country and he had no ideas if he could tell his sons could do anything and he neglected to kind of told us we couldn't do things and we went off as michele tell us but that formed our ideas of who we were. my father raised me in the '60s and '70s that when at a time we were called negro that was the acceptable term, term of art as we continue in this racism. he said if anyone calls you black which was at the time considered a slur your response should be, why thank you. and so i would try it. and it really shut people up. when people think they're insulting you and you merely thank them, they've got no comeback so my father was a raceman. we were taught to be proud of what we were. so i didn't -- it didn't occur me at any point that i should ever be longing to be something else and your father was a lot

the same. >> he was. my father was -- was someone who was very quiet and i grew up in the 1970s and i grew up in an era -- i was in high school in an era where activism was very aggressive. you know, activism wore dishiki's activism was very powerful. and only with the wisdom or what passes for wisdom now as i look back did i understand that activism sometimes whispers and activisms is sometimes putting on the best clothes in your closet not because you're trying to show the world that you have means but you're trying to show the world who you are. sometimes activism is shoveling your walk before everybody else because you want the world to understand that the lone black family in the neighborhood knows how to take care of themselves and their property. sometimes activism is going to work every day and doing your job better than anyone expects

you to be able to do that. and i came to see that my father was very much an activist and how that lives in me and how that shaped me even though these were things that were never really discussed but they were messages that were passed on in some other way. and again, some of that is about race but some of that is about identity and as we fielded these questions i realized that the stories that we told, whether i was talking about myself in memoir, whether you were talking about this breakthrough generation, they were individual stories but there was something that was still universal about them because when i wrote in the book about my father and how he tried to assert his manhood and his identity and how he tried to show the world what he could be but also show america what it could be by embracing these hard -- this hard-working generation of black families that were pushing through the color line, i was pulled aside by so many people who told similar stories about what it was like to be irish-american. or german american. or what it was like to be the first jewish family that moved

into a neighborhood where not very many jews lived. and sometimes there were people who pulled me joyed to whisper me these things and there were people who stood up and said them out loud and you could sense that people were saying these things and giving voice to them for the first time in a public setting and that was -- i was so deeply moved by that, to be able to contribute to this conversation about race and identity in that kind of way to allow people to have those kinds of conversations in a safe space. >> it should be said that after we were into this process for a while, michele and i one evening -- there may have been spirits on the table. [laughter] >> said we would never write another book about race 'cause it's too hard because people really are searching for answers and they're hoping that you can provide them, which we cannot necessarily do. i was -- i was happy that the people i chose to feature in my book were people who were the fruits of the civil rights generation.

they are people who were told no. there were people who were told it wasn't their time yet and there were people who was told all the things trying to break through gets told which is why people frequently ask me well, what about women breakthroughs and what about latino breakthroughs and i said i can only deal with one drama at a time. now, the good news is that it's something that we've also taken seriously about how do you pass on this question of identity to a generation of young people who don't identify the same way we did. my generation didn't have to sit at lunch counters. my parents generation did in order to get a cup of coffee. our children, my god child, right here, who's michele daughter, asia, is over here. she doesn't have to deal even with what we had to deal with but we want them to be conscious of the concerns without the burden. without the limitations. so there's a line we're all walking trying to figure how do we -- invest in our children a pride of who they are and a sense of history how far we come

but not the limitations which come with all that. that's a line i know a lot of people are struggling. >> and one of the things i think we can do for that next generation and it is instructed that we're in a school, you know, we're having this conversation. i mean, some of the questions that we've talked about here that we fielded on the book tour and in the wake of publishing our individual books seem to be bourne out of a confusion. that people see race and racism often as the same thing. and so when people ask does race still matter, you have to listen carefully to figure out are they talking about race? are they talking about a descripter and are they talking about various cohorts or are they talking about racism which is something that's very, very different. it's very different if you're talking about a post-racial america. when you posit that idea, are you asking if we're past race or if we're past racism? if you're talking about does race matter, and if you're

talking about the kind of questions about whether someone identifies as black or white or both, is it because they're concerned about embracing race or running away from racism? and if we can do something for the next generation, as i look at beautiful children in the audience as i say this, one of the best things we can do for them is help them understand that those two things are not the same thing. they travel on different tracks. sometimes. they do meet and sometimes they do collide but often they are separate things. and race need not always be something that is ugly or toxic or uncomfortable if you're not necessarily talking about racism while you're also trying to approach race. >> now, we could talk about this all afternoon, obviously, as you can tell, but we would like to engage you in our conversation as well. one of the ways that michele has started doing it, when she travels and talks about the book, she has race cards. now, you've heard about playing the race card, right? this is a slightly different interpretation. why don't you explain it.

>> i knew writing this book since my book was a memoir and it was about trying to explore the complex racial legacy that i inherited, i knew i would be talking about race and i figured that might be difficult to get people to open up and so i thought well, i'm going to make it a little bit easier by playing the race card. and what i did is i -- i at first printed a couple hundred of these and now i have thousands of people all over the country. and i place them on my website. it's a little exercise. i ask people to think about -- your thoughts about race, your experiences, your hopes, your dreams, your laments, your triumphs, your outlook, your viewpoint and then try to reduce your thought to just one sentence. and then to make it really interesting to take that down to just six words, to distill it and adjust to six words. and i ask people to send them and i have received hundreds of these at book signings thanks to facebook and twitter. i now have them from all over

the world from abu dhabi and brisbane and osaka. this one didn't get the instructions because it said each one is a different color of the rainbow. that's more than six words. but they're often windows into a deeper conversation. one of my favorites is, it will be up to women. six words. and she thought that it's women who often start these conversations, usually over food, to bring people together, to have that conversation. each one of you will leave with one of these if you want to participate in the conversation >> we're looking forward to that and we're looking forward to your conversations. are there microphones. okay. there's a nice fellow with a microphone, if you can get his attention, he will come to you. needless to say the farthest distance from where you're standing, sir, is where the first question is. there's someone right behind you

and then we'll come to you. >> have either of you written about how the census bureau has changed its race classifications through u.s. history? and have either of you addressed the birth certificates, most notably barack obama's? >> why don't you take that, michele. [laughter] >> i have not addressed the birth certificate issue of the pages of the book because this is a story that is out there. we are bothsts -- both journalists and we have addressed it. >> he with haven't done anything at the newshour. >> it winds up coming up. in terms of the census it's not something that i wound up writing about. in the book that i was originally was going to write, it was something that i was going to spend a little bit of time and how people identified themselves and how that has changed over time in an official construct in terms of -- you know, how the government actually identifies people or

allows people who identified themselves. i ended up not writing about that. but i find myself swimming in that conversation to some degree based on the race cards. because so many of the race cards come back, deal with questions of identity and deal with the sort of internal dialog that people have with themselves in trying to figure out how they identified themselves or how they should identify many other members of the family. some of the submissions come from people who are raising children who don't look like them. or who have grandchildren who represent a rainbow or, you know, come from a sort of wider diaspo diaspora. and i try to set aside time if i actually have information and how to reach someone, i will usually call them to find out the bigger story behind those six words. and as a result i wind up learning, you know, a lot more about how people continue to wrestle with these issues.

>> and i also just might add, 'cause i've forgotten your first question which was -- >> the census. >> oh, the census if you have time to read one other book besides ours. the most interesting part of the census so far to me has been the reverse migration which is going on -- the number of people who are living -- leaving big cities which were destination spots for the great migration in the '30s, '40s, '50s and heading back to the south. the person who wrote really an amazing and definitive story about that is another friend of ours isabelle wilkerson who used to work at the "new york times" and it's called "the warmth of other times" and if you have time for 600 pages in your life, it's really worth it. next question. >> you spoke of the rainbow that is occurring, i have two mixed race grandchildren who are very young. 2.5, 4.5, i'm just curious

whether you know at what point children become kind of race-aware? >> you know, again when i was writing the other book, the interesting thing about the book i wrote was i was deep into writing the first book before i changed course and it drove a lot of people crazy including my editor and my publisher. they were very happy in the end, but i was deep into writing this other book and one of the things i discovered in looking at the research is how early that actually happens. by the time children are 8 years old, american children i should say, they already have a sense that discussions about race carry a certain amount of risk for peril. and they are very aware of this and the researchers who have done this note that they will play certain games with these children and through the games and through the dialog, they're able to determine that children have a strong sense of who they are and of differences in the world. and they already associate a certain risk with even talking about race. so if someone -- and you've

experienced this with adults, but it happens with children in the book. if an adult walks in a room, they will say he had gray pants and a blue blazer and he had a really big watch and he had glasses. they will give you 15 things before they say oh, and he was a black guy because they don't want to mention something as innocuous as that. and the other piece of research that i thought was really interesting and that goes to the notion of a colorblind society is often that's the message that young children get and it can be somewhat confusing for very young children because that's how children learn. children learn by putting things into categories. and so they learn the differences between big and small, boys and girls, red and blue, tall and short. and so when they get the message that they're not supposed to pay attention to that particular difference, it can be a little bit confusing because that's often how they are sort of

ordering the world. and there's, you know, another book that was -- that was written by poe bronson. >> little bronson. >> and it was another book that looked at sort of nature versus nurture and how much of this is hardwired and how much of this is based on the subtle cues that children pick up from us. that basically we are their first teachers and they get many of their ideas about this from us but some of that is based on the hard wiring and how children learn and how they categorize things. it's fascinating research. right here. >> yes. how do you think the conversation -- >> i'll repeat some of these questions. i realize this isn't amplified for everybody. go ahead. >> how do you think the conversation of race has been impacted by the immigration of this country of blacks from around the world, from africa, the caribbean, you know, how has they changed the conversation about race? >> it's an interesting question. it's how has this conversation changed the immigration of african-americans from other cultures, from other countries,

from around the world? africa and the caribbean? i'll tell you it's interesting -- my mother is from barbados and my father was born in panama and they moved here and three of the -- of the six kids were born in barbados and sadly i was born here which means i don't have island property to retire to. [laughter] >> but the way that african-americans who have come from different backgrounds who think about a little bit race race has differently than african-americans. an immigrant uproot their entire life to search for a better world usually for your children. it is far more of a driving definer for a lot of people who are born in the diaspora than for people born here where you're born here, this is the place you had to make it. now, it doesn't mean we didn't identify -- my father was the man wearing civil rights marching and my father thought he would be deported at any

moment. but it does mean that you identify slightly differently about race. my sister, for instance, insists on -- she's a caribbean-american. she doesn't think of herself is an african-american. she's very price in what she thinks from race which is different for me because i was born here. and there's also the achievement issue which is when you've come from another country and you've been told by your parents you will succeed, there's just a better chance you're going to succeed. >> yeah, i heard that also. and one of the things and isabelle wilkerson talks about in her book the immigrants saw themselves even though they were born here. it was very much a immigrant experience because they came to the communities where they were the outsiders and that's one of the interesting things and i get pulled aside by people who were born from immigrant parents from european culture and realizing how similar the messages we all got at the dining room table were. the interesting thing to me about race and immigration in

this country right now is how much the discussion around race and identity in america is still rooted in the civil rights era. it's still largely a binary discussion. it's still largely about black america and white america trying to find each other. and right now 1 out of every 6 children america and i think i got that statistic right is latino and the conversation has not caught up to that. i mean, if you visit -- and it's not just in southwestern cities. it's really all over america. there's a fast-growing latino population and the conversation of race and it's is not fully -- does not fully embrace that except, you know, in the main, when you're talking about immigration and that's often a conversation that is very prickly and is born of debate but there is a very interesting conversation right now that i fear we in the media sort of don't get to as much as we should, as fully as we should. >> hello. i'm a librarian, a public

librarian, in prince george's county. i have been for 20 years. and as an aside, if i had to describe the two of you to say -- you're both wearing blue so i'd have to say well, gwen is the dark skinned one and michele is the light-skinned one and they both have great training. >> my mother would be so happy to hear that. >> the kids who are in my library maybe all the time they don't have aspirations particularly that, you know, their lucky if they get out of high school. >> what's your question? >> my question what about -- you know, i feel like you're kind of -- we were talking about the people who are succeeding and i know a lot of kids who are going to school and stuff but what about the feelings of -- or the perceptions of the kids who

don't feel like they have much future and don't have much background and do not have much home -- >> we probably don't have the time to solve that problem. why don't you repeat the question so everybody can hear it, michele? >> the question was, what -- noting that we both come from aspirational households where we were pushed to go out and to succeed and told you better not do anything other than raise -- you know, the kids we call it representing. and we were told that's what we had to do but your question, i think, is about young people who don't feel like they have a strong future. don't see a path food that will lead to succeed and, you know, that is sort of a really big question. and it's not just rooted in race. because there are lots of children of all colors and all backgrounds who don't look forward and see a lot of hope in their life. >> you know, i think that's a question for all of us.

what do we do to make sure that we provide -- we don't make a lie to the promise that any children in this country can succeed. i will say in some degree i will say i'm aware of that when i go out into the world and do my job. i mean, that is one of the messages that i always got at home is that if i did my job well, that i might be able to push the door open a little bit wider for someone who came behind me. and the corollary to that, you know, is sort of -- it can be burdensome if you choose to look at it that way. if you don't do well, that door might not open and it might slam shut for someone who comes behind you. and some of the things we talk about among ourselves is knowing that the next generation can see people who look like us. i mean, you know, that's important because i grew up, you know, watching and listening to the news and not, you know, hearing a lot of that. not hearing a lot of women in the news outside of public radio

where cokie and linda and susan have been doing it for quite a long time. >> i fear we're going to run out of time so we're going to try to take as many questions -- you're waving, no, we got to stop? oh, we're fine? okay. fine. but even so, if you keep your questions shorter, we'll keep our answers shorter and we'll get more questions in. >> hello, so everyone can hear me. we in america a lot of times, you know, say there's no such thing as class and class is a very ambiguous concept but it seems to me there's quite a relationship between class and race. and i'm wondering whether you folks address that or michele if you address that. >> the question is about the relationship between class and race and the degree to which there is one. of course, there is a connection between class and race. there's no question that there are debates within the african-american community about opportunities like michele was just discussing about -- about what their trajectory ought to be. i'm not certain, though,

however, how much class doesn't murk up the discussion about race. sometimes people want it to be a nice clean break and say this is really about class. it's not about race. when usually it's a mixture, both within races and outside in a cross-race. i do think that's something we have to function. i will tell you that the people that i wrote about in my book, which was interesting to me had a lot of things in common. they had elite educations. but they also had single mothers, most of them. they had the opportunity to be told no but they also had the fortitude to push ahead anyway. so you could say that people raised -- that a lot of -- a lot of american presidents were raised in the proverbial log cabin and they did not come from high class even though that has not been true in our recent history but that doesn't -- that's not necessarily the only definer of success. so i just -- i guess my first instinct when we talk about class and race as one thought

bubble is to always pull back from trying to define it too tightly because it's so much driven by individual -- >> the one thing in your book the describer in the book the breakthrough generation did have in common was even if they came from backgrounds -- from relatively poor background. duvall patrick did not grow up with a lot of money but he grew up with a different kind of wealth, a social capital which is people surrounding him, telling him that he was worthy, telling him -- >> not necessarily members of his family, by the way. >> yeah. >> and that goes to your question, you know, that each of us has the power to be an angel for someone else. to pass a message on to a child to tell them that you can succeed, to push them on the path and the other thing they had in common was a stellar education, access to a very good education >> in the end that's really the thing that closes all the gaps. >> yes. >> it may not be a combination of economic which is earning

potential on one side and education on the other. the whole concept of a meritocracy and if you don't get the education you don't get the job. and we live in a society in a sense it dumbs it down and not raises them. >> so the question is -- >> what about -- instead of just race as a question, what about education and the opportunity to quality education and the opportunity to get quality jobs and if you don't get that, you don't get anything else. >> i don't think we disagree with you on that. i mean, i have my mr. mcduffy story i tell, which is my guidance counselor in high school who told me i shouldn't bother -- i met someone here from my alma mater in simmons college in boston that i shouldn't bother apply to that school. i wouldn't be good enough and i wouldn't get in and i did and i did fine and i always think my mr. mcduffy question because how many young people who are of my

age and aspiration were told no and just said okay and didn't bother. there is no question -- the reason why so many of our economic discussions in this country come back to education. the correlation is very clear between educational attainment and opportunity and the ability to succeed race aside or race included. and i don't think we agree on that point. i don't think we figured out as a country how to make that consistent. >> the other thing about that, though, in economic -- in sort of leveling out the playing field, education is a big part of that but wealth attainment is part of that also. and that includes access to good jobs. what drove a lot of families north, families of color, black families was access to good jobs in factory towns and jobs that no longer exist because in the rust belt those jobs are gone and even the entry-level jobs of today require a skill-set that is very different than for previous generations and so that speaks to job openings.

the other thing is housing attainment. i mean, one of the ways that families pass on wealth is the homes that they own and the homes that accrue equity over time and how that is passed on for families who were locked out of that kind of wealth attainment through red lining or through the inability to get, you know, access to fair housing or mortgages, that has a generational impact that we see today and that we will continue to see if those playing fields aren't leveled. >> he's got the hardest job. >> what thoughts you might have when so many kids sneer at education and they bully kids who have educational aspirations and who really look down on them and have a completely different lifestyle and see that lifestyle as the best thing? do you have any thoughts about that or -- >> for those of you who couldn't

hear the question, it's about what do we say in cases where young people look at other young people who want to attain, who want to get education and they're sneered at or they're bullied or they said oh, you think you want to be smart. there's some things which are not new under the sun and almost everyone i know who achieved anything was told -- i mean, duvall patrick, the governor of massachusetts said when he was picked to go away to a private school in massachusetts as part of the better chance program, which turned out to be the breakthrough for him, and when he came home to the south side of chicago for the first time his sister listened for two minutes and he said he talk like a white boy and he was devastated because he was being cast outside of the circle. they made up and they've come around, it's fine but who among us haven't had that kind of question where they're like you talk so proper, what is your problem. >> it's a way of saying, who do you think you are. >> you think you're cute is the way of saying it.

in the end, you know, i wish i had a solution to that because it's a very frustrating thing to me when education is not rewarded, but i also do believe that this is one of those cases where rewards come in a million different ways and it has to start at home. and everybody doesn't have a home to go to which gives them that kind of support. but in the end, you have to be exposed. that's why michele and i, i think, are very, very conscious of this idea of being role models. sometimes the very point of being there is what makes all the difference for someone who might not have exposure to this. when i was a little girl growing up, i didn't anybody who looked like me on television doing the news. maybe one person melba toliver who had a big afro and i loved it. but i want to be in television but i didn't have anything to build on so i'm very conscious of the fact that when someone comes to me and my little daughter saw you and she's so excited because she didn't see on television that looks like

you and i take that responsibility seriously i don't know that closes the whole gap. >> no, i think of the child who would tease the other child. i'm thinking of that child because that -- that kind of school yard teasing is usually bourne out of insecurity. you know, in trying to pull someone back or the fear that this kid that you like and respect is going to leave you in the dust. that they're going to leave and they're going to move on to someplace better and you're not going to move on with them. and so we need to take -- we need to listen to that, when that happens but focus on both the children who are part of that conversation and make sure that the young people who don't value education get the signals that it's okay to value education. you know, we tend to reward athletes, you know, when you think about the people who get to strut through society as young people, they're usually the people who have letters on their jacket and we need to make sure -- you know, it was striking to me around the time of the state of the union, the president and paul ryan both in the same week said the same

thing and i don't think that either of them probably noticed that they both said it but it was essentially, we have to reward the students who are winning the science fairs and who are coming home with the good grades the same way we are awarding the kids who are making touchdowns or who are scoring goals. >> you told me to stand up. >> okay. >> we had no idea. [laughter] >> our adolescent students are less comfortable talking about race or more broadly different than we as adults are. what advice would you have to schools and educators regarding ways to help them have those conversations openly and honestly? >> well, part of it is what you just did. i like the use of the term "different" because that's something we have to appreciate even more precisely than race. race sometimes shuts the conversation down and for the reasons we discussed. the difference opens it up to all kinds of possibilities. difference also means smarter

kids, difference also means kids who may be conflicted about their sexuality. difference is a very broad notion. and that's the conversation we ought to be willing to have in almost every setting. and i think that part -- almost part of everything -- every conversation we have that's hard has to start with definitions and once we start with the definitions where we're embracing intolerance -- not tolerant fathers somehow because we're putting up with you in spite of but we're more embracing of difference and reward it, i think that's the beginning of the conversation we can have. and that's only the beginning but at least it's a starting off point instead of talking about race. >> you know, in signaling that it's okay to have the conversation even if it's uncomfortable, you know, when young people get to be junior high and high school, they still look at us adults almost in the way that they did when they were young. when a child skins their knee and before they cry they sort of look at you and you have to remember that as a parent to kind of keep your face straight because if you freak out, then they freak out, too.

but if you sort of keep your face straight like oh, my god he might have worried he might have skinned his knee but if you're kind of smiling through your concern -- >> asia is listening very carefully. >> they don't react in sort of the same way and as they get older they may not look to us in the same expectation but they are still looking to us for clues. and if they ask a difficult question, instead of shutting them down, honor it. try to figure out what's behind the question because again it goes to the discomfort that young people pick up around discussions about race. if they pick up those clues from us like oh, my goodness i'm really uncomfortable why are you asking that question, the message that they take from that i'm never going to ask that question again because i don't want to make people uncomfortable or i don't want to poke them in the eye or they get to a certain age where if you send the message that they're uncomfortable they're going to keep asking that question again and again. and that's exactly what they want to do is to make you comfortable. >> in our house we laugh a lot

and we're thinking this is enjoyable with this. >> i wonder the number of latin americans and the fact that -- sure. i'm wondering what you think about the fact that we have an increasing latin american component in our culture and yet the thing that -- the hallmark that makes them different is a language difference. and now they have their own television stations, their own media. they tend to be -- to isolate at least in this region. and the assimilation -- it's going to be interesting to see how assimilation takes place since there is no civil rights movement or there's no stressors to force the assimilation in our

society. >> the question for those who couldn't hear it was, what are we going to do now that we have a society which is becoming increasingly hispanic which is separated by the difference of language as much as skin color which we have gotten used to. what will allow assimilation without absent civil rights -- a civil rights movement and legal challenges? i would just challenge the word assimilation. because i don't think the goal of the civil rights movement in the end was assimilation as much as it was leveling the playing field. >> and opportunity. >> and opportunity. every immigrant group that come to this community came to their own neighborhoods, spoke their languages at home and ate their own foods and created and sustained their own cultures. so there's nothing particularly different or threatening except the large numbers of people who are coming here and doing -- and are doing the same thing. they are assimilating in the way they need to, to get jobs, to succeed, to buy a house, do all

the things that everybody wants to do for their families. but i don't think that assimilation should mean -- oftentimes people think assimilation means that you take on the majority culture and there's nothing the majority culture can do to understand the minority culture and that's where we run into trouble here. if we are now at the place where the country is becoming truly the melting pot to always claim we have been, the responsibility lies as much on the majority cultures to embrace and try to understand rather than depending on everybody else to assimilate. i mean, i think about this very much in newsrooms because most michele and i spent our careers in newsrooms which have very low number of people of color, and it's my pet peeve, for instance, in a store would happen in an african-american community they would look around -- in fact, most african-americans got hired in newsrooms because there were riots in the '60s. i'm not going there. who can we find? that's how we got in the door.

but the point is that at some point you want to know that everybody in the newsroom is capable of doing a story. the other night in the newsroom, at the newshour, we were given -- there was a report that came out about estrogen and women and menopause. and i said, why don't we try assigning that to a guideline for a change just to see how that feels and we did and he was like, okay. where's my sensitive jeff vibe and he pulled it off. of course he could pull it off. and that's a question of him assimilating instead of us always having to pick up the ball. >> hi. >> hi. >> i'm lucky enough to have been in two educational experiences with administrations very interested in discussing race. one of the experiences i didn't like about that, though, was that the discussion about race centered around an idea of privilege, and white privilege, and sometimes that didn't even necessarily fit into african-american populations, you know, in private schools and in campuses.

i was wondering if you think privilege is a good starting point for talking about race or not? >> well, i immediately want to ask you a question to find out why -- why wasn't privilege -- why didn't you think it fit into the particular environment that you were -- that you were in? >> for example, i think a lot of people took away from it that there's an assumption that if you are black, you know, that you did not grow up in a house that had books and people are offended by that. the question, though, we would do things did someone clean your house? i had black friends who said, yeah, a white woman from russia cleaned my house. and so it was -- it seemed very generalizing and to some extent offensive in some ways but also it is important for people to understand privilege in some ways. >> i turn the question on you based on everything you've said it may have been an uncomfortable place to start a question but it seemed like everything in the end was a

productive conversation because you wound up talking about things that would not have surfaced if you had not asked that initial question. so i turn it around you because when you're talking about a subject as complex as this, there's no -- there's no -- there's no formula. there's no recipe that you have to follow. there's no right or necessarily wrong way to start the conversation. if you come to the conversation with open minds and open hearts, and if it is just that, a beginning point for the conversation. if someone says well, i think you're asking the wrong thing or why should you assume that i come from a privileged background or why should you assume i don't come from a privileged background? you know, that's part of the conversation then i'm not sure why it would be necessarily a bad way to start the conversation. >> i just want to piggyback on that once when in my book tour someone said in the audience, you know, if everybody in your community talked like you and was like you, then we wouldn't have all these problems.

[laughter] >> now, the audience goes -- the truth is it was kind of an insulting question, obviously, but if i had responded by saying, something i can't say on c-span -- [laughter] >> what were you thinking? >> if i said what you were you thinking, the conversation would have ended right there. but instead, by listening to the question, which was awkwardly phrased but he was getting at something that was real and having a conversation with him and engaging other people in the conversation was an uncomfortable place to start but we ended up having an interesting conversation out of it. >> you know, i always say talking about race is a little bit like cooking with onions. [laughter] >> sometimes it makes you cry. and sometimes it gives you indigestion. and sometimes it really enriches the flavor of the conversation. >> sometimes it just doesn't but then you move past it. >> yeah. and you use more onions or fewer onions but it's worth it.

>> okay. he's going to be so glad when we're done. [laughter] >> have you had any conversations with people who have been discussing race in england or in south africa, different parts of the world where they may be having slightly different perspectives or maybe very similar perspectives? >> you know, i haven't -- i mean, maybe our book tour -- maybe we should take, you know, the show over the road overseas. i haven't gone overseas to have these discussions per se through the book, but they've come to them in some ways, through the race card again. and the thing that i realized -- two important points that i realized in the race card is how similar the questions are around the world. i mean, the questions around identity and race and how we talk about it. i mean, there's slight differences but there's a very animated conversation about identity that's taking place all over -- all over the globe in

large part because of immigration partners but also because, you know, these questions about identity are big and deep and as humans we all -- we all wrestle with them. you know, the last thing that i'm left with and i guess we can -- we're closing up and leave you with this, and i don't know if i speak for both of us when i embarked on this journey i again began the race card because i thought it would be difficult to have these conversations. i thought people didn't want to talk about race and i was going to have eat your peas conversation with people where i had to encourage them to do something that they really didn't want to do. and at the end of this, i'm left with a completely different -- i land in a completely different place. i think that people do actually do you want to have that conversation. they just don't know -- it's like trying to figure out where do i merge. how do i get into this conversation and how do i do it in a conversation and a productive conversation and not a painful one. >> michele and i have decided our next book is going to be about our friendship because we think we have a lot about share

how you can do the impossible because your girlfriend is there with you because, otherwise, we wouldn't be here and we wouldn't be able to do what we're is doing and we wouldn't have the chance to have this wonderful conversation with you so thank you very much for joining us. [applause]