often another fighter. and the result is that they build an elite in the corps of this elite are the mothers and the widows of those martyrs who sort of exemplify the most successful manifestation of islamic resistance of society and people, hah, this is the way to climb to the pinnacle of my society is by being willing to give my life this way and if i am chosen to die, then my family will be even more blessed. and it's incredibly effective. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> next on booktv, ellis cose spoke about the end of anger at the "chicago tribune" printers row lit fest.

he was interviewed and took questions from the audience. this is about 45 minutes. [applause] >> thank you and ellis, welcome back to chicago. he's a native son. >> i'm glad to be here again. >> ellis has a new book out and to put it in some context, 18 years ago, you wrote the rage of a privileged class which talked about african-american and the middle class, african-americans being and feeling pain i think was the phrase. he's acting new book coming out this month, the end of anger. what changed? >> a lot changed but even addressed that let me say since the book has come out it's interesting. you're right, i did write a book about rage. and the fundamental point that one person after another made in

that book -- and i conducted, you know, well over 100 interviews of very successful african-americans, the essential point that one after another made can be summed up with i don't care what credentials i have, how hardy work or what networks i try to get into, it's just not possible for me to get past the glass sealing. it's not possible for me to be the ceo of corporation or for me to be the president of this country, et cetera. so what has changed? a couple of things have changed. not too long after rage came out which was, i guess, the big magazine excerpt came out in '93, the book itself came out in '94, you saw some changes in corporate america. you saw a small but an interesting group of folks began to rise. you saw richard parsons become head of time warner.

you saw ken become head of american express. you saw a sort of change in this calculus. of course, with the recent presidential election you saw something that many people of many colors thought would never happen, at least not in our lifetimes and that was the election of a presidential who identifies as an african-american. the other thing that happened and this is something that i found just very interesting is that in the year since that book has come up, a new generation has come up the scene. and so a lot of the voices that are represented in rage are different than the voices that are represented in the end of anger, and the end of anger -- let me just say a couple words about that. 'cause even though i did as i said over 100 interviews for rage, i did even more for this book. in addition to interviews -- i mean, i conducted a couple of

surveys. i did a survey of the black alumni of had harvard business school and a fairly lengthy survey of 74 questions. and also a survey of graduates with a program called a better chance, which is a program that sends people for the most part poor from urban areas largely minority to some of the best secondary schools and prep schools in the country so we did two big surveys of these folks. and what i found fascinating as i began to look through the results of the surveys was the difference in how people were responding to questions about opportunity and access as a function of age, as a function of generation as i put it. and i'm sure we'll go into this a little bit later but the short story is that those people who were under 40 and i have a system that i've organized where i call these people generation three people, the people who

were under 40 responded quite differently to those who were over 40 in terms of how much discrimination they perceived from the workplace, in terms of what kind of opportunities they thought were available for them personally. and just in terms of how difficult it was to make it in american society and so once i saw this interesting generational breakout in the data i went back. we went back and conducted over 130 follow-up interviews just with people who were in the survey. in addition to over 100 interviews that were conducted generally for the book. so it was a somewhat different methodology but he asked about change, the country changed in some ways but also we're looking at a different generation to some extent. >> so part of it is generational and part of it you say is the obama election kind of the capstone to the corporate gains that were made. >> there's that -- i mean, one

of the things that i had as a backdrop as i began the research for this book were a series of studies. by "the washington post" indicating that there was a measurable increase in terms of optimism on african-americans. the recent large poll was done actually this year and it was a "washington post" harvard poll and it continues to show that african-americans are significantly more optimistic, one, than they were 10 years ago but, two, significantly more optimistic than whites when it comes to looking at how people see the strength of this economy. how people engage prospects with the future and certainly how they see prospects for themselves and their prodigy. >> ron bronstein wrote recently about a "national journal" poll that said two-thirds of african-americans in the u.s. said that barack obama's

policies would significantly help their advancement, the number for whites was 21%. hispanics fell somewhere in the middle but there was quite a gap -- >> there's a gap and those numbers have gone down actually in terms of african-americans saying that obama's election creates more opportunities for african-americans. it's down. it's gone down a bit since his election and certainly in my own surveys, it's not as high as 70%. it's closer to around 30%, 40% who are saying that it's going to help them. but i also think that the obama election is not just -- it's not just one phenomenon that accounts for all of this. i think it takes place against a backdrop of many things. it's certainly a huge event. and one that for at least many people of color and others as well indicates that things may be possible in this country that

a lot of people thought wasn't possible even a few years ago. it's an event which sort of -- i call it, you know, the final revelation in the series of things that happened which caused a lot of people to sit back and say wait a minute, let me rethink some fundamental assumptions that i've always made about where this country is and where it's possible for people to go. >> so what if he loses in 2012? and the gain that you saw from his election in 2008, will there be a resumption of anger? >> well, obviously, first of all, i am very careful to say in the book that there's still a lot of angry people out there. that hasn't changed. there are a lot of angry people and actually some of the most angry people are the party types and whatnot so it's not just black people who are angry. so anger is not going to go away but i also think that the fact of this presidency even if he loses in 2012 won't go away and

the -- and the reassessment that has begun to take place at least in some minds won't stop whether or not he wins. there would be a lot of disappointed people again of all colors if he loses. but i don't think it's going to change the fundamental way that people are beginning to look at what is possible in the political arena. >> is there a real divide in african-american thought, the elite or intellectual media thought and i ask this based on what cornell west recently said. he ripped obama, said obama is a black mascot of wall street oligarchs and a black puppet of plutocrats and now he has become head of the american killing machine and is proud of it. >> cornell is rather, obviously, upset. cornell is, obviously, a little bit upset at any number of

things having to do with obama. i know cornell. i haven't spoke about his particular comments in this case. but he's consistently been a critic of obama along certain lines. and also ideologically they are in quite different places, cornell and barack obama. >> is this more than attention-grabbing, though? >> well, i think it's always been a mistake to assume that any group and certainly that's true of african-americans are a monolith. and it's always a mistake to assume people are going to all think the same way. we never have no other group i'm aware of ever has. there have been differences. i think what's changed to some extent is the willingness to air these differences publicly. and i think clearly cornell west made the decision that he was quite ready and quite eager to

go public with quite a number of complaints with barack obama. and some of thinks complaints where having to do things with inauguration tickets and things like that but i think that's healthy that he feels free and other people are increasingly feel free to criticize this president. no president should be above criticism even from a group that he happens to belong to. if you go back some time ago to the clarence thomas nomination, there was a consternation among much of black leadership at that point when he was nominated about whether to criticize this guy or not. whether people ought to just stay quiet and in the hopes that he would be something that he hadn't demonstrated that he had any inclination to be. i don't think that's healthy and so i can -- whether or not i agree with all of cornell's

criticisms is besides the point. i think he certainly has a right to criticize and i don't think there's anything bizarre about that and i think it's something very healthy about it. >> i do talk to a number of people in chicago black and white, i think, from the left who do complain and say that obama can go to egypt or he can give a speech in the u.s. on the middle east and the world talks about the middle east for the next week. so why hasn't barack obama come to the west side of chicago or gone to detroit and talked about urban america? has he missed an opportunity, do you think, to put, you know, those issues which i think it's fair to say george bush ignored back on a higher plane? >> barack has a set of issues that a white president doesn't have and i can't look into his mind and i don't know what he will do in a second term if, in fact, he gets a second term.

when barack tried to make a point which he, obviously, saw as a teachable moment after skip gates got arrested in his house when he stepped outside of his house actually by the policeman in cambridge, i think barack said, okay, this is clearly a case of a cop overreacting to something he shouldn't have done, whatever the good professor said to him he was not creating a public disturbance. he was not a danger to anybody he certainly certainly didn't need to be in handcuffs so let me use this moment to make some statements about police behavior when it comes to african-american communities and let me take this occasion to say that the police did something stupid. well, there was a firestorm of reaction to that. and it broke down very much along racial lines. the vast majority of whites responded to that with dismay, anger and essentially saying the

president shouldn't be getting involved in this kind of stuff. one of the issues that this president has that clinton didn't have is the issue of being accused of showing favoritism, you know, to racial minorities. clinton didn't have that issue. if you look at the, for instance, the tea party there was a poll done a year and a half or so done by the "new york times" breaking down the tea party respondents. the vast majority who considered themselves a tea party were also growing that obama had given way too much attention to african-americans in the country and giving way too much attention to african-americans et cetera, et cetera. so it would be politically naive not to think that he doesn't have this going on in his head. she make some strong statements and should he have strong policies as regards to urban poverty? of course, he ought to. people claims he does but he doesn't talk them up so much he

talks other things but clearly that's a major issue and he ought to be dealing with it as vigorously as he deals with any other issue. >> you brought up the tea party and i think what you say in the book about the tea party and conservatism is going to cause some controversy. i'm going to read a couple of paragraphs from the book. you say when it all adds up to an america that is psychologically and politically divided in the most bizarre way. one america is celebrating the rise of a black president and the beginning of the end of racism while the other drowns in paranoia and racial fears. in one america anger is mellowing even in the other it explodes. in one america the future seems brighter than ever while in the other it is cloaked in gloom. one more bit. the biggest locus of anger these days seems not to be in the nation's black and brown communities but in the white heartland where numerous people are struggles to make sense of what seems to be a world turned upside down, a world they see as increasingly alien one from

which they are growing ever more estranged. .. there are lots of bases for those observations. one being the tea party people themselves, but actually i went out and spoke to a number of tea party people in an attempt to get at what is really bugging these guys and i found. it was like to do you want to take america back from? the people on washington, what are you angry about? i had a store and people begin to my store and now america's not good for the common man. there was a lot of incoherence and part of what i draw from that is that these people have this outside anchor at things they are not even cannot voice

or are uncomfortable voicing and we are looking at a country that demographically is changing. we are looking at a country which obviously is talking for the last what, 20 minutes where you have a person of color in the top job that some people, most tea party people it seems from the poll question whether he was born in the united states. why? well, i find they prefer to see america represented by a different kind of person that they are more congenial with. they don't like this idea and again this is my take but it's a take it is informed by data. they don't like this idea that these folks who don't represent america back in the 1950's the way america looked back in 1950's are taking over as they

see it and so i think it is an attribution to one an exaggeration of how much is being taken over bye whom, but number two, if this sort of anger at other kind of dynamic which also happens to encompass people coming over from the southern border, etc. which on sells a lot of people and says to them this america that is evolving is not the america that i knew and loved which is the america of the 1950's. so what is going to ease that ander? >> in 2008 in the primaries when he talked about bitter people clinging to their guns and religion and he got enormous flowback he may have lost texas for that. >> i don't think the issue is

religion here and in large measure i don't think it begun. i do think the issue is that there are just a hard core set of people who question everything about this presidency and the direction of the country, and i'm not sure that that's going to go away any time soon. i guess the spin on that is the folks stuck in the old paradigm tend to be rather old. so at some point they're going to give way to some other people >> you write in the book about the impact that riding on the west side when you were a young person had on you >> i'm happy to be back this weekend in chicago, and i came from the west side of chicago in the housing project and so for

me, a fundamental part of my childhood was growing up in a neighborhood that was literally set aflame first in 1966 as a result of a disturbance aggravated by the police and then in 1968 the result of course of the fascination of dr. martin luther king. i remember quite clearly as a very young person walking along madison street which was the main commercial corridor and the neighborhood after that time of their nine hits and still be able to feel the heat from the flame, the five-year that it consumes. there was one day during the 66 riots where we literally had to hit the floor because bullets were flying and we were fearful that something would happen. so not only shaped my view of what was happening in america at

that time and the course of a preteen and teenager it shakes you if your community and neighborhood but also of the press in some ways. and it's hard to think that far in some sense. >> each year gets harder. >> yes. >> i basically became a writer of that, and the short story is that all i remember reading the newspapers at the time even as a kid i did read the newspaper and remember reading the newspaper at the time and thinking that the neighborhood was being reported about in the newspaper. the neighborhood full of thugs and criminals and crazy people was not really the neighborhood that i knew, and thinking that there was a need or at least i

received in my ignorance and arrogance i suppose the need for another voice that could inform the discussion, and i went to high school with aspelin technical and at that time when i enrolled and started high school and i sort of thought i would go into some sort of scientific field. i had originally thought my favorite subject was mass but might be something related to math, maybe business or something like that, and the thing that made me change course was something that happened during my senior year. my senior year in high school, i had a teacher named mrs. clean air and i always had these fights with my english teachers because i thought english was boring and that a large part of it at least taught at leni tech at the time was answering questions i knew the answers to

and i considered it a waste of my time. so i had this big battle about whether i was going to do the english assignment, and i remember saying to her in the midst of this heated discussion i didn't see the point during these assignments. they were a waste of time. i didn't see what to do this stuff and she said to me well, okay, you are obviously a bright kid and what you decide to do is find so what are we going to do here? and i said well, it seems to me that the point of this class is one, to make sure i have an understanding of the english language and research skills and i can make a coherent argument, so why don't you testing on that? she said why don't you mean? i said have me write something. she said fine, what are you going to write? i said why not a history of riots in america.

she said okay. and i went off and several weeks later come back with i don't know how long it was that like a 140 page manuscript and she takes it home, comes back the next monday and this is okay i'm going to give you an essay for the course, but i don't -- i'm not really capable of evaluating this material and i make it from the project. professional what? and she said send it to gwendolyn brooks, you know what it is. i said that is of fort lauderdale illinois. she teaches at such and such college. so i send it to hurt and a few months later i heard from her. she called me and she said look,

young man, i don't know what you intend to do with your life and you ought to be a writer and that made something of an impression on me. [laughter] so from there it totally redefined myself and i went on to become a columnist for the chicago ton vv kurson times and might have was set. >> we both know clarence page very well. he tells the story how he got hired on "the chicago tribune" when the 1969 west side gone up in flames the tribune looked around the newsroom to find out who they could send who knew the west side and there was nobody. clemens gets hired. did you have a similar experience getting into the business? >> not exactly but i think i got in on some of that same energy. the beginning was the 1965 riot. you're talking about a time when

for reasons we probably need not go into in depth needed to become most see no need to hire anybody black so they didn't have anybody black on the staff and the "l.a. times" really noticed this when he exploded in 65 and they said we won't be in danger and the only person they can think to send out is the sales person who they say okay you're not a journalist go out there and cover watts. but he wrote was sort of representing what you expect from somebody that had no idea what journalism was. there were stories like that as the "washington post" and 68 would arrive at the same thing. a few of them had one or two people but most of them had nobody, and so after that there was this sense my god there is a

huge story and a huge community. they don't understand it or aren't comfortable out there. we need to hire some people to do it. i was hired a little bit differently. , but then what i did get to high year that as was my first john i was almost 18 with "the chicago sun-times" was as a columnist for something called viewpoint for schools and they realized they didn't have any voices that were people of color at all on this page and after doing that i got called in to the editor's office and he said to me i've been reading your column in the viewpoint for schools. what do you think starting monday if i give you a column in

the reel newspaper? and i sort of looked at him and foley incompetent 19-year-old said that's what i want to do all the time, so sure. that's what happened. so i wasn't hired as a direct result of the riot but there was an awareness at that time in that era that newspapers were at an advantage having no color and staff. >> we watched this business get shaken to the core and the basic underpinnings of journalism now if you were running coming out of the west side of chicago now would you advise him to go into journalism? >> coming into the west side now why would a first of all say the gerdemann tree is different. first of all, i don't know anybody that got hired the way i did even back then. that was kind of unusual and a

tribute i think to what i like to consider the vision of jim hoeven who saw this kid who was eager and in some ways ignorant and said we see something here. let's do something with that. it is contracting particularly print is contracting radically and virtually every large 1i know of has and the future is jerry uncertain. so if i were advising -- and also, the road to journalism is a little bit different. more and more it's become the path of gentry has become getting a graduate degree from a school at northwestern or going to columbia and getting a degree from there. so you find more and more people of the large institutions of those kind of credentials. i think what i would say to a young person who wants to start

on the career today is it could be a hell of a field is so much uncertainty have to be prepared to increase the uncertainty if you're going to embrace this career. >> i would invite you to come up to the microphone and i would be glad to take your questions. >> it's been a struggle to diversify newsrooms and we've now seen as those newsrooms have shrunk journalists and african american journalism going into alternative fields are you better off these days looking for a.com job than a newspaper or "newsweek"? >> newspaper in "newsweek," those are very different jobs. what we are seeing in journalism is one contraction of mainstream journalism but number two, three

different years developing. there are lots of space co.com jobs out there that a one-third but many of the traditional jobs today. so, these are jobs that were going to appeal to people who for the most part are young and willing to work for very little money in the hope that they will leverage this into something better in the future. i think it's a hard call for a lot of people going into this field in particular right now because it is a field in such flux and journalism was never a profession that you went into to be rich unless you have hopes of being a network anchor or something, but it was a field that not too long ago particularly with a larger publications you could depend on a good career, that is a long the case, and so i think that for young people looking at a profession, the need to acknowledge this and say okay, despite that this is something

still were trying to do. >> questioned? >> maybe we should say thanks to photo march, made in the u.s.a. and the audiovisual system which is the microphone stand. i didn't come here prepared to know what you're talking about, i didn't read your books and i assume it was about the black experience. i saw a psychiatrist some time ago in the 70's and i will never forget what he said early on. with regard to my history of mental problems and implement he said at least you're not black. compare that to barbara par rahman who i saw in the 80s she didn't tell me she was terminally ill with breast cancer and she died at the age of 37 in 1986 and is still living in his 90. >> i am getting to a question but of the words i used before don't overrule my questioning i recommended a book called sex,

murder and meaning of life -- >> do you have a question somewhere in there? if people want to hear your book recommendations ensure they can find you after. >> the question is about language. i use merriam-webster. if we don't know the words meaning as we are going to be in trouble. it's like speaking other languages. i don't believe in using words that make us more distance than we have to be. i think we should go back to negro and caucasian. >> the question? >> it wouldn't be bad for people to be scientifically literate and black-and-white is like should we -- to you think you would be better to talk about this in a way that makes us closer instead of saying black and white or for that matter the opposite sexes that makes us more different than similar? >> sure. okay, fine. do i think you would be better for us to talk about ourselves in ways to bring us closer?

of course i do. another question is what that is and i don't think it is as simple as substituting negro for black or caucasian for white. negro is just obviously a mispronunciation which is a spanish pronunciation for black so i'm not sure that is the way to do that but in principle, absolutely. >> [inaudible] obama is good for white people especially to put him in power for israel. obama [inaudible] illinois has been noted in the chicago reader to have 400 tons in which obama cannot sleep except in jail.

>> again, search is there a question? >> considering how racism is indebted in the criminal justice system where you say blacks are diluted to say things are getting better where more than half of people in prison for black. >> that is a good question. i think actually that is a good question. the bureau of labor statistics just last month released statistics which show that black employment is higher, black employment rather is lower than it has been since they have been kept. we are seeing a situation where in the economic sense african-americans have been hard hit by this current downturn in

the recession, and we are also as the questioner in the case over the last 35 to 40 years see a huge uptick in the number of african-americans that have been cursory that and having to deal with a criminal justice system such that its current trends continue roughly one-third of african-american males. >> the studies that i site don't give any kind of objective assessment of whether things are getting better or not. they talk about people's attitudes and take on one the future which by definition is unknown and number two, with a pre-sivas their options which for many people is broader than it has been. i think that we as a society

felt for a long time at least many of us did if we get a handle on racial inequality we will solve the issue of the equality in this society. i think in some respects, not all of them, some are going to get a handle on that issue i think what we are finding is that the issue of inequality is much more complicated than many people thought it was and that dealing with the decline of the zero and racism which has immeasurably declined is not the same of creating equal opportunity societies. >> you suggest in the book, you break out in generational change that african-americans are still more likely to have been predawn by shady lenders for instance as you see the mortgage crisis now when asked about that and when you talk about the end of anger is there a growing economic

divide among african-americans is this people that have succeeded are feeling better about racism or those that haven't succeeded economically feel a lot different? >> you do touch on something he alluded to before >> in answer to that direct question, certainly those who are doing economic and better felt a lot better about their options in life as measured by my various surveys including mine but even people doing not so well at all if you ask the question are african americans better off now than 15 years ago for instance the vast majority of people say african-americans across class lines say yes they are do you think your children will have a better life than you do? to say yes i think they will.

i think on the one hand you do have a sense that the options and opportunities are not nearly as bleak as a function of race than it used to be but you also have people who make a personal assessment based on where they were and where they are. among the states i don't really references. i did a small survey of people who were involved with a group called the fortune society for people reasonably out of prison or who have been diverted into programs to avoid going to prison and we asked them about their options in life most of them not needless to say are unemployed. they acknowledge they will have a hard time because their prison record getting a job. so people are totally out of touch with reality. that i do have a chapter that deals with the predatory lending

and the reason i have that chapter in their as an example of how even policies that on their face are not explicitly racist in any particular we could end up harming particular communities, and i think we have a textbook example in the case of how various neighbors were targeted and various groups were targeted in a way that ended up devastating those communities and people who happen to own homes and no one ever had to get together in a room and say we are going to target black people to do that. >> i'd like to ask about the education in the united states to your sister-in-law was a co-founder of the charter school network in chicago and many of them including your sister-in-law's network and it's done very well and yet is a very controversial issue still in the

city that comes down to an economic divide, ongoing argument whether traditional schools wind up being short changed because the emphasis on alternative schools. >> i don't think it's any question of the schools in boston and new york but i don't think it's any question that a charter school was well designed and that's the important stipulation and the charter schools also but i think without question the charter schools are well-designed that have the leadership and dedication can do wonders and communities where your public schools have not. they can take care to a lot of schools that essentially have given up on and oriented towards college. first of all get them to believe they can actually go to college which is part of what they need to do in certain areas, and get

them unprepared for a life that they otherwise wouldn't have, they just stay in their neighborhood schools but the reality is not unless something radically changes in this country the percentage of people and charter schools will always be a relatively small percentage and so the issue on ec is not that one ought to get rid of the charter schools which in some cases are doing a tremendous job, but we've really need to wrestle in a serious way with how we make public education better. estimate it's not a far leap to get into what's going on in wisconsin and ohio and indiana and this may go to some of the issues you talk about your sense of what we have a growing divide between the government class and the rest of america.

>> in guaranteed pensions and things like that that the taxpayers have to pay for and that now as ever economic ties become less and less certain, certain papers are less willing to pay for that but i think that is overlaid with a lot of issues and ever since the last five that it's been taken has found a greater divide between the top income and the lower quintile. we are clearly becoming a society where those who have wealth are doing progressively better as those who are doing worse. they are simply screwed up with the picture, and i certainly don't have the answer to that but that goes beyond issues of race. this is something fundamentally screwed up about that and we need to figure out how to get

the right. >> we are out of time. >> on >> we asked what are you reading this summer. here's what you have to say.