i would suspect not. if anybody can give me an answer on that, contact the leader and let me know. >> cut >> thank you for coming. it's been a pleasure. [applause] ..

>> up next on booktv, toure examines race, identity, politics and the concept of post-blackness at an event at busboys and poets near washington d.c. he opens his presentation by reading from his book, "who's afraid of post-blackness?" this lasts about an hour. >> the chris roth joke that is emblematic of modern racism is from his 2008 stand-up routine kill the messenger, and it's about alpine, new jersey, the posh town where he lives in a multimillion dollar home. his neighbors include marie j -- mary j. blige and eddie murphy. legends in their line of work. they're also the only four black homeowners in town. then he says his next door neighbor is a white dentist. he ain't the best dentist in the world, rock says. he ain't going to the dental hall of fame.

rock spells out the point with a devastating punch line: the black man gotta fly to get something the white man can walk to. he's saying that in modern america blacks can ascend to the upper class, but they have to fight so much more to get there because white supremacy remains a tall barrier to entry. a way of advancing the idea that white supremacy does not exist, an attempt to mask its awesome power because the matrix doesn't want you to know it's there. how can someone argue that alpine, new jersey, is rayist when four black families live there welcomed by the community and unharassed by police? of course, this is a fake argument. these extraordinary blacks would be welcome anywhere, and alpine itself is not racist because it doesn't need to be. there are institutional systems in place that keep the number of blacks in alpine and beverly hills and other exclusive communities very low but not so low that jesse jackson can come and raise a ruckus.

it's like releasing a tiny bit of air so the bottle doesn't explode. modern racism is a more slippery beast than its father or grandfather were. it has ways of making itself seem to not exist which can drive you crazy trying to prove its existence sometimes. it's a powerful force shaping the post-black experience because it combines a sense of you don't belong, you're a second-class citizen with the subterfuge of a spy and creates for some a devil's bargain. you may ascend higher on the ladders of power than previous generations of blacks could have imagined, but when you smack into that glass ceiling and you don't get as high as you feel you should go, it'll still drive you crazy and show you that your ability is not fully respected. blackness is expanding and broadening as black opportunities are improving, but we all still must deal with racism, and it has a pernicious impact on the modern black

persona. modern racism is one of the most mind-blowing analogies for it, like the president pardoning one turkey each year before thanksgiving. [laughter] in a 2004 speech in mumbai, aipped ya -- india, roy broke it down. every year the president spares one particular bird and eats another one. after receiving the presidential pardon, the chosen one is sent to frying pan park in virginia to live out its natural life. the rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten. conagra foods, the company that has won the presidential turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be social, to interact with dig dignitaries, school children and the press. [laughter] that's how new racism in the corporate era works. a few carefully-bred turkeys, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional coe listen powell or

condoleezza rice, some writers like myself -- she's talking about herself -- are given absolution and a path to frying pan park. the remaining millions lose their jobs, have their water and electricity connections cut and die of aids. basically, they're for the p.o. but the fortunate fowls in prying pan park are doing just fine. some of them even work for the imf and the world trade organization, so who can accuse those organizations of being anti-turkey? some choose as board members on the turkey-choosing committee. they participate in the it. who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalization? there's a stampede to get into frying pan park. it's a response to the rise in the number of blacks who live in or are trying to get into alpine, new jersey, but it's no wonder drug that can alter american white supremacy. the post-black era suggests to

me what it means to be black is broadening to infinity, but it does not mean that racism is over. racism remains a daily fact of life for blacks and a key component in shaping who we become as people even in the post-black era. indeed, where racism in our parents and grandparents' generations was plainly visible, modern racism seems to function like evaporating smoke: plainly visible, but impossible to grab onto. it adds the empirical data that attempts to argue racism no longer exists each though you know it does. the cognitive dissonance of that double consciousness can make you feel crazy. you're in target. is the security guard following you? you're not sure. you think he is, but you can't be certain. [laughter] maybe he is, maybe he's not. maybe he's actually following another black person you can't see. [laughter] but he's probably following you. or is he? they were following you in the

last store, and you couldn't see it, but you could feel it. maybe the guard is black, so if you tried to explain it to a white friend, they might not understand it as racist, but the guard's boss isn't black. or maybe he is. maybe they're watching all the blacks in the store more closely. maybe the guard himself feels badly about that directive, but has to follow it because they're watching him too. maybe what you're feeling are his ashamed vibes as if he's sending you a silent signal of apology for following you. or maybe, and now you're just looking for tylenol for migraines when all you needed was toothpaste. [laughter] and that's one of the basist examples of racism. that says nothing of the constellation of anxieties that can flash through you when the stakes are high, when you're applying for a job or competing for a promotion, buying a house or asking for a loan. when you're wondering if the white person got the promotion because they were actually better than you, or because they were better at networking upper management, sor someone wrongly

assumed you're not as good because you're black, or dr. lamont hill said there's this sort of existential angst black people say. you're walking around the store, you just want some socks, and you're worried about the security guard and whether he's following you. you have had to undergo so many psychological processes just between you and them socks that it's taxing on the spirit and on the intellect. [laughter] we squander so much time dealing with those issues that we sort of miss out on opportunities to do other good stuff like expanding, growing, developing and so forth. columbia professor patricia williams told me there's nothing that black people would like more than to be happy in the world and to have the freedom to go through the world without being constantly self-conscious. but that's nearly impossible. maybe the storekeeper's kind of scowling at you because he's tired and having a bad day and has nothing to do with you. or maybe he doesn't want his clothes to be seen out in the world on your black body. you just can't know.

professor williams said that's the necessary nuttiness of racism, and a kind of defensiveness is just a consequence of what we have to negotiate. and i don't think that's victimhood. she compares the necessary nuttiness of racism, the maddening funhouse mirror of modern racism to one day in law school when someone sent her a bouquet of flowers on valentine's day and didn't sign it. it could have been this person, it could have been that person. [laughter] i loved everybody. well, prejudice is the same thing in a negative degree. when a moment of racism occurs, especially a subtle one, you can find yourself walking around distrustful of everyone white wondering who else feels that way. this is often what the face of modern racism is, invisible or hard to discern. lurking in the shadows or hidden. glass ceilings that even racial profiling can be hard to see at times and can be easily dismissed by dissenters.

modern racism is often an amorphous beast. dr. john jackson of the university of pennsylvania said this idea that there's this sort of clicheed vision of someone who's racist from the time they brush their teeth in the morning and only thinks about ending the life of every black person isn't the only way to talk about what racism looks like. the category of you are racist or you are not isn't useful. what's more useful is to get people to think about the ways in which we perpetuate the kind of racial inequalities on purpose or inadvertently that produce the differences we see every day. unless you're going to tell me there's some hard-wired reason why people of color at academic institutions are always the people serbing you food -- serving you food or cleaning the bathroom or not teaching classes, then i think you going to have to be honest with yourself about the ways in which privilege accrues to people. race is more subliminal, race is more subjective, and race is

more subtle in the contemporary moment, and i think we need to find a way to really articulate that subtlety because there are very few smoking guns, thank god, anymore. i asked my 105 interviewees what is the most racist thing that ever happened to you. the response was indicative of modern racism. the answer is unknowable. aaron mcgruder said, i imagine it'd be a thing i don't even know ever happened. it would be that opportunity that never manifested, and i'll never know that it was even possible. so a decision is made in a back room or a high-level office, perhaps by someone you'll never see about whether or not you get a home or a home loan or a job or admission to a school, or perhaps you'll never be allowed to know that a home in a certain area or a job is available. this is how modern institutional racism functions, and it can weigh on and shape a black person differently than the more overt, simplistic racism of the past. people who told me the most rayist finish racist thing that

ever happened to them unknowable answered quickly. they're walking around consciously aware of racism as a ghost in the machine following them, impacting them even though they can't see it or know what's taken away. there's a sense of ma lev elect ghosts around you screwing with you, off out of sight, never out of mind. the poet and yale professor dr. elizabeth alexander who read an original poem at obama's inauguration said the most racist thing that ever happened to me would be the underestimation of my intellectual capacity and the real insidious aspect of that kind of racism is we don't know half the time when people are underestimating us, when we're being cut out of something because someone is unable to see us at full capacity. so i presume that happens and has happened a lot. she presumes this racist miscalculation of her brilliance happens quite often, even though it never makes its plain. how tragic. i can see alexander walking down

the street the inverse of patricia williams the day she got anonymous flowers correctly assuming anyone she's passing by could be looking at her as a cut far below the genius she is. alexander says she fights it by evaluating herself outside the judgment of others. but how can this daily, even hourly battle to constantly reconvince yourself of your ability not become an exhausting mental drain? so that's just a little of what i'm trying to deal with, and elizabeth -- thank you. [applause] elizabeth alexander provides a really interesting and powerful tool to try to deal with racism, and we cannot solve it simply. but she talks about having a private view of yourself. so knowing i am brilliant, i am capable, i am excellent, i'm extraordinary, i'm beautiful and not letting the outside world

tell you that you're not. and this is very hard because we shape how we see ourselves based on how the world sees us. that's part of it. but we have to work to get to that place. and part of the book is about my journey to get to that place, to build a sort of test lawn self-'s chemoshield -- esteem shield so when somebody comes up that would trigger a stereotype threat, it bounces off. and i'm like, okay, i know that you are racist, but i'm not. and i think of i'm not what you think i am. and i think of a moment when i was first at a magazine, and i was trying to get a contract there. the guy says to me, well, we know you can write about run dmc, but could you write about eric clapton? and he's dismissing my ability. you're good over here in this hip-hop thing, but when we get to the big dogs of music, you

are not wanted or valuable or capable of doing it. a horrendous example because i'm a journalist. i could study and interview anybody, and eric clapton in particular some of you will already have thought comes from black music. he comes from the blues. he idolizes jimi hend distribution, so it'd be valuable to have a black writer interview him. but i think some people maybe might have taken that moment and gone, wow, here's where i am. and that did not happen to me. i heard his insult, and i said how am i going to counter this. because i can't turn you in this room. you're not even asking me a question, you're just making an assertion. but i know you're wrong, so how can i change this argument and change this game later on? and years later i did change the game. never got to talk to eric clapton, but i got to interview other white musicians, so proved

him wrong. >> well, good. [laughter] all right, so i think we've got to dial it back because i think folks in this room completely get what you're talking about, and many, many times in the, in the reading you just did which goes, which is deep into the book, um, you mention the phrase "post-blackness." and i think for the c-span audience, you need to give just a brief definition of what is post-blackness, and where does this term come from? >> post-black comes from the art world, a term that thelma golden and glenn log, one of the great visual artists, coined together to talk about a group of artists they saw who wanted to be rooted in but not constrained by blackness. they wanted to deal with black art traditions, deal with black people, black subject matter, but also have the freedom to take influence from other things and perhaps not deal with black subjects and black traditions and black stories for some time. and they wanted to get away from

being defined solely by identity for being a black artist. it's confining. being an artist who happens to be black is liberating. and that's what they wanted. so i started to see that in the real world, this era of us doing what we want to do and not being constrained by those old, sort of ideas of, like, well, this is what a black person does, and this is not what a black person does. and wanted to explore that more fully. >> and i want to get to that in one second. but now define the difference between post-blackness and that sort of ephemeral, ethereal notion of being post-racial. >> post-racial. um, post-racial does not exist. [laughter] post-racial suggests -- [applause] os-racial suggests race does not matter or maybe it suggests that racism is behind us, that sort of thing. it's a total chi her rah. it's a word for something that

is not real that does not exist. post-blackness is dealing with the complexity of what it means to be black. i think occasionally you see post-racial in art. it does not exist in the real world, but in art. so i see an example of it in grey's anatomy where we have black, latina, asian, white, but you could switch any of those characters' races, and the storylines would be the same. it doesn't matter that this one's latina and this one -- >> race doesn't matter. >> race doesn't matter in that little world. but in a world like chapelle's show which is dealing much more with what the real world is all about, race matters deeply, and you see the complexity of modern race at play. >> and you say in the book, you devote -- for those of you who haven't read it, you devote an entire chapter to dave chapelle and the chapelle show, and you say it is the clearest example of post-blackness. >> on television. >> on television. >> yeah, yeah. it's an incredibly complex show. we see, you know, the sort of

racial morphing, multiple ways of performing blackness within one person. a lot of times on television they'll present a sort of hoodie black person and then a preppy sort of black person, two modes of being black as if we never vacillate or, you know, move around. and chapelle's show specifically in the wayne brady episode but in other episodes, we see one person giving us multiple modes of blackness because all of us have multiple ways of performing or embodying blackness within us. you think about other aspects of your personality. when you go with your grandmother, you're kind of embodying one part of you. when you go with your friends, you're doing another part. if your friends saw you with your grandmother, they'd recognize you, but you're being different. you're not selling out, you're just recognizing your audience. and we do that with gender, with race, with every part of our persona. >> i mean, the wayne brady episode of chapelle's show, i

think, is one of the most brilliant episodes because -- and as you spell out, all we knew about wayne brady up until that skit was that he was, you know, the happy-go-lucky, cheerful black guy who had a television show for a little bit. [laughter] and then here he is in the chapelle show episode being that wayne brady and then suddenly it's gangsta wayne brady. [laughter] i mean, it is really incredible. i guess y'all have seen that episode. >> i mean, but they're making mincemeat of this idea of here's the way that wayne brady is black or here's the way somebody else is black. and it came from a very organic place, that wayne saw dave in beverly hills when they were both shooting something, and he pulled him aside and said, you know, you really hurt me when paul mooney said wayne brady makes bryant gumbel look like malcolm x. [laughter] i mean, wow, you know? >> right. >> and that's not me, and you know me better than that. so then they con sired to

think -- conspired to think of something that would sort of get at those things. so you see wayne come out and be that person that we know him to be on stage. and then they throw to a taped speech where he gets gangsta, he's a pimps, he murders somebody. wayne brady gonna have to choke a bitch. [laughter] and all sorts of things. and he's mimicking denzel washington in "training day." he makes chapelle's character smoke, and it matters that they are playing themselves in the sketch because you see him jumping back and forth, and it makes you question who really is wayne brady? and you even see him, a police officer stops them, and wayne jumps from being denzel washington back to the corny sort of byron allen sort of black, right? [laughter] the appeaser, right? making him -- and he even pulls a microphone from his jacket so blacks are always ready to perform at a moment's notice.

>> right. >> and who does he sing? dionne warwick, right? [laughter] a little less edgy, if he does stevie wonder or marvin gaye, it's not the same. so he's singing a little dionne warwick, the white cop is loving it, and then, bam, he twists his neck and drops it to the ground, and he drops the mic and goes back to being gangsta. so i can go back and forth. the way i perform blackness in a heartbeat. so don't test me. don't act like i'm some chump, i'm bryant gumbel, and i'm corny, and you can just put me in a box because i can do this thing over here too. and we all have that sort of ability to modulate. >> as you were reading the chapter and focusing on racism, it made me think about another chapter in the book which is, or it's throughout the book about this, the whole prison sort of keeping it real. and it made me think, you know, i wrote down here racism versus

keeping it real. whereas racism you're self-conscious of, as you call it, the white gaze -- g-a-z-e -- [laughter] because i made this mistake on wnyc last week. what? what do they have to do with it? [laughter] with racism, you're self-conscious of the white gaze. with keeping it real, you're self-conscious of the black gaze. am i getting this wrong? >> no, i think that's right. and i think, you know, i started dealing with it in high school, i think some of the people started dealing with it in high school, that responding to the white gaze is one level of maturity for a black person, right? and when you get beyond that and you say i'm not going to respond to the white gaze, i'm going to do what i want to do with my life and my per son that without -- there's no response. i am not flipping them off, i'm not appeasing them. i'm doing what i want to do. that's one level of maturity. and i think the next level of sort of intellectual development

or personal development or maturity is when you say i'm not going to respond to the black gaze, that i'm going to do what i want to do. again, not flipping them off, not trying to appease my brothers and sisters, but i'm going to live the life the way i want. and maybe some of the things will be valuable or interesting to them, and i'm sorry that, you know, it wasn't interesting to you that i wanted to go skydiving, and i wanted to go to moscow, and i like sushi, ballet, opera, whatever. but you know what? blackness is portable. [laughter] it goes with me to those places and comes back. >> right. now, one of the things, what gave rise to this was in college. >> uh-huh. >> when someone came to you and said, toure, you ain't black. >> yeah. >> and tell that story because he says in the to you, and you had done all these black things. >> yeah. i was living in the black house, only three people lived, and you had to fight to get into the black house. we were stand anything the black house when this happened. i was a black studies major, i

was dating a black med school student, i was the founder of the black student newspaper, at all the step shows and all the parties -- >> he was bona fide black. [laughter] >> taking sacrament every week and the whole nine. but, you know, i wasn't living exactly right for him. and maybe it was something in the way that i spoke or maybe it's because i had some white friends or i just wasn't a recognizable black person to him. and he didn't know me from adam. we had never spoken. i didn't even know what his voice sounded like when he rose up to strike me down. so it's the whole question of how you would judge me is a bit bizarre. but, you know, it was about 2 a.m., we're at the black house, it's 2 a.m. saturday ending, going into sunday. there would have been a party there. and consistently everybody sort of left a mess for the actual residents of the house to clean up, and we're not supposed to be the janitorial service for the black community in the black

house. so i was kind of like, you guys, you know, we've complained about this before, can you help us clean up, just putting the stuff in the trash? you know, we're not the janitors. it wasn't even a heated argument at all. and this guy comes out of nowhere and says shut up, toure, you ain't black. i mean, it's completely non sequitur. we were talking about cleaning up the house. >> come on. >> he must have been drunk, you know, i would assume. i'm actually waiting for him to jump up at one of these readings. [laughter] let me tell you another thing. [laughter] you still ain't black. >> are you sure it wasn't wayne brady? [laughter] >> no, it wasn't wayne brady. >> all right. >> but it was an extraordinarily painful moment. i think a lot of us in this room are beyond the stage of forming our identity. we know who we are, we're comfortable with who we are. but when you're in college, you're an emerging adult, and you are still actively forming

your identity. and for another black person to say in a room full of black people you ain't black even while you're doing all these other things, it's very painful. and i had no retort, i had no witty response, i had no argument for him. there was about 20 people standing there, nobody said anything. i was crushed. and i turned around and wawkd away, and i said i'm never going to talk about this again, never going to think about this again, but i couldn't stop thinking about it. and i stayed up all night thinking about it. and what i had to do was some soul searching to get to a place where i understood, okay, you know, that may be correct for him, but it is not correct for me. and i get to define what being black is for me, and he does not. and that was really the beginning of me saying i'm going to reject this black gaze and say, i get to twine it. and because -- define it. and because you don't understand how i am performing or embodying blackness does not mean that you are right that i'm not black. because there's many different ways to be black.

skip gates says if there's 40 million black people, there's 40 million ways to be black. >> um, we're going to open this up to questions from you guys. laticia, should they go to the mic? >> are we ready for that? >> yeah. >> okay, all right. >> we say we give the audience on stage the first crack at it. anybody over here who wants to -- >> but just to be -- >> -- be first. >> wait up with second. just be sure that your questions are, indeed, questions and that they're short so that as many people cans ask a question as possible. and forewarning, because i've given you that warning, i will cut you off if i think you're giving a speech or going on too long. [laughter] so, first question. >> you bad. >> it has to be that way. >> no, he's right. >> i hope this reaches. >> you got it? >> wait, do you reach? can you reach? is. >> i can reach, yeah. >> my question relates to achieving our -- [inaudible]

social agencies, some new occurrence of racism, so in terms of choosing our battles today what some of the microaggressions are -- [inaudible] some issues where -- [inaudible] not worth fighting over, just let it go. people are going to understand why -- [inaudible] is that okay or just -- [inaudible] >> i mean, i think that's a really interesting question. we do need to pick our battles because there are, because there are issues of racism that will hurt you, and then there are issues of racism that will actually destroy you and change the trajectory of your life. and when we encounter these moments where, you know, like rick perry owns some property where the word "niggerhead" was once written and they crudely painted over it, it just shows his ignorance, and i kind of

want to roll my eyes. now, when we encounter a moment like troy davis getting executed when there's a mountain of evidence saying maybe he didn't do it, maybe we need to think twice about if we're going to execute somebody we're not 100% -- that is a moment of racism that we need to militate against. and we need to deal with the moments that have power behind them to change our lives and not get excised every time somebody says nigger. because most of the stories there's, that people are telling me about what happened to them, they're dealing with something more than somebody said nigger. ..

i have a co-worker who has kids who are 12 or 14 and she makes a big deal saying my kids care anymore, they don't care about race anymore. it's different.

she's very, you know, adam at -- adamant. they just don't care. is that a good thing or a bad thing. dvds unrealistic? do you think this kind of on the way to this post racial thing? >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> it is a little interesting. one of the thing to sociologists tell us is the denial of racism is racism in and of itself and that is a form of microaggression macroaggression in some cases. look, 12 to 14 is a bit early to have that level of racial identity. you know you're black, you know you're white. you know other people are asian or what have you but they haven't fully begun to a sign things that have no power.

they will catch up. i mean i know that they are aware of race. i had an extraordinary moment because my son is three and a half now. i don't talk to him about being black. i don't say these things because he is a baby. we deal with -- you are not dealing with race and racism. we took him to one of these plea groups when you try to get into a school and kids are playing around. he doesn't even play with dolls so i don't know where the beginning for this action was but there are four goals on a shelf and there's three white and then there is a black ball on the end and he reached up past the white balls and ground the black doll and says i want to play with this one. i was like wow, that's my boy. [laughter] that story gets in the baby

diary. i know that there's a consciousness of race at an early age and i don't deny this idea that, you know, she is perhaps not even aware of how they are aware of race. who else wants to get involved quest saugh als >> we are going to, back here. >> please. >> all right. your turn.

i am a try eink to reconcile something. use a racist ... but at the same time we are now in the era we permit people to have the luxury of liberation to the people, individuals. ibm trying to understand how you can have that luxury at the same time we recognize from history the only way racism was defeated with regards to the collective identity and it really kind of gave us value and a vision and helped define our actions and behavior and efforts. i want to get down to the individualism that characterizes america but at the same time american culture as i am dressed and it's much more humanitarian than individualistic. >> i think that we can be individualistic and humanitarian not the same time. i take issue with the comment that racism was defeated but i

think that you are talking about the very specific incidents of racism, and i'm writing a piece about some of these issues now. >> you are talking about the montgomery bus boycott where we stand together and if anybody was in the part of that and it would screw up the whole mission. okay, we don't have that sort of racism any more. what would constitute some of thing because the basic human civil rights that they fought for and they won we have now. we enjoy it now. so what would be something that we would been together for that would have a legal source or moral source that we would need that the unity alone what allowance to supersede? the battles are different now and unity alone is not going to supersede a glass ceiling stereotype threat even troy davis, you know, 40 million in the industry they still would have done what they wanted to

do, so there are two different sorts of things going on here, two different sorts of possibilities. the battle now cannot be won with the battle of the tactics of before. you know what i'm saying? [laughter] >> there is a difference of opinion what i'm talking about. >> obama was elected because black people got together in south carolina the site of their act as a group. >> your question? >> i wanted to know how you define blackness because based upon quote that i read on an interview that you did with i can't remember his name right now basically i guess my question is how do you define that because it sounds like you

define it based upon what i believe is a stereotype like blackness doesn't let you talk about people saying you're not white. when i think of blackness is a cultural identity based upon who we are coming not okay, this is basically a degradation of black mass. so what is the blackness that you say no longer exists, that is my question. >> we all have the ability to define it for ourselves. and i think before there was a multiplicity of visions of what it meant to be black and there is their multiplicity of the multiplicity. but part of what we are grappling with in the issue that you are saying is one of the questions i asked everybody is what is the typical force of blackness. what is the thing that holds us altogether that unites all of us and not specific to us, universal to us that we take apart from white people the experience of racism, that the

honor that we don't share a culture as tom foley as our parents and grandparents did. >> 62 >> one question and one question only. [laughter] >> i ask people what is the force of blackness and nobody had an answer and so the question is falling apart that nobody had anything close to the answer. i think that there are the broad sets of the biological characteristics by which we know signify as black, but there are some people we know who don't signify as black but they are black. there is this shared sense of history that we have a different relationship to that and different knowledge of that how much you actually know about it. and then we all have the experience of racism that we experience the different as well. it becomes difficult to say this is the thing that connects us

and partly this is because of the rupture from africa and their doctor from that basic national culture that we should have had that we would have had that i italians and germans, etc. enjoy. >> i saw you on twitter and i enjoy your tweets. i noticed that you are a musical journalist and jay-z is one of your favorite artists. how do you feel about international superstars naming their songs "n-word in paris." how do you feel about a black american superstores using that in word so freely and then get upset when other people lock them and say the same thing? >> that's a good question. excellent question. i love that song. it's one of my favorite songs

and i think the title was brilliant and here's the thing, when you step on stage and being in the studio is equivalent to being on stage, then the rules change. everything changes. so why all i have made a personal decision to not use nigger colloquially and just say what up my i don't do that anymore. i did that up until about two years ago when obama came to office i said i don't think that this is a zeitgeist anymore for me to be using it, but i'm not proselytizing and telling my brothers what not to do. but when you get on stage as an artist there are other things that come into play, and i thought in particular niggers in paris was brilliant because he's dealing with i'm from the project, from the hood and i'm from paris, yo. if you came from what i came

from you would become a too. [laughter] and it's extraordinary that -- right -- it is extraordinary -- >> my question is and really that. it's is there a responsibility for the international superstars not to use that word because i don't use it, i don't want anybody around me using it. i mean, i know you can't say to them you can't use it, but don't you feel like that could be at some point in your career of a platform that he would have that you don't use such an ignorant word? >> i think that the shocker value to the word that we still feel is part of what he is doing as a performer, as a person on stage who is trying to get a rise out of the audience. i mean, look, you see the value in the word as a performer and an extraordinarily powerful word. but i am -- if i see some what a

guy or a latino guy on the street saying that word, i'm going to check him. be like what are you talking about? you shouldn't be playing with that. but people on the stage it is a whole different map. like i mean you wouldn't have to check them using the n word they're listening back home. >> but you're right they should have the intelligence -- [applause] to know that that is not for you and many of them do know that. speed the that is a high are for many folks. [laughter] -- i'd like to go a little bit deeper. i come from the culture of background, both of them black. my connection isx african-american, so i've always

struggled with what african-americans defined as what's being black. one thing i boiled it down to a buy but like to get your take on this story is the notion of permission. that's what life broken it down< to. i see us as black people with special the men askingqn permission a lot to be men comel to the heads of our families, to be in charge, to be who we want to be as a man first and then you just happen to be black.qn so i think we waste a lot of permission inqn various ways.q.a.ql some subtle, some over to, to bh what we want to be and who weqih need to be for our communities, for our families and for ourselvesq.qnqña.q.qna/qhqjq.ql(

because somewhere back here media i don't feel like i'm asq. high on the totem pole as the other race and i see that a lot in our black men had no matter how macho they may be. >> i don't know if i fullyq. understand or agree that blackqh men feel that we are lesser on the totem pole. just talking about we understanh as black people that the outside world sees us as lesser but we

know that that is a law, so we are not fooled by that. last rebuttal. >> quick example. divorce or beebee mama situation, can't go see my child because the man has in order old and i have to adhere to this and that. be a man. this is my take. be a man, go see your son and daughter like men do. you don't need to ask permission to do what men do. that is -- i just wanted your take on that. >> okay. >> young lady. >> so you've discussed how black art particularly black music contributes to an idea of a collective identity and then no one can deny what michael jackson and jimi hendrix have

contributed to the mainstream idea of black, but you have also discussed how music is not consumed the same way today that it was 50 years ago. there is no, as determined, massive musical moment that really defines an era. so do you still think that music has the same impact on racial identity now that it did 20 or 30 years ago? >> that is a good question and she is referring to an essay that i just wrote on the salon.com why i missed the model culture. talking about how as far back as the early 90's, the 80's, 70's, 60's, there was this system of distribution of culture that allows that there were fewer artists in front of all of our eyeballs at one time so somebody could become a massive celebrity, massive icon. and think about the moment when a thriller came out. every betty white and black was listening at the same time. and i experienced the same thing when nirvana's "never mind,"

came out to greet everybody was listening. dr. trey chronicles the same thing. you can go james brown has a massive impact all of us and the system of cultural distribution now has changed since before you were born there were three television stations. [laughter] when i was little. so the next day everybody would talk about what was on johnny carson. now there are at least a thousand television stations. is everybody watching the same thing? you are watching the shows from last night but you have dvr, what have you. so this partner for the culture to connect us, and that is absolutely happening within the black cultural identity, not just the sort of fragmentation of what it means to be black, but also the fragmentation of culture in general. so, to think about a james brown

figure who is a massive figure who thinks all white people for the most part and black people have an opinion on james brown and probably almost all michael jackson doing the same sort of thing. who is doing that now? beyonce to a certain extent jay-z is very fragmented kanye is very polarized. i'm not playing kanye for my grandmother. [laughter] so who can do that now? who can bring all black people together on a cultural level? i don't think that person exists, and as for both those reasons what's happened to culture, black culture in particular. the problem with that, to deal with that is there used to be generational so we look back in the 60's and we look at what motown did and we bonded with

the parties and talked about motown music and what is that for now? like typical musical sharing experience with the white what are you listening to and he named three artists i've never heard of and there is nothing for the bond over the cultural level. so, we are missing out on the chance to have artists who bring us together culturally and that's not just happening for black people it's happening for white people as well. >> would you say that the consumption of pop culture is facilitating and allows us more freedom to, you know, find our own way because we don't have the seminal icons that are sort of setting the tone? >> perhaps. i mean i think it is being driven more by the regional diversity, the educational diversity, the class diversity within the culture. those sort of things especially

the educational diversity and how that is allowing us -- evin for my parents and grandparents segregation the class's live together. the janitor lived near the doctor. we understood each other. we knew each other and had a cohesion but it's not possible now. the janitor lives in bense dhaka, using the example, the janitor lives here and the doctor lives where? [inaudible] [laughter] so, you know, those are the things that are dividing us. >> i find it interesting that the biggest argument, i put that idea on atwitter that there is nobody connecting as maliki james brown and michael jackson and the number one name that kept coming up is beyonce.

it didn't come not be enough but i say in this room and nobodies like you missed that one up, beyonce is the one. it's true you would say that and i don't mean to say that. now from knoxville tennessee the university of tennessee history professor shows us the papers of andrew jackson, a 17 volume series of andrew jackson speeches, of letters and other writings. >> the andrew jackson papers is a project that's been going on for several decades to collect and order and transcribing and publish andrew jackson's complete documentary record. every letter he wrote, every letter that was written to him, his presidential messages on his

military orders scratch the paper on which he wrote notes, the autobiographical reminiscences, everything, every piece of paper that still survived on which andrew jackson left his dna and publisher these in a series of volumes are arranged chronologically as a record to be used by historians and anyone curious about andrew jackson in the times. i've been working on the project eight years as the director we back in the 1980's i was an assistant editor on the project and the project we plan 16 or 17 volumes we've published eight of them. volume mine is about to come out. we are in the middle of the presidency right now this is where we produce the volume. if you look around the room you will see boxes. all of these boxes are full of flowers and in each folder is and andrew jackson document. the ones out on the table are the ones we are working on now

from the year 1831 this is for volume nine in the series and if you open a folder, say this one, this is a letter from jackson to his secretary of the treasury written on june 6, 1831. a open it up, here's a photocopy that andrew jackson's handwriting. this letter is at the university of pennsylvania that's where we photocopied it and there are also several other versions because it provoked a little controversy and got into the daily newspapers. what we do is first we produce a transcription of a letter like this and we transcribe it and put on footnotes if any explanation is necessary, which it often is coming and we send it to the university of tennessee press and the publish

it in one of our volumes. we are finding a lot of information about everything. jackson's papers are a window into everything going on in the united states during his presidency. he gets letters from everybody. he gets petitions from indian leaders come he gets letters from several of these, from mothers whose husbands are dead and the only son was drunk when he enlisted in the army and needs him home and could the president please release him or we get petitions from pardons from criminals, of course is from army officers and navy officers and foreign diplomats and officers of the government. so almost any subject that a historian is interested in this period has information on it on our volume but we are also learning because the focus is trucks and we are learning an awful lot about jackson's personality. a famously controversy character.

there is a debate raging among historians about what made the man take for instance whether he was a crazy man with an uncontrolled temper, or whether he was a shrewd and calculating politician who faked his outburst for the political lessons. he didn't control himself so you have these two opposing pictures to battle back and forth about which was jackson as one historian portrayed him a tiger pacing in his cage or was he again a shrewd calculating politician. the answer to these is yes he was all of these things. his character was so larger-than-life. i hate to use that phrase that he was.

it involved so many different clashing aspects within one person. i ceased to be surprised by things jackson will do what he will do something amazing. something that you don't expect every day. >> water some of the things you didn't expect to read or find out? >> i didn't realize the full extent to which jackson was emotionally engaged in the famous affair. this is a sex scandal involving the secretary of war which led to the breakup of the cabinet in 1831. 1831 is the volume we are working on now, so there is a lot on this. jackson fantasized -- terrie is no better word, fantasized his own vice president, john c. calhoun, as -- and this is jackson's phrase and agent of satan and he wrote letters these are not for public display, these are letters to his own, in

one case his own niece saying john calhoun is behind everything. he's behind the sex scandal, he's the kind some political troubles in alabama, every vote that goes against me in congress and jackson could write this letter that is almost literally paranoid. by the way this is a letter that no one had seen until last year when the owner of it contacted us and said would you like to see this letter? jackson can write this letter and then turn around and write another letter and say i've got him trapped let's see how he gets out of this. the library of congress as the largest single connection when jackson went home from washington he took trunks of papers with him and after he died of those papers went here and there. in the 1880s of the cincinnati

newspaper editor phoned them all eventually the library of congress bought them. we are talking about maybe 100,000 pieces of paper. those are what jackson called his private papers. than official records or the national archives so if jackson wrote a letter on business let's say to the secretary of the war and wound up in the department in the national archives. we have searched through all of the papers from that era in the national archives and. but other letters wound up in other places. jackson wrote letters for instance to the secretary of the navy from north carolina, so his papers are a university of north carolina chapel hill. some of them are at duke university and some of them are in the hands of defendant's commission and those are the ones we still find out about. somebody calls up, in fact somebody called yesterday come the day before yesterday and said i have a letter from andrew jackson, would you like to see it? and of course