done, what does can it -- what are the, you know, what are the consequences down the road, what is the relationship of civilians, of citizens to military service and war? and i have my own strong feelings about this, but so much of what frustrated me was just the challenge of finding language to say something that wasn't already being said, that didn't already seem completely, completely obvious or just sort of fall to one side or another of really, really contentious and difficult public debates that were going on. and at the same time, i'd also been spending some time reading military memoir and biographies and journalistic accounts, and i started a couple years later i started to read some of the first, the first generation of memoirs that came from the wars in iraq and afghanistan including kayla's first book, including a lot of other really

excellent literature that a sort of came from this first generation of contemporary war memoirs and reporters and just started to have this sense of the activities that war actually consists of are often, often bare of strange, of stranger or sort of -- i can't find the word. they often don't relate in any sort of direct way to the things that we tend to talk about war as being about. ..

so, that was the spirit in which i did this on and it's something that i still find myself thinking about a lot but thanks for the question. >> i hear that question mark especially since i have a military background. and i mentioned before reading some articles and being interested in trying to understand that and it's also around the time in the newspapers starting to release reports about the suicide

epidemic among soldiers. a kid killed himself not far from where i was living so i felt strangely complicit and yet having no power to understand what was going on, you know for the people that were walking around me so not able to understand their background or their pain or why this was happening. and i guess i would define if i have to categorize as we so often do, i would say this is a book like sa. when i say that i just mean going back to the word to try. a series of attempts to emphasize his life is different though my own and i think one thing that frustrates me in the world generally generally is when we are dismissive of other people's realities and our ow

own -- but her own experience and reality on a pedestal and i thought you know what reality is so easy to dismiss but what if we try to take it to heart and try to understand what are the operations and embodiments of what they are representing. there's no way to really say it. i'm not moving from one hallucination to another throughout my whole life where reality is necessarily the wrong one. i think we can also kind of see that disparity happening when we look at soldiers corpses. people get angry but if we really look at the complicated world that existed prior to that moment most likely you'd be able to. a moment of empathy in the chaos and lack of sleep. all of that can contribute to moments where the morals we apply to our world and the world over there i think is very complicated and too easily categorized as understood in a

way that is black-and-white. so i wanted to get a really nuanced look at a mind that was experiencing, and interiority. one thing i say in my book is once we label ptsd it's sort of gives us permission to dismiss it because we feel like we are the understand it. oh here's a label. we love nice boxes. really the experiences are so varied that i'm not sure everyone fits in those neat categories all the time. and so trying to break up that box and leave room for experiences and push away some of the language that's out there that might be actually limiting our understanding of human beings that have gone through difficult experiences in war. >> when i came home from iraq, i felt invisible as a woman that. we would go out, groups of us

would go out to get beers and somebody would buy the guys around the free beers because they had just gotten back from the poor and they literally meant the guys. they assumed that the women who showed up were just wives or girlfriends or hangers on. people don't look at me and think combat veteran. so i wrote my first book to try to show a little bit more port it means to be a woman in today's military. i did not want jessica lynch and libby england to be the only women that most people could think up when i heard about a woman soldier and i wanted to give more nuance and depth to it. but i had written terrible poetry when i was in high school and i didn't quite understand that writing a book in letting it be published would mean i'd have to talk about in public with people with journalists saying what's it like to watch someone bleed to death on live television. i was not emotionally prepared for that and that was a challenging experience for me. and so when i reached the point where i knew that i wanted to

tell my husband story and our family story of that journey from war trauma to healing i knew i had to wait. so i had processed processed what i'd been through instead of trying to process it by writing it in the middle of it. i wanted to be able to pull back and see the arc of his recovery and put things in a bigger context. so i waited a lot longer to write the second book compared to when the first one came out and i'm glad that i did. the other thing i think it's interesting you both touched on that gap between what civilians understand in and what they don't and still who is on a panel of ripe for this one, he wrote an essay and i think "the new york times" that really struck me about the failure of imagination that relates to what we think of as the civil military divide. it really struck me to read that because so many people have said to me i just can't imagine what you went through. i just can't imagine going to

war. i can't imagine that and i'm like you and i we go see the movie avatar. we imagine blue aliens. we are willing to emotionally put ourselves there. we are willing to watch cartoo cartoons, we are willing to imagine that but we aren't willing to imagine what it's like to be a soldier and go to war anymore. why is that? as servicemembers and is veteran somehow we expect that. we let people say i can imagine what that's like and where like nope, you can't. you have to have been there and that's a failure on our part too. i think i'm trying to do my part to say here is what it was like and i would like civilians to take it and to try to put themselves there and have the willingness to imagine. >> yeah you will touched on something i felt so fascinating

is very rarely just bubbles of empathy and that's what able to find briefly in the smallest amount of time. it's just that it's fascinating to me like you said veterans as a culture we are our own worst enemy. like you said you can imagine. we keep everyone at arms distance and when they start coming, no, no you were not there and yet we don't understand why people don't understand us. so it tends to go around and around and around. but also to say that the circumstances you talk about with a good friend of mine, robert and it's just that you are not just joe the family guy

over there and that's the disconnect trying to understand where the rubber meets the road but when you pull the veil back you have to understand that it's really messed up and it's unjustifiable. so i guess one of the questions i would like to ask people is what do you feel, if you describe it i have my own definition of that. people say it's like the scarlet letter and it's a badge of honor. it's a true sense of enlightenment because i know what it takes to be able to live in the worst and best side of humanity and i'm very blessed by it. >> if you could define it from what you have seen with families and soldiers and stuff but would you put onto it? >> i will start my answer with a philosophical qualification which is that so there's this

philosopher of science who writes about the history of mental illness and one of the things, so he has this great wine he's writing about the different disorder about multiple personality disorder where he says you know people ask if this diagnosis is real or if this condition is real and when people ask is a thing real, one of the important follow-up questions is well a real what? real according to holmes, real for home, real in what ways? so in that sense like i would never, i would never argue that ptsd is not real. it is a name. it's a diagnosis that's encoded in dsm dsm. something described by a set of experiences. it is a label that a lot of people use to understand their experiences. it's a label that a lot of

health care providers use to understand the experiences of their patients as a label that families used to understand the experiences of their loved one. it's a diagnosis that's because of its peculiar history if you get it gives you access to certain kinds of treatment and benefits that you would not have access to if you are diagnosed with a similar disorder that is not as easily linked to military service or exposure to violence. so all of those things, all of those things make ptsd real and very particular kinds of ways. and so one of the ways that it was originally described in the third edition of dsm which was the first time it was formalized as a psychiatric diagnosis and early 1980s was to sort of

paraphrase the wording in the diagnosis as a normal reaction to extreme circumstances. and i think there's a tremendous amount of value in describing dramatic post-traumatic stress in that way. there is a lot of language of normalcy that people invoke when they i talk about post-traumatic stress to be able to say that yes, to feel these particular ways after going through difficult experiences as normal. at the same time that can help people. it can be very reassuring. it can normalize their experiences and they can remove the -- from their experiences but at the same time the meat not seem normal to people around you and so just to sort of label something normal or not normal it's easy to forget that demands

a whole lot of other work that has to follow very much along the lines of what kayla was describing a moment ago. and so, and i guess one last thing i will say about it is that because of how we tend to think about mental illness diagnoses in the contemporary u.s. there are sort of this notion that either you have something or you don't and especially with something like ptsd which is post-traumatic stress which in many ways and for many folks is regarded as a normal response to extreme circumstances but a response that many people may not suffer. ptsd is a disorder version of that normal stress and the threshold at which it becomes disordered has been changed multiple times over the last 30 years. people don't look whether it

changes with the people around them. and so there's this way of being attentive, of being attentive and imaginative and apathetic to people's experience as the dynamism and complexity of that experience i think is also, that's actually maybe an invitation that ptsd gives us that we may not realize that we are receiving. because it sounds straightforward. it sounds transparent and it sounds authority of medicine and it could potentially be an opportunity to constitute an explanation in itself. and so one of the things that i think when you look at folks actually experiences what you find is the opposite of that, but that label is the middle of something or the beginning of something rather than the end of something. so i will stop my answer. >> that was perfect. he said something about a ptsd

space. what exactly did you mean by that? >> it has to do with this idea of giving a space to imagine and empathize with soldiers coming home with ptsd but also more literally space. after homecoming there is just sort of, i was doing a little bit of research into other cultures and how they respond to the soldiers and quite a few have -- not for example in mozambique they have soldiers go away from the village for many weeks and if they killed someone or did something that has been bothering them and giving them flashbacks or nightmares they have to re-enact that a event over and over again. they are not separate from now. they are in dialogue with it and interacting with the soldiers experience. so it doesn't seem like americans of allow for that kind of transition or even want to

really have it. it's more of a let's go back back to the sum public celebration of heroism that we sent you off with when you get home. so i don't think there's space space for mourning in this culture at all. i think we have a problem with being said and i think it's ok okay. i really clung to this definition that ken was talking about that is a very normal life experience to an abnormal extraordinary event. unfortunately we could say war is always happening so as part of our, certainly part of my entire adult life now and you know it's a foreign war. so somehow i'm going to have to take that step to engage more thoroughly but yeah ptsd is whatever the dsm wanted to be on

a more technical level. health insurance you know cultural taboos play a part in the definition. jonathan shea has a new definition, moral injury which i could talk about a little more which is sort of looking at it as an intrusion into civilian life based on actions that would be considered immoral on the ground here. so yeah it's a question of if you decided definition they could break apart and you would have to go to another definition so it's slippery. >> yeah, he talked about the caregiver -- caregivers in the narrow sense of feeling that it's just for the guys and is quite liberal but i always say my job was simple. it really was. i just walked around in a circle in afghanistan. i didn't -- bin laden are

anything but no one ever trained were told were taught how to wait for three months for a phonecall or giving birth to two children were all the while thinking she may be a widow. and if it's a character trait of pure honest trade of love and caring is the fact that there are so many people who are able to love people like me who don't love themselves anymore and it's hard. i don't understand. at any given point i would have been upset. as someone who has been through that, i felt it was just a real hidden part of the military culture, spouses and kids and everyone. >> yeah.

so military women who are married, half are married to other servicemembers. it's a shockingly high percentage and so for me i had my transition, my reintegration from iraq, i went from a war zone to america which was weird and then i got out of the army and went from being a sergeant to being a civilian and went from being a soldier to being a spouse and that was weird. the first time i went to the pf with my salmon i.d. card instead of my white cat i felt this obligation to tell the people checking i.d.s that i was at that. i was in the army before, like they care. like the ridiculous sibling would care that i was in the army. i remember that time of transition and it took me a long time to find my way as a military self. i never felt connected to the military community and that was

tough for me. didn't feel like i had anything in common with them because i have been to war. when i got home and i saw these stickers on cars at the commissary parking lot that said army wife, toughest job in the army, i wanted to keep their cars. nobody's shooting at you. it can't be that hard. i was not empathetic at all. you have free health insurance compared to how many other americans and if you have a family readiness group that's here just for you i had known that before them at all until way down the road until probably have my own kids. my husband had become a volunteer firefighter getting back to the community and he gave gone from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.. i'm here with two kids under age two and there are women who do this for a year or 15 months. okay, yeah i'm developing empathy for them. it took time for that for me to

develop that. i also, i wonder sometimes about whether my own military service helped or hurt us as a couple. in some ways i think having been in the army part of the reason i stayed during the worst parts the worst part of brian's recovery was because of the warrior ethos and that ingrained in you message of leave no fallen comrade behind. if he had been wanted on the battlefield just because we were on the homefront i felt i can't leave him in the death of his injury but at the same time i was imbued with that message of there's plenty of time when you are dead. i didn't ask for help when i should have because i was so full of that mentality myself and i wonder if i have been a civilian what i have broken sooner and said please help us

we cannot do this on our own which complicates it as well. but it wasn't actually until calm and this is so weird and embarrassing to admit but it wasn't until i had been home from the war for probably eight years, then married, had two children and when i was in iraq i lived with just the constant day-to-day knowledge that i could die at any moment and i didn't care. it did not bother me. everybody dies. what are you so upset about especially if you believe in heaven. shouldn't you be actively excited about this? i did not understand. its death, we all die, deal with it. when my kids, they are 18 months apart so one time my son was two and my daughter was six months old. they were playing with each other and they were being really sweet. he was tickling her and she was

laughing and it hit me, i'll calm by god when i die and never get to see that megan and i freaked out. it wasn't until that moment eight years after i came home but i suddenly realized that i don't want to die. that was a shocking realization that it took you eight years before i was open to that level of feeling and that level of empathy and that level of connection to my spouse, to a man that i chose to marry but i still wouldn't have that all the way. so i feel like i still don't fully understand what it's like to be a military spouse who has never served and never goes through that closing off point who is always that open and use for somebody who comes home close to. i think that's got to be incredibly difficult challenge. >> thank you so much for that. that was amazing. so i just want to ask another question.

we are also going to have a signing afterwards. if you could say and this is for all of you, if you could, what was the one thing that you gained the most from this in the sense that just giving someone a the time of day just to be heard. it's also another problem that we have feeling marginalized as a whole and it's tough to be able to find a way to stand out in the crowd and to be an individual and not just a voice for others. >> that's a tough one but i guess your comment makes me think that one of the things that was the most rewarding and incredible to me about doing this project was what people's willingness to share their experiences and sometimes in the

really intense ways and sometimes with minimal preamble, to sit down with someone with a tape recorder and my list of questions and say okay well the first question i really like to ask is tell me about your service in iraq and that is where just about everyone i was talking to have been. they would start talking and wouldn't stop talking for two hours. and to know that, to know that i was, to know that i was being trusted with stories that people felt like were worth sharing and that was something that thinking about all these problems of apathy and communication and

representation, like you know it takes, it seems like it takes a lot of trust. it takes a lot of showing up. it takes a lot of willingness just to sort of you know, to open your mouth and tell a really difficult or complicated or intense or violent or awful story that means something to you but that you may not know what it's going to look like or sound like to the other person on the other end. so actually that's a big part of where my original sentiments that jen and cable have also expressed in other ways, the sense that there is this artificially constructed divide. the fact that so many folks that i talked to were even as they might have claimed, even as they

might have asserted the existence of that divide were willing to share these intense and difficult stories with someone who didn't share that experience and who they trusted to do right with the stories. and so i think that also strongly informed by science of what is possible and hopefully why it's important and why it matters to people. >> i have so many different answers to that question but a couple of things. first it made me really to stress language and that it changes culture to culture and changes every generation and tracking that history really helped me sort of undo some of the stereotypes and narratives

that we are relying on today to understand war and american foreign policy and psychiatric studies. so that was really wonderful and here is someone who you know, who dropped out of high school. he didn't care about any of that language anyway and to hear him talk about it in such a raw manner whatever language was available to him was really beautiful and poetic and it seemed to make sense of the world. i really like giving someone a chance to speak and show me the world as opposed to relying on others people's language to construct the world. and in the terms of this question representing suffering which is other people, there's a constant question that comes up when you are writing about grief from other people. one thing that got me early on when i have this reaction is

well, your trauma is the same as my trauma. he didn't try to put this experience on a hierarchy of grief. he was trying to close that divide right away. he didn't label it as a civilian military divide. he was kind of saying you can understand this easily etc. so i really like that invitation to his world and trying to sort of write about experiences like the military atrocity, anything that is outside the normal relative experience in making it not just about the topic but about how humans react to violence or love and grief and all these human emotions and trying to create a portrait that was nuanced enough to transcend the topic. and that was really fulfilling to me as a writer to try to fully envision him as a human being on the page and not just sort of a cliché in that

language. >> for me i have gotten e-mails from people saying i read your book or heard your interview on the radio and i'm going for mental health treatment. that for me has been the most rewarding thing about this book. >> yes sir. >> i came in a little bit late and i missed your presentation but i'm interested in what you have had to say. i came enduring jennifer's. i have tremendous respect for all of you for the work you do and have done to put a human face on what war does to people and i think i'm coming from a

little different perspective. i'm a vietnam veteran. i'm a member of an organization called veterans for peace. you may or may not be aware of it but i have met a lot of iraqi veterans of that organization although we tend to be overly represented by old folks like me. but i just want to say our perspective is really that we can't allow ourselves to say war is normal and that's acceptable. no one knows better than a veteran what the cost of war really is. unfortunately we have a country where that's 1% of the population at this point that i've experienced it. our mission is really to educate the american people are

ultimately accountable for sending you guys wherever you went and for people to understand it. we have to find alternatives to wars as an instrument of our national policy. if anyone is interested in learning more about the organization veterans for peace you can google it and get our web site. he just wanted to let people know that there are veterans who are i think finding some healing in trying to prevent their kids from having to live through what they have lived through. thank you. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> we have a few more minutes if anyone has any more questions. >> very quickly, air force that vietnam, the father of a

daughter who spent eight years in the navy who is married to a marine who is currently in baghdad working as a contractor. some of this sounds familiar. i myself write civil war history and i'm just wondering, all of you folks, knowing what you know and have found out all that you have found out in the experience do you ever look back a little bit and begin to think hey i kind of understand now some of these people that go back to vietnam and world war ii and all the way back to the civil war. we have had a whole of people that came out of that war. they didn't know what to call it.

because this kind of informed your view of what you thought you knew about history? >> jennifer mentioned jonathan shea and his books have been very important for me and helping me to contextualize trauma. he wrote achilles in vietnam exploring post-traumatic stress through the lens of american soldiers experiences in vietnam and with homecoming and similarly exploring those together and showing very clearly that what we now call ptsd existed back then. i have seen the persians put it on and you see clearly the trauma at war is something we

have always experienced that we didn't label it for a long time. that's important to me partly because i have heard from some people like what's wrong with your generation and all these guys came back from world war ii. they were just fine and they were not fine. it was like don't bother dad while he is sitting in his chair with his whiskey. they weren't fine. we just didn't talk about it and vietnam vets had to fight so hard to get recognized even though yeah after the civil war and george carlin did a great bit talking about there was shellshocked in world war i and it was battle fatigue and world war ii and they talked about how it in the beginning you could picture what i caused. shell shock, like a shell goes off and it shocks you and it gets more and more clinical and tele sounds like something may have happened to a vehicle and it's a really terrific fit. learning more about it in historical terms helping both understand my own family's

experience better understand history a little better and the challenges for people who were not allowed to talk about this. my dad wrote to my great uncle when i came home and was having trouble in my great uncle wrote back and said oh my god i had no idea but i have ptsd. reading about what your daughter is going good now i know what's wrong with me. he never talked about as i think it's helpful for everyone to be able to ground this in a circle in a global context and see there are different ways to conceive of how to come back for more in time and space. >> i would just add to that both the cross-cultural element and one of the things that is striking to me in thinking about this in historical terms is the way that, the way that these

efforts do individually and collectively negotiate and deal with the intense and potentially devastating experiences of war, is that something that is perennial and widespread? somehow, and i think it's historian ben shepard who make some version of this argument who says every time i go to war we actually are surprised by the fact this happened and in a way going back to the previous gentleman's comment the way th that, we imagine war as though it is always the same thing every time it happens when in fact the circumstances that give rise to it and people who are participating in it the circumstances under which it happened the diagnoses that we apply to it to make sense of it, all of those things give us

stories to tell about what people's experiences mean when they come through to the other side. those stories can potentially be tremendously productive and useful and healing and they can also be tremendously restrictive or confining or even stigmatizing or damaging. and so just trying to sort of be attentive and giving particular names to things conveys all sorts of meaning on its own. and so it's worth thinking carefully and often critically about what the names are that we want to give to particular experiences and what stories they do and don't help us tell but thanks for that question. >> i thank all of you for coming and thank you so much for the panel. it's been amazing.

[applause] >> they will be signing books immediately after. thank you all so much. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> thank you for attending this session. >> wait for the mic. >> good afternoon everyone. thanks for coming to the southern festival of books and i'm glad to be hosting this session exploring the impact of

inequality. we have three great offers on the panel which i will introduce in just a minute. before we begin the session just some housekeeping duties. the session is scheduled to end at 5:00 so we will wrap the session a few minutes before then. after the session is over all of the books, although the authors will sign the books. the books will be for sale in the book sales area. a portion of every book sold directly benefits as great festival so i encourage you to do that and come and get your book signed by the author by the authors but as far as the format will introduce each other to start the session with some questions about the current books and how they became interested in the topic. we want the session to be as interactive as possible and we encourage you to ask questions. their mics on both sides of the room so at any time if you have a question please feel free to give up -- come up and come to the microphone and give a question. first, i will briefly introduce

the offers and we will get to the questions. here are my left is alice goffman an assistant professor at the university of wisconsin-madison. her new book on the run fugitive like an american city investigates the war on drugs has had on one philadelphia community she calls sixth street. after 40 years the war on drugs has done little to prevent drug from being sold or used but it has created a little-known surveillance state and america's most disadvantaged neighborhoods. alice spent six years living in the sixth street neighborhood and focuses on an unforgettable task of young african-american men caught up in the threat of surveillance and warrants. next we have chris tomlinson who

is the author of tomlinson hill. as the great great grandson of texas slaveholders award-winning journalist chris tomlinson wanted to find out what crimes his ancestors had committed to maintain their power and privilege. in his new book tomlinson hill he writes about the slaveowning part of his family history. he also writes about the slaves who kept the thomason -- tomlinson name after they were freed and traces their family tree. chris tomlinson is a columnist for "the houston chronicle" in a fifth generation texan. he spent 14 years as a foreign correspondent with the "associated press" covering africa, the middle east and south asia. he's has reported nine conflicts raging from the end of apartheid in south africa post-genocide rwanda fighting in somalia and afghanistan and iraq. and then we have dr. ellen

griffith spears who teaches environmental history and interdisciplinary nick which program and the department of american studies at the university of alabama. earning a ph.d. in american studies from emory university her research focuses on environmental and civil rights history as a u.s. spouse in a global context with the emphasis on social studies and science technology and environmental public health. she has spoken on these themes around the u.s. and internationally and has authored numerous articles and essays including contributions in the american south in the global world emerging msn society negotiating the public health agenda and where we stand voices of southern dissent. her book, baptized in pcb, race pollution injustice in an all-american town has received

the arthur j. -- price and public health history from the american public health association. thank you all three authors for attending the session today. i just want to start first to give each one of you an overview of your book and how you became interested in the subject and the research process so we will start with alice in the corner. >> thank you so much for moderating. hi everybody. how are you doing? up until the 1970s the u.s. had a stable incarceration rate very flat and in 1970 it started climbing up and leveling off in the 2007 extremely high rate. we now present five times more people per-capita than we did four years ago. seven to nine times more than any western european nation, more than china.

only the forced labor camps under stalin and the former ussr have approached these levels of penal confinement. so the book that i wrote i guess it's an underground look at look at america's prison boom and i think for many people in this country it affects many citizens not at all. many citizens don't even realize that is happening because this is a pretty targeted effort in the african-american neighborhoods in poor neighborhoods white neighborhoods and latino neighborhoods but particularly african-american neighborhoods. so when i was a freshman in college i got a job working at the cafeteria on campus where i was in college at the university of pennsylvania and then i started tutoring the grandchildren of my boss at the cafeteria who was an african-american woman in her

60s who lived in a mixed african-american neighborhood near the university and then i you show one of the young women i was tutoring introduced me to her cousin ronnie ... come home from a juvenile detention center and from ronnie, run he introduced me to mike who was his older cousin and mike and i became friends. a few weeks after mike and i met his uncle's house which was the last known address was raided by the police and they said he was wanted on a shooting charge. mike mike had not done any shooting to his knowledge but he now had a warrant out for his arrest for a shooting charge, very serious charge. he lived on the run for a number of weeks until he scrape the money together to pay a lawyer and then he turned himself in. then he was in the county jail

and after a couple of weeks i started to visit him in the county jail. that was the first time i'd ever been to a jail. he was thrown and a whole which is solitary confinement and that his relatives but the money together to make his bail. then he came home with this case hanging over his head. he had to go to court every month. so i started going to the court dates with him and the first court date he had was in this local courthouse in the neighborhood. as we walked in he shared a cigarette with a guy standing outside outside who we happen to know when i thought that's funny he happen to know a guy standing outside. then when we walked in he created half of the men and there he knew them from the neighborhood and i started to realize what was happening. the other young men in the

courtroom that day weren't there just for violent charges. th would therefore unpaid court fees and probation and parole violations like failure to pass an alcohol test or make curfew. they weren't in school. they were sitting in court. at the time i didn't know about the prison raid and that we were incarcerating 6% of african-american young men who aren't graduating from high school. i had no idea as a sophomore in college and a white woman coming from a very middle-class background. that point i asked mike if i could write about his life for what was then my senior thesis. he said yeah great. i spent the next six years living in that neighborhood and getting to know his friends and relatives and writing this book.

>> i was about seven years old in dallas texas and i knew school busing was about to begin. dallas was finally going to desegregate their schools. i'm not that old. i was about 1972 or 73 and i became very well aware of race. then my grandfather said to me, our family once held slaves and they loved us so much they took tomlinson as their last name. even then i thought wow, that's a great story. there are black tomlinson's and their white tomlinson sent me come from the same place, the same slave plantation called of course, to the hill. now like most southerners i grew up with this idea of aristocra aristocracy, that being the

descendent of slaveholders meant that we were upper-class and we were in the same ilk as scarlett o'hara and rhett butler and this made us, this made us special and southern culture and we would go to school and think chico that would reinforce that idea and a -- even more. now i didn't come from means. my father drilled holes and bowling for a living and we lived in a horrible apartment and we were on the poor side of town. but, that's why i think i grasped onto this idea of this great southern heritage to somehow make me feel better about where i was in the world. and it wasn't until i was a journalist in south africa in 1993 covering township violence

and then i went on to watch nelson mandela be sworn into office. they had something called the truth and records -- reconciliation where suddenly you have had these perpetrators of white privilege and apartheid sitting in the same room in front of a mixed race panel justifying their actions. you have the victims up there in the same room in the same place having that same conversation saying what they had seen in the south. i thought wow this is very powerful because even desmond tutu, the archbishop, knew that we could throw people in jail and we could throw them into prison for the crimes against humanity for the things they had done during apartheid. but that wasn't going to solve the larger societal problem of coming together and have some sort of community. i also covered the end of the genocide in rwanda and i lived in rwanda for two and a half years.

i watch them struggle with this problem of defamation where 10% of the population was eliminated through genocide. and again i visited the prisons. there were a million people in prison in a prison system that was only 209,000 people and the conditions were horrible. why we could keep these people in jail and prison for murder, that rwanda have the death penalty but you can't execute a million people. we have to have the new process and it needs to be truth and reconciliation. they set up the good court system where again we have perpetrators and victims sitting together in the same place confronting their past and that's when i realized we had never done that in this country. we talk about race every day.

race is a big part of our lives to think about. but we don't think about how we got here. we haven't had a reckoning of what did our ancestors know and what did they do. what can we hold them responsible for? i knew i knew when i came home from africa in 2007 that there was no such thing as a slaveholder and that is a revolutionary thought for still a lot of people with my background living in the south. so tomlinson hill -- "tomlinson hill" tries to have that reckoning. i follow to families of to families comments and one white woman black from the slave days to the present days where my contemporaries the most successful tomlinson of all names ladainian who made a lot of money and gathered a lot of fame as a football player for

the san diego chargers. so that's what i try to do is look at what happens, why it happens, what people did and what they knew and have that accounting of my family history. so that's "tomlinson hill." >> "baptized in pcbs" examines these questions of race, place and inequality from the standpoint of alabama were chemical contamination fell squarely on the african-american neighborhoods and surrounded the town's chemical plants. people may know and as the dust is starkly in the civil rights movement and the site of the fire bombing of the bus. but aniston was also the place where for nearly 40 years the chemical company, the monsanto chemical company made pcbs or

poly-chlorinated biphenyls hence the title "baptized in pcbs." local people who lived in the neighborhood come african-americans who lived east and north of the plant and the working-class whites who lived south into the west were subject to what one health expert testified at an outrageously high body burden of pcbs that they carried in their blood. so i decided to write this book for two reasons. one is i was working at the time initially for the civil rights research institute in atlanta, the southern regional council and i was interested in historically how these inequalities were produced. a lot of people were doing cross sectional maps looking at the

distribution of pollution, showing the cross-section in time. i was interested in how did this come to be? aniston was known in its founding in the post-civil war south as the model city of the new south and it was an industrial utopia characterized. so how did it become to call than 2002 by 60 minutes a toxic town usa? how did this conceivably have been? the other reason i wrote the book is that i met the people locally who were involved in this fight. as you can imagine when people find out. it turns out that the producing companies, monsanto chemical and its corporate partners had known since 1937, they were told by the dean at the harvard school of public health that these chemicals that they were

producing cause possible systemic toxic effects. several of the workers had broken out in severe acne. one of the companies using these chemicals and their processes, three workers had died. that's when they called in the research to figure out what was going on. so if the chemical company knew as early as 1937 and if the world really new in 1966 when a researcher working in sweden identified pcbs as pervasive persistent and toxic, then why did it take until the 1990s that the people who were living near this plant came to find out? so i've met the local people who were involved, people like cassandra roberts who was the leader of the sweet valley cop town environmental task force.

cassandra had grown up in sweet valley and when she learned that the area was so polluted that several dozen families were going to need to be immediately relocated as she said to me, that's one i went to fighting. i also met -- actually her granddaddy worked at the plant of the 1930s. she was come to the plant gate and on the way home holding his hand and she wondered if that simple act contributed to the pcb body burden that she carried in her body. and in 2003, 2002 and 2003, people may have heard of this. there was an enormous settlement. folks locally took monsanto to court and won $600 billion, very successful litigation.