>> well, this was in the two largest or multiple lawsuits, toxic tort lawsuits, nuisance suits against monsanto and the corporate partners. the 600 million was split between two of the major lawsuits. the lawyers had contracts that gave them 40% of that amount, which was the subject of no small consternation, and there have been demonstrations and such at the lawyers' offices in one cases there were 18,000 plaintiffs and that meant that the individual average was $7,725 per person. that many people got more, most people got less. that is not enough to start a new mortgage for an elderly person who needs to move from their home. and so there was -- people hoped the settlement would allow this

deeply driven town to unify, but the furor around the finances kept things in motion. there were other features of the settlement which were innovative. one was funding to support a health clinic, educational foundation, because pcbs are associated with neurotoxic deficits in children, where funding was to go to scholarships and education. there were some health studies that were funded at the same time. not exactly through the same sae so the researchers are back doing a longitudinal study of the folks there. so, there have been some important things that came out of the settlement, but i think one of the things you're talking about, the need for criminal justice reform. we really need reform in how we

manage toxic chemicals in this country. the law that governs it, actually banned pcbs in 1976 because they were found to be so toxic. actually the ban was never really complete. the epa says that it left more than 750 million pounds of pcbs in youth, and the law that -- the toxic substance control act was ineffective to begin with and now badly out of date. so there's a big night congress right now over how to reform that law so that we have better regulation of toxic chemicals. >> my other question is, since we have these interweaving books, what is your reaction when you hear people say that this is the greatest kin -- country in the world? i'm -- >> i wish i could remember the line for line from that hbo

television show, where the journalists answers, this used to be a great country. you know, i think the problem with this idea of american exceptionalism is that we invite other countries to claim to be exceptional as well. i think history is full of countries that thought they were exceptional, and they went off and built empires and did horrible things. i see what is happening in russia today as russian exceptionalism, what is happening in china is chinese exceptionalism and it's the direct response to this idea of american exceptionalism. so, as someone who has reported from 50 countries, i can tell you that every country can make

that claim, and countries that do set themselves up to make major mistakes and overreach. i want to be very positive. the one thing that i got from my book, in doing the research, is goodness, gracious, have we come a long way. i mean, i went into the sharecropper shacks that are still standing in falls county, texas. one of his uncles showed me how to picot ton. the cotton was coming in, and we walked a row, and he showed me this is how you pick, this is how you pull, this is why you do -- you do this one this way or that way. he is 86 years old. and he doesn't have a great life but it sure beats the one that his grandfather did, and his

grandfather was born in slavery. so we have come a long way, and -- but every time we wave the flag and talk about how exceptional we are, we have to remember we have a long way to come. talking constitutions, look at the south african constitution. you compare -- i mean, the rights that a south african is guaranteed are so much greater and wider and deeper than the rights we have in this country, the liberty we enjoy in this country. that's not to say they're living up to that promise. but at least they made a bigger promise to their people than we made to our own. so, are we great country? i'd rather not say.

i'd rather us not try to be great. i think we should just concentrate on being kind. i think we should concentrate on knowing ourselves. and that's one of the reasons why i wrote my book. i don't think we know ourselves. i didn't know all these things about jim crow until i salt down to learn about it -- i sat down to learn about it. and every time i hear someone argue that we have civil rights because we passed an act in 1965, or we passed an amendment in 1865, that why i wrote the book. take a look at the differences. one family, one black, one white, same last name. both bankrupt in 1865, both dirt farmers in 1865. then see how they were treated in the last 160 years and continue to be treated differently. that's not a great country.

>> hi. i'm a sociologist as well, a public sociologist, and my discipline is economic sociology so theman. one of the very interesting things is when you add the immigration -- african-american we see the rise of the latino and people say they're the new black people. so in terms of prison, yes, african-americans are not getting out of the system, declassify -- now -- >> that's a maybe. >> maybe, right. they're trying. eric holder -- >> if we really, really push it will take ages for it to real -- >> look what they're doing in terms of criminalizing immigrants and exception now the privatization, in arizona they're building prisons for women and children while they wait to be deported. so the money -- that's why they're not fighting back, because as long as there's a financial stream coming through, and you look forward. you see kind of the latinos taking the space of the black

people if we don't stay vigilant. it's going to be exactly the same. we won't have the liberties orthos things. just going to be different kind of jim crow going forward. >> sometimes i make the case there are two completely separate justice systems in the country and the one being visited on particularly poor african-american communities is unlike that of the rest of the u.s. population in terms of policing and level of arrest and sentencing and incarceration, and i try to sketch this kind of life on the run that people are being made to lead. sometimes people raise their hand and say -- i study immigration. exactly the same. i.c.e. is doing the same thing. people are living in fear, and undocumented, the biggest growing people incarcerated.

and people say it's completely different. it's hard to draw these comparisons. but i definitely think it's interesting to think about the kind of expansion of the penal system and the kind of just people being granted a diminished form of citizenship. can we agree in this country to have full citizenship for the people living in it? as a basic right. and the kind of staggered levels of citizenship for immigrants. it's very parallel. you have people who are living as fugitives and then people in kind of partial legitimacy all the way. so, yeah. >> i think -- go ahead. >> i'm here in part because marian said i should be sure to come here you. my question has -- really can go to all three of you because i think that truth and reconciliation is long overdue,

is absolutely essential. white people don't know. that's a way that white people could come to know. black people don't get a chance on the daily level to talk about things that -- not just what happened during -- all during jim crow but what happened last week to a young guy that went to cookville and they're not very many black people in cookville, and he -- the police just sort of chased him around town, and then -- he didn't ever have to go to jail or anything, but it's just a constant. and i think that if any of you know anything about truth and reconciliation happening in this country, i'd like to know about it because i'd like to make

contact with -- and each of you could comment on that matter. >> well, thank you for your comment. you're actually making me -- while you're talking, making me think of a couple of max maxims from the south african context. one about -- this question about whether white people know or not, i believe it from nelson mandela, which is -- it's hard to awake a people -- awaken a people pretending to be asleep, and so i think this -- the kind of wilful ignorance, the wilful not knowing, is a real problem to challenge. the other is from alex, who co-chairs the truth and reconciliation committee, and he said, we vastly underestimated the legacy of apartheid. and i think that's true in this

country. we're commemorating this year the 50th anniversary of the civil rights act of 1964. also commemorating in the environmental justice world the clinton executive order, the 20th anniversary of clinton's executive order on environmental justice, requiring all federal agencies not just the epa but all federal agencies to examine their actions based on whether they're going to have a disparate impact. so those laws -- those policies and laws have made some difference. but we still have in the u.s., no statutory law about environmental injustice. the u.n. declaration on human rights is much broader, as you mentioned. many countries take into combat economic and social rights, environmental rights, for all, and so i think we need a broader conception of justice than we

have yet been exercising. >> i had a question about the writing process as it were. everyone that writes has things they come across that disgust them. you guys dealt with huge expansive issues that are so much birth than yourselves. how do you get through and keep going on that train, knowing how disgusting it is along the way? as a human being, everyone has a boundary how far they can go. >> so, there's a chapter of this book that i wrote as an article in a sociology journal, and at the american sociological review, it's called, and after i wrote the article -- it was all about -- in this book there's chapters from different perspectives in the community, and this was -- this article was from the perspective of young

men dealing with warrants and court cases, and i got an e-mail from the subject line of the e-mail was, like, what's a white girl like you know about warrants in philadelphia? parenthesis, from a former warrant unit officer. and i didn't open -- at this point i had seen a level of brutality by white police in philadelphia that i was basically scared of white men who even looked like cops. my heart would start racing. so, i just didn't open the e-mail, and my adviser was like, open the e-mail. open the e-mail. so i opened the e-mail. and it was a guy who was a former warrant officer. so in philadelphia there's many, many different units-all with federal funding, who are looking for men with low-level or high-level warrants and this a clearinghouse for different kinds of warrants and guys go out every day with names and

photos of people, and round up people for arrest. and he had been a warrant unit officer and he had been -- a pitbull bit him while he was raiding a house so he had become associate adjunct professor in criminal justice in a college and gets his sociology journal in the mail. so he contacted me and i was just terrified to be on that side of things, talking to police officers, and that was a time where my own fear and sort of visceral reaction at that point in time to police really prevented me from learning as much as i could from that side. i toured the officed and interviewed people, about i didn't go out with the cops and spend a year on that side, and i think maybe it would have been a better book if i had. but that was just a -- it was beyond what i could sort of

psychologically some emotionally do. >> do you want to answer? >> well, i interviewed people on all sides of the debate. i went to monsanto and their spinoff company in st. louis, and researchers who had looked at health issue inside then 1960s and wildlife exposures. epa remediation people, community involvement people in washington. a whole variety of people on all sides of the debate. and so it was -- i didn't encounter the kind of situation that you found. there were two chemical traumas unfolding in aniston. i focused today on the pcb fight. the other is a fight to safely

dispose of part over the u.s. chemical weapons stockpile. so aniston was one of eight continental u.s. sites where u.s. chemical weapons, designed to kill people, sarin and vx and mustard agent were stored. this is a double exposure that people there were facing. and so i worked to interview people that were involved with that as well. and those interviews were cordial but brief. >> i'm in a slightly different situation because, as a journalist, my mission is to bear witness. it is to go see things on behalf of larger society that larger society can't go see. whether that means going to the front lines in iraq, or if it

means watching the exhumation of a mass grave in rwanda. these are not meant things to see. -- not pleasant things to see but if you believe that the more informed a society is, the better off that society will we be, that it will make better decisions. when i reported on the mistaken bombing of a village in afghanistan after 9/11, and 200 people were killed by u.s. navy jets coming and bombing the village, and then when the rescuers arrived, the navy jets bombed it again to kill the rescuers. and i wrote that story, and i received hate mail. i received three envelopes envef white powder to add also drama. they were all waiting for me when i got home to nairobi.

so, sometimes they don't want you to tell you -- they don't want you to tell the truth about what you saw. there are people in my family that are not happy about what i wrote in my book, even though they acknowledge it's true. they don't want to face it. but if we want to talk about i would is our prison system so messed up, if we want to talk about what is happening in ferguson in st. louis, to understand why those things are happening, you need to understand how we got here, and that means facing up to some very uncomfortable truths. so, i spent 14 years as a war correspondent, i know disgusting. but i do assure you that it's easier to look at if you know that you have a mission to see it and to share it. there's no guarantee the world will be a better place. no guarantee anyone will ever read what you write.

but you throw that dice some you have to believe in that mission. you have to bear witness. >> i'm a -- at vanderbilt in sociology so i love your book. >> thanks. >> i have a question about it. you have one chapter on wifes we wives and girlfriends, and what struck me is women are always defined in relationship to men and there wasn't a huge focus on what the intersection of race and gender was doing to women rather -- without the relationship to men. so i wondering if you could talk about that and all the folks talk about how gender intersects with race in what you do, and also -- i'm curious about being -- in the transition to wisconsin, and so i'm curious about how the transition to madison is shaping your work,

and how being in a new place is shaping your work on race and inequality. >> yes. so, i guess the way i think about gender in the book is -- it's a great question, by the way. so i think -- i don't have women just all grouped into one chapter and this is a chapter on women. there's women everywhere, talking all kinds of different roles. so, it didn't -- i didn't think about it as like the women chapter. the point of the chapter was to -- what i had read about women and incarceration, we know that women are the largest growing -- women are shooting up very, very fast in terms of incarceration rates, which is very troubling. but they're still a very small percentage of people incarcerated compared to men.

so, the way that women had been portrayed in what i had read was that women are doing the work of visiting men in prison and having to deal with men when they come home and that's really difficult, and then they're being separated from men through prison. but that was like not all the action. there's a huge effort by police to convince women to inform and also to raid houses. so, like, run former warrant unit officer said we might be able to see every guy up on the computer screen, but when it comes down it to you always go through the girlfriend, the grandmother, because she knows where he is and what he has done. so a very deliberate effort -- reminds you when you read accounts of east germany before the fall and turning families and friends and colleagues against each other and the creation of informant. i wanted to understand what it was like for township want to

protect the men in their lives and be purred by the police with eviction, loss of child custody, with raids, with violence, and also with the police presenting women with all kinds of disparaging evidence about the anyone in their lives or telling women they would be arrested for the man's crimes if they didn't turn him in. how that rips apart relationships and how women are working really hard to withstand that police pressure. this is what resistance looks like, women standing at the door and refusing to allow the police to enter a home. so i wanted to understand how people -- especially how women are repairing their relationships and their sense of self, of being a good mother and partner after they have informed under pressure. so that kind of where the chapter was coming from. in terms of going to -- well, i should stop. thank you. >> part two question.

>> gender in your book. >> well, i would say that there aren't maintenance women in my book because i follow -- lines. the tomlinson names passed down from male to male to male. so, that to me is probably most valid criticism anyone can make of my book, that at 430 payments it's already too long. i you listen to my editor so the last thing they wanted was more. >> chris, one thing about your book, how sarah tomlinson had to take over the plantation after her husband passed away. i was asking you about this question, and also with ellen's book, that's one way that typically -- women didn't have property ownership but she had to assume that role. >> don't get me wrong, there are lots of women in the book.

and they -- the whole reason tomlinson hill exists is because church -- churchill jones was an entrepreneur, and they bought land, improved it into a plantation, growing a cash crop, either sold it to someone else and then went and bought more virgin land, or went off and bought another plantation. that's why many families would have four, five, six different plantations in different locationsment they were the mcdonald's entrepreneurs of their time. and so when churchill jones moved to texas, his wife was a tomlinson, and so she wrote to her younger brother and said, you need to move -- i've got some land for you. i set it aside. come to texas. and then jim tomlinson's wife was a stalwart and she wrote home to her brother and said, you should come to texas, too. churchill jones will sell you

cheap land as well. and so to understand how all these families were connect ode you had to understand the women and how they were related. so there's certainly important. >> well, like the environmental justice movement nationally, women in aniston took major leadership roles. the foundation, the west aniston foundation that came out of one of the lawsuits is still very much led by women, and so there were opportunities for lead leadership. nationally the environmentallity movement, doris taylor is the scholar who did the work on this but nationally the environmental justice movement is much more likely to have not just women in grassroots roles but women in leadership roles. i think it's -- over 50%, and so that is a marked contrast with some of the mainstream, mainly

white environmental organizations. so women played a leading role in this fight. woman women also are uniquely affected by these chemicals. it's another part of the story i haven't talked about. the hormone disruption and role of hydrocarbons, which these chemicals are, has been talked about much more in the news, but they can travel both through breast milk to the nursing child, or in the -- across the placenta, and so women have unique questions to face. should i have kids, shy breast-feed or what are the implications for my life of this chemical exposure? so, there's some very marked gender implications of the pcb story. >> time for a couple more

questions if anyone wants to ask one. >> this is for alice and possibly chris. you had a distant relative with a felony conviction. do you feel that most of the people that you knew who were going to jail or prison were taking plea deals and waiving their constitutional rights or exercising them with jury trials? and do you feel like they understood the full ramifications of those? >> this is a huge issue that almost no charges become jury trials. they don't even become trials. people settle with pleas and get a huge amount of pressure from prosecutors and from the public defenders to do that. so, the same was -- went for the people that i spent my 20s in with. i did see a couple of trials for

really serious crimes, but possession trials, ag assault trials, possession with intent to distribute, these kind of things, were all plea deals. and also even before the plea deal, you're sitting in jail for, like, 18 months, 12 months. so, like, when chuck was -- got into a fight in the schoolyard when he was 18, he had just turned 18, and he was making cs and bs on the basketball team, was trying really hard not to get arrested. and he got into a fight with a kid who called his mom a crack whore in the schoolyard and push his face in the snow. that became an aggravated assault charge by the school. so he spent his entire senior year sitting in adult county jail awaiting trial for this ag

assault charge from a schoolyard fight. and then almost all the charges were dismissed, and he came home that summer, tried to re-enroll again as a senior and was told now you're 19, you're too old, sorry. so he became a high school dropout, and then he couldn't pay the $225 in court fees that came due after the case ended, so then he had a warrant out for his arrest. so i think in addition to the pleas, there's all these other things going on with the court system, like how long people are spending without a conviction, and then the court fees are just crippling -- we could just agree to get rid of court fees as a reason to go back to prison or go back to jail. >> i would agree. the public defenders have no interest, they have such an