he became malcolm x. ...

>> you know, i travel the world and they speak to many different audiences. young people, middle-aged, elders and what i find is that there are many young people who are very much intend with malcolm. they are very much, very attracted to his legacy and then there are some who are not. so i think it's just important for all of us who are conscious, who are educated, it's important that we educate the ones who are misinformed or need guidance. >> there are supreme magnificent illustration. who did the illustrations? >> the illustrations were done done by a g4 and she is

absolutely phenomenal. beautiful, beautiful depictions of moments that were important to my father that play key roles in my fathers lied. >> malcolm little boy who grew up to be. ♪ max. here's the cover of the book. ilyasah shabazz, daughter of malcolm and eddie shabazz is the author. up next on booktv "after words" with guest host professor and commentator marc lamont hill. this week's jeff chang and his latest book "who we be" the colorization of america. in the book the author of can't stop won't stop examines the idea of racial progress and discusses how racist you today in an increasingly diverse america. the program is about an hour. >> host: jeff chang its eyes good to see you. talk to me about this book, "who

we be." why this book in my now? >> guest: the white? >> guest: the white now isn't up to me actually. we were looking at trying to get this book out in 2009 to 2010 but ended up taking longer to pray. i can go into why a little bit later but the book is about the colorization of america which is my term for looking at the demographic changes we have seen in the last half century century and a cultural sisters their accounting that. >> host: when you say colorization this is a term that i found baffling. what does that mean exactly? >> guest: it's meant to capture a lot of the cultural shifts that have occurred and i'm really interested in looking at the way that artists have actually changed the way that we see each other and how we can live together. it's looking into the metaphor and seeing how we see race and using that as a way to ask the question how far we have progressed in last half century? >> host: when i hear the word colorization to suggest there was a moment where color wasn't essential and now it is that you

said it's more nuanced. even in the book you talk about the way the race and color have always mattered so what does it mean for a nation to become colorize? >> guest: i think you know what we saw through the civil rights movement was in some ways the all relative race. race was seen largely in black-and-white, that you had one way of being american and you could build empathy. this was the way he theorizes perhaps that folks began to understand the african-american struggle was through the music. you and i both come from this kind come from the sky in the background the hip-hop soul funk type of background. it makes a lot of sense to me but after the civil rights act passes the immigration and nationality act, that goes to the side in the visuality of seeing becomes more important in the way of understanding race. so what we see now in the u.s.

as cultural desegregation. what we see in our blind spots as we have rising rates of resegregation, the gaps in wealth and income and housing homeownership and educational attainment. it's a paradox. we have cultural desegregation happening and cultural inequity increasing at the same time. >> host: left step back because you talk about the or relative race in how we shift from a oral to the visual. what's at stake remake that shipped? >> guest: race begins by saying the book between appearance and perception of difference. it's not biological. we can agree on that. it's something that's a construct, something that we think about when we see so when you attach difference, the real

difference to the systems of any quality of freedom of slavery of containment and freedom and so on and so forth that's when i start seeing the kinds of problems that the artists would dearly love talk about all the way from you know the turn-of-the-century all the way up until now. he talked about invisibility and "the invisible man." now we have questions of visibility which complicates things a lot. so these are the kinds of things we are talking about now. invisibility and i'm underrepresentation at the same time visibility and what it means. >> host: also hypervisibility. there's a way in which certain types of colorized individuals become ubiquitous and served a dangerous notion how the world imagines rays of how the world imagines difference. how do we strike that balance

between not wanting to be invisible in the public imagination but not wanting our visibility to become a social to merit and to become something that becomes more problematic? >> guest: that's a really different -- difficult question and something that i struggle with every single day. it's something that we as folks who are interested in change in racial progress think about all the time and it's something we talk with her students about all the time. you know i think that's the third rail of trying to be an artist of color in this particular moment. figure out how to negotiate between the need to be able to represent yourself and tell your story and the difficulty of dealing with the images that kind of precede you.

it's a burden of representation is whether this and it's no different than artists of color of that before but now the burden is changed and it's maybe a lot more difficult to negotiate. >> host: you divide your book up into periods and when i first read it i was trying to figure out what your logic was for the divisions. he didn't abide by presidential administrations which i expected. it would be an interesting distinction between a reagan moment and the clinton moment and that obama is moment. so is overlapping and transcends partisan difference. >> guest: right. >> host: what is the underlying framework of the underlying movement or impetus

for how you understand these different moments in colorization? >> guest: that's another question. i wanted to precede as a cultural history. it's spoken about through the eyes of the artist so it's interesting that you had said that you expected it to precede the presidential administrations and i think that's a lot of histories of race have been raised and this was meant to be a different kind of thing. and so i wanted to talk about the moments of the civil rights, the peak of the civil rights era to the beginning of the 80s as a period in which artists were struggling with underrepresentation with visibility. artists like morrie turner who is the first african-american syndicated cartoonist comes out with the first comic strip that is multicultural, casts of peanut style kids and trying to imagine what a post-segregated

america could look like. so after the civil rights revolution begins to dismantle the laws that have mandated segregation we still have to imagine what a post-segregated future is going to look like. artists like morrie turner and artists like the spiral in your city that becomes a core group that launches protest against major receipt -- museums in the 60s and 70's to get into the institutions of visibility. and then we move into the 80s which becomes the heir of the cultural rise, the rise of multiculturalism as an avant-garde and then the backlash that we see coming from conservatives both cultural conservatives both liberal cultural conservatives as well as conservatives.

folks who are democrats and republicans in other words who are against the notion that there could be more than one way of understanding how to become american. alt-a cultureless had a radical idea they thought america had always been made up of multiple cultures and people could have all of these different ways of living and being and that the exchange is what made america vital. this was a really threatening ideas so this is where it begins to occur. then you see a think of the 90s, in the mid-90s to now this era in which most of -- multiculturalism becomes a fate faith i'll complete. to become something where the institutions, corporate institutions, government institutions begin to say yeah we are all multiculturalists. this is a famous line of cultural conservatives. >> host: you say multiculturalism has become a

platitude. not that i disagree necessarily. what could be that a cynical. how do he make sense of that because you could argue that now in 2014 multiculturalism looks different but that it's still a dominant logic. it's still a sincere attempt by many people, not all people. but multiculturalism is alive and well and vibrant as farcical to democratize and color is america. >> guest: you could also say it's been emptied of its radical meaning. this is a movement that meant to be able to foster culture and equity. the basic idea was that if we are able to have the stories represented by what people told that this would create empathy and out of empathy would calm a new consensus for racial justice and the society in which people could be free to be who they be.

do you know what i mean? so we haven't necessarily gotten to that point yet. >> host: five though? so there are some who do argue that we wanted but that's not even a debate. we understand multiculturalism is america. the debates now are little different. some people say because they won the culture wars is like obama winning the election and people not being activists anymore. you have one so we are sitting back and others are saying there are more conservative and economical pieces of machinery that are making multiculturalism or empty. >> guest: i think it's both at the same time paid on one hand multiculturalism reset the boundaries of civility which is i think a lot of things we were arguing a students in the 80s when we are the first group of, the 80s and 90s will be the first group of kids coming out of the campuses that were part of in some instances the majority minority class.

i was part of the first class at cal that was majority minority who which who knows what majority minority means anyway and we will come back to that. we at that time were like i don't want to be on campus having to deal with all these racial microaggressions is what they call it now, basically racial incidents. we called slurs on the street and you are made to feel like you don't belong in the classroom. all these different types of things are happening during the 80s and it resets the boundaries of civility. now the language that reactionaries need to use has to be couched in multicultural terms. pat buchanan has this amazing piece in his book about will america survive 2025 and he talks about how everybody can enjoy ethnic foods. we all like to go out and have

thai food and ethiopian food and that's a good thing. let's just keep it at that though. you're just i like wow that's really interesting. and so multiculturalism has reset the boundaries of civility that we are at the point we can't have these conversations about the inequities and inequalities that persist in our ask the right thing. this is again our huge blind spot. the book was trying to really get at that. and on the one hand you have folks working in that culture to promote these new visions of what the u.s. can look like. for us to get to that particular point we have to deal with these inequalities. there is a poll that came out after ferguson into questions were asked. they are interviewing blacks and interbank whites. the first question was, to the event of ferguson raise issues that ought to be discussed around ray's? the second question was did the events in ferguson job too much

focus and attention to the issue of race? there's a big split. african-americans, blacks they overwhelmingly this raises issues that we haven't talked about and maybe not a majority but there's still this feeling of well we are paying too much attention to race right now. one set of folks invitation to have the conversation is another set of focuses cue to leave the room. so we have these gaps not just in wealth and income and housing and education but also in the way we talk about race. we can't get to those questions then we are looking at a 2042 where we are all minorities. that could be much worse than we are seeing right now. >> host: there's that willful neglect of white americans. we don't want to think about this because it makes them uncomfortable and we really feel

you resolve this in the 80s. look there is multicultural day at school. every february we be back asian food and indian food and brought speaking terms. we have done it and we are exhausted. what is in each of those things? guessed i think it's both happening at the same time. there were seven studies in 20 2070 -- 2007 of the parenting styles on whether parents have a conversation with a young children about race. 75% of white parents did not talk to their kids, big young kids about race where his parents of kids of color, so this could be inter-racial or mixed-race marriages are kids as well, two to five times as many conversations about race as white parents. and then earlier this year and 2014 there was a david binder mtv poll that was done.

they looked at it and they said you know how do you feel we should be thinking about race and it was interesting. milenials the ones who were surveyed here said colorblindness was a way of looking at race but we also have to be respecting the difference so this is the legacy of the 80s. this is the legacy of the culture wars. it's contradictory. it's both sides of the culture wars. you have this notion of putting up colorblindness is a way to roll back racial justice policies and on the other side you have this multiculturalism that is being put out by folks who are seeming to be radical at the moment saying we should be respecting difference. but the and bolt question that really was powerful to me was, how do you feel about having a conversation with people about racial violence? we are not talking about racial

inequality and discrimination. we are just talking about racial bias. only one in five milenials felt comfortable having that conversation so we are confused. this gets sort of brought back in the regeneration and this notion of colorblindness gets brought back and it has these very disturbing effects. i think that many parents, many white parents are very good will. they say look what happened in the past. when we talked about race in the past we did it to hold people down south we just don't talk about with her kids than the kids will grow up in a society in which we will have moved beyond that. i think that's willful and it's also maybe good willed but i feel like our history doesn't allow us that racial incidents. >> host: they would say my great grandparents are racist and my grandparents are racist

and my parents, and i'm not racist in my kids don't even like to think about race. we just keep dying off in the kids will -- that will be generated. >> i think every generation has been called the most diverse generation so the last generation dies in the next generation comes into place that everything will magically be slow. it's magical thinking. it is magical thinking. if we just ignore inequality will go away and that's not how anything works since baby. here we are 50 years, more than 50 years after brown v. board after the civil rights revolution and we see segregation reaching these levels that were pre-brown versus board of education even as the u.s. as diverse as dying at an astonishing rate. we are moving towards 2042 at a fast clip. >> host: let's unpack that inequality think because i think

you're raising something interesting that's in the book. on the one hand there is racial bias. there's the issue of individuals ill will toward people or individual prejudice and maybe some broader collective notions of who people are. on the other hand are also talking about a lack of resources health care and living. >> guest: culture. >> host: culture, right and that's my question. how does culture play do those things because people understa understand. >> guest: i think that's partly the work of what folks like you and me and a lot of our colleagues are doing trying to link the two together. what we say is culture change precedes political change. a lot of us who are working in this area. you have to have the imagination particularly now during this period in which politics is hamstrung and stalemated to be

able to imagine changes the crucial for us to be able to move to a place where we can build very healthy movements for change. so, but getting back to the question that you are talking about here, i think it's important for us to be able to foster a culture that points towards racial justice, that artists, creative folks and folks working in the culture should be uncovering our blind spots for us. we have to allow them to be able to do that and then we ought to be bringing those images into the culture that we are working in. and it's a process. it's not the kind of thing where you kind of press a lever and then change happens. this is something that builds over time. so all of the things that are happening on twitter right now even as we are speaking all of

the stuff that's happening on facebook right now, all the stuff that's happening all throughout the country in the sword of interventions that people are making they all add up to something. that might sound crazy optimistic and hopeful but you know i think it was interesting to look at the 2008 election and the explosion of street art that happened to get this obama hoped posters that shepherd. put together and that gets out there and suddenly have this explosion of images of people wanting change. a lot of stuff is now spilling outside of the democratic agenda and barack obama's platform. but it's images of the third world liberation front reborn. it's images of environmental injustice and images of immigrant rights. it's images of all these different types of things that the democrats and taking positions that the democrats are taking much less the republicans. at that particular point but we

saw was attached to this single change this obama not as a policy but as a symbol of change are all these other folks putting up their symbols of changes well. that's a the moment at which all of this imagination is coming forth and that allowed in a lot of respects this wave to build that resulted in barack obama selection. i'm not saying that elections are going to be the end-all and be-all. in fact we can see what happened was in 2009 the culture wars flare up again. that the sample of obama is as a symbol of change becomes twist twisted. you have the obama joker. >> host: which is another thing you talk talk about in the book how that figure comes out. unintended. the initial image was by

attaching socialist but all this other stuff to it took on a life of its own. >> guest: the story is there is an american who is trying to learn photoshop so he takes the cover of obama from "time" magazine and -- joker in and just posted on his flickr account and wakes up a couple months later to find socialism has been put at the bottom of this poster and it's been posted all over los angeles which is where they obama whole hope poster made its debut as well. suddenly obama it is a socialist and then there's obama as a foreigner, the kenyan and so on on and so forth and obama is a symbol of all fears as opposed to the symbol of all hope. that's just the image war. what you also see is the conservative movement is very smart about targeting people within the obama administration right away who have an

understanding about hip-hop, about hip-hop's impact on young people and about culture and the role of culture in being able to move people around different kinds of ideas and policies. immediately you will see sergeant van jones drummed out of the administration. immediately what we see is the shirley sharad incident. we see obama making comments about henry louis gates being racially profiled in his own doorstep bennies hammered for that. >> host: it's ironic. what are the key figures of culturalism in the 80s and then being the target of these new culture wars of the 2000 or the 80s and 90s but what's interesting to me and brings up two questions for me. one is sort of the culture wars that exists now are being prosecuted in different ways.

in the 60s and the 50s it was the claim of neutrality. the culture and america's just this thing. and in the 80s it became okay to culture is arbitrary and their different choices we can make. culture is something that should be contested. they began a fervent fight in particular about it. they didn't say culture is value neutral as they did in the 60s. george will said look we need eurocentric stuff or we need to push back against the stuff. air force insisted they -- afro-sensitivity is garbage. all the stuff happening. now they are not making as clear and earnestly claimed that their values are better. seems to me right now it's different. he's a socialist and you know what that means. he's from kenya kenya and you know that means. is there room for the honesty

that existed in the 80s. george will have a column and said europeans are just better. there is value to that honesty and it's something we can contest. we can write back to these people. now it seems because of the bounds of civility you talk about that is hard to have the conversation because they are always in perpetual denial but attacking anything on the racial or ethnic ground. >> guest: yeah but i i think there are still a lot of those types of things coming out all the time. was that george will who made the comment a little while ago about sexual assault so they are different kinds of things that are happening and they can still kind of catch fire and move on. michelle malkin the concentration camp, the japanese-american concentration camp denier.

posted the 80s and 90s where the center of the conversation was. >> guest: the ground has shifted but at the same time the debate is still there. bill maher talking about his mom. these are culture wars that take different forms but it's still coming down to this ultimate division of narratives. the narrative of this great america is about to fall into the complete of this. the end of american civilization versus the idea of an america that can be transformed into something great to the vitality of its peoples interacting. again this is the basis of conservative reaction now. it's about restoration area do people honestly and openly use the language of restoration. sara palin saying you know we can't allow our great country to

be transformed and must -- and let's restore her in first-order values. the interesting thing about it is conservatives actually don't ever have to do anything but argue for the status quo. what they have to do is adapt to the new kind of language that gets instilled when movements are able to make changes. so in the 80s they are using the language of the civil rights revolution. now in some ways they have to adopt some of the language of the multiculturalists. and so on and so forth. at the same time they don't have to instill new visions. those progressives who want change in racial progress always have to instill those divisions. so there's always that extra burden that's added to us to be able to do that. within the left they think they're still an argument about

quote unquote identity politics. certainly in the art world around identity arts and so those are different kinds of fronts that the culture wars are being fought on. >> host: there's a little bit of optimism in your book. i finished the book feeling much more optimistic about the possibility of us coming to terms with this stuff. one question i had was and it goes back to the other point about the way in which we have to imagine a new world, and new self, and the nation and a culture of art that we produce can help bring that about. but the thing that kept nagging me as i read the book is, but to what extent is the opposite happening? to what extent is art overdetermined? >> guest: what you mean by that? was going other words if i think

that obama's hope and change poster might gerez -- but the flip of that is to what extent does the current economic realities from liberalism to everything else, make this so constrained in our political imagination that obama becomes the face of hope and change or maybe slightly less liberal but certainly not the left's left that we dreamed of 40 years ago. to what extent is our political imagination constrained by the moment so that the art itself -- not i imagine this generation of artists is being limited in that way. >> guest: i think artists always overspill the cuff. i guess maybe i'm optimistic in that kind of way that there are always visionaries who are going to break the glass and bring it home so to speak. it's a line from one of the

essays around the height of the culture wars to take a hammer and crash the mayor and bring it home and make it authentic, make it real, make it relative to your experience that's happening. i think we have seen that around ferguson. and in hip-hop. a lot of the artists that have been coming out, there's a shift that's happening in the language that people are using now to be able to describe what's actually going on in what people's experiences are. dear white people, an and amazing movie breaking through a lot of the noise around colorblindness at this particular moment in saying here we are with all of these questions of visibility and invisibility and we even have a foot in the door. one of the characters is a very high-ranking administrator at the university which we couldn't have imagined during the 80s and 90s.

and the sun is one of the key activist characters in the movie. here we are with all of the stuff going on and yet we are still going to have situations in which there will be racist incidents and parties that are going on. i don't want to give away too much with a movie and i think people ought to see it but it's much more complicated than it was for us probably. and so i have no doubt that there'll be artists who will be able to make their statements so to speak, to make their work, to have it appreciated for the formal values that they are instilling as well as the messages they are putting out at the same time. >> host: how do we think about whiteness? oftentimes we talk about colorization and race. we talk about everybody what white people. how do we in the 21st century come to terms with this thing

called whiteness because that's a central piece about power and identity. >> guest: i think again conservatives have a strong idea about how that should be conveyed and it should be conveyed in terms of anxiety, in terms of fear. "time" magazine did a thing couple of years ago in 20101 of the top 10 ideas of the year and one of them was the one anxiety crisis and i have saturday night live that is. thing -- parodying that. i believe that's a force that's leading to things to suburbs that are further and further out this flight from multiculturalism and this flight from the city's that have become very diverse. so that's one vision that we have going on there.

i think the other vision again is sort of a liberal colorblindness. the idea that if we don't talk about it will all go away. i think we need to build up an elaborate on what does it mean for us to be living in a society in which all of us are minorities? what it means is that we have to find a basis for a new majority and that's a political question. it's a question that republicans and democrats are finding out and figuring out every second of the day, every second of every hour of every day to figure it out. right now is we are going into the midterm elections and into 2016 and beyond, the political question in the party since. it's a larger pelot -- larger political question in terms of how do you form a new politic, a new sort of consensus around values that includes

desegregation, compassion and empathy, all those good ideas that we love so much. >> host: to my whiteness question a lot of that narrative even progressives how we can be less biased to them whoever them as and create more access to them. there's a difference between that and being reflective saying what does it mean to be weighed? what does it mean to be in this position of power to have this identity in 202014 particular he went to mean something so radically different than it may have meant in 1914 or 1814. part of what i'm thinking about particularly at this moment is how do we create a conversation about what it means to be wiped a thing against which all other racial categories are measured? >> guest: i think that has to do with having these honest conversations about privilege and where privilege comes from, what it means, how it gets and still then passes through generations and gets re-created.

to dismantle those things you have to have those honest conversations about it. >> host: let's go to the third moment but this later moment in the book because one of the things that have forced me to think outside of the bones is that black white paradigm. because obviously the racial demographics of the nation have change for a variety of reasons and so how we think and talk about racial difference has to become more diverse and interesting. talk about some of the factors that have made that the case. why are we where we are right now? demographically and culturally as to how we talk about racial difference. even the language of we are a majority minority and it's a new kind of language. >> guest: i think there has been an emerging push to talk about unnamed and i think that's been a very positive and

powerful push. it's important for us to be able to understand how certain races are used, how race is used i should say that way, how race is used to perpetuate anti-black racism specifically and so for asian asian-americans, for latinos to look at the ways in which we are talked about becomes a leverage to reinforce anti-black racism. which has been ongoing. and i think now questions are on next to raise children and youth and populations. in some ways there is this sort of beautiful vision that if we all get busy with each other

that we all intermarry or we all have kids together that the future will be better and racism all magically disappeared. we will never have these conversations anymore. we only need to look at brazil to talk about the fact that discrimination still exists, that there are still these paradigms that are put into place that create inequalities that are long-standing and continue. so there's a lot of discussion that needs to be had and it gets much more complicated as we move forward. but i think that ultimately it has to be about this question of racial inequality and closing these gaps. it's about closing the gaps about cultural inequity. it's about moving towards a society in which we are again all wanting to be freed

together. in order to do that we have to imagine beyond ourselves and beyond our identities to think about what it means. i will give example. in the bay area where i am from asian-american appearance to my chagrin have been at the head of the movement to undo consent decrees in public schools. and in a lot of ways they will say we were underrepresented in the past. so maybe this is the way it ought to be in order to make up for the past. my question is what kind of world do you want to live in? what kind of city do you want to live in? do you want to live in every segregated society with just you at the top? i don't think that the progressive vision that i want to be a part of it is something i've been fighting in a lot of respects. those kinds of questions become relevant in there. what's interesting to me is that during the height of multiculturalism liberals who are arguing against

multiculturalism said what we are going to see is the racial apocalypse is pursuing california were all the formerly excluded groups are going to begin fighting against each other. >> host: a racial war of the worlds. >> guest: especially after the los angeles riots. don't follow multiculturalism because that is leading you down a path towards balkanization and a divided country. it's going to be happening in the cities and it's going to be happening in the neighbors and school boards. that's not to minimize any of the tensions around change happening in different neighborhoods because they are there but there are also a lot of people with their goodwill in the favorites have been working together to try to find commonalities across different backgrounds and histories. i think that's the kind of stuff that we like to uplift as a model for is looking towards 2042.

>> host: one of the things that has been in the news over the last few months is isis and sparked this whole conversation about islam and this whole conversation about different. you mentioned bill maher earlier and part of what i'm wondering if this conversation about islam becomes another way to address the racing korisha by different means. they are not thinking about german or white muslims. to what extent do we have to reimagine the sights of racial contents now because again people are just saying keep the arabs out. they are saying islam is dangerous. to what extent do we have to look at the demographic shifts have been? as the other issues begin to emerge in the front? >> guest: absolutely. i think what we see especially after 2001 is the sort of heightened division around

differences in religion but then it gets racialized is he just noted. again we are not talking about white muslims for the most part. we are talking about muslims of color and entire neighborhoods have been wiped out where the policies of homeland security have gone in and uprooted and deported thousands and thousands of pakistani americans, bangladeshi americans, south asian-americans, arab-americans, entire neighborhoods have been torn apart by these different types of policies. this again is one of the things that is in our blind spot because i'm a huge fan of name your favorite athlete i can't be racist. but don't let me sit next to somebody on the subway wearing a. it's crazy. so we do have to absolutely rethink how it looks in the 21st century.

these are the kinds of things that i think i'm talking about when i'm talking about sort of neighborhoods kind of coming together and folks coming together across different kinds of backgrounds and saying no we are not going to stand for that. yes these are people in our neighborhood. yes we are all in this together. and to move forward but the question is so difficult. when you really get down to the heart of it we kind of have to get beyond all of these questions of what martin luther king called the great three triplets, racism, militarism and economic inequality. in order to get to the kinds of society that frees us all. we are always dealing with all of this noise that we are

getting. so what i guess i'm saying is in the lack of people like you and i or people in any kind of neighborhood, any kind of setting, a church, a café, the schoolyard, having these conversations what happens as extremists begin to dominate the conversation. and this is what is enabling the culture wars. the culture wars exist because we are not having these movements at the ground level below the surface of what is visible on 24-hour cable. >> host: one of the places this conversation is beginning to emerge again is tv. >> guest: in twitter. >> host: and think about cultural images and i agree with you about social media. i'm thinking about black jesus

or adult swim. i'm thinking about these kinds of edgy dangerous representations and in your book you talk about daisy's racial diversity and multiculturalism as a parody which is its own kind of politics. do the images that you see now make you more encouraged about our ability to have those kinds of conversations, the edgy ones, the dangerous ones that go deeper in the civil bush while liberal ones that we have. >> guest: i'm really ambivalent and i think anybody who reads the book will see that. it's really interesting that abcs fall lineup has to focus on nonwhite families and nonwhite leads, fort -- folks of color who are leads. in some respects it's an understanding that demographics have shifted.

again this is something -- so i'm going to be ambivalent here. so fox tv when i was trying to establish itself as a fourth network decided by pepsi-cola before that, they were behind and they had to catch up. how are they going to do that but we are going to go after youth and communities of color. we are going to build a business from the niches as opposed to the number one coke or nbc at the time but you had the big audiences. we are going to build up a whole number of niches. so fox did that. they have the simpsons and on and on. they had all the shows that were bringing in these new audiences and folks were saying wow this is a golden age of black tv. as soon as fox tv gets the nfl

they dropped all the shows. so i'm cynical and not sons. how long will this last? we know that scandal did really well and all these other types of shows. how long will that last? i don't know how long it will last. there might be a concession at this particular point during the latter years of the obama presidency to shore up these audiences or it could be a -- and how far can ask representations go? i think that's a relevant question. so yes i'm ambivalent about that but at the same time i'm happy. there is the fighting fists in the air multiculturalism representation. i'm happy that eddie wong has a show now. i want to see that pretty much more than any show on tv. this is something i might ask to

be able to recognize and representation in recognition is always important. let's go you a culture historian. i have got to push back against her overall overarching optimism even with your cynicism on this point. you look at our history and you see where we get and in the book you talk about the structural stuff. we are in a jacked up spot politically and economically. >> guest: we are absolutely. >> host: but in the end you reiterate just how hopeful you are that we are going to be imagine a world that in my estimation there's no evidence for. i might share your optimism but

i want to know where you get it from. the book to me talk about just how complicated and messy this stuff is and you retrieve out of the messes up the pope. >> guest: people talk about changing demographics and i can tell you about changing demographics. i come from a chinese hawaiian family. i married into a filipino family and by now -- everybody possible. we have these grand reunions all the time. lots of food lots of hanging out in lots of fun and this is what my kids have grown up around. it's what i grew up around. i see that happening. it's not like this person or that person don't have a fight that they have been nursing for 20 years maybe. it's not that there is peace and

love through the whole thing. there are the hard conversations that people are having i'm sure in the corners and that kind of thing and using it as an opportunity to reconnect in that kind of thing. that is real and that's my reality. people talk about 2042, that's been my reality ever since i was born. a few that's where i get it from interpersonal kind of way. i mean we have to. we have to figure this out. do we want to get to a point where we have the majority minority society but the grand experiment has failed and we are no longer talking about class and race and gender. we are talking about cast and we are talking about it permanent inside an apartment outside. i wouldn't like to see that for my kids. i would like to see that for my grandkids.

i would like to see a better world. >> host: want to make two predictions. the first one you'll be good at. the second one maybe not but the first you'll be good at. how will the shifting racial demographics inform the election of the next president? >> guest: i think it's going to be a really interesting contest. i think the republicans have to remake themselves and the likelihood of seeing the latino republican candidate is likely pretty high. i think democrats are going to have to figure out after obama how they attract a constituency that obama brought into the fo fold. >> host: which ones though? black folks will vote for a democrat anyway. >> guest: by cornel was saying of black turnout is low and and

turnout is low if the young people's turnout is low than the democrats are pretty much where they started before 2007. so all of that is real and again these are mathematical calculations. it's not what i mean when i'm talking about trying to build a new cultural majority. >> host: it matters to the extent that the people making political decisions can undermine the type of cultural values and cultural pluralities and diversity that we want to see as they have in the 60s and 80s in and 2000 etc.. >> guest: even if we are able to create that coalition that will put someone into office will we still be moving towards those cultural values that we want to instill in order to move us towards a better society? i'm not sure.

the question certainly has been very mixed and complicated with obama's presidency. >> host: that brings me to my other crystal ball request. indulge me. in 2042 that magic year guest of the year at augusta hell. [laughter] >> host: what do we have to d do, what needs to happen for us to be in the kind of place that you ideally imagine us to be an imagine with us in the book? >> we have to get to our blind spots. we have to understand that we really have to rethink the kind of divisions in segregation that is happening below the surface and how we address that. we have to attack desegregation and attack these gaps. again, the numbers are stark and

many of us know the numbers about the folks of color behind bars. many of us understand the educational gap. i think less of us necessarily understand the wealth gap and eight racial and income gap but those are really pressing. i think recent studies have shown that if we try to make the kind of progress we are making around the race wealth gap now it would take as you know more than a century really to get to the point where folks would be near so these are the kinds of issues we have to address in a very measured, nuanced and devoted committed kind of way. >> host: my last question is one i should have asked you

first. what is it about artist? what is it about culture which you describe as soft and malleable that allows us to get at this stuff sometimes in more substantive than rigorous ways in the greatest intellectuals are the greatest philosophers? >> guest: well part of it goes to the artistic process and the political process brings it down to questions that should be -- should this bill be read nor the cut-off at the age is going to be 62 or 59. the questions are very narrow. with the artistic process the questions are much broader and they can cascade down. what the artists bring to the table is the ability to be able to ask impertinent of the wrong but ultimately right questions that need to be asked of us of our society. >> host: arts are tricky does that in this book certainly does it. it's an amazing book.

thanks so much for joining us. >> guest: thanks for having me. >> that was "after words" booktv's signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policymakers and others familiar with their material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10:00 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9:00 p.m. on sunday and 12:00 a.m. on monday. and you can also watch "after words" on line. go to booktv.org and click on "after words" in the booktv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page.

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