booktv. you can also visit the website booktv.org and click on news about books. .. the book is about the coloration of america, which is my term of

looking at the demographic change citizen cultural shifts that accompanied it. >> host: when you saw the colorization, what does that mean? >> 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 are that's actually changed the way we see each other and how we can live together. so it's looking into the metaphor of seeing, how we see race, and using that as a way to ask the question, how far have we really progressed. >> host: when i hear the word colorization, it suggests there was a time when color wasn't -- color always mattered. the talk about the way x-rays color have always mentioned. what does it mean for a nation to become colorized. >> guest: we we saw through the civil rights mom was in some way s the -- that race was seen

largely in black and white. you hat one way of being american and that through the race you can build empathy. so this is how the theorizes that folks gab to understand the african-american struggle was through the music, and we come from this kind of a background, hip-hop, soul, funk type of background. so, makes a lot of sense to me. after the civil right act passes, voting rights, that goes to the side and visuality, seeing, is a much more important way of understanding race. what we see now in the u.s. is cultural desegregation. what is neighbor our blind spot we have rising rates of resegregation, gaps in wealth and income and housing and home ownership and educational attainment. so it's a paradox. we have both cultural

desegregation happening and racial and resegregation and cultural inequity happening attachment. >> host: you talk about the orality of race -- what is that statement. it's not a shift that is advantageous. there was some value to the prove movement as well that we lose. >> guest: race begins -- i say in the book, between appearance and the perception of difference. it's not biologgal, it's something we think.when we see it. when you attach difference -- visual difference to the systems of inequality, of freedom, of slavery, of containment, and freedom, and so on and so forth, that is when we start seeing the kinds of problems artists talk about. all the way from the turn of the

century, up through now, artists of color. and he talked about invisibility. now we have questions of visibility, which complicates things a lot, and so these are the kind of things we're talking about now. invisibility, underrepresentation, and at the same time, visibility and what it means. >> host: and hyper visibility. one thing you two into the book is this idea of hyper visible, a way certain -- became ubiquitous, how the world imagines race and imagines difference. how do we strike the balance between wanting visible, not wanting to be invisible in the public information but not something that becomes more problematic than the racial contract. >> guest: that's a really difficult question. a question that artists are struggling with every single day. right? but it's certainly -- it's

something that we as folks who are interested in change and racial progress, think about all the time. something we talk with students about. i think that's really the third rail of trying to be an artist of color at this particular moment. trying to figure out how to negotiate between the need to be able to represent yourself, right? and certain of -- and tell your story, and the difficulty of dealing with the images that kind of precede you. right? it's the burden of representation is what it is, and it's no different than artists of color before, but now the burden is changed and maybe a lot more difficult to negotiate in a lot of different cases. >> host: you divide your book into periods.

when i first read it i was trying to figure out what your logic was for where the divisions were you didn't divide it by presidential administrations, which is what i expected. because interesting distinction between the reagan moment and a clinton moment and now an obama moment. you have '63 to '79 and '7 2:09:92. what this underlying sort of framework or the underlying mom or impetus for how you understand the different moments in colorization. >> guest: another good question. i wanted to proceed as a cultural history, spoken about through the eyes of the artists who are trying to make change. so it's interesting you said you expected it to proceed by presidential administration. that's the way that a lot of hoyts of race have been run. >> host: exactly. >> guest: and this is 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 invisibility. so artists like morrie turner, the first syndicated african-american cartoonist, comes out with the fifth come nick strip, that is multiracial, and trying to imagine what a post segregated america could look like. after the civil rights revolution begins to dismantle the laws that have mandated segregation, you still have to imagine what a post segregated future will look like, and this where is the artists enter. artists like the spiral collective in new york city that becomes the core group that launches protests against the major museums in new york city, in the '60s and and '70s to get

into the halls of the institutions of visibility. right? and then we move into the '80s, which becomes the era of the culture wars. the rise of multiculturalism, and the backlash from conservatives, both -- i'd say cultural conserveties, both liberal cultural conservatives as well as conservative cultural conservatives. folks who are democrats and republicans, who are against the notion that there could be more one way of understanding how to become an american. and so multiculturallists had a radical idea. they thought that america had always been made up of multiple cultures cultures and people could have different wives living and being, and the exchange is what made america vital, and this is a threatening idea. so this where is the culture

wars begin to occur. and then in the mid-'90s to now this era in which mull my culturallism becomes sort of something where the institutions, corporate institutions, government institutions, begin to say, yeah, we're all multiculturallist. this is a famous line. >> host: it's become a platitude. i wondered about that. i don't necessarily disagree. quan read that as cynical. how do you make sense of that? you could argue that now in 2014, multiculturalism looks different but is still a dominant logic, it's still a sincere attempt by men people -- not all people, corporations have their own interests regardless, but multicull curlism is still alive and vibrant in terms of the goal to

democratize america. >> guest: it's emptied of its radical meaning. a mom that meant to be able to -- a movement that meant to be able to foster cultural inequity. the basic idea was that if we are able to have the stories of underrepresented people told, this would create empathy, and out of empathy would come a new consensus for racial justice and a society in which people could be free to be who they be. you know what i mean? >> host: right. >> guest: so we haven't necessarily got ton that point. >> host: why? is it because of -- so, there are some who do argue that we won the culture war. that's not a debate anymore. we understand the multiculturalism is america. the debates noir different, and some people say because we won the cultural wars -- kind of like obama winning an election and people not becoming an activist. we won ask they're sitting back.

others consider there are certain machinery that are making the multiculturalism empty of the revolution. >> guest: on the one handed multiculturalism reset the boundaries of civility, which is a lot of the stuff we are we are arguing at students in the '80s,the first group of kids coming on to campuses that were part of in some instances a majority, minority, entering class. that was part of the first class at cal that was majority minority, who knows what that means. but we at that time were like -- i don't want to be on campus and having to deal with racial microaggressions, is what they call it, but able incidentes, being called slurs on the street, being made to feel like you don't belong in the classroom.

all happening during the '80s and resets the bounds of civility so now the language that even reaction areas need to use has to be couched in multicultural terms. pat buchanan has this amazing piece in his book about, will america survive 2025? he talks about how everybody can enjoy ethnic foods. we all like to go out and have thai food and ethopian food. let's just keep it at that. and that's reallying and. -- that's really interesting. so multiculturism has reset the bounds of civility but we're still at a point where we can't have these conversations about the inequities and inequalities that persist and that are actually rising. this is, again, our blind spot. and so the book was trying to really kind of get at that. on the one hand you have folks working in the cultural acid --

asidously to promote visions of the u.s., but to get to that point we have to deal with inequality. there was a poll that came out after ferguson, two questions were asked. they're interviewing blacks and whites. the first question was: does this raise the -- do the events raise issues that ought to be discussed about around race? and the second question was: do the events in ferguson draw too much focus and attention to the issue of race? and there's a big split. african-americans, blacks, say, overwhelmingly, this raises issues we ought to be talking about. and for whites there's a pleasurity -- maybe not a majority but this feeling of, well, we're paying too much attention to race right now. so, one set of folks' invitation to have a conversation is another set of folks' cue to leave the room.

so, we have these gaps. not just in wealth. in income and housing and education, but also in the way we talk about race. and if we can't get to those questions, then we're looking at a 2042, when we're all minorities. that could be much, much worse than we're seeing right now. >> host: what about the wilful neglect and ignorance of white americans, we don't want to think bat this because it makes us uncomfortable and to what extent we feel like we resolved this in the '80s. there's multicultural day at school. we eat indian food and asian food. we have done it. we're exhausted. >> guest: i think it's both. happening at the same time. so, there's a set of really interesting studies in 2007, think, vanderbilt university, this massive survey, of parents and their parenting styles and whether parents had the

conversation with their young children about race. and so 75% of white parents did not talk to their kids,down kids, about race. whereas parents of kids of color -- could be mixed race marriages or mixed race kids two to five times as many conversations about race as white parents. and then earlier this year in 2014 there was a david binder and mtv poll that was done, and they looked at and it said, how do you feel we should be thinking about race? and it was really interesting. millenials, were the ones surveyed here, says both that color blindness was the way we ought to be looking at race and we have to respect difference so this is the legacy of the '80s, the legacy of the culture ward. both sides of the culture wars. you have on the right this

notion of putting out color blindness as a way to roll back justice policies and then 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 nut and bolt question that really was powerful to me was, how do you feel about having a conversation with people about racial bias? and we're not talking about racial inequality for discrimination. just talking about racial bias, and only one in five millenials felt comfortable having that conversation. so we're confused. we're confused. this gets brought back in every generation, this notion of color blindness is brought back in every generation, and it has these very disturbing kind of effects. i think that many parents, many white parents, are very good will. they say, look at what happened in the past, when we talked

about race in the past, we did it to hold people down. so if we just don't talk about it with our kids, then the kid grow up in a society in which we'll have moved beyond that. i think that's wilful, and it's also maybe good-willed. but i feel like our history doesn't allow us the racial innocence. >> host: they would say race is on their side, my great-grandparents were racist, my decide i'm not racist mitchell kids don't like to think about race wimp keep dying off the race thing will be solved. that's the narrative. >> guest: every generation has been called the most diverse generation. right? and so the last generation dies and the next generation comes in to place, that everything will magically be solved. right? and it's magical thinking. it is magical thinking. if we just ignore inequal, it

will go away, and that's not how anything works in society. so here we are, 50 years after -- more than 50 years after brown v. board, after the civil rights revolution, and we see segregation reaching these levels that were pre-brown vs. board of education, even as the u.s. is diversifying at an astonishing rate and we are moving towards 2042 at a fast clip. >> host: late inpack the inequality thing. on the one hand there's racial bias, the issue of individual sort of ill will toward people, or individual prejudice, and collective notions who people are and what they are. on the other hand you're talking about lack of access to stuff, housing, health care, living wage snooze -- wages. >> guest: culture. >> host: how does culture play into each of those things? people understand racial bias

linked to culture. aim not sure it's intuitive to understand the link between cultural and structural stuff. >> guest: that's partly the work of what folks like you and me and a lot of our colleagues are doing, is trying to relate the two together. what we say is that culture change precedes political change. lo oft of us working in this area. you have to have the imagination, particularly now during this period in which politics is hamstrung, stalemated, to be able to imagine change is really crucial for us to be able to move to the place where we can build very healthy movements for change. so, getting back to the question that you're talking about here, i think that it's important for us to be able to foster a culture that points temperatures racial justice, that artists that creative folks that folks

are working in the culture should be uncovered or blind spots for us and we ought to allow them to be able to do that, and then we ought to be bringing those images into the culture that we're all working in. and it's a process, right? it's not the kind of thing where you press a lever and then change happens. this is something that builds over time. and so all of the things are happening on twitter right now, even as we're speaking, stuff happening on facebook right now, stuff happening all throughout the country in these sort of interventions that people are making, they all add up to something, and that might sound crazy, optimistic and hopeful, but i think it was interesting to look at the 2008 election and the explosion of street art that happened. you had this obama hope poster and that gets out there into the

ether, and then you have this exploding images of people wanting to change and now stuff is spilling outside of the democratic agenda and the barack obama platform but it's images of the third world generation front, illinoiss of environmental justice, immigrant rights, all different types of things that the democrats and taking positions that the democrats aren't taking, much less the republicans. but at that point what we saw was attached to the symbol of change, this obama now not as politician but a symbol of change -- are all these other folks putting up their symbols of change as well and that's a moment at which all of this imagination is coming forth and that allowed, in a lot of of respects, the wave to build that result ned barack obama's election, i'm not saying that elections are going to be the end all and be all. in fact we can see what happened

what in 2009, the cultural wars flare up again. right? that the symbol of obama is a symbol of change becomes twisted. you have the obama joker -- >> host: things about the book, how that figure comes out. unintended, right, but -- >> guest: i think it -- >> host: the initial image wasn't and then the idea of attaching the socialism was stuck to it, took a life of its own. >> guest: right. so the story is that there's a an american who is trying to learn photo shop and takes the cover of obama from "time" magazine and douse him up as the joker in the batman, and just posts it on his flickr account and wakes up a couple months later to find that socialism has been put at the bottom of the poster and it's been posted all over los angeles, where is where

the obama hope poster made it debut as well. suddenly there's obama as a socialist and then obama as the foreigner, the kenyan, and so on and so forth, and obama now is a symbol of all the fears, as opposed to the symbol of hopes. so that's just the image war. what you also see is a conservative movement is very smart about targeting people within the obama administration right away, who have the 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, and so immediately you'll see sergeant van jones drummed out of the administration, immediately what we see is the sherrod incident. we see obama making comments about henry louis gates being

racially profiled on his own doorstep and he is hammered for that. and so -- it's crazy. >> host: the irony, being one of the key figures in the cultural war ask then the target of this new cull -- culture war. the culture wars that exist now are being prosecuted in very different ways, and in the '60s and '50s it was the claim neutrality. america is just this thing. and then in the '80s,okay, culture is arbitrary and there are different choices to make, almost conceded that culture should be conted. they just began a figure for particular values. they didn't suggest that america was val youless or value neutral. george will saying, we need your

centric stuff, or we need to push back against -- the left was saying, it's garbage, left, gates kind of playing the middle. and then all this stuff happening mitchell point is now they're not making as clear and earnest a claim that their values are better. right now it's happening on a very different means. he is a socialist. he is from kenya, you know what that means. is there political rope of the kind of honesty that exist ned the '80s where george will will write a column and say, european values are just better? a value to that honesty. we can write back. we can write back to these people. now, its seems because of the bounds of civility that it's hard to even have the conversation but a they're analysis a state of perpetual denial they're attacking things on ethnic or racial grounds.

>> guest: still a lot of those type of things coming out all the time. so, wasn't it george will who made the comment a little while ago about sexual assault, and so there are different kind of things that are happening and can still kind of catch fire and kind of move out -- michelle malcolm, the sort of concentration camp, the japan-american concentration camp denier. >> host: the center of the conversation with this stuff. >> guest: they do. the ground has shifted. but at the same time, the debate is still there. bill mahr, talking about his mom. so, these so these are culture wars that attention different forms but still coming down to this ultimate division of narratives. the narrative of this great

america that is about to fall into the complete abyss, the end of american civilization, versus the idea of an america that could be transformed into something great through the vitality of its peoples' enter acting. again, this the basis of conservative reaction now. it's about restoration, and people honestly and openly use the language of restoration. sarah palin saying we can't allow our great country to be transformed. we must restore her, and restore her values, and the really interesting thing is that conservatives actually don't ever have to do anything but argue for the status quo. what they have to do is to adapt to the new kinds of language that gets instilled when movements are able to make changes. so, they in the '8s so are using the language over the civil rights revolution, and now they

have to adopt some of the language of the multiculturallists, and so on and soing for. but at the same time, they don't have to ever instill new visions. those who are progressive and those who want change and racial progress, always have to instill the new visions, and so it's always that extra burden that is added us to do that, and within the left there's still an argument about quote-unquote identity politics, and certainly in the art world around identity art. and so those are different kinds of fronts that the cultural wars are being fought on right now. >> host: there's a bit of optimism in your book that i needed. i finished the book feeling much more optimistic about the possibilities of america. >> guest: really. >> host: the possibility of coming to terms with this. one question i had was -- kind

of goes back to the other point about the way in which we have to imagine a new world. a new self. a new nation. and that our culture can the art we produce, can help bring that about. the thing that kept nagging me, to what extent is the opposite happening? to what extent is art overdetermined. >> guest: what do you mean by that? >> host: i get how an obama -- mite dare us and encourage to us imagine a world that is not yet, but the flip is to what extent does the current set of conditions, the current economic realities, from neoliberalism to everything else, make us so constrained in our political imagination that obama becomes the face of hope and change, a fairly centrist liberal or lyingly to the left but note the left left we dreamed of 40 years ago. to what extent is ours political

imagination constrained by the moment so the art itself -- >> guest: constrained by the moment. >> host: we don't have this on the wall anymore. we have obama. this generation of artists is also being limited in that way. >> guest: artist always overspill the cup. i'm optimistic in that kind of way. there are always visionaries who are going to break the glass and kind of bring it home. it's a line from one of the essays around the height of the cultural wars, to take a hammer and crash the mirror and bring it home, just like make it authentic, make it real, make it relative to your experience, and i think we have seen that around ferguson. a lot of -- and hip-hop, right? a lot of the art coming out, there's a shift that is kind of happening in the language that people are using now to be able to describe what is actually

going on, what people's experiences are. dear white people, justin siemian, amazing movie, breaking through, think, lot of the noise around color blindness and around race at this particular moment, and saying, here we are, with all of these questions of visible and invisibility and we even have a foot in the door. one character is a very high ranking administrator at the university, which we couldn't have imagined during the '80s and '90s, and his son is one of the key student activist, whichs d -- characters in the movies. so we're 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 of the movie. 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 will be artists who will be able to make the -- make their statements so to speak to to make their work to have it appreciated for the formal values that they're instilling as well as the messages they're putting out at the same time. >> host: how do we think about whiteness? often times we talk about color, colorization. talking about white people. how do we come to terms with this thing called whiteness. that's ang essential piece about power and identity. >> guest: again, the conservatives have a very strong idea 0 about how that should be conveyed and it should be conveyed in terms of anxiety, in terms terms of fear. there was -- "time magazine eye "did a thing in 2010, top ten ideas of the year. one of them was the waiting anxiety crisis.

and now you "saturday night live" parodying that. so the new white flight to suburbs that are further and further out of the cities. the flight from multiculturalism. the flight from the cities that have become very diverse. so, that's one vision we have going on there, and i think the other vision, again, of sort of liberal color-blindness, the idea that if we don't talk about it, it will all go away, and i think that we need to build up and sort of 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 the 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, trying to figure that out. right now as we're questioning seen the mid-term elections and certainly 2016 and beyond. it's a political question in the party sense. it's a larger political question in terms of how do you form a new politic, a new sort of consensus around values and inclusion, desegregation, compassion, empathy, all those good ideas we love so much. >> host: i think to my whiteness question, a lot of that, though, that narrative, how we can be less bias to them, whoever them is. how we can give more stuff to them. createmer access for them. there's a difference between that and being reflective. what does it mean to be white, to be in this position of power to have this identity in 2014, particularly when it means

something so radically different than it may have meant in 1914 or 1814. so what i'm thinking about at this moment, how do we create a conversation around what it means to be white? what it means to be the thing against which all other racial categories are measured? >> guest: i think that has to do with having these honest conversations about privilege, where privilege comes from, what it means, how it gets instilled, how it passes through generations, how it gets recreated, and to dismantle those things we have to have honest conversation about it. >> host: this later moment in the book, because done -- one thing it forced me to think outsides the bounds of is black-white paradigm. the racial demographics of the nation are changing for a variety of reasons, and how we think and talk about race and racial difference that to become more diverse and more

interesting. talk about the factor that have method the case. why are we where we are right now, dem graphically, and even sort of culturally, how we talk about racial difference? even the language of, we are a majority minority world, is it very new kind of language. >> guest: i think there's been an emerging sort of push to talk about -- and name antiblack racism, and that's been a very positive and powerful push, because it's really important for us to be able to understand how certain races are used -- how race is used dish should say it that way -- how race is used to perpetuate antiblack racism specifically, and so for asian-americans, latinos, to look at the ways in which we're

talked about. becomes a leverage to recent foreign antiblackism. for asian-americans which has been ongoing. and i think now questions are on mixed race children, and youth, and populations. in some ways there's this sort of beautiful vision that if we all get busy with each other, that we all intermarry or have kids together, that the future will all be better-that racism will naturally disappear. >> re al bull the same the. >> guest: right. we won't have these conversations anymore. and you don't have to be from brazil or hawai'i to talk about the fact that discrimination exists, paradigms put into place that create inequalities that are long-standing and that

continue. so, there's a lot of discussion that kind of needs to be had and gets much, much more complicate as we move forward, but i think that ultimately it has to be about this question of racial inequality. it's about closing these gaps. it's about closing the gaps around culture inequity, about moving towards a society in which we are again all able to be free together in order to do that we have to imagine beyond yourselves, beyond our identities to think about what the whole means. so i'll give you an example inch the bay areay i'm from asian-american parents 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'll say we were underrepresented in the past, and so maybe this is the way it ought to be in order to

make up for all the sins of the paste. my question is, what kind of world do you want to live? what kind of city do you want to live? do you want to live in a resegregated society with just you at the top? i don't think that's a progressive vision i want to be part of. and it's something i've been fighting in a lot of respects. those questions become relevant and new. what is interesting to me is that during the height of multiculturalism, lib recalls arguing against multiculturism said we'll see a racial apocalypse, especially california, and all of these gripes we fight against each other. >> host: the racial war of the world. >> guest: especially after the los angeles riots, don't followed multiku culturallism, it's going to be happening in

the cities in the neighborhoods in the school boards, and that's not to minimize any of the tensions around change that are happening in different neighborhoods, because they are there. but there are also a lot of people of very good will in those neighborhoods who have been working together to try to find commonalities across different backgrounds and histories, and i think that is the kind of stuff that we like to uplift as a model for us looking towards 2042. >> host: one thing in the news is isis and brought the conversation about islam and the conversation about difference. you mentioned bill mahr, and i wonder about the conversation about islam becomes another way to address the race and color issue by different means but a there's not saying it about german muslims or white muslims. they're talking about arabs and asians. to do extent do we have to

re-imagine the fight of racial contests now? people aren't just saying, keep the arabs out but they're they're saying, islam is dangerous. how do we leave to look at new places they demographics shift and it's not black-white. >> guest: i think that what we see, especially after 2001, is the sort of heightened division around difference around religion. but then it gets racialized. as you just noted. we're not talk about white muslims for the most part. we're 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, like, thousands and thousands of pakistani americans, bangladeshi

americans, south asian americans, arab americans, entire neighborhood have been torn apart by these different policies. this is one of the things in our blind spot. right? 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 hijab. it's crazy. and so we do have too absolutely rethink how it looks in the 21st century, and these are the kind of things that i think i'm talking about, when i'm talking about sort of neighborhoods kind of coming together, folks coming together across different kinds of backgrounds, and saying, no, we're not actually going to stand for that. yes, these are people in our neighborhood. yes, we are are all in this together. and to move forward. but the question is so

difficult. when you really kind of get down to the heart of it, we kind of have to get beyond all these questions of what martin luther king called the great three triplets, racism, militarism, and economic inequality. in order to get to the kind of society that frees us all, and we're always dealing with all of this noise that we're getting, and 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, the church, the cafe, the schoolyard, having these conversations, what happens is the extremists begin to dominate the conversation. and this is what i'm labeling the cultural wars. the cultural 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: those conversations are beginning to emerge again is tv. >> guest: and twitter. strange places like that. >> host: for sure. i was thinking about cultural images. i am thinking about black jesus, or adult swim. i'm thinking about these kind of edgy, dangerous representations, in the book you talk about even the boondocks -- they see racial diversity as something to parody, which is its own politics. do the images you see now make you more encouraged about our able to have those kind of conversations? the edgy ones, dangerous ones,

ones that go deeper than the bourgeois liberal conversations. >> guest: i'm ambivalent. it's really interesting that abc's fall lineup has a focus on nonwhite families and nonwhite leads. folks of color who are leads. and in some respects, it's an understanding that demographics have shifted. right? again, this is sort of -- >> guest: i like -- >> guest: i'm going to be ambivalent here. so, fox tv, when it was trying to establish itself as the fourth network, decided that, like pepsi actually before that, pitch si coal la before that -- pepsi-cola before that, they were behind and had to catch up. we're going to go after youth and color.

we're going to build a business from the nitches as opposed to the number one, coke, or nbc at the time, that had the big audiences. we're going to build up a whole number of niches. so, fox did that. they had the simpsons, in living color, on and on. all of these shows bringing in new audiences, and folks are saying, wow, this isn't golden age. the golden age of black tv. as soon as fox tv gets the nfl they dropped all the shows. right? and so i'm cynical in that sense. right? how long will this last? we know that scandal did really well. all these other types of shows and see where they go. i don't foe how long it's going -- i don't know how long it's going to last. might be a concession during the latedder year of the obama

president si, or could be a permanent move, and then how far can those representations go? is i think the relevant question. so, i'm ambivalent. but at the same time i'm happy. right? there's the old sort of fighting, fist in the air, multiculturallist in me who is like, representation, i'm happy that eddie juan has a show itch -- i'm thinking, this is something i might be able to actually recognize and representation to recognition is always really important. >> host: so, you're a culture historian. i got to push back against your optimism. your overall, overarching optimism, even in the -- you look across history and you see where we have been, and in the book you talk about the structural stuff.

in a new answered way. -- knew nooned way. at the end of the book you reiterate from king and -- you reiterate just how hopeful you are as one of their children, that we are going to be able to imagine and produce 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, because i -- the book to me talks about just how complicated and messy this stuff is, and yet you retrieve out of that mess a sent -- sense of hope. >> guest: people talk about changing demographics. i come from a chinese hawaiian family. i married into a filipino family, and by now our clans have enter married with just about everybody possible. so, we have these grand

reunions, all the time. lots of food. lots of eats. lots of hanging out. lots of fun. and this is what my kids are growing up around. it's what i grew up around, really, and i see that happening. it's not like this person and that person don't have a fight that they've been nursing for 20 years maybe. it's not that there's all sort of peace and love through the whole thing. there's hard conversations that people are having, i'm sure, in the corners, or maybe they're using it as an opportunity to reconnect to that kind of thing. but that's real. that's may reality. right? people talk about getting into 2042. that's been my arrest ever since i was -- my reality ever since i was born. maybe that's where i get it from. on a personal way.

>> host: we have to figure this out. >> guest: do we want to get to a point where we have a majority minority society but the grand experiment has failed, and we're no longer talking about class and race and gender. we're talking about caste and a permanent inside and a permanent outside. and so i wouldn't like to see that. i wouldn't three-quarter see that for us, for my kids or my grandkids. i'd like to see a better world. >> host: i want you to make two predict snooze i'm not good at predictions. >> host: the first first one you'll be good at because i'm only asking you to predict 2016. how will the shifting racial demographics inform the election of the next.? >> guest: i think it's goal to be a really, really interesting contest. i think that the republicans have to remake themselves, and that the likelihood of seeing a

latino republican candidate is probably pretty high. i think the democrats as well are going to have to figure out, after obama, how they attract a con con it student si that obama brought into the fold. and -- >> host: which ones, though. black folk vote democratic anyway. >> guest: if black turnout is low, that's going to make the difference. if latino turnout is low, if asian-american concernout is low, gay and and lesbian turn out is low, young people's turnout is low, the democrats are where they started before 2007. and so all of that is real, and again, these are mathematical calculations. it's not what i'm really interested in the end. it's not a what i mean when i talk about trying to build a new cultural majority. >> host: but it matters to the extent that the people who are

making political decisions can undermine the type of cultural values and cultural plurality and diversity we want to see. >> guest: to take if your cynical kind of mind state on this, even if we are able to create that cools that will propel somebody into office, will we till move towards the cultural values 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 crystal ball question. 2042, that magic year -- >> guest: goes to hell. >> host: what needs to help for us to be in the place you

ideally imagine us to be and imagine with us good the book. >> guest: we have to get tower blind spot. we have to understand that we really have to rethink the kind of divisions and segregation that is happening below the surface, and how we address that. we have to attack resegregation, attack the gaps. again, the numbers are stark, and many of us know the numbers about the folks of color behind bars, right? many of us understand the numbers of -- around the educational gap. i think less of us necessarily understand the wealth gap and the income gap, but those are really pressing. i think recent studies have shown that if we try to make the

kind of progress that we're making around the race gap, the race-wealth gap now, it would take us more than a century to get to the point where folks would be near to being equal. and so these are the kinds of issues we have to address in a very, very measured, nuanced, and devoted, committed kind of way. >> host: my last question, what is it about artists, about cultural, which you describe as soft, mallable -- that allows us to get at this stuff sometimes in more substantive and rigorous ways than the greatest intellectuals of philosophers? >> guest: well, part of it owes to the artistic process. the political is should this bill we written, the cutoff is of 2 or 59.

the questions are narrow. with the artistic process the questions are much broader, and they can kind of cascade down. and what the artist bring to the table is the ability to be able to ask the impertinence, the wrong of ultimately right questions that need to be asked of us, of our society. >> host: well, well, art certainly does that and this book certainly does that. it's an amazing book. you have upped the intellectual stakes once again. thank you for being here. >> guest: thank you for having me. >> that was after words in which authors 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" online, go to book of.org and clock on "after words" in the topics list on the right side of the page. >> there was a time i had five -- i learned and understood this in the course of writing the book. i had five families on television, and i had one on mooncrest drive. fresh the one on mooncrest drive, the kids got up and went to school. i think i drove them to school sometimes but they didn't need me to drive. they were able to get to school. the ones on television needed me to breathe. they needed me to be alive. and that is where i paid more attention. now, i don't think that's peculiar to the work i was

doing. i think there are doctors and lawyers and people in all kind of work whose work dominates their lives and defines who they are for the time they're doing it. and i was defined more by what i was doing than what i was -- on the air than what i was doing on mooncrest drive. >> yet you begin this is full of detail of your childhood, and having written a memoir myself, like many successful people, there's a fascination with, this is not a childhood without significant challenges. and you begin by talking about your father, herman k. lear, and you say the k stands for king lear. i love that.

i know he becomes a prototype for a couple of people in your shows. but let's stay with him for a while. tell us about king lear, your king lear. >> guest: he served time when i was nine years old. he announced he was going to oklahoma to finish some deal, do something there, and a couple of men my mother had met who said, i don't like those men, herman, don't go with those men. >> host: you're living on the east coast. oklahoma is -- >> guest: we were living in connecticut. and his reply was, finally, when they were arguing about it, jeannette, stifle yourself! and that, of course, is where archie got the word.

and he left and was arrested the day he got back. he was going to bring me a ten gallon hat, from oklahoma, and the day he was arrested, there was a picture in the paper with this -- his holing a hat over his face, man kelled to a -- handcuffed to a detective and was away at a crucial time for a kid. and he persisted following that, in getting into trouble one way or the other. and the thing that defined him for me, i could not not love hill. >> you can find books like this

online. here's a look at events we'll be attending this week. look for this programs to air in the near future on booktv on c-span2. on monday, we're at the jewish community center of san francisco for former cia operative robert bear's talk on the history of political asass nations. the next evening at the university of pennsylvania book store in philadelphia. steven cook examines the life of joseph stalin. on wednesday, james robbins recounsels the military career of general george custer at the hudson library in hudson, ohio. and on thursday, at book court book store in brooklyn, new york, the chief national cooperate for "the new york times" magazine profiled several politics and members of the media. and that's a look at some of the author programs booktv will be covering this upcoming week. for more go to the web site, book toe.org and visit, upcoming programs. ...