booktv.org. >> and now on book tv, new jersey senator corey booker discusses civic involvement and recounts the experience that shaped political thinking, he discusses his book united with robert george of the new york post >> you'd drop a book called united, why the title and why now? >> well, first of all, it's great to be here. [laughter] >> it's actually nice to be on it. >> exactly. >> and i appreciate you being here and not making me feel in anyway challenged. [laughter] >> absolutely. i shaved yesterday.

>> made me feel good. i appreciate that. but, look, i ran for this office chris-cross the state of new jersey to all the southern counties actually and heard from people time and time again the lamen that our country was so divided, there was so much partisan gridlock in washington and lament that are not only dividing it but so much of my personal experience growing up with african-american family attending black church but living in an all-white town i have been chris-crosses lines a lot, going to stanford, yale, it just showed me how united as a country we are and some of the best leaders i had some of them coming from new york, taught me lessons of the urgey of breaking

-- urgency. >> host: it's an interesting book because it's not your chronological memoir, it's kind of cimematic in terms of zeroing on moments. tell me about virginia jones. >> guest: well, she's a pretty remarkable soul that's revereed newark and people were talking about her. because of people like her and i had worked in the intercity communities since i was a teenager, east harlem, east palo alto but i decided to jump into newark coming out of high school.

drug traffic, my first reaction, experiences are actually -- i was robbed, you know, my first moments there. there's an old saying that when you come to the end of all the light you know and knowing one of the things are going to happen, either you find solid ground or the university is going to send you people to teach you how to fly. i found this elderly woman, tough, but profoundly wise and she broke me down and rebuilt me and the first moment i had with her, you know, i went to go talk to her and i'm corey booker, i'm from yale law school. you don't want my help? she has to bless me and she didn't seem like the blessing was forthcoming. i will never forget this moment where she seems frustrated with me and took me to the mittle of

martin luther king boulevard and said what do you see around you, what do i see, describe what you see, i described the crack house and projects and i just described the neighborhood, you can't help me. she walked away seemingly and dye doesed and ran after her, grabbed her respectfully, you know, ms. jones, what, what. she goes you need to understand something that the world you see outside of you is a reflection of what you have inside of you and if you only see darkness and despair and problems that's all that's ever going to be and you're the stubborn people that every time you open your eyes you see hope, possibility, love, you see the face of god, then you can be someone who helps me and she walked off leaving me on the street thinking to myself, okay, lesson. so i went back and i came correct now, not seeing, you know, when i first got in the neighborhood i saw the problems, i saw -- i was victimized by crime but i went back now with humility and a willingness to surrender preconceived notions

and vendor my agenda and plug into her and she made me do meaningful work at the beginning that i became like an apprentice to her and what was amaidsing to me, this woman showed a love and a grit and a capacity to care that -- that i didn't even fully appreciate until i was writing this book but you know her son was murdered in the buildings, her son served in the american military came home and yet she stayed there, she kept leading, i trace that arc in that book. she never gave up. when i get emotional now, eventually we became, you know, partners in taking up slum lord and the building spiral out of control because the city comes in and the city was being run by a political opponent.

sharp james. but at the end of this now i'm writing the book thinking i have a story to tell but i decide to go back and interview, thought i track down everybody that might have been around in the -t 0's that could tell me what they observed because i know what i remember but i want to see what they remember and what they observed. i found drug dealers, i went back to guys that were dealing drugs because they are much more than the things we have done, so to find men that were coming out of prison, i find other tenant leaders and so this is what i found out about her, you know, it was very moving to me is that -- she made me feel like i had to work very hard to earn her trust and what have you, one i heard from a tenant leader, when you left, one of your first meetings she turn today me and told me that's my son. that so moved me and when i'm interviewing the guys who were dealing drugs who -- one of them

said to me at one point, like he intervened to try to allege that they had decided that i was a threat and they were going to shoot me, just a warning shot in the leg is the way he put it. this is when i was moving in. she was telling these guys, leave him alone and this word that she was calling me family from the beginning, so, you know, this is a woman who really shaped me in some profound ways, not only because of the colorful things that she said in her character, she's rough justice, you know, because more of her symbol and example, my lowest moments in those eight years i lived in buildings that

eradicate hot water, roach infestations, elevators that didn't work, all the hardship that is for me as a young man were difficult for seniors, children were really threatening. what i found out -- what i saw within her was an american character that is the best of who we are and in many ways her ability to hold united this community has just profound lessons for all of us. >> family is a recurring theme through this book, in fact, you start with when you learned about your ancestry having gone on henry gaits program and findings goes back to the a slave master james who goes back to, you know, days of the pilgrims. >> right. >> and then, you know, flashing forward you talk about how how

one of your grandfathers was raised by a single mother and your father was raised by a single mother and at that point they had the feelings of growing up as a bachelor, but you having grown up with two -- two parents there seems to be a theme of trying to, you know, identify the -- the familiar lengths of both blood and nonblood. >> i start the chapter in a funny way. i hate henry lewis gates, by the way i'm going to partner you with john lewis, which is like partnering with superman. [laughter] >> comical, humbling connection with this amazing hero and then this oddessy that i can trace my

lineage back to a white confederate soldier, i'm a direct descendant of member who fought in the alabama creek wars, moving native americans off their lands but i'm descendant of native americans and sleighs, unbelievable that he revealed to me made me understand our connections including introducing me to my mom's first cousins who never knew that they were related directly to a black family because that was the time in the south where you had a lot of -- >> white cousins. >> you had reuniting. so that expanded my view of family right there to know that i could be walking past folks and there's not a black person in the country unless they came right from an immigrant from africa that doesn't have white blood and the flip side of that, there are many whites that have

black branches that they just don't know about. that expanded my idea of family. i think the leap for me at discovery was that our -- we are as america a spiritual family much more than we know. we were all tied to each other and influencing each other every single day beyond our imagination that the power that walker says, not realizing they have it in the first place, we have powered a touch to connect and influence that we don't know and so the story sort of ends with my family now fighting a court case or legal efforts to move to integrate a white town in 1969 that i ended up growing in that my father called it and it's -- you know, i dedicate this book to the people of that town, the people of newark, new jersey. harrington park. my participants had to rely on courageous white folks who

formed council but i had listened to these stories growing up from my parents, now i'm a reporter basically, i want to find the people that were there and interview them, i find this one lawyer and i ask him, why did you back in the 60's get involved. well, i remember the day and i go, do you remember the actual day, it was a monday, i go why, because the day before was a sunday and it was bloody sunday and i watched the bridge, john lewis and others on this bridge and i came in and i said, leo, we need to go to alabama and they were struggling lawyers and they realized they couldn't afford to, what can we do right here right now with what we have to help out this great movement for civil rights and so they found council and given the file of my parents and so you -- i'm not relate today john lewis that i know of, i'm not related to the whites and blacks that were on the bridge, christians, jews

others but their actions set ripples out that almost immediately change it had course of my family and so these are the ties in this country, my father would say growing up, he would say bastard but to a single mom who couldn't pick -- couldn't take care of them that he broke that cycle of poverty which i show in the book because of a conspiracy of love, because all these people understood they can't solve all the problems of jim crowe, they can't change all the outcomes but wouldn't allow ininabilities and they understood that the biggest thing they could do any day is often that small act of kindness. that community of kindness and love broke a cycle of poverty and batched my father into the middle class, he would say i'm a hard worker and i made sacrifices to where i am and i other a debt to these people

that did that and that's how we are related in this country. we have this myth of rugged individualism and i really respect those ideals but rugged individuals didn't get us to the moon, it didn't build at amazing infrastructure. there's a spirit of interdependence when we say we pledge to each other our lives, our fortune and sacred honor, it's a recognition if we are going to be successful we need each other, we may not be blood brother who is were brothers in cause or u spirit, the cause of our country there's interesting story that goes in here, you

know, you date your lineage, great, great grandfather is james from the pilgrim era and your father is ending uptaking in by james who are running a funeral home and he learns worth ethic and so forth from them and it's a -- you know, it's slave time pilgrim to pilgrim, fascinating, almost a perfect line. >> i love it. i learned in life and maybe just my spiritual view that there's no such thing of coincidence. there's a purpose in everything. i do love that.

>> host: just take a quick passage here, from your interaction with the convicts, there was the obvious feeling but for the grace of god, but there was more to my discomfort than that. i was responsible, people were being put in this massive facility in my thought and i had given it too little thought. the people versus or the united states versus, and i realized now that we are the people and we are the united states, people's liberty taken away their freedom seized, prison after prisons filled again, i knew and couldn't deny it, a key part of the whole, the good and the bad, and the true truth and our lies and how are some works and how it fails. what i saw here is another

another thing of individuals choice that is have to face up to but also the idea of social -- social responsibility, can you speak on that? >> look, that's the balance between individual responsibility and the idea of interdependency and i was told by parents that you have to balance those, you have to know that ultimately you are responsible for your actions, you're responsible for success or failure. it has to be part of the understanding that you're also interdependent and the things that you've relied on, the things that you've benefited from are blessings that have been yelledded by others and so my parents were relentless, you know, me father is joking with me growing up, boy, i was an 18-year-old kids with a lot of swagger, i was a high school,

president, football player. i had a head so much bigger than this studio. you were born on third base. i worked hard in high school and my father would try to remind me that the blessings i was enjoying me, anybody who calls themselves american, i don't care what your struggles are, it's better to be born in this country regardless of circumstances than a lot of places in the planet earth. we are benefiting and so next step, i don't care if it's mass incarceration, environmental contamination that's not just flint, there are many towns throughout this country that are facing challenges that flint is chasing that are hurting our children right now and i say you have a choice and take responsibility for changing them. if you know they are where they

because others took responsibility even though it didn't affect them directly, they took responsibility for civil rights, responsibility for laborer rights, then you -- to be a patriotic american, you -- and who swears an oath that we are going to be a country of liberty and justice, then you got to be one of those people that steps up and take change -- princeton professor, was mentioned in the last debate, liberal blacks, but, you know, he talks -- there was so much death in this book. his decisions led him to his coffin but our decisions did

too. >> hasam. >> that's one of the father-son-kind of issues. >> right, and that's the title of the chapter, father-son, my father's son. i was weeks into the mayor's office and suddenly made me re-examine. >> this was a young man that you bonded with in the projects? >> my father that he really was my dad. both of them were raised by single moms. well, in this case my father got taken from his grandfather. it reminded me of my dad and

charisma and then he started hanging out with teenagers in the lobby of my building and i started seeing gang tags and smelling marijuana, marijuana smell is common in my college but we all know we live in america where the justice system and the drug war is fought differently in different areas, while people -- nobody is stopping frisking home from parties who recollects is the guy you are buying pot for. that drug dealer, the drug kingpin that are in college campuses all over the country. they're not facing the same justice system. just on race, forget class which makes it more dramatic, blacks and whites use drugs the same amount and use with drugs, some studies show that young whitings a little bit more but blacks would be arrested 3.7 times more than somebody that's white. shocking disparities in the

enforcement of drug laws which means that asan and his friends did not have a margin of error in the way that my college friends flaunted drug laws without fear of consequence. you name it, i saw it being used. i thought to myself, i have to help these guys, started trying to help them but we are busy people, we are professionals. i'm going to be mayor of the city of newark. i can help people. after doing some intervention with the kids i didn't have time to follow through on the mentorship that i was trying to set up on my own involvement with them i was so gracious and i get death threats, they would put police officers in my lobby and kids don't hang out where there's cops. i didn't see the kids and didn't see them until i got sworn in and days into my time as mayor i'm responding to shootings and

i respond to one of -- early on the scene and there's body covered up and one being loaded in the balance -- ambulance and one thing that i regret. human beings, being loaded, i didn't ask the name, i went about administering to the living, come home the night, i see the police report and read it now and i read that the kid was now dead. i began the chapter actually with the decent of a community into a basement of a funeral home that i into the people change together and grief of misery piled on top of each other. i couldn't handle it. i felt like i was choking grief and guilt. two fathers and two sons as i sit and weeping in my mayor's

office, a time that i'm success but the most failure. >> that's very striking because it's not usually something that politicians kind of own up to where they feel that even if it's not their own fault that they've somehow failed and you show a lot of vulnerability that you don't often see, i guess, among most -- most politicians, are you at all concerned that people will feel that book wears his heart on his sleeves on some of those issues? >> it broke me at times, i don't know how you can see america for who we truly are and not get

broken, the problem that we have in our country is we don't want to tell each other the truth, when people look at history, they want to whitewash it, so to speak. [laughter] >> and so that -- that does a disservice and diminishes humanity as oppose to telling the truth, my participants raised me never unflinching and exposing to me horrors in order to make me a great person. you can't have great hope unless you're willing to confront despair. ms. jones taught me that hope is a response, optimism is i'm going to be happy no matter what, but hope confronts and

sets conviction that despair will not have the last word. i don't mind telling folks about -- in fact, i was talking about this on a stage of 50 people that made me crying again because as i was writing the book was working through the emotion of all this in my mind and i feel that this division that i'm trying to be a voice against in this country make us more united, one of the first things you have to do is courageous empathy is really seeing each other, not building walls around each other so we don't see humanity, see the trials, but you have to have a courageous empathy and i don't want to try to say -- that's a mistake we make in our politics, you think strong to be mean, to be tough you have to be -- you have to -- you have to wear this veneer like you have iron for

skin, that so me is just not the way that i've chosen to lead my life and i think we need more leaders who are willing to show vulnerability and humanity because it helps a lot more people who are struggling themselves, like one of the things i sweet out all of the time, sometimes when i'm feeling that way, you know, i tell people let's be kind to one another because we are a lot more fragile than we led on, when i was at sanford i started crisis center and i was stunned at it was almost like somebody lifted the vial because the calls would roll in about eating disorders, about men and women coming out and what they were enduring being gay, about depression and mental illness, about rape, and sexual assault, and wait a minute, all this is going on and how can we be about

confronting it if we won't even admit that it's happening at the degree that it's happening at our country. >> you said -- it's about the importance of seeing people and one your mentors frank hutch ins talks about, i see you corey, speak about frank. speak about that. >> frank was one of the great professors that emerged in my earliest years and took me under the wing, is where i am today and he was not a flashy guy, he was not -- i go through this moment where i first observe him and almost get frustrated with him because we're dealing with a real crisis in these buildings, conditions that are really bad that human beings are living in, we think our criminal behavior in the sense that people are accepting money and not providing services and i'm just trying to get the legal, i want to get testimony so i can write letters to hud and inspector general, wait a minute, he's going slow in the meeting, we

are going on hours giving everybody space to talk and so the next day i sort of confront him on this. dude, i was like, you know, and then he just gives me this powerful talk about you don't understand that it's not just about healing the building, that we have so much trauma in this country that affects our children, it affects others that we don't address that trauma and -- and people need to be heard. they need to have their moment to speak truth to power or to authority and it was just a beautiful which i go into the book but it was weird, it was beautifully coincidental again, ii don't believe there's things such as coincidences, seeing -- letting people, struggles be seen, validating humans and creating bonds between us where we could help each other is eyesight, my career went on to the mayor's office and so and so forth and here is this great tenant leader who was one of our most celebrated tenant leaders in the sense that he led the

longest rent strike in the 70's, a constant advocate but eyesight was going and he was getting old and so i started taking him out to movies and things like that, he couldn't see, it was one of the most precious moments we had together but on his death bed, we had begun this rhythm where i knew he was blind and i would come up to him, frank, t corey and he would say, i see you corey. i used to love it. you don't see me. but he would joke and that would be, hi, frank, it's corey, i see you corey. to me i loved it because he was a man that saw the truth of me and validated me and so on his death bed, i knew it would be the last day i would see him and nurses told me it wouldn't be long, i had this moment with him where i was saying good-bye and he could only -- his breath was e raddic and very fast and the last of the chapter ends with

that powerful moment where all he says to me is, i say to him i love you and he forces how very difficult i love you and then one of the last things he said to me, i see you, and so, you know, i'm a senator, you know, but if i can't recognize humanity of my constituencies even a tea party, trump-loving guy who is struggling with his family making $40,000 a year in a state with high taxes, if i can't see him just because i make preconceived notions about him immediately and judge him immediately, fail to his humanity or bond or as ms. jones fail to see vanity in him, i weaken my country because i fail to establish bonds over the lines that divide us and stitch the fabrics.

.. >> host: it's tough enough to even, you know, legislate tolerance. can, can you -- you can't really legislate, you can't really legislate love, you know? what to you, as a leader, you know, how does a leader, you know, bring love into the public

debate? >> guest: well, first of all, some of our greatest leaders say these laws mean nothing, they're worth nothing if it's not, if we don't have a spirit of democracy, of love, of connection of spirit. and so i am frustrated. i am the first person to preach against tolerance -- [laughter] and that sounds horribly, but i think tolerance is a lazy or cynical state of being that says i'm just going to stomach your right to be different. if you disappear off the face of the earth, i'm no better or worse off because i was just tolerating you anyway. that's tolerance. we should be aspiring to be a society of compassion, of empathy, of love. because love recognizes value. love recognizes that we have an interwoven destiny. love recognizes that you are hope for me because i can't move

this country myself. there's an old saying if you want to go fast, go alone. if you want to go far, go together. so and so when people say that they're patriotic, you know, often it's used as a sword to cut somebody else because i'm a patriot and you're not. off it's used as a way to demean another person or distinguish yourself from another american. to me, that's not patriotism. patriotism is love of country. love of country necessitates a love of fellow citizens. so we are going to be a patriotic society, we need to work on ascending above tolerance to being far more loving to each other. >> host: one of the other people you sort of learned from maybe in a different kind of way, chase bradley. >> guest: yeah. >> host: tell us about chase. >> guest: so jace and his

operation -- i moved in this building in my 20s, i used to sit across the street -- >> host: just a reminder, you're a sitting councilman in newark -- >> guest: yes. >> host: -- and you've made a conscious decision to move into the projects. >> guest: low income housing, yes. >> host: brick towers in newark. >> guest: and i made it as a promise to ms. jones, and now i'm live anything this community, and my mere presence there is a little disruptive to what was a drug trade like i had never witnessed before, around the clock. people use to just line up, and i used to say it's so paragraph, it's so end. when white friends of mind would come visit me, people would mistake them for buyers and practically throw drugs through their window. so the guy that consolidated the

drug trade in that building ran an operation when he started detailing it and other guys that just was amazing to me. e he alleges that he bribed guards. you're making this much an hour? i'm going to pay you three times on top of that so you help my operation. he went new the whole operation, some of which i detail here. lookouts on the building, the way the projects -- you could see a cop car coming for miles. so just an intricate operation of drugs all going on behind the veil which i couldn't see or know about, so he was a guy who was willing to teach me what was really going on, get stories i knew in my head. i wanted to be able to get their perspective on those stories. so he was a chilling guy. i mean, he's now no longer, he had served him time in prison, he's out. a daughter i saw yesterday.

but when he really descended into describing this to me, it was a very chilling part of the book. and then when he started moving out of the brick tower structure and it was taken over by younger drug dealers, talking about having to intervene to protect me. he said it was because i saw how you treated my mother who was living in those buildings. it was interesting about a lot of these guys to see their sense of regret, their sense of remorse. and when i talked to a lot of these young bays about how the young ones got sucked in, you given to see, yeah, this is their fault, bad decisions, but you begin to understand some of the causal factors of creating an environment where the drug trade was an option for black men as i've already said, as it's been for americans in general. >> host: later on in the book you get very passionate about

the inequities of drug policy and the criminal justice system and so forth. and you, you refer to it as the american caste system. the american caste system is far more extensive than most of us realize. people with an arrest record teeter on the edge. americans who have been arrested feel its effects, they experience the symptoms even though they don't have the terminal disease. they live in a world where the principle of innocent until proven guilty is a fundamental value in to our justice system, however, 36 states legally allow employers to deny jobs to people arrested but never convicted of a crime leaving people with no recourse in the face of this illegal gym nation. that seems -- discrimination. that seems to guide you into what some of the issues you're focusing on now as a senator. >> guest: first of all, i want to give a lot of deference to michelle alexander who wrote the

book "the new jim crow" who i quote here who i think is one of the important voices in exposing the injustice. and she refers to it as a caste system there. but live anything newark, new jersey, and seeing the, how awful the system is and how it violates the very principles of justice in our country -- and it's not just an urban black or latino problem. it is not just an urban black problem. about one in three american adults now have an arrest record. so that is a profound -- we are, as one of my chapter titles, an incarceration nation. weaver arresting more people -- we have 5% of the globe's population but one out of every four imprisoned people on the planet earth is in the united states. and our jails have nine times the admissions rate that our prisons do, and these are people most of them being held waiting for trial who are too poor. if you and i got arrested or what have you, we'd pay our

bail, we'd get out for minor crimes. people are in jail right now in america for minor crimes because they can't pay the fees or whatever to get out. often mentally ill, vulnerable people, poor, addicted minorities. as baldwin has said, mandela has said, you want to see the truth of a country, don't look at the halls of power, go to their prison ands see who they're imprisoning. it's shameful who america's criminal justice system seems to feed on to the point that brian stevenson says this is a nation where you're treated better if you're rich and guilty than poor and innocent. so i try to expose a lot of this in the book to tell the story, number one, of how we're all -- you may live in a nice suburban town, but you're being hurt by this system and show very real ways in which you're doing this. but also as you read already that piece, we all bear a responsibility for this and must

address these continued injustices in our country if we are ever to be able to truly say that we are a nation of liberty and justice for all. >> host: there's an interesting line going from your first unsuccessful run for mayor in 2002 when your opponent painted you as, you know, this outsider who's taking money from republicans and so forth. now you're in the senate, and you're actually finding common ground with republicans on issues of criminal justice and so forth. so kind of talk about the, you know, those bookends. >> right. that's the power of this issue that i've just described. you have republicans now from all different stripes who understand that this is a violation of our values. so you have christian evangelicals which if you read bible, know it like i do, rife with examples of compassion for

prisoners. if you are a fiscal conservative, we are -- this is government and bureaucratic expansion like never before. >> host: the building of the prisons is government expansion. >> guest: we were building a new prison every 10, 12 days in the '90s in terms of percentage of gdp. if you are a libertarian and believe that, in the liberty of folks, government's taking people's liberty on flimsy reasons. the last two presidents admitted to crimes that are felonies that people every day in america -- especially during the height of the drug war pumping people in for nonviolent drug offenses that we're incarsing people for. -- incarcerating people for. i don't care what you are, whatever your area, i'm finding allies, grover norquist, the koch brothers, newt gingrich,

christian evangelical leaders in our country, mike lee, tea party member of the senate, rand paul. so this is something that there's so much agreement, the question is why aren't we making the change. and that's been sort of battle of my life not sense i've been in the senate, but even in my final year withs of newark where every year the gravity and the impact of the problem was dawning on me more and more and more. >> host: do you think -- it seems there's a couple of bills and the president's behind it now but we're in a presidential year, does it almost make it harder even though there's so much common ground? >> guest: this is my first time as a senator during the presidential year. i was just on the phone with senator dick durbin before i came here, one of the great leaders of criminal justice

reform in the senate along with people like ranking member leahy. these are sort of the lions that have been working on this issue for a long time, and we were discussing just that, this coalition we have, can we get it across the finish line, what can we be doing in terms of tactics at the time that the supreme court battle is about to happen and the like. so i'm getting increasingly impatient. it shouldn't take this long when you have this great of a coalition. you still have the house which is making slow but steady progress with great bipartisan leaders over there. this is one of those things that will reverse a direction we've been going in since the '80s and for the first time turn back around. we have all these states that are lowering their prison population, saving taxpayer dollars, lowering their crime rate. please understand, as i saw firsthand and tried to demonstrate in the book is that this maas incarceration creates

more violation, more crime. when you strip away from a person any hope that they can provide for a family, can't get many jobs, can't get many business licenses, can't get loans from banks, can't get a pell grant to go to college, can't get food stamps to feed yourself and others. strip all that way from people, surprise, surprise, you've got a slippery slope often going back to making bad choices. we know from data rapid attachment to work, this is something i worked on with the manhattan institute, rapid attachment to work dramatically lowers the recidivism rate. and, in fact, we found out in newark thanks to rutgers who was getting killed. 84 percent of our murder victims had been arrested before an average of ten times. so this was that cycle of incarceration that people get stuck on that often ends in

tragedy to the point now for african-americans newark has this big story about the disappearance of black men disappearing overwhelmingly because of death, of murder and incarceration. so the time is now. the urgency of the moment is upon us. the coalition exists, but we've got to be doing things on the state and federal level to turn the ship around so that america, this land of the free, land of justice cannot just talk about it, but also be about it within its criminal justice system. >> host: you're the fourth elected african-american in the senate. president obama was the third, and he had a book, obviously, talking about, you know, the intersection of, you know, race and his personal journey. how do you see it? you touch upon all the things of how the races really are linked, you know, biologically going

back multigenerations. i mean, how are you seeing where we are in terms of race right now in 2016? >> guest: it's a complicated picture. i mean, you still have a -- you have a nation now with a black president, fourth black-elected senator, tim scott, number five, the first time two black senators have served together in the senate. >> host: similar hair styles. >> guest: similar styles, handsome heads. [laughter] you know, i bump into black ceos of companies now, so your seeing some progress, black millionaires and -- but when you look at success, you know, look towards the vulnerable, look towards poverty, look towards -- test your country that way. and is so what i look at, how does -- when you use a racial lens, you see disparities jump out at you whether it's black

kids and black adults with health care outcomes, with wealth outcomes with, you know, violence. so it's still a constructive lens to see the unfinished business of america that we still have a lot of work to do. it's why black lives matter, to me, is a very important stream of protests in our country, is trying to get people to wake up to not defensiveness, not feeling like they're being accused of something, but please pay attention to the fact that we live in a nation that if you are black and white, we know this, and this is not opinion, this is objective data, that two people arrested for the same crime the african-american on average is going to get about a 20% longer sentence for that crime. you have courageous police officers, the head of the fbi now coming out and saying the implicit racial bias is having a negative impact in policing in

america and that, you know, i've talked with police leaders who are starting to say we need to address this, there's actually training on implicit racial bias because everybody's got it, including you and i, that we need to start training on these issues to reduce the impact on our justice system. so there's a conversation we need to have, and we need to have the courage to have it, and we need to not let it fall boo prejudging and defensiveness, but get to where we really want to be as a society where no matter what your background, you have a fair shot, an equal chance through your hard work, grit and determination to have the kind of outcomes that are the american dream. >> you actually touched upon this. i mean, as a mayor, obviously, you know, you work with the police very, very closely. and you, in the book you talk about, you know, the tough jobs that they have and the sacrifices that they're making. so that's going on on the one

hand and, of course, you've got the black lives matter issue on the other. is there a way to, i mean, there's a guide that goes going on right there whether you've got cops who are often dying in the street trying to protect black lives in many neighborhoods and then there's the critique on the other. how, having seen it from both sides, how to you get those two sides to try and see one another as frank hutchins might say? >> guest: right. first of all, i don't see those two values as diametrically opposed. when i talk to professionals and some of police leaders that i respect the most, they understand that they want their -- they revere their officers. anybody who's like me who's had to rely on a police department, you see levels of courage and bravery every day in america of our police officers who are putting their lives online to protect their fellow americans. there's a story i tell in the policing chapter about being on the phone with my police

director during a hostage situation and talking about what tragedy. but before i could even, he and i could even come to a conclusion about how to handle it, gunshots start going off, and i just hear in the phone go, go, go. the officers storm into the building, no situational awareness. these are men and women with families and others. i wouldn't be racing into that building, into fun fire. but these people -- gunfire. but these people are determined to save human life. so that's the type of courage i encounter. but that's not contrary to the fact that the people we bestow with the power to use with deadly force, that we should want them to be the representatives in every way. if i was that police officer, train me so is that i can be the best representation of the values of this community. and so admitting that there's implicit racial bias that i had to learn -- this whole book is a lot about my come comeuppances,i

definitely in that chapter get a serious comeuppance because i was, i began not a great manager but learned how to manage complex organizations and how important data is. and we were able to move at a time when we were reducing our government by 25% in the midst of a recession, a republican governor cutting streams to cities, new jersey be cities were just i cutting cut, cutting, we had to increase efficiency dramatically. i wasn't collecting data, the right data on police accountability and was making big mistakes in doing so, and it wasn't until the end of my career working in partnership with the head of the aclu in new jersey to begin to correct more that. and as comey says, the head of the fbi has said, we're not collecting the data in america to even have a constructive conversation about race. about racial, implicit racial bias. if we don't even know and

collect data on police-involved shootings which we know the overwhelming majority of police are wonderful, but we're not collecting the data, that's wrong. so i sat down with the data team at the white house who is now doing things because they're not afraid to look at this problem to understand that police officers are human beings, that police officers under stress who are traumatized at times by the experience they have around them can do very bad things like all of us because sometimes hurt people hurt people. with the big data folks at the white house, what they're starting to see is by just collecting the right data, we can begin to have predictive analytics about when a cop might break, when they might do something. in fact, the cop that was -- remember the pool party and the police officer -- >> host: oh, down in texas? >> guest: yeah with, exactly. >> host: started beating up on the girl. >> guest: and he was being vilified, rightfully creating outrage. what they found was one of the

predicters of police officers doing those bad things is having within -- having been involved with suicides. not suicides themselves, but going to suicide calls. now, as a guy who had experience on a hotline dealing with suicide calls, those can be very mentally dressful and create the context in which -- stressful and create the context in which somebody could lash out. manage we had the data, you and i, people collecting data, they can predict what we might want to buy, when we might want to buy it based on our ages, the private sector's using that data, but why aren't we using that data in policing to better predict the behavior? they found out that having two suicides, handling two suicide calls within a certain amount of time makes it so much more likely that you have a negative interaction with somebody you pull over or what have you. but the data's a lot more sophisticated than i'm telling you. for me as a mayor, i found that

out the hard way. and now i sponsored legislation with barbara boxer to say, time out, america. i turn on 24-hour news and let's talk about racesome people yelling back and fort at each -- forth at each other without the facts. when i have objective data about what kind of sentence do they get, but on policing we haven't created the kind of data dive we need to help our sworn officers who want to do the right thing to help schedule power them to do the right thing every day in our communities. and by the way, catch those officers who aren't doing the right thing because i'm telling you right now as a mayor who had thousands of employees, you can this -- have 99.9%, you need to find ways of catching people when they're doing things that are wrong and stopping that baer, taking. >> corrective action or firing those people.

>> host: before we finish up, what would you -- can you -- one thing that you know now that you didn't know before you started writing this book. >> guest: a lot of things from interviews of other people. you asked one thing. i think it just goes back to interviewing people who let me know things that i didn't know at the time. and off what it did is re-- often what it did is it reflected to me that we have a capacity for kindness, decency and love that we don't fully appreciate. and it gets back to that ideal of are we, do we use our power every day to create the kind of america we want, or do we -- like i have -- get caught up in what i call a state of sedentary agitation where we're so upset about what we see in the world, but we don't realize we could get up and do something dramatic

about it. >> host: i think that's, i guess, a perfect place to stop. senator booker, thank you very much. >> guest: thank you. >> host: "united" is the book, and it's a great read. >> guest: thank you very much. i appreciate you saying that. >> that was "after words," booktv's signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed. watch past programs online at booktv.org. >> is and when i first started writing these columns five years ago, i got a ton of pushback. >> right. >> if i dared to say anything wrong about christine to o'donnell, i was a rino, a sellout. i think the timing is right in so many ways including the fact that people are fed up. when ann coulter tweets out somewhere where i'm paraphrasing, but she said i don't care if donald trump

performances abortions in the white house, as long as he has this hard core anti-immigration policy, i think people are finally waking up and even a lot of conservatives who were his about the to engage in introspection or sort of criticism of the conservative cause are finally like, yeah, it's time -- [laughter] >> did we finally reach critical mass? >> somebody needs to look under the hood and -- >> yeah. so do you think, i mean, all of these very successful and arguably talented faces of the party for the past 10, 20 years like rush, like ann, are they on their way out? or are they, are we going to have some kind of a live together for the next decade or so? >> that's a good question. i wonder if we're not in the midst of a reordering where you basically have a conservative movement that i would be a part of that believes, you know, in

small government and free trailed, that free markets bring about flourishing, you know, and, you know, help humans to basically reach their potential and the most joy, the most prosperity and a more populist nativist party that baseically wants to build walls. and, essentially, becomes as i think has been said, a european-style white identity politics party. >> right. >> and that's what i'm really hoping we don't get to. i fear we're heading in a direction where our politics is no longer decided on ideas or philosophy, it becomes, essentially, what tribe are you at? if you're a college graduate or a minority, you just automatically are assigned a democratic card -- >> right. >> and if you are a working class white person, you just reflexively become a republican.

and i think that politics should be about ideas and we should have this vigorous debate about ideas, and you shouldn't -- identity politics should not define, your identity should not define your political persuasion. >> yeah. i mean, that's what liberalism does. let's let them. >> i know. and that's the sad part, is in many ways we are aping liberalism. >> right. >> there's a conservative argument that says, well, they do it too. we have to fight fire with fire. i reject that. why should we try to emulate the worst characteristics of liberalism? >> you can what this and -- watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> host: ped agree is the name of the book -- pedigree is the name of the book. lauren rivera is the author. how do you define elite? >> guest: it's an excellent question. i've been looking at elite jobs in