the rest by things cannot continue. we have to find a new method to classify things. >> the wikileaks cable as the officers who decide what the gimpy which means that you are assuming that a person would know whether or not something would be highly damaging or just damaging or possibly not damaging at all. that office -- officer may not have sufficient information to make a judgment on that and a higher level classification the more likely you will have a readership that will be intrigued in interested. ..

>> good afternoon. i am deeply humbled. let me tell you who i am. i am chris and i'm humbled to have the honor of introducing jeff chang this morning. i know many of you know his work, i can't stop, i won't stop and my work is so very inspired by jeff's previous work. everything from how i see his work in his essays and articles from the village voice and everywhere else.so his sort of completed the trifecta of sorts with this new

book, we going to be alright. it's a collection a collection of essays, it's described as connecting black lives matter, talks about african-americans and race and class and diversits in the collection of essays. in each of those essays, he takes a major major theme, and in those themes, this is as collective optimism and he says. we gonna be alright. i could talk about him and his impact on my work for eons, but i do not want to steal away from the gift that you have to hear him talk about his amazing work. without further ado, and me getting in the way any longer, the iconic executive director, my friend, mr. jeff chang. [applause] >> thank you so much. how is everyone doing today? >> he is one of my hip-hop

education, urban education superheroes. if you over here for the earlier hip-hop education summit sponsored by the university of wisconsin, please read that book if you're a teacher or an educator. this book is very important. i want to say thank you to the amazing staff of the book festival. it's an honor to be here. thank you for the kind invitation.anks so thanks so much to the c-span book tv staff for making this telecast available. i have so many folks here in madison who i just want to give a big shout out to willie ney for the university of wisconsin, you can feel free to clap if you want to.

he has done so much. i've been able to work with them for over a decade now, and it's just been an honor. he has introduced me to so many people and he's a big supporter of hip-hop education. the first wave scholars in the house, i know you're in the house, and the staff. i love you all.. y'all give me so much hope in heart. thank you so much for always making me feel like i'm at home when i'm here. i've got this new book, it's called we going to be all right. it's on race and segregation in the begins with donald trump and anne's with fiancé because after beyoncé what is there to say, really, right? the book falls fast on the heels

of a previous book i did and that looked at the question of how we see race and how that has changed or not changed over the previous half-century or the previous 50 plus years. the book came out two months before the indictment of the murder of michael brown in ferguson. it came out too two monthshs before the movement for blackev lives changed everything for all of us. this book came from a visit that i took to ferguson to north st. louis county for the first anniversary of michael brown's death in 2015. there were a number of demonstrations that were planned and i felt drawn to ferguson st. louis as many thousands have

been drawn in the past year to learn from the young organizers in the streets so i put together the longest continuous protest in civil rights history with the exception of maybe the montgomery bus boycott, the historic protest. i came back to berkeley hoping to write an intro to the paperback version of who we be.w it just poured out of me. it sprawled. i wrote 50 pages. i turned it in, my publisher said this is not an intro to ao book, but it's probably a new book. i had taken two decades to do the first two book, but this one had that essay poured out of me. i finished the rest of the book

in about four months. one of the main ideas that i trace in who we be, it just deepens when i had a chance to be there in san diego city, in st. louis county invertedlouis ferguson. it was a strange paradox that i think we face right now in our country which is, we live in a time. where the picture of diversity has become more prevalent than ever.r cultur our culture seems more t desegregated than ever. all of the indices show growing inequality across the board, for for all folks in the u.s., but the front line of that is racial inequality. all the indices show this across growing racial inequality across the board and health, wealth, ad income and life expectancy andpr premature death and policing and mass incarceration.

along with that is a rise in resegregation. what i wanted to do in this book was to try spore the idea that maybe resegregation, and to be clear, segregation never ended in many parts of our nation, but resegregation may be the under discussed condition of our time. i just want to try to connect the dots between what is happening in housing and schooling with what was happening in the popular culture and in the streets. it made me think that this is the moment that we are living through right now in which weha might have the opportunity to step outside of this bad cycle of crisis, this bad loop of history that we find ourselves in with regards to race. in order to do so, we're going to have to recognize what keeps us in this particular cycle.s

i titled this book after a songf which, if you didn't already know, it's become kind of an anthem for the movement, all across the country for young people in the black lives matter movement and in other social movements. we hear it happening around undocumented young folks who are organizing. we hear that song sung around climate change folks and young folks who are organizing around standing. it's become an anthem for a new generation of organizers and activists who are pushing us to recognize the new realities and i hear in the song, sort of a modern blues. 95% of the lyrics that he is putting out are about struggle. he seems to still put out this line, you're left up, i'm after up but god's got got us and we

gonna be all right. it feels true in so many ways because it's a leap of the imagination and it seems so important right now in this particular moment. we are living in time, i don't have to tell you this, they're being defined by division mongering demagogue. we can talk about the debates the other night but you're probably like me, feeling really exhausted. to see an address the growing equality between the races on all these different types ofof issues, around state violence,, around life expectancy. the movement for black lives in so many ways asked that black

lives be centered because the gap is the whitest with just a few cohorts between black and white. of course all lives matter, of of course they do. what needs attention is this, the fact that by all indices, we seem to be valuing black lives less than others. in order to make good on the idea that all lives matter, we have to turn the idea of blackm lives matter from an aspiration into reality, and that's what black lives matter is all about. let's start there, real basic. fundamental baseline. let's start there.erned we can also start with this. more polls than ever show that americans are more concerned than ever about race relations than at any time since 1992, the moment of the last riots. a concern when all the way back

to 1965, half-century ago.l rigs the year of the peak of the civil rights movement, the civil rights had already been passed.. the voting right act was point we passed. the immigration and nationality act was going to be placed. however incomplete or besieged, it was being put into place to move us toward racial justice. 1965 was five was the last year that we had a national consensus for racial justice and equity. it has been more than a half-century since we have had a consensus. what we saw in 1965 was that the riots happened. we had a white highway policeulr officer pullover two black men coming from a party a couple

blocks from the house, and he pulls them out of their cars, he starts talking down to them, the neighborhood goes to the house,h they bring back the two young men's mother. the first thing mother does is to ask the boys what kind of trouble they had gotten into. she is berating her son. then the police escalate the situation and soon the mother and boys are arguing with the police and the police respond by beating them, the three of them and admit all of this chaos, the mother and tucson are hauled into a police car, the neighborhood is getting veryry a angry and the cars haul off and people start throwing bottles and a 60 day outbreak begins. this is a moment of a turn of policing in this country.

the way he makes his name is that he decides to talk about creating military forces. military team, a trained team, they they call it swat teams. as a reaction to prevent any of these things from happening again produces the beginning of the militarization of the police in 1965. it leads us into the moment that we are in now. this is a moment you can actually mark as the beginning of the post- civil rights era. it's an era that has been defined by this rich vital culture that has been born. it's also a time. in which racial backlash and has been supported by egregious

military policing. from 1965 until 1922, we seem caught in this crisis.action t there's a reaction to that, backlash, there's a sense of exhaustion that sets in. then we find ourselves in another crisis. how do we break ourselves out of this racist cycle? we have to recognize that the cycle has taken away the focus on how racism has shifted over the past century. the infrastructure that was put in place, what was put in place in the 60s was dismantled, sometimes quietly and sometimes mildly. during this time, explicit racism has become less

acceptable unless you're runninm for presidential office, but racism racism has morphed and become something else. i asked in my last book, how do we see race now. he wrote about the vision reality of race, it's not just how we see race, but how how we see race in order to preserve power.ac he wrote i am in an invisible man. i'm invisible because people refuse to see me. when they approached me, the only one surrounding themselves are figments of their imagination of anything except me. for longtime people of color were simply not seen. they were not being seen or excluded from institutions of power. we will fast-forward now into

the 80s as demographics shift when the civil rights movementen comes of age. this becomes an era of the cultural world. it's an experience of what is needed by that time, the mostge diverse generation ever except for now our current generation. they declare multiculturalism and assault on america. what they will tell you is that this is a time. that was right with racial tension. one of the places they showed up was on campus and in free speech and violence was on the rise. against that, students protested and by large it succeeded becoming visible and shifts were happening in the culture.

1993 is the year that multiculturalism finally crosses over. this is an old cover of "time" magazine from 1993. they literally created a grid of people from all these different races across the top and down the side and in the boxes and in this matrix, they put pictures of what they thought the love children of those folks would look like. they pulled this picture out of the middle of that. she was a perfect example of a mix of all the different races in the u.s. and she looked a lot like o'brien actually. they called her eve, and so now there was visibility in the '90s for people of color. diversity becomes not just a rallying cry for the left, but for corporations. by the end of the decade, even even for the george w. bush presidency. do you remember those pictureswl

of the cabinet with colin powell this creates new issues, he wrote when they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or or figments of their imagination.yt indeed everything in anything except me. think of the kinds of images that preceded treyvon martin and michael brown and others. they said the only thing that surrounds themselves are figments of their imagination of anything except me. it's the fight for black people to be able to be seen in all of their difference in community and everyone to be seen in all

of our difference and all of our humanity. if we can all be seen in ourth humanity, we might have the possibility of forming a moreefo open and for your community. in this moment, people of color find themselves in a strange position. what does it mean to be so invisible and yet so visible at the same time.e they don't see me, and they don't see. we have the picture of diversity , the image of a happy rainbow hospital, a healthcare system based on the extensive treatment of advanced diseasess. and prevention and wellness. here's a problem with diversity. the problem isn't with diversity itself. i run in institute of diversity

and health. i live this every day. i'm not not about it. i love it. in so many ways, the word diversity has been divorced. it's been uncoupled, decoupled from the word equity. so, if we are really truly committed to forming community, what we have to do is repair diversity and equity together.r. the front line of this is racial inequality. what is this picture of diversity hide?th let's talk about that one of the places where the picture is most prominent is the marketing of colleges and university. the student protest shouldn't have been surprising at all. was students calling out the gap of the picture of diversity and the reality of inequity. campus climate is a term that came into vote for my generation.

it was officially coined in an academic article in 1992. through that, people have done campus climate surveys and one of the things we found is that campus climate studies done are remarkably consistent. in both, you see one in four receiving considerable racial conflict on their campus.mp in a more recent report in 2012 from the university ofr california, we learned that these issues are so deep that one in four students of color seriously consider dropping out and that's not including the one in five actually do. when you look at the top didn't demands, students walked out ofd over a hundred campuses last year. the demand had more to do with

the hiring of more diverse faculty and staff, mental health professionals who are culturally sensitive, more cultural programs, more diversity training they were asking for this more than five times as much. what's interesting is that the focus in the national debate has been on the question of the freedom of expression. what we have is students protesting for the same things like students like i was protesting for back in the 80s. ten, 20, 30 years ago, calling y out this gap, being visible and invisible all at the same time. the reality of inequity, the lack of faculty and staff of

color and professionals, that'sf all we had. if you notice, the debate has been about freedom of expression. it's been focusing on these words, safe spaces and triggeree warnings. i think it might be fair to ask how long it took to be studentsy at the university of missouri to be able to get the words, to find the words to be able to come together to launch this protest in the first place. the person who went on strike, jonathan butler who vowed he was not going to eat until the university of missouri fired thn president, jonathan told me a story about his first year of the university of missouri and this was the year that president obama was elected and he had been celebrating in his dorm. he was one of two young black men in this entire dorm. the other had gone home to chicago to celebrate with hisag family. so, when victory was declared for obama, he started

celebrating in his dorm floor and he was quickly approached by for white guys who talk to him and started beating him. this was the first semester that he was there at the university of missouri. i think it is fair to ask how much students had to overcome. i want to suggest that in this country, it has always been easier to mobilize people around generational conflict than it has been to be able to mobilize folks around moving toward racial justice and cultural equity. in fact, the extent of thehe backlash has been about delegitimizing the words they need to find in order to explain what's happening to them on the campuses then limiting freedom of expression itself. one thing they will tell you is

that young people these days are the most diverse generation this country has ever seen but another thing that's not discussed is that this generation has come of age in re- segregating the country. let's ponder that. young people, more diverse than ever, more segregated than ever. this is a picture of the class after brown versus board of education. let's know that the peak of public school desegregation came in 1989. since that time, we have been backsliding. in 2010, 80% of latino and 70% of latino attended. [inaudible] it's even true in the bay area where i'm from, the home, the

birthplace of multiculturalism, we have an entire generation that's come of age and this of course mirrors what is happening with housing. i will use bay areas numbers right here. there's been a huge decline in the population of black people. it is devastated the blackck middle class and furtherat isolated what's left of black neighborhoods. what you see there with median income numbers as the result of that.an the median white household is making more than $100,000. year and the medium black household is less than 30. people are displaced and i have to go somewhere. what is happening now is that we c oakland which 50 years ago produce a group called the black panther party for self-defense.r it is known for its working class five. it is not now the fifth mostst

expensive market in the country. since 1990, same thing it has grown by more than a thousand% in terms of the black population what we have seen is that the last two decades. [inaudible] this term is too small. it centers the gentry moving into the city. what happens to all of those who are disappeared or displaced? they have to move somewhere.e.st so they move someplace like florida, orlando, they moved to suburbs like ferguson missouri outside of st. louis. it's part of a larger problem which is resegregation. we can even talk about the culture so let's talk about cultural equity here.

the field of culture is a place where we have been able to uphold the images of diversity's but it's where we can also fledged diversity and that's partly why we saw the white controversy trending over the past two years on twitter. it is calling our attention to the underrepresentation ofe people of color receiving awards in hollywood. let's take a lot further. there's been a state of studiesi that have come out that have been able to document what's happening in our cultural sectors. the places that produce and reproduce the knowledge we needt to maintain ourselves as a society. 87% of leaders. [inaudible] half security workers are nonwhite. the museums and dance companies,

none have a budget of less than 23 million, but of the 20 largest african-american museuma theaters and dance companies only five have annual budgets of more than 5 million. here's maybe some things that is most telling. in a survey of over a thousand new york city organizations, pretty much all of the organizations in new york city, 69% of those polled agree or strongly agree with thement: i statement, i feel my organization is diverse. when you look at the board membership or the leadership, over two thirds of leadership were white. the city is one third white. why is this important? we need to be able to move past the picture of diversity toward result in inequity. it's often thought of in terms of representation.tions of

there are also questions of access as well. what cultural knowledges are accessible and available. who are they available to? what is the cost of preserving and passing on these cultural knowledges, and finally, these are questions of power. who makes a decision about what we see are what we listen to, what we talk about, the storiese that we circulate, they are about who makes and shapes the future. these are fundamentally questions of how we constitute our very country. the values that we uphold. that's why with diversity, must come equity we are becoming more diverse by the day. in 2042, we will always be minorities. if we don't deal with equity, wh are condemned.s

this brings us back that the movements of black lives have forced us to consider.r by drawing our attention to premature death, the movement also causes us to look at how do we live? how can we live? can we live well or together. how can we confront these structures that create that and figure out how to live together. hopefully move out of this crisis cycle. it brings us finally, to the work of the great revolutionary and when we think about revolution, we often think about it as something that is one through bloodshed in which one elite is in place with another ruling power. as grace has put it, the next revolution might be better thought of of advancing humankind to a new stage of consciousness, of creativity, of

social and political responsibility. her revolution will require us to move away to find new ways to divide and rule but to think instead of how to live and share , to honor and transform ourselves and our relationships to each other. she insists that we rethink how we live and how we live together at this moment when it seems impossible to get any kind of relief from this, any releasewe that we are seeing on it day-to-day basis, from theio functioning in the malfunctioning, but this functioning of our institutions of power, we still need to be able to keep the imagination for change alive so we have to remember that cultural change always precedes political change. change is always within our hands. our agency and creativity will be the spring of hope in these

times. it's about creating alternative visions of how we can see the world. the song goes, those who believe in freedom cannot rest, and it's true, those of us who believe in freedom have to continue to, to produce new knowledges to allow people to be able to imagine what has not yet come. we cannot rest. we have to continue to work toward finding that sense together. your messed up, i'm aft up what god has got us and we are going to be all right. thank you so much for your time. i appreciate you coming in today [applause]e have s >> i think we've got some time to have a discussion if folks want to talk, ask questions, make comments, issue rebuttals, that kind of thing. there is a mic right here in the

center. and since we are being livee cast, come with the good questions of good comments and please do it in the microphone. >> thank you very much for that articulation of the complexities of the world that we are in right now. the thing that i would like toia say is that in a time like this, every point that you made draws into the topic of food, and let's not forget the topic of food when we talk about social justice or anything because when were talking about trying to repair the world and come together, there is something that everyone of us across this universe understands because it is something we have to do. eaco

when we can humble ourselves to recognize that is something that draws us together, it allows us to perhaps eat more humbly and share more. thank you very much.hu a >> thank you for that. >> i appreciate that. i just want to make a point to add-on, food is implicated in segregation as well.ons of a there's questions of access and representation and questions of power when we talk about ource food justice that we need to get to. we have language for this, food deserts. we have a clear understanding that part of what makes segregation and creates health issues is the lack of access to good food that folks may suffer by being segregated in the ways they are segregated. i think absolutely, food is at

the core of this. when we get to the question of life expectancy and illness and health equity, at the bottom line, we have to be able to transform the way we understandn the production and distribution and access to good food in so i many ways.>> h >> how do we get more economic equity, especially with the global forces and global capitalism and the hollowed out middle class in this country. >> i think that's a question i am not entirely qualified to answer, but what i can say is: this, if we look at the impact of the great recession, those who felt it first were communities of color because

there was a lack of enforcement of fair lending laws and housing laws. everybody was impacted, but in some ways community of color felt it first and more steeply. what i want to suggest here iseo that it is not a question of one or the other. it's a question of all of the things at the same time. there's a term that academics like to use called intersection alley. it's about class and race and gender, it's about all of these things all at the same time. the violence that's done to the american middle class is being practiced on communities of color, and when we get to a point that we are in a country in which there is a full-fledged ideological push to gain

homeownership, there is a lack of enforcement of these basicngt laws that are about enforcing equity and justice for everyone. what we saw was the redlining of even the wealthiest blackla communities and latino communities and asian suburbs as well. we need to be able to figure out, our next move is to figureh out how we are able to articulate these questions all at once. it's all of these things at the same time. we all have different entry wayo points and it helps us understand the problem in total. that's why i feel like the next movement has to be something

that builds upon what bernieal sanders was doing but also something more intersectional.ce something that shows justice as the front line to these questions. thank you for that. >> have a quick question question about how this current dialogue for the body of knowledge presented in the documentary, how you can take the notion of mass incarceration and beyond institutional racism, societal construct of racism and how do we move through something like that and how does that inform the discussion now.

you indicated we were never really desegregated so how do we take that notion of we are still segregated, mass incarcerated, and move forward. >> thank you for the question. i think what we have seen over the past three or four decades in particular has been the rise of the politics of containment. think thanks to movies like michelle alexander, brian stephenson, so many others were able to understand how incarceration has become a key h part of the development of an unequal system based on inequality for all. the idea is simple, if we can't

figure out places, rather than figuring out places to be able to employ people, to be able to educate people in the way that freeze them, instead we want to relegate people to a criminal justice system. again, this question that we see, that happy rainbow picture of the hospital is that theat is counter image to the image that's really out there of schools that are not teaching, of a society that is hell-bent on incarceration of young people of color, and i think what we have to do is, as we are reaching a point where we are thinking about trying to turn

the ship around, we have to be able to take all of those things into consideration that it's about incarceration but it's also about de-escalating policing and d militarizing and building up the structures that create healthy communities and educated communities at the same time. they're all these these things that have to shift at once. i hope we are at that point where people are being able to see those sessions connected. >> thank you for the new book in the work that you've done for i want to ask you a question. you gave us this image that cultural change proceeds global change and we can think about that in the positive sense and at the grassroots level,

transcended before it happens in the law but there's also the reverse scenario that reverse backlash happens and becomes institutionalized. don't know if you want to save your comments about beyoncé ande trump for the book, i've got my copy here, but i'll invite you to say something about, i'm sort of piggybacking off chris's earlier comment about how things that look and feel like cultural expression are not intersectional in the way that they can re-and describe the very things that we are trying to fight. i'm thinking about the way trump, for instance serves as a bogeyman that allows hillary to look like a good guy while in fact she inscribes all kind of things that trump makes us so worried about.

beyoncé, with her beautiful and evocative work, how it's not intersectional in terms of class and re- inscribing. how do we, i know you think about this, if you have some jewels to drop on doing this kind of cultural work well and critiquing and keeping in check these kinds of ways in which our forms of expressions are used to counteract. >> wow, there's so much in their so the first thing is to go back to something you are mentioningn in the last session across the street which is that it comes from radical love. it is key to developing this

radical notion while maintaining our love and it's not about bringing down folks. it's about recognizing and pushing each other further and how harder. >> for me, what i found, i'm just gonna start with beyoncé. i think i can talk about some things beyond her. let's start with her. what struck me about lemonade was that here was an album on its face that was about a relationship that has gone bad. it's about her lover has cheated on her and she goes through all the emotions and the anger and this depression and the despair and what brings her back is the sense of trying to figure out

how to make herself whole again. she finds her own redemption and as a part of that redemption, she is forgiving the person who did her wrong. this is based on the idea of radical love. it is consonant with trying to think about race relations through the lens as well and that is justice has to hold out the possibility that theic oppressor can be transformed as well. that is a very difficult thought it's easier for us to like the first part of the album lemonade then to like the last. we can be real critical about the last part of it. she just letting him off?e that kind of thing.ly where

i think part of me, imagination has to be able to come in. it's not about letting people off the hook, it's going through the process and understanding that the burden is on us to be able to think about that and do that as well. unfortunately, those of us who believe freedom cannot rest, we have to continue to take steps to create the new images in the new song in the new ideas and the new narratives that help push the wheel forward, recognizing that it could turniz we could get crushed under it. the idea of equal opportunity in the 1960s as part of the civil right movement becomes part of the wheel that is turning in the 80s and 90s when anti- affirmative actions come on the ballot in california, in florida , they are called equal opportunity initiatives. the language is appropriated and

taken from us. the exact opposite of what we were demanding is what isso offered up. understanding that is the way that we have to play it, and unfortunately it's always point to be more difficult to try to get to that new thing than it is to reinforce the crappy system that's already here. maybe i will stop here. there's so much market talk about.t. maybe i'll stop there. >> i'm glad that i got the chance to come here and speak. like to narrow the focus down, maybe a little bit about the unanswered question that you pose in your book, perhaps about the divide by the early on

protest, but also that is kind of balanced out by the focus on. [inaudible] you dressed a couple of the issues but i was wonderingng within this movement, how do you feel could give examples or possibilities of how asian americans can be involved asrr well as the movement that could be more, i feel like you finish the book with the question and i was hoping you go deeper into how you think about that. >> that this movement you mean the movement of black lives. >> yes, addressing the current time. >> so there's an essay in the

book called the in between andme it's very personal and very difficult for me to write. i ended up writing it in second person. i couldn't write it in first person. it was very difficult to imagine myself being able to do that.s o what i was trying to do was to get at the notion of where asian americans land and the racial hierarchy which is in between black and white. it's in between complicity freedom and in some anyways it's in between, to kind of dive in, i know how i direct my own personal energies and they are not with trying to undo racial justice initiatives such as affirmative action.

it's exactly the opposite of that. yet, i had to sort of confront the idea that growing up i may be didn't the same kind ofof feeling and anger about previous historic and can canoeing discrimination that those folks who grew up in san francisco chinatown might have had. i needed to do that. i think the reality is where asian american privilege lies is in the ability to sit on the fence, to sit out the running battle on the street and figure out who the winner is going to be and jump on board with them. i think that is something we have to be able to confront and frankly that we have to be able

to find an ethical and a moral stance and a backup to be able to articulate an alternative politics. there is a way in which you can articulate politics. so many people already have. it should all be all about asians all-time. how far does that go. i can tell you in the san francisco bay area where asian americans make up a large percentage of the population and growing, a quarter or a third in some cities. what we see is asian american-ai activists under the banner of activism trying to claim all of the spots for themselves. that's not the kind of society i want to live in. it's not an ethical position that's defensible. if you believe in racial justice, you believe in equity, if you believe in fairness, and

so i think that it's difficult, but i think think that it's symbolic, the position that everybody else has to get as well who's not indigenous or not african-american. we have to be able to look at who we are in between and the ways we can choose not to act, we can set out or choose not to engage. i think in able for us to be able to get to that, we have to be able to figure out what our place of engagement is going to be and how to broaden that. thanks for the question. >> thank you for coming here and speaking today. you pointed out that the music is about struggle and at the core of that is optimism and that's where you got your title for your book. i'm just going to ask a bag ands

nebulous question, are you optimistic as your title suggests? >> i think it depends on the day i think it's like that for all of us. you have to have a reason to get up in the morning. you have to have a reason to get up and fight and do your thing and to continue to try to push forward the rock a little bitat more up that hill. i try to be, yes the book has an optimistic title. people tell me it's a very pessimistic book and it's hard for me to disagree with them on that level, i just think of all of the things that my previous generation made possible for me

and i think that it's not fair for me to be able to disengage. i have to engage. i've got to be able to do what i can during my lifetime to makeim it better for the next five, six, seven generations. i guess that's where the optimism comes from. thank you. [applause] >> you just put so many ideas through my mind. it was great. thank you so much for that. you ended your slideshow with this powerful quote that cultural change always precedesr political change. i am wondering, you kind kind of immersed yourself in black lives matter movements and all of these things, but the last time communities of color strongly pushed for cultural change that would lead to political change, we saw what happened to a black panther party where the

government kind of moved against them and brought them down from within and it led to the beginning of the prisonat industrial and the criminalization of the new. my is looking at immersing yourself the way you did in the black lives matter movement and the change that were pushing for now, what gives you hope that this movement in the future movement will lead to the cultural change of the political change and it won't be undermined in such a way that the cultural change that we see. >> that's a big question. it's a real one. one of the things that anybody who is a close observer of movements have been able to see over the past few years is that there have been increasing tensions within the movement. there's burnout.

people are coming to stages where they feel like they can continue on in the movement. we know this has happened historically. we know that some of those is done through surveillance, through constant policing, through the court system. we see a lot of activists who are now, two years later still working their cases through the court system. their entire lives have been put on hold because they have been standing up for justice in ferguson and oakland and san francisco, i can talk about, these things that are happening. the thing that gives me hope is

to think about that these are ideas that have infected, if you will, an entire generation. i noticed it as a teacher coming in in the fall of 2013. students are coming in, after the death, the shooting death tn and then in 2014 and every class since. i spent some time in chicago two weeks ago with a number of high school students who are initiating all kinds of programs in their local neighborhoodsicea around social and racial justice. and i look at what's : that there's an of a renaissance happening amongst artists and these ideas are getting spread. i take heart in the fact that the numbers that we have now are much larger than they had during

that particular time and so maybe and the last thing to say is that yeah, this election has been hellish. it's shown the worst of what we can be, but maybe perhaps by taking us to the brink, the openings being created within the culture like might be able to lead towards a politics, grassroots politic, infrastructure that we do not put into place after obama won, to be able to build out the kind of progressive movement we really need to see this country in the next generation. thank you very much for your time. thanks so much for c