seat on the current state of black america in between the world in me. that's followed by the soft side by chicago native, natalie moore who weighs in on segregation in the city. wrapping up our look at the most popular nonfiction book according to the chicago public library is arley hoekstra fields the political right, strangers in their own land. many of these authors have or will be appearing on book tv. you can watch them on a website booktv.org. >> the publicity manner at johns hopkins in baltimore, maryland. what are some of the things you have coming up with mike. >> sharks of the shallows. it's coming out right after shark week which is a huge thing for the general public and it's an unofficial oversized coffee table books heavily oversized and riesling price and work in a handful of them and the dinosaur

book we now have a short book coming out. we have a book that tongue-in-cheek is about the remnant minus the bear, the story of the western frontier in for trapping and three guys whose lives intersected at a place called lake house that's coming out. then we have a book called uncompromising activists about a gentleman who was the first black graduate of harvard college and so, that the biography for us which is somewhat unusual but kind of a nice story for us. >> could you give me background about the press? sure, we are the oldest university press in the us. we were established in 1878, next year will be our 140th anniversary. we have four divisions, we have books, journals, news, digital and publishing and we have a fulfillment service.

>> talking from the 2014 book expo in new york city and he's the manager at john hopkins university press. thanks so much. >> you are watching the tv on c-span two. is our live coverage from chicago of the printers wrote lit fest. in just a minute, ibram kendi will be speaking. he is a national book award winning historian and will be discussing stamp from the beginning: the definitive history of racist ideas in america. good morning, everyone. welcome to the 33rd annual chicago printers wrote lit fest. my name is thomas and i'm i like to think the possible sponsors.

today's program is being broadcasted live on c-span twos book tv and we will use the time at the end for audience questions so when the time comes please line up at the microphones to your right. will hope the audience will be able to hear. as always, make sure to silence your cell phones and turn off your camera flashes at this point in time. with that, please welcome the colonists from the chicago tribune mac

praised him in presenting that award voyage through the history of u.s. rhetoric. [laughter] >> so even as professor of history at the university of florida, also a finalist for the book critic circle award and i just learned today that while in undergraduate school iibram was interested in being a journalist working for a newspaper. we essential could have used him

in that profession but i'm sure that he has been able to get a lot more accomplished by writing his books. [laughter] >> so we are going to start now and just kind of >> >> so so ibram, as a journalist i'm always curious when someone publishes something so compelling, thoroughly researched piece like you, piece of work that you've don't here. did you set out to write a 600-piece page -- piece of nonfiction and how long did it take you to complete this book? >> first of all, it's a pleasure to sit here with you and be in conversation with you and to be here in chicago for this festival and, first, i will

answer the second question first. it took me about three years, it was three long years of working from the time the sun was down till the time was still down, and i did not actually set out to write a narrative history of racist ideas that literally covers the entire course of antiblack racist ideas. i actually set out to initially write scientific racism up to the 1960's and then expand it to history of scientific racism to the present and let's write a history of racist ideas in general which is ultimately what i ended up doing and as many of you can imagine, quite a few racist ideas in history and so i actually had to cut a lot in order to make it -- [laughter] >> as you would imagine. >> so during that time that you

were writing as you point out in your book, there were as you call heartbreaking events that took place in our country that helped to kind of create kind of a black empowerment movement particularly among young people. it was a time of trayvon martin and michael brown, freddie gray and others, so how did those events actually influence your writing? >> well, i think when you are writing about antiblack, racist ideas and you're seeing on cell phone videos, on television screens, through the cries of mothers and fathers just how lethal antiblack racist ideas still are. i think it sort of inspires you and it really in short of encouraged and showed me just how important this project that

i was undertaking and i think that's really , i think, what guided me along the way. i could not sit here and talk about how difficult it is to compos this history of racist ideas when i saw these families having to deal with the difficulties of police violence. >> and certainly these are issues that we continue to grapple with here and so what i like about your book is that it -- it lays out the history of these racist ideas in america and a great narrative and gives us a road map of how we can kind of move forward using what we have learned from your research. but another thing and perhaps more important is that you have challenged us to look at

ourselves and to understand that it's not just white people but african americans who can also have racist ideas and that perhaps we are part of the problem rather than the solution. so some would argue that african americans can't be racist, that racism involves power over segments of the population that, you know, have impact economically, politically, socially, what do you say to that, is there a difference between racism and racist ideas? >> i think the easiest way to understand and to really answer this, is for us to distinguish between a racist policy and a racist idea.

so i defined a racist idea, any idea suggesting that a racial group is superior, inferior to another racial group in anyway and a racist policy are more or less defined as any policy that yield an unequal outcome between racial groups. so any policy that produces racial inequality, and so i think as it relates to power, you have power in order to create or even defend or execute a discriminatory policy against a group of people and so certainly it is the case let's say white people have far and away more power in the country to execute but to say that black people do not have any power, which is typically the argument of those who say black people can't be racist because black people don't have power is to simultaneous i will say that

white people are all powerful and so say that white people are all powerful is to express one of the oldest racist ideas in history which is -- which is that white people are like gods and so i don't think despite many people making the case that white people are gods and they're all powerful, that that is the case. i also think and showed from the beginning that black people can say black people are lazy, right, and i think we should also recognize the function of racist ideas. and i think that's one of the whole contribution from the beginning. the way racist ideas function and operate in our society is it causes people when they see racial disparities, it causes them to blame black people for those racial disparities as oppose to racial discrimination and so the next step becomes too

either civilized and incarcerate black people and so fundamentally that's what racist ideas do, it suppresses to racial discrimination including within the black community. >> that's interesting, you know, one of the other things that i find interesting and what you write is, it made me think about what we do a lot of time as journalists and as in the newspaper industry, we publish, everybody know that is in chicago we've had our share of problems here with violence and so forth and we have daily tolls of the murder victims that get probably more clicks than anything on our web pages, people like to read that.

so do those kinds of things actually contribute to a feeling that perhaps african americans are violent people overall? does that -- i mean, does that in any way shape the way people view african americans? >> i think for some people it does. i think that one of the most dangerous racist ideas in this country is the idea of the dangerous black person, is the idea of the dangerous black community and i think we see how dangerous this idea is and the way it operates in the minds of police officers who when they see these so-called dangerous people or they enter into these dangerous communities, they -- they're trigger fipger is a lot closer than when they're in other communities and i think this idea is based on misleading statistics or it's based on

ideas that only when we think about the most dangerous neighborhoods we only think about homicides. we don't think like other thickses like drunk driving, to give you an example. more people die of drunk driving than they do homicides. we have studies that sometimes show that white men are more likely to drink and drive and kill people than other racial groups but those communities with those high levels of drunk drivers are not considered to be dangerous, right, because our danger and blackens. and i think we should reimagine and, i think, what neighborhoods are truly the most dangerous by actually bringing in many different factors. i don't think we should just reduce it to those communities that have the most homicide. and last week, i will say that

studies show that there's a direct correlation between violent crime rate and unemployment levels, which means that it's actually better for us to understand certain communities as dangerous, unemployed communities as opposed to dangerous black communities. but then that would cause a different solution to the problem, right, the solution would not be kill more cops, is civilize people and the solution would be very simple, jobs. [applause] >> what it boils down to really is racially inequality and what that means for -- for all of us, so in your book you talk about three sides of the argument surrounding racially inequality

and -- and you say that those are not new ideas, those are ideas that have been around every point in every century. so tell us about the segregationist, the antiracist and the assimilationist. >> sure. again, stamped from the beginning, one of the sort of ways we can understand this title is that racial inequality has been stamped from the beginning of this country and therefore americans have been debating or i should say arguing about why we have some racial inequality and there's been three positions, the segregationist position has stated is because black people are inferior, so to give an example, over the last 50 years, the black unemployment rate has been twice as high as white unemployment consistently so segregationist will say is because black workers are lazy, black workers don't want to

work, they want to hang out on welfare, they're not qualified, they will principally blame and the other position is antiracist position and typically view racial groups as equal. so for them it can't be something wrong with black workers, it must be the result of job discrimination so they point to job discrimination as the cause of racial inequality and then the third position which is a little bit more tricky is the assimilationist position and typically a assimilation is actually both, so, yes, it is the black workers are lazy, but it's also the case that there's job discrimination. assimilationist will say, one of the reasons why they are so lazy is because they've been subject today so much job discrimination, right, and what we need to do is not only challenge racial discrimination but we also need to civilize black workers.

>> so we are amongst friends here, so give me some examples of people who we might know who you think fit into those categories. [laughter] >> okay. so let's see the segregationist position after weeks after barack obama was elected president, john wrote a colups in forbes magazine stating that we are living in a post racial society which basically means that racism, racial discrimination is over which means that any racial disparities and inequalities that still exist must be the result of black inferiority. and so i think that that's one obvious example of a segregationist position. as it relates to an snt racist position, black lives matter activist when they look at the

problem of race and policing they are principally stated, you know what, we know it's the case that in 2016 young black men were nine times more likely to be killed by police than other racial groups since young black men are equal to the other groups, it must be the result of racial discrimination, it must be the result of discrimination from police, from the criminal justice system more broadly. but then they were not challenged by the segregationist blue lives matter and the crowd that, yes, there's a problem with race and policing but also a problem with thugs and problems with black on black crime and we need to basically solve. >> what's the problem? >> what's the problem? >> what is the problem with

maybe saying that it's the combination of that? that it's not just, you know, the fact that we should focus on just black and black -- black-on-black crimes and we should not just focus on police brutality but black-on-black crime. what is the issue for that? >> typically the argument for black-on-black crime is typically staged that there's a fund rental -- fundamental problem that black people are killing black people that's not occurring in other neighborhoods. there's something actually worse that's happening in black neighborhoods as it relates to crime.

idea of black criminality, not criminality but black criminality being an -- a problem. when we look at statistics, again, you have the policing community that will say is because black people commit more crimes and so that's why we we have a greater black problem and they make the cases based on arrests and incarceration rates even though we have people every day in this country who are committing crimes and what, not being arrested, we have people who are being arrested and not going to prison, but people assume that if a neighborhood that has higher of arrests and incarceration that they have levels of crime and they have been assuming that to justify the number of police in black neighborhoods which ultimately leads to what, more arrests and ultimately more incarceration. i should say also that a very

seductive idea is the idea that slavery literally harmed black people as a group, that segregation literally made back people into group, the poverty is literally impoverishing the values of the black community. these are seductive idea that's prominent and i once believed them wholeheartedly myself. but when i started looking at evidence it came up lacking. >> that's interesting. you know, surveys of various types is that african americans and white people in general look at race through a different lens and, you know, we just don't see

things eye to eye. so often this talk about conversation about race that the country needs a conversation about race, what would that look like? >> well, i think the first and most important thing that would be important for that type of conversation, i think, this is the very reason i wrote this book, for us as a nation to sit down and finally agree on a definition for racist idea and the reason why that's so important, you know, i ended up again defining a racist idea, any idea suggesting that a racial group is superior, inferior to another racial group in any way. the reason that's why so important is because people have conversations regularly about race and then they refuse to admit that their ideas about black people of other group are racist and people want to speak

and people want to imagine the racial hierarchies but they don't want to be considered racist and so that creates this conundrum and people do not also want to accept the fact, right. you present people with facts that dispute their ideas about black people but they still want to believe what they want to believe. it makes sense because the other alternative is that racial discrimination is pervasive and people do not want to believe that. people are so -- i mean, they love this idea of a post racial america. they are hugging it so tightly and they refuse to look at the facts that say otherwise. >> well, anybody who still think that is we live in a post racial society, you know, i don't know what to say. [laughter] >> but you're right, though, i mean, because we -- we do hear a lot of that. >> and if i could add one quick thing. >> sure.

>> another thing that we should do as a nation is the way i let off this book is by admitting my own racist ideas. so i admitted that i had been basically -- i had consumed a series of racist ideas about black people over the course of my lifetime, living in this country and i think we have to enter these discussions admitting ourself, how are we going to become better people, how are we going to become a better nation if we're not willing to admit it, it makes sense. you have racist ideas floating around you, it makes sense that you're going to consume a few. >> can you share with us something that you realized about yourself? >> sure. i -- i, of course, as a black male having negative experiences with a black woman, i would generalize to say that black woman are like this in a negative which in a sense is a racist idea, i should be saying that that particular individual was like that.

i used to think that black neighborhoods were more dangerous than white neighborhoods. i still realize that this was based on a series of misleading statistics. i used to believe that black children were intellectually inferior to white children and that black children are achieving at a lower level than white children when i realized that those ideas were based on standardized tests and i can sort of go on and on. you know, i had all these ways of explaining racial disparities that denigrated black people that i didn't realize were actually not based on facts. >> so in order to do that, if it -- does it have to be a conscious decision that you -- you want to examine how you feel about race? >> yes. >> and decide that you're going to do something about it? >> yes, and i think it has to be a conscious decision to want to

become an antiracist, and so we have to think of and image that there are racists and nonracists, there's no such thing as a nonracist, either you believe in racial hierarchy, that certain racial groups are superior in certain ways than others or you believe in racial equality. when you say racial equality, when you say groups are equal, you're not stating that the people are the same, right, you can have two equal teams that have different offenses and defenses but they are still equal and you're also not stating that everybody in both groups are great, right. what actually make black people actual to white people and other groups is not the barack obama's of the world, it's not the oprah's of the world, it's actually the imperfection of black people that make them equal because it makes them human, right, any group of people in this country, in this world has a series of, you know,

it's basically a collection of imperfect individuals, right, but what happens is black negativity is generalized while white negativity is individualized. and so black people are not able to basically be imperfect, right, when they're surrounded by the racist ideas and so i think, you know, us striving to be antiracist, us asking questions, since the racial groups are equal, what is actually causing this inequality. >> so that raises another question. you know in the news lately, actually last week or the week before, we heard about what happened to lebron james at his home. we know that, that was just one thing that happened, there's been a series of things to happen that was bill mahr that used the n-word on had hbo.

how do you view things like that, are those distractions, are those things that we really should be focusing on or are those just things that are out there that we should maybe just say, you know, those are just some crazies and let them go and focus on things that are more important, what do you think? >> so to answer your question, i want to be very precise because i don't want to get -- when you say focus on, that's not saying you're not even looking at that at all, right? >> right. >> i would argue that, no, those are not things that we should be focused on. i think people who truly want to create an antiracist america with racial disparities do not exist should be focused on searching out and studying the discriminatory policies that are actually creating those racial disparities, that should be our focus from a racial sense, right?

we should be trying to eliminate racial inequality, we should be changing policy to make that happen and we should not think that we have to do anything to black people to create equality. there's nothing wrong with black people. really the only thing that's wrong with black people is that we think something is wrong with black people just like the only thing that's extraordinary about white people, they think it's extraordinary about white people . [laughter] >> okay, well, so you've talked about angela davis, thomas jefferson, so we might consider

people who were probably, i don't know about thomas jefferson, we know that thomas jefferson had some issues beneficiaries ris. >> but the others were probably some of the most problack people we know yet they had racist ideals? >> in the case of debois in particular, had five major characters and each of the characters sort of served as tour guides or windows to this larger three-way debate that i was referencing earlier and jefferson was one of those and angela davis was n. the case of debois, there's a specific reason why i wanted to write a

history of racist ideas as oppose to racist with an s, i wanted to sort of show the complexity of the human mind, right, that in certain vantage point you can see the racial groups as -- you could see a hierarchy, but in other advantage points you could see the racial groups as equal, in certain ways you could hold antiracist ideas and in other ways you can hard assimilationist ideas as deboise did and i actually show from the beginning that his double consciousness was in fact, a double consciousness of assimilation and antiracist ideas but i also show over the course in his very long life that he was able to develop a single consciousness of antiracism particularly by the 1930's in which he was critiquing his own ideas. so we are not static, we can be

born into a world and have assimilation and antiracist ideas but i think the story of deboise showed that we have the capability to become antiracist. >> okay. and with someone as challenging as deboise it took evolution for him to, you know, to come a realization. boy, is there a hope for regular people like us? [laughter] >> it seems like it's very complicated. >> it is and at the same time it's complicated it's actually simple because very simple idea for a person to believe that the racial groups are equal, but then that becomes very complicated when you realize, you know, all of the sort of different ways in which we have been told that they're not equal, that there's something wrong or inferior about black

people and so what antiracist too is again their assumption is equality between racial groups. that's their fundamental assumption and then therefore when they see socioeconomic, they see the disparities when it comes to let's say, wealth, they don't say it must be because black people don't want to save money, no, they look for discrimination in basically banks giving out mortgages and they find that discrimination. you know as many studies have found in recent years and so i think that's really -- and i'm actually watching on a book right now titled how to be an antiracist and i'm sort of -- i'm taking the reader through my own personal story and i sort of begin the book with a chapter called my racist introduction and i sort of take the reader through and how i sort of became an antiracist the way i tried to show with deboise.

>> listening to you talk about this i also am thinking a lot about the young men and women that we come across all of the time when we are reporting about the violence in chicago in neighborhoods that where disinvestment is just a way of life. i mean, there's nothing there. it's obvious that the neighborhoods have been forgotten and so have a lot of the young people to be quite honest. so how do you make a young person who lives in that environment who sees this every day where the world tells him that he is not equal. how do you make him believe that he is? >> well, i think that's a very sort of difficult question.

i think that it is a very long process. you know, i think first and foremost people, individuals understand the world from their own very narrow vantage point. right, they don't know about the disinvestment, they don't know about the policies that are driving down the number of jobs in their community, they don't know about the policies driving the amount of resources for their schools, they don't know about the policies causing police officers to continue to get off when they abuse them, they don't know about those things, all they know is about what they see, the violence, you know, that they see. and so i think what i tried to do with young people just like i tried to do with older people, is for them to step out of their own individual sort of circle and try to imagine their own circle from a sort of macro standpoint which allows them to see how all of these greater

forces are creating that circle, right, and i also tried to sort of hit home that let's imagine for a moment that the problem is not the people, let's just imagine for a moment that the problem is not the people, the problem is not these young people in south side of chicago, the problem is not their supposed horrible camps, let's not imagine that it's not the people, then what else could be causing this and those are the questions that i asked them and sometimes they come up with brilliant answers. >> and you're right and i also think that young people who live in some of these very poor communities, it's their norm, right, it's who they identify with and so it makes sense that there is often violence, right. i mean, do you all think that

some of it is even a bit of self-hatred? >> yeah, the only thing wrong with black people is we think something is wrong with black people. that's the only thing that is well documented that's a problem with black people, is their own sense that they are a problem, right, because they have been reared within that conception and particularly poor black people, right, because you had -- you have the entire weight of the nation, the intellectual weight of the nation from black elites to nonblacks looking at poor blacks as the worst problem in this country. you know, as the cause of the violence, as the cause of their own poverty. and so for them, of course, they're going to think, yes, i am the worse, i am at the bottom, right, i should be getting my head stepped over by every other group in this country. and so, of course, it's certainly ininternallized even though those ideas are not true.

there's nothing wrong with poor black people other than them thinking that there's something wrong with black people -- poor black people. if we were to look out as black people as human as us, i think it would make a world of difference. >> and within the communities where this has happening, certainly young black men are killing other young black men who look just like them, who live just like them. >> another way for us to understand this, if any of us were to go on today and pull up what are the top causes of death in this country, homicide is not even there. right, it's not even there, right, and so that's one of the reasons why, you know, even though people demean these young

black males, right, are we demeaning all those white males who voted for trumpcare who presumably are going to cause way more death, right, if that bill is passed than these young black males, so i think we have to think bigger, right, when we think of who is the most dangerous, who is killing americans, it is not these young black males, when we imagine why is it that so many americans are obese, why is it that so many americans die of heart disease and cancer, this isn't because of the young black males, and so i think -- again, we like to imagine, but there is, of course, there has not been a war against any of those people, any of those corporations, any of those establishment that is are causing those problems. i'm sorry. [laughter]

>> one of the things that is obvious if we make a difference here it's upon the people themselves to do it, a black president couldn't do it, right? [laughter] >> no reason to think that we have an administration now that's going to do it. so it's on us, right, so where do we go from here? what what's do we do now? >> i think again as it relates to racial issues, i think another -- i guess you can call it the central thesis from the beginning is for us to think of

where racist ideas come from, people are just ignorant and hateful and it's these people that black people are barbaric, these are the people who instituted policy -- racist policies like segregation and even now mass incarceration. well, i actually show that that popular folk tale is just not true. what actually happened in course of history is you had people who have created discriminatory policies because it benefits them economically, even culturally. i want to enslave people because it's going to make me money. these very people or sean spicers create -- [laughter] [applause] >> create, produce, defend racist ideas to justify, to defend, to rationalize the

inequality that comes out as a result of those policies and then they circumstanculate the racist ideas like the voter fraud problem and then people believe them and they become ignorant and hateful and allows the policies continue and therefore those people who say in office, those people who continue to make money are those people who continue to benefit, like that's the history that i show and so what that means is us trying to educate or persuade aaway the racist ideas of powerful americans, it's bound to fail. even more important gaining power and putting people who are committed to antiracist policies in power and ensuring that those people are held accountable by the antiracist common sense of you and i, of the people.

>> that gives us a lot to think about. [applause] >> we are going to open up for questions. people are lined up over here. [laughter] >> the question i have as a white person is why is there still a black acceptance in the community the n-word being okay only inside. i don't want to hear anyone say comments like dumb broad, woman driver, woman empower are bitches, so why is that we are still okay when all it does is reinforce the use of that word, defensive of uses of that word

and in any community that word should be gone, why is that word still there? all it does for me is reinforce a bad word. >> thank you. >> i should say that -- within the feminist community there's actually a pretty strong debate about the b-word. there are feminists who have sort of reimagined the b-word assign of endearment and, of course, i'm sure you would disagree with that position and within the black community there's a similar debate sort of going on about the n-word and that debate has been going on for quite sometime and i think what -- what we should all do is we should engage in debates in our own communities and i think i'm not going to step into the women's community or the feminist community and state

that will you should not be using the b-word, and from the same stand point is important for nonblacks to not step into the black community and tell us what we should or should not use. i think it's important again for us to try to stay in our own lanes. [applause] >> i really appreciate your comments about the origins of racist ideas and -- and how it makes money and i wanted to point out a book that's written by dorothy roberts, wrote a book called failed invention which goes into the history of race and race is a mainly social construct that's been using to divide people. there's another book called the harmon hate speech which discusses the issue of free speech and when it really is free and when it isn't, i was concerned about some of the debate going on in some of the colleges now where you have people, to give you an example,

there's the guy charles murray who wrote the bell curve along with richard which basically came out with ideas around racist blaming black people specially for some of the ideas you mentioned. he actually was going to be speaking in college recently and there was a protest that prevented him from speaking. personally, i think -- i would like to know your opinion because i actually think that that was a actually a good thing because the problem is hate speech, i think, is something like yelling fire in a crowded theater, some laws against that and in a racist society that creates the conditions that exist to build racism to blame people and as charles murray has done for their own problem for their own predicament is to me danger and potentially harmful and people die from this. you know, it's a tricky free speech thing, but thank you.

>> very quickly, i'm happy you mentioned dorothy roberts fatal inventions, that's one of my favorite books and she actually operates as structural standpoint and this is about power, it's a power struggle and as it relates to your question, i wrote a column that sitting next to a world class columnist, i won't feel bad saying that, i wrote a column that differentiated between free speech and unfree speech and i made the case that unfree speech is based on a series of alternative facts or outright lies and people should not have the ability to stand up in a column or even in a speech and basically state a series of just lies that then people are going to believe and then people are going to go out and kill people

as you certainly stated. [applause] >> in talking about disinvestment in communities and different things, recently a whole foods opened in inglewood which is one of the severely, socially economic disadvantaged neighborhoods and there was some concern, there was concern from a bunch of groups but inside of the community about the loss of incomes locally-owned business to this whole foods that brought better economic stability and jobs, where does that fall in the spectrum of where your work is and how can you walk the line between adding economic stability while not taking away others that exist? >> i think there's a difference between -- i mean, i mentioned earlier about the importance of

jobs. you build wealth from being able to building businesses. and so when you have a larger business like that come in as you stated, it sort of reduces the market share for small businesses, however, at the same time you have those companies coming and bringing a lot of jobs. so it's -- it's more of a question for that community themselves, right, for them to figure out what it is that they want, but i think if you were to remove the whole foods, i think it's just as important to bring in access to resources so those people can have access to capital, to basically have not just small businesses but small businesses that thrive. >> hi. i wondered if you could speak a little bit about the impact of

film and hollywood experience impacting popular views on racist views and -- and speak a little bit about legacy that we are still having a a hang-over for the birth of the nation. >> birth of the nation, first major motion picture was basically the best-selling film until another film by the name of gone with the wind came out and gone with the wind held it down until another film i talk about until other films sort of emerged. i think you had a generation of people that were born and raised thinking that we construction heara -- era was horrible for white and black people loved

slavery and this sort of through gone with the wind and just like now you have people who still were born and raised on tarzan who think that africa is a barbaric place and when i go to africa they say are you going to wear clothes over there, crazy things like that. and so i think it's -- people watch films even more so than read books and ideas that these films are reinforcing that, of course, we have to push back against. >> so even you have given us so much to think about and i certainly appreciate that. [applause] >> so let's go home and do some self-evaluation, i know i am. [applause]

>> all right, thank you once again to dolly and ibram kendi. mr. kendi will be signing books and books for sale. thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> and you're watching book tv on c-span2, this is our live coverage from the 33rd annual printers row lit festival in chicago and you have been listening to ibram kendi. in just a few minutes we will be

back live with michael eric dyson, tears we cannot stop, a sermon to white america. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

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