tv Discussion on Literature CSPAN April 7, 2018 1:45pm-3:14pm EDT
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readers. visit booktv.org. >> every year the center for black literature at medgar evers college in brooklyn host the national black writers conference, a weeklong event focused on expanding the public's understanding of black literature. first up you will hear desire cooper, margo jefferson and andrea ritchie and moderator joseph surette, talking about challenging cultural or political times. >> the theme of this year's conference is gathering up the waters, to present a panel eager to discuss ways literature and poetry face challenges as we open our hearts and minds to healing. at this point i would like to welcome mr. joseph surette, desiree cooper, margo
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jefferson, abca 12, abca tylan. thai -- tai allen. >> good afternoon. my name is joseph surette from african-american studies. it is my privilege to moderate this panel. just to give you a quick sense of what to expect our call to this roundtable gathering of waters to call for healing and introduce panelists in the order in which they open the conversation, they offer brief
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remarks, brief opening remarks and follow-up you and a among the panel and open up looking to engage all of you who are here in conversation. a call for healing, the mandate from the national black writers conference literature and poetry often served as a bomb where we are faced with personal and societal challenges, through creative storytelling and prose writers expressed ways of overcoming ideas for harnessing emotional strength and meditated on the elements that pertain to the well-being of families and communities, individually and collectively. during this discussion panelists discuss how literary narratives, nurturing and reflecting reflection with regard to understanding cultural and social and
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political themes represented in literature during turbulent times, privileged to have 3 amazing panelists doing interesting work at the intersection of literature, art and activism. i want to take a few moments and introduce them to you, we have abca 12 - andrea ritchie, author of police violence against black women and women of color published by beacon in 2017. andrea ritchie is a black lesbian immigrant attorney, in the 2014 justice fellow, two decades of experience advocating police violence and criminalization of women and people of color. she is currently researcher on race, gender, sexuality, causation at the center for research on women and this is our first time meeting today,
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and resisting police brutality against black women and clear in justice, criminalization of lgbt people in the united states, she lives here, in brooklyn, in chicago. following andrea will hear from desiree cooper, an artist fellow, former attorney, nominated journalist in detroit, and a collection of short stories, and her fiction and poetry, african-american fiction of 2010, a host of other online and print publications and founding board member, national residency for emerging black poets, and a
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fellow, national residency for african-american fiction writers. following desiree we will hear from tai allen, producer and designer, toured domestically and internationally and published in magazines like bomb and african voices, has been covered by okay players, soul tracks and color lane. as an artist he has performed headlines at the apollo music café, american jazz museum, poets café, the blue note and charles wright museum, he has released no jewels, a book project supported by soul soundtrack that deals with questions of trauma and emergence from pain that helps set the conversation today. we are opening up the first question for the panelists, each of them will respond in their own way on the questions
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at hand. when i think about black writing, the long history, we could say even from the slave narratives forward, the tension between art and politics, the assumption that the work of black writers can be mapped to a specific political movement and the panels tweak this from art and politics to art and hearing, slightly different angle but art and politics backdrop is still prominent. and three examples over the history of black writing that navigate this tension. i was thinking of negro club woman and activist victoria matthews who in the 1890s just a year before, plessy versus ferguson, the national association of negro women convening in boston and delivers a speech on the value of race and literature and argues what we think of as
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african-american literature has two contribution someone tells the tale of black heroism as a counter to jim crow and on the other hand, reveals true christianity by which she means christianity of that size, treats one's neighbor as oneself. that literature is enmeshed in this political landscape. if we flash forward to an essay by a young richard wright and his blueprint for negro writing which appears in dorothy west's channel, black writers, negro writers, take the place to occupy black preachers to a provide -- black people oriented in the world to reflect the complexities of what it means to be black in
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the united states and reorient black folks along the liberation struggle. the genesis for these negro writers conferences of larry neal in his conclusion or afterword to the black arts anthology black fire which eco-edited and calls for black writers for spiritual integration to move us towards wholeness through writing, and each of our panelists think about how they think about themselves in relationship to this one take animated by political vision towards wholeness and how they wrestle with feeling in their own work. >> i will answer this and look
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forward to healing myself. talking about my book police violence against black women of color, and what is the first name that comes to mind when i say police brutality? times have changed. usually it has been different across generations but universally mail. rodney king, it has been oscar graham, mike brown, eric gardner, freddie gray, the list goes on. this week if we ask the question, first name became to mind this week in terms of police violence we would hear stephan clark and not cynthia clemens who was killed by police outside chicago. why is that the case? my answer focuses on the power
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of the story and the narrative and the story that is so deeply entrenched the racial profiling and police violence, it hasn't exclusively to black blue plumed perceived not to be transgender and not gay even though they might be and violence against women is something that only happens to white women in private spaces, without it being seen as any of those stories. the goal was to expand our understanding of police violence and racial profiling and mass criminalization by bringing into that narrative the story of black women and girls that have driven the
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growth of 700%. and 50% greater. and were predominantly black women continue to be incarcerated twice as much is right women. and in jail increased 14 times in the foot past we for decades, women are not doing as much hard time in prison but as much time cycling in and out of local jail cells 3 days, 10 days, and up state, but less programming and less healthcare, less support in most -- most places but that is not the story of mass incarceration. looking at the 13th the new jim crow doesn't include the story
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of those, the goal was to tell more stories, to fold more stories into the mix not just to add them but see how they -- how does that change how we understand things. beyond the notable exception of sandra bland, would we see a woman named promise, the black atty. gen. elected in florida who was pulled over for driving while black. or olivia ferguson who before mike brown was killed the population with the most traffic stops in ferguson than any other population. would we see the stories that came out of st. louis as part of a study that shows the only group of people in which the majority of people are killed when unarmed are black women. police officers are more likely to perceive black women is a threat than a fatal threat than
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any other group. it helps us to better understand this narrative, what it means to be black in america. the power of the story of police violence, only the shooting of unarmed black people for instance renders invisible story of police violence from 13 black women and girls, assaulted by oklahoma city police officer or the experiences of 5 young women in new york city who experience sexual harassment by police officers. i live two blocks over on a street with three schools and watch police offices every single day sexually harass women going back and forth to school to get an education from subway to the school and those stories need to be told because
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of the experience of being black in america but they are not the ones that we tell often and we don't - driving while black, standing while black, stop and frisk is a story in new york city neighborhoods but we don't know stories of women who identify racial disparity in stop and frisk as men do. and 88% of women, and that experience comes with some extra. young women, stop and frisk stop and grope. those stories give us a better sense of what standing or driving while black looks like and we need to expand further to hear the stories of giving birth while black and the reality black women who go to prenatal care or deliver their
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children are 10 times more likely to be tested for drugs even though they use the net equal or lesser rates and if drugs are found to be arrested from their delivery beds and taken from their children in ways that white women are referred to treatment, that story doesn't get told as the larger story of mass incarceration and that is part of the story of mass incarceration. lastly being a victim of violence while black, there's a story i heard in new york almost 20 years ago of a woman named williams. ..
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they handcuffed her and took her to a part-- parking lot and they beat her with in 8-inch of her life. they broke her spleen. they broke her jaw. they left her for dead and he told her if we hear from you again we will come back. these are police officers responding for cause force-- help. cynthia was killed by police officers responding for cough. that's the experience of police violence in this country and the violence against women that does not get told in those narratives so, those are the stories that i tell in the book and i could tell you for like two hours. i want to do that to you, but i think it's a book that speaks to the power of the tory to expand our understanding of what police violence looks like and also to promote healing. i know what i just told you doesn't sound like it promotes
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healing, but i read have to say that for women who have experienced this violence, to read the stories and hear them told, it opens up a base for them and to tell them and every single time i speak about this issue doing workshop and someone comes up to me and tells me a story they have never told of being raped by a police officer, but-- beaten by a police officer when they called for help or threatened if a police officer would never show up again if they are called, so for them it's healing, to finally have a space where stories can be heard, told and part of the conversation whether it's about police violence, violence against women or racial profiling because as black women we are fighting for our communities and it is so painful to stand at a rally not been able to tell a story, a rally you organized that you brought the food for and organize the transportation for, but the only
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story you are allowed to tell is the story of your child, your son, your brother, your partner, but not your own or your daughters. there was something healing for me i didn't intend to tell my own story of police of violent in writing this book and when do they just appeared on the page. i really can't tell you how it happened, but i read them one day on my computer and i didn't talk about them and i don't talk with them now, but the fact they are finally out there out of my body onto a page is a way of healing in the last thing i will say is that there is healing in the story that we can tell about these of situations. there's a story i tell about this community coming together around two women beat outside a bar by police officers. there's a rally outside the precinct where the community came together around those
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women. they went back to the precinct with 300 people behind them after having been beaten and abused in the precinct. there is healing and knowing the history that the montgomery bus boycott was also sparked by organizing women like rosa parks around a woman named virtue perkins and that's part of our civil rights history and legacy and struggle. there's healing and knowing the black women's blueprint just down the block brought a caravan of black women to oklahoma city to sit with those black women who were raped by the police officer there during their trial, during his sentence and during the sentencing to say we believe you. we are standing with you. we see police violence and sexual violence and we want to bring those of stories to the national conversation, so i think for me that has been the real journey of the book is seen the healing aspect of it and the healing stories of thinking of other ways to organize our
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society that can bring safety for women like sheree williams where we can make sure when she calls for help is what she gets his help and support. with cynthia clements calls for help that she doesn't get shot, that she gets the support she deserves and are dreaming those of stories is also part of the healing and the one i'm excited to engage in as we move afford with these conversations. >> thank you, andrea. [applause]. >> andrea said she did not know where she would start. i think she found a wonderful place. thank you for that and for your work. very important work. i think may be where i would like to go sort of working off of the landscape that andrea has laid for us is, so what role
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does fiction and poetry have two adding to stories and why do we have to make them up and there is so many real ones for us to talk about? when you mentioned women in prison and how women come you mentioned women in prison, but how women to organize things about-- around mastercard thracian can only talk about the mass incarceration of their mates for the most part or their sons. how many of you have read in american marriage-- that is jones' book. it's a national book award winner-- is that what it was? yeah, it's a huge book and it's so crazy is called "on american marriage", not an african-american marriage and it
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is about an african-american couple who have been married a year and half, not the easiest year and half as it is for many people. takes a little while for the marriage to smooth out and they are relaxing in a hotel. the door bangs open. people come in and arrest her husband for rape and he's in the senate. eastman with her the whole time, but a woman identifies him and he ends up spending five years in prison before he is out and that is the beginning of the story. from there and the story is told from many different points of view. these two people navigate on american marriage and this is the american landscape.
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mass incarceration, you know so me black people are now in prison and they got to find other people to throw in their work its on american story. a line in there that blew me away was the husband who is behind bars said something like, you know, he's always saying can you come and visit and it's like a three-hour drive for her to visit him and she keeps this up for a while and then gets a little spaced out and he's like i'm innocent. you have to come see me durkheim innocent and she said i'm innocent to. now, where is there the room in our report harsh of mastercard perseveration for the women voices to be heard who are not behind bars, but who are left behind in communities that are ravaged by this?
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and would a woman be shouted down at a conference if she were to stand up and say i'm innocent to? i think she might because it's not her time. it's never not quite your fight right now. the bigger issue is blah blah blah and it's never quite your time for your issue. this is where fiction and poetry can fill a gap to ask a question , can explore the question, not safely but intimately where you can in your own room as you are reading the story go way too many. i hate this woman. she married him. she should do so and so and then you read her inner struggles. it's called empathy, which is the only reason we write and so a question that i have about
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fiction and poetry and healing is how do we go from trauma to empathy as writers of fiction because we are already traumatized by reality and that's part of the reason we go to another device is because to hit it dead on is sometimes too painful or it's too big for reality. have you ever had one of those days when he repeated to someone and they say if you wrote that down they would tell you that never happened. that's pretty much the life we are living right now is black people in america. we are living a life that this could never happen and we are walking around in trauma and i think that we need people who are documented the stories to tell the stories and document them from as many prospective as possible, from the community perspective, from the victim's perspective, from the sciences
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and then we need the literary perspective to translate the emotional math and help us take the trauma from pain to empathy, so one thing: troy dara koch is a poet i greatly admire and she writes from a brutally intimate point of view. she wrote a book called the undertaker's daughter and it's a book about abuse at the hands of her father who is undertaker. there's a poem called burial sites and there's an epigraph that says trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside of us in the absence of an empathetic witness. trauma when it happens, but what keeps the trauma alive and unhealed is that there is no witness to the pain, but perhaps yourself if you're able to even
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grasp the trauma that happened and so what we have found over time is that this is out of neuroscience that often writing, the act of writing, not just speaking, but literally writing a trauma can help define it, contain its and weaken its power or could this is not universally true. there are people especially people that are not used to voice a motion. sometimes it can read traumatized to write things down and i am having that personal experience of that feeling read traumatized every time i look at the paper these days because it's a hell of a time to be alive, but for most people when they transcribe their trauma comes up answers to happen. when you write it down, at first
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its first-person meaning high, this happen to me, i did this come i did that, i felt this the more you write it, third person starts to seep in and this is proven, these are studies of people that were asked to rewrite their trauma. it becomes she, he and the word because starts to trickle in or in relation to the consequences of and so the trauma gets a different context. you go from this happened to me too higher and higher perspective of what has happened to heat, to them, today and the trauma gets deduced over a large your emotional math. one thing that i-- a teacher taught me this. she said what is a slave and i said well the black people from africa, you know the story and she said really like how did the word slave become black people
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from africa when there have been slaves for a million years and there are still slaves and there are all kinds of slaves from every single ethnic group imaginable. how do we own that word? how did that just become-- like there's even in some languages the word slave means black. they are synonymous, so the more you come to grips with that-- so, is there a slave narrative that's not an african-american slave narrative? and what is that mean in terms of global healing? what is the connection between these narratives. i feel like i'm rambling a little here because i'm just so full, but that is a role of free investigating our trauma and i
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do in literature and poetry and what i do hope that we get a chance to talk about it here today is if we are the witnesses, then who is witnessing the witness because i feel vulnerable. i feel on the edge of madness. i feel broken into tears. can you witness-- i have not lg bt, but i die when i witness the atrocities that are happening. my kids have never been in a school shooting, but i die when he think of the babies in the schools. how many times can i do that? as a human being and as a writer and who is the witness to my trauma and how do we as a writing community nurture each other through the stories that
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are absolutely necessary? i think that if we are lucky and if we heal the way we can at this might be the most important time in human history right now because the potential for us to see past their own stories is huge if we can do that. >> thank you. [applause]. >> the funny thing you said on the panel issue and of having these random moments that end up working perfectly. i always think that when you are making art whether you are in a studio session or writers group or a room by yourself, it's a sabbath moment. you walk into a space in your trying to figure out how to get yourself across. rappers always talk about the studio being a place of escape, escape is the sabbath, so making
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arts of any sort makes you feel like you are doing something for a larger group. it's emotional whether you want it to be or not. it could be anger, love, said that the, but it will have an emotional aspect to it. taking are giving it to recipients, if you are an artist the word you're looking for permanent subpoena or consumer or fan is i'm feeling that. i like that. i want that i want to pay for that are can i share that, so moving those two parts forward, the maker in the recipient at some point have to meet somewhere because making art by yourself means it's you and thought and that can be beautiful and cathartic, but once you do it for a living you want someone to take something away from your work, maybe not what you intended, but often times you know you had intention and if someone pulls something that you'd never imagined you are okay, need to change my focus, but then there is a third part when the work works for you
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, not a critic, not a teacher, not a fan, what works for you and then someone or someone finds it working for them. it's no longer just about feeling it. it's about it becoming necessary when the work becomes necessary in some capacity where it's used for a tool and now you have rebellion. yarbrough revolution coming of resolution, all these words to live to reset the thick of the work as more than just a piece of work because a piece of work is good. we dancing clubs all the time to fantastic work. we go to movies and love stories and we hope a movie like birth of our nation can reinvent how we think and for reasons it doesn't and then a movie comes out and people feel like they found the tabernacle. the language has changed, greetings have changed. i have been dressing since a
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young boy, i'm muslim and i see people now looking better than i do. i want to know where they are getting the clothing from and it's a beautiful thing to watch the growth and that's a thing and are we don't talk about. we want people not to just have the work, but to be a tool for change of that person's life. with this book i was indiana singing some songs doing some poems and talking about how we are taking the work and turning it into actualized programs in different states. anywhere we perform we do something that when we leave their people can go back and use the work. when we leaving this woman was crying outside because she said no one ever talked about abuse in the way that she understood and she didn't understand it if she didn't understand she was being abused when she was
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younger, so the work works. if no one ever cares about the book i'd know we walked out of a place in indiana and this woman was able to take this piece of work, find a place in it, feel it and turn it into something she can use for herself and that's part of healing that i hope happens into my work. i know their work and i know i have read some of the things that some of these people in this room have done and seen how the interactions between work and process because after you wake this work someone somewhere has to turn this work is something we can use. i'm going to take a gamble that someone in this room has-- [inaudible] when the stories, i will forget which one, but as he's leaving he's talking about taking-- what he's telling you is not just to tell you at that moment. ways telling you is he's going back into your community and using it.
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arch is only good if it's used. if you want it to be used. even you it doesn't mean just going out and storming a white house to make change. it also means if the storm makes you dance makes you feel better that day after a long day at work, that's revolutionary. if the song works at your wedding and you are now getting to the woman or man of your dreams, that is change, resolve, finding how we can make and most of you are craters yourself, how we can create something that is worthy to give to the world that someone in the world will find worthy to steal, buy, borrow and take which you wrote or created or painted or sculpted or produced in turn it into something in their life or otherwise becomes worthy and when that happened you find healing and people find change and change and healing go hand-in-hand because there is no healing without change.
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doesn't happen. this panel i think have addressed that perfectly so i will keep it short. >> thank you. [applause]. so much they are complicating the narrative, adding more narrative to the next. whose witness to the witnesses. i guess i want to pick up on hopefully something that i think was apparent in each of the conversations, each of the presentations, but invites panelists to think across the responses and maybe do it in a way that doesn't quite make sense which is to-- thai alluded to i guess something that came up at the end of the previous panel, which is that these he has conduct which is to say a desire to escape. what seems to me like we are part of a long history where we want more representation of
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black and brown folks. the question in andrew's presentation of a narrative that put women at the center, lgbtq focus at the center we are familiar with the story, but it seems like that enthusiasm for condo was more about something than representation, that in fact it said something-- the joy about the movie seem to me to say something about how dark the present moment is and it seems-- and yet at the same time we know that the long history of racialized violence suggests that it's not just an uptick in violence, something in the ways in which this present moment has put. racialized: generalize, sexualized violence and something about the shifting landscape in this moment and i remembered teaching a african american studies course of the fall of 2014, just after mike brown and darren garner in new york and we are on-- my students
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did not know what to do. these were folks that entered adolescence when obama was first elected. none of us complained that the radical shift for that generation, but i want to ask for you all who i think is fair to say we were maybe a little older than my students with obama's election. >> not me. >> except for tie. like the last four years have been something else. the last five years have been something else. i wonder, though, none light of the history of the work you been doing on this particular moment has shifted what you do in the genre in which you do it. the insistence that fiction and poetry still matter as much as telling the historical stories or tie, you look like you are ready to jump in. >> when the election happened i will start their. people were running around as if
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the devil showed up on their doorstep and i was confused. i didn't know he left. i was like why would i now become radicalized? i'm a black the muslim. makes you a bit of a target. so i kind of scott that people. then i started to think about it. let me as my children how you feel, so i called my youngest and i-- she asked me if i lost my mind. what changed, so i called my oldest and he almost hung up on me. he's like we've been doing this since we started work i think what may have happened is we got a bit confused. without we were accepted and is sometimes. it's almost like we had a bit of a racial stockholm seldom. we have arrived. even when he was president he was in our president. he fooled us into believing that man was our president.
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you may look like us, talk like us, play basketball like us, but he still worked for corporation that has never been about as. never has been for us, so, i mean, i grew up in a household, that joking new line a power baby. b of the system. don't be of it, so i never understood-- my work has been the same something was 14 about saving black people, changing the world for black people, being for black people. that will change with the election of a black person or election of the person like that kkk. it's been the same for me since i started doing this. >> i think i might have to echo that. i'm not sure my work has changed at all. i have been very concerned with gender, mostly because i have
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walked in the skin of a black woman and i don't feel like my story is respected represented, so it's my job to tell that story and i tell it in essays. i tell it in fiction and it really really bad poetry, but i think part-- i hope we are not back there, but i'm wondering if you tiptoed into the black aesthetic question, especially during the black arts movement. if your work wasn't political than it was then to work because at the time it was we can't be fooling around with sunshine and
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rain bones at this juncture. we have work to do with our hearts and i hope that we don't go there this time. i feel like that was part interracial plat for an interracial gender war that women were going to talk about things that weren't important and we don't need to talk about babies right now. we don't need to talk about love right now. we don't need to talk about who's the boss at home right now we have work to do and it's back to the danger of a single-story and we just can't do that right now. we cannot afford to shut down, i mean, actually it is an epic moments where people are going wow, i did know that and there
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are so many more people open to perspective in general as long as it is either liberal or conservative, like that is the bright line, but within those, people want to hear range and so i don't want to hear much conservative range, but that's my shortcoming. book, the poet and novelist shirley and williams wrote in surviving the blight of 1988 and i pulled this quote thinking about this talk today. she said and when we to use alice walker's lovely phrase go in search of our mother's garden , it's not to learn who trampled on them or how or even why. we usually know that already. rather is to learn what our mothers planted there and what they thought as they sewed and how they survived them the lighting of so many fruits, so i think that in this time where i
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am crying for my people and i'm crying for democracy as i foolishly thought it existed in nine crying for planet earth think i can write about daisies and i think i can write about grocery shopping and i think i can write about the sacrifices of my soul that i gave in order to be a mother and i think all of these stories need to be there for the mass healing to happen because once again we are just trying to get back to humanity. that's all we are trying to do and if we redline out certain aspects of it then we aren't going to be able to get there and i just don't want to go back assuming we have come forward, which is a big assumption, which
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as you have pointed out, but i can't go back to this war on the black ascetic. >> no question about that. >> brain exploding. could go many different ways. briefly as to what has changed-- i feel like it's shifting because more stories are available. we used to have to depend on someone thinking our stories were important enough to cover and now, we can just cover them ourselves on social media. we don't have to wait for the naacp to decide a woman story is important enough to merit the press release or campaign, but more volume and more conversation about it, but i think also we have not come for enough in terms of those stories being part of how we think about the issue, how we organize ourselves about the demand we make in the world we dream so
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many of us can say sandra bland's name, so that for me is the next step. i want to break apart a little bit this dichotomy between fiction documentation because i think sarah haley eloquently writes about this for many of us it's documentation that the buddha fiction because we have to figure out what our mothers planted in the garden because there is no record of it. there is no record of the middle passage for black women, so we have to imagine what happened and i think for many of the women i write about all there is is 20 seconds of dash cam video or a newspaper story and i have to in some ways fictionalize what she may have been thinking when the police came crashing through her door and how might she have been feeling. why might she have reacted in this way when she was told to do something or ordered to do something or what the air may have informed her lunging towards the police when she saw
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them taking her child or her sister or her daughter, so there is some creative black fiction going on there and then i have learned the value of fiction with this other piece of the world so i think what kind is about escape and also about what adrian brown calls visionary fiction, so if we could have a world that was really about us it would be fabulous. would be a monarchy? like is that what we want so we get to experience will conduct. would it be engaged with the rest of the world? and we can also fictionalize stories that are so hard to tell and what so powerful of that was what is it like to be abandoned over here on this land in some ways and to have that experience of feeling left behind and it tried to come back and figure out what the relationship is with the mother country and i feel like being able to figure
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those out in a fantastical realm is what visionary fiction is about and the resurgence of octavia is not accidental in this moment work you are being honored and it's not accidental. we need to imagine new worlds, other ways of responding to violence and that will require us-- our imagination has been so limited by colonialism, anti- blackness, white supremacy, by the prison state that we really need to go to will conduct to think about something else, so i encourage people to read this written by predominantly by a black activists who are like literally trying to go somewhere else to imagine a world and into the p sure target about i think those questions that have been framed not political are about human transformation and we
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can't get to where we want to go unless we learn how to transform our relationships with each other whether it's with her mother, child, garden and so that to me is revolutionary work and i would never say your work and mine are different. they are very much on the continuum. >> i will say i do think most women would agree. [laughter] >> i agree. >> it's not as that said-- >> (want to say about adrian and writing about daisies is that she is also a pleasure activists and about black people experiencing pleasure every single day is revolutionary because we can't wait till after the revolution to experience pleasure so i want to read and watch and listen to that music that's about liberation of the moment. >> there is a movie called firefly and the brotherhood played best way like cat say his name got it going to try and do
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it at least talked about his character and they said to him you are evil and he goes no, i'm not evil, i'm necessary because there has to be a moment where the people are actually enjoying themselves and what you are talking about can't just be all about fight, fight, fight. falling in love is important. there's a song we did a long time ago, go girl and we were doing a concert and doing the writing in baltimore and literally trying to drive to the show we are in the car and we decided to change the entire show. i think it was around february, supposed to be a valentine's day show we got the show we like can't do this. we do a performance about falling in love so we did it, but we wrote a song in the car about what it meant to fall in love. we wanted to make sure we were
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conscious of what was happening around us and allowing people who came to the show to have an escape, but still when you leave here don't forget the police are out to get your things are happening in your city of baltimore. stay in that place, but just leave that place for the two hours where you are here with us , so i totally agree with her. you have had the daisies and sometimes you have to dance with whiskey in your hand. things have to happen. >> so, we have about five minutes before we open it up for q&a, so if you have questions please get them ready and we have microphones there. >> most of my work is about slave narrative and until this very moment i realized that if it is about women. i'm actually embarrassed about that. >> we have arrived. >> i was sitting here going like
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that's not true and i literally went through everything in my head in my library. that's ridiculous. wow. >> that's fixable. >> it's fixable, but its like okay this is a problem. >> and yet there are a whole host of narrative by limited-- women by writing their way through and out of slavery even though we continue to imagine slavery is manhood. >> the best leader out of it was a woman. >> absolutely took the stories are there and sometimes telling those stories are shifting the ways in which those stories are privileged or become taken as normative. i went to ask you one more quick question has folks are getting ready with their questions, which i hope is a response i think to desiree's provocation of who will witness, so i think about back to that gathering we had that was a celebration of the work called the ancestral witness.
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ended up with folks describing the event of a moment of healing and it was in sort of these basic-- odd record in james baldwin, that was faced in their writing that we found some sort of-- to use the conference it seems that i venture to say as much as we struggle to find that , i'm anxious to hear where for you you find that. is a work like yours. is there particular writer that is a resource you commend others that you feel you can take you with you as a witness to the things you are even trying to name as writers. >> i think i was really taken by that question. the forward to my book, one of them and was also a bomb because
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it was a witness across generations because i wrote that book after the police killing of elinor bumper. it was a crossgenerational conversation, the witnessing, but another one was by marion carver. she's-- she came from chicago, but she rode a foreword in the last paragraph she acknowledges the weight of carrying the story i have been carrying probably years i was writing the book and continue to carry and until i read that paragraph i had never thought about it and every time i read it still i cry and i think that the first step is acknowledging that we has black writers need witness and that we need witnesses for the story we tell whether it's christina sharp writing or-- particularly as black women how the trauma and invisibility we are writing through suggests right.
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i think we need to have, so i found that in my activist community, my sisterhood, the people who work with me, you know the people we have been able to be on the phone together and we are supposed to talk about the indexed, but instead we have talked about how we have been moved by a story and how to index it and find it and in an informal community like that i'm blessed to have the conversation with black writers and black women writers and i'm inspired by the work because i feel like it so important to have residencies and spaces where black writers can be together having a conversation and i have been on many writers residencies where they're like one or none are in the only black writer and that's even more isolating and lonely and also makes it worse. i think your call to us to witness for each other as black writers is one that really focuses on.
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>> i guess i don't know the answer. i asked that question because i need an answer. i feel very ravaged and broken and lost. i am taking care of my senior parents, one who has alzheimer's and one with dementia and i'm sort of in this anger mode of america's public policy to -- towards bringing human beings into the world and escorting them out issue get a girl to do it preferably free. that is a public policy and when most alzheimer's victims are going to be women or are women and most of the caregivers are women, trust me there is no solution coming because the girls are doing it for free, so i think that for me kindness to
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myself is the only healing i can expect and unfortunately that also feels like a lowering of standards for myself which creates more stress because i'm type a, but let me offer something. how many of you guys are writers out there? okay. so, i want to offer something that i pulled-- that i pulled it out of there-- from other writers who have felt terrified by the work they must do. so, richard wright and i'm sure most of you know this, but i will reiterate this who wrote native son and black boy wrote hiq for the last years of his life. he was very well for a long time and during that time he
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transitioned from writing the real to fiction an essay in every feels he did to writing haiku and his daughter juliet described his poland says self develop anecdotes against illness and also said he continued to spin these alums of light out of the gathering darkness, so maybe what we all do is get another trick, you know. if you are coming out through essay, then maybe back off and just write some poetry for yourself or if you are a poet, journal more or find-- paint. find another medium to sort of deposit some of the angst's. now, i have not done this, so i'm just throwing it out there because i'm searching for options and i also want to go to toy because she said in an interview-- this is a quote from
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her i couldn't read burial sites out loud because every time i did i would go through the pain i felt a remembering those occurrences with my father and something came to me that said don't say the stories, seeing them and this gave me a practical way to be a performer of the pieces rather than the writer who had experienced these things. it was another way of gaining distance and emotional control, so again maybe don't write the story, maybe you draw the story. just keep the lid on one more day. maybe you pray the story. may be saying the story, but i do think that i will leave with this. i gave birth to two children and both times when you go from laboring to the transition there were people around me saying push and my thought was what the hell would i do that for like
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that's going to hurt me. that's the life i want to do is push and of course that's the only thing i could do was push, so i think that's kind of where we are. we have to give birth and we don't want to go through the pain of it, but so what, that's where we are now and somehow we have to figure out how to get through that transition, hopefully together. >> thank you, desiree. [applause]. >> as you are clapping and what to ask that those of you have questions make your way to the microphone. >> i'm such a different person. i have tried to reconcile the fact-- two things, one i'm a black guy as you've noticed, so there are support systems for black men. we know it's not a blind spot in
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the community. the book no jewels is about trauma. i wrote a kind of like a bizarro version of what is it-- 20 songs and-- 20 poems and son of-- you know the book. it's 18 poems up well and three of love. i'm writing the book or guy could write the book because i was able tickets ago to conquer and deal with an process by abuse. while interviewing other men for the book, a lot of people-- [inaudible] a lot of people that need a hug the drink and a collation of those things, so i began to realize that yes as a writer i have support. , i have brothers who i can
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write with. i can call and talk about them with. most people don't so you lean on other things. you lean on alcohol and drugs promiscuity, lying through these are the things you can lean on, so if you're witnessing-- i adopted the tools my parents gave me to do with personal oppressions i had a day worked. i was able to come out of my own trauma by using that thinks my parents told me were for global universal change and it can also go to solve so one thing is recognizing there is a problem, which is a big problem for everyone to know there is something wrong happening around you. the second one is to sit down and figure out, not how it's going to end because problems are adding to your debt. would it they say if you are added that you don't beach or
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addiction, you treat every day as a win. i'm not saying that properly, but it's something to that regard, so i treat my abuse every day as a win. here every day approach that now with other people it's inviting people into your circle who actually give a damn about you and your circle and about your plans peered doesn't mean they always believe you are right. doesn't mean they will always pat you on the back. they believe they see a bigger picture that even when you are angry the law for your progression in your ideas. big difference between agreeing with you. you do not want people in your circle who think you are right and love you unconditionally, people who love you, fight with you, loyal to your progression in the parishioner your ideas. very clear distinction i want you to understand that. there will be a difference
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between you getting the workout. there's a difference between you making art and beautiful that everything is okay. listening to them talk is really them finding-- i don't want to say support, but finding family that believes in you and what your big ideas are because you didn't come to a writer's conference to say you are a fan. how many here are brighter's? hemi your good? how many think you are good? most of your not good. i'm kidding. being good is not actually about being good. how many of you actually read? thank you. that's the only real question i have because in the end craft and good any motion to me. i had to learn that. to people here always joked that i'm a leader when he comes to writing. i ask had to sit back and think about that that the emotion
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aspect as important because part of mike process was kicking emotion out of my head and unlike i can't do that in write this book for other people. i had to find friends who would support me. i need it so i can create work that other people can care about, so think about that, loyalty, progression and the progression of your ideas and hopefully eric and will fall place. >> let's give the entire panel hand and we will go toward first question. >> this is-- i went his touch on something-- >> the panel would like to know who you are. >> my name is marcus coleman a criminal defense attorney from cincinnati. we'll know about the large
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percentage of numbers of black men imprisoned. i don't have anything to say about that. what i know several years ago is the high percentages and i mean like 90% of legal fees i received which come from black women took these brothers, grandmothers and mothers, wives, girlfriends, sisters who spend money because they are supporting the people they love and then i read the book by matt-- matthew desmond when he talks about the large number of black women who are evicted and i see the connection between the women who cannot pay rent because they are paying me to support their loved one and so when andrea was talking about the story not being spoken about desiree mentioned that i'm innocent to, these are sisters who are watching their furniture being set out. this is the direct correlation between the system which harvest black bodies in the sister who is being addicted with the direct correlation between all of that.
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>> there is also a part of that that is also forgotten. if you hustle for a living, there's a good idea you don't have a plan, so, i mean, i hustled as a young kid from 13 to about 19 and we were not thinking about a retirement plan we were thinking about the next day's rent, the next day's clothing, the next days a date, the next day's car and we also didn't trust the women we had. i estimate i could have bought two houses by the time i was 20, but i was too stupid to live out -- listen to the women around me that tommy to do something with the money and it leads to your conversation about why when someone gets busted if you've made enough money and you made that much money on that street there should be a treasure trove somewhere that your women should be able to grab you to pay for
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lawyer fees, but we were not smart enough, often times we are not smart to think that part-- forehead and puts the onus on the women. >> there is a reporter called the true cost ben carson ray should talking about that, the woman-- burden women carry economically as the women who are still paid the lowest. black women have more opportunities for employment, maybe, but the pay is schematically lower than any other group and so women are working hard for much less pay and then carrying the weight of mass incarceration in supporting families that are devastated by mass incarceration and also individuals of the massive perspiration. i think that i also went to again push to extend the
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narrative and to the extent we talk about women in the context of massive conversation-- incarceration always defaults to well, we are left behind your car partners, family members locked up. we are grieving, paying the bills which are important to recognize and it also takes us out of being a direct target, so i think the piece i would say about the bail and legal fees is that black women die in jail because they cannot pay bail. a woman who died in westchester because she was accused of shoplifting seafood to feed her family and then could not get bail and died inside, sebastian apiece of the story i want to make sure we include in the mix and it's not always like that we are a group that's a secondarily impacted by mass incarceration, but primarily impacted and secondarily impacted. that's why it's so important to keep initiatives like the national mama state bailout, so please go to know more money
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bail.org and make a donation whatever you can, $5, $10. the longer you are locked up the more chance you will lose your kids. the reason you're locked up probably is because you are trying to hustle to feed those kids, take care of those kids and pay the lawyer bill for someone else and also or you are self-medicating with something to deal with the trauma of the things we're talking about and the longer you are in the more likely you will stay in, so last year we bailed 100 women out on mother's day and brought them home with their kids for mother's day and continue to offer them support in the community, so help us do that. no more money bail.org. mama state bailout. >> did you want to respond? >> now, you guys covered it. thank you.
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>> i wanted to follow-up on that last conversation and one of the things we can advocate for and i don't know brother if this is anything similar in ohio, but what's been introduced here is an idea of supervised release as an alternative to bail. so, the judge has the taxability to place someone in supervised release, so they don't have to put up money, but there is the kind of supervision that gives the court the assurance that might otherwise need and that's a variation of no more money bail. >> the different ways in which there are perhaps alternatives. >> as long as supervision doesn't involve in a cobre slit that yet to pay for yourself
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which ends up being you pay for your own and conservation in your own home, so i feel like the idea of alternative is essential. we have to make sure the alternatives don't download the cost of incarceration on the same people. [inaudible] one of the things that's coming to mine is listening because my default is fiction and how to take. this feels like intimate details of the experience and them through fiction so that one of the stories in my collection is called another mother. it's called home for the holidays as the family drives from detroit to maryland for christmas and the woman who is driving, husband is sleeping and it's his time to rest with two children in the backseat and it's in the overnight in a truck starts following the family and starts to be your and get them off the road and quickly they
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realize it's like rednecks. their license plate says motown or something so they have been identified as black people. in my aim-- when i read that people are breathless and i read it in very diverse audiences and instead of saying driving while black means xyz or many people are heard, unlike let's could in the car. lets get in the car with your kids and let's not make it the police because even though the police is a problem, driving while black is a problem from private citizen antagonizing and running you off the road and let's just see what it feels like and i think that can also be because in a newspaper article in a longer essay people can say well, that's not me, but sometimes you can get hooked
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into a character of a story before you know it in your heart is pounding and you can believe this is happening to these people and i had no idea and so i think that is a role that fiction and poetry, creative nonfiction can play like you said the creative nonfiction into humanizing those statistics even though in journalism you are telling the story generally through the eyes of one person. .. tony blackland and my question, i work with a lot of emerging artists but also artists involving reading and sharing the work. i have been working with a lot
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of performers who don't still their personal personal stories and are turning 40 come in their 40s and want to tell their personal stories and consulting with a few artists who have success in yesteryear and they are women and they have some stories and they are freaking out and nervous but they have - tough, strong woman on the outside but they disappear and shrink when i find them in editor or someone to support them for the page or the stage and confronted with this as well as a performance poet who can hide behind my performance and my personality and charm and being at an age welling up here. we have a room full of writers here, how do we as writers who
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have maybe had a - it is not a thing yet, get to the point of overcoming the obstacle and the block, what did you do to be able to tell is painful stories, and traumatize the process of going there. telling everything on facebook, i do. don't know why i can tell and harnessing the emotional and power and where do you get your reserves from, and there was so much i didn't want to miss in the moment. the statistics, i didn't know
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all of that about women. my mind is blown. now to sit down and write about that my mind would be triply blown in by then i'm tired and i didn't write anything today. >> what you just said, i got a book deal for a book, everything i do, what is this nonsense? she calls me up and goes there's a phone in here. turned to a book. it was about the abuse. it pays based on a couple guys and myself, didn't want to write that book. two days past, i want you to write that book, and tells you to do something, do it or get on your nerves until you do it in a good way.
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she kept telling me, i asked her why and she said who cares if you don't need it, there are people who need this story. there is no story about especially black men who have gone through trauma and come out of it, go right the book. if anyone knows my work i don't write about that, slavery, streaks and women so come to the world, it is hard to write a book about myself. it isn't just about me taking the narrative, and take that story and use it, that is
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personal, 2 million people walk around with the same process in their head, i need to do that. >> these are the questions, listening to you, being forced to come up with a financer, have you ever, as a fiction writer, people will say, ask questions and stay in your essay about so-and-so or your column, it is fiction. when i come out of it people think it is all true anyway, like i am writing fiction and it didn't happen to me. >> that must've happened to
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you. some people don't -- don't think it already happened. as far as the world is concerned, what is the step? go ahead and do it. i talked myself into something. i'm struggling with that very thing. why are you doing it. a revenge tale like somebody gives me and they get hit by a train and live happily ever after, if that is your motivation, that is why you are being blocked because you realize that will start a more events cycle. if it is there to show the way, push on it a little easier.
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a lot of good literature is revenge literature. >> what you were saying about it, it is a very clinical book, it tells stories but focusing on stories and archetypes of queer folks and what we think of them and how it contributes to criminalization but i wasn't in it, both of them are white, a constant station about what is in it but this was my story of doing this work for the past 25 years and it is my story, just jumped onto the page without my permission or approval or will that i did ask myself why is it in their? i'm deeply uncomfortable. the fact that you know it is
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making me anxious, the idea that people are reading your book, that is great, but you read that part, so i think people, when they interview me, the lead question, no, i have developed very adopt ways of getting around that question moving past it but it was important because it was part of the work. here i am talking about how black women are leading struggles and never telling our own stories of those things and i'm challenging other women, i hear you talking about your son but i also know that you are experiencing police violence and you never talk about how i can support you in that and i have to turn the question on myself. are you challenging - you have privilege in so many ways but
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it requires to go to the process of appealing too. to being vulnerable in that way, part of your healing or go through a process of healing where jumping outfield important but for me it felt i had never been pregnant but felt like i imagine it is like to be 10 months pregnant and used to come at all evident 10 boxes in my apartment, two blocks over, newspaper clippings, stories, videos so people could use it in ways they wanted to and other stories and stories - listening to what needs to come out and to do whatever healing is necessary and coming up with a strategy. i will never talk about this on radio or tv so to protect yourself just because your
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story is out there doesn't mean it has to be all the way out there and you have no control over it and you can hold it in the way you need to hold it. >> we are just about 3:00. i have the two questions. c-span is wrapping up at 3:00 so i want to invite our questions, present your question and give each of you 30 seconds to respond, final words and say thank you. >> two quick things. thanks to each of you for the gift of your acknowledgment to find the witness. that is invaluable to me, the price of admission, find the witness. i'm the resilient researcher and writer and that is the missing piece so i thank you for that. are you familiar with ursula or
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out of arizona state university? she's a good friend and colleague? very quickly, she was accosted by campus police roughly four years ago for jaywalking in tempe, arizona. her dress was flipped upside down, she was physically assaulted and she was fired and had to fight for her job back in. she is just finding her voice and is allowing me to chronicle her experiences and she needs to connect with you as well so we need to thank you for that. >> her story is in the book. >> i wanted to get your comment on two statements earlier, things haven't changed. we think things have changed but they haven't and maybe they
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changed for the worst and it is next, talked about censorship in the black arts movement. as i misremember it, everything was fair game you can talk about it right about what you want and people could critique based on their reality-based on how it is. so my concern is whatever was happening with the black arts movement positive or negative, this situations corresponds to overall advancement and progress of our social status and now we are free to talk about the flowers and daffodils but things are going to hell. this is my concern.
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>> quick final remarks. >> i can't do that quickly. thank you for having me. >> misremembered it as well. >> the panelist and all of you. thank you for inviting me out of it. >> in this black writers conference, on the influence of race and politics, denzil smith, jacqueline jones lamont, nina alexander, share their
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