>> reviewers react. [laughter] >> give one more round of applause. [applause] >> thank you for coming. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> book tv is on twitter and facebook and we want to hear from you, tweet us, twitter.com/book tv or post a comment on our facebook page, facebook.com/booktv. >> how is everybody doing

tonight? [applause] >> wow, that is a good response. that was awesome. well, everyone welcome to red emma's. to who is it your first time, event at red emma's, welcome, a little bit about us, 13 years in the making, a little bit older than that, who knows who a co-op is? cool. not that many people. a worker cooperative is a business in which everybody that you see here working, that's me, kate right here, everybody behind the register, in the back, everybody that works here owns an equal part of the business, we all make democratic decisions through meetings to decide everything from the way the lights are going to look when they turn on, where to put

them, what books to sell, the tables where you're going eat at and sit in and the food we will serve, everything. we function as a coffee, vegan restaurant, titled bookstore, we are part of co-op family. if you go down, that's baltimore preschool and our coffee comes from another cooperative and they provide all that beautiful coffee you are drinking. so without further due, i want to introduce our speaker tonight, britney cooper is well known writer, published writer, black feminist, future at rutgers, cofounder of awesome called feminist collectives but without further due i will give

her the mike, brittany cooper, y'all. [cheers and applause] >> all right now. maybe pull it over. perfect. all right, y'all have to see fat short people get into tall, skinny chairs. okay, good evening, everybody. thank y'all so much for coming. so i thought what i would do is read a little bit from my new book eloquent rage, black feminist discovers her super power. and i will talk a little bit about the book and then i want to have a conversation with you guys, is that cool? and when we get ready to have the conversation, c-span book tv is here and so if you would come

to the mic that would be really helpful, cool? all right. so i want to start by reading a bit from a chapter called strong female leads, strong female leads. i have a complicated relationship with white women as clear as i am about meeting black women as a matter of survival, i feel far less sure about the need to be in solidary with white women, on the one hand if my television viewing preferences are any indicater i love white women, especially those who run shit, my netflix q is populated with show that is feature strong female leads, gilmore girls, girl boss, grace and frapgy, i can be found any given day watching reruns of madame secretary, old shows or beep on regular television.

rachel ray gets credit, i know i committed country southern blast for me but i swapped out delicious cans of heart-clogging use greece for bottle of evoo, extra virgin olive oil. the last white girl to visit a place where i lived was my friend michelle who famously stepped into my room and put my pink oil moisturer. my friend putting my pink oil in her white girl hair, real friends can share cross culture intimacies like that. i had no idea that i had a predilection for watching white

girls run the world. it all started with the baby sister's club. well, really, it all started with tammy brown, a poor mouthy brown-haired white girl who could fit the description of ramona, tammy screamed the words dirty anythinger to me in recess when i was 18 year's old. i only registered niger a word that my father used with his friends because insult. she delivered it with such force that my body recoiled from the shock of it even though i wasn't fully aware who she meant. that might i came home and asked momma, what is the word nigger mean, before my mother answered, her face in pain, she hated

hearing and knowing that her daughter had been called such a thing. mom stopped stirring the pot on the stove and replaced, ignorant person, a nigger is a ignorant. she initiated me to a world of racial knowing. now i want to read from a chapter called bag lady. black woman pay the highest cost for investing in respectability politics. first, it breeds distrust between middle-class striving women and poor women of color. we middle-class women are taught that those women who were once quote, unquote, fast-tail girls make us all look bad. i never thought about poor women making me look bad because my

community of women was working class and my mom reminded me, child, we are poor. like many, many americans and most black folks i know, we lived paycheck to paycheck and given the dubious origins of my births my parents wouldn't have been invite today jack and hill. i didn't want to be the girls in my middle school saddled with children i couldn't support and due with low-wage work with little opportunity to advancement. these are the narratives that working class, quote, unquote, good girls buy into in order to make our way out of the hood. the goal to not be like them animates our drive and our hustles but now that i'm grown, i know longer believe that black woman should invibe blame and shame for all the creative ways that we build families and lives, arrange pull filling partnerships and work to maintain safe homes and steady employment. i spent my 20's and most of my

30's waiting on a partner to show up before i would ever consider children because i never wanted to be a single mother. i bought into the idea that making good choices around education and career would entitle me to a broader set of options in every part of my life, but the world doesn't work that way for black women, in my college, the female to male ratio was 3 to 2, assuming that everyone hooked up, one-third of black girls were automatically going to be left out. when i graduated from howard without having one boyfriend there, it didn't dawn on me that i was one of the 33%. the optimism of my 20's would not let me consider that these numbers would not improve over the course of my life. my friends and i didn't realize the structural that shaped black partnering options until we are already in the thick of things. suffice it to say that we thought as all young people do that we had endless time, that our chosen would arise and advanced degrees would bring us

into a world of men with advanced degrees and earning potential too, it hasn't worked out that way for a great many of us. in my 30's, i became an unwilling member of the sisterhood of black women struggle with thyroid tumors. successful outpatient procedure that i thought would buy me more time, my doctor, a lovely black gynecologist said more than likely your thyroids tumors would return. i began to wander whether i should have been less reckless and black women deserve more options than these extremes, same choices we make to not ruin our lives as young people become the choices that make us

miserable 20 years later. part of what friendship has meant in 30's supporting home girls in their 30's and 40's, who have limited partnering options and even fewer options for starting families. the intimate consequences of all these good-ass choices we have made are relentlessly brutal. yes, folks are quick to say, adopt, freeze your eggs, vie invisit -- invitrio, but with what money, many of us single women are first again-ration middle class with loads of educational debt and without a two-income household and have no way to fund a creative family structure. the wait of the absence of the partners who didn't show up, of the children you didn't get to have, of the uterus robbed by thyroid is not something

prepared. our social conditions are largely as a result of personal failings and individual bad choices, i often want to throw the book or walk out of the service. but while i have, in fact, walked out of a service or two, i have thus far refrained from throwing books, those who preach the sermon think they are empowering black women to face conditions we face, empowerment is a tricky word. it's also a decidedly neo liberal word that places the responsibility for combating systems on individuals. neo liberalism is endlessly concern with personal responsibility and individual self-regulation. it tells us that in a free market accountability at the top, what happens to those on the bottom is entirely our fault. did we have enough drive, enough vision, enough hustle to change our condition, the politics of

personal empowerment suggest to us that if we free our minds then our asses would follow. i'm not convinced that this is true. why, have you ever noticed that people who have real power, wealth, job security, influence, seminars, power is not obtained from books and seminars, not alone anyway. power is conferred by social systems, empowerment and power are not the same thing, we must quit mistaking the two. and last let me read from a little bit of a chapter called favor and fair. and if you've ever been to a black church, you've heard this saying. [laughter] >> survivor's guilt show up in way, the ongoing narrative in

black social justice and academic spaces is that working class black neighborhoods, the hood, the ghetto, the projects are revolutionary, one activist told me that it was the job of black professionals, those of us who had made it to return to live in the hood. i lived for four of my five years of the project, i remember it and while the projects in the small town south are not at all comparable to the horror stories i hear coming out of urban ghettos i have no intention of returning. and i don't have any guilt about it. the activist who insisted that i should want to return is himself first-generation middle class, his parents grew up in the hood and he suffered from a serious case of father or -- homo. i on the other hand witnessed what it looked like from my mother who had the nerve to have middle-class aspirations as she

slowly worked her way from place in the projects to modest apartment to a house. when i was about 4, my mom, dad and i went to anp grocery store, my mom looked bone tire as the grocery sale, my dad stood at the other end, when time came to pay, only my mother reached for her wallet. i looked at daddy expecting, thinking, waiting on him to contribute. he looked at me almost shrugging as my mother paid for groceries alone. why hadn't my daddy helped my mommy? in months to come, daddy bounced , after my mother summoned the courage to tell him it's over. he left without incident, refusing even to catch my eye as i sat on the softa witnessing his exit. i asked my mother what motivated her to want to get out of the projects even though all of her friends still lived there, she said simply, i saw people going

to sleep all around me, i wanted better for you. concentrated poverty meant that seeing balancing and hearing police sirens were a regular occurrence, one evening one of momma's friends showed up showing bloody t-shirt in a bag and brother had been stabbed and she had gone to the hospital to collect belongs, i knew her brother and i was horrify today see the bloody content offense the bag dangling from her bag as she stood in the living room. there's often little peace and quiet and less space to think when violence can show up any given time. i told the young activists who began to insist on revolutionary housing program that asking black women to move to underresourced spaces didn't seem revolutionary to me. his revolution was rooted of men in ghetto, black women's revolutions are always about safety, food and education for

women, children and the elderly. no matter where the sisters are, we are always making meals, raising children an keeping things together, when we do make it out, we make it out in the simple hopes that it would be easier to keep things together now. guilting black folks, particularly black women for pursuing safety, care and possibility for their children is not a freedom project. thank you. [applause] >> thank you. let me say a little bit about my process and why i wrote this book. i'm academic and professor, i would like to say i'm a professional nerd and professional feminist but i'm also the first of my family to graduate from college, the first of my family to get a ph.d and so i wrote last spring a book

called beyond respectability, the intellectual thought of race woman and that gives more academic tone where i'm thinking about black feminist across history and thinking about their theoretical contributions. but this book is the book that i wrote for my home girls, i wrote for myself, folks who don't have ph.d's, don't have any kind of d's, no degrees, might not ever come sit in a college classroom, but who cared deeply about what it means to live, thrive, to be safe, to have some sense of possibility because those are the women who raised me, women who didn't have a great amount of access to education but who were deeply committed to the notion that anything was possible for their children. and so i like to tell folks that eloquent rage is a book that you get, we drink wine and talk about how terrible the

patriarchy. the book is called eloquent rage for a couple of reasons. when i was a graduate student instructor, i had a young black woman student in one of my courses who months after the class ran into me and we were talking about the course and she said, i used to love listening to you lecture, lectures were filled with rage, but it was like the most eloquent rage ever. and i was like, i'm not angry, i'm passionate because i felt like the assertion that she was seeing my rage in the classroom was an indictment of my teaching and indictment of my intellectual work i was there to do. because often that's what happens to woman, right, you're raising a concern about injustice and people -- any time you raise your folks say, why are you so mad, why are you angry, calm down, relax, right, any woman who has been in a room full of men who are powerful or men who want to be powerful knows what that moment is like.

so i thought that the anger, calling out the anger was indictment and so i immediately denied it and brittany, you know you're angry. when the student calls out the teacher sometimes you have to give it up and so i did and it was a transformative moment for me because i had great respect for her as student, she's really smart, we are still connected today, just really smart and one of my best students and i realized that she didn't say that i was not good at any job, she said that the anger made me better as a teacher and that was a revolutionary concept to me because of the things that i saw as a child, so much violence, instability particularly in the younger parts of my childhood and lots of anger because that is rage inducing and i'm a black in america and deep south and all things can do rage when you

think about confront racism and sexism as kid and dealing with not extreme poverty but working class and having limited economic resources. and i thought that my anger -- i had only -- my father struggled with addiction and was abusive, i only seen anger being used in destructive ways and so to have a student, one, tell me that i wasn't hiding it well and she thought that was the strength of what i did allowed me to have a breakthrough that i really needed and the breakthrough was that i had the right to be angry and that i could use that anger in service of the work that i'm here to do in the world rather than resisting it or feeling ashamed about it or acting as though it isn't there, and so she called my anger eloquent rage and so this is my tribute to her for seeing me, for naming

a breakthrough for me and also hopefully me calling out and saying to other sisters who struggle with this, i see you and it's fine, juice it, don't run from it. [applause] >> yes. yeah, i'm trying to figure out how to use my anger as a super power, trying to, you know, coral all of that energy into building something that i want to see in the world and, look, let me say at the outset, i don't want to say that i want to police the way that black folks use their anger, this may be controversial but i'm saying and i'm saying in baltimore. if black folks need to take anger on building, that's fine, i would rather for us to take that on this embodied flesh. sometimes we have priorities

off. i'm not saying anything to black folks, this book is not called elegant rage, it's not called elegant rage, a lot of times people think when we are talking about eloquent we are talking about elegant. i'm not saying your rage has to look pretty, i'm not saying it has to be palatable, i'm not saying anything about it needing to be respectable, i'm saying that it needs to be eloquent and eloquent rage is clear and expressive, people know who the target is, you know who they're mad at and they have a sense why you're mad and i'm saying that that is an eloquent moment and that we should respect it, we should listen to it and that we should listen more to what is at the core of black rage and particularly black women's rage, i think it's one of the most honest forces in america right now. these are times where everybody is mad. trump is mad, white men are mad, that's why they elected mad, white ladies are mad, they elected trump and not now they are mad about it, weird.

[laughter] >> black people are mad because we are like, we saw you white people doing this and we told you it was a bad idea and you did it anyway and now we all have to live with the consequences with it and con chemical weaponses of the ways which you have been terrible long before trump. and the ways in which he became personification of things you have been doing forever. yeah, we are mad about it and what i want to say i don't want to engage in false equivalencies, i believe in picking sides and i picked the side of black people and in particularly black women. so i think that everybody is mad but i don't think all of our anger is equal and i don't think all of it is equally righteous. and i think that what we have a s a moment where white male rage is driving politics and driving us to cliff that nobody wants to go over or offer into and i think that black women's rage can save us, not because black women are pure, black girls can be evil and terrible too, like i want to own that because one of

the things i'm trying to do in the book, i don't want to ever make a singular pronouncement. there's always nuance, black girls aren't perfect. any black girl you know can point out the black girl who ain't quite right. ii want to own that. structurally there's a thing about black women and politics because we are not seduced by white supremacy or male supremacy because we are not male and we are not white and so we don't have any access to what that looks like, then structurally we typically are always thinking about how can we make all of this work better for everybody. how can we take the nothing that we have and make something anyway? and i'm not saying that we should continue to give black women nothing and applaud them for making something, given that we can typically given something out of nothing, imagine if you gave us something, imagine what we could do then. i'm trying to hold the

complexity. these projects are connected beyond respectability, my academic book and this book because what i want people to do is take black women seriously infullness. i want my colleagues to recognize that black women have been they arizing since the beginning of time. that's something that scholars always say and we have to keep on saying, i'm happy to join the the chorus and i also want in this book, one, black women to stop blaming ourselves for conditions that we did not produce or create and two, i want other people to see us as serious, thoughtful, revolutionary forward-thinking political actors, i don't think we get enough credit for that. and i think we deserve that credit. and so those are some of the things i'm trying achieve. [applause]

>> okay, let's talk. who wants to come to the mic? these things are no fun if i just talk, so my folks are going to bring the mic over, if y'all would come to the mic and have any questions or cries of rage, you can disagree with me, it's cool. it's all right. i just want to be in dialogue. >> don't all come at once. [laughter] >> thank you, brave soul. >> you're welcome. >> my name is floyd. >> hi, floyd. >> you blew my mind, thank you so much for coming. >> thank you. [applause] >> my question is about the conversation you were having about church and how god language, i wanted to know where the strength to resist that came

from and such a culture that's so dominant, as you can imagine, everywhere we go black people are churchy, i'm not particularly churchy, where did you find the strength to be as objective as you have been about the god language in relation to feminism? >> yeah, that's a really great question. so there's a chapter in this book called grown women theology. i would read you a little bit of it but i will tell you the opening story, so it starts with the story about me going to see my grandmother, i'm about 22, i'm a real good evan general call -- evangelical. tell me the rules, tell me all the rules. i am going the follow the rules, i will read the bible every day for 30 minutes, i'm going to do it. my step dad is a preacher.

i was commit today all of these rules. i go to see my grandmother. [laughter] >> delicious food she's awesome. >> northern louisiana, rural part of the deep south. as i'm walking on the porch, black women, they never something when you want them to do it. you need to start having sex. oh, my god, i was so shocked. i was like the devil will use anybody. [laughter] >> i am trying to live right.

i'm sylabit. she got me on the porch and had an inappropriate conversation with me that god rest her soul, till this day i'm not grown enough, not even now. [laughter] >> so that was the first thing. when i'm committed to something, i'm committed. grandmoma is wrong. many years later what happened was that i tried so i talk in this book about the fact that i was deeply invested in sort of evangelical christianity because it dove tailed with middle-class aspirations. you're trying to get somewhere and to me pregnancy primary, and

so i was just like, okay, no i don't want to make any of these kinds of choices and if you go, they're sin. if you follow rules god will help you be successful, it dove tails really nicely. you just commit to it because theology becomes a marker and that became the story, you know, oiled people will be saying, elders, do anything you want, you put god first and you can be successful and i believed that because i was having great success and then i think part of what happened is that at some point i start to question, one, whether is that the purpose of god to help people get into middle class, is that what christianity is about, you're blessed if you have a great house in the suburbs and a dope car and, look, there's a lot of

preachers who tell black people that that that use longings that capitalism use longings. it's like treating god like the parking god genie. is that what this is about? is that what the relationship is about? that was one thing. and then the other thing was so much of the policing, the theological policing was around sex, that's what it was around. and you know, we need to think about why the whole thing is about controlling women's bodies and sexuality in particular and feminism gave me a language for knowing what that part was about and so i felt like at some point in late 20's came back to what my grandmother was saying, look, you know, if -- there's a more

dynamic relationship to this theology than people give us credit for and that she was deeply thoughtful, she loved god, she believed in jesus but she also lived her life and i think she was inviting me to do the same and so one of the things i would say to you when you're talking to black folks, the story is never pretty as it sounds on the surface and that actually asking people to dig in and figure out what the theological relationships really look like and i think that what we find in some cases is more dynamism, more picking and choosing more of a push-pull relationship. i didn't think of my grandmother as a critical theological actor, taking the parts that worked and leaving that parts that didn't. now i feel a lot of freedom to do the same because i recognize that what she wanted for me, what she was say to go me, all of this great success that you have achieved, we are proud of you, if you're not happy it's a

failure, not a win. and so that helps me to get free and i will tell you i think it's uphill battle and i think it's an uphill battle because what churches do with the bible is so i have this whole thing about how black people are being eaten alive by capitalism, patriorchy and if you go to church and you're being eaten alive, you can't make end's meet, you are being mistreated in the relationship, you have a boss that's racist and you know it and you need the job, you go to church and god has a purpose for you, god has your book, god will work this out for you, then what it means is that all of the sudden theology becomes the stopgap between all of the ways the systems would crush us, right, but god, you see, and so

then we begin to use god -- to me, yeah, i think god -- i believe in god but i'm also like, god empowers me to fight back against the system, for folks who don't have the language or the frameworks, right -- [applause] >> god becomes the thing that protects you from all the stuff the system is doing and so then -- so if i say to church girls who are working this out, no, girl, go ahead and get you some, god wants you to be free and have some all of that, you know, they're like you are trying to ruin my whole life, you're trying to get me to make god mad at me and my whole life is going the fall apart because for them -- i was so much this way fi step out and think about this differently, what is the risk, the little bit of protection i have, look, this is the last thing, it is really high stakes, it is actually high stakes for me, my mother was single mother, my dad abusive, he died when i was 9, i had to be dam-near

perfect to build this life for myself. i couldn't have any bad days at school, pop-off at teachers, have bad years, get detention, not make a's, not slay the sat. you have to be perfect, it feels like to have -- to get to here from there, my mom, baby, do they know where you come from, the people that listen to hear you talk, do they know that you come from real regular people and i don't know either, mom, i don't understand either, but what i know is that the climb is really steep and so when it feels that critical, then you want everybody on your side and who you don't want not to be on your side is god, you want god on your side when you are trying that hard and so when you start to mess with people's theology, you are messing with the one bit of safety that folks feel like they have and what black preachers have done, god loves

us and care about us but the thing we owe god in response to the love is to follow all of the rules and when you start to say something real different then folks get mad at you and it's because of fear of what will happen if they follow you down the path to the thing that you're talking about and so that's the thing, so i try to work with it. i'm still a church girl, i still go to church, me and god are cool. don't mess with me because i will pray about you and it might not work out for you. so i want to be clear on that. [laughter] >> at the same time say that i also really deeply feel like god was like, you're going to miss me because the theological tools that you needed to get you here not the theological tools for the other things and i'm thankful for that invitation and i hope that this would give black women in particular permission to redefine and come again to that conversation and think about it differently. [applause]

>> come on to the microphone. what y'all want to talk about? feminism, white girls, racism. >> hi, i'm a white girl asking a question. >> how are you? >> i'm good. you're beautiful, thank you so much. >> thank you. >> my wife asked me to come to your talk tonight so it's awesome, such a gift so thank you. when did you start questioning the tools that you were brought up with in terms of believing in god, believing in the rules and when did you start questioning the rules and it sounds like you have created new rules for yourself? >> yeah, thank you. you know, i graduated at 28 with a ph.d and then i got a job in alabama and, look, i'm from

louisiana, so alabama and northern louisiana aren't that different, but i was like sitting in my apartment alone, like, well, great, this is -- this is good. i'm here with this degree and i'm young and fly in alabama and what are we going to do now. [laughter] >> how do i build a life for myself now that i've made it? .. >> i was like no i am holding on. i know you're walking away from jesus but i am staying faithful. i was just a church girl. when i was 28 i was like this is

not working because part of what was happening is that i telling the very baptist mega church and i was living in atlanta and i left a grad school and had been celibate for most of my 20s and this is the time when years was to be, you know, busting it wide open. [laughter] i was not. i was busting books wide open. that's what i was doing and getting a phd and that all is what i was doing. i got to alabama and thought this is terrible and i want some and what in the world and what will happen because there is no one here will i do. one of my girls we were out and i was doing this whole thing about i just am trying to live right but i don't know which is a girl, god knows you want to get some and i was like rights. that is right. i just needed permission. i needed permission and that i was like cool, i'll commit to this inside it.

that was for me the breaking point but the other thing was i had become a nuisance in my prior church. i was like this creation story what about [inaudible] people and i was resting the teachers and i said this binary gender conception thing that doesn't fit with how people actually are so how does that work and i don't know why would i -- dudes don't run [bleep] well. i've never seen them run anything well. i run my own thing and i have so, i don't know that i believe you but part of what happened is i was able to reclaim my skepticism which i had a lot of as a kid and i would always asking questions and so i had church people who told me to shut up. i literally have them say to me things like shut up. and i was like, that's not like jesus. and i was like really shocked

because even though i grew up a punk i'm take people on face value so i don't necessarily agree with you but i thank you are loving people but let's start challenging theology and they become unloving quickly. i realized that something was wrong and at some point i was like all the stuff i learned in school you all would have me believe that i just have a phd for no reason. and that all of this is wrong and it can't be that. i realize that there was a way these tools can work together and i also decided that what i care most about is being free not being right. a lot of my childhood was spent

with me wanting to make sure that i was right. i mean, it's an impulse that we craft and kids when we kill their curiosity so they want days and they want the right answer and they are afraid to be wrong and afraid to take risk. at some point not taking risk became more painful to not take the risk that you keep doing the right thing so, yeah, i was late to the party with this but in some ways it was reclaiming questions it also, look, the question that i started to ask was will god -- icy black girls all around me doing everything supposedly right. going to church and serving in following these rules and getting degrees and for those of us who are straight, black men hate us and for those of us who are queer the church will not acknowledge us to begin with, right? and so, do you care about us because if you do all of this theology that we are hearing is not loving in any way. what does it look like if you

actually care about us? what does that look like? at some point i made the connection i said right, enslaved folks came up with the theology that suited them. they didn't abide with what the bible said whether they should stay asleep. they said no, we will be free and we don't care. we will choose our freedom because we know there's something divinely ordered about that. i realize that some of it i had to redefine my relationship to the bible and part of that is and i'm like this is a great cultural resource and it tells me a lot about how folks have thought about their relationship to god overtime but is not a rulebook for how i live my life

but i borrow the stuff about love and trying to be nice but the love ethic -- the net simple things i left those things on the table. that makes my conservative evangelical friends mad but i'm happier than they are so desperate yet. [applause] >> my name is charla and my question is grounded in politics and respectability. particularly if you think about the celebration of the death of martin luther king recently and i am thinking about identify as a black feminist and i have been at since i was in my mother's will and it's caused me a lot of pain and not having relationships with blackman but like you just said i want to be free so i have to craft a stand. i'm thinking about how do you hold your peers, mail, accountable in their scholarship they continue to write another book like mlk used to be written and study to the degree that they do and like how we have people in black scholars and

public intellectuals who are often quoting a limited group of black males but not bringing black women into the story and they are our age. i thought you got a different kind of education and i thought you went to school with me and you would understand to bring us into the narrative and so i particularly think about angelina cooper and with all three talk about the black body and that was ida b wells life the black body. in particularly, blackman's body in the entire lynching campaign that she is the mother of the revolutionary and she doesn't get her do so those are statements but i'm wondering how do you push your peers, blackmail public intellectuals and scholars, and do you? where we at? and you should know this and i shouldn't have to be the one to

continuously say -- >> yeah, no, thank you for the question. i agree with you. it makes me so mad that black men are like the only people we want to talk about our james baldwin and mlk like they got a tram print and they act like every year we got have another book about those dudes. meanwhile in the academic enterprise you write one book about angelina cooper folks are like this doesn't really say anything new because we already know who she is and it's like what you think are they saying about dubois and he she lived to be one oh five and the boy lived to be in his 90s and they both

wrote for over 60 years and there's another woman i read about in all of these -- for small house they lived i want to know because i'm trying to live to be one oh five and that's my first question. have you lived to be that long as a black person living in the midst of lynching and the aftermath of reconstruction. it's a real question, right? but also they do these lifetime for the work and the people are like were enamored with him because he grows over time in shifts and changes and we want to document all of that. yet, they want you to write one book about the black woman in everyone's like you not saying anything new because know her. until i write about her for the next hundred years that i have not said enough. part of that is you have to have the moxie. i think the black women professors who trained me training for the site and the beverly of the world and with the joneses of the world and the professor was here at baltimore johns hopkins different these

folks trained us to go in and be prepared for that fight. many of them are like those men and those men wb dubois got great ideas about the books he should write never gave her credit but he got his ideas from her book and ida b wells was like i mentor that world country boy didn't give me credit. these young black men who are following in the footsteps following in more ways than one. i'll be a little shady and say that if you think about freddie douglas and the dudes were womanizers a lot of these young black male intellectuals and someone should say -- it. they are following their model. what i'm saying more directly and not talking about any particular but like with someone current black intellectuals are my friends and some of them or not but what i think they get i will say it in print and i challenge them about the way they like to take on ida b wells because she talked about blackman but they don't think about her as a feminist and unpublished you can google it.

i won't call that brother same tonight is not trying to be messy. [laughter] i was willing to have the fights with them but i'm also saying they are drawn to those brothers for the same reason i'm drawn to the women because they see in them in intellectual legacy and a set of possibilities. about that. i think they're engaged in sexism and i think they should see the intellectual traditions but there is only so much fighting that i will do. not to fight them to do it but i'm going to do it and show them how it's done and participate with other black women scholars who are doing the work of recovery in putting forth black women. they also think were talking about something more broad than the estimate conversation in the academic conversation i have is beyond respectively. in this book talk about what is solidarity between black women in blackman and what it looks like. some brothers to me today and said you took my whole black male life but i love you for it

and i was like that's not what is trying to do. not trying to kill you but trying to say there's a weird thing happening in black feminism right now where a lot of young black women are we are not feminist because white women are racist. like sure, but blackman are sexist and antifeminist very often and yet you don't have a problem doing black politics and fighting for black freedom and showing up for blackman so i would you let white women racism keep you from the fight against patriarchy customers there is a way that blackman and black solidarity with black women just seems to not always be visible to black women so i like dresses question. black women get killed by the cops to and i'm in baltimore so all call nuance name -- do blackman march for us? do blackman organized marches or are they outraged collectively when black women get killed or harmed by the cops or when it blackman kill black women and a

black woman dies a week mostly from violent encounters with blackman we don't have initial conversation about that and then when you bring it up it's like why are you hating on brothers and it's now, look, all these brothers that been killed by cops a lot of my national writing career came into being after treatment martin got killed and i wrote about that and spent several years writing in the press weekly about the things that happen to blackman. my commitment to blackman and blackman splurging is on paper and i got voluminous receipts to show for it and every brother who says that i want to know where his receipts are. his receipts do not match mine, right? i'm a black feminist because black women have the right to be the center of our own story because our priorities matter.

the way the blackman sometimes feel entitled to take the racial space and room is a problem. i think it's black women who most consistently say we are trying for everyone to be free and we want to bring women and the children in the dudes and we want everyone to have a place. i think there's a real problem because i think that it becomes very easy to go hard and white women for their racism and want to be clear that i'm not a fan of white women in the racism. i demand of white women that if we have solidarity you have to be willing to have an antiracist analysis. if not committed to that what we talking about? i'm also this is also the question. when black girls say this i'm like let's think about the harms you experience in life and who has done this. yes, in my book i had a white girl coming in word when i was eight. i've had white girls disinvited me from for the parties because

their parents were racist and i've had a white lady boss fire me for my first job because i challenged her racism. so, harm. i have seen blackman desperate you know, my mother is a survivor of nonviolence at the hands of a black man and my father was shot four times in my lifetime. he was killed the four-time all my brothers. my father was also abusive. you can read more about that in this chapter that i have called the smartest man i never knew why talk about the extreme levels of violence that i witnessed and experienced as a kid. i watched black men do all, all of that violence. lethal traumatic harmful forms of violence. how do i swear that you call me the inward against you be to my

mama shot and killed my daddy? right? all of it is a problem and all of it has to be part of the political analysis and no one side of the political analysis holds a great white girl don't good do a good job holding it just look, here's white women problems. they are approximate to white men and what they see freedom as the ability to do everything white men get to do. that's blackman problem too. they are mad as [bleep] that they don't get to do what white men get to do. they want to be men but they want the power that white men have. they're not committed ultimately to black women freedom or what

it looks like but freedom is being able to move to the world like a white man and that is what we want to be able to do. that's a terrible freedom vision because look at the things that white men have done, exceptions outstanding. settler colonialism, imperialism, war, capitalism, come on you all. is that what we want to do? we need a more expansive freedom vision and i think lack feminism is a thing that sets us on the path. [applause] >> i'm very sorry if this is not fully formed but i'm in the process. i'm a verbal processor and don't do very well. very intrigued with the idea that you talked about that making it out is something that is like a dirty word that once you make it out that you should go back that is a very interesting concept to me and i

wonder how that -- there are some people, racist people pressure, who say making it out is making it closer to whitene whiteness, in a sense. i don't know if it makes sense but if you make it out you are coming closer to what is acceptable and what is acceptable in our society is held by whiteness and so i wonder the idea that you have also the dichotomy that we in baltimore there's areas that is being gender fight and why people are coming into take the place of people of color and i wonder how those two ideas that it's okay for you to -- i'm

sorry, that it's okay for you to want to get out of that space and seek safety while there are these other forms that are invading that space district you know what i mean? have you because then it's like it's the space and the people who are helping within the space are in a sense are -- >> look, here's the thing that i'm really saying. ultimately what we need to be committed to is anyplace that people live is a livable place. real talk. that is what the freedom vision has to be. we have to think about how do ghettos get formed and those are

structural projects that get imposed on black communities and so me talking about making it out and making it out -- i don't understand that to be freedom. i don't understand the fact that my mom and i were able to make it out of the projects to be freedom. that's one of the things i'm fighting against. it's an exceptional list narrative but what i'm saying is by the same token telling us the just going back to the hood is the revolutionary thing that is deeply limited. in my making it it's not about or any person making it out it's not about aspiring to whiteness but black folks want proximity to whiteness not understand what white and black folks with good schools, good purchasers, good jobs, bookstores like -- in what he mean? typically why people live in the places where those things are because their white people. in so, yeah, i don't -- when i'm fighting against is in the book i'm critiquing a particular

thing which is that in a very woke space there are -- this might be the wrong reading but my read is that i look to middle-class black kids who feel angst about having middle-class privilege so they preach it everybody about how the hood is revolutionary and this kind of stuff. i want to challenge that notion by saying if the folks on the block and figure out what is revolutionary we would've had a revolution because most of our folks don't live there not middle-class. the preponderance of our people living in conditions of probation and it's disingenuous to make it into public spaces and romanticize the hood. that is not serving anyone and

having your critique of being in the academy is being what i'm supposed to do but i like being a professional nerd. i like my academic job and last spring i got those able to come in at and say to him they had never take this job for me. i can pre- much to say what i want and they cannot take this job away even though i know there challenge but they're not doing it in new jersey because we have union and workers and they cannot take this job away for me. i said i cannot be fired as a guaranteed paycheck from the rest my life and i just have it and he was like say that again like what do you mean? so what i see your middle-class being like is your elitist because you're an academic and i'm like no, no, that's not it and i know what it looks like for the folks who sacrifice for me to be here and i saw them hustle and work for me every day for my ability to be in this place and i won't tell them it

doesn't matter. i won't tell them that what i have is not materially different from what they have the cause it is and it's a lot. i don't like the performance of woke this. i don't like folks using their angst and acting like, you know you get access and all of a sudden -- is like this, i'll be mad at my folks back home in my whole life they were like mom baby go to school and get your lesson. make something of yourself. be everything you can be. soon as i got a phd don't think that because you got a phd that you're better than anyone. what are you talking about? you told me to get this. you paid me through the phd like, you know, e-news hardness and as i got it from their stuff about you thank you better and what are you talking about or you get educated and then you get educated just because you have education doesn't mean you know everything. i might know something and i've been reading books for six years. [bleep]. i know something abuse. the problem is with folks to

feel they're better than everybody because they have degrees or the degrees made them but i had a clear sense of myself before i got a degree. i did not get a degree because would make me somebody. the reason i was able to get degrees is in part because i knew i was somebody and even with folks to take my system someone away i knew that i had a sense of somebody and i've known that and that is the same. that's more what i'm really against is the way that all of us try to enact our angst with each other when look, none of this stuff is freedom. what you need is a structural overhaul. at any point in time you advocate for what individuals need to do then probably you ain't anywhere near what revolution looks like. look, it is hard to watch white people gentrify things. it's hard to watch it because for one thing it's like white

people -- white people, nice. it's colonization because why people don't just move in. there now we need you all to stop drumming and playing music after 10:00 p.m. because it's too loud for us. well, then go somewhere where it's not loud but on this block is loud. and the residents have been fine with that for the better part of 40 years. why should everything change to suit your sensibilities? that's the issue. white people are justified because they are -- literally, why people run up the property values which they can't afford to place like you're too expensive for yourself. it's an interesting problem to have. sometimes i feel like maybe i would love some day to write a piece about the surplus value of white lives and i think all life is invaluable but i literally

say that this is like white people are so expensive that you can't afford yourself. that means that if you live in a system where black life is undervalued then necessarily white life is overvalued in the system. all lives should be valued equally. all life should be valued but the problem is we place too much value on white life and white people pay the cost for that now. you're moving to a gentrified area. the only place you can get the land in the space. that is what is happening. at some point you will see this is a problem with capitalism right now as long as their black people who you can displace and you have to reckon with capitalism but it's ruining white folks lives too. what it means for black people is but people came in these

places from the great migration and build up the spaces and 50, 60, 70 years later now why people decided they move in black people getting displaced. the inability to have agency about where you live and where you build a community and let me make it plainer. i make good money. i'm solidly middle-class now. none of that should translate to me -- i'm thinking about buying house right now. i can't afford the houses the my white colleagues who are similarly placed can afford. not even a little bit. i'm solidly in the middle class and what middle-class means for me doesn't look anything like what it looks like for my white tenure colleagues, not even a little bit because i'm not going to have anybody net wealth to rely on for down payment but it'll be whatever i can scrap it say for myself. that is just what is true. i'm looking at that and i'm literally thinking about but i did everything right. part of what i was working from this book is i made the choices and impeccable academic credentials and i'm proud of

them for they tell you to get those things because it gives you a particular axis. i did the things 37 and not married and i don't have children and i don't own property. what i have to my name is a lot of degrees. that is what i have. a lot of the things that came in the marriage rates don't work that way for black folks and past prime childbearing age and i live in a weird place because i'm an academic and we go where the jobs are. i'm saying that not as a -- i'm happy with my life and proud of it but one of the reasons i'm happy with my life is because of feminism. feminism gave me the tools to redefine where i am in the fact that i'm not living some suburban heterosexual fantasy feminism gave me the tools to refine that is not a failure. to say this is the life chosen for myself i would not do it differently and i'm proud of the

ability to put families together in a way i want them proud of the ability to have the tools to own property and put my name on it and feminism help me to see many other ways to imagine a life and that is why am thankful and that is a conversation i wanted to have. when the structure eats you life and you do everything out right and you look hourly like you have these things and you still can't make it happen and as her white colleagues can in what confidence can what you do then so that you don't still depressed and feel like a failure until the failure of the american dream but maybe that was the thing to not want in the first place and what are the other things that i can build for myself is maintaining nuclear structure that none of us can maintain that's becoming more unattainable. we want this conversation around gentrification and white people and how we the entire structure is becoming unlivable and unsustainable and is not serving

any of us particularly well what folks think they are doing well right now but it is getting worse and worse. what i care about is how black folks are doing but what i know is that white folks need to begin to think about whether or not all of this whether they should be gentrifying not because get the hot real estate or whatever but because it is the marker of the system that is designed to eat us live from the bottom up. that is the conversation we should be having. yeah, that's what i'm talking: >> i am ruth and i have a vocal disability. bear with me. i've been aware of most of these issues most of my life starting at about eight years old.

[inaudible] there are many white women would like to do something but are not involved. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] i myself trying to

figure out who to talk to. [inaudibl [inaudible] >> i'm with you and i agree. i think the hard part in this is where i'm saying the white people desperate here for unity at some level and we got to build trust and bonds of trust because you know two things, one part of the challenge that i think why people have is that you grew up and you grew up in

the community with conservatives and you want to humanize their very bad behavior. real talk. the way the white men get humanized in the midst of -- think about these white male shooters and the way they get cast is troubled young men going through something but we are quick if they're not white to call them terrorists when they the kid and the man in the domestic terrorism committed these bombings in austin. terrorized communities of color there for several days and the first thing they said was he was having some problems working at home. who is not having problems at work at home? real talk. the move to humanize bad behavior is the way white folks think hundred need to think through. there's a deep desire -- one of the reasons democrats look, i understand the ways their morally bankrupt but one of the

reasons there bankrupt is because they still seat republicans -- they see that they are angry and have economic insight. they see them as so deeply human that they're not attending to the destructive nature and the rest of us don't have the privilege of seeing that kind of brazen whiteness as anything other than a form of racial terrorism because we are living with the impact of it. the other thing i think white people got to go get their people. this is the thing i say to the white people. i'm a black feminist and most black people are feminism and i'm like holding aloft the inner of feminism. patriarchy is terrible for black women and we have got to get under this thing and we got to fight and i feel like i have to

gather my people and help them to think more critically about the politics. i feel like i have tools that would be useful but white folks you don't think about your people. you're like no, i got it and i'm woken i'm liberal and i'm not like this. that is the wrong approach. those are your people in here is why they are your people even when they don't feel like it. white people, as a group, if you look at them politically continue to vote in ways that maintain white supremacy so why people are moving as a group and when people are moving as an identity category to maintain white dominance. that's what the 2016 election was about at base level. you call it anger or say anxiety or white desire for change but hillary and is not a great option but will take her. we don't need radical change just for the sake of radical change. why people make those choices so

those explanations fall flat on their face when what is more true is the country is browning and it will be a majority minority country in a decade and some change. white men feel every type of way about that. here is where these things lineup. why people feel some type of way about the change in categories of race and white men in particular feel something. i say feeling because they are not rooted. whiteman still run everything. there more wealth and more power than everybody and they are still on top. solidly. but they feel like they are slipping. because they feel that way they are terrorizing the rest of us. part of the patriarchy is the thing that tells us about the way that feelings and facts go together. when you are white your feelings get treated as fact. when you're black your fax get treated as merely feeling. that is what is true and it's true for many women. if your man, you treat your fax

is -- that is why you got to have a political analysis that helps us get at the root of this thing. what i'm saying to you is that we see white people as a group moving in ways to maintain white dominance. that's what white women did in 2016. that is what white women did in 2060. they were back our brothers and will not let this sister take them down. like women, we understand that and that's what we always work and do. the difference is we didn't see white women as being racial. we saw them as being racist. any black woman can tell you how white women are racist. white women moved in ways that maintain racial categories of dominance and so white feminists are the ones i got in intersectional analysis and the ones that know something about

the relationship of race and gender you got to go get your people. if you see them moving en masse in a way that will harm everybody why are you up here talking about the i'm not like them. but they are you and that's your sister and your cousin in your church lady in your yoga friend. those your people, go get them. i feel like i'm a sister to a black woman when i see black women having feelings about trains black folks i feel like i have to go gather gender black women and say we will not fight with trans- black women about this category of womanhood. we will fight white women for them to refer to us as women in the first place and so why we battle a category that we have to fight for and make someone else fight for access as a category two. it's terrible. i go gather my people and i'm not like well, i'll have no problem with trans- black women and i'm not like them. i say yes, i am. because if i don't say something to black women and black women

who get the problem don't say something to other black women then who will? if you're a white feminist in your of feminist was white and you know that your folks are not right, have a conversation. i know they're committed and i know and i'm very clear about how hard it is. but i talked to brothers about being feminist. i'm a feminist who, you know, wants to partner with a man, a black man. and i'm a feminist. when you are committed feminist dudes i like what are you talking about now? so, yeah, look, my partner is a man used open great but mostly he's like that feminist thing i don't know but a treat you right. [laughter] he's like look, women are cool and not trying to harm women and this is a sidebar that that's the thing to figure out what i was trying to date and i'm a feminist and i need a dude who

has read [inaudible]. those dudes are terrible. they are horrible people. all the dudes who read [inaudible] and can talk to about it in depth or whatever these are one with a have so many feelings that they can't get out of them to be useful to you or they are just using it to mask that they're saying no words. the thing that i figured out is if the dudes you want are like those of you who want dudes like dude they just like women as people who are like maybe has women who are friends or has actual real substantive conversation and doesn't see them as people to have sex with that when you meet that dude and there's real potential. mostly they look at you strangely go on a feminist rant but they also find it interesting. it's weird and fine. that's how my duties. so, like that's the thing i

feared out. you will pay much be at the core of the project. that is also the through line of eloquent which is we should do all the woke stuff and we can have a great analysis and talk about me all liberalism and gentrification in all of our huge buzzwords and we talk about that stuff and still treat people like trash. we throw folks away and we don't allow people to be in process and that is why when we get woke we are like i can't talk to nobody who don't think like me and if we really say that we don't have a politics to disposability we say we don't have a problem but when folks don't have a right we throw them away. you don't have a responsibility to retain people who will do you actual physical or emotional harm.

not telling you to excuse that but if you had met me 20 years ago, i mean, my 20 -year-old or 17. does not recognize this girl because at 17 i was running around howard and i was running around with the wwj decanting evangelizing people on the street and talking about how i might be a woman but i was no feminist. that is who i was 20 years ago. i was running around saying it's white women [bleep] and i hadn't read anything but i'd heard somebody say it and i was like yes. one of my home girls was like what now?

that's crazy. here's something for you to read. read it and stop talking crazy. that's how i became a sister. that's the journey i went on to feminism. one of my girls was like you're talking crazy, stop doing this, revisiting, informers often do better. we are still friends to this day. she is still my homey to the state. she did not fill me away because i didn't have the right analysis. she helped me get the right analysis so i didn't become a feminist immediately but she was like here, girl, here's a way to do better. we don't have a sense of you didn't read all the things i read on similar so it's like what now? i'm just saying to you all we got to do better and be more loving and that is the through my brain is not having the right analysis but can you be in conversation when people give

you love and can you have authentic relationships with people because that's what we need and the revolution. revolutions. part not be as people don't have the right political length but because we don't treat each other. [applause] >> we have enough time for one more question. >> first of all, i want to share with you that your book has helped me on my own journey. i teach a social change the other program in a baltimore city public high school and

allow my young people to have agency over themselves through their performance and the caveat is that what you speak and what you do can help you elevate and uplift humanity in your cells in people. what i have been battling against and i realize in my own journey as a educate myself as a gender, heterosexual, african black male is that i have a lot of ability but the permeation of white misogyny is so deeply ingrained even unconsciously within myself as i try to keep myself woke but particularly when talking to the african black men and boys in my classroom today i was struggling with the 15 -year-old, incredibly taling, brilliant young lady and i was teaching about micro- aggression and misogyny and sexism and got into

the current term for tramp or slot within the hip-hop community and said there's no such thing as a b term and i had my rules in my classroom as a b and an word freezone. she swore me up and down. there are girls who are [inaudible] and coming out of her 15 mouth in the night when into the different aspects in your writing and other brilliant african black women writing and also within my troop i had an incredibly talented transgender young woman and had young men who come out before their parents about their sexuality of being gay but what is so permeating is the refusal of calling this incredibly talented brilliant transgender young woman the dignity of the pronoun of she and the fact that in january outside of the house school best team she was

assaulted by ten african black boys that beat her to the point where she received a concussion and went to the hospital and charges were pressed and everything else and went to court but because of a young person witnessed it would not say that a young men was involved in it the case was thrown out so everyone knows something was done and that's the lack of respect regardless of any gender or sexuality. how can that be combated when i'm also a teacher and i i was writing material and i got into the battle of other gendered friend of mine about how ridiculous it is for you to know the strategy and the budget and the injuries and the personal challenges of basketball and

football player but you don't even know your child school schedule in high school. it's ridiculous. you don't know what is going on with your partner in your life but you can read down about this multimillionaire man who don't even care about you and you know everything about him and the many crack jokes about perpetuating gay stereotypes like suspect anything they got livid about like i attacked their masculinity by saying it was ridiculous for them to idolize sports. how can that be combated through patriarchy and misogyny among african black folk and for us to elevate ourselves for our trinity world to become better? >> trans black women have a life expectancy of 35 years in this

country. let me say that again. trans black women have a life expectancy of 35 years. that's a crisis. we got to do something about it. what i want to say is that brother, so we need our folks were committed to struggling that folks who have it all figured out. what is great is that you're in the trenches and committed to struggling and figuring out and here is the other thing. you work with kids so you model for them for another way to be or think they might not see another man like you. that is a click. till much later but the model matters. the folks who were transformative to me and never clicked immediately when i was young person. it took years later before i was able to say this is what she was saying and this is what mr.

so-and-so was trying to tell me and help me understand. being in the trenches and embodying that there's another way to be the motives of perfection that even as a 55 -year-old person that you can still grow change and adopt new language or the framework and being that model really matters. i think you're right. the problem is not masculinity but it's an intense and enduring problem. what i would say is that the most transformative change comes in building relationships you are already doing that and that is what it looks like continuing to educate yourself and what i love is your able to do the internal work and you get that outward framework but we've done the internal work and that's the real revolution. the commitment to realize and i internalize misogyny and yes, growing up deep south christian i internalized my transfer via and learning how to be not so heteronormative is a daily project that i have to commit to because when i say i want black

people to be free i really mean that. i thank you are doing the work and i think with the young lady struggling -- look, let young girls have their categories like i don't even know to be honest if i would fight the battle. not that one. what you have maybe a better conversation is around what are those categories do or what is she trying to make it part of them? what is wrong with girls who own their sexuality? you boys get to -- more asking questions about what the categories do for her and whether it was useful for the things she's talking about and whether she lands at those conclusions. is she comfortable with the conclusions that she is drawing

and that is more the thing. engaging young people in dialogue that is ripe with questions rather than answers and assertions is always a good thing. look, giving young men models. this is a pop-culture example for this great episode of queen sugar where in the second season where the character ralph has a trans young man to a friend and i love this episode because these are real regular black people in the episode renders it regular that that is his boy. he's a straight gender man and his boy is a trans black man and they have solidarity because he knew his boy was trans when they were in school and with respect to what he was amidst transition and it's modeled regular. in might be worth having a talk about that up so because sometimes our kids need to see that there is another world that is possible and it isn't okay to embrace -- the last thing we've got to do is the reason young men we tied their masculinity to

violence and sexual everything. we got to have real forthright conversations what about respecting bodily dignity and have deep conversations with young men about we got ask young men or they think that sexuality is not violence rather than about consent and pleasure. much of it is because it's a one place they feel like they have notion of masculinity intact. look, you got up question on the table and i thank you have to be combative about that. what man do you want to be? the man who goes around assaulting women and is your manhood so fragile that you can't understand or coexist with someone living out their truth because that is no man that will serve anybody. be combative and to attend for some to define the terms of their manhood and no one would look at you and be like you

ain't no man. be the embodied model even if they thank you don't know what you're talking about but it clicks at some point. it really does. [applause] >> thank you. i appreciate what you are doing. you have mentioned racism several times and white women racist and i wonder if the work of jane, blue eyes, brown eyes exercise is one of the things that you think might help because that's one of the things i've been working on is trying to bring that not only to teachers and teacher candidates but to police and any other organizations so what do you think? >> i think jane elliott's work just fine. i'm down for any white person that is committed to antiracism. yet, i like her work and i like robin angela's work in this new book by [inaudible] called so you want to talk race? she's white woman who talks about resources for black women and anyone committed to the

struggle can come up with the revolution. at the same time i'm also want to hold this trooper to anyone committed to the struggle can come but the revolution is not just for the people you like. it's for everyone. [applause] >> thank you so much. brittany cooper, we have the book right now at our book desk. will be around for a little bit for a books signing and more conversations? thank you again for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

>> for nearly 20 years in depth on the tv is featured the nation's best known nonfiction writers for life conversations about the books for this year is a special project we are featuring best-selling fiction writers for monthly program in depth fiction addition. join us live a sunday at noon eastern. during the program will take your calls, facebook comments, and live tweets.

>> you know, staying on the strip club example i immediately confessed the woman came to our table and i said i'm a journalist and i'm just asking some questions. do you mind and she was super helpful. she was like get, she named all these companies are here all the time in the coming groups of mostly guys and sometimes there's woman tell you long for whatever reason. they talk about work and they will be with her boss and after the big tech conferences the executives will walk in the door with their special badges and people flock to them they might go to a private room together and this business is getting done in the middle of the day in the heart of san francisco at a strip club. we are talking about part of

it -- look, sexism exists in every industry but in silicon valley this is supposed to be the most progressive industry in the world. it certainly is the most powerful industry in the world. and yet, the people who have connected the world and organize the world information and build self driving cars and trying to take us to mars when you asked them what can we do about hiring more women in diversity they say it's so hard. i don't know how we will solve that. [laughter] so one of the really important reasons i wanted to write was simply the hypocrisy of it. on top of that i fully believe that the people who are taking us to mars and connecting the world and have given us rides at the push of a button i believe they can do this. they can hire women and pay them fairly. another stat for you -- the pay gap in silicon valley is five times the national average. if you control job title and experience in geographical location the pay gap is about

5%. in silicon valley it's 28.5%. at the very least you could look at the data and we love data on paper but pay women what you're paying the men. it seems pretty simple. >> you watch this and other programs online at the tv .org. >> you're watching book tv on c-span2, television for serious readers. here is our primetime lineup.

>> now, here is scott horton on the war in afghanistan. >> good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. welcome to the 2018 literature he public party