tv 2018 Brooklyn Book Festival CSPAN September 16, 2018 12:02pm-2:03pm EDT
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the author of "american hate: survivors speak out", records the heartbreaking true stories of individuals affected by hate. peel -- please welcome arjun. [applause] >> down at her opposite in, pulitzer prize-winning journalist eli saslow, the author of "rising out of hatred", should the journey of a white supremacist leader as he evolved to disown his heritage and bigotry and hate. please welcome eli. [applause] >> and dolly chugh, author of "the person you mean to be, how good people fight bias", shows a research to effectively and respectfully confront one's own personal biases and prejudices. these authors hold up the mirror for us to see the victims and the instigators, but more importantly for each of us to
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see the opportunities and urgency to reject the inhumanity of hate. moderated by brian tate. you know -- [applause] >> to organizers and found the book festival are very dear, dear friends of mine and they asked if i would moderate this conversation. and they pressed me as recently as a couple days ago. would you please send your bio so we could put it in? i also say that i'm a marketing strategist and a culture curator, and also organized a panel discussion series called what will be different, conversation on the changing america. it looks at how diverse issues and communities affected by the sweeping article change we are not experiencing. okay, let's dive into our conversation. oh, thanks. [applause]
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eli, can you tell us, please, what prompted you to track them tells the strip to their lack? black? >> i was writing about dylann roof who would murdered ten people at a church in charleston, south carolina, and he spent some time on a message board called storm front which for 20 years was the biggest racist message board in the world. so in writing about dylan and trying to understand storefront, when spent some time on this message board where of course people are saying or both celebratory things about what dylann roof had just done but the biggest threat on this message board was still about derek black who would been raised at the epicenter of this new -- and a been raised to sort of lead and mentioned this movement and then had a radical change of mind and heart and that sort of disappeared, disavowed a very publicly. the threat on the messageboard was about him, what happened to him, what can we do if we find
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him? i want to set out to fighting and see what it happen. that was the beginnings of the book. >> okay, thank you. arjun, what prompted you to tell the story of survivors of hate? >> i'm a a community activist t i will close with muslim, arab, south asian and sikh americans. what i was hearing from infected persons both in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election and the inauguration of donald trump was that hate was spiking in every facet of american life, in the classroom, in the university, workplace and public life. i thought it was important to meet with survivors into homes, houses of worship and community centers, and the children what "american hate: survivors speak out" is. it's a collection of 14 testimonials of muslim voices,, trans, disabled, jewish, sikh, document, people who have been
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impacted in this moment. >> okay, thank you. and dolly, what led you to write about unconscious bias from willful ignorance to willful awareness? >> yeah, unlike my very esteemed co-panelists here are writing about hate the world around them, i'm someone who studies buys and also grapples with my own everyday bias. i am a professor and i sometimes confuse to students of the same race who look nothing alike or each other. i consider myself a feminist. i'm raising to feminist daughters and yet i get e-mails from a student, i get an email from a student saying i have assigned sexist reading. a study this stuff is a social psychologist and i listed the challenges of being the person they mean to be. so for me this book was how do i take what i can keep about and
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know a lot about as a scientist and how to make that come to let both for myself and based on the sites we do the vast majority of us are also wrestling with unconscious biases and systemic biases the sometimes benefit us. my book is a combination of stores and science, people interviewed as well as science done by myself as well as others that gives us a path and some approaches towards managing our own biases. >> i have a question for each of you, , and dolly, like to start with you. based on the books come in your case based on the book you've written and your own understanding of history, what's your sense of what we are today as a country? light question. >> i thought you're going to ease into it, right? it's a great question.
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so i think we are all, my guess is everyone in this room is in an agitated state, like most of the time now, and it's a real struggle to find are we trying to reconcile that and call ourselves down, or are we trying to stay agitated and not allow normalcy to take over. for me given the kinds of things i write about and study, , whati think is really helpful right now is how much has become visible. i write a lot in my book about noticing and i use the studies that are done by people who study things like vision and cognition to show how much we don't notice what is literally in front of us. picture when you're stirring in the fridge looking for the butter and don't see it and then somebody is in next year pointed out and you're looking at it the whole time. that lack of noticing is really actually normal for our brains. what i think it's happening right now is that whole bunch of
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like butter that a lot of us didn't notice that was happening in our country for a really long time, some of it has become louder and more vocal, but some of it is that our noticing has also gone up. to me the noticing is actually that this part is not so great this part is a really good news story. >> arjun, same question. >> the united states was built on a hate crime. the decimation and genocide native communities, and was furthered on additional hate crimes including slavery, jim crow and mass incarceration. but it's nevertheless, the fact that hate in all its forms is spiking in this moment. and i think it's spiked because of president trump's policies here i think it's spiking because of his rhetoric. one of the stories i would like to tell people for those who don't believe that rhetoric and policies matter, in december
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december 2015 donald trump sent on the campaign trail -- said on the camping trip he was going to pain medicines from entering the training. that day at peak said was found outside a mosque in philadelphia. fast-forward -- eggs head. paid -- donald trump signed executive order banning refugees and muslims from entering the united states. that night a mosque was burned to the ground in texas. so policies matter, rhetoric matters, political appointments matter, and really so long as the president of united states wants to ban muslims and refugees, kate and separate emigrant families, rollback protections for transgender students, rollback protections for gender violence survivors and so much more, it really puts a target on our back. >> eli? >> i mean, i really agree with all that.
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comforting for a sometimes to think hate or extremist is something that comes from a few or a small percentage of bad villain actress. i think the reason that derek whom my book is about and of the people in white nationalism were so successful and dangers is that they figured out that with needed to do was start speaking to a scary for large portion of the country that agrees with a lot of their ideas. almost polls consistently almost half of white people in the country believe that they suffer more from prejudice and people of color. and white white nationalist dit add a way to speak to that sense of grievance in a way of me take the country back. the country is yours, taken back. anyway there's of politics and in a really scary way. i also think this story that a a book about is a story about how still through sustained engagement into investing ourselves and trying to forge change it can happen.
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in derricks story goes by extreme civil -- the catchment and forced him think about thas ideas in different ways and then through really courageous outreach and conversation relationship building by people on the campus that had huge transformers results first in his life and then in this racist movement. >> eli, a question for all of you really i was struck by so much of what i read in your book about, about that transformation that derek black experienced. it leads me to a question, you know, about what we are and what we are doing. so you know, for those of us who are committed to social change
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and committed to human justice,, which i think would apply to many of the people here today, what is the strongest path forward for us? what is both the moral path and the strategic path from an idea of we could take one path perhaps but not the other, not simultaneously. and if one path is to engage with an attempt to change the hearts of people whose lives are consumed with bigotry, is that the path to take to attempt to engage with these folks of that type, or is it to gather with and organize with and he did people whose lives have been decimated by hate, such of those who turn to a spoken to? >> i think it's a great question, but i think in my experience in reporting this book what i realized is that the
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choice is not that binary. both of the things actually work in concert to forge change. what's crucial i think is that we invest yourself. sometimes now the country is so polarized and it seems like peeps ideas are so intractable at just the possibility that anybody can change anything seems almost impossible and it's pretty easy sometimes or pretending to say, like i can change what this person thinks about this and just to give up. what students on this college campus did in multiple ways is a decided to invest themselves again and again and again. and it took not like a few conversations but two years. that medicine cases investing themselves in shutting the school down and making it clear to derek andrew slavitt at the school that people call did not feel safe and that having him there was not okay. and for other students in that investing themselves by inviting a white supremacist over to dinner at seeing if they could try to start beginning to build a relationship with him.
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and i think it needed both of those things in order for this preservation to take place, and students to use all of those tactics i think were courageous and also following the own hearts and doing it the way they knew how to do it. >> arjun, do you have thought about that? >> i i agree. there's a lot of work that needs to be done. that said, i will tell you that i am very partial to survivors and impacted committees in this moment. there are literally hundreds of thousands of people in this country who are targets of hate crimes. many of them don't have access to health care. many of them struggle with medical bills. they need access to mental health support. and for me in this moment our top priority has to be making sure that the of the resources we need. i will also make a general observation and the method on the one to make it but if you feel comfortable saying that there are times when it seems like mainstream media is more
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interested in humanizing white supremacists than they are giving the floor to survivors of hate and state violence. just i think a few days ago, right come we learn the economist decide to give steve bannon platform. the new yorker did the same thing, and for some people might be an academic discussion to a somebody like steve bannon on the stage like this but i will tell you there are people every day who are targeted by violence because of the hate he preaches. so while we do need to be doing all of this work, it's clearly a delicate balance. >> dolly, your thoughts on the especially on the media component. >> absolutely. so one of the things i offer in my book that is earned through the running of the book and this was an example, something where i fall from beginning to end, is my understanding of heat and
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light affronts of social change and social justice. so think of heat is work that is confrontational. it's the protest, the work that does not worry about the comfort or the evolution of the people harboring the hate at all. and it is, it can be divisive as some people call it. light is more centering the people you're trying to change in their comfort and meeting them where they are and will go whatever pace that change goes. and i consider myself a light person more than a heat person personality was. i'm not super argumentative. i just rearrange the dishwasher when my husband doesn't does iy he does the idle actor telling i don't like the way he does it. so i'm definitely more of a light person. this book is more example of a light person. but by evolution researching the book was that social justice movement that are affected have
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both heat and light. that is absolutely essential that you both component and that you people who are focusing on the victims and that you people who are bringing the heat and jeff of the people are sort of meeting people where they are. both as radical and modern approaches to what leads to most change according to historians who study social justice movement. that was important for me to hear because i think sometimes those of us whose yourself more as light can undermine the people bringing the heat, and vice versa, people to bring the heat can undermine the people bring the light. what we need to do is encourage both and find our own place. what we don't want to be is ist the person doing neither of those. >> how do we go about finding our own place? >> well speedy how did you go about finding your own place? >> i think there's a lot of experimentation involved in it. it's everything from, i tell a story, i start my book action
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with a story about meeting at my first protest, black lives matter protest, and deeply committed in believing in the work i was there to support and yet by the end of the protest being pretty sure this is not something i could sustain, the level of fear i i felt and the discomfort i felt. this was a heat based activity. it was completely nonviolent but it was intended to provoke and it just didn't feel like the right place for me. i'm glad i went to the so that i could experience that and that i said well then, i need to find other ways. in the book i talk about everything from how do you steer a conversation, how do you confront some who tells a racist joke, how do you think about your own, the history, america was such a powerful line, america was founded on a hate crime and was built on hate crime and he underlined that when i read your book, which is a good and you really must read it. that level of looking at that
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kind of reality in history requires a lot of willful awareness that are part to keep looking when it hurts. and i think that's a big part of a a place we can all fight is with camilla carter innkeeper after cells at our history. >> eli, can you speak a bit about, can you share some of your thinking about the media platforms that arjun mention that are created and offered to ku klux klan members and neo-nazi, et cetera? >> that's a great point he brought up and it's a really complicated issue. because i think in the book that i wrote, derek's father, don black, who remains an avowed white nationalist, is, i had to spend use meta- type with him for this book. there's no redemption for don black in the book because he's
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done all things and he continues to believe awful things. he doesn't ask for redemption nor does he deserve it what i also think sometimes like some of her biggest problems as a society to happen when we humanize people. they happened when we dehumanize people. it can be a little bit scarier to write about people as fully rendered human beings even when they do really awful things. because it's more comforting to think of these people as car t villains but the fact is that share a lot in common with us which is much scarier. that said, in order to do that well it has to be done with nuance and with a really article i and based exactly on the foundational fax and it has to be done in addition to writing similarly nuanced big stories about the victims and the people with severed at the hands of this kind of ideology again and again. >> do you think, does the needy have a role in pushing back on those narratives while providing
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those types of platforms, or is it best to take a more distance detached approach, what is your thought? >> it depends on the peace and the medium but i think oftentimes, for instance, these white nationals, don black, david duke, laying out the facts is critical enough. these people are spent their lives damaging themselves by doing irredeemable things of the most smart readers understand that and instead of writing something that feels hysterical, laying out the facts is oftentimes the most damning thing you can do as a journalist. i also think there are other venues where the thing to do is take it on directly. as the journalist general you n reports about peoples lives. that's not usually my role. >> okay. arjun, do you have any thoughts in response to that?
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>> nothing addition other than what i said before, which is that in some ways it's a question of parity. the survivors in my book rarely have access to national platforms to tell their stories, to tell have they been impacted by hate, impacted by hate violence. going back decades. yet, i find that often there is a great interest, and again giving that platform to white supremacists. and i find that deeply troubling. not that i don't think that work is important if it's done with nuance and done with care, but i just think there is a lot of bias and discrimination in terms of who gets a platform, who gets to tell their stories. and really that's one of the principal reasons i wrote this book your there are survivors across the country who feel -- on talking survivors whose houses of worship and burn to
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the ground, people who have lost loved ones, anything you can think of, whose stories are reduced to headlines or soundbites, which is why i met with survivors for many hours over in some cases days and work with them to create a testimonial that is in their words. and what i found and through the rollout of the book is that they feel extraordinarily empowered to have their stories in this type of collection. i'll give you a very concrete example. so i mentioned the mosque in victoria texas that was burned to the ground in january 2017. when i went to meet with this looks person for the mosque, and asked him, you know, what are you doing to combat hate violence? how can we be of assistance to you? he told me that not a single national reporter had been to victoria, texas. not a single journalist at the time had actually asked him that question. right, this is stunning.
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this mosque was burned to the ground the night that donald trump signed a muslim ban. nobody cares what he said. >> can i share as a reader? i'm about halfway through his book and i am not saying anything i have told those of them in the green room. i was dreading reading the "washington post" story that led to utilize book that's commit mexican i was reading your book because i just don't like all the darkness and expensive reading both pieces was so different than i expected. in the case of the victims that arjun describes, i didn't realize until i read their stories in their words that i thought i knew what was going on and i understood hate crimes and i wasn't willfully ignorant of hate crimes. but it wasn't until he read the stories i realize i've never read a story about the people and that there was a difference
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between the crime and the person, and that literally was invisible to me and telling read the story. so to completely, i think echo -- i had to actually see to know i wasn't seeing it. >> just on that point i just want everyone to know that, survivors across this country are extraordinarily brave and resilient. it's not easy coming forward and telling your story, right? you are accused of fabrication. sometimes you are trolled online. sometimes you are targeted again. in some cases that have events across the country where we have kept private security because we are worried that people could target us at these events. so these survivors of rape,, resilient, and they are pushing back in any way you can fathom,, the entire conclusion focus on best practices, ensuring with mandatory hate crime reporting,
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encouraging that we have antiracism trainings, calling for the dismantling of policies that criminalize our communities, calling for state hearings in everything in the country that survivors can come forward and tell their stories and talk about how the violence of this administration has impacted them. >> at its the humidity i think dash that's what struck me. eli talked about dehumanization and i think the humanity of one of the stories about, we like pizza. just sort of the humanity of their stories really soars when the soul in their own words. >> i actually want to come back to that, eli, but i think of what to first, , dolly, i have a follow-up question for you, is in terms of just our own, you know, if we are people of a
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certain drive and commitment to justice and empathy and allies perhaps have not been personally touched or scarred by his broad exposure to bigotry and hate and violence, how to reengage with people who have? you tell a story about a young woman, i think her name is grace, who following the pulse nightclub shooting -- >> rachel. >> rachel, yeah, any number of people would come up to her. can you share that? >> sure. so this is rachel who is a former student of mine who i have stayed in touch with as it's always wonderful to do when students graduated. she identifies as a middle of the lgbtq community. she was working at a very
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progressive company in the san francisco area, and when the polls shooting happen in orlando and she woke to the news on a sunday morning, she merely began to dread going to work the next day. she had this pit in her stomach and was it because they would be raging homophobia in a workplace? no, quite the opposite. many people with self identify as allies pick would it be because there would be silence and a difference and no one would've paid attention to something so deeply searing in her life? no, not at all. in fact, she expected lots of people to engage with on the topic. so what was it? what it was is she expected a lot of well-meaning colleagues and friends to be coming up to her with lots of visible emotion and their own processing of this event, this tragedy that has happened and that she would be doing the emotional labor of
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supporting them, that they would be cookie seeking, a term that activist sometimes use the tape would be looking for validation, unconsciously, but in a way that i as a psychologist can say is very consistent with what we study, that their self that would be high. they would want to be seen as a well-meaning supportive ally they are, and how would they get that validation? how would they get that cookie? they would do by expressing their sorrow to her, talk about their donations to the trevor project or their gay women from college or the gay wedding they've been to pick in all instances would be her job to validate and sue and comfort, and she was too upset and scared and exhausted to go and do that work the next day at work. and so she openly, she can suck that night, putting a post upon i think linkedin that shares this is what i'm feeling going into work tomorrow. chemical think about how are we going to support each other?
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how are we going to support our lgbtq plus friends? how are they going to support our muslim friends who was sort of end up being blamed for this? how are we going to show up for each other in a way that isn't cookie seeking behavior? >> that is, in fact, the story. just in terms of how we show up to people. >> that's what i learned from her, and my, as she is an amazing person who always at least people and committees better then she found them and this is yet another example that she shared her story to her blog and interview i did with her i was thinking to myself every behavior she said she was dreading a colleague doing, i was like checking it out, i would've done that. like it was just okay, so what exactly you want me to do? it was actually so simply
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obvious that it was like just show up, just be there. just allow me to feel pain without me needing to feel your pain. >> eli in your book you talk about, you talk about some of the calculation i think is the word, involved in people on campus and engaging with derek black and attempting not to shame him or to chastise him or to pressure him, but to simply bring him into their very diverse circle, to get in an explosion that he had never had before. and through that over a period of time to attempt to open his thinking, as it were. and i guess i want to ask, you know, following up on what dolly said about how we on the one
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hand, how we engage with people, peoples whose lives have been changed by violence, by hate, and on the other hand, engaging with people whose lives are so now consumed with that come with those beliefs. what kinds of things should we be mindful of? and is calculation actually a strong choice or what is your thought? >> that's a great question. i think first about with derek in particular, like it's important to note he has grown up in this very insular world surrounded by people who felt like he did. the power of suddenly bumping up against and having conversations with people whose backgrounds were totally different than him had probably and even exaggerated effect because he did not have many of those interactions before. i would say the first thing everybody who erected with derek successfully did is i think we should all do is the arm themselves with the facts.
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because the facts are all on the side of the antiracist. every piece of logic that derek's world was built on was built on a flawed understanding of world history, flawed racial science, total misunderstanding of privilege and the weight works. everybody on that campus who was successful in changing him first of the knowledge of that. and then i think the other thing that everybody did was they were so patient. i think we sometimes expect change to happen very quickly or for it to be a straight line, affable the people that were resisting his presence on campus and try again and again to up with the voice of people of color on campus from mine people not terribly few point was ever people sitting at him again and again at dinner over the course of two years, there were moments of the notice frustration, like this guys never going to change. he still going to this conference in the woods in tennessee to speak on estate of david duke actually been deemed
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with him for a year. i think it's disingenuous to suggest that we can change the growing quickly. it requires a tremendous investment of time and energy them out of what tactic are using. >> you know, i remember seeing from the movie dead men walking -- have people seem that? very, very powerful film. and sister -- >> helen prejean. you know, it leads me to a couple of questions. one is about, you know, eli, you know, , the story that is so powerful in american culture about the person who was
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transformed by some experience and then becomes a transformational figure. you know, malcolm x or bobby kennedy. and the place that such a person occupies in our cultural imagination. it leads me to a question of, is that something that exists within many of us, or is it frankly quite rare to experience that type of transmission? that's on the one side. this is sort of a long-winded two-part question. on the other side, there's a scene in that film where the sister is confronted by -- and she has been doing this really, you know, incredible work hoping peoples minds about the moral consequence, the moral cost of the death penalty. and then she's confronted by the
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people who are survivors, the victims of the people who are committed those murders. and they asked her why have you never, to us, you know? all of this work to humanize come to understand but you never even reached out to us to ask us about our lives. and what our experience is. so, you know, i guess, i think i may be coming to the time for the last question here. so i was sort of throw that out as something for each of you to respond to and i think maybe eli, the principal part for me there is about that transformational force and culture, is a something we can actually cultivate? is that something, or is it really so rare that it almost --
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>> i think we can cultivate it. to me anyway it seems that the act of transformation is essentially human. we all change and transform all the time and i think, like i hope, especially early on in life we're in the process of encountering people in thinking that ideas in new ways. i think a transformation were somebody goes from being the future air to white supremacist movement to antiracist rising and promise fighting against his own family, that's obviously a long path to travel. but, in fact, that that can happen gives me hope that much smaller transformations which are the things that think are more commonly necessary in order to foster these kinds of improvements are very possible anything we can all help ourselves pacheco and help other people achieve them by engaging. >> arjun, eli said earlier, and i'm going to roughly paraphrase here, , that most short readers
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understand that these racist beliefs are heinous and what have you. i guess my question is, you know, when we look at the state of the culture right now in america, , overseas, what have you, are we talking about people who come in your opinion and from the perspective of people you've interviewed, are we talking about, you know, we talk about the aggressors, the people are committing a perpetrating violence in bigotry, are we talking about people who are actually come who can be transformed by logic and fax or a we talk about something quite different? >> so i will give you an example straight from the book. the first testimonial in the book is from the first syrian refugee to ever be resettled in boise, idaho, and she talked about lots of micro-aggression she experienced the and observant muslim woman without a
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job being a syrian refugee and i hope your chelsea talks our young muslim son was walking in downtown boise, someone came up to mention are you a muslim? he said yes. he was violently punched to the ground. she talks about how later she was invited to court asked by the judge what she thought an appropriate sentence would be. and a response, remarkably, was that i don't think the suspect should go to jail because he's not going to learn about muslims and syrians and refugees in jail. so i completely agree that we are all better that our worst act. and i can tell you that survivors across the country are open to restorative justice. they are open to reconciliation, so long as there is accountability.
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>> dolly, your fellow panelists here have talked about restorative justice here today if talked about redemption. what do you think we need -- how do we work towards those things, which are aimed at different people but as eli said, perhaps we have to achieve all of this stuff? >> yeah, i don't think, i think it's a false binary. i agree that an edit has to choose what stewart to run on a given day but there's lots of ways to get stories out in the world. i took a one-year sabbatical from nyu where i'm a professor to work on this book, and i had two goals in that year. one was to write the book and the other was to teach in a
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prison, and so that you was really eye-opening for me because your question about did sister helen visit the victims families, if you've spent time in a prison, you come to realize that there's a pretty wide spectrum of people and it's not so different from the wide spectrum of people you encounter in your daily life, which is kind of a mind blowing idea that there's that much similarity. and the rides home, to be a traffic would be two to three hours. the right home, my brain with just, like implode with confusion of trying to reconcile the reality of how peoples lives were affected by actions of the students i was investing in and care deeply about.
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and who were kind and generous and fun a protective of me. like if you're confused, just imagine my brain on those long car rides home. i don't think we can afford to dehumanize anyone. if people were not actually human, then fine, we could dehumanize them but the rails is they are not cartoonish villains. when i read the "washington post" story i came away with a much richer understanding not just because of derek blacks transformation, but a much richer understanding of like what we as psychologist call moral identity. so i deeply do you care about being a good person and being seen as a good person? most of us on a one to seven skill, not just in brooklyn, most of us if you were on a one to seven skill of a six or seven on this. most of us see ourselves as a good person. derek black and his father and his mother i guarantee you are a six or seven on that skill before and after. so if that's true for people in
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prison and for white nationalists and for those of us sitting at the brooklyn law school, we've got to wrestle with our humanity. we can't choose between restorative justice and rehabilitation. >> retention. >> redemption, i'm sorry. i don't think we have another option other than humanity. that doesn't mean we don't fight tooth and nail for what's right. >> i have five minutes, okay. let me try to use this wisely. arjun, you tell a story of a young woman who, against the odds perhaps, ran for president at her college, the student union, and she was the only woman of color who was running, and she won. which she took to be a very moment of great opportunity and
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she was presumably not alone in thinking that. only to discover, well, to also discovered that she had been, she quickly have been singled out for a campaign of hate that was, the lid very much on storm fronts website and elsewhere, which just proves completely traumatic for her. what is it that we could do to be supportive of people who are experiencing those kinds of, that kind of targeting? >> so he's referring to the story of taylor thompson, an african-american woman. she took a break and extraordinary step of running for student body president at american university washington, d.c. last year. this is five miles from the white house. she won if she's the first
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african-american woman to ever hold the position in history of the university. the day that she took office, nooses were found hanging across campus. and then days later she got to her apartment and realize she was being viciously trolled by sites like the daily stoermer. they had photoshop buckets of kfc chicken they put on her head. all kinds which is things, analogizing her to gorillas and monkeys. so the entire book, conclusion, focuses on best practices. i'll tell you some of what taylor said. taylor talked about the importance of intersectionality, making sure that we don't engage in peaceful advocacy. making sure that whatever we push for we include our next brothers and sister, , are undocumented predecessors, muslim, queer, , trans folks pik make sure that we understand that sometimes lawful hate
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speech is really hurtful and in her case actually cause ptsd. that's something that's come up throughout my travel across the country. they're all lawful forms of hate in the united states that lead to such pain and trauma. literally, in places like phoenix there are armed protesters outside mosques yelling things like that the muslims, go home. if you're a young muslim you should have to walk by that en route to friday. i think we need to be intersexual. i think we need to talk about the impact of hate speech. i think universities need to be understanding of what students of color are enduring endless moment. i think we need to treat racism and hate is public health issues and we also need to better understand vicarious. hate doesn't just impact individuals. it impacts at large. the public health and public signs now clearly shows that.
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>> i don't think i've time for another question so i just want to say before we turn over to q&a with the audience, eli, you tell a story in the book, and i encourage all to read all of the books here, if you have started already, eli, you tell a story about derek black's father on that long drive to a conference like a white nationalist conference with david duke and with franklin who later became a serial killer, and that i don't know if was so much a radicalization as it was an affirmation of the things that derek black's father, don black, had been sort of coming to on his own but there's something in this notion of this affirmation
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and radicalization that can happen within these close circles. and just our own, just the work that we can do, you know, income and together is like an opposing force to that. i really don't have questioned her i just want to say that that was a very powerful telling. >> thanks. i mean, the other scripting is that of course the close circles are all around us. they exist in communities, online, on facebook. this is what's driving so much. i think we engage all of us oftentimes in dew points beckon from our own more than we probably ever have. and that sort of confirmation bias is a really dangerous thing. >> i think i'm going to stop here. please give a big applause to the panel. [applause]
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>> and before we go to q&a with the audience, we don't have time for q&a? really? >> sorry. >> we will do one question. my goodness, all right. so sorry. okay, one question and please use the microphone. i think someone is going to bring you a microphone. >> thank you. my name is lauren. i'm getting my masters and i'm working on a thesis -- refugee and were crime health. i'm just wondering a question for you, how often do you see, because you touch on mental health several times in your answers, i just wondering how often do you see mental health -- [inaudible] or underlying thing in everybody's life with the people you work for? >> it's absolutely a huge issue,
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and i have found that you do not have to be a target of hate violence to have mental health issues. you know, again, hate speech can cause it and i completely agree. i mean, it's stigmatized. we don't want to talk about it but it's real, it's growing. i will tell you one of the long-term consequences of having a white supremacist president is that mental health, a lot of those issues i really just intensify in ways that we can't even comprehend. >> okay. i think we are done. thank you much for coming. and for those of you who are interested, the next program in my series what will be different, conversation on the changing of america, is if that is called if the company to market these are townhall forums on xenophobia. if you go to the website what
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will be different.com it's got all the information. inks so much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> booktv is live coverage of the brooklyn book festival continues all day. you just saw an author discussion on hate and lies. next up is authors discussing the art of people accused of crimes. we will be right back with live coverage. [inaudible conversations]
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[inaudible conversations] i talk about this in the book, by interest of academic background are in economics but if you think about the global economy today there are a whole host of very deeply structural long-term problems that the global economy has to contend with and i imagine will get to the in the moment but things like demographic shift come with the impact of technology will be for the jobless, , underclass, concern from productivity and that. the debt overhang and income inequality, something the west in the phd was never discussed and out it is at the top three big issues on the policy agenda. these are all long-term structural problems, yet the people who are charged with overseeing the regulatory and policy environment, essential to
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politicians, i very short-term and myopic in their frame. i thought this schism of mismatch between the long-term economic problem in the short-term political frame is something that had not been fully explored and certain i don't feel the potential solutions to this mismatch, has been adequate come to quit in a liberal democratic system. and given the sort of groundswell of emotion in terms of peoples apathy to the voting process but also because the profits of popular support of the motivations may be across western europe and i go here in united states, i felt this was something i wanted to explore. >> and you do talk quite possibly as the people around the world about many places at very different models, like china. >> yes. >> what's wrong with that model? >> in many respects this book was deliberately not wishing to
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write about china. i feel like we talk a lot about china and what works, what doesn't work there and they do have a very fundamental different system. in the west we prioritize the individual pics of individual is sacrosanct by utility function of an individual tries market capitalist system but also in the political frame my right to jews as an individual, my rights are paramount. it's a very different model in the chinese system where for them the most important thing is really the social and the community. and so their frame and the policy levers that they can use as an of a very different from those sort of frank and policy initiatives that we can adopt in the west. i feel a lot of been written by china. unless of the threat the book on china and if you like me to waste it's become a bit of a red herring. they've done a lot of things right but they are still in early stages velva.
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they've moved hundreds of things of people out of poverty and the last several decades but many rankings, they still rank near 100 in terms of per capita income. they have the issues. we know about their debt problems but i think that which really an important issue that needs to be addressed is that western economies certainly the trend is still the largest economy in gdp terms and many estimates, and it is to look to as for the ben cardin or harbinger or growth and living standard improvements. and i think we want to continue to support that. i certainly do. i certainly believe in that in l and i think over time china has already but will continue to adopt a lot of the western positive aspects of the western system. >> you could watch this and other programs online at booktv.org.
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>> look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for many of the authors in the near future on booktv on c-span2. >> facebook, wow, et cetera really rough couple of years. you may have noticed that it has been involved in, responsible for or police contributing or lease it has contributed to a number of very bad things in the world. everything from the leakage of our personal data to an unsavory political consulting firm out of london, to the perpetuation of all sorts of lies and nonsense, to the harassment of people, to call for genocide in some parts of the world.
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so all sorts of problems of various levels of horribleness. let's also remember there was a reason that we joined facebook. there was a reason that 2.2 billion people are regular users of facebook. that reason is, my dog writer who appears on facebook pretty regularly and she's super cute and she gets a tremendous response every time i post anything about butter. that just goes to show we all joined facebook for the puppies and the babies and the family news, you know, and updates on our friend from high school who just had a baby and a puppy or maybe what are the other. and that's the good stuff. so if it were just good stuff, we would probably be pretty thrilled with our experience on facebook. but it's not pickets that because of course we are more than that. we are more than our horrible relationships. we are secondary tertiary
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relationships as well. we are eight degrees out. we are an abundance of interest, upon the of passions, a bundle of hatred often. and we are fascinated by our ability to share and connect with people. so that is a certain addictive nature using facebook, and that's as my mother-in-law and would say, how they get you. .. >> she was afraid it was a fraying relationshipping rather than enriching relationships.
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and you're overreacting, it's too early to tell, people have to learn how to behave in this medium and, of course, i should always listen to my mother-in-law, she knew what i was talking about and the first thing i did what i did was called her and tell her how sorry i was for having this attitude. she was right all along. >> starting live discussion on art, people accused of crime, live coverage on book tv c-span2 .
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>> hello, everybody, i'm name is carolyn, i'm producer of festival and we welcome you all today, this is the 13th annual brooklyn book festival. we have 300 authors from 22 countries. and i want to say something about how wonderful our authors are. these are spectacular people who often get high-speaking fees to go out places, every single one of our authors is a volunteer, they do this out of love of sharing. [applause] >> so i want you to show them the love and feel free to buy their books and have them sign it and also the festival is free and if you feel like buying brooklyn book festival merchandise all goes for nonfor profit. the biggest thing is we want to thank all of the authors all day long and all of you audience for coming out and enjoying it and giving us the good faith and the people are out there reading,
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thank you. [applause] [laughter] >> good afternoon, everybody. welcome i'm director of public programs at panamerica and i will be very brief, i ran from another -- what a great crowd. thank you for coming today, it's such an honor for pan america to be back at brooklyn book festival. thank you for inviting us back and it's also a delight to partner with the time's literary supplement to present this panel. we also joined forces with artists at risk connection hosted at pan america, you will see in your program more information about art and i
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encourage you to be more familiar with the work of art as it just worked so hard for artists worldwide and defending their rights of free expression. ly do a -- i will do a quick intro of the panelists and they will take it away and we will have note cards that we will pass around q&a session, don't worry about it, we will circulate in the room, write your question on the card, we will collect it and pass it to our moderator and last but not least, this event is supported by the andy war foundation for visual arts, now for the introductions, we are pleased to have as a moderator debra sullivan, art critic and long-time contributor to new york times, let's welcome debra. [applause]
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>> and in order right next to debra we have maggie who senior research fellow at the museum of contemporary art. she was a chief adviser for incomplement iraqi sex life and death in the work of iraqi at the museum of sex in new york, please welcome maggie. [applause] >> next to maggie tonya, writer and emmy-nominated winning producer and cofounder of federation, currently she's also the consultant of a shed, team member of the 50-state initiative for freedoms and executive producer for unstoppable planned parent root and glamor woman of the year, thank you tonya for being here. [applause]
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>> and lastly but not least scott is a film critic for "the new york times" who has also written literary criticism for "the new york times" book review and other publications, thank you for being here. [applause] >> hello, the topic today is the art of the accused. when we say accused these days we are often referring to artists who have been accused of sexual misconduct and it's a category that seems to be growing larger by the minute unfortunately. just this morning, i was reading the guardian and i saw that the latest writer to be accused of sexual malfeasance and manuscript found by his second wife in which it accuses him and
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writes in the book, for instance, that he was very unhappy when she had their two sons because she said children interfere with the writer's schedule, how dare you have children, how will i get my writing done and and also pointed out that he had a pet rat named bergis which he kept in his room and when people came over he liked to let the rat out and watch as they screamed and lifted their legs and that she took this as evidence of his sadism generally. the question that i want to ask our panelists is once we know that an artist is not a perfect human being and in fact, maybe guilty of truly reprehensible act does it affect reading of the work, how would you approach and other once you learn that he
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was morally unsavorily? okay. any order. i want you all to answer this question because this is very basic, meaning what do we do with the art of death artists, what do we do with picasso, you can name any number of artists whose behavior by toed's standards leaves much to be desired, do we hold that against the work or is art somehow separate and in a realm removed for morality and good and evil, he said there's no such thing as moral or amoral, only poor writtenly art. do you feel that you can safely separate from the morally tainted maker, maggie? >> no. >> no? >> what i will say i'm coming at it from a very specific point of
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view in the way thinking about art institutions are telling the narratives, a museum is not just institution of appreciation but edifying institution and basic education and comup occasion and community and i think you brought up picasso, great example to think about just how because the narrative about him has changed over the last, you know, half century, doesn't mean that you necessarily, you know, every picasso. i don't think institutions know what to do but there's a way to reframe and allow people to engage with the conversation. >> i think you're drawing a distinction between living artists and dead artists. >> absolutely. >> if a living artist is accused of sexual misconduct should there be a penalty, tony, you've written a famous piece about woody allen.
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>> i come away from a noninstitutional or subjective kind of critical point of view as somebody, the essay that you're referring to is about woody alan and kind of what i felt, you know, i could do or should do as someone who had admired and in many ways been kind of formed and influenced by his work with my understanding of his character. i think that my feeling has always been that that's in a way kind of always a personal individual division and it's hard to make a problematic statement because everybody has comfort zones, things that they care about and don't care about but i have to say i've come in the last year just to feel sort of the inadequacy or even the cowardliness of that position
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and to feel like there is something more that needs to be done or there is, i think, an imperative to we examined assumption as critics and people who look at art about the supposed boundary between art and life and -- and all i can say now it's a very complicated undertaking and it's one that we should be cautious about jumping too quickly to conclusions about either rejecting the work of these men and almost entirely men or sort of, you know, letting them off the hook or continuing as before as if nothing had changed. >> tonya. >> i think even shakespeare is problematic as of today, we have to be open to subjective
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opinions about it. i might feel very strongly that the art and the artist cannot be separated but i feel like we have to be open around us who might not make that -- that connection and i think we have to look at the context in which it was created, what was the norms of the day, what was accepted during the day, we can think differently about the artist, that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to do away with all of those books knowing -- >> no. >> the context in which it was created and i think that that context can be a window into the context in which it was created. i come from the perspective that there's no work of art so great that it's not indispensable and to me personally i would like to see the works replaced by those whose voices were suppressed, when it comes to artist, i would like to see amendiaga, that's what i like to see, where can we
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find space for those voice who is were silenced during those times? >> well, i feel like -- i don't like when people start attacking works of art as morally to face, i think that's problematic and i think artists can go wherever they want and that's what artist is about, it's about using imagination to say something that hasn't been said before and i don't think we really can judge work of art in moral terms, for instance, a protest this year to remove painting i was against that, i thought -- i thought you could do whatever you want in your art, it's in your life that your behavior becomes problematic. so i don't like seeing paintings removed from museum and but if we are dealing with the artists themselves and what kind of punishment or penalty is
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appropriate, then it really gets complicated. for instance, chuck has been accused of sexual misconduct and the national gallery of washington canceled the show of his. okay. what do you think of that? >> i think you raised two things to say about that, one comparing what happened with controversy and what they have done, two different versions and i think this some ways are too extreme, on the one hand -- i don't want to -- paraphrasing correctly but i believe the institutional response was if you have a problem with work, maybe you are the one with the problem as opposed to thinking about why the community might be reframing or reconsidering some of his like very controversial for a
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long time, so that side is basically we are not going to address this, right, i don't hear you and on the other side you have this is ongoing situation and we don't really have all of the facts, we will play it -- the chuck situation and pull the show, right, which i think a lot of people who feel a certain ways about this have compared to a form of censorship, so you have two institutional extremes, i think that there is instead a kind of the risk of coming across a bit sort of footed, there's a middle ground where an institution can say we are not going to necessarily censor anything and make this conversation that's happening around me accused artist part of the conversation that you as a visitor, member of public, community that the museum serves, we are going to
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give you all of the information that you have and making this conversation, you know, might mean that you have to change 5 or 10 times during course of exhibition and might mean that the educators and the teaching fellows that you have are being trained to engage sensitively with the topics and engage the community, that's a responsibility that i think an institution has. i don't -- i think it's messy but it's worth doing. >> tonya, would you have canceled the chuck close show? you would have. >> i'm not absolutist about these things. >> i'm not sugging that you are. >> what do we do looking back and how do we approach moving forward, three very different phases i feel. right now we are in a context in which that type of behavior is not okay. >> i agree.
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>> this behavior has gone on for a very long time because of conditioning, because we have i adequate laws and i think the behavior happens because they know that the law will let them get away with this and the institution would enable them and there's enabler and sadly ten -- the enabler is a woman. i think that we are seeing a lot of people trying to make comebacks that have been outed. [laughter] >> whether it be lewis c.k. or john huckenberry. [laughter] >> oh, my god. >> i think, you know, you are dealing with people who are bifurcated in the individuals, most people are in some ways, compelling, brilliant but they also are hideous in their
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private lives with so many people and their currency is their audience and the currency gives them impunity and by giving them platform continue their impunity and i think that we have to take some collective responsibility for that and also think about how the victims feel, think about, you know, subtle triggering that continues every time they see that person continue to have a platform, if people don't hold them accountable because the laws often won't. >> well, it's interesting that so many people think lewis c.k. is coming back too soon or that charlie rose is trying to get on the air too soon and because these cases were decided in the court of public opinion, there's no verdict, there's no sentence, we can't say they have to stay away for two years, basically they can come back when the public let's them back, we express within as consumers,
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will we support art or buy album or ticket to a movie but i was wondering since that does seem to be the issue of the moment when can someone come back, we don't want to give anybody a life sentence for their behavior, that's not fair, this is america, the land of second chances but when and how can they express their remorse because so far the peach by john in new york review which came out yesterday, it's controversial and outrageous, i was appalled by it, tried to cancel my subscription to the new yorker after reading it but i -- it was so complicated that i just ended up hitting the do not automatic renew button -- [laughter] >> it's a really horrible piece. >> ironic. >> hosting the panel today. >> i know. >> instead of acknowledging the issues, this person who is a canadian broadcaster who lost
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job because of severe accusations writes this piece that's one big pity party, he talking about how hard it's been and his mother is upset. i was thinking how can accused of misbehavior show remorse, what is a response. i had an idea and i want to propose it, what if all of these people who are accused talented have skills and i thought well, why can't they -- what if chuck close donated art, all his new work for a year to planned parenthood, something that showed remorse and understanding that there are plights other than his own. >> i think there's maybe one, dan harmon, the create other of community and other tv shows is singular example of an adequate and accepted and -- and apology. >> what did he do? can you tell us? >> he described what he had done specifically to the people he had done it to and waited for
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them to response and what you know in the piece in whatever lewis c.k. is doing is act of remorse and failure of empathy, failure to understand and acknowledge what it is, so immediately about not only their own sense of victimmation but own continued entitlement to intention, the bottom line of this is really power and is way men are seen as successful and powerful feel themselves and are told that they are entitled sex, to attention and to more power and so on. in a way it serves as alibi.
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les moonves made cbs number one. crowe could say that the you're a man in this world the pow they're you have makes you potentially predatory and gives you a license to do what you want, whether you're the head of a network, whether you're a great artist, whether you're filmmaker, whether you're the manager of down king -- dunkin donuts and radical potential of metoo movement is to unwind that a little bit -- >> totally. sexual harassment really was -- had no consequences or penalties and i know i'm older than both maggie and tonya, for my own career i complain today editors. [laughter]
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>> i have complained about situations, i went to cellar -- keller who i thought should be fired and i recounted all of his sins in a meeting with bill keller who said to me, debra, we all have a history and, you know that was the attitude then it was -- there were no consequences, men thought it was okay, they really did, they didn't know they weren't supposed to harass women. now the way they know they are not supposed to steal money from a money, they know if you harass out there jonah farrow is out there, don't do it. that has been the incredible achievement and revolution and when the antismoking movement got everyone to quit smoking, we
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all know now it's not cool to bully women in the workplace and that's incredible and if we have to miss a few art shows, if we have to miss national gallery because of it, it's okay, it's okay, i can live with that. at this particular moment we are devoted to equality and changing workplace for women and i'm just so moved that your generation, not my generation, my generation is like, okay, that's the way it is, but your generation through social media has brought about this incredible revision in values. thereare a lot of people waitind empty seats. >> you want to sit down? if someone wants to atone, we were talking about the atoning process, you were talking about men of power, they don't really know thousand atone, they can't get their head around it, what is a good process for atonement?
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like what about the idea of donating your skills to planned parenthood or another organization for a year, why shouldn't charlie rose write press releases for planned parenthood for a year, why not to show that he cares about someone other than himself? >> obscurity is a great punishment for these people. also to kind of go off what tonya was talking about which is really important, i don't mean to divert the conversation necessarily but one of the things about the sort of comeback conversation that makes me feel a little bit -- but in particular one of the things as tonya was saying, replicates the cycle of abuse because they think they are entitled to certain things and but at the same time so that's really tram attic for people who have experienced who survived experience with these men to see
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it sort of replicated but one of the things that does make me feels iky and to go off making a good point, one to have ways in which we as society atone for the enabling that we have done because i think in our own ways we are all responsible institutionally or otherwise is to try really hard as equally as we sort of of what we do with users, let's put energy in amplifying the voices of women who had careers voiced impacted and creativity uplifted and i don't know -- i think that that is a bigger change to come out of me too that hasn't necessarily taken -- >> how do you do that? >> it's interesting to note that harpers and the new york review gave thousands of words to first-person narratives.
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>> and thousands of dollars. >> yes of who we are calling the accused, neither of those publications to my knowledge has -- has given equivalent space or attention or play to the voices of accusers and in fact, you can really see the asymmetry in that these guys get to stand up on the stage alone or be in print alone where as, you know, it takes dozens of women and enormous work of journalistic institutions to bring the accusations to the table and i think that that -- that kind of asymmetry it seems so natural and so obvious and that's part of the problem, is how, you know, how to level that, how to unwind that, how to redistribute
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the attention and it's something that some journalistic outlets have tried to do but i think there is kind of a pushback or i -- keeps the attention to these guys. >> why did the new york write the piece? they are supposed to write about books, has nothing to do with the books. >> it's like why does cnn and nbc give air time to trump, because he would turn eyeballs. >> abruptly had career ended because of accusations, some of the accusations are very severe, some less severe and, you know,
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friends asked me recently if a friend of yours loses job for sexual misconduct, a friend, should you send him a note and say that you feel bad? what's the etiquette there? [laughter] >> yes or no. >> send him a note, just say how you feel about this. >> that's nice, send him a note without compromising yourself. you want to be a humane person. we are not -- it's not the french revolution. we are not saying off with your head. we want to be sensitive with individuals, this is democracy, we have to respect individuals and make sure that that punishment -- >> striving for a more humane society has to be the end result. >> that's our priority. >> it's rocking my world.
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but there's a scene with this young girl in piano lesson and the piano teach e tells her to keep playing and be quiet, after the piano lessons she tells her father and he beat it is guy, every time he sees the girl he turns and runs, is that what needs to happen -- [laughter] >> but, no, highlights the problem right now which is that the laws as i said before are willfully inadequate and the laws have to be re-examined. >> wait a second. the laws -- i think the laws are not the problem, the laws make harassment in the workplace illegal, the problem is that sexual harassment doesn't lend itself to judicial overreview because it's always she said, he said and those cases are hard to try and the court of public opinion stepped in. >> a lot of us who had to deal with the law and we find that
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when we do it it's inadequate. that's a whole separate conversation. but there's statute of limitations, takes a long time for victims to feel couraged to speak up. a whole system in play. >> you're right. >> suppressing the victims. >> all i meant to say -- >> what i wanted to say is that what's important and tonya was talking about this too is how do we kind of cod fie atonement, how do we get to the next level and roxanne gave amazing op-ed for the times and we should codify those. >> can you summarize them? >> everybody deserves a second chance. they are getting a second chance. when you talk to victims most of them don't want punitive justice for their abusers, they want
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restorative justice. >> right. >> how do you achieve that? >> i feel that way as well but i think, you know, it's important to take into account and/or acknowledge the crime to transcend that abuse and most of the cases that we are seeing happen -- >> are incapable of understanding the issue. >> that's why they should volunteer their time to the organization. >> somebody has to make them. >> exactly, help charlie rose to go work right now for a rape crisis center. >> yes, bring attention. organizations that need attention. >> a lot of them get golden parachutes so you're still keeping them in power, take away their money and see how they feel. >> but then some of them don't have as much money.
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>> you look at roger ailes. les moonves can go sail into the sunset and friends will enable them. >> we have questions from the audience. okay, these are very long questions. we have a lot of very good essayists out there. people outside can come in. >> well, okay. i'm going to read this question because the handwritten is so beautiful, it's long, but let's see if we can break it down. it's funny in a way, when you think artists are being held up as examples of moral hygiene, there's supposed to be exemplars of morality. back then artists were supposed to misbehave, you have a
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breakthrough as a painter or poet, you have to break something, you have to break tradition, the imagination can be violent. the changes have been for the good even though it's hard on certain individuals. here is the question with good handwriting, how can you keep from lumping people like harvey weinstein together without franklin? that's a very good question. crimes of various degrees of severities, we need to constantly remind ourselves that these are all individual cases and steer away from blanket rules. >> i'm not aware that there are blanket rules.
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we talk about the sort of align between harvey weinstein, let's say, you know on one extreme and someone whose misdeeds seem much milder but it's not a boundary. it's a spectrum, it has to do, again, with male entitlement and male power and the permission that men aren't given to behave in certain ways and how far individuals go on that. you have to understand what the accusers have been saying and continuum of the crime -- of the crimes. >> right, i think we are aware of the differences which is amazing, shows that the court of public opinion can make subtle judgments. okay. what about books, should people like sherman alxy and juno still
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be and invited to book festivals? >> i mean, i can't speak to book festivals but i can think about -- >> i can think, it doesn't mean that they fall off but they do get reframed and i think that there are a lot of things that go into the way in which you communicate these works to younger generations of creative media or artistic media, i don't know -- i think those are two very different forms of platforming, right, and i don't want to split hairs necessarily but i think something being on a syllabus is different from a speaking fee. i think it's important to think about the context in which that platform is happening and be sensitive to the way -- like some forms of platforming and
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might be more auditory than others by what they are, but you know, it doesn't mean that he can't be on a syllabus, maybe the conversation around the work is different to students and to be sensitive to what students' experiences might be also. >> i don't know how much about case and i don't want to get too much into the weeds on this one. polarizing opinions, there have been a lot of meaningful conversations and there was thorough investigation done as well. >> do you think he should be invited to the book festival, for instance? >> well, i'm not programming it -- [laughter] >> i would like to see juno speak, yeah. >> okay, how about mui tree pressure the institution that is enabled the guilty men to make
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reparations, hire women, promote more women, create programs that feature women? >> yes. >> you've described the moral sailings of the artist, sounds like it was written by an artist but in the past conservatives have used morality to suppress art, for example, giuliani trying to remove the piece from the brooklyn museum, how do you address discharges of condemning artists from the right mimicking the current condemnation of certain artists from the left? >> i actually think with respect to the question ore that this was a huge red hairing, censorship is action of the
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state and what is happening to these men is not in most cases involved in up state power and i would also suggest that the accusation of censorship comes very quickly and quitism of any art arises even before an especially maybe before the me too movement. and a couple of weeks ago there was an essay in "the new york times" review about her experience and in particular her experience having written about that experience which if you're talking about, you know, someone being cast out and silenced and marginalized and made poria it was her, she had write about something that happened to her in her relationship with very
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famous artist, so the -- i guess i'm not -- i don't tend to be moved by the -- the censorship or, you know, the responses that i got to my woody allen piece, all i said is that we need to look at these things in a new way and that compared me to stalin. [laughter] >> but there's something telling about how quickly that rhetoric kind of sets in. >> well, i think it's great that we are so attune, there's a difference between censorship and members of a consumerist society deciding not to patronize, right, we have power as consumers and that's not censorship, we decide not to go see a movie or show, that's not sen -- censorship. >> what came to my mind and the
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question came up was we have this unusual situation in america right now where as long as we have a perpetrator in the white house and a perpetrator in the supreme court anything goes and nothing surprises me, so it's like what do we do with this current moment and i think that this reckoning is happening largely because of that very, you know, devastating constant reminder that we have to get to a better place. >> and our institutions aren't going to do it for us, the federal government is not going to do and our supreme court is not going to do it for us so we've taken into it our own hands, right, okay. how do you make a connection between harassment and a boost that might give the ability to produce particularly the confidence artists sometimes strive from the others and how
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do we see art if producers might have serially drawn energy from harassment. is harassment amuse? okay. is it necessary for artists to destroy in order to create? that's the question. >> i mean, if it's really interesting i think -- the question is reminding me of the particular artists that i worked with for the show, the museum of sex which the japanese photographer was certain degree of celebrity here in the united states but is kind of i would say titan-like in japan. >> tell us his name? >> iraki and his work in particular is most well known for being very sexually provocative and explicit and often is very heterosex wall and
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sort of feminist arguments that it's objectifying women and women tied up in a sort of traditional rope-tie b apparatus and there's lots of other work that he does but that's the work he's most famous for and one of the challenges with the show figuring out a way especially allegations, horrible business practices in relationship to his muses, it's not just reframing now for an audience the interpretation of his work, right, but also making available additional information and context of production, right, the dissemination and interpretation and it is important that we be as much aware as possible of all of the
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stages of an artistic work coming into creation, right. >> i disagree with that. i think if an artist is that openly abusive, we don't need to look at him now. let him show his work a hundred years from now when he's dead, right now we are devoted to the cause of making the world more just and i think that's a good priority for us in the 21st century. >> about tonya -- >> i mean, harassment like many painful experiences provides excellent and i think -- >> you mean being harassed or being a harasser? >> both. you're saying -- >> is -- it's a really powerful subject. >> talking about the harassed person, you're not talking about the harasser? >> the harassed and the
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harasser, what's being facilitated is more voices from those who are the victims. >> right. >> that i think -- >> that's good. >> is very powerful. >> very powerful. i was looking at the show and that tends to been very graphic and i thought this isn't the right time for the show, this moment is different than other moments. moments change, cultural context change and this is a very special moment and the more we try to define it, conversations like this one, the more aware we all are. >> what i wanted to get to the reason i feel it's important to hear from the harassers and harassed because it leads us to understanding of where this behavior comes from because in many cases, you know, we read the statistics that the majority of people in prison are people who are harassed or abused as
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children but we often don't know that, we see them as criminals, but for me i'm personally interested in understanding both psychologies. >> okay, i'm not interested in the psychology of the harasser, i just want to -- thank you all so much for coming today and let's all -- let's all work on making this a nicer country. [laughter] [applause] >> it was great. >> you were so good. [inaudible conversations] >> okay. [inaudible conversations]
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[inaudible conversations] >> here is a look at authors recently featured at book tv after words, best-selling nonfiction books and guest interviewers. retired marine corps lieutenant colonel offered her thoughts on gender bias in the military. economists weighed in on why democracies around the world are fail to go produce economic growth. and former education secretary arnie duncan looked at successes an failures of schools in america.
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in the coming weeks on after words former secretary of state john kerry will reflect on his life and career. journalists macy will discuss the opioid crisis and this weekend political columnist derrick hunter provides his thoughts on how progressives influence academia, the media and pop culture. >> the media is the center point because it's the easiest conduit and they are despite what your organization has thankfully addressed and documented for 30 years, they are trusted by a lot of people inherently. you know, you see somebody on tv and you see republicans strategists, democratic strategists and are talking about what happened in north korea, they must know what they are doing because they are on tv, there's no such job as republican strategists or democratic -- looks, seems really easy, you talk on tv, i can't find that job. you begin to realize that it is all, if you look good on tv, can
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you convey the message that they want, are you willing to play along and becomes theater, it really is not brainwashing because i don't know that it's done from nefarious purposes most of the time, sometimes it certainly is but done for convenience sake, done out of laziness, this is what we need, this person will do it, like a lego piece, we will snap it together. it's disappointing because you need journalism. >> after words airs saturdays at 10:00 p.m. and sunday at 9:00 p.m. eastern and pacific time on book tv on c-span2. all previous after words are available to watch online at booktv.org. >> c-span launched book tv 20 years ago on c-span2 and since then we have covered thousands of authors and book festivals totaling more than 64,000 hours of programming, astro physicist tyson has appeared on book tv 5
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times n2017 he was guest of monthly call-in program in-depth. >> so the lesson here is however weird it is to assert that 14 billion years ago the universe was this big, literally this big and exploded from there, you say, well, you weren't there how do you know, you're right, i wasn't there, but if everything we know happens to matter happens then then it accurately predicts things we do measure. that's what gives us the confidence to to describe the first 10 seconds of the universe like if we were there. >> you can watch online at booktv.org. type the author's name and book at the top of the page. >> now, i'm going read a little bit from a section called, after
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the election my friend told me about watching the clarence thomas hearing, he harassed her while he was in equal opportunity commission, thomas asked her out repeatedly and when she said no he continually discussed sexual top knicks the workplace. watching the televised hearing gave her vertigo, so much describing was a few years back. glancing at her body and she found ways to live it, never went too far she said. she was watching the hearings
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too, he said, he wanted to know whether what thomas did to hill was what he had done to her, this was the point at which she paused story, look at me and shook her head in disbelief, you know what i did, she asked, i told him no, i told him it was fine, i reassured him, i marched along side in protests, i have seen her defend rights and voices of teenagers in foster care and juvenile justice system, as somebody is progressively and politically engaged struggled as so many of us do to understand how she could minimize experience in that way. it's notable that 53% of white women voted to trump, they decided behavior was reasonable or quote, unquote personal aspect of his life was separate from politics, gloria in memoir on life on the road, tried to disassociate her mother because she saw her mother passive,
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struggling with mental illness and it was a stand she came to revise when she discovered that, quote, we were alike in many ways, something i hadn't seen or admit in fear that i would face her fate. we want to believe that we aren't subject to the same forces, we want to feel free to be and do anything we choose, sometimes we become so attached to heavy narrative that will throw our true allies and even ourselves under the bus. it's frightening easy for so many of us to empathize with those who abuse power and after all we are forced to grow up strong white men and if the person of the year was silence breakers, all the women that came forward, the run-up for the honor president trump. what better evidence of how we are wrestling with how power means and where it resides. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org.
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>> here is a look at current best-selling nonfiction books according to new york times, unhinged by former white house omarosa about her time in the trump administration, at the top of the wall street journal's best seller list is rachel health advice, girl, wash your face, on the second spot on wall street journalist, the restless waves memoir by late john mccain in third according to times tera recount of childhood in idaho mountains and formal education at age 17. up next for "the new york times" is journalist craig report's on donald trump's relationship with
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vladimir putin in house of trump, house of putin. for the wall street journal it's strength finder 2.0 by the gallup organization and tom wrath. in fifth according to new york times fox news jeanine pirro who defends president trump in liars, leakers and liberals, on the wall street journal's list mark manson's advice on leading a happy life. wall street journal best-seller list continues with magnolia table by hgtv joanna gaines. and chapo trap house, "the new york times" thoughts on human progress, in the seventh position, tera educated hold spot on wall street journalist. next on the times list is astro physicist tyson astro physics for people in a hurry, the
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journal has jeanie pirro's liars, leaker and liberals. dan siel seagal aware and on times list, beth macy looks at opioid epidemic in america. wrapping up comparison in wall street journal and new york times best seller list, jordan peterson the 12 rules for life for the journal and in the tenth spot on the times list is the soul of america by john meachum, many of these authors have or will be appearing on book tv, you watch their programs online, on our website booktv.org. >> here is a look at some that are coming up. this weekend book tv is live from the brooklyn book fair, on saturday september 29th, look for us at baltimore book festival which will be held at
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city's inner harbor, on october 11th through 14th, the wisconsin book festival that takes place in state's capital city madison and in the same weekend the 30th annual southern festival of books in nashville. then later that month live at texas book festival in austin. for more information about upcoming book fairs and festivals and to watch our previous festival coverage click the book fairs tab on our website, booktv.org. [inaudible conversations] >> and you're looking at the street festival right outside the brooklyn law school where we are live all day with author events from the brooklyn book festival. next up it's conversation about the history, government and policies of states.
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