leadership for the journal. a biography of the new england patriots head coach bill belichick. some of these authors have or will be appearing on booktv. you can watch the programs online on our website booktv.org.>> welcome to madison and wisconsin book festival. we've got a full day of coverage from the madison public library. it includes author programs and your chance to talk with authors during call in programs. we are going to kick off now with an author discussion on hate in america this is booktv's live coverage of the "2018 wisconsin book festival". >> i want to thank the public library foundation. they raise all the private funds to make it possible for

us to bring authors to madison and for us to make it available to everyone for free. take you to them and all our sponsors for putting on wisconsin book festival this year.part of my job as director of course is selecting the books but one of my favorite things about that is being able to find that wisconsin authors doing incredible work. that's what we are going to start with today. i came across this book, the gift of our wounds by party coleco and otto michaelis. tells an incredible story that doesn't matter where you are from its incredible story but the fact it tells an incredible story about wisconsin is even better to me. ãbcame together and he formed a friendship and the hardest of times after the shooting of the sikh temple in milwaukee in 2012. the book, the gift of our wounds, tells that story and it's my distinct pleasure today to welcome parties and arnaud and listen to their conversation. [applause] >> thank you. good morning. my name is arnold michaelis and disses party coleco.

i'm just kidding. over the years we have definitely become that close that we can probably speak for one another. we are going to as soon as possible open it up to questions that you have. we love there are so many people here on this cold saturday morning. we appreciate you. we love you. i'm really party coleco ãbour brotherhood started because of a tragic shooting that happened on august 5, 2012 as connor alluded to. that day not only changed my life but it changed the lives of a lot of people, not just within the ãcommunity and within our temple but people all throughout wisconsin and the united states have been affected by it.

at that time i was an educator. i was working with at risk youth. summer vacations for us. it was like any normal sunday morning. that's when we found out what happened. i'm going to let arnold read a little bit of the book. and how our worlds came together. he's going be reading the prologue of the gift of our wounds. >> what does hate look like? hey it looks like the body of a devoted mother of two teenage boys crumpled inelegantly on a cold tiled floor near the altar where she had been praying moments before her death. it looks like a young husband and father, the way his little girl last saw him. his face ravaged by the fatal bullet that ripped through his eye and blew his head apart.

and the kindly family man who laid in a vegetative state with no hope of awakening. while his wife and children sat at his bedside praying for a miracle. and the tortured expression of a leader, mortally wounded as he tried but failed to save his flock and himself. hate looks like the bullet hole in the door frame leading into the prayer room at this sick temple of wisconsin. the best of the carnage that took place there on august 5, 2012. when a troubled man with the distorted view of what america should look like executed peaceful people inside. life goes on, services still take place at the same time every sunday. congregants continue to worship in the prayer room.all people are welcome to the ãkitchen for the free communal meal. families who lost loved ones persevere as they continue to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.

the bullet hole remains, now enshrined with a tiny plaque inscribed with the message "we are one". the victims develop souls who strive to follow the tenets of their sick faith to live a meritorious life of honest hard work and service to others and to god. spiritual beings who grace this earth with love, inspiration, and shirley glove. translated from punjabi, the language of the indian region where the sick religion was founded. shared eco-law remains relentless optimism. why would anyone seek to harm these good people? why would someone take the lives of this fellow human beings with such senseless cruelty. because hurt people hurt people. because when suffering isn't treated with compassion it feeds and spreads. because when fear isn't met with courage it deceives and disconnects humans from community. when ignorance is encountered

with wisdom it festers and takes root in the heart of the fearful. when hatred isn't capable of kindness it can corrupt the beauty of existence to the extreme that causing suffering is the only thing that makes sense anymore. the killer wants as innocent and as lovely a child as any other, became mitered in a cycle of misery that ended in tragedy of the ãtemple of wisconsin. and brought us together. rather than cultivate hatred with vengeance we chose to commemorate our lost loved ones with the glory and grace of our common humanity. we chose to soul seeds of kindness and compassion. ãbcreated by god. they are shaped by the society we live in. by us. the ingredients that make monsters are hatred, suffering, isolation, and minimization.

seven people died that day including the shooter. because one man's untreated suffering was inflamed by fear, ignorance, and rage. what if instead it had been met with compassion? , courage, and wisdom. if we can find the strength to forgive the one who took the others, we can answer the tragedy with unconditional love for the entire human race. we can address conflict with care and cooperation. we can meet fear, ignorance, and hatred, by teaching truth. we can shape the reality we create collaboratively one of uplift and healing. we can live in honor of ã

of the lives lost in oklahoma city and at columbine, sandy hook, the movie theater in aurora. the boston marathon. the manual and they may church is charleston south carolina. the pulse nightclub in orlando florida. the bicycle path in new york city. and of the people dying every day on the north side of milwaukee and on the south side of chicago. and in syria, afghanistan, the holy land, mexico, africa. we can find a gift in the wound. if we can forgive. with vengeance. with purpose. with love. >> thank you. the man reading that prologue right now is the most unlikeliest of people to read that prologue. this man here, arnold michaelis, is one of the founding members of the same gain that the man who murdered

six people that morning before taking his own life, belonged to. ray page was a continuation of the suffering and the harm that arnold had caused from his time when he was affiliated. arnold's journey out of the movement and back into life required that he go back and go back and heal some of those wounds. i will let him explain his journey out of hate and back into humanity. and the deliberateness of his actions to come back to that same pain that he inflicted on other people. and really plans those wounds.

>> growing up i wouldn't have seemed like the kind of kid that who would have became a violent racist neo-nazi skinhead. i grew up on the rough streets of matawan wisconsin. [laughter] to the people chuckling nowhere won is and know that the roughest thing in won is probably keeping up with the joneses. as it's very well-to-do, predominantly white, my family was like the poor family of matawan. but that meant that for summer vacation we only had to go up north to dad's cabin instead of going to hawaii like all my friends did. like it sounds ridiculous to complain about that and it is, but even though everything on the surface looked great in my childhood, i lived in an alcoholic household. and it caused a lot of tension between my parents. and it was very difficult for my mom to keep things together

and keep the bills paid in our nice house in a nice neighborhood. she was miserable. her relationship with my dad sucked. as a kid that hurt me. rather than say, hey mom i love you how can i help? i started distancing myself from her, distanced myself from my dad.both of whom love me very much and let me know that all the time. but as i distances myself or my parents and all the adults in my life who had fawned over me and wanted to help me, of course my suffering got worse. i started lashing out at other kids. i was a bully on the school bus as early as kindergarten. i got a kick from causing havoc from getting teachers and parents to tear their hair out and my behavior. and like any other kind of addiction, what's get you off

the first time like 10 times later doesn't, you have to keep escalating the fix so i went from being a bully on the school bus to getting in fights in the schoolyard, to breaking and entering, vandalism, burglary, getting in fights in the street. but the time i was 14 i started drinking myself. the first time i drank i drank until i passed out. and i drink like that for another 20 years. by the time i was 16 years old i was a full blown alcoholic. i was very familiar with violence. i have been violent since i could remember. and it seems second nature for me. i had convinced myself that i like to get in fights and that i like to get hit. which i did quite often because i was not a very talented fighter. i also thought that hate was just part of the kick. i think that every human being who's ever been a teenager has had at least one split second when a teacher or parent or somebody says, you can't do something you really want to do

and your hormones raging and you're like, i hate you. fortunately for the both of us, that just comes and goes. but for me i would grab onto that. that was part of the rush. i hate you, i hate this school, i hit the principal, i hate these kids, i hate won, i hate society, i hate the government, i hate cops. i was riding this wave of hatred. drunk all the time. fighting all the time. and that's who i was when i heard white power skinhead music. i had been in a punk rock for a couple years before that. i still love punk rock, i never wanted to sound like punk is a gateway drug to become a white party skinhead. there's a lot of great things about the idea of punk rock, questioning authority, not conforming, thinking for yourself, doing things yourself. but to me punk was just about breaking stuff. and piecing people.

and nothing pieces people off like a swastika. i wasn't ignorant as to why people were passed off by swastikas. i knew about the holocaust. i knew why that repulsed people. but in the same way that a heroin junkie may do horrible things to get money for their drugs, i didn't care where that swastika came from. all i cared is that it gave me that rush. it gave me the adrenaline of lashing out at society. of shocking people. of hurting people. so me and a couple friends of mine one of whom was from madison actually, started a white power skinhead again and we started a white power skinhead band as well. i had been screaming and punk bands for couple years. i don't have a lick of musical talent. as anyone who sees videos of my old bands will agree. i was good at screaming really loud and good at getting people

crazy and punk shows. so i was a great front man for this white power skinhead. as our guitar player who's from madison and together we had quite a stage presence. our band was like a magnet for pitstop white kids. soon our game grew from just a couple of us to 10 of us, to 20 of us. as we radiated hate and violence into the world around us, the world reflected it back. we live in a system. it produces output according to our input. when we input hate and violence into the world, the world gives it back often times in multiples. before long, pat went to prison for shooting a kid that came to do a drive-by in our house. shortly thereafter, a second friend of mine ãba dear friend of mine was shot and killed in a street fight. and rather than take these

misfortunes that we definitely brought upon ourselves as a wake-up call, we spawned all the bad stuff that happened to us to suit our narrative. so when our friend was shot and killed out on the street as he was walking around with a swastika on his jacket and shaved head, starting fights with people, rather than say maybe we should change the way we think and the way we act, we blamed it on everyone else. we fully bought into this white supremacist narrative that there is a jewish conspiracy to kill all the white people on the planet earth. if that sounds ridiculous, that's good, it should sound ridiculous because it is. at the time considering who i was, this drunk, angry, adrenaline, alcohol addicted, violent kid, that was literally music to my ears. everything that happened to us in the world was spun to suit that narrative.

that spin was constant. we had to constantly be spinning every bit of information we had to suit the story that we told ourselves about who we were and what our place in the world was. that took a ton of energy. it was exhausting. exhausting came from all directions. there were times or even early on in my seven year involvement as a violent racist where as i'm hitting someone there's an inner voice saying, what the hell are you doing? what is wrong with you? you are a horrible person for acting this way. i didn't have the courage to even acknowledge that voice. much less answer those questions. so i'm constantly trying to suppress that inner knowledge of how wrong i am. which was absolutely exhausting. any time a person is subscribed to a fundamentalist ideology, whether it's racial or religious or political, they are in a constant exercise of

spinning reality, also blocking things out from their day-to-day experience that don't corroborate their ideology. that's the bulk of the information that you experience every day because the world is not a fundamental place. really the only fundamental thing about this universe that we live in is change. and that change is constant. a white supremacy like every other fundamental ideology, is essentially based in fear. it's fear of change happening. which is the human condition. all human beings have a hard time dealing with change. i believe that all human spirituality from the abraham of religions to buddhism, of which i'm an inheritance to sikh, what have you, all means of finding peace with change. i think today and closer to

that than i've ever been but back in the movement days we were terrified of change. as part of this conditioning that we put ourselves through and cutting ourselves off from the rest of society, i had to disconnect from cultural will qualities and cultural content i had once enjoyed. i'm a lifelong tv, film, music, and sports geek. he much all of those things are not allowed when you are a white power to skinhead. being from wisconsin like everybody else, i was part of the cult we called the green bay packers fans. but as a white power to skinhead i could very well get my buddies together to watch the packer game sundays because an nfl football team is pretty much the anti-thesis of a white power skinhead's worldview.

a successful football team has people of all sorts of backgrounds on it. and they not only have to get along together but they have to like work as a unit if they want to have a prayer of winning again. so on sundays i would sneak off away from my buddies, i lock myself in my dingy efficiency apartment, turn on this little battered tv really low, watch the packer game. [laughter] it was ridiculous. i knew it was ridiculous then. but again, i didn't have the courage to call myself out and be like, how stupid is this? why didn't you get out of this? that was exhausting. what was most exhausting though was when people who i claimed to hate, treated me with kindness. i was very fortunate that happened time and time again throughout my seven year involvement in hate groups.

there were people like a jewish boss, lesbian supervisor, black and latino coworkers, who treated me with kindness when i least deserved it. in doing so they demonstrated for me a number of things, one of them being how wrong i was about feeling superior to people because of their skin color or their sexuality or their religion, and they also demonstrated for me how human beings should treat each other. and how much nicer life is when you are not caught up in fearful ignorant bs like i was. i would love to say that these acts of kindness change me on the spot. it would've saved me a lot of trouble. it would've resulted in a lot less harm in the society. but in truth most of these acts of kindness actually seemed to make me worse. at the time. i never attacked someone who was kind to me but there were times where i literally ran

away from people who were treating me with kindness because it made me so uncomfortable. i was diligently practicing hate, practicing violence, every single day. all day every day, every waking moment. i was terrified of the world around me. i'm trying to maintain this narrative that anyone who is not white is my enemy, anyone who is white and isn't on my side is a traitor. and when people treated me with kindness, they blew all that out of the water. it made me very uncomfortable. it threatened everything that i thought i was because i had adopted this ideology as my identity. it's very important to understand, especially in the current political climate, which i'm getting the loop saying, in the current political climate, in the current political climate, as

in every piece of media we see. but it's all the more important to understand when we treat hostile people with kindness, that is the greatest act of defiance we can demonstrate. when i was a white power skinhead, everything i did was meant to provoke hostility. everything i did was meant to provoke hatred. it was meant to cultivate hatred in the world in a way that a farmer would cultivate a crop. if the hatred was directed at me, all the better. that's excellent. that's what i'm trying to accomplish. so when people got in my face and wanted to fight me and think they're going to beat the nazi out of me, they are literally putty in my hands. i got beat up as often as i be other people up. both of which were very often. and never once did violence make me any less violent. never once did hate make me any less hateful. so when people treated me with kindness, they were dictating the rules of engagement. in our interaction. rather than allowing me to do

so. when people reflected my aggression, they are playing the my rules. when people absorbed my aggression and let it pass past them and respond with compassion, they were making the rules. they were in control. and it was the bravery of those people that really put my exhaustion over the edge to the point where after seven years i was literally looking for an excuse to leave. that excuse came in a two-stage process in 1994 i ãbmy relationship with my girlfriend crumbled. we had had a child about 18 months before then. go figure, but hate and violence and alcohol is not the recipe for a healthy relationship between a man and a woman. i found myself a single parent to my year and and a half old daughter. a couple months later a second

friend of mine was shot and killed in a street fight after a concert that my band had played. so by that time i had lost count of how many friends had been incarcerated. it finally hit me that death or prison would take me from my daughter if i didn't change my ways. so those two catalysts were the excuse i was looking for to leave the movement in 1984. and once i did i never looked back. it was honestly like this massive weight off my shoulders. at first it was literally like hedonistic. i'm like i can watch the packers every sunday now! i can wear packers hat! i can watch seinfeld! i can listen to the beastie boys! i can watch this is a spinal tap and blade runner and all these things in the world that i had cut myself off from. for so many years. i went from being a white power skinhead to being a raver within the span of a couple

years. i'm a man of extremes. to this day i'm not very good at moderation. so that's why he went from extreme hate and violence, to extreme peace and love. going to all night outlaw techno parties on the south side of chicago. there might have been a few in medicine actually, from what i remember. in that environment was really probably one of the best places i could have been. while i had added heavy drug use to my already rampant drinking and for a time was selling drugs to support my party habit, that was certainly not healthy. the ideology of the rave scene was very healthy for me. there's a mantra in riverland called clerk, with his peace, love, unity, respect. that's a lot nicer than we must secure the existence of our race in the future for white children.that became my mantra. back then i still had swastikas

tattooed all over me and there were people i met at these rave parties who accepted me absolutely unconditionally off the bat. not only accepted me but embrace me and forgive me. i remember sitting on the floor at some dilapidated old the warehouse in chicago, probably 4:00 a.m. on a sunday, and a girl sitting next to me has my arm in her lap and she's looking at this arm, which used to be a big pile of skulls and swastikas, she's running her fingers over it and looking at me. she said what's that about? i said i used to be a white power skinhead, i feel really horribleabout it. she said are you not anymore are you? i said no . and she said okay. [laughter] that's how everyone was. it demonstrated for me the possibility of human beings not only living peacefully together, not only coexisting and getting along but loving

each other. in a deep spiritual kinship kind of love where you just look at people on the streets and be like, that guy is my brother. she's my sister. i hope they're having a great day. i hope they have safety and peace in their life. so that was really transformational. that was a big factor in me getting from there to here. i quit drinking in 2004. i started writing in 2007. and in 2010 i came public with my story. i had founded an organization called life after hate, which was an online magazine dedicated to the human need for compassion and the ability to give it. we launched on the king holiday 2010 and shortly after i shared my story, publicly, a woman named tonya cromartie reached out to me, she was and is a piece activist in milwaukee's inner city.

she ran a program called summer peace for over a decade at that point she asked me to come work with young people through the boys and girls club. so by the time august 5, 2012 rolled around i had been doing peace education for a couple years. i was very passionate about it. i was very really dedicated to the dream of doing this full time and i felt a definite urgency about helping the world heal from racism and hate and violence. but that urgency was taken to another level when the shooting happened. it really reminded me ãbso ã ãbless you bãit reminded me of the very real loss and harm that hate causes in our world in the sense that a grandfather who started a community of worship and other grandfather and brothers and sons and fathers and a mother, were murdered that day.

so today every day am grateful to be connected with this trendline community. though i'm a buddhist, sikh is a huge source of inspiration to me on a daily basis i think of ... it tells a story of growing up and leading up to the shooting which it goes into an absolutely prove brutal vivid detail. it was difficult for me to read. it needed to go.

i definitely have to give all the love and respect and gratitude to our other co-author who did an amazing job capturing the horror of that day. but then following it up with the friendship and brotherhood that we developed and the amazing things we were able to do through our organizations. leading up to today. we are happy to take any questions you guys may have. nothing is off-limits. always tell people if a question comes to your mind and i don't know if i should ask a mac, that's a question we want. if you have a tough question, a question we have never heard, it's the best thing in the world. happy to do that for you. >> thank you. >> we are broadcasting. i know it can be difficult getting over here. take your time.

make your way to the microphone and will take questions over here. thank you. >> i made it. >> during your period of whites the premise activities, you are not the only group in the country that were white supremacy and neo-nazis existed. any other groups whether they be in wisconsin are nationwide that you are influenced by or affiliated with. the skinheads kind of, aspect happened in the late 1980s. it was kind of like a revival. too many of us are painfully aware, the united states and the

entire western world, prior to us there was in addition to the structural violence. there is also the american nazi party. when we started breaking stuff and spray painting swastikas all over the place and beating people up and causing havoc and getting newspaper stories and tv stories on us, all these old-school neo-nazi guys started crawling out from underneath their rocks. a lot of them thought they would come waltzing in and be our commanders because they were older than us and they been around longer. those guys got the ship kicked out of them. nobody was going to tell us to the commander was and whether they were nazi or not. because we were so violent and really visceral, we got all kinds of attention from groups all over the country and all

over the world. this was all pre-internet days. i always find interesting for those of us that lived before the internet and after the internet, contemplating how different things were. back then, there was a paper, printing books with, you fold it up on another piece of paper. you put a piece of money on it. it gets a somebody else pretty far away. that is how we communicated. stolen calling card numbers on payphones. via that network we connected with all these other organizations from around the country, from around the world. a member of what went on to be the largest group on the planet.

the story behind that is when we start getting big in milwaukee, our band was a big part of that also, there was a skinhead from dallas, from dallas, texas, that came up to visit. he had a patch on his jacket that was a confederate flag with cross hammers in front. it looked really cool. he had this idea. confederate hammers. and then there will be the eastern, western. all white power skinheads. he had this vision for unifying all skinheads, planet earth. as he is telling us about this, are those hammers from pink floyd the wall? he's like, yeah. >> you know that scene in a movie and anti-nazi thing. you know bob is jewish.

a bunch of other jews that made that movie. >> yeah, but they look cool. [laughter] and they did. we made the logo a colonial 13 stars in the circle on the hammers in the middle of that. later on, the hammer skins would become hammer skin nation. new zealand, australia, all over the americas, including south america as well as europe. that all happened because of that meeting that happened that day. that is how we connected with groups and how it spread all over the world. >> in your opinion, not the correct response, but the best response to stuff like charlottesville or not the demonstrations. do what you have to do.

>> it as a result of your questions being asked. i apologize for that. if are going to talk about how to respond to hate and violence, i have to be absolutely adamant. more hate and violence does not help. i am not a big fan of donald trump, actually. i did not vote for him. i very rarely agree with him. but there is one thing that he said that i have to agree with. the violence in charlottesville was a two-way street. the reason why there were white supremacy there with their shields and helmets is because they knew there would be people there that would give a violent confrontation. that is -- they exist for that.

the violence, if we want to stop violence, we have to make sure is not keeping us. i wrote a piece how to smash neo-nazi events. my life after hate.com. in a nutshell, rather than protest their rally, let them control the conversation, as close as he could across the street or wherever, a really fun multicultural event. demonstrates that all of their fear is utterly unfounded. as they are sitting here going all these muslims and brown people and black people and yellow people are coming here. everything is horrible. everybody else together. you spend the day sharing each other's culture and food and music.

cancer research. at the end of the day, as you're having all this fund and demonstrating how diversity is a beautiful thing, here you you are helping this cause the right diverse multicultural effort. other than drawing all the media from them. at the end you get one of those big paper checks for 50 grand. we would like to think the socialist party for helping us raise all this money. thanks, guys. if you believe diversity is beautiful and you believe multiculturalism is beautiful, live it, act it. what that message out into the world every day. >> as he mentioned, that was

obviously optimistic, in the book. the whole thing is. [speaking in native tongue] which really means we shall be relentlessly optimistic to the peace and prosperity of all people. when something like this happens to you, the last thing that you want to do is be relentlessly up to mystic. what you do on a daily basis is a prevention to things like this happening. what we are already doing, showing up. you prevent this from happening all the time. what person feels rejected. typically rejection that causes other people to want to reject other folks. you will not reject someone out of tape.

that was a challenge that we had here. this was one of the deadliest hate crimes committed in nearly 50 years by an affiliated white supremacist. and, really, learn. we learn at a temple. little translation. six people, seven people lost their lives. what have you learned? you have to do something about it. we felt the need to respond. we felt the need to say okay. if it is that we stay the same every single time we are at the temple, is it just a saying?

is it just lip service? that questions all of our spirituality. is it that we can love. or can we challenge our spirituality to say i can see that spirit. i can see the divine. i can see that essence. within the person that does not look like me or walk like me or talk like me. that is a challenge now. can you see it in a person that out right says i hate you. i hate what you represent. i am not even going to reject you as a religion. i'm going to reject you as the essence of these six people. they do not just belong in this

country, they don't belong on the face of this earth. i will take it upon myself to take them off the face of the earth. how do you respond to that? >> that leads me to my question. one question was for you. i think you just started to answer that. your journey to forgiveness is almost unimaginable to me. i would like you to talk a little bit more about that. i think that that is heroic, really. you talk about how people treating you with love and acceptance helped you to move out of the movement. i am curious because you are loved. if there was any way to prevent you from getting into the movement in the first place. or was that just teenage hormones? >> my journey, my or i or us, i

think it is because, for me, i do not represent just myself anymore. i represent this dream that immigrants have. this dream that was taken away or attempted to take away. i will show you kind of what happened that day. i will kind of explain how people came together in the most unfortunate of circumstances. and really embraced others spirituality. as christians, muslims, juice, traneight, all came came together to pray that day. there were forces that were trying to divide. i came to this country when i was six years old. i was born in a small village. my parents were both farmers.

my mom graduated from fifth grade. at that time, that was very common. when they came here, they did not speak a lot of english. they didn't have any kind of trade that they could hang their hat on. the first shot that my brother got was working at a gas station. at that time they kind of just watched out for each other. gave each other jobs. a very small tightknit community they sort of made a life for themselves. during that time was kind of up to me and my brothers to raise each other. when i was six years old and my brother was for, i was literally walking him to school. milwaukee was okay at that time. it was kind of turning. from a very blue-collar sort of

working-class neighborhood. the economy turned from a legit legal economy to an illegal economy. you really saw that in front of your eyes. in milwaukee wisconsin. with that said, my parents always tried to shelter us. we will move to this neighborhood and we will move to this neighborhood. the north side of milwaukee to the east side of milwaukee. just kind of all around. the irony of all of that is, i think a lot of immigrants tried to move neighborhoods. the hope is you send your kids to school and you help them create a better life than they would've led act then. the irony of it is, if we do not start to invest, no

neighborhoods are safe. because this happened in wisconsin. something we would deem a fake neighborhood. if i can happen there, it can can happen anywhere. unfortunately, when we do some of these talks, we actually ask the audience. this could happen at your church. your synagogue. your mosque. this could happen right now as we sit here and we shoot this interview. unfortunately, we have to engage in that vulnerability to really get anywhere as a country. this does not have anything to do with me. we wash our hands. that is their problem. fortunately, that mindset, that giving back mindset, that was instilled in me with my parents.

there were always a good part of the services. things like that. they understood that i had that spirit. my brother and i became the first to graduate from college. i became a police officer in the city of milwaukee. the same neighborhood that i kind of grew up in as we initially came here. a documentary about this specific neighborhood. talking about the mass incarceration rate and the effect it has on families. i was policing that neighborhood i decided after five years that i had enough policing and decided i would be an educator working with at risk youth in the same neighborhood. i became an educator. when it happened, all of that muscle memory, all of that

stuff, going to church are going to the temple, wherever you go, find your healing. i did not know that that was already nourished within me. when something like this happened, it was already the memory of like, you have the ability to fix it. that spirit of being able to to fix something. my father, no matter what the situation was, i can fix it. he could have the wrong tool sometimes. a screwdriver when he needed a hammer. he would have a wrench. how you going to fix that? you guys are member the old show he was kind of the macgyver. i did not think about how important that mindset was.

no matter the difficult circumstances, will guard list of the tools, and if you have the wrong tools at the time, i still want to give you the spirit of a fixer. one day when you need it, you can fix and you can change the trajectory of what this means. that was our mission. if i tell you that right away, all of that nourishment was already in me. okay. i'm just gonna fix it. there is an external process and an internal process. internal process takes you looking into yourself and saying, okay. i am going through a severe trauma symptom. my brain is going off. it is going off when i hear loud

bangs. something in my biochemistry has changed. now, how do i fight against that ? that is when we started to hear these stories. we started to get stories of other survivors. people -- and i guarantee everybody in this room, everybody in this room has has a journey that they have taken. this title spoke to you. what does that really mean? what is that about? everyone here is on a journey. we started to notice that. we started to notice survivors. we realize that all of them, all

of them looked back at their journey. at least sought depth. that is where they function from that was the inspiration for the book. not just for our journey. a broader issue that we have to not run away from the wounds. we wish nobody. we want them to live in existence where they are free of harm. the likelihood of that happening is probably rare. as much as we want to repress or push away harm, we all must have to say we need to look into that

in this life for reason. pain without purpose is pointless. purpose derived from pain. that is what it's about. >> you say forgiveness is vengeance. can you elaborate on that just a little bit. >> in the book we sort of talk about how forgiveness is vengeful. what do we think forgiveness is? forgetting. forgetting. or getting over something. we have worked with sexual assault survivors. we worked with people that have survived trauma. we will never tell a person this is what your journey looks like. this is what you should do. but, for us, vengeance.

forgiveness was vengeance. not vengeance against the person per se, sometimes we get that mixed up. well, this, you know, i hate racists. and then you say i hate racists. we personalize it. no, you hate racism. racist is a person. we are creating a danger. forgiveness in our situation looked like vengeance not against that person at racism. racism is a separation and division. something where humans don't naturally exist. it's a state of loneliness. the shooter was once growing up.

he was probably lonely. i would assume that later on he couldn't be courageous enough to come back and say what is it that's causing my loneliness? this is a fact. we know that when somebody feels lonely, we know know from research we are social creatures they do something called predatory. you have a mouth and you have them in a big box. they will anticipate predators. when they do, they will hang out on the fringes.

no different. no different. hanging out on the fringes. never felt like he was truly accepted. white supremacy and the ideology , we were at mcfarland high school. we were sitting with a group of kids. the group of kids were like there's a student at our school who displays the cfederate flag. i asked, is the kid one of the most popular kids in school? the answer was he was a loner. is he kind of shameful about his loneliness? well, we don't know. we don't know. they're like he's hateful. did you ever think he was hateful because he would rather you hate his racism then hate

him? he could not personalize the hate. he did not want to be hated. he did not want to be called a loser. why don't you hate my hatred. that is easier for me to take. we have to become a more forgiving society. we have to be a more in-depth society. what is the underlying issue? >> age old question. are we shaped nature or are we shaped i nurture? the most widely accepted answer these days and the ones that i subscribe to is it is a combination of oath. i am the type of messed up adrenaline junkie person who was far more at risk than somebody else in the same situation. that combined with my family life is what led me astray. as far as and interventions go,

i really think martial arts would've been the best thing for me. i believe all the violence on the planet earth and throughout history rates down the testosterone. women can be violent. it's a hormone everybody has. anytime a woman commits violence , you can connect one.to some as some acyl dude that is typically the painful influence that led to that. testosterone's not going anywhere. we cannot expect always to stop having this aggression to have that urge to compete. we need to have a healthy outlet for it. for some kids, art is a healthy outlet or music is. i was super into art music. if i could have been in a thing where the situation was, okay, now a physical competition with

people, like you are going to use your aggression in a controlled way, that could really help to divert me to a better place. i'm a big advocate of not only martial arts, but contact sports like football and hockey. try to find ways it without concussions. >> at this point we will keep the conversation going by inviting and some questions from our national audience on c-span tv. stay in the room and participate. have another question in mind. we will get to that as well. we will keep the conversation going. if you could just -- a reminder for those in the room -- silence your cell phones. thank you. >> the gift of our wounds. the co-authors. thank you for being with us on book tv. 202 is the area code.

748-8400. you have been listening to this conversation. oh ahead and dial in. we will get to those calls and we will also get to people online if you have a question here in line. let's begin with a call from mike in la crosse, wisconsin. a couple hours from where we are in madison. hi, mike. >> how do you think a country that is made up entirely -- immigrants in odd back. >> thank you. would you like to start? >> mike, that is a fantastic question. human nature to be tribal. that is part of our nature going

back a long, long ways. really believing that we can shape our reality and shape our reaction to the world. i expand the size of my tribe. my tribe is no longer just like violet jerk racist white people. my tribe is everyone. my brothers and sisters forgetting that we are immigrants, i think it is a really interesting statement on human nature. it's been going on for a long time. it happens to everybody. it should not be made to sound like it is exclusive to white people or anybody else. having a friend of ours, one of the deepest speakers i've ever met. jobs for a very long time.

a movement towards, independence having their own country. he said, dude, what if we had colonist on and we had our own country and all of a sudden a bunch of muslims started moving in. and then more of them coming in. how would we react? what would we do? this is our place. you get out. it's something we are all susceptible to. what happens to one of us will affect everybody. the more we are on board with that, the bigger bigger we see our tribes, the more successfully and happy we will be personally and our society can be. >> nations of immigrants. turning to hate. >> yeah.

when we talk about this, we talk about fear. fear being some of the underlying private response. luckily, we are human beings and human beings have a bigger cortex. that is why we can thrive. rather than just survive. so, now, we've got, we have to understand that that exist within us. the fear mechanism, we are animals, 300,000 years of species. 300 million years of primal beings. now we are getting to a place where we have attempted the consciousness consciousness of who we are. this is testing the spirituality within what is america, what do do we believe in?

>> let's hear from stephen chico california. >> what form do you practice? and so forth. >> thank you, steve. six grade and middle school. bullied and excluded. helping her through the struggle she was going through. always very interested in dharma in the teachings. i did not know anything about buddhism other than it had to do a suffering.

in 2009 attending the university of wisconsin at milwaukee, i took a sport and rat class called meditation and wellness. at that point in my life it resigned myself to for never forgetting what i had done. i practice forgiveness. it really occurred to me that self forgiveness was possible. i took a refuge vow in 2014. renunciation dharma bridge. very important to me.

it is really something that is within all of us. it really informs everything that i do. what i think and my actions as well. >> step up to the microphones of the national audience can hear you as well. >> hi. >> i apologize. if you can bring the mic to your mouth, thanks so much. >> have you encountered any dead ends? >> that is in -- that is an awesome question. >> i sure have. i'm at the point now, i think this is where we all need and want to be as human beings. welcome the process of life even when it sucks. even when things don't work out. in the past eight years as i've been doing this, i've had some things not work out.

i started a nonprofit. that sucked. i am still not very happy about it. it made me a better person. working on and eight episode unscripted series for a any that would have been one of the most powerful weapons against racism to ever be on television. that got canceled before it ran. getting it in their head that it normalized racism. without seeing a single episode. when those things happen, it is an opportunity to do something else. no matter what happens, no matter how difficult it is, the more difficult something is, the more you learn from it. the better person you are going forward. i literally put that into action every time i am in a situation.

>> it feels like every time there is a shooting, every time there's a mass tragedy, every time time there's something, not used to being part of the news. you approach it from a different lens. i am really consumed. sandy hook, when that happened, it took me a day and a half to even response. be a social media anything like that. we need to respond. you really are consumed by it. i came, i was at my clinic and i collapsed on the chair. i think i cried for a little while.

there was this relief that something was done. maybe this book could've been something permanent. really falling in love and saying, you know what, you will have to get used to it. what does that mean? it means that when something bad happens to you, you sit there and you dwell on it. you wonder how other people can go on with their lives. they are just going on with their day. you wish the world would just stop. tonight, the sun will come out tomorrow. but then what happens is the sun comes up tomorrow. you came out again.

you are really frustrated. you should just stay. the sun looks back at you in the most loving glaze and says to you, because you are worth it. that is the gift of your wounds. we are hoping nothing bad happens. we are assuming that it will. every obstacle will be an opportunity. >> you had a follow-up? again, into the microphone. >> what do you think -- i feel like when there is major tragedy, to give an example,

like, in world war ii you had a lot of people who said i did this because i was ordered to. i did because i was told to. large-scale or small-scale. >> thank you very much. >> one of the things that we always say is if you can feel, you can heal. it takes courage. sometimes when you do harm, when you're thinking about world war ii or other places, there was sort of the separation between intimacy of doing that harm. as far as, like, there is a separation from your self. a person gets disassociated.

it's not just about the person that is being harmed. there is a certain disassociation affect that happens with that. when that happens, you have to call that person back. that is something that, we talk about loneliness,, especially loneliness amongst men. men tend to externalize when women tend to internalize. here is this man who was feeling lonely. going through all of these mechanisms. but, instead of of coming back to himself, there is this plane that is put out in society. that existence is not having the courage to understand your own loneliness. your own role in your own misery

looking at a window and then looking in mirrors. not that one is more important than the other, but we have to be able to have the courage both simultaneously. >> did you feel pressure to act in the way you did in your old life? >> that is a great question. i think for many violent extremists, the answer would be yes. any pressure i felt, i think, was going to be self-imposed. the way that i am, again, my personality, my chemical makeup, combined with the fact that when i was this crazy little kid, my parents went to the pediatrician and was like what the hell is wrong with this kid. he's a gifted genius. just let him run a monk and be a genius. and they did. i was running amok my whole life i never really felt pressured to

do anything. the only pressure i felt was to be the wonderful sweet kid that everybody said i was. i think that that is what motivated me to not be. but as far as pressure to hurt people, pressure to hate people, any pressure in that regard was definitely self-imposed by my suffering. >> the name of the book is the gift of our wounds. the next call is from kathy from washington. hi, kathy, you are on book tv. >> high. beautiful to listen. i guess i should turn this completely off. i have a lot of faith in the babies from romania that show

that they wanted to be loved and held. it tells me the human race wants to be loved. >> we have an opportunity, we have a consciousness to find this opportunity to go within. if we can forgive our selves -- then to see face-to-face with ourselves, to take personal responsibility -- >> i would like to hear kathy a

bit more. everything you said was so true. it is about simplicity. i tried to simplify my thought despite my wordiness. the simplest way to look at other human beings is to say every human being has an innate deep desire to experience love in their life. when we don't, things go go wrong. anything that we can do to help somebody feel loved is transformative. not only for us and not for that person, but that entire world. >> this question is for either of the gentlemen. i remember what happened in oak creek.

my question is, kind of tribal, how do we go from a country that is 30% minority to equality when you have a tribe, half of a tribe who don't want to see that equality. we know from the lincoln era, from the civil war to get people to love each other. we have to get to a place where love, and i mean godly love, i am i am a pastor as well. it has two transcend our tribal to want to be dominant.

i love the thing about the aggression and how we want to do that. at some point, if we are hurting people, i mean, housing, education, even healthcare and saying you don't deserve it, we will make laws to make sure you cannot be equal, this has got to stop. how do you see it going forward? it can't be fixed. the problem is you don't have enough people that want to fix it. >> you used to be a policeman in milwaukee. you maybe know some of the issues he is talking about. >> overall the issues of tribalism and fear. that pending our perceptions of what people are and what they're worth. that is what we have to

understand. we have to impact spiritually. i think therefore i am. then we got to the philosophy of i can observe my own consciousness. now we get to a deeper place where we stop seeing god. let's stop asking for something. in seconds inside and outside of us. can you find that within us to be able to see the spirituality of somebody else that overrides the tribalism of fear. we talk about the brain biology. that is the deeper spiritual part. even science can explain. we all know we have that part to be able to challenge and say, okay. how can i override this? it's really addressing fear. it's a connection. humans have the longing to be connected. that is why when you love

somebody you have a release. it's a connection. when you feel nurtured by a loved one or a parent, that is a connection. we are over complicating it. we are externalizing it. we don't see our old self and the solution of what the minute he really should look like. i love that he is a pastor. teaching both that the answer is external. really, it's the internal. >> again, we have to see ourselves and others. it is not just like they coup by spiritual thing. this is a prerequisite if we are to have a hope of solving these colossal problems we face is the human species. and they are colossal.

we have been jacking this planet up left and right for far too long. if we don't come together and start thinking of ways to fix that, we will beat our heads over policy and that will make a whole lot of sense. we have to see ourselves and others as a survival mechanism. it is coexistence are : elation. understand the urgency is super important, but not letting that urgency diverged us. we have a tendency to be like they don't get it. they are the problem. very simply seeing themselves that don't look like you and don't think like you. >> we have time for one quick phone call for dan in baltimore. hi, dan. >> high. how are you.

>> a teacher and now a therapist all of these experiences coming to bear. how do we make sure, you know, ptsd has ran into the police force and they tend to interact a lot which means not much between the groups. two, the u.s. are about 9% of the world's prison population. .5% of the world. we represent the prison population. what is going on. going through the roof.

how does ptsd play in the police force. inner-city population. what do you think of you being on both sides of the equation. i'm not talking about next year. >> i think as a society, a lot of people are using this model, it's getting away from the old diagnosis. this trauma can be passed on through our dna. i am a clinician now. i can only help through direct services. addressing it in school as a

society. if we become a prominent form of culture. this is how we can do it. everybody has to be trained to be able to do that. i will get away from the old diagnosis model. the new diagnosis model of what happened to you. taking ownership of what you can do about it. >> the name of the book is a gift of our wounds. they will be signing their book out in the lobby, if you want to get a copy. thank you both for being on book tv. we appreciate it. [applause] coming up next from the wisconsin book festival is longtime medicine journalist and longtime wisconsin governor tommy thompson. that is in about 10 minutes. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] >> here's a look at some books being published this week. profiling her father vice president mike pence and where

you go. former white house photographer compares and contrasts the obama and trump administration. republican senator ben sass of nebraska shares his thoughts on how to share the company's political divide. former chair alan greenspan and adrian provide a history of the american economy in capitalism in america. emmy award winning writer jill saul away shares her experiences with sexuality and gender identity in hollywood. our new releases continues with the humorous take on the current political landscape in donald drains the swamp. in the library book recounting the 1986 los angeles public library fire.

examining the political thinking of four of our founding fathers and applies that to today's political issues in american dialogue. in the hurricanes i best selling author nathaniel provides a history of the revolutionary wars battle of the chesapeake. military historian recounts those civil war. watch for many of the authors in the near future on c-span two. >> launching book tv 20 years ago on c-span two. since and we have covered thousands of authors and book festivals. including more than 100 book events events for the first lady laura bush. the national book festival. we have covered it every year since 2001.

>> everyone does that lives there. i also knew it was a fact of life. the children of the president. 1992 when you when you launch that election. nothing new. we feel like it is new. as we look around now. if you visit the lincoln librarians bring field, illinois and see the terrible things that were written, it was not 24 hour news. templates that were published that were so critical and terrible. it is just a fact of life. it is also a function of our democracy. we can criticize our president.

we do have the freedom to say whatever we want to say. >> you can watch us and all other book tv programs from the past 20 years at book tv.org. type the author's name and the word book in the search bar at the top of the page. >> i was born on october 1, 1940 in brooklyn exactly 10 months after my parents were married. all firstborn orthodox girls i was supposed to be a boy. in many ways i behaved like a boy. i refused to help my mother wash the dishes. i played punch ball and stick all. i engage in other kinds of games with the boys. i was known as brain. i was also an early blooming outlaw. i ran away from home when i was five years old and get a job

sweeping the floor and the barber shop across the street. the police found me and brought me home. only boys, especially boys who wrote, did things like that. they hit the road, walked across america, drink, took drugs, had sex, lots of sex, joined the navy. :: :: :: :: daughter and granddaughter of immigrants. on the jewish american, error to a treasured tradition of learning that has survived countless massacres, exiles, and genocides. i'm a child of the working poor. a daughter of earth. america and the moment in history at which i was born

meant that i received a first-class education. on my father's side i'm a first generation american. i know that my father leon was born in 1912 in ukraine. he was a child survivor of world war i, the russian revolution, a civil war in pahrump. he never once mentioned any of this. nothing this important was ever openly discussed. how can i ever pieced together his story. my father named me after the mother he barely knew. my yiddish name is payroll, pearl. a woman hacked to death by coccyx in leticia. where my father was only an infant. my mother was the only member of her family who was born in america. her parents and sisters were born in poland. my grandparents never learned to speak english.

my mother remained there translator and only caregiver until they died. i wrote the first draft of this book as if it were a nero. every day you could find me perched on my stool as i checked memory against diaries, correspondence, scrapbooks. i could spend weeks reworking a small detail in one corner of the canvas. i was everywhere at the same time. all over my feminist life. writing about patriarchy in kabul in 1961, attending a national organization for women meeting in 1967. cofounding the association for women in psychology in 1969. , commanding $1 million in reparation for women from the american psychological association, too little money. and pioneering one of the first

women's study courses in 1970, delivering a keynote speech at the first radical feminist conference on race in 1971. publishing women in madness in 1972. we pioneers emerge between 1963 and 1973 and took ideas seriously. some of us were geniuses. most of us were dangerously intelligent. and most of us were radical thinkers. we did not all think alike. we were champion hair splitters. and he disagreed with each other with searing passion. in our midst was the usual assortment of scoundrels, sadists, bullies, con artists, liars, loners, and incompetence. not to mention the high functioning psychopaths, schizophrenics, manic-depressive, and suicide

artists. i love them all. i even began to love myself. without a feminist movement i would have had a career but not necessarily a calling. i still would have written my books. but they would have had much smaller audiences and far less impacts. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. booktv.org tapes hundreds of other programs throughout the country. here's a look at some of the events we will be covering this week. on monday we will be at the harvard bookstore in cambridge massachusetts to hear who the yale law professor stephen carter recalled the life of his grandmother eunice hunt and carter. and the barriers she broke down as a black female lawyer in the 1930s and 40s. on tuesday at the free library philadelphia, pollutes or plies

demo prize winner historian joseph ellis examines the political thinking of four founding fathers and how it relates to our current social and political issues. then on wednesday in new york city ben mcintyre reports on a high ranking kgb spy who worked for british intelligence at the height of the cold war. and on thursday we will be at politics and prose bookstore in washington dc to hear nathaniel philbrick provide a history of the revolutionary wars battle of the chesapeake. that's a look at some of what booktv will be covering this week.many of these events are open to the public. look for them to air in the near future on booktv on c-span2. >> good afternoon folks, thanks for coming. governor thompson will be here

momentarily. if you can believe it this isn't the first time i've had to wait for him. [laughter] but he did call from the car and he will be here shortly. i thought i might take this chance to thank you folks for coming out and one thing we probably weren't going to get to in our conversation is how the book came about and what it was like being the co-author. somebody said getting to people together to write a book is like getting three people together to make a baby. [laughter] it really wasn't like that for us. [laughter] i think we work pretty well together. but governor thompson actually reach out to me seven years ago in 2011 and we met out at the esquire club on the north side and had a late breakfast and talked about collaboration,

shook hands, never had more of a deal than that. and ended up i interviewed him about the first race for governor. we had to do a sample chapter for ew press, our publisher. and that went pretty well. and the process seemed happy. then he decided to run for the senate. we got sidetracked. and never really got really engaged until about three or four years ago, so it still took quite a while. i did 30 hours about approximately of interviews with him. in various locations, usually out at his house. on the east side of madison. but also in the car sometimes. and then of course i transcribed the tapes. i always do that myself. it's horrible.

[laughter] but it's really it's a way of the material sort of gets ingrained in you a little bit. and i found when i have had transcriptions done, even by really good transcribers, they miss some things and just the material is not as ingrained in you as it is when you do it yourself. i also supplemented with interviews because it is a first-person book. it's his autobiography. but i supplemented my interviews with him with a number of interviews with friends and family and associates of his. in an effort to kind of check his version of events against the printed record and other people's recollections. that sort of thing. in the end if there was a discrepancy we pretty much usually went with the way he remembers it because it's his book.

[laughter] but that was helpful. it's interesting that from my standpoint i was appreciative of the fact that he was always willing to have me as the co-author. in this business of as told to autobiographies for the longest time, and it still continues, the writer isn't credited, sometimes. that has changed a lot. but the goal for jean sayers, i remember a story about he won the grand slam for all four majors. and got a book contract and the writer named charlie price wrote the whole thing. sarasin wrote a letter to his publisher at the book came out and he said thanks for sending my my book, i look forward to reading it. [laughter] with governor thompson i would write a chapter and we would go over it ã [applause]

>> how are you? where am i right here? >> yet right there. >> i just told them how hard i worked and all the stuff i did. >> i told everybody that dog is the best writer anybody could ever have. he can put lipstick on an 800 pound sow and make it look good. that's what he did in this regard. i think him for it. i want to tell you that, i apologize, doug knows this when i was governor and secretary i didn't get a chance to go into many of my son and daughter's basketball and football games. because as always busy. today i went to portage to see my grandson playing in his last grad ãbgrade school football game.

i'm late and i would apologize that i was doing grandfather duties.[applause] i hope you will understand. we might have violated if you traffic signals coming here. i got here. these are my relatives, did you know that? >> i did not know that. >> connor, you know connor? >> yes. >> is my cousin. >> i think to start i think folks, governor, would love to hear how is for elroy got into politics. i know your father was connie borden used to have meetings on fridays at his store, right? >> i know my catherine, betty, and tom know little thompson grocery store. about the size of this room. two families we were open seven days a week. it was very small but sort of the center of political action for elroy wisconsin. every friday night a couple

sixpacks of beer and a lot of cheese and a lot of raw hamburger, which was my father's favorite. they would stick around and talk about my father was chairman of the county committee for building roads and bridges. and all the farmers and all the local pols would come in and find out where the roads were going to be built. so i got to witness my father was quite a negotiator, trying to figure out where the roads and bridges were and then we would go travel around and look at them sunday afternoon. that's how i got it. i really got excited about the give and take but more importantly getting things done. that's what i always try to do when i was governor and secretary, not look at what was partisan or what was good for me politically, but how to get things done. that's what i think doug picked up when he was interviewing me many hours. he did a great job and thank

you doug. >> your guidance counselor as i recall, in elroy, try to talk you out of going to ew medicine. >> william claire was the guidance counselor and played football at platteville and he tried to make sure that every graduate from elroy went to the university of platteville. i was no exception. so he asked me where i was going to go and i said i'm going to go to madison. he said it's too big for you, you're not smart enough, and you can't play football there. why are you going there? you're going to platteville. he said that's where you're supposed to go. he was very good guidance counselor, a very good friend of myself as a teacher and of course to my parents. but he was very upset that i did not go to platteville. so when he wrote the history of elroy instead of saying that elroy had elected a governor, he said he never mentioned my

name in the whole thing. all he mentions was my father, what a great politician my father was. at the county board. i always resented the fact that i didn't even make the cutting room floor. i was not even mentioned in the history of elroy. so that's my story of elroy. >> during school at ew medicine you worked in the capital. for the sergeant of arms. there was one story you told about that he would ask you to take care of the senators. >> when i was going to school i didn't have any money so i heard that they were hiring people up at the capital. so my father said, go see louis ravel. is represents us from adams ã and marquette counties. i called up there to see if i could see louis and he wouldn't see me. that was a little strange but i

found out later he wouldn't see me because he was afraid if he gave me a job i would run against him, which i did. [laughter] so when i couldn't get a job in the assembly and went over to the senate and jess miller was the state senate. he knew my father he didn't know me and he was on his deathbed but summary called him and said young tommy thompson is ãbwe have the money to hire clerks under the form foundation and he would like to know if you would hire him and he said sure. that's alan thompson's son. i never met the man, never got a chance to thank him. but he hired me. so i was a clerk for alan busby, who was a senator from west dallas and last republican elected out of west dallas but i learned a lot from him. i also learned how to be bipartisan and make

compromises. he taught me a few things. he said, tommy, two things i will tell you. always read the bills and know what's in them more than anybody else, which i always did when i was in the assembly and governor. in the second thing, he said by stock and don't sell it. just put them if you ever get any money by stock and put them in the top drawer. he said i've done that and i never sell and i've done very well. he was quite wealthy. then after about six months about a year i was working in harry live band or was this marshal of arms. they had some extra money in the senate was going a little bit longer during the days so sometimes they had night sessions. so harry live band or asked john gable and another student and myself if we would take over the job of running the senate when he wasn't there from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. and run errands and do things ministerial tasks for the senators. i jumped at the occasion because what we could do was we

could work for four hours and study and get paid if the senate wasn't in session or if we didn't have anything to do. it was a fantastic job. but sometimes the senate was in session and this one night the senate was in session and when the senate or assembly goes on call and they have a call of the senate or call of the assembly, means that every senator and every assembly, unless excused, have got to come vote. there was a senator by the name of packing mcfarlane, in his younger days ãbpack he liked to have a few snorts. that afternoon he started snorting a little early. he was over at the end of the park and we knew where he was. so john gabriel and i went over there to get him. pack he was in no mood to come back and vote. we said, well you have to. he said i'm not going.

finally we convinced him ãbit was on the old park model and in the borrows. we got him on front street and crossing the street by the stop and go line, and pack he senator mcfarlane decided when he was going to step on the curb to go into capital they thought maybe he should go back and have another drink.so he decided to turn on john ndn he started downhill but he had so many snorts. you can see it coming but he wanted to hit us. he doubled up his fist and went like that and i ducked, he swung at me. he went all the way around, fell down on his back and hit his head. i thought he was really hurt. but he had enough alcohol in him that it didn't faze him too

much. finally we woke him up and got him up on his feet and took him in and he voted in then harry the banter asked us to take him to his office where he slept it off. today that would never happen. the press would've picked it up. ãbat that time it was just a way to get things done. it was funny but part of what the book is about and some of the stories. that's the way i go. >> he graduated in 1966 and planning to join the j corps later that fall you kind got a free summer. >> i had three credits to go into law school. jake ^ does anybody remember professor jake voyager, great

guy on water land rights. i had to pick up three credits and he took me under his wing and said he would give me an opportunity to write a story on water law and recurring in the ownership. and i got the best mark i got in law school because probably because he was helpful. but louis ravel, the guy couldn't give me the job. i announced i was going to run against him because i wasn't going to go into the air force j corps until january. so i decided my way of thinking was i didn't have a chance because this guy was in for 16 years. so i decided i was going to run against him for the state assembly. so i did and announced. now louis ravel didn't think i was very serious because i was still in law school and i didn't move back home. so he went to alaska on a

cruise. so i graduated from law school, got my three credits done and it was the first week in august and the first ãbsecond week in september when the primary was. so i had six weeks. i didn't have any money. i borrowed 500 books from the bank of elroy. bought a $100 car that had 225,000 miles. you can look through the floorboards and see the street. i ran on highway safety. [laughter] > father gave me $10 a day, five dollars for gas and five dollars to eat. it was coney's i had adams, donor and marquette county. i went all over i would start out at 7:00 a.m., i was not married, living with my

parents. i would go to all these small communities. i learned early on that the town drunk was in the bar at 8:00 a.m.. i could go into the bar ãbhe said go by that guy a beer and he will talk to you all day. [laughter] so you can't do that today but he was the town drunk and louis connor was a democrat but he didn't like louis ravel so he wanted to help me. so he said go and buy my beer it will do a lot of good. so i went and bought him a beer and i heard later he said, about 2:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. when the bar was full, you should have been in here this morning. that young tommy thompson came in and bought the whole bar a beer! [laughter] so i then left the

bar at 9:00 a.m.. i didn't have a drink of course. then i go and nobody ever not been any doors back then. adams marquette, my good friend sam gross was here who ran against me. he is a good friend. i went door to door and nobody else overdid this. i was scared to death. i was afraid of speaking. afraid of introducing myself but after a while you knocked on enough doors and people say, like you and they ask you questions and you had to answer and think on your feet.which helped me a great deal. i went around and then i go to the businesses. what a story that i tell other young politicians that want to get elected. i went into this chevrolet dealer and i was talking to the owner. i waited for the owner so i went in to meet the owner it was mr. connor, another connor. ãbthis one was friday, dyck fry tag on the montel chevrolet

and buick dealership. i sat in his office across from him and i said i introduced myself and said i was running, i said i didn't have much money but i got a lot of spirit, got a lot of good ideas and i'm for small businesses and i would like you to help me. he said i've been supporting louis ravel all these years he never has come in here the first guy who's come into asked for my vote. i think i'm gonna vote for you. i said, mr. freitag that's great. thank you very much. and i walked out. less than three minutes mr. fry tag comes out chasing me down he said i decided i'm not in a book for you. [laughter] here i'm 23, no money, i got the biggest cooler in the world chemist mr. fry taken with the best businessperson in montello there to support me, now he tells me he's not. i said what i do? why are you not supporting me?

he said you're not very smart. i said why did you say that? he said because i'm one individual. but i have 45 employees. auto mechanics back in the back room. i've got people working in the office. i've got people selling cars. you did it stop and ask for their vote from any one of the 45. are you going to win? i'm only one boat, there's 45. you got to go back and you got to make sure that you talk to everybody. so it was a lesson learned. several lessons you learn, first go to the bar really early and by the town drunks here. second, go and make sure you always go hide and shake hands with everybody in the business. which i started from that day forward and i've always done it. i will tell you a story, i was in washington with george hw bush. staying overnight with him and

he took me to one of his private clubs. to fill in the rest of the story. we went down to eat and he was absolutely great. he was president. he was taking a young governor under his arm. he liked me before george w. bush got elected governor i was his favorite governor. [laughter] but i went in and we had lunch and i was going to go to the alfalfa club, which is a club that they had put up a dummy running for president on the alfalfa ticket and some other ticket and george bush had always ãbit's a fun organization. he took me behind into the kitchen. here's the president of the united states taking me by the hand going into the kitchen and he shook hands with everybody and their, everybody that was serving. everybody knew him because he had done that so often. he said to me, tommy, it

reaffirmed what happened to me at the chevrolet dealership back in montello. president bush says, tommy, never ever forget where you come from. that's why i've never forgotten about elroy, i never forgot about my basic lessons in politics and that's what doug was so good to capture. can i tell them about how i built elroy in the center? >> we will get there. [laughter] >> am i talking too much? [laughter] >> i was going to ask about salic and the assembly. okay. you get elected to the assembly, the republicans are in the majority, but you all know ãbthe leadership all

want your vote, need your vote to elect them speaker.>> the republicans had gotten defeated by gaylor nelson. and then in 96 the republicans came back with awarded knowles as governor. i was running and when i ran in the primary everybody down here in madison was supporting louis ravel. because he was incumbent. nobody would support me. i didn't have any money. louis had plenty of money because first off they've never expected me to win and nobody else did either. including people in elroy. my father was the only one, he sometimes i question whether he voted for me. [laughter] but the truth of the matter was, i didn't have everybody supporting me. everybody supported louis ravel. why when the primary everybody wanted to come up and say, who is tommy thompson? they came to elroy to meet me. i got my first donation, back then you could take some cash.

i got $50 in cash and a bunch of stamps. i don't know? i wrote it down. somebody down here in madison everybody was trying to find out who tommy thompson was because the republicans thought i would win. i did win but then the republicans won control of the assembly. so the number one position in the assembly of course is the speaker. and there were four candidates running for speaker, paul alfonsi, maybe a name some of you remember. harold clements, who later became secretary of treasury. harold freilich, and curtis mckay. eventually curtis mckay dropped out and went with freilich. harold clements was there and paul alfonsi dropped out and went with harold clements. there was 50 ãb51

republicans. so 26 is going to win. so harold freilich comes to elroy to meet me. he didn't support me. he comes in and i still remember i was in the front room in my mother's house and harold fraley knocked at 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon. he came in and he sat down and he said, you know i'm on the floor speak a speaker i said yeah everybody's called me. he said i need your vote. i said that's good, so today. he says i'm no conservative. i said i'm a conservative too. he said will you support me? i said i tell you what i will do, if you put me on joint finance ãbthere is a freshman, they wouldn't put any freshman on joint finance but i knew i was young and nobody would pay me attention. i was on joint finance they had to. so i have been around the capital a long enough that i was playing politics. so i told freilich, if you want me at my boat, put me on joint

finance committee. he said, can't do that. no freshman gets on joint finance. that's what you have to do if you want my vote. nothing happens. about a week later he calls up and says i'm considering putting on joint payments. i said, when you make up your mind, call back. [laughter] week later he calls back and says, i decided to put you on finance. he says you are my 13th boat. i even remember that. i was his 13th boat. three days before before the vote it was 26 ã25. both sides thought they had one. fraley calls me three days before the vote and said john shabbat doesn't trust you and doesn't think it about for me. i said are you going to put me

on finance? he said yes. then i'm voting for you. the day of the election everybody was saying freilich one, everybody said harold clements was going to win. it was 26 ã25, harold freilich one by one vote. so he called me up and he said, do i have to put you on finance?i said absolutely. so he did. that's how i got on joint finance as a freshman. it was interesting times. the. >> we jump ahead a bit and john shabbat gets a federal judgeship and you become assistant ãbyou become minority leader of the assembly in the early 80s. >> right. >> tony earl was elected in 82. you are thinking about running for governor but staked your run on increasing number of republican assembly seats in

84. can you talk about that and how it took you around the state? >> i decided, i wanted to run for governor and i knew nobody knew where elroy wisconsin was. nobody knew who tommy thompson was, how can you run for governor with the first name like tommy? it doesn't give you any great deal of confidence. somebody with a name like tommy. anyway, i knew i had to get around the state to get people to know me. i also knew that the election in 64 ãb484, was going to be a crucial one. the republicans in the assembly only had 40 seats. i went to the convention, the republican convention, people were asking are you going to run for governor against tony earl in 86? i said only if i can increase considerably the number of seats in the assembly.

i still remember tom loveless and tony earl saying they like me but they said tommy comey made a terrible mistake. it had the press that tommy thompson is putting his stake running for governor by increasing the number of seats in the assembly. so i went around and i had three beautiful charming women with me. one was bobby benson from portage, who was representing the republican party. she always wore these flamboyant hats. remember when you go to the kentucky derby all the big hats? she had a hat for every occasion. like this. she went around and she would fly up and hobby be was the caucus chairman, i appointed her caucus secretary. and it diane hardwick was my administrative assistant. barbie would fly in and it diane and ãi would sleep as

they would plot up things. we would recruit candidates and raise money for the assembly. nobody thought, everybody wanted to give money to the senate because they didn't think we had a chance in the assembly. all i went around and butch johnson was a big log are up in hayward. he called me and said, if you bring that woman appear to hayward with that big hat, i'm going to disown you and what i can give you any money. [laughter] she had big high heels and a big hat. so we went up there and she was with me. she charmed the whole thing. it was all loggers and she was the hit. we raised a lot of money and we got some good candidates. i went around all around the state. getting my name out there. recruiting candidates.

raising money for the candidates. so all these republican candidates that one in 84 we picked up eight seats. that it was the biggest story ã ãsherman dreyfus said that was the biggest story that wasn't written was the fact that tommy thompson and his team engineered eight seats. we did it take over but we came so close to getting control of the assembly. he said it was a tremendous accomplishments. that set me in a tremendous position because the republicans in the house really loved me. because i raise money for them and organize. these assembly individuals, 48 of them now, were my field force. they were the individuals that campaigned for me when i ran for governor in 86. raise the money. brought me into their organizations and everything. that's how i was able to build a statewide organization, much

to the chagrin of the candidates who ran against me. much more organized and one thing about me, nobody has ever given me every thought that i was going to win. everyone of my elections everybody thought i was going to lose. including those individuals that didn't think i could take over control of the assembly. all i ever wanted to do was win and become speaker. i never wanted to become governor, i wanted to be speaker of the assembly. when i knew i could become speaker of the assembly, could never get enough republicans elected the assembly that's when i decided to run for governor. >> 86, going down to the wire against tony earl, very good story i think.henry meyer told you that he thought the kenosha mayor ã >> this is a funny story. >>. [laughter] >> john bilotti is his name. >> john bilotti had won the election of mayor by one vote. henry meyer was ãhow many of you remember henry meyer, the mayor of milwaukee? wonderful guy. almost a socialist.

democrat. and was proud of his democratic heritage in the past but he couldn't stand tony earl. and because tony was going to put a prison in milwaukee. anybody remember that? tony wouldn't back off of that. so henry meyer called me up and said come over see me i'm going to support you. can you imagine henry meyer, who's never supported a republican in his life, called me up out of nowhere to come over to have me come over so he could support me. i talked to him for a while and he said i won't build a prison in milwaukee, he said good i will support you. he said i think i can get the kenosha mayor to support you. so he called up the mayor and said this young tommy thompson wants to come over and have lunch with you and be a friend to me and meet with him. he's a good guy. i'm supporting him. so i went to kenosha. kenosha at that time kenosha,

superior, and milwaukee are the most democratic communities in the state. and kenosha is old-time democratic union bosses and supporters. they never elected a republican. so i went down there and mayor henry meyer, who had just won his mayor. didn't want to be seen with me. so he says, come into the parking lot. here's this guy, and mayor, comes out of his office with a hat over like this.over his head. [laughter] he comes over, knocks on the window. i got my driver john trees, he said are you thompson? he said i'm the driver. [laughter] he said, mayor and tommy thompson. he said i can't shake your hand somebody might see me. he said i'm going to go back in that side door but him to leave it open. come on in the side door.

i said you want me to go in. no i can't be seen with you. wait five minutes and don't talk to anybody. so he went in, i said what the hell is going on here? what meyer set me up for? we went in i said are we going out for lunch he said no i ordered sandwiches.so i went in the door but of course being tommy thompson i shook hands with everybody i could see. i went up and down the thing. i walked up the steps and shaking hands with everybody and he came out and said don't shake hands. he came in and he said did anybody see you? i said i don't know. [laughter] long story short i went in there we had a sandwich and i said, what can you do for me? he said well, i can support you but i can't do it publicly. can you put on a fundraiser?

no i can't do that. can you go down the streets? no i can't do that. what can you do? he said i can talk to some republicans. i said okay. i don't know if ãbimmediately after i got elected i got a call from john bilotti saying, you know i supported you tommy, because i didn't have a job. and i gave him one. i don't think he ever once did anything for me but it was funny. can you imagine the mayor of kenosha coming down like this. nobody would see him because he didn't want to be seen with a republican. it's a sign of the times. >> we have to skip some things. i do want to get were running a little low on time.a couple washington stories.i think important to talk about your day on 9/11. you were coming in, in the car when the first tower was hit? >> i'm not going to get to talk about it? >> yes.

right on the heels of 9/11. >> 9/11 changes. in this country we average 36,000 americans die every year from the flu. last year was 70,000. so i decided one of my causes, located welfare and economic development when i was governor, was to come up with a ubiquitous vaccine for the flu. i had invited scientists in from all over and they were coming on 9/11. several of them were going to have a daylong seminar of the best scientists and virologists that we come up with to be able to come up with the vaccine. i was given a speech in the

morning and the first thing i heard coming in was, the first at 8:46 am the first plane hit the tower. then 16 minutes later the second one. by this time i was in the ãbi was in my office and i called him, i knew something was really bad because it was beautiful out. the sun was out and everything was like this. i called in my lawyers and i said, the president was in florida, the vice president was down in some bunker. because everybody thought we were going to be under attack. so i knew i had to be in charge. i knew there was a lot of people that would be injured and somebody had to take care of them. so i called in my lawyers and it's never been done before, i don't even know if i have the authority to do it, i called my lawyers and and i said, i want to declare a national health emergency. so, he said i don't know if we

can do it. i said don't tell me i can't do it, figure out how to do it and figure out how to get back here. this is 9:16 am i said you have 45 minutes. at 10:00 a.m. i declared a health emergency. we were the last ones to get a plane. remember all the planes were grounded. i got a plane in the air, there are eight medical depots around america that are top-secret that you can get tons of medical supplies. the closest one to new york we sent the plane up there, filled up the plane with medical supplies and fluid to new york. we had it thereby 5:00 p.m. in the afternoon. the only one outside the air force back on the plane up in the air to fly and get medical supplies to new york. we had kits, medicines, masks, gloves, everything like this. we got it up there to be unloaded. at 11:30 a.m. cheney bright idea was that all the secretaries except for colin powell and don rumsfeld, had to

go out to a cloistered site in west virginia, there is called camp whether down 175 feet, got a huge city down there. 175 feet and they didn't know what was happening and wanted to make sure there would be one secretary alive. and i wouldn't go. they are helicopters down going and i wouldn't go. i had all these things to do. so i was ordered to go by the vice president to get on the plane. i said i'm not going. he said you are going to be arrested. the plane was supposed to be up there 12 pm, came out at 12:20 pm and they had federal security guys out there to arrest me.my chief of staff bob wood and my deputy secretary thought it would be great for me to get out of there so he could be in charge so he was pushing ãbit would not look good on this terrible day to have you arrested.

my own security came in and said tommy you can do it. i said to my one guy, my really good friend mike galindo, i said mike if i have to go you get the car out there, you find the back door to camp whether and i'm going to walk in and walk out and you get me back here right away. he said okay mr. secretary. so always secretaries are mad at me because they been waiting since 12 pm. i get out on the helicopter at 12:50 pm, we got there about 1:45 pm. the driver said we check-in, grant dormitories everything down there. every one of the departments has got places for office and so on. they gave me a billet and a blanket and cleaning stuff, shaving and all this. i took it in and through it on my bed and i said, i'm tired. i'm nervous. can i take a walk? i said where's the back door. it's a mile and and a half i walked, i got out there. that's how big this place is. a mile and and a half and i walked out there and here's

michael and otto there. i said go as fast as you can. we were doing 100 miles an hour coming off the mountains of west virginia going into madison. i got there at 4:30 p.m. back in the office. much to the green of the deputy secretary and i took over and a lot of the employees wanted to see me. i said ãbthey said are you going to open tomorrow. i said i'm going to be here and i'd love to have you come. the next morning at 5:00 a.m. i was out in front of the humphrey building shaking hands with any ãbyou got to imagine everybody was really afraid because the plane coming from that was going to hit the capital that went into the things in pennsylvania would've gone right by the humphrey building. all they were rightly so ãbi said i'm going to be here. if you are not afraid, come on

in. they said i'm afraid that i'm coming in. i stood there and shook hands with every one of my employees. welcoming them and i made it up to new york the first secretary to go there two days before bush got up there i was up there walking down the streets of new york. i'm going out to see the hospital, meeting individuals that were injured. and those individuals ãbone of the worst things i've ever done in my life as i went down to the morgue that afternoon after 9/11. you can imagine the poor people were trying to find their loved ones, bringing in hairbrushes and i went in there to thank the good doctors, some that had worked for me. they were having fragments of bodies, trying to get dna. it was utterly impossible to believe that that took place. >> one more washington story and then maybe we can open up for a few audience questions and we also have to see status and open up to questions around the country. if you would, great story, you

are on point for medicare part d. but it was a brutal fight on the house floor and there was a story you told at the end where you are like one vote short and trent franks republican from arizona, for i am not he wants to talk to who? >> the president of the united states. i needed his boat and we needed his vote to have the 217 votes to carry part d. part d as you all know who was my idea and my department came up with it even though george bush gets the credit for it, it was really tommy thompson. when you get to part d, remember, thank me.we put it together and we were having a tough time getting it passed. and speakerácalled me over and he said, trent ãthe 4:00 a.m. president bush to his credit was wonderful. he came in from england, he had

just been over in london. i think to see the queen if i remember correctly. he had just landed the night before. as tired as you can imagine. so i have this individual congressman, two from arizona. they wanted to weigh in on who the president was going to appoint as federal judge. in arizona. i called over one of the presidents individuals and i said, you got to call the president. so i can talk to him and he's got to reassure these two congressman that he is going to appoint a conservative. the judge in arizona. but they won't vote for part d. he said you want me to call the president at 4:00 a.m.? i said yes. so the president gets on, not happy. well imagine.

they woke him up. i said mr. president we have a situation, we have two individuals, they may vote for part d and we needed in order to pass it. if they get some reassurance from you that you will appoint a conservative, he said put them on. they got on the phone and he said, yes sure what you want? he talked for probably 15 minutes. afterwards, i wasn't on the phone so i don't exactly know what was said.but after it was all over he said, trent franks and the other congressman, said they would vote for it. so we called the floor. this is after we kept the role open, the longest i think it had ever been opened. from about 1:30 a.m. to about 4:30 a.m., they voted and at 4:30 a.m. it passed.

by that time there was two other individuals. we ended up with 219 boats. we only needed to 17. so it passed and that was the beginning of part d. which has turned out to be one of the most popular programs in medicare today. everybody loves it and it's worked out very well. very effective program. and then the president called me at 9:00 a.m., i didn't go to bed that night. i worked ãbi went right to the floor of the capital to my office. the president said good job tommy but if you ever call me at 4:00 a.m. i'm firing you. [laughter] that's the story. >> we have a microphone over here folks. i don't know how easy it is logistically but we ask that you come over and ask your questions. >> thank you. thank you doug and governor thompson. we will take a couple questions from those here just line up at the microphone. then we will keep it the conversation going with questions from the c-span book tv viewers.

we will also take a couple questions. >> good to see you, thanks for coming back to town. you write very movingly in the beginning of the book how you really wanted to be secretary of transportation. health and human services. so you could bring high-speed rail to the country the same way a republican president eisenhower ã >> are trying to set me up to get me in trouble. >> yes. [laughter] >> you know i love you but you have a tendency of always trying to get me into a political difficulty. >> to write about the importance of high-speed rail. >> i believe in high-speed trains. [applause] elroy at the turn-of-the-century was a railroad city. the chicago northwestern came up and turned around in elroy and then down to minneapolis. growing up at age 12 i used to

jump on a train coming into town when it slowed down and wrote to the other end of town and jumped off. so i love trance. it's funny i never broke a bone. >> my question is, would wisconsin and the midwest be better off if wisconsin had the high-speed rails system that governor walker canceled? >> yes. don't put me in a position of pitting myself against governor walker because i support him but people can differ as to whether or not they believe in it but i believe in high-speed trains. i've always believed in that. i think high-speed trains is something that would solve a lot of problems. you go up and down the interstate. we have to keep building it. the bypass around madison, you have to keep ãbit's so crowded. sooner or later we have to find ways to move people. i think high-speed trains has got a lot of opportunities. >> thank you. [applause] >> if you ever find that an

opponent is telling missed truths about you how do you usually handle that? >> if one of your opponents is untruthful during a debate or during a campaign, how do you handle that? >> you just say that that's not true. and you are full of beans. whatever you want to say. sometimes it's not quite as ãb i've got to tell you. i to this day everyone of my democrat opponents that ran against me is my friend. tony earl is still my friend i love the guy. he's wonderful.

he's a great individual. tom loftus and i are the best of friends. in fact, if he was here he would probably stand up and say that's absolutely true. even though we fought on the floor, the nice thing about back when i was in the state legislature you could disagree, you didn't have to be disagreeable. tom loftus i think the world of him. and chuck whilehuck and i never along when he was in the state senate but since we got out of it chuck is a friend of mine. i think he's an outstanding young person. ed garvey and i had troubles. throughout our whole life. but i felt really sad when ed garvey left. he had a lot to offer. his point of use were not mine, but i always consider them very honest individuals. i guess i've been lucky. i've had opponents that i respect and admire and all of them today i still would say our great individuals. not as good as me but.

[laughter] >> thank you. >> that's not true. they were very good. and quite reputable. >> thank you. >> one more. >> governor, you said that one of the things you regret is building so many prisons. >> yes. >> are there too many people locked up for too long? >> that's true. >> how do we change that? >> follow my lead in the next several months. i'm pushing through a new what's called a second chance initiative. at the time that i was governor, you got to put yourself back then. there were a lot of judges who were not sentencing people to the right sentences. the proration of parole system if you knew the right person and right thing you got out sooner. it was not a very ãbif it

didn't think it was a very good system.that's why we got truth in sentencing. to make it so there was no scam or race whatsoever. i thought at that time if you remember there was a prisoner that got out real early and a young girl was out trick-or-treating and ãbi don't know if you remember that. and was killed and it was a very heinous crime. so the people ãbone got out in milwaukee and at the tenure of the times, jerry, people really thought we had to get tougher. i bought into that. since then i have evolved into believing now that we can do a much better job. here's what i want to do. and i'm passionate about it. first of all i want to introduce my daughters kelly thompson, [applause] kelly is the head of the public

defender. the joke was around the thompson family is kelly ãbi was putting them away and she was keeping them out. [laughter] interesting conversation. but kelly is dedicated. i really gotten around to her point of view because what i want to do is i want to take an assessment.i want your help on this. i want an assessment of the prisoners. some prisoners should not get out. there's some bad people out there. but there are some good people that because of the circumstance, the way they were brought up, and i was no angel in high school or college. i look at some of you and that you probably agree with me that you probably did a few things that were not always according to the law. but what i want to do is make an assessment. find out those individuals to do it and i want to turn the

prison in racing into a vocational school. i've talked to the head of the college blackhawk university. constance college and vocational school. i want them to set up a vocational program and i want to get fox con and wmc to sponsor prisoners. ... alcohol and drug problems. i want to put them through an intensive course as long as the university -- and then i want employers to sponsor them. they become interns. they go to school in the morning come back to prison in the afternoon. if they complete everything without it breaking any rules or

regulations, they get out of jail free card to go to work for that one. the company takes responsibility for them. you will see individuals moving into the workforce educated and not be dependent upon alcohol and drugs and become meaningful members of society. we would not have the rate of recidivism. we can make things happen. we can make individual prisoners meaningful members of society. i need your help. [applause] that is my new cause. that in pancreatic cancer. >> i will be glad to help. >> you are on my team and always have been. thank you very much. >> a couple more questions in the room. make your way up to the microphone.

a few questions from our national audience on book tv. you will be able to hear the questions here in the room. keep the conversation going. silence your cell phones. that would help with the reception. >> 748-8200. east and central zones. if you live in the mountaineer pacific time zone, have a question for the longest-serving governor of wisconsin or one of the longest-serving journalists in wisconsin, paul. how many of you over the years have read doug in the times in the journal? how many of you have voted at 1.4 tommy thompson. [laughter] not half? how did you win. >> democrats i'm trying to convert. [laughter] >> let's take some calls. we will take questions from the audience. the book is called tommy my journey of a lifetime.

james is calling in from seattle. james, go ahead. >> let's go back to the reagan administration. a tax bill in 1986. a top tax rate. another republican president, he had texas. after of these tax cuts, a meeting recession. not having any money. crime such as newt gingrich and these guys. you are all about treatment. what are you going to do to get these black people that still can't get jobs and things. recently, it was ruled that the

three strikes, i still know people that are locked up for this. we don't know these things. why is it when democrats -- >> insert. governor thompson if you could address. >> absolutely. individuals that are incarcerated. i am trying to find ways. they have to go through an assessment. get past alcohol and drug treatment. being reintegrated into our society and having a beautiful job. the thing we do right now as we have individuals get out of jail , still have alcohol and drug problems, little training and looking for a job. i want to take care of the situation. sort of a smooth assimilation

back into society. helping a lot of individuals, both black black and white, as well as latinos and a few of us irish people. >> how is the opioid crisis affected wisconsin? >> i think it is as bad here as any place. i have not written about it directly. you know, it is one of the biggest issues our state faces. >> we have another james calling. this one from east greenwich rhode island. we are listening. you are on book tv. >> i do not mean to be her on such an important topic like opioids. i came in a little bit late with the kenosha story which was fabulous. the book sounds great. what about your time in geneva?

>> absolutely. the global fund to me as one of my biggest accomplishments. it's going to probably pay bigger dividends worldwide than anything else i've ever done. first of all, he called : -- colin powell saying he would like to talk to some people about aids, tuberculosis and malaria. he called me and i said absolutely. came down in met with us and then we went over and we talked to president george w. bush. it was on a sunday afternoon. we convince the president to put some money into the global fund. i think it was a hundred million dollars. the global fund started with that conversation we raised $100 million from the united

states to raise the global fund. we raised $5 billion. now it is up to $8 billion. it is probably the best international fund to help people, give people hope to reduce hiv,, tuberculosis and malaria. i am absolutely overjoyed with the success it's had. i am very happy and appreciative of the small part i was able to play and setting it up and getting it started. i have been to africa several times as chairman. it is amazing the countries in africa that absolutely are so impressed and love the united states because of the global fund. the viruses, medication to them, i can tell you a beautiful story, but it would take too long of having one of my

daughters, tommy, go, go with me to africa and meeting a woman with nine children. she cried and said, you know the nice thing about what the united states has done and what you individuals are doing on the global fund is that metro viral virus medication. i will live long enough to see my children graduate from school and not become part of the 20 some million orphanages around africa. that was just so moving and so poignant of what the america has been able to accomplish. it was a great story. >> armando. scottsdale arizona. good morning. you are on book tv. >> thank you so much. i had the pleasure working for you for your administration. i just wanted to call and say hello. i also wanted to ask you,

wisconsin products have already been known around globally. you did an incredible job of promoting wisconsin. also around the globe. what is your take going on right now with the terrace and some of the things coming out of washington that is putting some really serious economic impact. not only to our neighbors and our allies, but also to folks here at home. if i could have your comments on that. again, rate to see you and talk to you. >> thank you. thank you for your hard work for me in the state of wisconsin and promoting our great products. everybody knows i am a cheerleader for wisconsin. i love wisconsin and i love everything about it. any chance i get to talk about wisconsin and its products, it's a good day for me. thank you for your help and thank you for remembering that. as far as tariffs, i don't like

like them. i have to come back to what i do right now. one of the things that i do right now and that's being a farmer. i raise corn and soybeans. 800 acres of them. i've got a lot of corn and a lot of soybeans. i can assure you that tears are not helping the farmers in wisconsin or across america. i am hoping that the president is able to get china to come to the negotiating table and if they're able to reach an agreement, tariffs don't help anybody. fair trade would help everybody. i am hoping that the president is going to be successful. tariffs are not helping the economy of wisconsin, especially farmers. >> i should ask you this without governor thompson present. >> can i first they one thing. the opioid that you asked me. i did a profile of my police

chief year so ago. one thing he told me was he had not gone a shift, a eight hour period without getting a call. i just, i wanted to bring that up. that was him here in madison. governor thompson's legacy. i think we have hit on a few of the things this afternoon. i think promoting wisconsin, being a big tent, one thing we did not talk about was the fact he brought a democrat into his cabinet. passionate about his own ideas. i am a little bias. i think it is a great legacy. >> i hope that i said that right. go ahead.

>> hello. >> we are listening. please go ahead. >> talking about putting people in prison. to educate them. i think that that is a great thing. spend their time and go right back out and nothing to look forward to. i think it is a great thing to rehabilitate them. you said earlier that you had evolved. >> yes. >> how did you evolve? >> i evolved into believing that there is a better way. inset adjusts blacking people up. individuals will go thou. without giving them the training , it is a no-win situation for them. the rate of recidivism is going to continue to rise.

i want to break the rate of recidivism by giving individual prisoners and opportunity to get training and to get rehabilitated as far as drugs and alcohol. have a ticket into a job. instead of having to get kicked out of prison and saying go find a job, i want that to be sort of a matriculation from being in prison right into the workforce. i think if we are able to do that unable to keep giving good jobs, i think we can break or reduce considerably the rate of recidivism and that is what i want to do. >> a question right here in madison from this gentleman. >> my name is joel. you spoke just a little bit about the global fund and the proud work you have done. i think everyone in the room appreciated your story about

africa and how much it impacted peoples below the u.s. and stuff i do not want to put you on the spot in terms of criticizing someone i know you support. at the same time, obviously, we have a president that seems a little bit challenged in regards to appreciating that outreach efforts of the united states in the united states. what advice would you give him about, you know, those efforts efforts. what can be done to bring him around to a better recognition about the impact of how things that the u.s. does. >> i support the president. i think overall he has accomplished some great things. i applaud him for that. i do not like his tweeting. i told him i think he should stop tweeting. it is not presidential.

he seems to feel that that is one way he can get his message out. that, in and of itself is helpful. i think if he was more, if he would not have been so willing to pick a fight and much more for getting this minister release from turkey. the president has had many successes. you have to give him credit for that. if he can act more presidential, you know, and at the same time i think his approval rating would be much higher than it is today. less on the tweeting. be more presidential. don't be such a bully. keep accomplishing great things. i think you would go down as a very good president.

>> it could be a great boom to wisconsin. whether or not great for people that develop the package, still to be debatable. fox con is much more of a success in milwaukee than it is in hurley, elroy and superior. they will not see the impact. anytime you have somebody that will spend billions of dollars in your state and with high-paying jobs, yet the the say that's not bad. that's good. overall, in the long run, it will be good for wisconsin. what i have negotiated that? i will defer on that right now. i do not think so.

>> i apologize. we have a caller from texas. this is jim. hi, jim. >> yes, governor. your progressive agenda makes you sound more like a democrat than a republican. i have a question for you. >> a lot of republicans think i've denied the democrat party their membership fees for a long time. [laughter] >> i need to assess question. do you believe they can provide everybody wanting a job with the job? >> yeah. i certainly do. if they want to work, there are plenty of jobs out there. there is no question about it. i believe very much in my republican philosophy. i also believe that once you get elected, you are elected to all the people.

i also believe that democrats have some good ideas, as well well as republicans. those individuals in power, should do what they can to mesh them together and do what is good for the people. i think that that is what i did. i also have something that probably force me into the situation. probably more so than i probably would've volunteered if i had all of the stars or all the power to do so. the democrats control all process of government when i became governor. i could sit and do nothing. the head of the majority and steve and other democrats secretary of corrections. what i did was i tried to find the best ideas possible from democrats as well as republicans

and bring them together and give credit. as president reagan once said, it's amazing how much you can get done if you don't care who gets the credit. if more politicians would believe that and go along with that, you would get a lot more done. even though i am a republican, i think, i think there are a lot of democrats out there with good ideas and we should bring them forth. not as many as republicans, but overall we need to come together more as individuals are statesmen and try to do what is right for the state and the country. >> barbara in atlanta. we have 30 seconds go ahead. >> thank you. i wonder what you think we should be doing for medicare today. try to make it sustainable for the seniors coming on down the pike in record numbers. >> if i knew that answer, i would be president of the united

states today instead of just being an individual friend of doug. medicare is a very complex thing i think we did a great job in part d. what we need to do is something that i've asked people to do for a long time. i wish there was the power to do it. the best thinking democrats in the best thinking republicans to sit down and take a look at medicare and leave your party agendas at the doorstep and go in and say what can we accomplish together. if we don't do that, we will end up -- if they come up with an idea just like obama came up with obamacare, there was no republicans that supported it. as it is republicans got the

power, they tried to dismantle it. all of the great achievements, it's always been done on the bipartisan basis. medicaid, social security, workers compensation. all done on a bipartisan basis. that is why, in order to achieve what you want and what i want is to make medicare solve it for years to come for everybody. we have to sit down and we have to come together on a bipartisan basis. what that solution is, i can't can't tell you at this time, but i know it's there. >> how are you? >> good. >> i was watching my grandson play football today. >> i heard you say that when you walked in. >> what would you say your

experience? what do you think the role of state and federal governments are in addressing these crises? >> there is no easy answer. i studied this a lot. almost 60% of people to get strung out on opioids are individuals that first get the taste of opioids from their doctor. there've been too much prescriptions by doctors. i got my knee replaced and i got fiftysomething oxycodone. i did not take them. we have to look at how we dispense it. make sure the person taking care of it don't have pain. have to put money into treatment money into finding better medicines. there are still many things out there that we have to do as a society. we are not doing enough.

>> you are not accomplish the solution we need. opioids is a terrible problem. it is not a minority problem. it is not a rich problem. it's not a poor problem. it's an everyday problem. we have to start looking at cures. we have to find ways we have better prescriptions. methodology that we have right now. all of this goes a long way. there are things out there that we have to do more not doing enough of them. >> tommy, my journey of a lifetime. doug moe and tommy thompson. thank you, gentlemen. [applause]

ten minutes. margaret hagerman will be here. talking about her books white kids growing up privilege in a racially divided america. you're watching book tv on c-span two. [applause] [inaudible conversations] here's a look at some authors recently featured on book tvs afterwards. our weekly author interview program that includes best-selling nonfiction books and guest interviewers. former secretary of state john kerry reflected on his life and career.

emory university african american studies chair carol anderson provided a history of voter suppression. new york magazines rebecca traced her looked at how women's anger has been used to transform political movements throughout history. in the coming weeks, macy will report on the opioid crisis in america. josé antonio vargas will discuss his life as an undocumented immigrant. this weekend, trumped 2020 campaign via advisor and fox news guest analyst gina offers her opinion on the current political environment. >> i do believe that most of us, not meaning meaning you, you may be the great exception. having an unusual sense of confidence. if you want to call that narcissism, i don't have a problem with with that. a dangerous source of narcissism? i do not think so.

are there dangerous sources, absolutely. >> airing saturdays at 7:00 p.m. and sundays at 9:00 p.m. eastern and pacific on book tv on c-span two. all previous are available to watch online at book tv.org. >> c-span watch book tv 20 years ago on c-span two. since then, we've covered thousands of book festivals. spanning more than 54,000 hours. in 2001 david macola discussed his biography of john adams. >> it was here in this library, the great library of congress, while i was employed in the government job as a young man that i first discovered the flow of history and first discovered my vocation. found out what i wanted to do. i can never ever express

sufficiently my gratitude to the congress. when you think of what we have in this country, and our public library system, there is nothing like it in the world. when you walk through the doors of a public library, anywhere in the country, little town, big-city, doesn't, big city, doesn't matter, when you walk through those doors, you are walking through the portals of freedom. you can watch these from the past 20 years at book tv.org. type the author's name and the word book in the search bar at the top of the page. fall is a busy time for book fairs across the country. here's a look at some coming up. live coverage of the wisconsin book festival. october 27 and 28, tune in for our live coverage of the texas

book festival in austin featuring discussions on education, journalism, the middle class, the me to movement and more. the national book awards will be presented november 14 in new york city. we will wrap up our fall book festival season with live author talks and segments from the miami book fair. for more information and to watch our previous festival coverage, click the tab on our website book tv.org. >> still obviously very active as a senator. serving on committees. health, labor, pensions. she's got all for ducks in a row is she coming up for 2020 run? do you think she will be on that roster presidential candidates question. >> she did something just this past month that makes me think

yes. you know a lot about elizabeth warren. but last month, two weeks in a row, she brought out these sleeping pills. the first one was accountable capitalism act. this is something people have been writing about. our capitalist system, our corporate entities need to be more of a voice. she followed that up with an anticorruption bill. those are big statements. that is what i believe about this country.

>> you can watch us and all other book tv programs for the past 20 years apple tv.org. type the word book in the search bar at the top of the page. [inaudible conversations]

>> hi, everyone. welcome. i am emily clark. associate director of the center for humanities. we are very, very happy to be cosponsoring the visit to the wisconsin book festival to talk about her book white kids growing up with privilege and a racially divided america. maggie received her phd from emory university. she is currently an assistant professor so she actually

entered sociology at mississippi state university. the context of the families of local communities. in particular she wanted to find out how young people make sense of racism. the atlantic, l.a. times. time magazine. our own wisconsin public radio. a book that speaks really directly. also speaking to where we've been. hopefully making us think about how we want our future to be. please join me in welcoming meggie as she talks about the book. [applause]

>> hey. i am maggie. for a get started today i just wanted to take a second to think the book festival. especially connor for all his help. i also really want to thank you, emily, as well as the university of wisconsin center for the humanities. i also want to thank all of you for coming today. especially my friends that are here. thanks for coming. okay. this is the first time i have done a book talk like this. i will try not to be too academic he. we will see. i will start by discussing some of the data. i think it will be accessible. we will back out again and frameless projects a go to a couple of the other scenes without giving too much away. i want you to go read the book.

i drive 12-year-old edward home for basketball practice. snowflakes are falling from the sky. i turn on the wood chilled wipers to brush them away. he asked if he gets up at mcdonald's for a snack. i reluctantly agree. i think about where the nearest mcdonald's is located. edward looks out the window and says this is not where we usually go. we usually go to the one over by the mall. not thinking much about his comment i tell nicely this is the most convenient location and this is where we are going. he does not respond. i glanced in the rearview mirror to check his expression. edward is looking out the window. we go through the drive-through. i place the order in trouble around. edward continues to look out the window. he watches a group of seven children walk across a parking lot in front of us. the kids all look to be the same age as him. wearing close just like he typically wears. what are coats, hats, hats, jeans and gloves. they are black.

laughing, joking and caring their school backpacks. one of the girls makes a snowball and throws it at one of the boys. all of the kid laughs. watching the kids goof around, edward states definitively, this neighborhood really is not all that good, is it #what do you mean i ask. it just seems that there are a lot of poor people around here. we don't usually stop here, my mom mom says it's dangerous. i say why do you think she says it's dangerous? edward says i don't think she would say the less it is true. our turn to go up to the window. his attention shifts. he starts talking about his snowmobile. even as i listen to them chatter on and on, i am reminded of something edward told me. in other day a few weeks prior. we are all the same he said. race does not really matter anymore. we continue on into the snow.

that comes from the field no part of this project. i will talk about that in a second. i will share more of the kids voices. it is an interesting part of my research. i wanted to frame this work a little bit. tell you little bit about being being -- i do think it is important to understand what this book is really about. for your social scientists, studying how it is that parents, particularly black parents communicate with their children about race. largely referred to as racial socialization. we know that lack of brown kids are likely to experience racism encounters in america. whether it's in their neighborhood, school or other kids and so forth tiered preparing children for encounters of racism as well as preparing, as was teaching racial pride and resiliency, these are all parts of racial

socialization. the majority of this research has been conducted by african-american scholars and is focused exclusively on the experiences of black families. increasingly, though, research looking at latin families, asian, multiracial families, biracial families. when i was reading all of this scholarship in graduate school, i became really interested in this topic tiered i started wondering what goes on and why families question how are they communicating with their children about race. how does this work, especially when we know that many white people say they do not notice race. race is no longer a problem in america. what is going on in those families if they believe race is not a thing? one of the things that they are doing and their families to teach your children about race and how children are actually interpreting those messages.

how do we learn about race. then, also, what they what they actually think. what are their attitudes on these topics? i spent two years. i can talk more about the methods later if you're interested in. i moved to this particular community that i studied. there were 30 families that were included. all of the families identified as white. they also were identified as economically privileged as well. both parents had degrees. they were parents that owned, at least one of the parents owned a single-family home. had a significant amount of wealth. occupations that we consider to be prestige. occupations that were very prestigious. affluent people have the ability to make all different kinds of

choices. when faced with all the different choices about where to send your kids to school. why do they do that? i think it is also important to note that there have been a lot of scholarships on marginalized communities. you may be familiar. gangs and economic communities. poverty and homelessness. there is less research on people and their positions of power and privilege. i thought it was really important to figure out what is going on in those communities. that gives you just a sense. their families in their everyday life. some provided childcare. i spent time with their kids as they went about their day. i conducted interviews with parents and their children. i'm happy to talk more about this later, if you'd like.

i went back and reinterviewed the children a couple years later when they were in high school. they were between the ages of 10 and 13. go back a few years later talk to them when they are in high school. as they continue in i hope to go back and interview them again. here are my major findings. there are four. the first 1 i will not really give a lot of data from the book. i want to highlight the children's perspective. that is the richness of the research. i think it's important to talk about the parents. actions speak louder than words. whenever there is a hate crime or something like that, blog posts an op-ed's about how white people need to talk to their kids about race. it is important that white parents talk to their children about race. first of all, it should not happen in the aftermath of a racist event. the parents are doing things in their everyday life every day. they communicate race to their

children. only focusing on what parents say mrs. a big part about how children learn about race. what parents say to their kids about race, i think, based on on my research matters less. i talk in the book about how white kids learn by observing and interpreting the social environment in which they live. and even in this community that i studied, the parents made different choices for their kids some opted to live in a neighborhood that was predominantly white. isolated away from the metropolitan center. private schools versus integrated public schools versus integrated public schools. really high levels of tracking. why classes are in the ap classes and et cetera. what i try to sort of highlight, i try to look for a pattern in these decisions. there are actually three different groups of parents and families that i studied tiered

and a lot of times these decisions about neighborhoods are connected to these other choices. you make a decision about what neighborhood to live in, often times tied to what carpool your kid would be in. even things like, you know, soccer teams. connected to their local neighborhood tiered i talk a lot in the book about how these decisions that parents make shape what their kids think. again, i do not want to spend too much time with that. it's very complicated. i really do try to highlight how choices parents are making are really playing a powerful role in the kids perspective. i think that by talking about the kids voices, you will see what i mean by that. the second major finding here is as a result of growing up in these different racial contacts, i found kids actually have different ideas about racism and equality and privilege.

white kids think the same things about these topics. there is a tremendous variability. we will start by reading to you from this book. i will share her comments with you. i've given her the name natalie. she's grown up in a colorblind context of childhood. her parents opaque racism is a problem. she has basically lived her life and never come in contact with a person of color. she went to school that is 99.9% white. here is what natalie has to say when asked what she things about racism. racism is not a problem anymore. racism was a problem one all those slaves were around. everything was crazy back in the olden days. all those things. now, since martin luther king and eleanor roosevelt and how she went on the bus and she was

african-american, but after the 1920s and all that things change. presumably natalie is referring to the jim crow era in the story of rosa parks. her mom who listens to her daughter as natalie makes these comments does not intervene to correct her or guide her. she nods along as her daughter speaks. after the 1920s and all all that things change. natalie, as well as many other children clearly have not been taught much about the history of race and racism in the united states. either at school or at home. i did not attempt to quiz the kids on history when i interviewed them. through the course of our discussions i think they were underinformed with respect to the history of race. natalie and her sister erica also tend to flat in time. events and those taking place 100 years later later during the civil rights movement appear to

be one in the same to these kids only really famous race scholar. socially shared tales. almost all tell me that racism is only a feature of the past. something that happened during the olden days. people used to treat black people really terribly. not anymore. as a country we have moved on from racism. carly, she lives in the same community, i think we are good. i don't think that there are any issues. why bring it up? the kids don't even think about it. the name of the suburban community, the operational definition of that, they understand the united states to be a system and in which hard work is rewarded. almost all the children tell me racism is something from the olden days of the past and political equilibrium some and

opportunity equals out society. nothing these kids how rich people become rich, they mention hard work. poor people are poor because they're lazy or make bad choices while some discuss the bad economy, they also explained that anyone can get a job at mcdonald's at work their way up. "public school does not even cost that much, does it? i think it might even be free". anyone to go to school and try their best to go to college. even a poor black kid could try their best and move up. black parents must get "a better job". get a better job. they could stop getting things they don't absolutely need. i don't think black people do that job of saving money.

why would i do want to talk to their kids. they don't know anything about it. i'm going to switch it i'll be able to talk about another one. enjoys reading the new york times. conrad talks about a range of topics together. the views about what she is most passionate are the ones he holds on race and politics in the united states. why people don't realize it. he things part of the problem is why people don't pay attention to things happening around them as much as they should.

in arizona i know they passed a law where you have to care about your photo id or something. police are always topping latinos because they don't believe they are americans. they believe they are illegal immigrants. really they are just picking on people that are different race. that is wrong and racist. he tells me he read about it in the newspaper. he's had conversations with his dad. he says he's also discussed it with a friend. a lot of poor people in this area are black and latino. he continues growing more passionate. that is just not right. i think everyone should be able to eat and have a home. he says heavily and sits back in his chair. existing within the laws.

he also acknowledges a more structural racism and policies. i thought it was interesting. i think we have moved beyond racism. i think it is wrong to let illegal immigrants come and without a green card and steal our money. we work hard in america. they can't just come here and be lazy and take it weird as a country, i believe we've moved beyond it. >> growing up with the same type of privilege. they have very different conclusions about immigration and other topics. while the kids and sheridan

believe kids like connor and some of the kids other peers, they are much more able to talk about, even though they don't use words like racial wealth gap or intergenerational transfers of wealth, they are talking about those concepts with me. they really feel like the government needs a way to make up for inequality in the past. just one more quote. if you are black in your ancestors -- you never got a chance to sit upon a large sum of money. 99.9% of the upper class are probably white. you can really see how these kids are talking about race and class. i would be time here.

i want to tell you about a story. i wrote string cheese so i know what story does okay. kids use each other to make sense. testing ideas out and arguing about ideas. for kids that are growing up in a colorblind community where even talking about race is considered to be taboo or it's not okay, there is even a rule at the school that they can't use the word racist because the kids were using this as an insult. they say you are racist. no, we cannot use that term. basically silencing any actual discussion about racism. while eating string cheese one afternoon edward and his friends

debated whether black people have an action muscle to make them better in the legs. there is anatomical differences between white and black athletes. elite black basketball players proving the point. he peels the string cheese. dangles it above his mouth. without any direction. racist biological. of course, race is not biological. he will talk about that later. on another afternoon, carly and her younger sister and a friend discussed rihanna. they disagree about the race of rihanna. one girl thinks rihanna is black or at least a mix of the other girl believes rihanna is white and just wearing a lot of makeup to look can. the girl spent a lot of time debating this. rubbing as much bronze or make up they can on their skin to make sure they can get it as dark as rihanna's. she really wants rihanna to be white with bronzer rather than

black. those are moments where i am observing these kids. sort of in their everyday life talking about their plans to experiment with makeup and so forth. there is a lot of that in the book that you can read. not really paying attention to me in my presence. certainly a lot of things happening when i'm driving them to soccer practice in the backseat having conversations. okay. another topic that i think is of interest that i think plays a role is part of the context having to do with this thing that we refer to as contact theory. this goes back to some of the logic behind desegregating schools. this idea that if kids can come in contact with each other across the color line that will reduce. i can talk more about that later i do think that there are some ways in which it may work. some ways where it doesn't work. i did notice that, really, there

there was only one child of the 36 kids in this book that actually had close meaningful friendships with black kids. of all the kids in the sample. tyler. i won't read this all peak. he met these guys that he became friends with. when they were young. it was because they were at a playground. he says, you know, derek i met him in third grade because i saw matt my elementary school. i thought he is pretty funny. he likes to jump off things. he likes to jump off play structures and lands. i like that. we became friends. that sound like a basic statement, but i think think it's really powerful. the fact that these kids are in the same space when they are doing things like jumping off of lay structures. that is a kind a moment where

kids can actually form friendships. fast forward there in school now i asked tyler pianist black friends his black friends ever talk about race. he replies, not that often. tyler tells his mom about how sean got in trouble for having the put on his sweatshirt up at school. it is important to note that they told me about the no hood rule at school. he was kind of referencing this. one girl told me they only enforce it when the teacher really wants to yell at you. or if the child is black. one girl also tells me i wear my foot up all the time and i never get in trouble. they are noticing how they are treated as well as how their peers are being treated. tyler's mom calmly talk to him about this moment at school. asking tyler if the role is applied to all the kids are just sean? sean was really mad, too. they thought he got into trouble

they thought he got in trouble because he was black. clearly frustrated with the teacher. before he can say anything his older sister and her ups and offers her perspective. the conversation shifted to her being the focal point. tyler who quickly grow silent and tired wanders upstairs to his bedroom by himself. although this interaction is brief, it demonstrates even though he does not talk much about his friends that particularly in these moments, when he and his friend is getting in trouble at school. in a way that he identifies as racist. there is a lot to say about contact theory. just have kids hangout together we won't have racism anymore. that's not what i'm saying. i do think there are some powerful lessons that children can learn. especially equal status situations. not at the same kind of power

differential tiered on a playground rather than in a group. all right. so. second scene. all right. that is the 1 i was going to go into. i will be relatively quick. on the third period kids don't share the same ideas as their parents. this is something i've been really interested in. new research if you'd like. how kids are making sense of current political moment. a lot of assumptions that children just repeat the ideas of their parents. i do think that parents shape their kids and someways, there are some powerful moments in my research in which this was not happening. on saturday morning i sit in a coffee shop with meredith. she also lives in that colorblind context that i mentioned. and her mom. meredith stirs the whip cream on top of her hot chocolate with

her pointer finger. licking her finger and sticking it back in the cup. i asked her if she's ever witnessed an active racism firsthand. she said no and i'm taken aback when she says yes. she goes on to tell me a story. i remember one time i was at a liquor store with my mom about a year ago. there was a bunch of black guys in front of us. only two of them out of the three or four had an idea. they were obviously like 45. the guy would not let him buy the one bottle of liquor. and then my mom and i were there she was getting her bottle of merlot or whatever. the cashier did not even ask her for an idea. i went outside and i heard the black man talking in their car about white trash and sing all the stuff about the cashier. her mom interrupts. she says, but, i think when you buy something at the liquor store all the people in your party need to show their id. meredith interrupts and says those guys were not even

standing at the register. i was with you and i'm not 21. her mother rolls her eyes. if you say so. this sets her off emotionally. she grabs her cell phone and stops off to the bathroom. her mother goes on to tell me this is just one of her most recent teenage antics. god only knows what i have in store for the future. she believed we certainly believed the story and tried to smooth things over. she says of course the cashier was being racist. how ridiculous. later when veronica, the mom, is not around, she insists her version of the story was accurate. something was not right. it was racism. sometimes my mom is racist and pretend she is in. my mom confides -- she confides with me with frustration. it kind of worked the inverse

way, too. some children will come home from school and say racist things to their parents and their parents would be horrified and argue about that. there were some disagreements about current events that happen in the community that i don't have time to get into today. certainly i'm a there some disagreements. one more here. i do think this one is powerful. okay. :: :: :: :: an e-mail sent to me after the george zimmerman verdict and so gail is the mother and use media to con stray to -- after george zimmerman was found not guilty of murdering trayvon martin she

e-mail med but here chris' reaction. chris is outraged. tried to explain the disdistinct -- she as lawyer -- reand court sim that design to identify whether a suspect set of facts meets the element of the crime. the judge justice system its not designedded to fix so-social problems. be angry with us and society, not angry with the jurors, i present out a few good shored editorials for him. i don think he read them. he does nose need my input or perspective because he is adamantly of the opinion that the verdict is acknowledge outrage and travesty of justice. simmer more than means to be put away and the jury failed. that's not a perspective i agree with rue respect. he gets angry when don't agree

with behind 100%. despite the representation of an alternative view, chris develops his own ideas. so i think these moments are powerful ask they really demonstrat the agency that young people have especially when he assume that parents are really controlling what their kids thing, and i always talk to my students can how many times when you're a young person you reject what your parents think but stuff. that's mormon that people think -- more common than people think. the fourth finding -- i won't read from the book -- i rallied one more. i very strange for know read from the book, is the okay? the fourth theme is what i refer these conundrum of privilege. this is at the heart of the book and the argument. this emerged from the research and i wasn't even really expecting this. when i started paying attention to the decisioned parents were making, particularly when i was looking at their decisions

versus what they articulated, where their value they didn't line up. so this is where i get to the idea of conundrum of privilege. when white parents draw upon their own race and which is privilege to secure advantages for their children, like demanding that their child have the best math teacher or suing the school district when they don't like something, or using social and professional networks to get their child a summer internship or moving to a white suburb to escape the black kids, they're participating in the reproduction of inequality. for many of the white affluent parents in this study, regard's of where they lived or their politics, making decision how to raise their children meant navigating tension between their privilege and their values. so saying i really value equal opportunity but mitt kidded need have the good math teacher. the tension between those two things. on the one hand none of these parents in the book told me they

wanted to reproduce or reinforce racism. and for some they genuinely seemed to want to raise kids who rejected racism and they identified strongly as being antiracist. connor, that i read -- the kid that was fitting in that example and these parents believed they were committed no challenging inequality. but these parents admitted feeling conflicted when they used their social status to advocate for kids to have the best math teach are because thaw nye kid's would stuck with the bad math teacher and they were conflicted when the used the social prestige to kid their kids a summer internship and they felt guilty when they removed their children from explicit racist and contentious situations as a way of protecting them. one guy who -- the school situation becomes to racist and has to take his kid out of the public school' put her in private school. a how race and class privilege

work together because people of color can't remove themselves from racism. and so that's another example. but despite the sort of feelings of being conflicted, these parents still made these choices to benefit their own child, even parents that really truly i believe that they are antiracist. so i describe this as a conundrum of privilege and a tension between -- how i argue in the end of the -- -- between being a good parent and being a good citizen and i don't think the two principles should be in tension for many of the parent they'd seem to be in tension and many parents wanted the two things to align but i would hear the phrase, he care bit racial justice but it don't want my kid to by a guinea guinea pig.

the actual material advantages, the passing money on to youred, but may research shows the choices have a meaningful consequences for the way privileged white children under race and develop racial views in the united states. so the last thing i want to read is actually from the introduction which is strange to end this with the introduction. and the point i want to make its why i think this is important. so, i think there are couple reasons why it's important to study this subject. the first of which is that sociologists know very little about how the ideas that support racial inequality get reproduced from one generation to the next. we have have a lot of assumptions but don't know the mechanisms at play and how they work. it's important to understand hour racism -- how is that

reproduced or get reworked bet still lead to the same outcome. the second reason is that understanding how the ideas of future powerful people take hold during childhood its important. again there's a lot of research on people who are no not positions of power and that he reach says important but it's important to understand what is going on with people who experience various forms of privilege and the third and perhaps most pressing reason to has to do with race and class in the united states right now in the present moment and in applied sense. american children have ongoing public debates another race, world that has seen two completed termed of the first black president of the united states. political and racialized arguments about immigration and justice and violence in charlottesville, unprecedented youth access to other people through social media and growing youth activism and protest such as the emergence of "black lives matter" and other groups working for racial groups which are led

by young people. and have young participants. these are children growing up in a world that has seen white peers chanting trump and build the wall at basketball games thence predominantly -- children reporting bullying along the lines race and classrooms and immediate coverage who is subjected to violence and torture at the hands of the police, a heighten it discourse but inequality in the united states. in addition to the current events, a significant in the long history of racism in the united states, social science research to thes that white children receive the wages of whiteness from early ages and into young adult had. wages of whiteness. prince, run over to driving forces behind increased residence shall segregation involves decisions made by pointers where their white kids go to could and research findings white kidds moore he can likely to be considered

instant in the juvenile justice context or school discipline. when you i white young adults commit around such as in 2015 when the white man murdered church members or when a 22-year-old man shot a b.b. gun at police officers in new hampshire, their lives remained intact. young black people are murdered in second by the police when they're suspected of criminal behave such as tamir rice, or 14-year-old cameron tillman who entered an appan donned house with a bb gun. even though white youth are more likely to use illegal drugs arrest rates other do not reflect this reality. teachers perceive white kids to be more smarter and more capable. withdoctors think black children need more pain demonstration the demonstrate the thought that white children need more. these are the privileges of whiteness. i believe it is important to

examine empirically how white children not only are going to have power anywhere futures as white adults but also already have power and influence in the present moment as young white people and they're family and communities. pushing back against the notion that children lack agency or free will or power to shape adults, this book explores the power of white kids and their families, their schools, peer groups, extracurricular spaces and public discourse about who is mint and who is not, who is special and who is not, who i deserving and h is not. wild childhood is a playing where power and privilege take on ideological significance and also material significance for white youth. and the last thing i want to end with is of course the children are not a personal fault for their unearned advantages. their power is tied directly to the social structure of the society in which they live and to which they're born and their with hire are can is they asked for or not control.

i'm not interested in demonizing the children and their parents and not individually -- i am interested in confronting honestly what is going on beneath in the century pfaff within aflute white families and communities that perpetuates racism and racial inequality in the united states. that's all. [applause] >> we have 20 minutes for questions. he askat you ask them from the microphone because you're broadcasting. if you can make your way over we want to hear from you. so thank you. >> i have two quick questions, one is if you saw gender differences, and the other is you talked about a suburban, geographical area.

do you think that -- what impact that would be if i wasn't suburban or different geographical area. >> thank you for the questions. they're great. did not interrogate gender closely in this book and very up front about this. it's not about gender. but gender matters in this book and there are a lot of examples particularly in term odd extracurricular activities kids participate inment one example of water volley which is all girls. it apart of the book and i bring it up when it makes sense. in terms geography, that's the part one that i skipped over. i really go in depth and try to talk but how -- where people live, whether it's sub-under barn or part of the city, maybe the city is i racially diverse but have residential segregation. so most of the kids in the book, all of the kids are growing up in predominantly white communities, neighborhoods. so, yes, i think that geographic

region matters and the brooder geography shapes ideas. >> i loved your book and found it to be sher thought provoking. sparked a lot of conversations with my friends who are fellow parents of young children. i do have a question. there's a partner book where you talk but a school that has a lot of asian american children and white children and felt a bit like you glossed over that counting as diversity and i don't know if you had to field this question before or if you have had to talk about that. felt like if you're not black and brown, you doesn't qualify. >> a good question. i certainly wasn't trying to gloss over the numbers and if it comes across like that, that's not my intention. i was trying to get at is that particular school there's a choice made by the families that

live in the community but that school. the community has -- the kid live in a neighborhood and then it's divided in half. some kid going to the school that is preknock anywayly who it and asian american and other kids going to the school that is predominantly black and the understanding is connected to the racialized so the parents think that, hi kid goes to could with asian american kids and that's better. smalls interesting class differences there, too. and i think -- i have been getting questions about class, doing radio very intos where -- interview where people call up and yell at me. i'm not trying to parse out race and class, and i think that's also part of that, but thank you for the question. >> if you could talk but your decision to use middle schoolers

as your age base and if there's research about opening and changing before or beyond that. >> yes. another great question. one thing i try to do is approach i from at interdisciplinary perspective. i draw on child development literature and think what might -- certainly middle childhood is considered to be a moment in which kids are, a., spending more time outside their family because anywhere middle school and also developmentally thinking more ideal terms or able to think about social inequality. we know that children as young as three can talk but race and notice race or even able to sometimes apply some of the social ideas about race on to these distinctions. certainly kids of all ages are often concerned but fairness. but middle school is when the ideas take hold in a different way according to developmental scholars and i think there's not a lot of research on middle school as in younger kids and

high school. there's a great book walled despite the best intentions about schools. actually it's a -- they have that great book about schools and she has another book called rails in the schoolyard so enough about elementary school kids so a lot of research that looks younger and older kids but less that is doing ethnographic work with middle school kids. >> i'm involved in an organization, families for justice and been trying to encourage white parents especially to talk with their kid about race and racism since the time they're starting to learn how to walk. so two questions related. one is do you have any sense of how parents and parents are influencing each other or adults who are broader influencing how individuals are parenting their kids, and then second, it was

lovely to hear about connor and i'm wondering, is cop nor an armchair activist or -- because it's great to hear, like, yeah, there's some kids who seem to be on the right path, but is it a child who can intellectualize well the issues or a child that is actually able to do something and act on those beliefs. >> thank you for the questions. the first -- maybe i'll start with the second one base it's in my head. variation across the different kids. i didn't read the part where i go back and reinterview them in high school but a that's a remarkable time. and certainly some of the kidded like connor are participating in -- not just participating in activist work but they're being really thoughtful about their position and i'll sit any back and not try to take over this racial justice project.

i'll sit back and do what people of color tell me they'd need know time thought at was kind of remarkable given their age. guess not given their age, just in general. lots of times that's what happens with white people. but certainly i think that there's some range. one thing that was interesting was -- talk but the private school kid but some children going to really -- the private schools and have small classrooms and they're more able -- able to get outside the traditional curriculum and talk more about -- have a richer multi cultural history social studies and those kids are able to do all that intellectualizing and know what is happening but then there's not really putting those words into actions. so, yeah, i want to speak specifically about connor because i have to go back to my data but i think in general there's a range of that. in term of your first question, parents influencing other parents. yes, for sure. one way that parents often make

decisions about schools, we know from the researches, is by talking to other parents and go and visiting a school is, like, not happening us a much as you might think when parents are shopping around for elementary schools. a lot of times it's word of mouth. so i think in that respect i observed all kinds of interesting conversations about they water ballet and conversations happening between parents on the sidelines of sporting events, like the soccer field, the soccer field and then the sideline of the soccer field. so i think that the parents are influencing each other. >> i had a question. so, the conundrum of privilege and so this is something i thing about, and the book made me think about, ways i provide advantages for mr. children i haven't thought how that fits into larger inequality.

are there weighed other than, like, not giving your kids a leg up that you feel are useful strategies for increasing equality in schools, let's say, for parents who do other than just folk can you can you go --g on i won't advocate for the witnesses to get special dream. what can parent does that would benefit the citizen level versus just the parenting level. >> thank you. that's a great question. i have one example actually and it's from a conversation with someone that i had recently where they talked about how their child was having a negative experience at school with the teacher in this particular classroom and this guy that it was talking to, he -- he is a dean, he has lot of influence in his community, everyone knows him and likes him, et cetera. and so he complained a couple of times to the principal, what's

going with this classroom and something happened the principal whereas like, hey, just take your kid out of the class and putter in a different class and problem solved. and he was like, he told me he was having a moment, he was saying, so. faced with a choice, carrying but my own kid and getting him out of this come and all these other kids are left in the classroom with the teachers and all the problems. he talked about hoe he was trying to use his status in the community and in fact that people are thinking he is really great guy but he has a lot of influence to say, no, i'm going to keep my kid in the classroom and we need to figure out strategies to fix this problem because we can't let the problem continue. it thought what at powerful example of someone in a moment trying to figure out how to make a digits that will, yes, help their child and help all the other kids, not in a way that takes away from the efforts of

this particular school is prominently black in the deep south but it-it's not to like take over from the black parents who are calling the school complaining to ai'm going to save the day because i'm the white guy but thinking carefully in those moments about ways that privilege can be leveraged to help more kids than just your open. that's an example. there's and really great research -- a professor at wisconsin here, and she has a great book about how white people try to take over the pta or pto and how, like, they think i'm here to do good work but then they dominate. and so i think those are the dynamics that are at play. very well intentioned people but they're sometimes not -- their actions are not matching their words.

>> i'm wondering if any of the families or even the children that you researched had an opportunity to read your book or even some of the research and if you have had feedback or responses. >> thank you for asking that. yes, i have some of the families have read the book, some of the kids kids who are no longer kids have read the book, and i think that generally the response has been it's an accurate portrayal of what happened and that's the most important thing to me. i want to get it right. and i really try in the book to understand the world from these parent's perspective. i want to understand why it is they're making these decisions and how they're thinking about these things. that is in fact the job of anth nothing -- ethnographer issue have talked to the kid can one in particular who i think there are moments when having a mirror held up to you is unpleasant and

i think that's definitely -- she talked to me about that but also kind of interesting because i think that based on our conversation, this book is now shaping even how she is thinking about her own racial socialization in an interesting way. you're in this book, which is -- i'm shire sure is very strange to be in a book and that's making you think more carefully and critically but yourself and that. so, again, she told me she thought it was accurate. >> hi. so, you talk about i think it was connor meeting the other kid on a playground, an equal playing field. so i know you saw a lot of ignorance or ignoring issues or kind of covering them over, but i wonder if you saw any cases of well-intended racism, sort of like i should -- these people need my help sort of thing.

like, they're being treated differently because of their race in a positive way but, like, it's still sort of this racism. i don't know. >> chapter five is what you're looking for. [laughter] >> this chapter is called everybody is white, volunteering and vacationing. this gets into the white savior complex and looks at volunteering at the local level and then international trips that families take to teach their child but their child's own privilege but how that inned a vert tently is object identifying and exploiting the people they're encountering. gets to into a poverty tourism stuff. i think with what you're getting at. that its the theme of the book. >> any other questions? all right, well, are re done?

[applause] >> thank you for everyone here and watching at home. we'll turn in a foe moments. awe. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> you're watching book of the's live coverage of the wisconsin book festival. that was sociology professor

margaret hagerman. several more author talks and callins are coming up from the wisconsin book five. right now we'll take brief back and be back in 30 minute with more live coverage from madison in me meantime we want to show you a persian of a new program at book of the. it's a talk but his book, militant normals. >> they will tell you, you are alone. they will tell you that there's no one who thinks like you, you're some sort of weirdo because you believe that you should stand and respect the flag and the people who fight for it. you're some kind of freak becauseow want to support your own family and you expect other people to do the same. that your some sort of loser because you don't want to subsidize every bum, vagrant and hobo who comes along, and wants to chisel your hard-earned money off you.