mention, and doctor of the house by michael burgess, one of my colleagues. but i'm trying to do is draw from other people's experience is and insight which helps me navigate the issues i deal with. >> our host again this morning as the host of the popular public radio program into today's conversation as i said it will be broadcast at a later date. in addition to the work, founder and leader of the project, carried her of the civil conversations project and the best-selling author of among several other titles in inquiry

into the mystery and art of living. joining in conversation today is the professor of african-american studies and faculty associate in the program in law and public affairs and gender and sexuality studies at princeton university. that is a longer title than the one. a scholar of legal history, cultural studies and african american studies the work often focuses on multifaceted issues such as the influence of race, literature and music. the author of five books including the radiant and radical life of your brain, the winner of the 201910 america gradwell award for biography. her newest book a letter to my son be published in september.

other works include maybe forever stand the history of the national anthem which was a 2019 naacp image award nominee and on gender and liberation. she also wrote the introduction to the barnes and noble introduction of the negative of sojourner truth and eight bachelor's degree from yale university, harvard law school and phd from harvard university. we are so honored -- [applause] we are so honored to host her today on this return visit. please join me in a offering a warm welcome. [applause]

good morning. i am so happy to bring you back. i brought her here once before when we did a week of programs on a stage and it was a day of biblical range. we actually had to stop the recording to it three times and because just the nature of the stage. we were able to create a program but it was hard. i am delighted to bring her back and we will not be interrupted. >> it was wonderful despite the rain. [laughter] >> many things have changed.

the sound, congratulations. also, there were no questions. we talked a little bit yesterday about the definition of the word grace. i wanted to read a few lines from the new book which we will discuss in just a few minutes where you take on one definition if we may come back to this in the conversation but i want you to read this as we start. the catholic traditioin the cata form of grace that is the stuff of your school. it isn't defined by moments of mercy or opportunity. it is and good things happening to you. rather it is a good thing in you regardless of what happens. you can read them through

generations the same as a violent slave master society. that's what they hold on so that we may become. [applause] the fact that in my profession of journalism in particular and in the academy we are very sophisticated and skilled and investigating into telling the catastrophic and descriptive narrative and story of our time and not as sophisticated as telling the story and who and what we are and can become rich is not to deny what's going on but also to take this other

parts seriously that i feel you just named. and as we are going to discuss in your life and story you contain so many in your personal story of touched on so many of the stories of the times so i want to delve into that. it's divine intervention. >> a moment of silence.

one thing that is so interesting in your writing -- i don't know what that alarm means. [laughter] >> you also describe yourself as a child of the fragment. [laughter] >> we have to let that die down.

i am not prepared for smalltalk. [laughter] i'm guessing as a speaker they just talk through it that when we are recording we can't. >> and a child of the fragment and multiple traditions. there is a kind of traditional

black southern coming-of-age it is rather unusual for that part of the world. i grew up in massachusetts and i spent summers in alabama and chicago and in all of those places there are multiple encounters. i'm going to think of myself as a speaker that designates with within. i'd like to think so whether it

is from protestantism and europe tradition that speaks to me, i followed pathway. what strikes me between the time we spoke and now it's been a tumultuous moment. culturally and something that strikes me that i don't think i saw in the same way when we spoke before your mother and grandmother are catholic. your father raised u.s. jewish

and what i see is so many american divides, not just black and white with south and north. there's alabama, chicago, princeton, the religious and intellectual polarization enabled by class identity that is extraordinary in a moment like this. the racial inequality in the united states she said american history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more careful than anything anyone has said about it.

the best person in turning these worlds thinking about it as a source of insight and that is part of the process of maturing so i was thinking about being a little girl in chicago and having a trends documented when i was growing up, and the window into that experience including things like when i went to visit my friends you couldn't knock on the door because there was a fear that it might be immigration. then walking around the back steps and going int to the baset and see my friends who were ten

and 11 navigating financial business work negotiation so that now we are repeating the worst parts of our history when you see people being ripped from their parents in a way that is reminiscent to slavery, that is the repetition of the worst parts of history and for me it is also a recollection of those relationships so i'm trying to think about how we recognize each other as human to be more humane.

whatever little job it is to bring those stories through to add to the conversation. >> i want this to run through the conversation today. i like to play this term what will people looking back 100 years from now actually see. but i also know i notice when te becomes history they will look back at us. although it's very fraught to use the term p., so that

connection between human and humane it is the same, but some have that move as their salvation lies. >> absolutely. it's funny because one of the reviewer is in the process from my book on gender said you keep using this word i think about this on a daily basis, and also in terms of personal history so as a child of the sort of

movement i remember being five and 6-years-old like you care about birds and trees and at this moment we have come to fully realize there is no separation of those questioned of the environment and human suffering and the wide variety of injustices in the form of violence so they think about we in the global sense as we break off and in the multiplicity of the silos and factions. >> that is a complicated move for us to make. you wrote an article in 2016 if

they were talking about the genre of. >> i wasn' >> i wasn't familiar with this book honestly, but here's something interesting that you noted in that article. in 2011, there was the professor kenneth warren who declared there was no such thing as african-american literature because we had the first black president in the white house and of course where my mind went with 1989 declaration that this was the end of history and on

september 1121 we understood the history was back and had never gone away. >> and i feel like that designates also in your writing. >> one thing to ask is what is the investment in declaring the end, and i do think part of the investment comes from the desire for the new. so, wh why you let is why ... on vectorization to say that this is the end of history, the desire for the new is some is meaningful. kind of a regeneration after the kind that post-apocalyptic films and novels we want to think about what happens after.

>> we have to live with the residue, we have to live with the pollution. so you know, you try to revitalize the commitment, but you can't wipe away history in the midst of it but because there is a risk of repeating it because it lives inside of us. all of the ugliness and we still try to do things that are meaningful. >> i think that declaring the end of history is not too taking the consequences of history that it just hasn't shown yet. when i spoke a few years ago and

this article was written, we had elected in extraordinary accomplishment and one way i thought it was that also served to surface all of the unfinished reckoning. and that isn't what everybody expected. it was heartbreaking for me. once upon a time in 2008, you said we were wistful that her grandmother did to see a black man become president. our grandmother and a collective collective sense, all of our departures.

that night was extraordinary. i was in philadelphia and we wrote and people were in the streets cheering. i've also written after that i am so glad that my grandmother is in here to see this moment. you have these times you are overwhelmed with grief and tears and one of the things i said with respect to my mother who came of age in jim crow alabama. my mother left her youth through the white nationalist society. the feeling of sort of what will it take for the nation of us

collectively to take seriously the creed is foundational. not something that you can move in and out of based upon anxiety, fear and resentment that actually at a core value. one of the ways you have been working through this we talked about the identities. in other of two sons.

they were eight and 11. we were halfway through the second term. what was present in that moment was the shooting of trayvon martin. ferguson. i feel like in this book it's reflecting and speaking to them and the rest of us.

you started with a quote that you attribute to. it also feels voyeuristic. >> you wrote the indelicate assertion is in the thin air as a matter of fact hungry for your suffering or crude for sympathy. i want to acknowledge that right here. >> it is an echo when he talks about how does it feel to be a problem to which i felt an

answer and there is something to the fact. it is that humanity of our lives and also the incredible beauty. so, the question for me is both how do we acknowledge the social reality and the mass incarceration of the death of the innocent black youth and

also recognize it's important to assert and offer them offered n of their lives that is meaningful. that's what i'm trying to do and give them that tradition so they understand that these are not new question. they are questions that are definitive of the united states and notwithstanding their persistence is a gifted society into the world with some extraordinary lessons and beauty and art and with this and they d of quickness i think speaks to the integrity of the human experience. >> what i want to ask you to do if the question i ask is that a good question if it isn't a

question you don't want to engage. i feel like part of what is going on at this moment those of us who are reckoning we don't know how to clear the air this is you speaking to your sons how do you become ever so as a mother i read that if i want to

know what it means like how the question unfolds in the life of your son is and what does that mean. >> sorry i'm going to let you speak. if you begin your journey in the united states from the beginning of your life you've are less likelyou are less likelyto recee and teachers with higher expectations of you have less likely to live in a safe community and that isn't true of your son. it was important for me to acknowledge the class position of my sons and the rarity of lyrics. this and then they lived with thousands of.

it also follows a large public voice to over represent the experience. i could give examples from the time they were 5-years-old encounters with racism. i have two arm of then not simply with a set of skills and intellectual tools that allow them to worship in schools and ethics and values but also a way

to make sense of the hostility y thathe hostilitythat they encouy from people to treat them as community members back to the world they occupy and sometimes they spend more hours with them every day than they do with me and that is a complicated task. i mention that because i want it to trigger an ethical reflection on their part will visit all of these things, but when we have these sort of cross racial encounters or cross class encounters and attend up to the respectful of them in part because as talked about americans are addicted to innocent.

to assess what they are experiencing to not internalize the venom to have the sort of antidote to the res rest also to feel the spaces they can return and acknowledge the experience of suffering and pain that is the part of the work of intimacy that they have with the work of intimacy. and families. >> can you give an example of something that happened recently that illustrates how this turns out innocently?

>> there was an incident, this is when my son was very small afterschool and a child said i like you and you, and my son of course the senate is it because we are black and she said yes. my son said that means you are a racist. my child had this indignation into the teachers dealt with it appropriately. there were discussions, etc. but what stuck with me is the parents of the child that said

this never spoke to me, they never would look me in the eye and speak to me. they identified themselves as liberal or progressive's and not just wouldn't speak to me but wouldn't speak to others. they talked this lesson in how was she to make sense of it any other way who never said anything negative but when you see the refusal to even have an interaction you are teaching children a lesson. it's not an invite to the parents, it demands a mirror of

us in terms of who is seen to interact with whom. >> what that leads into is a dot worword of the dawning realizatn

that it is a construct of race into the pit discussion isn't about everybody else. there are so many angles to this and i want to hear your though thoughts. there is something you wrote about which was the analogy of foot binding. i think it is a construction.

it cuts off to shift the metaphor a little bit it cuts off the blood supply. it disciplines or threatens to discipline people out of the deep identification with other human beings which i think is a natural state of things. i'm always struck by how often people act as if the differentiation is natural. it creates a differentiation and creates the sense of the potential terror and not holding the boundary. it's not incidental but there

were laws against black-and-white people playing checkers in alabama. so i do think about the prospect from the imagination that isn't sort of bound up in this identity and doesn't get articulated, but one is reminded of constantly so whether it is the media television and how we are educated and the way that even the genealogy i'm often telling my kids things like it is strange that greece is figured as the beginning point

for the history. or how marginalized it is currently. all of these mythology is taken at face value. so that is a piece of it. i will say it is a little bit off topic that relates to the requester and. several years ago when people started showing videos of unarmed black people being killed by police officers and there's this idea is quite people know, they just don't know and if you show them things will change should.

i was skeptical of it then. but you never know, the repetition of seeing a particular group of people suffering they have the capacity to make one identify but it also made stigma. to me out of the question isn't so much the visual. there are a lot of ways to think about this. but i don't think that it is whether or not it must seem visually. the issue is the disbelief about the death of an inequality and ritualized violence in the country into the disbelief is actually at the cornerstone of the structure. we can see different versions in the 18th and 19th century.

it won't work unless they are disciplined in certain ways and they are fundamentally criminal. all of these ideas are still circulating. that is what has to be. it's not whether there is a visual recognition, it's the ideological commitments that is a cornerstone of american history that has to be i think that is so helpful and useful to focus in on the disbelief as the thing to be working with.

you say to come back to this analogy you were doing this thought experiment and then i wonder what happened when in a cultural upheaval the same women have been told all their lives that thi this was the way to be beautiful and respectfully and noble the same were told it was over. it doesn't let you get a free. >> i think that we would do an ethical wrong if we didn't acknowledge there would be enormous and growing pain.

one of the things research shows is that if futile white constituents and potential voters about the ethnic plurality it will be sort of a collection of the various groups that leads to increased conservatism. that is a demographic shift. but even that causes a great deal of discomfort. it is a transformation i'm not sure how it will play out.

it's more stressful for some than for others. >> i think it's important and i try to do this with myself but also to acknowledge we all experienced the difficulties of change and transformation and tragedy from much worse than others. >> i want to actually read a little bit from your book. we as i said before i want to come back to the subject of grace but start by reading a little bit earlier in the book. mothers like me once had no recourse, no power to hold off

the match, to hold on and definitely, to fight back when they crushed her heart and life. if i think that i would have been like frederic mike frederis mother. i would have dared one of my explorers like the one on my knee from a cookout when i was six and told you to remember me by it in the crowd defenseless neighbor and if i didn't have a landmark on my flesh i would have made one for you, carved it in to my right arm. so you know, this life that we have is grace in the catholic tradition there is a form of grace that is the stuff of your soul. it's not defined by moments of mercy or opportunity. it isn't good things happening to you. rather, it is the good thing in regardless of what happens.

you carry this down through generations, same as the trauma of the slave master society but it is the bigger part. it is what made the ancestors hold on so that he could become. [applause] one of the things i -- earlier this summer i was in florence and i saw and one of the questions i asked was how many so there was a repetition of mothers who had their sons taken

away and i am resistant to the repetition that that could have been my son because we shouldn't sort of robbed the moment with our self-interested acts of the tragedy. we are supposed to surround the people that have confronted the tragedy. but there is something that is. through history and generations of the most devastating tragedies and we live despite them and with them and i think the question is not, there is a part of it what does that tell us about how to be human better. we ought to be sort of listening to history in the world.

one of the things with toni morrison's passing that i'd been thinking about and talking about it is the ordinariness of the tragedy of devastation to be present with all of those and do not i go back to her work and read the entire body of the work we are always trying to find our

way through the charmed life where no disaster ever happened. >> i think it is a humane thing. >> it's like we can't even talk about that. every relationship that we have in our lives will end coming in nicely god willing because that means we have loved and lost. every relationship. these are fundamental questions. it's how to organize the society better but i think that we also have to tap into the kind of universe reality of them to even

begin to answer them. there is a reason. my favorite metaphor is the one of guitar string. if you are sitting next to someone and you both have guitars and you are close enough and it makes the strings on the other guitar reverberate, to me that as a metaphor of the capacity of human beings to connect with one another. that is what we have to be looking for, and not in a pollyanna sense because that is hard but i don't know what else we do. it is what we do in concert and in conversation. there's something very special about reading because you were

entering into the world with other human beings but it's very interior. there is a possibility to get to that. >> with open this up to right now we will open up for back and forth. the first question is about the network and one asks do you have any advice how to advocate without resorting to attacks. it is to help.

it is such a complicated word nowadays because so often what is a frank confrontation is the attack on social media because people feel so invested in this presentation of themselves into the public so that when it is confronted people get defensive. it's one of the perils of the social media age. so, i do think that we have a responsibility to be able to hear, to listen, to sit with people that confront us.

it's to channel it into something productive if this dramatic event and of march of fact the marches came after 15 or 150 years. >> day in and day out. >> what is the function of history and part of it is to move forward. that speaks to how to put it to work today.

>> this needs to have this place and also knowing that we need to be listeners of the same conversation and it isn't going to feel this way all the time what are your thoughts about reparation, formal reconciliation to begin to potentially move the country to words healing? >> i am supportive of recreati recreation. i think there's lots of potential models for it. they will not eradicate the systems and structures of racial inequality. the process of this accumulation

which is my grandmother brought me home in 1964 and it is probably worth i don't know, thousand dollars today because of the neighborhood. there was an immediate flight so it is now in the area of concentrated poverty. the way it functions as an economic dimension. the neighborhoods that have a lot of people are devalued in all these sort of things. i describe it as a social economy of grace. so, reparations for example if it is a monetary grant doesn't get away from the structure. it is part of the obligation of

race. that process will continue. my only hesitation is to think of it as a cure-all. it is not. it could not be. and yet, i do think that given the unbelievable wealth of the nation is built on king kaufman so of course the reparations make sense. >> if their parents were able to keep in the eye can you imagine the conversation that you would have liked to have?

>> i haven't thought about the substance of the conversation. i thought about the fact of the conversation, the idea that acknowledging as members of the community would be meaningful. it's a repeated incidents. if you talk to people you will hear stories upon stories of being misnamed feminist recognized. i worked at an institution for seven years and i promise every time i step off campus the

majority of my colleagues wouldn't recognize me on the street. i would say hello to people and they went in to say hello back. so there's something about to understand people who look at me and see black. i saw at the train station we looked around at the corner from each other and hello, look behind me. hello, tim. for the third time i said i am not kim.

she's a wonderful person but is 6 inches shorter than me. shaved head, totally different complexion and build. then he was so embarrassed he didn't speak to me anymore which was not the appropriate response. i understood the embarrassment the question is how do you work. and i'm sure they were embarrassed but working through the embarrassment as opposed to further isolating me and my children would be more appropriate. powell has or does your tradition help you frame the vision for living a life with race read that the influence of others in your life how have they worked?

>> so, i do think that there is something -- i haven't raised my children as catholic as one of the things i talk about. there's all these examples for me in the religious practice that are extraordinary and the celebration of mass and the reachable and what it means to speak with other people, professions of faith and other traditions. the emulations of the lights are thwives arethe same, the recognl these things that are deeply important to me for imagining how to live my life and they

have all these doctrines of exclusion that i cannot abide by. i have this extraordinary experience at a church with my friends, dear friend of mine, her mother passed away and i went to the surfac circus and it been in a pentecostal church. i was absolutely blown away because the virtuosity of the women in the church. many of them were elderly, singing, playing piano, it was unbelievable. the extraordinary art in that moment it wasn't in exchange for money or recognition.

i thought this is the best of what it means to be human and a celebration of life and in some one home. for me, it's like something is wrong where on the one hand this extraordinary beauty and grace also finds itself attached to denigration of people are because of their gender or their family structure. on the other hand we have an idea of the purpose of art being money or accumulation, there is some thing done for the beautiful parts of being human. i'm trying to draw out the beauty to distill and use it in

a way that doesn't feel like i'm part of the in an of producing human suffering. that may be an aspiration that is foolhardy, but i'm trying. [applause] i think we have time for one more. you talk about the history and i think that the questioner has a sense of that. we have been wrestling with how do we take what we are learning and act upon it. how do you do that in your life and not get paralyzed by all, how does that not way you down? >> to be honest, it is a combination of my grandmother and my children. every once in a while people will say to me how can you be

hopeful and i think as a mother i have an ethical responsibility to be hopeful. the task is to invest in our children as a way of investing in the world and humanity, and i think that i see this in the book also it is a cliché. my grandmother is the smartest person, but i really do mean it. [laughter] this is a woman who didn't complete high school, and 12 children, clean home, said all 12 children to college. [applause] she was extraordinary. and had a brilliant husband but had struggles with his own aunt

passed away before i was born. she got up every day and lived her life. i tried to sort of prey and i did the exercises in the catholic tradition but a lot of it was modeled after her. i do think there is something about a life in which you understand the meaning of the small moments that were against the feelings of being overwhelmed. it's going to come, but then one more thing when she had those moments, she would rely on her for an essay and call into the wood talk her through when she

was feeling overwhelmed. she modeled the idea and so i feel like i am living through her and there is a part of me that is trying to be what she would have been had the circumstances been different. sometimes people ask me what are recurring themes. i find what we are trying to do is listen to the culture and the

world as much. what happens is suddenly something surfaces and then it is in every conversation. >> right now what that is his two young women working in a very different sphere. what is surfacing right now it feels countercultural beaux-arts muscles or inhabiting these difficult times and what your grandmothegrandmother and dogrgz

dumb it american thing of pulling up your own bootstraps. it's about also understanding that he can't carry those things alone on any given day. >> in my about i write a poem about the joy of a woman complimenting him on his feet. it's hard to talk about without sounding like an evasion but it what we are fighting for, the human experience we are fighting for the proliferation of but

it's actually the thing all of us possess which is an incredible capacity for joy and beauty and isn't ego driven. this generation is with us and there is a lot of display of joy or quick pleasure and rush of excitement. it is deeper than that. it's something that reaches deep inside of the most beautiful moment is a moment of connecti connection. we have a very similar disposition, my cousin gardening with children all the time and she shares the sunflowers and

tomatoes and basil and that is both life-giving and spiritually speaking. so i think that is essential. you wrote there is still a future as harrowing as it might be. i try to give you everything in the face of this, every bit of this weakness to indulge. there is enough for everyone's lifetime a million times over.

>> life is hard enough. to listen and also to teach but also lavished with love. that is a big part of care today. they are emotionally spoiled people. i would like to close with you reading from your book, but i think first you have to explain your references.

>> i start with this part that begins with a quotation from my mother. your grandmother said it this way bothering black boys in america, that has a special calling. how do i need it, what is it like, how do i need this calling is it like cultivating diagrams, pressure so tight that it turns you black into something white and shiny deemed precious and valuable? do i feel something that should be used for the warmth of others or the consolation prize on christmas, that is no good either. do i cover my home in the blood

for the sacrificial but they are passed over that the bloodthirsty is that someone else's door? i could attempt it but i know prayers do not prevent a tragedy. they hold you up as it passed through. is it like going through and avoiding, maybe i'm the fetus. was it ever so apparent that we need to have a reckoning i'm a living vocation but also living with beckoning and that is what it feels like. sometimes it's reaches its sometimes it is a perfect pitch. >> thank you so much. [applause]

[applause]

i am delighted to tell you about this book written by a friend and constituent of mine that spent 544 days in an iranian prison. it's a story about that and his amazing work as a journalist and relationship with his incredible journalist wife and reentry into society after. this is my copy of prisoner and

i hope everyone watching this will go out and buy a prisoner available on amazon. and reputable bookstores around the country. .. >> thank you so much for joining us this book conversation. tell us about on mask. who is your audience and what is the biggest take away? >> well, when we were approached by -- to do this book my initial reaction was i didn't want to do