like, be aware of your surroundings. because really that ability to listen and understand, it's a fundamental aspect of i think what ultimately is to make you a success or failure. >> to watch the rest of the interview visit our website at booktv.org and click on the "after words" tab. or type george soriano into the search box at the top of the page. >> our host again this morning is krista tippett, host of the popular public radio program on being and today's conversation will be broadcast on the show at a later date. in addition to her radio work, ms. tippett is founder and leader of the on being project, curator of the civil conversations project and the best-selling author of among several other titles "becoming wise, and inquiry into the mystery and art of living". joining her in conversation today is imani perry, the

hughes rogers 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's a longer title than the ã [laughter] a scholar of legal history, cultural studies and african american studies professor pairings work often focuses on multifaceted issues such as the influence of race on law, literature and music. she's the author of five books including "looking for lorraine: the rut ãb a new york times notable book for 2018. her newest book "breathe" a letter to my son, will be published in september. other works include may we forever stand the history of the brock national anthem which was a 2019 naacp ãbshe wrote

the notes an introduction to the barnes and noble classics edition of the narrative of ã truth and professor perry received a bachelor degree from yale university her jd from harvard law school and a phd from harvard university. we are so honored. [applause] we are so honored to host her today on this return visit to chautauqua, please join me in offering a warm chautauqua and welcome to imani perry and krista tibbett. [applause] >> good morning. i'm so happy to bring imani perry back to chautauqua.

i brought her here once before we did a week before we did a programs on the stage of ãit was a day of biblical rain. >> torrential. >> we actually had to stop the recording two or three times, we had to stop the conversation to her three times and because just the nature of that space in the range deafened it. we were able to create a program from it but it was hard, the production was propagated. i'm delighted to bring her back and we will not be interrupted. >> thank you so much for having me again. it was wonderful despite the rain. [laughter] many things have changed also the sound is

incredible in this amphitheater, congratulations, also, there was no tweeting back then.no questions by tweet. we talked a little bit yesterday about the many definitions of the word grace and this really is a week of expansively taking that on. i wanted to read a few lines from imani's new book called "breathe" which we will discuss in a few minutes. where you actually take on one definition of grace and we might come back to this in the conversation but i wanted to read it as a start. in the catholic tradition there is a form of grace, the sanctifying one that is the stuff of your soul. it's not defined by moments of mercy or opportunity, it is not good things happening to you. rather, it is the good thing that is in you, regardless of what happens. you carry this down through generations, same as the epigenetic trauma of a violent slave master society. but the graces the bigger part.

it is what made the ancestors hold on so that we can become. [applause] so one of the things i think about a great deal in these years is the fact that in my professional journalism in particular and in the academy i think, we are very sophisticated and skilled at investigating and telling the catastrophic and destructive narrative and story of our time. and not as sophisticated as telling the story of the generative narrative of our time and who and what we are and what we can become. which is not to deny what's going wrong but it is also to take this other part of us seriously that i feel you just

named. as we are going to discuss, in your life and your story, you contain so many in your personal story you touched on so many of the stories of our time. i want to delve into that for all of us in the room and everyone who might eventually listen to help to see the world in our time to that lens of your life. you describe yourself as a cradle catholic. >> yes. >> born in alabama.>> indeed. >> there you go. it's divine intervention. there is a jinx. okay. a moment of silence while the alarm winds down. but one thing that is so interesting in someplace i found in your writing your cradle catholic.

number. [laughter] >> i don't know what that alarm means related to the word catholic. i'm trying to work it out. [laughter] use the weekly tornado alarm test or something? okay. it just does not work with radio. but you also describe yourself as a child of the fragment. we have to let that died down. four or five cycles? >> that should be three. [laughter]

[inaudible speaking] i guess we could make small talk but i'm not prepared for small talk. [laughter] bringing imani perry to chautauqua means ãbthis is the last one? [applause] [laughter] i guess when what you have is a speaker they just talk through it. but when we are recording we can do that. cradle catholic and yet also a child of the fragment of christianity. >> yes. and really multiple traditions. in my own life there is this vance between a very traditional black southern coming-of-age as my foundation and then on the other hand, my

family is catholic, which is rather unusual. for that part of the world. i grew up in massachusetts and spent summers in both alabama and chicago. in all of those places there's these sort of multiple encounters both with a variety of types of people and also spiritual traditions. so as a consequence for me, i think of myself as a seeker. i respond to that which rather do resonates within. my spiritual life is kind of promiscuous as my intellectual interests. >> let's say interdisciplinary. [laughter] i like to take whether it's threads from product to statism and catholicism but also hinduism and other traditions that speak to me, i follow that

that pathway. >> what strikes me between the time that we spoke in 2014 here in chautauqua, and now, it's not that many years but it's been a really tortuous moment of great shift, 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 catholic, your mother in fact was a former nun for a little while. your great-grandmother was baptist. your birth father was lutheran, your father who raised he was jewish. and white.

what i see at large now is you straddle so many american device. not just black and white but south and north. there's alabama, there chicago, there's princeton, there's the religious and intellectual polarization and there is kind of a multiclass identity, which is really extraordinary in a moment like this. there's some words of james baldwin at the beginning of your book which you named after these words of his, more beautiful and more terrible the embrace and transcendence of racial inequality in the united states he said american history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. i kind of feel like you and your person and ãand body that prison

m. >> thank you, i think that's my experience. the transition for me personally from feeling like i am this strange person entering all of these worlds, to actually thinking about it as a source of insight and often the capacity to connect with it a variety of people. that's part of the process of maturing. recently i was thinking about being a little girl in chicago and having lots of friends who are undocumented. >> when you were growing up? >> yes. and the window into that experience including things like when i went to visit my friends you could knock on the door because there was this fear it might be immigration. so when you would knock on the door but no one would answer and then walking around the back steps and going to the basement and then also seeing my friends who were 10 and 11 navigating financial business work negotiations for their parents. so that now in this moment in

history in some ways we are repeating the worst parts of our history, when you see children being ripped from their parents in a way that's reminiscent of slavery, that really is the repetition of the worst parts of our history, for me it's also a recollection of those intimate relationships with children, who had the burdens of adulthood on their shoulders. i'm constantly trying to think about how do we more fully recognize each other as human in order to be more humane. and how do we shift what we talk about as political questions to ethical questions, which is really where they belong. some of that is through stories. some of that i think has to be encounter. to whatever little job my

calling do, i think part of it is to bring the stories through to add to the conversation. >> a couple things about that. i also think and i want this to run through our conversation today. i have a long view of time i think that comes out of the kind of conversation i have. i like to play this thought experiment, what will people looking back 100 years from now, will they actually see? and it might be that what we think is important that's going on is not at all what will rise to the surface. what i also know when time becomes history there will be an us. they will look back at us. although it's a very frothing to use the word we for any individual person it means a lot of other groups. that's interesting. also the connection between human and humane.

in french it's the same word but some that move is where our salvation lies. >> absolutely. it's funny because one of our reviewers and the process for my book on gender said, you keep using this word we stop that stock is a problem. but the wii shifts. we as a collective we but also sometimes a smaller way. in this moment for me, especially with the question of 100 years in the future, the thing that i think about on a daily basis is the earth. and the earth screaming. i think about it also in my personal history. as a child the movements i remember being five and six years old the greenpeace folks

are ridiculous you care about trees and birds and not human beings suffering. and at this point we come to i think fully we those of us people of conscience there is no separation. there is no separation of the question of the environment and human suffering and the wide variety of injustices and forms of violence. there is an imperative i think to think about we in the global sense as much as we break off in a multiplicity of silos and factions. >> yes. and that is a complicated move for us to make about juggling all of that at the same time. you wrote an article a few years ago in 2016 called "2016 the year of black memoir ". you

are talking about genre books. a book by rosemary franey and rachel harding i believe, the child ãbno, that was rachel ã ãthe child of bãi wasn't familiar with this book called remnants. here's something interesting you noted in the article. in 2011 there was a professor kenneth warren who declared there was no longer any such thing as african-american literature because we had the first black president in the white house. of course where my mind went is in 1989 and i ãbthe declaration that this was the end of history. and then at latest on september 11, 2001 we understood the history was back and had never gone away.

>> absolutely. >> i feel like that resonated also in your writing. >> one thing to ask is whether the investment in declaring an end? i do think that part of the investment comes from the desire for the new. while it's often the mischaracterization to say this is the end of history, desire for the new is something that's meaningful. kind of regeneration, rebirth. after the kind of post-apocalyptic, that's why we have all these post-apocalyptic films and novels. we want to think about what happens after disaster? how do we clear the air? but the air is never fully cleared. >> we don't want to actually dwell on what it's gonna take to clear the air. >> right. we actually have to live with the residue. we have to live with the

pollution. so you try to revitalize our commitments but you can't wipe away history in the midst of it. there is a risk of repeating it but it lives inside of us. all the ugliness dwells inside us and we still try to do things that are meaningful. i think declaring the end of history in 1989 was not to take in the consequences of history that just tenants shown themselves yet. >> absolutely. >> when you and i spoke a few years ago and when you wrote when this article about the end of the african-american literature was written, we had

elected an african-american president, which was an extraordinary thing and accomplishment and yet one way i've thought about it is that also served to service all of the unfinished reckoning. ... >> all of our departed really. >> right. and that night was extraordinary. i was in philadelphia, and we rode through the streets, and people were just in the streets,

cheering. put i've also written after that aim so glad my grandmother isn't here to see this moment. i had this -- you have these periods where you sort of are overwhelmed with grief and tears, and one of the things i said -- this is with respect to my mother mitchell mother came of age in jim crow alabama and lived her youth through white nationalist society, and it has come back -- >> openly officially white nationalist society. >> yes. and it has reared it head again, and the feeling of sort of what will it take? what will it take for the nation, us collectively to take seriously our creed, as

foundational, right? not something that you can move in and out of. based upon anxieties or fears or resentment but actually as a core value. and i -- i don't know. that's terrifying, to not dvr after all of these generations of struggle and re sis stance and transformation to not know what we do now is frighten, frankly. >> one of the ways you have been working through this is through this book you have written, we talked but all the many identities you have and this is your identity as a mother. >> yes. the most important one. >> a mother of two sons, two black sons, and so when you and i were -- in 201 they were 8 and

11. >> gosh. >> it was very -- we were halfway through the second term of a black president. it was very present in that moment was the sheeting of trayvon martin and discussed that here, and ferguson and so many other milestones that are now part of our cultural imagination-for better and worse. were yet to come. i remember you talking about how your sons just went when george zimmerman was acquitted, and i -- across the year i thought of you and your sons because we had that conversation in that moment, and i feel like in this book, this is you both reflecting on what that has been and speaking to them and speak to go the rest of us. so, you started with a quote, which you attribute to everybody in and their mother. >> yes.

>> it must be terrifying to raise a black boy in america. >> yes. i'm a bit tired of that question. >> are you? >> yeah. >> okay. >> um, because it often feels like voyeuristic. >> i wanted to acknowledge that. and you say that in the book. you say that, yes, you feel people -- you actually wrote, the indelicate assertion hangs in mid-air, people speculaing as if this is a matter of fact, hungry for your suffering or crude with sympathy. i do actually want to acknowledge that right here. >> it's an echo of due dubois, how does it feel to be a problem to which i seldom answer a word. and there is something to the fact that 100 plus years later

the same question remains. and part of the -- what i'm trying to work through is that, yes, there is terror but they're also incredible beauty, and there's a way in which the repetition of the narrative of the terror almost evacuates the full humanity of their lives, and my life, and also the incredible beauty, and so the question for me is, both how do we acknowledge this social reality of deep inequality, mass incarceration, of death of innocent black youth. and also, recognize that it's important to assert and reassert the fuel humanity and beauty of

their lives and offer them vision of their lives that is meaningful. that's what i'm trying to do. and to give them that tradition. so that they understand, these are not new questions. these are questions that are definitive of the black experience in the united states, and notwithstanding their persistance, we have gifted this society and this world with some extraordinary lessons and beauty and art and witness, and a kind of witness i think actually speaks to the entirety of the human experience. >> yes. >> i want to ask you to do, as we talk about this, if the question i ask isn't a in question -- i mean it. if it's not a question you want to engage, tell me what question you do want to engage. >> i will. i. >> i feel like what is going on in this moment -- those who are

reckoning we don't know how to -- we say clear the air. we're figuring this out. >> we're all figuring it out. >> and i actually think part of what has to happen is this kind of -- you saying to me, i'm weary of that question, and yet it's not that you don't want to talk. we have to learn together and from each other and i have to learn from you how to engage this particular aspect of what as you say is not just a piece of your story, it's a piece of our story. >> yes. >> i mean, i -- theirs this question in the book that -- tell me if this is -- that you say this is you speaking to your sons, how do you become in a world bent on you not being and not becoming, and so i want -- as a mother i read that and i want to know, unfold how you see what it means, very particularly how the question unfolds in the life of your sons and your life with. the as a mother.

>> absolutely. >> what does that mean? >> i mean -- >> because your sons are also -- sorry. i'm going let you speak. you talk but it's true that if you begin your journey as a black or brown child in the united states from the very beginning of your life, you're less likely to receive decent medical care, quality education, have teachers who have high expectations of you, and less likely to live in a safe community, and that's not true of your sons and yet,. >> and yet. >> this question is something you live with. >> absolutely. so, just -- it was very important for me to acknowledge the class position of my sons and the rarity of their experiences, not just for black children but for children in the united states. they have remarkable -- live in a home literally with thousands of books. they have remarkable resources. and i think it's important to acknowledge that because i don't want to participate in the

fiction that often i think follows when those who are black people have a large public voice to overrepresent our particular experience as the experience. and at the same time, they deal with race and racism every day of their lives. they see it, they know it. i can give examples from the time they were five years old, of encounters with racism. in progressive schools, on the street, and so the reality is that i have to arm them, not simply with kind of a set of skills and intellectual tools that allow hem to nourish in school anding thicks and value and way to deal with the -- from people whose responsibility is to treat them as community

members. that's the world they occupy. the people who are closest with them, sometimes people who they spend more hours with every day than the do with me. and that's a complicated task, and i messenger it in part because -- i mention it in part because i want it to trigger for readers an ethical reflex on the part. -- reflection on their part. all of these things come up when we have these sort of cross-racial encounters or cross-class encounters and tend not to be reflective because as james baldwin talked about, americans are addicted to innocence. i'm not that, i'm not that thing i don't want to be. but it becomes very hard to engage in correctives our behavior. so i want them to be able to assess what they're experienced, to not internalize the venom

that sometimes -- to have antidotes at the ready, but also to feel as though there are spaces where they can return and actually acknowledge the experiences and suffering and pain. the badest part of the work of intimacy in our families. >> can you give an example of just maybe something that has happened recently that kind of illustrates that how this turns up innocently. >> yes. >> or -- >> yeah. gosh, how many examples. so actually it's not that recent but there was an incident -- this is actually when my younger son was very small, at school,

and a child said, i don't -- something -- doing some craft and she was like issue like you, you, and you and i don't like you, and my son of course being my son is it because we're black? and she said, yes. and the -- my son said that means you're a racist, and the other child was really hurt, who was one of the ones put out, and my child had this indignation, and the teachers dealt with it appropriately. there was discussions and, et cetera, et cetera. but what stuck with me is that the parents of the child who said this, who i had been seeing for -- never spoke to me. like never would like me in the eye and speak to me in school every day. who identified themselves as

liberal, as progressive on race, and that wouldn't speak to other black parents. they had taught this child this lesson. how was she to make sense of it any other way? who never said anything, i assume, negative about black people but when you are -- you see however innocently a refusal to even have the barest interaction with black people, you're teaching children a lesson, right? even a basic reading, and i think -- that's not an indictment of those parents. it's actually, i think -- it demands a mirror of us. i can think of corollaries along the lines of class amongst black people. terms of who is seeing -- for thoser who bodge waugh, who -- bourgeois, who are their efforts to distance ourselves from.

. so those -- what seem like rather -- moments that are resolved, that actually are not at all resolved, because we -- well, we resolve the moment but not the underlying drama. >> so, what that leads into is something else i want to talk to you about, which is whiteness. which is a -- i feel like at least in this -- doesn't necessarily mean a huge amount of progress but there's that word is out there, and there is, would say a dawning realization that whiteness is a thing, it's construct of race is a construction, that white people

also must acknowledge they have race, their race discussion is not about everybody else. there's so many angles to this and i want to hear your -- load to hear your thoughts about it and i think we just wandered interest it. but there's something you wrote about that it found useful which is the analogy of foot binding. have this fascination with foot binding as a cultural practice in china. you said whiteness is a potent form of binding. so, would you kind of tease that out, that imagery? >> right. i mean, i think that it is a constriction. it cuts off -- to shift the metaphor but like the binding that cuts off the blood supply. it disciplines or threatens to

white people out of deep identification with other human beings and i'm strike how people act as though racial differentiation is natural. i don't think that's natural. the natural condition is for human beings to actually have a capacity to identify and resonate with one another. think the creation of whiteness actually has -- does some things to close -- >> creates the difference. >> creates the differentiation and creates the sense of potential terror in not holding the boundary. it's not incident'll there were laws against black' white people playing checkers together in alabama. this kind of absurd thing but it was immelted to discipline

particularly working class white people from identifying with people who are much closer to them than the elites, who are making laws. and so i do think about the prospect of the emancipation of white people from a white imagination, to human one, that isn't sort of bound up in this identity that often doesn't get articulated, but one is reminded of constantly. so whether it is media, television, how we're educated, the way that -- even the genealogy, i'm often telling my kid things like it's strange that greece is figured as the beginning point for the history of the west for americans when it's such a tiny greek american population.

or how marginalized greece is actually currently in the west. how vulnerable. so there's all these mythologies that are taken at face value that are are real -- >> it's an act of imagination. >> we can imagine differently. so i think that's a piece of it. will say this, though. it's a little bit off topic but relates to your question. several years ago, when people started showing the videos of the -- unarmed black people being killed by police officers or others. and there was this idea that, well, if white people know, they just don't know and if you show these -- and people know, then something will change. and i was skeptical of it then, i'm very sure now, that actually the repetition -- you never know. the repetition of seeing a group

of -- a particular group of people suffering may have the capacity to make one identify with their suffering but also made deepen stigma, the prospect of saying, those are the people who just get killed. and that's -- we know that -- >> becomes another way to differentiate. >> and to me the question is not so much the visual. there's lots of sort of difference ways to think pout this but i don't think that the issue was whether or not it was seen visually. the issue is that the disbelief about the depth of inequality the country ask the depth of rey racialized violence and disbelief is at the corner stone of the structure of racialization, we can see different investigation necessary 18th and 19th 19th century. black people don't hey souls, won't work unless their disminimummed. black people are funnelmentally

criminal. that is what hasp to be -- that's the stuff of it. it's not whether there's a visual recognition of it. it's the ideological commitment that the cornerstone of american history that has to be kind of -- has to be broken down, and videos, tragic as they are, are not going to do that. >> i think -- hang on. this is the moment for you to ask your questions or pass the questions in. what was i going to say now? i think that's so helpful and useful to focus in on the disbelief as the thing to be working with. >> uh-huh. >> you say to come back to this foot binding analogy, you were just kind of doing this thought experiment.

i want -- talking about foot binding and said i wonder what happened when in a cultural upheaval, these self-same women who have been told all their lives this was the way to be beautiful and respectable and noble, these self-same women were told foot binding was over and they could barely walk. binding doesn't let you get free without serious wounding. >> yes. i mean, it's -- i think we would do an ethical wrong if we didn't acknowledge there will be enormous growing pains, and also there are growing pains now that are -- i mean, one of the things that research shows that is that if you tell white constituents,

potential voters, but the coming ethnic plurality. the united states will no longer by a majority white nation, be a collection of various groups. everybody will be a minority. that leads to increased conservativism amongst white voters. that it is a huge -- that's just a demographic shift. which is a very different question than a political or moral or ethical shift . but even that cause as great deal of discomfort. it's a transformation that i'm not sure how that will play out in this country, but it's -- change is hard. >> deliberate or not. >> yeah. >> we don't deal biologically, it's stressful for some than for others. >> i think it's important to -- i mean i try do this with myself

in this book and also to acknowledge that we all experience the difficulties or change and transformation and tragedy, some get it much worse than others. >> yes. i want to actually read a little bit from your book, breathe. we as i've said before we're at this -- i want to come back to this sum of grace, which -- subject of grace but start this reading earlier in the book. mothers like me once had no recourse. no power to hold off the lash to hold on indefinitely, to fight back when they crushed your heart and life. i think back then, i would have

been like frederick douglass are mother would have beared a scars like the one on my fee from bit of flying charcoal at a cookout when i was six and told you to remember me by it, the crowd of endless labor to know me by it and if if grand have a landmark on the i would have made one for you, carve its into my right arm, knife x for your mother. so, you know, this life we have is grace. in the catholic tradition there is a form of grace, the sanctifying one that is the stuff of your soul. it is not defined by moments of mercy or opportunity. is it not good things happening to you. rather, it is the good thing that is in you regardless of what happens. you carry this down through generations, same as the trauma of a violent slavemaster society.

that the grace is the bigger part. it is what made the ancestors hold on so we could become. [applause] >> i mean, i -- one of the things i -- so earlier this summer i was in florence and i saw michelangelo's painting and one question is asked how many, so we see this repetition of mothers who have had their sons taken away and i resistant to the repetition of that could have been my son, because it's not and we shouldn't sort of rob

the moment with our self-interestedness. of the tragedy. we're supposed to surround at the people who have confronted a tragedy with love, but there is something that is carried through history and generations of the most devastating tragedies and we live despite them and live with them and the question is not -- there's a part of it that is what does that tell us about how to be human better; that ought to be we ought to be listening to history and the world. one of the things that with tony morrison's passing that i have been thinking about and talking

about is that what her work has done for me and i think for many others, is to really have us sit in the ordinariness of tragedy, of devastation. with historical awareness, so that there are specific forms of tragedy that we have a responsibility to respond to, to act, but it's also there's something universal, and to be present with both of those, and to not -- i mean, every time i go through some heartbreak or something devastating go bark to her, and read the buyer body of her work and i think this peculiarry american where we're all trying to find our way to the charged life where no dash the charmed life where temperatures a never happened.

>> it's -- the americans aren't good it's. >> we can't even talk about death but we all are going to be there. right? we're all going -- and god willing, every meaningful relationship will have in our lives we expend say god willing because that means we have loved and then lost. we have loved long enough and lived long enough to love and lose. every relationship, even the most important, ends in death. or another kind of fracture, and so all of the society, it's a fundamentally human question, and if -- so there's social questions, social and political questions how we organize our osite better, burt i think we also have to tap into the kind of -- the universality of it to begin to answer them. there's a reason. my favorite metaphor is the one of guitar strings. if you're sitting next to one

and you beth have guitars and if you're close enough and you strum and the wind makes the strings on the other guitar reverberate, that to me that is a metaphor of, like, the capacity of human beings to connect with one another. and that is what i think we have to be looking for, and not in a poll pollan polliana issue stance and -- that its interior work as much as it is work that we do in concert and in conversation. >> that's right. >> and in shared life. >> yes. and it's, i think -- it's why i love all forms of art but there's something very special about reading, because you are entering interest a world with other human beings, but it's very interior. there's something very intimate about it, and so there's this --

i mean it's why i'm a writer. a possible to get to that. >> let's open this up and i'll say again what is going to happen. we're going to come back and finish the radio conversation for ten minutes after the q & a, but right now we'll open this up for a back and forth. >> it's as if we planned this, our first question from twitter is about that interior work and one of our questioners ask, do you have any advice on how to advocate for justice without resorting to attacks? feels like the more i see in our world the easier to let hate into my heart and unintentionally embody what i seek to help stop. >> yeah. so that's -- i think it's a really important question. attack is such a complicated word nowdays because -- so often

what is a kind of frank confrontation is experienced as attack, especially on social media because people feel so kind of invested in this presentation of themselves in the public so when it's confronted, people get really 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 0, listen to sit when people confront us, and on the other hand, i think -- actually not on the other hand. and likewise there's a lot of good reason to be furious right now. i don't -- there is such a thing as righteous rage, righteous anger and i don't want to smith that. the question is just, how do you experience that and also channel it into something productive,

which is slow work. we want -- probably the problem is the way we have taught the history of social movement everything is a dramatic march, this dramatic event, bra-burning or whatever and in point to of fact it's always slow work. it's deliberate work. >> in point of fact the marched came after 15 and 150 years. >> right, of work. day in, da another. >> we don't tell that story of the long arc. >> and we have -- that's one of our -- i was thinking what is the function of history? and part of the function of history is for us to move forward, so i think that speaks to thinking pout how we tell history in order to put it to work today. >> i feel like something you said that's important, is that we tissue think it's a feature of this messy moment that we actually have to live in that discomfort of the -- righteous rage which needs to have its

place and also knowing that we need to try to be listeners and stay in conversation and it's not going to feel -- not going to work all the time. >> right, not going to work all the time. some conversation will absolutely break down. >> another question lee-related to channeling. your thought outside rep reparations and formal -- to move our country toureds a place of grace and healing. >> i'm supportive of reparations. i think there's a lot of -- a wide variety of potential models for it, but i will say this. for example, my second book one of the thing i wrote about is the process of disaccumulation, which is so my grandmother bought a home in 1964, and it's

probably worth $18,000 today. because of the neighborhood. the third black family to live on the block, immediate white flight. it's now in an area of concentrated poverty. so the way race functions has an economic dimension. homes -- neighborhood with a lot of black people are devalueed irrespective of the quality of house because there are black people there. i describe it as the social economy of race. so, reparations, for example, if it's a monetary grant, doesn't get away from the structure of racialization, that money is going to be worth less in a generation by virtue of the fact that disaccumulation is part of the operation of race. just as when women are paid less, black people are paid less, things associated with black people are valued less,

et cetera, et cetera. that process will continue. so i don't doctor my only hesitation is to think of reparations as a cure-all. it's not. it would not be. and yet i do think given the unbelievable wealth, the wealth of the nation is built on king cotton. that's the black labor 0, of course reparations makes sense. [applause] >> to take it back down to a more personal level, going back to child at the arts and craftses table, if their parents were able to look you in the eye, can you imagine for us the conversation you would have liked to have? >> oh, wow. i mean, honestly, i haven't thought about the substance of the conversation. i thought about the fact of the conversation.

the idea that acknowledging me and my children as members of their community. so, hello. would be meaningful. and this is not -- i should say it's a repeated instance -- you talk -- anybody here, i if you tike black people in your life, you will hear stories upon stories of being misnamed, misrecognized. worked at an institution for stenyears and i promise you earth -- theirself is not princeton -- every time i stepped off campus, the majority of my colleagues would not recognize me on the street. would say hello to people and they wouldn't say hello back.

that is -- again, liberal, progressive people. so there's something about -- to understand they're people who look at me and see black. not imani. black. it's as crude as that. and that's serious work that has to be done. and it requires -- there -- i'll tell one more anecdote. it's funny to me am colleague at one point who i saw at the train station, we lived around the corner from each other he said to me, hello, kim. and then he said it again, and he said it's third time and i said, i'm not kim. and -- and kim is a -- a wonderful person, but she is literally six inches shorter than me, shaved head, totally different complexion, different build, and then he was so

embarrassed he didn't speak to me anymore which was not the appropriate response. and i understood his embarrassment but the question is, how do you work dish think the same thing ire shoes their parents were embarrassed but work through the embarrassment as opposed to actually further isolating me and my children, would be a much more appropriate response. >> as a cradle catholic, how has or does your faith tradition help you frame a new vision for living a life with grace? you talk but the influence of faith traditions in your house. how have they worked together to form your vision of a graceful life. >> yeah. so, i do think that there's something -- i have not -- i did not -- i have not raised my children as catholics and one

thing talk about in the somewhat angsty favre in' bring, every i missed up not giving my children the anchor in expression lyft has to i have to doctrine of the church and disagreeing with the doctrine. there are all these examples for me, and religious practice that are extraordinary. the celebration of mass. and all of the incredible beauty, the scent, the resident to all, what i means to speak with other people, professions of faith. it's like chanting in another tradition. the emulation of the lives of the saints. the recognition of the grace of mary. all of these things that are deeply important to me for imagining how to live my life, and yet it's also an institution that has doctrines of exclusion. that i cannot abides. very similar to being an

american. all these beautiful things and -- and i just had this extraordinary experience at a pentecostal church. a dear friend of mine's mother passed away, and i went to the service, and i hadn't been in the pentecostal church before. been a baptist and am and all these sayre you -- and i was absolutely blown away. largely because of the virtueosty of the women in the children. they're sing, the piano playing, it was unbelievable, the extraordinary art in that moment, and this extraordinary art for this church. it wasn't an exchange for money or recognition. it was for this community, and i was like, this is the best of what it means to be human and celebration of a life, and sending someone home, home-going service, and i -- so for me,

it's like something is wrong when on the one hand this extraordinary beauty and grace also finds itself attached to denegation of people because of their sexuality, or because of their gender, or because of their family structure. on the one hand and then on the other hand we have an idea that the sole purpose of art is money or accumulation. something we have done to the most beautiful part of being human that's ugly and at least two different ways, and so i'm just trying to draw out the beauty, trying to distill the beauty and use it in a way that doesn't feel like i'm part of the engine of producing human suffering. that may be an as separation that aspiration that is

fool-hardy but i'm trying. [applause] , just i think we have time for one more, and that is you talked notice history inside of us and i think the questioner has a sense of the weightiness of that. we here have been wrestling with how to take what wore learning and act upon it. how too you do nat your life and pat perillized be all that you know? how does that not way you down? >> to be really honest, it's a combination of my grandmother, my late grandmother and my children. so, every once in a while people will say to me, you know, how can you be hope inflame and i think as a mother i have an ethical responsibility to be

hopeful. that's the task is to invest in our children as a way of investing in the world and investing in humanity, and i think for my -- my grandmother -- i say that's in the become, too much it's a cliche for those of us, black people from the south with working class roots are always like, my grandmother was the smartest person i knew, but i really do mean it. this is a woman who did not complete high school, had 12 children, cleaned homes, sent all 12 children to college. [applause] she was extraordinary. and had a brilliant husband, but who had struggles of his own. he passed away before i was born. and she got up every day, she lived a prayerful life. went through a period in my life where i tried sort of pray

unceasingly. did thing nation exercises in the catholic tradition but a lot of it was modeled after her and she would say thank god for his many blessings every day. even in the most difficult moments she read every day. she saw a sense of meaning in every meal and every interaction, and i do think there's something about a life in which you understand the meaning of these small moments of grace that actually wards against the feeling of being overwhelmed. it's going to come. then she also -- one more thing when when he sad the moments she would rely on her friends, call miles an hour stewart or -- mrs. stewart and mrs. mcand all they would talk her through when she was feeling overwhelmed. so she modeled intimacy, modeled frontship, the ideal for me as

maternal love, and i feel like i'm living through her and also living what i think is a big part of me that is trying to be what she would have been had the circumstances of her life been different. i'm trying. i'm not her. she pass extraordinary was -- she was extraordinary but i'm trying. >> thank you. >> thank you. [applause] >> sometimes people ask me if what are like recuring themes. it doesn't work that way but what i find dish feel like what we're trying to do in our project is kind of listen to the culture and listen to the world machs as we're listening to the wise people. what happens is that suddenly something surfaces and then it's

in every conversation for a little while, and right now what that is, which you just so echoed some things that happened the conversation yesterday with two young women working in a very dissphere, not princeton professors-not imani perry, but what is surfacing right now in more recently also with a poet and a gardener. which feels countercultural is an innocence citizen on hope and an insistence on joel -- on joy and those are muscles for inhabiting these difficult times, and what your grandmother now, that wisdom, it's not the american thing of pulling up your own joy boot straps. it's about also understanding that we can't carry those things alone and any of us can't carry

them on any given day. >> absolutely. it's funny. i use in my book a poem that ross gay wrote about the joy of a woman compliments him on his feet, have beautiful his feet were. and that to -- it's hard to talk about without i think for some people it's sounding like an evasion but it's really in some part -- it's the thing we're fighting for, and it's the human experience that we're fighting for the proliferation of. so that life is not defined for so many people by suffering and violence and hardship, but actually that thing that we -- that all of us possess, which is this incredible capacity for joy and beauty.

that is not -- that is not ego driven. so this sort of -- we are not of the instagram generation in this room but the instagram generation is with us and there's a lot of display of joy. or there's a lot of kind of quick pleasure, a rush of excitement. joy is something much deeper than that. it's not surface. it's something that reaches deep inside that at the most beautiful moments is a moment of connection. it's not another person, with the earth if watch my cousin, who we have a very kind of similar disposition, my cousin jillian, who is gardening with her children all the time, and she shares the sunflowers and the tomatoes and the beans and the basel and that is both life-giving literally speaking

and also spiritually speaking. so, yes, i think that kind of resistant joy is essential. >> you can applaud. you wrote, as you're writing to your sons and grieved, there is stale fewer as harrowing as it might be, i admit. try to give you everything in the face of this, every bate of sweetness to indull college spoil to delight. there's enough of the other stuff for everyone's lifetimes a million times over. >> yeah. i don't -- there's the sensibility that is like, let's -- we have to arm kids and prepare them, and discipline and -- and i just -- life is hard enough. i mean i just want them -- i want them to be moral and

ethical human beings and we all have responsible with young people, not just children, but we have to have the responsibility experience it from elders to listen, and also to teach, but also to lavish with love? i think that is a big part of care today. i'm not taking any of that away from them. they are emotionally spoiled people. >> i would like for -- to close with you reading from your book, but i think first, so this is -- you're at the beginning, and i think you had to explain your references to the greek god. >> okay.

>> so i start with this part begins with a quotation from my mother. me, new grandmother said it this way. mothering black boys in america, that is a special calling. how do i meet it? what is it like? how do i meet this calling? is it like cultivating diamonds? pressure that is so tight that it turns you, black, interest something white and shiny and deemed precious and valuable? that's no good. do i fuel it like coal, to be born and used for the warmth of other or the consolation prize on christmas. that's no good either. die cover hi poem the goat praying we're pasted over that the blood thirty fear land at someone else's door? i'm tempted but i know that

prayers don't prevent tragedy. they hold you up as you pass through it. sometimes. is it like stalking through a labyrinth, avoting the snow might minaton what it ever so apparent we need to have this reckoning? maybe i am theseus, a living vocation but also simply living with beck conning and that is what it feels like, it's tenor and tone shift with the shadows of each day, but it is always there, sometimes it screeches, sometimes its shrills and warbles, sometimes it's a perfect, sweet pitch. >> thank you, imani perry. >> thank you so much. [applause]

[applause] >> you're watching booktv on c-span with top nontexas books and awe authorized every weekend. booktv, television for serious readers. >> while in lansing we took a driving tour of the city with lori from the greater lansing convention visitor's bureau. >> we're touring lansing, michigan, today, where is lansing? i know there's a certain way to show it on a map. >> yep. i'm going to held up my right hand and i'm going to point right here, because michigan is actually in the shape of a mitten. we call