>> to watch the rest of this discussion, visit booktv.org. search for helen fraser on or the title of her book, river of fire at the top of the page. >> and now we're back live in allston with an auto discussion on racism in america. [inaudible conversations] >> how are you today? great to see so many people here in the now hot texas. welcome to the 24th annual

texas book festival. i have a couple announcements before i introduce our speakers and then we will have a brief conversation appear and then open it up or you and day for the last 10 minutes or so. there are microphones down the aisles and i will send volunteers to help if you need a microphone brought to you. first and foremost, please finance your cell phones. don't be that person. they also want me to remind you to share your experience on social media. the festival uses the@ texas book fest as the twitter handle and the # is # tx book fest. authors will find books. because we are in the main tent, it's just write down that

way. a portion goes to the texas book festival's mission and helps fund. programs that brings authors and students together and brings grants to libraries in texas. we are very grateful to have you here. all right, without further ado, let me introduce our wonderful speakers that really don't need introduction but, you've got to do your thing. first we have - - was a new york times - - [applause] >> - - is in your times best-selling author and the founding director of the antiracist research and policy center at american university. a professor of history and international relations and a frequent public speaker, he is an author at the atlantic. [indiscernible] and the black

campus movement which won the - - prize. he lives in washington d.c.. next we have - - [applause]. >> next we have - - washington. [applause] she has been a fellow at the university of nevada's black mountain institute. a recent fellow at harvard vet school. a scholar at the national center for bioethics at tuskegee university. she has had fellowships at the harvard school of public health and the stanford university. she's the author of deadly monopolies, infectious madness and medical apartheid which one he puts critics circle award and the american library association black caucus nonfiction award.

let's give them a hand. [applause] >> and we will get started. we are here to discuss a terrible thing. environmental racism. and how to be an antiracist by abram kinsey. i wanted to begin by talking about a theme that comes up in both of these books which is the relationship between the individual accountability and systemic and structural racism. both of the books talk about this duality of where this our individual accountability ended where do we attribute racism and racist practices to institutions around us. i wonder if they would give us an example of what they think individual accountability is and talk about that relationship.

>>. [laughter] >> first of all, i'm very happy to be here. individual responsibility. that might be telling people don't smoke and don't smoke particularly while your pregnant. that might be telling people don't smoke around others because you might be harming their bonds. but our largest fear is a context of smoking. what if you live in an area that's been targeted by tobacco manufacturers? where everywhere you can buy tobacco products that are not found elsewhere.rehab - - where you have products that are marketed. they use tactics of black men. like opening the pack from the bottom. what he found out your community has been studied acutely and targeted efficiently for not only tobacco but like menthol

related tobacco. now we have examples of both. true use - - you shouldn't smoke but it's also true that corporations shouldn't be allowed to be legally and acutely target populations with products. even a better example in terms of toxicity, exposure to things like classic - - plants which has a higher asthma rate. make sure you tell people don't have cockroaches in your home which might trigger your kids asthma. closure windows and that your air-conditioning run during the day. but the larger point is why are we allowing a corporation across the street from residential areas to pump toxins, neurotoxins into the air? so we have both. but what's more important depends on the context.

what's more important is public-health responsibility. if individuals cannot do much about the things that are being ãwith. >> to answer that, one of the things i try to investigate in my book is what causes the individual to resist racism and structural racism and what causes other individuals to do nothing. to do nothing in the face of racial inequity, racial injustice. or even supporting those policies and policymakers that are essentially leading to those inequities or injustices. what i try to prevent, ultimately, is that what causes the individual to end up challenging racism, is when the individual is striving to be antiracist. historically, individuals who have racist ideas that think

that the racial problem is that people opposed to bad policy. causes though individuals to go after those quote, bad people. they've imagined they are the problem. if there's something wrong with people. that prevents that individual from seeing the true source of the racial problem which is racist policies. racist power. many ways, racist ideas sort of incarcerated us from challenging racism.prevents us from challenging racism. to be antiracist is to be fundamentally focused on those institutions and structures and power. [applause] >> your responses lead me to speaking about how we use terms like racism, antiracist,

environmental racism. one of the things that struck me about both of your books is the ways in which going through the process of writing these books has major rethink how we use the language to talk about power, racism and individual and collective responsibility. i was wondering if you could both give us a few examples of perhaps turns you have come to do differently or defined differently or used differently in the process of writing about environmental racism and how to be an antiracist.>> everyone hear me? i have historically try to avoid the term racism and racist. that's because people in this country interpreted very differently. studies have shown many white people view it in one way and

blacks view it differently so it impedes communication rather than a that's it.but i had to reverse that my book because i came to understand that the term was actually key to understand what's transpiring. unfortunately, language has been used to shroud reality of racism. when it comes to environmental toxicity, we often read in newspapers and medical reports and elsewhere about socioeconomic factors and poverty factors and lack of education and all these things make people more vulnerable to environmental toxicity. that's not true. it's race. poverty is a risk factor but race is a stronger risk factor. the best example is the fact that studies have shown that african-americans with incomes of $50,000 a year are more exposed to toxins than whites with an income below $10,000 a year. a clear indication we are talking about race. and we have to be frank and open in discussing these things because otherwise they'll continue to smolder under the service. it will be a shield for what we've been talking about and will impede medication and keep

us from crafting solutions. >> i think a large part of my book was sort of interrogating common terms that we use to describe the way race and racism operates. in this country. so i'm thinking like where do i even begin? probably two terms i think many racial justice reformers and activists have used in the last 50 years have been sort of distinguishing between what people call covert and overt racism. anybody heard that? the more i sort of thought about that sort of construct of covert racism. people made the case that over the last 50 years, racism has become more covert. anybody heard that? what i sort of make the case

about in my book is that that's basically not true. what actually happened is we've been using 1960s classes to understand racism in the 21st century. then we wonder why we can't see it or even that it's covert. we also imagine that a policy is racist if the policymaker intends to exclude a particular racial group. as opposed to defining a policy is racist based on its outcome. if we were to fundamentally defined a policy is racist based on its outcome, then we could easily see racist policies. if we were to recognize that when we are seeing racial inequity and injustice, we are seeing racism. then clearly racism would be extremely overt. we don't use those terms

because for me, racism is very overt if you know how to see it. >> is there one turn you hear people use a lot that you really wish like, every time you're here it, you're like - - if you could ban it. from people's vocabulary. what would it be? >> not racist. [laughter] >> whenever i hear that phrase, i'm not racist but - - i know i'm about to the most racist thing ever coming at me. >> one of the things that's interesting about both of these books and something all of you will enjoy reading them is the ways in which these authors offer this analysis of languages in terms and corporate racism. and just the personal experience of it.

and the generational effects of this discrimination. i'm wondering if both of you can speak about, using this typical genre and talking about racism. harriet, you offer anecdotes from communities that have experienced environmental racism. it's very much a memoir of your self-discovery and thinking about these ideas. why is it important to include individual stories when talking about such a structural issue? >> talking about race is difficult because of the visceral reactions. white people may feel shame. not only on their purple groups they can identify with. that's a hurdle to be gotten over when you want to communicate with people. to help people by having them share an experience i've had

that with ratchet up my experience of racism. i hope to bring everyone along with me on that journey. i hope whites will see it for what it is. when i explained that when i grew up on army bases abroad and in new york. may my friends played outside. we had different experiences in harlem where my cousins were living in a 30 story building. and almost everyone i knew had asthma. when i got older, i realized that building was across the street from a bus depot. pre-1970s, it was belching everything. and causing rampant asthma.

so when i point out that nine out of 10 bus depots were located in harlem, people can see clearly. here we have a racist distribution. more effective than an excuse for a term i think. >> let's just say i did not want to use personal narratives. i'm very private. my family is here. they are very private. and it's difficult to write about yourself. at least it is for me. but i realized early on and conceiving of this book that what distinguished at its most fundamental way, the racist from someone who is striving to be antiracist is essentially the construct of the dial and concession. that the heartbeat of racism has always been denial. and the heartbeat of antiracism

has always been concession. in other words, when someone who is racist is charged with saying or doing something that is racist. the responses on the least racist person you've ever interviewed or encountered. i'm actually the least racist person anywhere in the world. that's right after i just said that black baltimore is this rat infested the bonus that no human being would want to live in. [applause] so that denial is essential. just as you have people who deny their policies are racist. the people who deny their ideas are racist and that they are racist. what's fundamental to being antiracist is knowing we were born and raised in this society and trained and nurtured to be racist. and recognizing that and thereby admitting and

confessing the times in which we have actually said there is something wrong with particular racial groups. we were not part of the struggles against racist policies and power. for me, i felt like i had to model that like i had to write a confessional. like i had to admit those times in which i said there was something wrong with black people in order for other people to open up to be willing to say the same thing too. >> your responses to this question made me realize that perhaps at the outset i should have asked more about how you found your way to each of these books. can you perhaps give us a little overview of how you got from the previous book wrote to this when we are talking about today?>> the previous book i wrote, i spoke about here at the book festival.

it was investigations into the infectious causes of mental illness. i'm always curious about pathogens and their technology role in health. but i've always been interested in poison. i ran a poison control center in new york. what i learned about poisons was voluminous. the thing i left with was an appreciation with how versatile their effects were. there are effects we don't pay attention to. i also have been concerned about the intelligence debate in this country. and the two came together in this book. iq is an important construct and i did analyze and point out its many flaws but i also used it to show how environmental toxicity is - - in this country

without being appreciated or addressed. >> my last book was a narrative history of racist ideas. i didn't just want to write a history of racist ideas. i also wanted to chronicle ideas that overtime had been challenging. to write about the opposite of racist ideas and show this debate. so very early on in my research, i realized that many of the producers of racist ideas for self identifying their ideas as not racist. and the way we understand it today. in other words, you have slave traders, and jim crow segregation list, just as you have white nationalist today claiming their ideas are not racist. i know i can use that term to describe the opposite of racist

ideas. when throughout history, that term has been used to describe racist ideas. i end up using the term antiracist. when i went about speaking about that book, of course i would urge people to adopt more antiracist ideas. that there's nothing wrong or right or superior or inferior about any racial group that they are equal. i would urge more people to adopt more antiracist ideas. the more i urged people to be in antiracist, the more people were like, you don't have to tell me more about that because i thought i'm supposed to be not racist. the more people asked me that question, the more i realized i needed to write this book. >> one of the things that's interesting about both your books is your really focused on the iq test as this barometer that racists choose to keep black people back. and you focus on the idea that

all of these are contracted to also keep black people back but in a different way. how do you begin thinking about iq tests were ideas of measurement for black people and how has that changed over the course of writing these books? >> for me, and medical apartheid, i've laid out how 19th-century scientists had a slew of theories about lower intelligence and blacks. afterwards, people try to validate with tests that were profoundly rigged. they were crudely and openly rigged. they were not accurate. but more than that, the definition of iq is very different from what it actually is. we're told it's an eight. her intellectual capacity. that's not true. it measures what you have learned. making people understand that helps show them how shoddy the basis was for these claims of

inferiority. [applause] >> when i was in college, florida a&m university. any rattlers out there? i decided i wanted to go to graduate school. and i remembered i didn't do too well on my sat tests. i was like a minute to take this - - test and i need to do well in order to get into the graduate school that i wanted to get into. and so i decided to use some of the savings i had accrued from part-time working during college to essentially take a high-priced test prep class. and i assumed that this class would make me smarter. and thereby would allow me to get a better score on the test. because i thought the people get high scores because they're the smartest.

and so, very early on in the class, i began to realize that the teacher wasn't making us smarter. she was rarely teaching us about - -. after the class i would deeply go work out and weight lift on my way home. so i had this relationship in which i would go to this class and then work out. the more i did that, the more i realized. she's not teaching us strength. she's taking us form. for those who work out, you know that the bonus for those who lift weights, there's a way in which you're supposed to lift weights and it's called form. if you don't lift in that way, you can get hurt. but if you do, you can lift more weight than someone else who has poor form. ultimately, i began to realize, she was basically teaching us

how to cheat. oh my god. i'm going to be able to get 200 points higher than somebody who did not have the money to pay for this class. the students who were able to be privately tutored is probably going to get 300-400 points higher and that we will prevent ourselves to present ourselves and say look how smart we are. in this multibillion-dollar test prep industry is legal and existing. and we know for instance, people talk about asian and white getting higher scores on this test. it happens that test prep companies are concentrated in asian and white neighborhoods. so that everybody imagines that the kids are so fundamentally smarter.

and it allows them to get into the more selective colleges and jobs on the basis of the test. so obviously, we've been had. [laughter] [applause] >> the pick million affect is the undue influence of teachers on assessing kids intelligence. if you believe a child is especially gifted, you treat them that way and he will have better grades and scores. >> will we talk about the policies and how the - - review is damning of all. it's easy to feel like everything is awful. - - scamming us all. can you give us one long-term solution that you need think needs to happen in one kind of behavioral shift that each of

us can engage in to start the process of creating the world we want to live in. >> i think in terms of behavioral shift, that whenever we are confronted with an inequity between racial groups or even an injustice that specifically affecting a particular racial group, like police violence. we learn to not explain that inequity by saying what's wrong with a particular racial group. we learn to recognize that if we have a racial inequity, and because of that racial inequity is racist policy or the lack thereof of protected antiracist policy. in other words, the reason why black people are far and away more likely to be killed by

police is because the lack of protective antiracist policies. the reason why black people are twice as likely to be unemployed is because the series of racist policies within the employment industry. the reason why black people are 40 percent of the incarcerated population is because of the racism within the criminal justice system. black people are over policed. when they commit crimes, they are more likely to get arrested. in other words, white people are committing crimes to but they're not getting arrested because they're not perceived as criminals. but then in terms of policies, where to even begin? if we have something as simple as people are automatically registered to vote - - [applause]: they offer for election day and the removal of money from politics. then you wouldn't have people

from this state to other states, figuring out ways to suppress votes. because they realize the way they have been elected and the way they can get elected is through figuring out innovative ways to suppress votes. in our time, they are suppressing votes based on this idea that there's voter fraud. and then when we prevent the data that shows that voter fraud is a nonexistent problem, they say welcome in places like iowa. there is a perception that it's a problem. so therefore, we need the voter id logs and other policies that are purging voters. no matter what, they will push these policies, because they know when you don't have the votes to win, you suppress votes. >> in terms of environmental toxicity. we need an epa that works. [applause] we need criminal

penalties for corporations that poison people. and in terms of individual action, we need people willing to put their bodies and lives on the lines like in the civil rights era.today we have - -. back then, people castigated them. ... [laughter] >> go ahead. >> okay, so no offense

to the two amazing authors that are here but who are you? [laughter] >> because you did an excellent job. >> thank you. i'm a professor here at ut in black study in history. [cheers and applause] >> and the title of your book? >> the title of my book, the title of my book is remaking black power, how black women transform. [applause] >> next. >> hi, my name is penny adrián and i'm a survivor of both homelessness and the sex trade and as i enraged that i get sex work is work, my sister is survivors black and brown become more enraged. the attitude towards poor women of color -- they are perfectly fine

selling, we can't give them jobs and health care and environment that doesn't kill them and their children, just let them sell, i am wondering what you see as a gap between economically privileged progressives sadly across racial lines and those who live in poverty, homelessness and very different experiences of things like what college girls, little white college girls like to call sex work. >> i don't have a response to that question. [laughter] >> well, i think what i will say briefly is that often times elite women at least elite men have perspective ant different racial groups, in other words, you have white elite women are specific racial group and impoverished poor, i

should say latina women are different racial group and you often times have ideas, those elite idea white women have particular ideas about those poor latina women that inform their scholarship and advocacy and simultaneously refuse to recognize how those ideas could be racist and so i think it is critical for people to ensure that when they are thinking across class lines to ensure they are giving people their humanity. [applause] >> so we will alternate between the front and back microphone, so whoever is up next at the back microphone, hi, back there. >> hi, i'm wondering what are your thoughts on policies to address racism and policing, have there been any steady policies that have been implemented that have been shown to

be effective in terms of changing police's behavior to be antiracist? >> i think we are missing a lot of data here. i think we need to put -- employ scrutiny on police behavior in the way that we have not been willing to do so far. freddie gray was not only a victim of police brutality, was a victim of lead poisoning and people speculating that maybe the lead poisoning caused his death, you're blaming the victim, look at police themselves they have high lead poisoning, leads to criminal behavior and violence, we need to look at the police and under the same microscope and correct some of the factors that might be causing disproportionate behavior, also, we need to change the law and stop giving them -- why do have two days to get their story after they kill somebody, starts

with that, we need to collect. >> obviously we shouldn't have police investigating themselves, i think that would be the top of the list. [applause] >> i can consider ourselves if we were family, investigating particular families and if an outside investigator was investigating us, i use the term family because that's how they describe themselves. obviously, i don't think any officer should-should be policing in a black neighborhood if they believe black people and black neighborhoods are dangerous. [applause] >> and -- but then even more so, i think that we should invest actually more in finding alternatives to prisons to social problems, we have social problems and then we can see police officers as those who are supposed to solve those social problems

like poverty even environmental issues and -- and then we see the recent calls and so i think we have completely different conception of social problems and how to solve them, to give an example, all across the world you have higher levels of poverty and high levels of unemployment, instead of paying with high-paying, you know, jobs, instead we pour more police officers into those communities when know statistically that's not going to have an affect. [applause] >> hi, so i may have read about the fact that there's election coming up next year, president, and i was just wondering if you had any thoughts about which candidates

are doing a good job or a job better than the others when it comes to issues regarding race? >> no, i really don't. [laughter] >> let me -- people ask me this all of the time and i actually want people to have the skills to be able to figure out which candidate is striving to be antiracist and those skills are essentially analyzing policies between the two of them and asking which policies have the greatest likelihood to reduce racial inequity, to create justice across the board, who is more likely to say things like i don't have a racist bone in my body versus others who are willing to admit, when they said or did something that was racist, those are the types of things that we should be looking for.

>> back microphone. >> well, first thank you, all 3 of you for your time and for your work, seeing that we are at the texas festival i was curious if any of you would be willing to maybe share some of the books that have helped your understanding on the subject of racism and antiracism? >> yes, excellent book by steven jay guhl called mismeasure of men, rig used to establish lower iq in black and hispanic people and also on parallel track, book by robert gutfry saying even the rat was white, also accurate history and those are the two that i recommend the highest. >> man, that's going -- asking a scholar to recommend books, let me

recommend books that are permanent to texas. let's see. i'm going come back because i need to figure out books permanent to texas and one is in my mind but it's in louisiana. >> i would decide there's a couple of great books on the founding of origins of mass incarceration including i'm blinking on the book's name quickly, guillermo among women, there's a great book out about founder of modern gynecology but also did all the experiments on slaves, so i think those are a couple that help us think about both the science and the tools and mechanisms on racism that take place. i can't -- i can't think of the books now, it's going the drive me nuts, change in silent is the name of the first book. >> and the book i was thinking about was actually -- it's called

in american prisonses by shane which talks about the prison industry and he went under cover as a guard in a louisiana private prison but a lot of also talks about the history of private prisons and the history originates in texas. >> medical apartheid change my life, thinking about how the medical profession excluded black people and used black people and from the beginning is a sleeping history of thinking about how racist ideas are engrain ed in fabric of american life. >> on the subject of racism and denial, of course, the implicit association test at the harvard website that's been taken by millions of people who might routinely deny that they're racist and if they don't have a racist bone they probably still if they were raised in america have racist brains or racially

organized brains, racism, however, is in this discussion has been largely confined to black and white, last year ut english professor produced for cambridge university press the invention of race in the european middle ages and she deals with jews, muslim, african blacks, north american indians, gypsies and race concepts and more recent times, one connecting the present day with 100 years the infamous madison grant a century ago divided white people up, if you want to be antiracist you have like race trader organization, treason -- >> is there a question. >> the question is do you agree that -- would you agree that nordi and mediterraneans should be separated out and undermined as -- as if

whiteness was something as monolithic. >> yes, we should attack whiteness. [laughter] [applause] >> in the back there. >> speak to how white privilege could prevent one to being a racist? >> so i think that when you look at america's racist policies, those policies generally particularly if we are thinking about it from a black-white conception, although we probably should think about nit -- it in a broader sense. particularly leads to white privileges and what white people are privileged with, the privilege that you assume to be intelligent, presume to be innocent while black

people are deprived of that assumption and so you have white people imagining that, you know what, i don't want coconfess my own racism, i don't want to challenge rage racism because i'm going to lose those privileges but i think what's also happening and i think there's a book entitled dying of whiteness by jonathan that sort of documents how white people today have actually been losing -- i should say racist ideas which they imagined are allowing them to sustain privileges are actually leading to their own death, to give an example in certain states where you have white americans refusing to allow obamacare provisions to come to that state, that then leads -- they don't want those people of color to get access, so then what happens to those white people, they don't have access, or you have white people who are

advocating for the removal of gun control policies so they can protect their family against so-called black criminals, so call latino invaders and so called muslim terrorists and then you have a proliferation of guns in the state, where you have gun removal policies and in those states today you had spike in white male suicide by handguns. in other words, they are taking those guns; not using them to protect against these mythical dangerous people of color but they're using them to kill themselves, so what in fact, is a privilege is actually leading to their own death. [applause] >> all right, looks like we have time for one last question. lucky you, yes. >> okay. >> good call. >> do you feel that strong environmental

policy go hand in hand with antiracist and feminist policies that you couldn't be antiracist without being environmentalists, seems to me that those should all be the same politician, but very often politicians are divided on all of those lines, but i'd be more interested in hearing what you have to say about it. >> i'm not sure i understand all your question. can you summarize it? >> do you think that as a politician, for example, you couldn't be antiracist or, for example, feminist if you weren't also an environmentalist in your policies? >> that's not true, environmentalist strains that don't have anything to do with race, you know, recreational environmentalism, you can adhere to those and yet be a racist. >> what i think you're asking is should one be or can you think -- i think there are intersections is what you're getting at between all of those and perhaps we should be search searching for a candidate that can --

can find those intersections, right? >> that can be done, the sierra club now has has first african american president a few years ago, so there's progress, interaction between different environmental strains and that gives me hope. >> great. all right, can everybody join me in thanking our wonderful authors today. [cheers and applause] >> all right, and if you would like to get a signed book please head over to the signing tent where they'll be signs, lines and books. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> live coverage of book it's value will continue in a few minutes, josh campbell, former assistant director to james comey, shares thoughts on president trump's relationship with the bureau. and later today you'll hear from gun safety advocate. we will be back live from austin shortly. after words with fox news legal and political analyst greg jaret on the mueller investigation. >> there were multiple dueling investigations going on at the same time, trey gowdy's investigation was probably the foremost but had it not been for the deceptions by hillary clinton and the state department about benghazi, we would have