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and then just put them in the chat it's my pleasure to introduce the most well-known books how race inflates the american soul and pragmatism and the politics of black america a professor of religion and african-american studies at princeton university. he will have to tell doctor west from harvard divinity school and his memoir and also is the host that we will be discussing the book that was just released yesterday so please add yourself and it's

hopeful. >> it begins with all that love and labor comes to nothing we knew where we had been of those who had been murdered. not everything is lost responsibility cannot be lost and if one refuses abdication and begins again. so welcome. >> thank you.

im so delighted to be here. >> we are excited to jump in this question. why now? >> first of all thank you to everybody to make this possible all of those that haymarket press in thank you to doctor west who has been so important in my life that made this possible just to be with you in this moment that we saw baldwin emerge in that context as black lives matter was beginning to give a voice for

a more just america reaching the black man who had a straight no chaser and who offered a different kind of understanding of a different way to be in the world. >> so trying to grapple with my own despair and delusion and then we saw for eight years what that meant we witnessed police murdering and brothers and sisters in the streets risking life and limb

with voter suppression. so this was a moment of profound betrayal to see how he dealt with his moment of betrayal. how did he pick up the pieces and what resources are available now. because he is one of the most insightful critics of american democracy to ever produce so it made sense for me in this moment what do you think?

>> the poetry section and manuscript section in general.

and this brother right here, lord have mercy. looking i into his eyes and remembering 30 years ago i was convinced i said you see that brother talking, he's going to be one of the great exemplars of our great tradition. talking about the greatest tradition in the modern world, unflinchingly and love is a beauty, love is a truth, and christian love of god. those 30 years have been such a magnificent journey for me because this is such an occasion in the decline of the american

empire, being in dialogue with my dear brother and see what you have in this text, see what you have in this text is the way in which you intend to regenerate and revitalize the greatness of a tradition of black intellectuals or any concern about the sufferings of the begins talking about the end of his life. i try to do my work, he says. i hope somebody will find when they did in the wreckage in the rubble of the ruins something that could be of use to them. thlow and behold start taking it

to a whole new level like i'm going to take mary lou [inaudible] is the exemplary figure among others as well. as much as i'm going after that brother, he is, to back. we have a whole cloud of what is to keep this alive and he represents the voices of a cloud of witnesses, a custodian of a rich inheritance and caretaker of a great tradition of a hated people. this is by the highest levels of

greatness isn't, i want the book to be number one, but the greatness othat thegreatness oft measured by just the number but what went into it and the courage to generate and practice how and be connected to understand what it's going to do to the molding. that is what is in it. to make that tradition available to the whole world is a different level of catastrophe. people have been able to somehow keep on so that is what you actually get and begin again. let's be honest about it is the

bloodsoaked soulful tradition. >> i hope my mom was listening. i pray that she heard that. there are so many lines but there is a moment in istanbul and he uses begin again and the interviewer asked about hope. >> i remember that.

>> he said it must be invented every day. that's our tradition. its motion and movement and practice and you've got to be improvisational and reinvent every day, good morning heartache, i have resources to deal with it. it will come back the next day. i was thinking about that line as an answer in the space of the

assassination of doctor king and jimmy could barely pick up the pieces, tried to commit suicide. has defined relationships and still thinks that he is this loveless child in his daddy told him he was so ugly nobody could love that little boy. find your self, trying to figure out how to speak to this moment and fair to give utterance to this line of. >> that is

>> that is a necessary practice, but we are the hope, it is our commitment to showing up, that is the practice. it's so bright and so often. >> the courage and the risk and willingness to be misconstrued and still have that kind of bounce back. what we have in the book in the middle of the blues situation in the u.s. empire he's saying this isn't new for us. we've been here before. not at this historical moment, but a similar kind of moments

and it is a human thing. don't have to prove nothing to nobody. you have to learn how to love and fight in our temples and synagogues and churches and universities. [inaudible] to be distinguished university professors. to no surprise he's our fellow colleague and a teacher to teach us as we grow and mature, we are not surprised that in the fact,

that is the thing about it. you tell that story to. they produced that radical cohort. they all come out of that group so they invite him to come to campus and he's supposed to be on stage but couldn't make it. they retreat after the panel discussion. now come was then that audience as well. when he comes i know that they will speak the truth.

he goes to the apartment compl complex. they are talking until the late night hours and jimmy says if you promise you will not believe what the world says about you, i will promise you that i will never betray you. he tells in his autobiography and farewell quotes at and jimmy never betrayed the matter what they said about it. >> i was sitting next to stokely carmichael december, 1987 saint

john's cathedral and stokely carmichael cried like a baby. i traveled with stokely. she never sold out and he was never fake or a coward given all the ups anof the ups and downs e attempts. he never betrayed people. that is a beautiful thing and

this is the most important text written on his relevance to. in terms of this moment politically, spiritually. >> you've made it clear that he looks into the basis of his own demons because he was a person who believed you made yourself from your reality to get the perspective that you had to come back and show up and that is abundantly clear through the

text. >> i barely survived writing the book. i knew when i decided to start reading that people would ask things of me but i wasn't quite ready for when i was younger and he assumed this as a precondition to say anything about the messiness of the world so you've got to deal with the pain of a precondition because he thinks that it's a reflection of the dishonesty that we tell ourselves, so i'm sitting here wanting to write about the moment grappling with the fact that i am a board of a little boy still dealing with my daddy issues, grappling with the fact

and that is why i began this way. i love my father, woke up every day delivering mail but he couldn't look at me and scared me to do i was grappling with what it meant and this and this came out a. by the time i get to the end, my father is with me as they visit the grave, and i'm talking about hothen talkingabout how us tellr

how we love each other and how he's called me to tell me what to say on television and how proud he is. and when you read jimmy you read the critique of the stepfather is scathing but by the time that he is about to die in december, the later writings he understands what the world did to him so i think it's a kind of writing that i've never been in public before. i'm taking risks because ginny demanded of me and i should say this quickly he's forced me to deal with the scaffolding of my own life.

>> host: is asking that of the country as well, those of us that are trying to pull the nation back, to be honest with ourselves because the narratives are important enough to take a moment to speak to the definition of both as we talk about in the book and the notion of the value gap resulting those things >> best way to talk about it is on page nine, 1964 essay. he wrote it for the volume 100 years of emancipation. the people that settled the country have a flaw. they could recognize the man. they knew he wasn't anything else but a man but since they were christian and since they already decided that they came here to establish a free

country, the only way to justify buzz to see that he was not a man or if he wasn't, that no crime had been committed. that is the basis. so what he's saying is there've been lies told about our character and our passions all to justify this system of exploitation at the heart of the founding of the modern world and country and not only do you have lies about black people but about what white americans have done to black people, then this is the key point, the way that it works it now forms coming and i use the verb on purpose, for any effort to expose the reality

of what it has done. so, anything that comes to reveal the truth of the nation has done and what he has done to the native people and to haiti and cuba and the philippines and hiroshima and nagasaki and anything that reveals that america isn't a shining city on the hill or the redeemer nation or do anything to reveal that reality. but that is what we mean and it is the architecture within which the value gap reads in this fundamental belief that white people madder than i do and that is at the heart of our social and political arrangements on our economic arrangement it's an

evaluation of folks that leads to the distribution of and distribution of the character so they cannot even become the kind of people whose conception of democracy requires. >> absolutely. the key tool that we have two fighting this is to have a true sense of who we actually are, that we are human without having to ask, that we are important and deserving and we are not ugly. that is the sort of social truth that we have to fight. i'm going to read a little passage from the book and then ask one more question about the notion of innocence. the most pernicious effect when it comes to our history is to get the story whenever america's

innocence is threatened by a reality. when measured against the actions, we've told ourselves about america being a sanctioned nation called to be a beacon of light to. the idea is an honest assessment of what happened after the civil war is a lie. the stories would often tell ourselves in the movement and racial progress in the country with courage and doctor king's moral regime and unreasonable black power culminated in the election of bartok obama are all too often wise, so i wonder what can we gain in the notion of innocence as it relates to the citizenry of the state? >> we could leave behind the sparkling clothing.

we could become mature and grow up. but it keeps us in never never land with a comfortable state so they don't have to be responsible for anything. it allows us to exist in a kind of willful ignorance. remember that time in 63 when he talks about what is happening to the day don't want to acknowledge what they are doing

a. once we leave that behind, we are stepping into maternity. part of the greatness is that he also knows how big the white supremacy is. it's something too many have consented to so if you believe you are less intelligent, you run around scared, intimidated, fearful it is unfunny and scratching. the only thing that can break it

is love. you listen to the emotions and reference to the third part. the id can break the back of fear [inaudible] people are fearful and the only way to grow into maturity is with history in the sense of memory and the love that empowers you to break the kind of anxiety that doesn't allow you to be a free person that you ought to be. it forces us to take off the

mask we know and the fear they cannot live without a. he put more responsibility on himself now because baldwin of course was someone chewed up and spit out by the liberal establishment. that's why he argues. brother skip, we love you. baldwin was great and by no name industry lost his literary power, he was bitter, read it and get it straightened out. it's where the only thing he can

fall back on is the love of his family, ray charles and others because as he got closer to that which is true for all of us, those things that really, really mattered and can sustain you, that is what you are going to fall back on with your partners and intellectual ancestors. >> baldwin never stopped telling the truth even when it seemed he was fully disheartened. i'm reading a passage in that first couple of sections that it could be read as he gave up a. our young activists talked earlier about the having the

third movement where we hear the melody in order to show the beauty of destruction and the lyrics. that's important. i want to turn to this idea that he points out in the book of memory. you had a different perspective and learned that comes with age and station. >> i try to say that i think that it's much more articulate it. so the traditional, early and

late baldwin, folks don't buy into that anymore, but biography has been kind of displaced by others, but i want to hold on to the claim that there is a continuity running through that he's grappling with different ideas that change how he is thinking about history and memory so it's not that he succumbs to the propaganda of power only after he spun out of celebrity. no, he is grappling with the conditions under which folks have lived and the conditions

under which life has to be expressed. that's why i think somebody has to grapple with the evidence of things not seen but when he's writing and trying to figure out what are we dealing with when we have all of these black folks in power, how are we going to grapple with this, the book needed a good editing, but it is a growing and that requires a different kind of reading. but i think the the trauma that itrauma that isat the heart of k about reading this phase of these grapple with the narrating problems others of what they want to get into in this chapter and i remember writing this and trying to figure out, i got up and poured myself a stiff drink because i knew something had just happened, and it goes something like this.

it fragments how we remember. we recall what we can and what e desperately need to keep ourselves together, his the present, threatens to render and if that happens, nothing else matters, telling the story of trauma isn't history any formal sense, it is the way that it works with recollection caught in the battle between remembering and forgetting. that is tony right there. the fact is on behalf of the much-needed truths we try to keep our heads above water and tell ourselves the story that keeps our legs and arms moving beneath the surface. then i go on page 43 and 44.

page 43 and 44. i don't have my glasses on. >> i had to take mine off, too. [laughter] >> i quote this passage. it cannot be remembered, one block south, one invents or creates a persona and the memory repudiates and moves us about and we did the trenches to get t them to flow away from us but like the waters of the mississippi river, the memory is always returned, flooding everything, no matter how high we build the stilts. but in the latter part of his career, he tried to tell the story of what happened and trying to overcome language that would allow us to pick up the pieces and move forward.

to my mind that you cannot understand what tony is doing and not understand what baldwin is doing with no name in the street. structurally, it is almost like they are echoing each other indy's extraordinarily beautiful ways turning back on itself, anything triggering the return of. the mind is a strange thing. he was on the verge of matt us a. back to my reading at the beginning of the dialogue where right before you talk about the beginning again, you talked about what is not lost is responsibility, responding, and the ability to respond,

accountability, accounting of oneself and one's community, once society. we have to be able t to answer e another, and you think that this is all you think that they must take responsibility for the notes they play right or wrong and the impact on the audience to enable that in such a way that they can be agents of love and hope and i think baldwin understood, and as he laid this out so magnificently that the plug-in selector velocity like that with musicians.

here comes another arrogance, so vendors are looking down on people thinking they are better than and so forth and so on. if they had the same status as black musicians, they would be looking for us. we are hungry for more. that is the argument that they are black intellectuals. >> absolutely that is true. the. it's still a gap. >> in the academy and moving with music. >> part of my critique of, we

appreciate he's unbelievable and critical. his voice is very important and so on and so forth generated by the relationship with the higher standards and any two or three generations, let alone one, but the voice is very important to both my critique, and we talked about this with all the others that are they doesn't linger with his critique of the worst of the black bruzual shade did t it could delete code that critique has developed and is there that he doesn't really sustain it.

in the obama era that we live in, we have a critique of the worst of the bruzual css has in fact too often turned its back to the black working class with the best. but baldwin tends to be reluctant. i think this is why we need to return to the state-by-state. the what are we to make of this representation of the very class that you are talking about? so they are the object of consideration. the white supremacy you make the

distinction trying to get us to pay attention, the object of that critique is the way in which color functions and capitalism functions and what happens when we get access to and white supremacy still obtained and because the book is often i remember when i interviewed michael for the buck i said you know, we've got to return to the evidence of things and he said hell no. he wrote that in. probably, but that doesn't really lead to the judgment of tech. but i think the genital dismissal of the book we don't read because it isn't in the price of the ticket or in the library collection so it kind of

angles out there and that is where we would look for that critique. what happens is it gets so disarmed in the age of obama and telling the truth about the connections and the empir empird so forth everybody wanted to protect a. blocks are delayed for solidarity with means the poor, the working class, not just the highly successful, they are not the measure of how black people are doing it. >> i want to ask before we put it in i want to ask one more

question can you speak to the possibility of the multiracial democracy while capitalism persists? >> do you want to take that? >> of course. i think there's a possibility for a multiracial coalition to speak to the contradictions of capitalism in this moment. but as long as capitalism maintains, there will be people at the disposal it seems to me.

racial capitalism is what it is. but that doesn't preclude, because as i understand the question, it doesn't preclude the possibility of the multiracial coalition to actually strike the blow. they are in full view. one of the interesting things about this current moment the last 40 to 50 years it's been revealed to be bankrupt. all of its contradictions are in full view. so part of what we are seeing in the street are folks that have come of age or have accumulated grease and the like. you see folks protesting over police brutality and the like and a kind of solidarity and dependability epidemic has generated.

the idea underneath it all with the judgment underneath it all is that that's why we see these different groups and coalition out in the streets risking their lives because they are risking their lives. my short answer to that question is yes i believe in the possibility of the coalition's. does that make sense? >> we've got to have some solidarity coalition based on the willingness to fight gets the treatment of indigenous peoples and the democratic experiment. but we have to have the multiracial coalition, there's no doubt about it. we just have to make sure they have the unapologetic fighting

white supremacy he was young, very much so. they keep the pressure on. america is an empire and a predatory capitalist civilization and profoundly white supremacy at its core a bug within the same experiment there've been freedom fighters coming out of the different traditions i don't mean to set

up that question in opposition. all of the questions must be honest and evaluated critically and honestly. thank you. before we make the transition to the audience questions, is there anything you want to share? >> i always thought jimmy was talking with me as i wrote the book. that's why you need to buy the book to get somebody to the

campaign. he said you need to write this book. a few weeks later i get a package in the mail and he sent me a candle to. there are these moments, the first biography in 1966, there were all of these amazing quotes in the biography and i remember saying i wish i could find the archives, and my writing partner was like why don't you call, he's got to be like 100-years-old and she said of course she sent me all of these telephone numbers by e-mail, so i called the first member added that willing to behold, he's

alive. i go to the apartment in new york and meet the needs, but i got the transcripts. in the transcription of the interview, baldwin's description of quickness there is an end i found in that space the moment i went to visit his grave at the end of if the partner of david baldwin and they had a beautif beautiful, carol drives me to the grave site and we think that we are going to find him and they are walking all around.

they pulle rolled down the windd it was loud. i write about this at the end of the book. the brother turns around and he says no, we don't know, but malcolm is over there. so then when they return i find him and he's right behind the younger folks waiting for it. he's been waiting to see what this history will do. >> with you talk about on the last pages of the text and the

american empire, this is one that is timely and will be timeless. this man has loved me to death and without his love and example, none of it would be possible. they booked me into understanding that it could save something in the world.

and to understand that i had the capacity to be a free black man and understand what it means to block and lot's of the portal of this log into me and i want to give him all the glory. >> one of the great honors of my life but also your parents, mom and dad in mississippi, they were such a blessing to be part of the great tradition knowing the self-examination goes hand-in-hand with the determination to keep on

swinging a. >> with a beautiful exchange. thank you for allowing me to be a witness to that. before we begin audience questions i want to remind everybody about the book beginninbeginagain which you cam labyrinth and free shipping if you put in the code and a 10% oe tempers of the signals go to the poor people's campaign and that is what we need to be doing, so please do pick up this book that is guiding the young people who need to know about the future of your going to fight for together.

and another [inaudible] on the fourth of july. with lesser-known voices in the two would you recommend to the audience whether historical or present? >> i would begin to on black radical with the young socialist a. philip randolph t. committed

suicide and jumped off the top of the building because black folks turned their back on him, but his life except some very data -- exemplary. the book about his voice to become more visible and he's in the same tradition. in the appropriating and manipulating the political discourses and practices and emotions. >> i think we have to and it's

going to sound a bit abstract but we have to figure out how to be together differently under these contemporary moral conditions, so how do we resist the way in which it reduces us into being individuals in pursuit of our own competition and rivalry with other individuals in pursuit of their own self-interest into the basic values that define that it's the notion that the public good business by folks understand why they cannot wear masks. they have no conception of

understanding others communities as part of what we have to do it seems to me is figure out how to build relationships with one another in some ways that hold off the way of speaking i and te world into the communities of love, those that will enable you to reach for a different way of being in the world and i'm not trying to sound like allison mcintosh talking about creating these little pockets you can run away but how we forge relationships with one another becomes an active political gesture in the moment, does that seem to make sense? >> absolutely. the joy that you have in those

relationships are like those you get in other corners of the world, other corners of the community. we have been a joyful people. you can't be soulful for pleasure, it is joy. the tradition that we come from, the deeper spiritual ki and we have to be honest and realized all of us especially those of us in the black middle class are always modified in one way or another and that has been the object of the critical reflection. he says by knowing the great white hope for the liberal establishment and i want to talk about that. i don't want to be that hope.

he has something inside him called a calling and i need to say that. they are missing the point. something just isn't right. [laughter] it's about freedom and all they talk about is money. the it's right there from chicago and what does that say, he understood the difference between keeping us safe and making it. you've got to make it because you've got to have cash.

you can't make it by bread alone. whatever faith is, bigger than us, bigger than your career, bigger than your next pr move. you've got to have something inside of you. >> intensity, empathy. >> i'm going to get more house for some credit here. [laughter] >> i'm going to ask a little follow-up because this moment is particularly unusual that we are asking for deep, useful, productive connection in a moment we are not a close because of the pandemic. how do we build closeness and the digital era and the platforms of these capitalist

projects and the kind of relationships that we would make in person otherwise? >> that is a hard question. the i'm thinking about [inaudible] paul taylor's wife, she lost her mother to covid-19 and couldn't go home to say goodbye to her, couldn't send her home right because she was worried about the coronavirus and her children. you think about as complicated as the relationship, they

couldn't do a second life for him in new orleans, can you imagine that a company could send him home right. so there are ways in which this current pandemic has interacted touch and has given brief a different register an image because it now comes with regret, and grief and regret or dangerous. i wish i could have said i was sorry before you went away. so that is happening alongside of the fact we are sheltering in place. many of us we cannot engage but

in the midst of this i'm trying to get to an answer to the question in the midst of this we have to find ways of being together a. i'm in a reading group. >> we have a good time, too. >> you and i don't even have time to blink. we sit here reading, and for every two weeks with our close partners, charles taylor, charles peterson, we are just talking about the book. there might be a little liquor flowing, but the point is we are trying to figure out how to maintain each other and how to

be a a shoulder to so how are they going to be coming out on the opposite end of this the way we've tried to continue under these conditions what it will look like when we get on the other side of this might be even deeper if that makes sense. >> i hope so and that is a possibility in the project of making time for one another. ..

>> and resolve that nothing would get in the way of the love we have for the people. whatever it takes. that whatever it takes and that's part of the great tradition that started the dialogue. [laughter] >> i been waiting my whole life to be in conversations like these and i am hopeful i was prepared thank you for the time you have given to us.

black people who love black people and care for our souls and there is a question here how we raise our black children. how do we negotiate our own radicalized trauma for children not to be burned? >> wow. yes there is a wonderful moment where jimmy rejects a certain description i don't know what people mean by the negro problem what we mean whatever they are saying to her children trying to keep

whatever the world is saying about them from taking root in their souls the 1000 cuts. interestingly we have to be honest with ourselves my own trauma and wounds that show up when i try to raise my baby. because there is generational baggage. you love the best way you can. and as vulnerable as it may be that it seems to me what fortifies that love and as crazy as he may be and is broken as he seems but if they can come out of that with the

love because that black love is something else. we have to keep the world from taking root and settling in the spirits and that is an ongoing battle. >> that is so powerful and it's so true. one of the great moments it says don't come be afraid. >> the negro is not afraid. >> i would rather be dead than afraid.

>> and i say you are so precious and priceless the world might not understand that but don't you ever be afraid. take a stand for something right the best of who you are what is in your mama and daddy and grandparents. >> don't settle from the gangster side. that's what you stand for. don't be afraid. don't ever sell out. don't cave-in or give up. that's exactly what brother eddie did with langston. do you see what i mean? and the community and the collegiality that he has we

have brothers and sisters to be as vanilla as a stereo typical norwegian. [laughter] keep the love flowing. it is real. [laughter] with the indigenous people. >> and very quickly i just reach back to grab it. but he said to be loved is hard. and forever your love is too hard. no no no. remember that i know how black it looks today yes we were

trembling we have not stop troubling but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. now you must survive because we love you for the sake of your children and your children's children. >>. >> that this is not love of blackness but black people individually and those that will cuss you out you don't love them because you want them to love you back. it's not a popularity contest. they are partly crucified by black people they are the ones.

now to marcus and betty lou and ella baker that they did anyway it wasn't man bpm be quid pro quo you help me i help you is that what people say about? >> no. that's embarrassing. >> thank you for that robust and joyous answer to that question. so now a part of the idea of forgiveness. james baldwin hated his father because people hate their parents and because of something that you point out in this book and he had let go

of the hatred because he needed to and also because what we are afraid of that when we let go we will feel the pain so give the children the ability to feel the pain and then they accept their parents has fallible human beings that is a gift to ourselves and i think the gift of having a child as an adult to see you as an adult. thank you for that. one more question. to make what do you think baldwin would have to offer those organizers deeply militarized police department or the white supremacist

violence? >> that is an interesting question. i wouldn't dare try to suggest that i could anticipate baldwin's works in this moment but i would direct you to the search because he has language for us that speaks to the moment. and they ask him this question in "esquire" in 1958 and said what did you say out in the street? he said i wouldn't tell them not to get their guns i

paraphrase. i would not tell them not to fight or defend themselves and i'm paraphrasing but i would say if you going to shoot that white man which it may come to , don't hate him. because the hatred corrodes the soul. because at the heart of the project it seems to me that moral concern of who we aspire to be. how do we not allow to just form and disfigure the soul? as we engage in this arduous path of self creation under these captive conditions. so fight to your last breath because that's what he said. but do it in the name of love

not in the name of hate. >> that's right. >> that is eloquent speaking my brother. we should never speak for brother baldwin. we went to the heart of american apartheid, slavery and terroris terrorism. that is what he was up against. he got off the plane and the bus and walked into a militarized zone with a very vicious attack. but he asks how black folks can keep their souls intact. that is a moral and spiritual question they had a richness and a death on - - a depth of something cultural and moral

and spiritual that made them morally said. or than the white supremacist. not because they were born that way that the tradition under blood sweat and tears. but that was different in harlem but we're all new world african africans. >> the speed of walking and a lot of other things. so what blew his mind to encounter such a great people spiritually and morally under those militarized conditions and those of the standards we have to keep it is a very difficult standard because we face strong moral declines because of commercialization

and white supremacy to get inside of us. but if in the name of love white people are not the point of reference then you are in a world of trouble and still captive but there are other white folk the newer second pathological. [laughter] >> and by means of access to tradition. that's what the synagogues ought to be doing and the hype you see what i mean? so you never get niggerized in

such a way to forget that tradition. >> so now we will and there. and speaking to the notion of radical levels and how it shapes the movement and we and there. thank you so much for coming to speak with us and for all of you and i hope you see what the next one. >> thank you. >> we love you. >> what a love warrior you are. >> we made a covenant we will

go down swinging. i will go down for him and we will continue on. >> thank you brother. >> thank you both.

>> welcome to book tv fiction in addition you have written nearly 50 fiction books. devil in a blue dress this launched you who is easy rawlins? >> he is the every man for the black community in the middle of the 20th century. and his full view of himself