prior to this job, and i decided i could not just read this for three weeks, so i'd read when i walked, on the bus, in class, three minutes before. everyone was, like, what are you doing here? you care about books. no, i do this job, i'm super happy, and it's great. there's a role for novels in just daily life. yeah, and all of your books will come probably in a bundle, brian's and janna's books together, so expect them in november. thank you so much for being here. eric, i'm so glad we got to have you featured tonight. >> hello. my name is connor moran, i'm the direct or of the wisconsin book festival. thank you so much for being here today for our event with laila lalami for conditional citizens, her million worry about coming to america, what it means to be american. we have a lot of great things that we can talk about with this book and maybe just current

events, laula. we were just -- laila, we were just talking about them in the green room x there's a lot to say. we are also joined by kate archer kent, you may know her as the host of the morning show. kate, thanks for being here. kate will be moderating today's conversation. before we got started, i do, as always, want to say thank you to madison public library and the madison public library foundation. their support for free cultural events here in madison and now across wisconsin, as cross the nation and across the globe has been unwavering for the past eight years but particularly during the pandemic. it was never a question of whether we were going to bring you great cultural events like this, it was just a matter of how. and so i always want to thank them. i also want to thank laila for being here today. we were going to bring her to madison in may and get to see her in person. obviously, that didn't happen. for our donor thank you event. as such, we are giving away free copies of "conditional citizen"

today. i will put a link in the green box at the bottom of your screen, and you can sign up, and our book partners will mail you a copy free of charge to your home. we hope that you'll talk advantage of that and read the book. i think i've said enough. i will step away and let the two of you have a wonderful conversation about laila's wonderful book, and i'll see you at the end. thanks so much. >> thanks, connor. laila, what a privilege to be able to talk with you. >> thanks so much, kate. i'm so happy to be here. >> well, or i'm going to start with a little introduction of you and read the introduction -- or the bio a butt from the back of your -- a bit from the back of your book. we're with leyla la laila lalams born in the morocco. she spoke arabic as a child, was educated in morocco, great britain and the u.s. she's the author of four novels including the moors account

which won the american book award, the arab-american book award, and it was a final u.s. for the pulitzer. finalist. her most recent work, "the other americans," was a finalist for the national book award, and her essays have appeared all over the place; l.a. times, washington post, the nation, harper's, new york times, the guardian. she is the recipient of fellowships from the british council, the fulbright program and the guggenheim foundation. laila lalami is a creative writing professor at the university of california at riverside, and she lives in los angeles where she is joining us. so, laila, thank you again. it is such a privilege to be here and talk about your book which was really moving. and we're going to start with the opening because when you became a u.s. citizen, this is the a sweltering day in the year 2000, and you talk about 3,000 people packed into the, you

know, fairgrounds complex. and then soon after you got your american passport which you called your powerful artifact. what did that american passport symbolize to you? [laughter] >> i think that's an excellent question to start with because it gets to the heart of how things can be interpreted in the moment and how they can be interpreted 20 years later in the middle of a pan pandemic. at the time, we see the passport as both a tangible proof of u.s. citizenship since i don't have, obviously, a birth certificate here. so if you're a naturalized citizen, the passport is essentially your proof of citizenship. you don't walk around, in fact, you're not supposed to carry your naturalization certificate. it's very precious, you have to save it, so the passport is essentially your proof of citizenship. and also the reason that i said it was a powerful artifact is that at the time it allowed you

to travel to more than 150 countries without having to go through the formalities of applying for a visa. americans may be unfamiliar with how complicated and tedious and at times really infuriating the procedure is for applying for visas to other countries. and that's something that i had gone through on my moroccan passport, so i was kind of familiar with it. and then having the u.s. passport meant that i could travel, as i said, to 150 countries without having to -- [inaudible] so the first thing that i did was at the time i was working for a computer start-up, a software start-up company as a computational linguist which is my training. i was trained in linguistics. and there was a conference that was taking place in hong kong that fall. and so i traveled to hong kong, and my husband came with me. my husband's american.

and so coming back to the u.s., we for the first time got to go in the same line which is the line reserved for u.s. citizens. and that was my first time actually having an encounter with a border agent as a citizen. and as i describe in the book, the question that asked me was -- he tonight even speak to me -- he didn't even speak to me, he spoke to my husband which was this patriarchal thing, and he said how many camels did you trade in for her? and i just was flabbergasted. just renderedded speechless really. and then he just laughed. he thought he was being funny. he stamped our passports and let us through. and to me, since that was my very first encounter with an agent at of the state as a u.s. citizen, i felt like it was, it carried a great deal of meaning about the difference between me and say, for example, my husband who's a native born citizen.

and he's a man that doesn't get asked these questions with. and so in the book, that's basically how i start the discussion of u.s. citizenship and the lived experience of u.s. citizenship. >> it didn't happen just once, it happened twice. >> yes. yeah finish. >> it happened years later again. >> yeah. >> you know, the day that all of us of a certain age remember where we were or was 9/11. how did everything change for american muslims when the planes hit the twin towers and in subsequent months and years? >> i think it was, for american muslims i think it was a defining event as much as it was for other americans in the sense that there was this feeling of being under attack by people that you didn't see, know who it was or what their reasoning was, what their reasons behind what

they did was. so there was the initial reaction, of course, the shock and horror and and just sort of, like, sorrow for the victims of the crime. and then immediately after that there was this feeling of fear because of the backlash that happened against muslims in the u.s. and people who appeared -- [inaudible] for example, sikhs who wear turbans who are not muslims but are frequently mistaken for muslims, it was a backlash to anybody who appeared muslim. and that backlash, of course, took the form of hate crimes which have been documented by the fbi, so you can go to the if fbi web site and look at the statistics for 2001 and after, and you can see the spike. but it's not just hate crimes which, after all, are random events driven by individuals,

having their own sort of views about others and seeking to sort of formalize them in a crime. there's also a government sanction reaction which is, which included things like special registration with immigration and naturalization service for arab and muslim men from 26 -- who originated from 26 countries all had to register as a group. and that was called the -- [inaudible] program. and it was spying. which, by the way, began before 9/11 because there are, there's actually a great documentary about surveillance prior to 9/11 called the feeling of being watched which it aired on pbs. and so surveillance of muslims, which is something that happened in new york, so in new york there was a new office that was started within the nypd called

the demographics unit. and so, of course, you would never know if it's called demographics unit that it's actually a spy program. and its sole purpose was to infiltrates mosques, infiltrate muslim businesses, muslim student unions even at different colleges in the area. you had student groups, like there was an informant somewhere in there. and even gaining access to private homes in order to sort of spy on the people who lived there. and all of that data was collected in these massive databases over a number of years. never leading to -- >> nothing. >> -- to a single lead on terrorism. people didn't even know that it existed until the associated press, two appropriators from the associated possess who ended up winning the pulitzer prize for their reporting series basically exposed that. and then it was, after it was

exposed and written about, then it was dismantled. and so this happened during the mayorship of michael bloomberg in new york. so i'm mentioning these because these are government-sanctioned actions taken against american muslims that go beyond just saying that there were hate crimes which, of course, there were. so it was a period of time, i would say, that was in my memory it's something that was unprecedented because i hadn't experienced something like that before. before 9/11 often times when i would meet people and i would say i was born and raised in morocco, they would then start talking to me about the arab world. there was this idea that we're all connected to the arab world, we were arabs. >> you're supposed to have all the answers about isis. >> well, that too -- [laughter] but i think that 9/11, but

after -- but before 9/11 people would treat people like me as arabs, but then after 9/11 we became muslims. so that, and that was the only identity. on though we're both, like, i'm both, but there was this sort of perception that everybody was lumped into the same, the same group. and so in my mind, it really is a period of time that both has this sort of, like, environment of fear. but also on a personal level, it's something that i experienced in various ways and comments in the workplace, job interviewing different things that happened. but of course i don't coffer and i'm not, you know, there's nothing necessarily about me that says that i am -- [inaudible] than a lot of times i hear these comments more than i see them. and then of course, you know, later, you know, just as things

were kind of, like, calming down, along comes isis and then, of course, that's a whole other stet of questions. >> right, right. did you feel like you could talk openly about questioning the war in iraq or the war in afghanistan? >> i think that after 9/11 i think that there was a great deal of awareness on the parts of american muslims that everything that came out of their mouths would be scrutinized for any sign of disloyalty the or any sign of, you know, sympathy for anything that was not american. so i think that a number of people were very, very careful when they spoke. what happened after 9/11 is that among muslim voices that supported wars, those were elevated. so you have people like fareed zakaria who, i think at the time, was working at "newsweek"

and who supported both the afghanistan war and the iraq war, you know, obviously had no shortage of air time. you know, people like hem and so on and so forth. but even though he's very well respected at the time, the late ed war said, you know, wasn't getting invited to speak about his positions on these issues. so i think e that the muslims who supported the wars were listened to and elevated, and the people who expressed defense were considered to be just sort of like rabble-rousers and potentially even, you know, traitors. so there's definitely -- there wasn't a sense that expressing the sense was welcomed. and if this isn't something that was re restricted -- i remember

that there was a piece in the new yorker a week after the attacks, and she was -- because she expressed worry about what might happen in a country in which everybody is expositived to the same three or four slogans and talking points. and that essentially indicated that we were hurtling towards a massive war. and so she was expressing concern about that. she was attacked in the press for weeks on it. so i think it was a different, it was a time when just expressing disagreement with u.s. foreign policy could cost people their, their careers really. finish. >> i want to look at self-identity a little bit. your whole life you've lived in between regions, multiple languages, in between multiple countries, and you have talked

about separating yourself from these painful inequalities in operating in a kind of gray zone, gray area. can you explain a little more what this gray area's like in how it relates to a conditional as. >> yeah. to this term of gray zone is a term that i came across a few years ago because i was researching a piece for "the new york times"es magazine. it's actually a term that was coined by the pr department -- there is such a thing -- at -- [inaudible] match laugh -- [laughter] and they put out back in the day when they were still operating in syria, there were comments on current effects. and one of the things that they put out, the attack on france, is an article basically calling on them to pick a side. you either chose the side of

isis, or you chose the pseudoof the unbelievers. and anybody who was in the gray zone meaning that have any kind of wanting to coexist with others rath other than just go to the service, quote-unquote crusade ors, you know? if you chose the side of resistance, that meant you were living in the gray zone. and the gray zone is a terrible thing because they view the world in black and white. and that's the kind of year that we i thought very much of what george w. bush had said in his address when he said're either with us or you're against us. that has always a struck me as a very sort of dangerous way of looking at the word around us, that, in fact, the world is composed of grays even in terms

of our identities. none of us are just one thing or another. you're not just a come, you're a woman and you're a citizen, and you're a mother, you're -- i don't know, you're part of multiple identities. you can't just be one thing or another. and to approach the world with, a world as complicated as ours, this these very simplistic ways is extremely poisonous really. >> and so in that's cay i kind of talk about my realization that all few life i have lived in the gray zone. you know, i grew up in an arab and muslim country, but a number of my realliest i cautions, i are a number of french teachers, all of these people were christians or it justs. and and that was ordinary to me because that was my life. and then i came to the u.s. and moved to l.a. which is just a massive city add people from all

over, nearly 40% of the people who live in l.a. are foreign-born. so everybody's from somewhere else. we have all of these different languages and religions gotisting and nobody think abouts it about it because they're going about their business. real lois of us live in gray areases and are used to it. to this idea that there's manager bad about -- that is, the fundamental part of our lives, is extremely distressing. so i was weeing about, actually, running to be in the grain krill. , not wans to -- not wanting to give up on this idea of coexisting with others. >> you write about the dangers of assimilation, this notion that we're all in this great momenting pot, but that's not exactly the reality of it. you talk about the apoach more

keeping our core background and culture and being able to celebrate that and live that. what does that look like? and has the idea of integration and assimilation? >> i think that's a really good question. i think that the question of integration and assimilation has never been entirely settled in american society. i think that when it's the foundational myths of the united states, it's a nation of immigrants. how often do you hear nation of immigrants, right? it's something that is a source of pride for many americans even if in reality the immigration laws really were extremely tight and favored immigrants from wen europe and excluded a number of immigrants from all around the world beginning with the chinese exclusion act of 1982. chinese people were not allowed

to integrate until 194. and there were all kinds of laws that were bassed. and, of course, you know, the quote of nation of immigrants also doesn't talk into account that there were people before in this nation, indigenous people, and that people that were brought here who were not immigrants, meaning enslaved people. so it's kind of a slogan that really denies on a great deal of e raise jury. nevertheless, it's a course of pride for americans that they have a nation chat so diverse where with which is this is kind of a national identity based on a showered set of principles. and that -- a shared set of principles. that also depends on figuring out how everybody is going to live together that comes if from different cultures. and the model that the nation

really used for a long time was ace simulation. in the case of -- assimilation. in the cause of unding juice people, it was forest bl where their children were taken from them and put in boarding schools and forced to speak english and, you know, were socially acculture rated in order to assimilate into white society. over the years, that model really has changed and so there was this introduction of a model called integration which so you could start seeing, you know, the emphasis on integration during the civil rights movements, right? where people are fighting for the right to desegregation racists. and it doesn't mean -- [inaudible] how they fit the society around them. and now in the modern era it is

sill the a situation of ongoing debate where people talk. anytime there's any kind of a tension that involves a particular are e liberties group or cultural group, the idea of awe simulation comes back up, and you hard accusations of lots of i assimilation. so in the's cay e that i write about, what i write about assimilation, i was actually travel thing to a book event in eerie know, and i sat next to a gentleman who proceeded -- who said he was from gardena, and i used to live in torrance, so i knew the area. i said, oh, you know, i know the area. you know it's changed, we have all those koreans now. [laughter] and then he started complaining that they don't assimilate. and i said, well, what do you mean? he said, well, they send their children to some day schools, and it bothered him, and i couldn't understand why -- i

just didn't understand what that did to him that other people were doing that. [laughter] and that view of assimilation which demands that other people give up their cultures and languages is actually on the ascendance. so you have somebody like president trump who complained in interviews that the muslim-americans, there's just no assimilation there. that's the quote. and so its used as a cudgel. it's used as a way to say these people do not belong here, and the only way to belong is to give up everything or that makes them different. and that's not to possible. first of all, just on a basic level, you know, our identities have components that are cultural and linguistic, and you can't ask people to to give that up. >> on that linguistic point, you know, you spoke arabic as a child, and there's a point where

you're chatting in the airport with our sister -- with your sister and getting stares from someone right across to you until you switch to english, then the person goes back to reading their magazine. [laughter] and then another point, too, is when you are trying to encourage your daughter to speak arabic and really trying to encourage that as a toddler to get that fluency. but she would always gravitate to english. .. this caller who years and years ago had tried to interest u.s. publishers in translating the works of the nobel prize

winning novelist from egypt, and the response from u.s. publishers was, we can't do that because arabic is a controversial -- can you imagine thinking but a language -- the language, right? just the language has been -- >> i think there's this kind of like sort of the perception that if you speak arabic you are suspicious, and definitely something how to will encounter if you speak arabic in places like airports or places that involve government surveillance of some kind. any space that is essentially a government space. >> and you see something, say something. >> right. right. and so there's a heightened perception to anything that is different, and speaking arabic is the height of the difference because you are in this airport. so people really do get nervous, which is kind of amusing to me

every once in a while. >> speak arabic. but in terms of of its role, obviously something i have tried to pass on the my daughter, but it has been an uphill battle because even though she spoke it, by the time she was in preschool and kindergarten, the second year, she would refuse to because she thought it made her -- i'm guessing here -- get it made her look different from the other can is and all the other kid only spoke english and she wanted to be like the other kids which i guess is an impulse that all kid have to be like the other kids at school. and so i think that it is -- there is that pressure in the united states in particular to give up the languages of your

parents and to become -- to have mono-lingual english proficiency, something that, for example, the mayor of san antonio, julian castro who ran for the democratic nomination, always spoke about because he spoke spanish in the home but said that when he started school they were not encouraged to speak spanish, and so i think today his spanish is not as proficient. he is very much an english speak ir. >> the pressure that is central to i think this idea of integration and assimilation in american society. >> i want to switch gears and talk but border walls and borderment because that's such a prominent piece of discussion in your book and thoughtful in your book. we talked but the opening the ins of you crossing the border.

what struck me was the day you and your husband just wanted to go watch a world cup soccer match in mexico cali and just crossing over the border no problem, and coming back was this major ordeal, and was really -- felt very threatening to you, and when you look at our border system, what do you see and what is the contrast there, especially first on our southern border. >> well, yeah. it's something that i noticed -- i only crossed the land border into mexico a couple of times, and that incident you described was a few years ago. a world cup match and we hand to be floor the border, and i said wouldn't it be fun to watch this in a cafe with a bunch of other people who care about soccer as much as we. do let cross.

so we did. and crossing into i was stunned that nobody was asking us for id, crossing the border into mexico. just i guess because it's a border town and they get to a lot of traffic back and forth. coming back in was a different thing altogether. it was a lot more the lines were longer, it was a lot more questions, and why would you cross the border to go -- a lot of questioning. just was a different experience, and i think that the border really reminded me because it's so similar to the experience of morocco and spain. it really reminded me of how the border has physically changed over my lifetime. i think people who live in the southwest border of the u.s. will testify to the fact that the border did not look the way it looks now. there was no wall prior to 1994, for example, and people could

come in and out. so it was a little bit a situation in which even example, seasonal workers would come and return. but with the border, if they come they're here and that is where the stay and makes things even from a pure need labor perspective, makes things a lot more complicated than they have to be. and just this view of the border as becoming more of a militarized and a physical manifestation of difference between countries, something i observed with morocco and spain. when i was little my parents would pack us in the car and we would go to spain -- spain has a couple of land borders with moore rocco, old holdovers along the coast, and the border post was just a cinder block building and you waved to the guard and go in and back out. it wasn't what it is today which

is this insanely militarized border post with fences each 20 feet high, a moat, cameras, guard dogs, motion detectors. just a different situation. so the border really has become this literalized expression of differences between countries, and it's something that people should really think about if that's what they really want. >> something i learned that i wasn't even that aware of is i was aware of it at all, is these checkpoints and you take us from checkpoint when el paso and miles from any external border. why do we have border patrol

checkpoints so far inland in our country. >> that is an excellent question and that is a question that the departments of justice and the department of homeland security really need to address. i didn't even know that the united states had these checkpoints. i discovered them completely by chance. i was going to an artist residency and in the middle of interstate 10, between el paso and mar that we were stopped a cheng point and the guys were wearing these green uniforms but essentially law enforcement uniforms and guard dogs, huge guns, and so very serious, and they stop you and ask you, are you a u.s. citizen? and so we each said, yes, and at that point the border patrol agent has the discretionary power to decide whether they believe you in which case you

are on your way, or they actually don't believe you're a u.s. citizen. now you have to prove it and most people don't go around carrying a birth certificate or a u.s. passport on therm so if that happen today how would you prove that you're a u.s. citizen? so you see in a situation like that where the border agent is going to make a determination based on how you look and how you sound and something pout your affect, and when that comes into making a decision, then that means it's going to get used unequally depending on the race and language and accent of the personert you can be a u.s. citizen but the border patrol doesn't believe you, then you basically are stuck there, and you can be put into immigration detention until you can provide proof of citizenship. so each year people get caught the border checkpoints and when i got stopped myself at one of

these, i -- by the time -- when i got marfa i started researching these border checkpoints and there's quite a few of them. the website of customs and border protection lists 134, but there also roving checkpoints. so when you add up the checkpoints you might be looking at something like 200. and they're positioned within 100-miles of both land borders are so the land border between mexico and canada, but also sea borders so the atlantic the pacific, and also the lakes, the great lakes. so, it -- they are everywhere in the u.s. and a majority of the u.s. population lives in what is technically the border zone which means at any point border patrol could be setting up a checkpoint and saying, are you a u.s. citizen? are you a u.s. citizen? and making these determinations. so it's really a massive amount of power, and it guess back to a

regulation that was set in 1952, that basically extended the power of border patrol from just the border to looking 25 miles within the border in case some people had bon through without showing papers and that power was extended to 100 miles year later, and that is where -- that's just been on the books. nobody ever challenged it, nobody has run on getting rid of it. one thing that is just folded into the duties of border patrol. and what happens-or at least that's my experience is the more funding we give to the particular agencies, the more they're going to find reasons to justify that funding. and border principal's budget has blendes over the last 30 years and that money is going to having these checkpoints. so it's something that people really should consider if you

have never come across a checkpoint, probably not a problem in your life, but if you live near one, it can be a tremendously disruptive force because if you are driving to the grocery store or you're driving to go to school or anywhere that involves being on that road where the checkpoint is, you're going to get stopped and asked that question. and so it can really turn into a form of harassment if you are constantly told where is your paper and you happen to be, say, for example, nonwhite person, and then you're getting stopped more often, and so it can really turn into a form of harassment. >> i want to turn to the travel ban. shortly after president trump took office, he issued the executive ban, banning nationals from seven muslim majority countries. you viewed the muslim ban as a

erasing muslim from america's collective past of the what does this effectively do to american muslims in our country and this travel ban? >> well, the -- a number of things. but one of the things i want to say is that we are supposed to call it the travel ban because the initial countries that were put on it were all muslim countries but in the form in which -- the form of which -- the form that survived legal challenges, which is a presidential proclamation which the supreme court upheld in 2018 is a list of at least five muslim countries, plus venezuela and we ended up with the term "travel ban" after great deal of back and forth within the administration to try and make

sure that the ban survived constitutional and legal challenges. and in reality, what it is is it's a -- they already prevent citizens from leaving their country youch can't ban people from entering that are backed from leaving their own country and venezuela, the ban does not aflow venezuelans, applies to venezuelan officials, government officials so 40 people every year. but the other five countries combined have something like 80,000 visas eave year so if you have regulation that targets 80,000 people of one kind of community, and 40 from another, how can you then say it's not a muslim ban? so of course itself is a muslim ban but just the inclusion of that tiny number was enough for the supreme court to say it was neutral towards religion and to let it become law. the muslim ban is part of a long

series of immigration restrictions that the united states has imposed on nonwhite immigrants, and i mentioned earlier the chinese immigration act of 1882. that was just one of many, many other laws that were passed. the most serious of which was the immigration act of 1924, which essentially shut down immigration in the out to anyone except in we were europe ir. the used the census from 30 years earlier and established quotas and by doing that they were able to essentially restriction immigration from everywhere except for western europe, and it's a way to ensure that white immigrants arrive but not asians, africans, soul

americans and so on. so to me the muslim dan -- the is act of 1924, restrictions were not abolished folly until 1965. so we have only had essentially 50 years of immigration being open to people -- to anybody who wants to apply. doesn't mean that everybody comes. just means that anybody can apply to come, but with this muslim ban wore going right back to those old restrictions and saying, people from these countries cannot apply to come to the u.s. doesn't matter what they have done. doesn't matter what thy might contribute. doesn'tmeter wham family they have or who they're trying to join. they're simply not eligible to come end of story. so it is a xeno fobbic ban you

have seen period contraction and then another ban that targeted mostly african and asian countries. so, my expectation honestly is if there is a trump reelect we'll see new bans and the administration has already proposed rule odden student visas which will ban many african and asian students from come topping the u.s. and again the way they do that is not through saying, people from africa or asia can't come. it's by writhing lieus that look like they're racially neutral but get the same results also if they are not racially neutral. and the final point i want to make put the muslim ban is that -- this ties to erasure -- muslims have been in america

since long before there was colony of jamestown. the earlier muslims than landed here came with spanish expeditions that explored the north american continent. so this idea you're going to ban people who were here even before you arrived is really kind of telling. it tells us that you perceive yourself to have the power to decide who belongs in this country and who doesn't. and i think that because that history, because that history of earliest muslims is not taught in schools, it contributes to a kind of erasure of muslims from american collective history and makes these bans seem like they're just targeted at foreigners when in reality these bans often times are targeting americans like you and me. if you are a yemeni american you have now lost the ability to -- if you're born here, you

areemeni dissent you have lost the ability to sponsor a grandmother or uncle or cousin or anybody who was born in yemen. you don't have that option. you're german you have that right. so it's actually taking away rights from people from yemen, from people -- from people of yemeni descent that are american born. so it is stripping away at the constitutional rights of people here but it looks like only targeted at immigrants abroad. >> the president has also used rhetoric against muslims, he hays made tweets blasting radical is islamic terrorism and they're dangerous. what does the tweet and rhetoric do for the muslim community and

for our country as a whole? >> i think that it's easy when somebody as vulgar and as blunt as the president to seem as though he is unique, but he isn't. he is somebody that got to his position by riding a wave of populist support. people had to agree with him or else they wouldn't have voted for him. and so i think that he is very much part of a long tradition of xeno phobic tradition in the u.s. it is true, and i think that the constant stream of tweet is find exhausting. i to be the follow him. don't retweet him.

i don't propagate what he has to say. i think i understand what it is he is trying to communicate just by reading about it in the newspapers and the headlines but i don't feel the need to validate it by retweeting it or giving it space on my own social media. i do think that he is very much a symptom and i think that even if he does lose re-election, his supporters are still going to be around, and there's going to have to be some kind of resolution to this debate that we are really having about what kind of a country we want to live in. that is what it really comes town to. do be want to live in a country that is diverse and everybody is bound by a set of shared principles or do we want to police in a country in which some people, namely white people, have more rights than everybody else. that is ultimately what donald

trump is promising people and if not him somebody will come after him that will make that promise a bit more elegantly than he has, because he has this ability to speak in very, also i said, vulgar terms and makes him so divisive. think that in fact if there was another candidate who basically proposed the same policies but more elf gant and more polished in the way that they presented them. it would actually be a lot scarier and a lot more effective. >> i want to look at gender for a moment. you have lived under a monarchy. you're a citizen of the u.s. put neither structure afforded you opportunities to be on equal footing as men and enjoy the same rights and privileges. the reaction you get here to feeling that way is disbelief

and, really? can you explain why you haven't felt free or fully equal in either country? >> i think it has to do with the fact that patriarchy is a global system and you can feel better about the fact there are certain rights we have in the u.s. that people in other countries don't have. so for the moment, women in the united states have the right to make medical decisions about their bodies up to and including abortion, and i live in california whichs to have access -- you have access to reproductive care, but in other states that is nose necessarily the case there's been so many closures of abortion clinics. so you can say with hayes have to rights and therefore it's better to live here than to live in another country, but rights are never just -- should never

be considered nearly taken for granted. for example, right now, we're going through -- we just finished two weeks of hearings of a supreme court justice whose track record indicates less than -- indicated she will not support abortion as a right. so nearly possible in the next to years that will be taken away , you can tell yourself you have more righting but that's an effort at consolation. i think that patriarchy is a global problem and women face challenges and living in lives dignity and they can make their own medical decisions and also be taken seriously with respect to somethings like sexual

harassment or sexual assault. the president himself has a dozen or so examples of sexual assaults against him and none of those have led to any kind of legal -- consequence. >> what can the u.s. do to take strides toward equal citizenship? what do you want to see -- i mean, what can this country do first to start moving in that direction of equal citizenship? >> i think it means -- i think in order to get to equal citizenship it is going to require each of us to use what talents we have and what privileges we have to smash this idea and the reality, too, of

hierarchical citizenship. this is a country that managed to give us the civil rights movement. so i know that it has the possibility of changing things. we need a movement just like that to ensure that citizenship is equal among us and is not this hierarchical thing where some people have more rights than others and that's going require each of us to take actions. obviously in a very, very small way, voting and taking partner electoral process is part of that and that is super important because the people who make decisions are not just presidents of i think there's too much time and attention spent on presidential candidates and probably not enough on the person who is running for the school board or who is running for county sheriff, district attorneys and those are the races have the biggest impact on

our day-to-day lives, on how criminal justice is enacted in our communities, which textback our children read, decision not made in washington. they're made in our communitiess and so voting and'ing involved never downtown ballot races are important but outside of the electoral cycles there's always an opportunity to be involved in our communities and that can take the form of being involved in funds or mutual aid organizations, volunteering time at schools, a number of the problems we have stem from the fact that there's so much inequality and so much of it takes place so early in people's lives so if we can basically give some of our time and volunteer some of our time to help children at school who are disadvantaged, don't have a parent who stays at home, help this homework, that can really

make a huge difference people's lives. right now that we're in a pandemic, an entire generation of kids is being left behind because of something as simple as not having access to wi-fi at home or not having access to a space at home in which they took their homework. even even if the school provides the devices, doesn't necessarily mean that wi-fi is available. so, just basically being involved in organizations that can address these early, early inequalities. that can make a huge difference in the future. >> i'm wondering, maybe we can end this way but do you feel some hope when you like around? will you ever be able to look at your gray zone? a different way? >> well issue sure hope sew. it's something i have been -- i feel hope when i look at our younger generation.

i think that they are so involved, for example, my daughter is very much involved in the climate movement. it's something that matters to her because of -- we live in california and we were talking but this in the green room, how we have had wildfires this summer that have lasted so long it's air quality is so terrible you can't even go out and take a walk. today is not so bad, but this is the kind of world that we are leaving them, and they very much feel that their future has been mortgaged, and has been risked, and so they're involved in trying to change that. so i do find hope in young people and so many others who are actually being agent of change. so when we -- when i wake up in morning this is the question ask myself, how can i be an agent of change? i don't want to just be a person who watches it all without getting involved.

>> s to your daughter still want to be president? >> no. >> that could change. when i think she was like 10 or 12. no, no, shoe is a musician, an artist, i think. >> that was really conflicted for you because of a gender, of race, of a lot of things, a lot of feelings. >> he hope things are better by the time she is old enough to be president. we have few years to do. a lot of work to do before then. well, this has been such an honor, such a pleasure, and i just am so grateful to have the opportunity to talk with you today. >> thank you so much for having me, kate. canthank you all for listen, an. >> and everybody gets a free copy of the book. that's amazing.