much. >> you are watching the tv on c-span2, every week and with the latest nonfiction books and authors. book tv on c-span2 created by america's television company and brought to you by these television companies to provide book tv to viewers as a public service ♪ ♪ >> hello my name is connor moran i'm the director of the wisconsin book festival thank you so much for being here today and her memoir about coming to america and coming to be american, we have a lot of great things that we could talk with this book in current events. inward is talking about the greenroom, we are also joined from keith with wisconsin public radio, kate, thank you for being

here she will be monitoring today's conversation before we get started i want to say thank you to madison public library foundation and now across wisconsin in the nation and the globe, it's been unwavering for the past eight years for particularly during the pandemic, it was never a question of whether we were going to bring you great cultural event like this, it's just a matter of how, i hoist want to thank them, i want to thank layla for being here today we were going to bring her to madison and nate and see her in person, obviously that didn't happen for our donor event as such we are giving away free copies, once i leave the screen and i will put a link in the green box at the bottom of your screen and you can sign up in our bookselling partners we will know you a copy free of charge to your home. we hope that you will take advantage of that and read

layla's book. i think i've said enough, i will step away and that the two of you have a wonderful conversation about layla's wonderful book and i will see you at the in. >> thank you connor, what a privilege to talk with you. >> thank you so much, i'm so happy to be here. >> i'm going to start with a little introduction and read the bio from the back of your book were layla who was born in the capital of morocco in layla spoke arabic as a child who educated in morocco, great britain and the u.s. she is the author of four novels including the more of the account which won the american book award, the arab-american book award the right legacy award in the final for the poster, the most recent work finalist for the national book award in her essays have appeared all over the place, los

angeles times, the washington post, facing nation, harpers, new york times, the guardian, the recipient of fellowship from the british council, and the guggenheim foundation. layla is a creative writing professor at the university of california riverside and she lives in los angeles where she is joining us. layla, thank you again it's such a privilege to be here and talk about your book which is really moving and were going to start with the opening because when you became a u.s. citizen this is a sweltering day in the year 2000 and you talk about 3000 people packed into this fairground complex and soon after you got your american passport which you called your powerful artifact, what did the american passport symbolize to

you? >> i think that's an excellent question to start with because it gets to the heart of how things can be introverted in the moment and 20 years later in the middle the pandemic. at this time we see a passport served as a tangible proof as u.s. citizenship because we obviously don't have a birth certificate so were naturalized citizen and the passport is essentially your proof of citizenship and you don't walk around and you're not supposed to cure your naturalization certificate, the passport is essentially your citizenship and also i said it was a powerful artifact because at the time it allowed you to travel to more than 150 countries without having to go to the formality of applying for a visa and americans may be unfamiliar with how complicated and tedious and at times infuriating and the

procedure for applying to other countries. that is something that had gone through and it was kind of familiar and having the u.s. passport that i could travel to 150 countries without having to doing that. the first thing that i did at the time i was working for computer startup and a software startup company as a computational linguist which i was trained in and a conference that was taking place in hong kong in that fall i traveled to hong kong and my husband came with me, my husband is american so coming back to the u.s. we for the first time got to go on the same line from the u.s. citizen and that was my first time having an encounter with the border agent as a citizen

and as i described in my book and he asked me, he didn't speak to me, he spoke to my husband which is a patriarchal thing going on. i was flabbergasted and rendered speechless really, then he just laughed, he thought he was being funny and then he sent our passports and let us through. to me since it was my very first encounter with the agent of the state as a u.s. citizen, i felt like it was and carried a great deal of meaning about the difference between me and my husband who is a native foreign citizen and demanded does not get asked these questions. in the book that's basically how i start the discussion in the lived experience about u.s. citizenship.

>> did not just happen once, the day that all of us is a certain age remember 9/11 how did everything change for american muslims when the plane hit the twin towers and in subsequent months and years. >> for american muslims it was a defining event as much as it was brother americans in the sense that there was a feeling of being under attack by people you didn't meet and the reasoning and the reasonings behind what they did was and to the initial reaction, the shock to the core and sorrow for the victims of the crime and immediately after that there was a feeling of

smear because the backlash happened against the u.s. and people that appeared to seek men who are turbans and not listen to their mistakes, it was a backlash against anybody who appeared. >> that backlash took the form of hate crime and documented by the fbi, you can go to the fbi website and look at the statistics for 2001 and you can see the spike but it is not just hate crime which after all i ran by having their own views about others in seeking to formalize the need in a crime. there is also a government sanctioned, reaction which

included things like special registration with immigration and naturalization service who originated from 26 countries all had to register as a group, that was going to be in the program and then there was fine which by the way began before 9/11 because there is actually a great documentary, this is prior to 9/11 called the ceiling of being watched and aired on pbs, is a surveillance of something that happened in new york and in new york there was a new office that was started called the benner graphic in court she would never know it sole purpose was to infiltrate muslim

businesses with the student union of different colleges in the area if you had a student group, there was an informant somewhere and even gaining access to private homes to buy on the people who live there. and all of that data was collected in the massive databases were a number member of years and never leading to a single lead on terrorism but people didn't even know that it existed until the associated press, two reporters from the associated press ended up winning the pulitzer prize for their reported series and exposed and after it was exposed and written about, then it was dismantled, this happened during the marriage of a michael bloomberg in new york, i am mentioning these because these are government sanctions,

actions taken against american muslims that go beyond that there was hate crimes, of course they were, of course there was a period of time, in my memory it was something and it's because it something that i have an experience like that before, before 9/11 i would meet people and say i was born and raised in morocco and they would start talking to me about the arab world, the idea that morocco was connected to the arab world, then after 9/11 -- >> you were supposed to have all the answers about isis. >> that to but i am saying that 9/11 -- before 9/11 people would treat people like me as arabs as after 9/11 we became and that was only identity, even though were both, i'm both.

there was a perception that everybody was lumped into the same group. in my mind it's a period of time an environment of fear and also on a personal level it something i experience in various ways and comments in the workplace and different things to happen and of course i don't cover and there's not nothing necessarily about me that says i muslim or anything. then a lot of times i hear these comments more than i see them and of course you know later, things were calming down along comes isis and that's a whole another set of questions. >> right. did you feel like you can talk openly about question need the war on iraq or the war on

afghanistan? >> i think after 9/11 i think there was a great deal of awareness on the parts of american muslims that everything that came out of their mouth would be scrutinized for any sign of disloyalty or any sign of sympathy for anything that was not american. i think that a number of people were very, very careful when they spoke what happened after 9/11 those were elevated, you have people who i think at the time was looking at newsweek and supported both afghanistan war and iraq were, obviously had no shortage of airtime, people like him and so on and so forth.

and even though he's very well-respected at the time, the late edward was not getting invited to speak on primetime television on his positions of these issues. i think the muslims who supported the wars were listen to in elevated the people who express the sense were considered to be ravel browser's and potentially even traders. there was not a sense that it was welcome, this is something that was restricted to muslims, i remember he had a piece in the new yorker a week after the attack because she expressed worry about what might happen in a country in which everybody is

exposed to the same three or four slogans and talking points and that indicated toward the massive war. so she was expressing concern about that, she was attacked in the press for weeks. in u.s. foreign policy could cost people their careers really. >> i want to look at self-identity a little bit. your whole life you lived in between languages, multiple languages in between multiple cultures, and between countries and you have talked about buffering yourself from these painful inequalities by operating in a gray zone, gray area, can you explain a little more what does gray area like, how it relates to conditional

citizen. >> this term of gray zone that i came across a few years ago with the new york times magazine is actually a term coined by the pr department, there is such a thing and they put out back in the day when they were still operating, they put out a move magazine and they would comment on current events and one of the things that they put out after the attack on france was article basically calling on muslims to take aside, you either chose the side of isis or you chose the side of the unbeliever. , anybody in the gray zone meaning that they coexist with others rather than just go to

the terrorist or crusaders, if you didn't pick a side and chose aside it meant you were living in the gray zone in the gray zone of isis is a terrible thing. they view the world in black and white, that is the kind of view that i thought reminded me very much in his address to the nation after 9/11 you're either with a store against us there's a sort of way of looking at the world in black and white, that has always struck me as a dangerous way of looking at the world around us and in terms of identity none of us just want one thing or another, and your citizen and a mother and i don't know, your partner multiple

identities you can just be one thing or another and to approach the world of complicated as ours and these very simplistic ways, and this appointment under poisonous, and the essay i talked about my realization that all my life i have lived in the gray zone, i grew up in a country because a member of my earliest acquaintances, my teachers, and a number of french teachers, although these people were christian or atheist, that was ordinary to me because that was my life and i came to the u.s. and moved to l.a. which is a massive city of people from all over nearly 40% of the people who live in l.a. are foreign-born and all these different languages and racism in languages and nobody thinks about it because everybody's going about their business,

really most of us living gray areas. and we are used to it. the idea that there is something bad about that in the fundamental part of our life is extremely distressing so i was writing about wanting to be in the gray field and not wanting to give up on this idea of coexisting with others. >> coexisting with others, you also write about assimilation and the dangers about that this notion that were in a great melting pot and that's not the exact reality of it. the approach is more that we are keeping our core background and culture and being able to celebrate that and live that, what does that look like and the idea of integration zone and

civilization. >> i think that's a great question, the great question of immigration and civilization has ever been settled in american society, i think one of the foundational myths of the united states is how often do you hear a nation of immigrants, that is something is a source of pride for many americans. even if in reality the nation's immigration laws were extremely tight and favored immigrants from western europe and excluded a number of immigrants all over the world beginning with the chinese exclusion in 1982 chinese people were not allowed to immigrate into the u.s. until 1943 and there was all kinds of other laws that were passed to exclude people in a sense and if they were here to exclude them from citizenship and living in white neighborhoods and so on and so forth.

of course the nation of immigrants also doesn't take into account that there were people before and that people were brought here that were not immigrants meaning enslaved people, it is a slogan that relies on a great deal, nevertheless it is a source of pride for americans i think that they have a nation that is so diverse. and there is a binding national identity and they share a set of principles. , that also depends figuring out how everybody's going to live together that comes from different cultures and the model that the nation really use for a long time was a simulation in the case of forcible simulation where the children were taken from them and in boarding

schools. and essentially court treated and to assimilate into life society. over the years, that model really has changed so there was introduction of the model of integration and you can start seeing of integration during the civil rights movement where people are fighting for the right to desegregate places and integrate them and that doesn't mean adopting holy the society around them. and now in the modern era it still a situation of ongoing debate where anytime there is any kind attention that involved a particular religious group or cultural group the idea of the simulation comes back up and you

hear accusations of lots of assimilation. in the essay that i read about assimilation, it is actually traveling to a book event in reno and i sat next to a gentleman who preceded and said he was from gardena and i used to live in torrance which is close to gardena. i knew the area and i said i know the area and he said it's changed we have all those koreans now. then he started complaining that they don't simulate. and i said what you mean and they said they send their children to sunday school and that bothered him and i could not understand why you bothered him the other people were sending their children to sunday school to learn korean i did not understand what that did to him the other people are doing. that view of a simulation which demands the other people give up their culture and languages, see

have somebody like president trump who complained to the interview and that is just noah simulation there. a simulation is really used as a way to say these people did not belong here. the only way to belong is to give up everything that makes them different. that is not possible, first of all on a basic level our identities have components the glue sticks and you can't ask people to give that up. >> you spoke arabic as a child and there's a point where your chatting in the airport with your sister on the phone and error back and getting stares from someone right across from you with the english and the person goes back to reading a

magazine and another point, when you are trying to encourage your daughter to speak arabic and really trying to encourage that as a toddler to give the fluency, she would ways gravitate to english so how is arabic viewed in your family and the perception from the outside world. >> i think the perception from the outside world is exactly what you would describe the perception of suspicion and integrate glory about edward who years and years ago had tried to interest u.s. publishers in translating the work of the nobel prize-winning novelist from egypt. in the response from u.s. publishers, we cannot do that because arabic is not a controversial, can you imagine thinking about a language, just

the language. >> i think there is the perception that if you speak arabic you are somehow suspicious and is definitely something you will encounter if you speak arabic in places like airports or places like involve government of surveillance of some kind. every space that is a government space. >> and you say something, say something type of thing. >> so there is a heightened perception to anything that is different. in speaking arabic is the height because you were in the airport. people really do get nervous and it's amusing to me every once in a while. [laughter] >> in terms of its role obviously something i have to

pass on to my daughter but it hasn't been an uphill battle because even when she spoke at by the time she was in preschool and kindergarten for the second year preschool and kindergarten she would refuse to because she thought it made her look different from the other kids and all the other kids spoke english and she wanted to be like the other kids and it's an impulse but all kids want to be like the other kids at school. so i think there is that pressure in the united states in particular to give up the languages of your parents and to have monolingual english proficiency. that is something for example the mayor of san antonio julian castro who ran for the

democratic nomination also spoke about because he spoke spanish in the home and said when you start school they were not encouraged to speak spanish. i think today the spanish is not proficient. >> he is very much an english speaker. >> the pressure that is central to the idea of integration simulation of american society. >> i want to switch gears and talk about border wall and borders because that is such a prominent piece of discussion in your book and thoughtfulness in your book. we talked about the opening in the instance of you crossing the border and what struck me the day you and your husband wanted to go watch a world cup soccer match and crossing over the border, no problem in coming back was a major ordeal and it

felt very threatening to you. you were scared. and when you look at our border system. what do you see and what is a contrast there especially first on our southern border. >> it is something -- i've only crossed the land border into mexico a couple of times in that incident you described a few years ago was a world cup match and they happen to be at the border. and i said wouldn't it be fun to watch us in a café with other people who care about soccer as much as we do, let's cross and go there. and crossing in i was stunned that nobody was asking an id for crossing the border into mexico it was just the border to get a lot of traffic back and forth. but coming back and was a different thing altogether the

lines were longer, it was a lot more questions in why would you cross the border, were questioning it was a different experience. i think that the border just reminded me that is so similar to the experience of morocco and spain, and really reminded me of how the border has physically changed over my lifetime and i think people who live in the southwest border of the u.s. will testify to the fact that the border did not like the way that it looks now. there was no wall prior to 1994 for example and people could come in and out, it was a little bit a situation for an example seasonal workers would come and return but with the border they are here and they stay, it just

actually makes things even from a pure labor perspective it makes things a lot more complicated than they have to be. in the view of the border is becoming more as a militarized manifestation of difference between countries that i observed with morocco and spain, when i was little my parents would pack us in the car and we would go, spain has a couple of land borders with morocco. the border post was just a cinderblock building and you have to wait for the garden going, it wasn't what it is today it's insanely militarized and it read fences each 20 feet high, cameras, guard dogs, motion detectors the border has

become a liberalized expression of differences between countries. it is something that people should really think about if that's what they would want. >> something that i learned that i was not even that aware of, i was aware at all is the checkpoints and you take us from a checkpoint to el paso and these in land checkpoints are 100 miles from any external border, why do we have the border patrol checkpoints so far inland in our country. >> that's an excellent question and that's a question the department 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 that by chance i was going to residency and martha and in the middle of interstate ten between el paso and martha we were stopped at a checkpoint and these guys were wearing they are not military but green uniforms, essentially law-enforcement and guard dogs, huge guns, it was very serious and they stopped you and asked you for your u.s. citizen. and we each said yes, at that point the border patrol agents had the discretionary power to decide whether they believe you and him each case whether you're on your way or they don't believe your u.s. citizen so now you have to prove it. most people don't go around carrying a birth certificate or u.s. passport on them, if that

happened today how would you prove you're a u.s. citizen, you see in a situation where the border agent is going to make a determination based on how we look and how we sound and something about your aspect. when that comes into making a decision then that means it's going to get used unequally depending on the race and the language in the accident of the person, you can be a u.s. person but the border patrol doesn't believe you then you are basically stuck there. and you can be put into immigration detention until such time as you provide proof of your citizenship. each year people get caught at the border checkpoints. i discovered when i got stopped at one of these, by the time i got there i started researching the checkpoints, it turns out there is quite a few of them, the website of custom and border

list 134 but there's also roving checkpoints, when you add up all the checkpoints you might be looking at something like 200. they are positioned within 100 miles of land borders the lillian border between mexico and canada and also see borders in the pacific and also the great lakes. they are everywhere in the u.s. and the majority of the u.s. population lives in what is technically the border zone which means any point order patrol can be setting up a checkpoint and saying are you a u.s. citizen in making these determinations. it is a massive amount of power and it goes back to regulation set 1962 and extended the power of border patrol from just the border and looking 25 miles into the border in case some people had gone through without showing

their papers. and that power was extended to 100 miles a year or later and that's been on the books, nobody's ever challenged it and nobody's ever run on getting rid of it, it's one of those things that is folded into the duty and what happens, that is my experience, the more funding that we give to particular agencies the more they're going to find reason to justify the funding and border patrol for example how does budget has ballooned over the last 30 years, the money is going to having the checkpoints. it is something that people really should consider if you have never come across a checkpoint it's probably not a problem in your life and if you live near one it can be a tremendous disruptive force. if you are driving to the grocery store or driving to go

to school or anywhere being on that road where the checkpoint is you will get stopped and asked that question. and it can really turn into a form of harassment if you are constantly told where's your paper, which are paper and you have to be for example nonwhite person in your getting stopped more often. he 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 national muslim majority countries, he viewed the muslim man as what he calls a racing muslim america's collective pass. what does this effectively due to american muslims in our country and the travel ban.

>> one of the things i want to say we're supposed to call the travel ban because the initial country that were put on and all the countries are the same in the form that survived legal challenges which is the presidential proclamation and the supreme court upheld into thousand 18 is a list of five muslim countries of north korea and venezuela. we ended up with the term travel ban after a great deal back and forth within the ministry center try to make sure they survive constitutional and legal challenges. in reality north korea already prevented citizens from leaving

their country, you cannot ban people from entering and needing their own country. in venezuela the band does not apply in a place to government officials. if you're talking about 40 people every year. the other five countries combined this is what they get every year, if you have a regulation that targets a thousand people of one kind of community and 40 from another how can you say it's not them, but the inclusion of the number was a supreme court that was neutral toward religion and to let it be lost. the muslim man in my view is part of a long series of immigration restriction with the united states on nonwhite immigrants. i mentioned earlier the chinese immigration act of 1982, that

was one of many other laws that were passed the most serious of the immigration act of 1924 which is essentially shut down immigration in the united states to everyone except people from western europe. and without getting into too many details the use the census from 30 or 40 years earlier to do this. and establish quotas. by doing that they were able to essentially restrict immigration from everywhere especially western europe and to ensure what immigrants arrived but not asian, african, south american and so on. it was a muslim man in the immigration act in 1924 there was restrictions that were really not abolished fully until 1965, we've only had essentially

50 years of immigration and anybody who wants to apply, just anybody can apply, with the muslim ban were going right back to the old restrictions, people from these countries cannot apply to come to the u.s., does not matter what they might contribute, doesn't matter what family they have or who they are trying to join they are simply not eligible to come, and of story. it is a xenophobia ban but again it's part of the history. we are seen with immigration uc periods extension periods of contraction and right now it's a beginning of the major period of contraction and beginning with the muslim man which is followed two years later which is another band that targeted mostly african and asian countries. my expectation honestly if there

is a trump reelection like if trump is reelection we will see no bands. in fact the administration has proposed rules on visas that will be on many african and asian students from coming to the u.s. again the way they do that and by writing laws that look like they are racially mutual but get to the same result as it is beyond and not racially neutral. the final point i want to make about the muslim ban, muslims have been in america long before there was a colony of jamestown. the earliest muslims that landed here with span and content, the idea that you're going to be in people even before you arrive is

really kind of telling, it tells us the new enter new procedure self to have the power who belongs in this country and who does not. and because of that history of earliest modems of not really taught in school and contribute to a racial muslim from america collective history and it makes these bands seem like they are targeted foreigners when in reality these bands often time our targeting americans like you and me, if you're yemenite or yemeni american you have now lost the ability, if you are born here if you or yemeni dissent you have lost the ability to sponsor grandmother or an uncle or cousin or anybody he was born in yemen. >> exactly the same way if you're german you have that

right. it is actually taking away rights from people from yemen and people of yemen dissent by nativeborn americans. it is really stricken away at the constitutional right of people here but it looks like it's only targeted of immigrants abroad. >> the president has also used rhetoric against muslims, he has made tweets blasting radical islamic terrorism" calling countries on the muslim ban was dangerous, what are the tweets and the rhetoric not only for the muslim communities but for our country as a whole. >> somebody is vulgar and blunt as the president to seem as though he is unique.

but he isn't, he is somebody by writing a wave popular support, people had to agree with him or they would not have a voted for him. i think he is very much part of a long tradition of xenophobia tradition in the u.s., is something that is not pleasant to think about, this is something that long predates of him but nonetheless true and just the constant chain of tweets personally i find exhausting, i don't follow him and i 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 in the newspapers in the headlines and someone but i don't feel the need by

validating it or retreating or given a space on my own, i do think he's very much -- even if he does lose the reelection his supporters will still be around and there's going to have to be some kind of resolution to the debate that we are having about what kind of a country we want to live in, that's really what it comes down to, do we want to live in a country that is diverse and everybody as i said is bound by a set of shared principles or do we want to live in a country in which some people than everybody else ultimately what donald trump is promising his people and if not him somebody will come after him but will make that promise a bit more elegantly than he has because he is ability to speak as i said to vulgar terms and that's what makes him so

divisive. i think another candidate would be more elegant in a way that would prevented them and a lot more effective. >> i want to look at gender for a moment you lived under a monarchy, you are a citizen of the u.s. but neither structure afforded you opportunities to be on equal footing as men and enjoy the same rights and privileges in the reaction that you get here to feeling that way, can you explain why you haven't felt free or fully equal in either country questioning. >> i think it has to do with patriarchy is a global system

and you feel better about the fact that there are certain rights that we have in the u.s. the people in other countries don't have, for the moment women in the united states have the right to make medical decisions about their bodies up to and including abortion. i live in california which does have access to reproductive care, but in other states that is not necessarily the case because there's so many closures of abortion clinics so you can tell yourself we have these rights and therefore it's better to live here then to live in another country but rights are never, should never be considered entirely taken for granted. right now -- we just finished

two weeks of hearings of the supreme court justice whose track record indicates that she will not support abortion as a right. it's entirely possible that within the next few years we will have that right taken away. you can tell yourself you have more rights but that's an effort of constellation, i think the patriarchy is a global problem and when you do face a lot more challenges with their bodily integrity into living lives of dignity in which they can make their own medical decisions and they can also be taken seriously, with respect to things like sexual harassment or sexual assault, the president himself has a dozen or so allegations of sexual assaults against him and none of those have led to any legal --

>> what can the u.s. do to take strides toward equal citizenship, what do you want to see, what can this country do first to start moving in that direction of equal citizenship. >> i think in order to get to equal citizenship is going to require each of us to use what talents that we have and what privileges we have two smash this idea and the reality of hierarchal citizenship. >> this is a country that managed to give up the civil

rights movement, nor has the possibility of changing things, we need a movement like that to ensure that citizenship is equal and not just hierarchical thing where people have more rights than others. that is going to require action. >> obviously in a very small way with the electoral process, it's too important because the people make decisions are not just presidents. i think there is too much time and attention spent on presidential candidates and probably not enough on the person who is running for county sheriff and running for district attorney and those are the races that are actually going to have the biggest impact on our day-to-day lives on how criminal justice is enacted in our communities, what textbooks our children read they are not made in washington are made right there in our communities so voting in being involved in

those races is super important. the outside of the electoral cycle there is always an opportunity to be involved in our communities and that could take the form of being involved with mutual aid organization and volunteering time, a number of problems that we have really stems from the fact that there is so much inequality and so early in people's lives, if we can basically give some overtime and volunteer some of our time to help children at school who don't have a parent who stays at home and help them with homework and all of that i think that could really make a huge difference in people's lives in right now in a pandemic in the entire generation is being left behind because of something people don't have wi-fi at home and access at home.

even if this will provide the devices, doesn't necessarily mean that wi-fi is available, 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 we can in this way but do you feel some hope when you look around, would you be able to look at your gray zone in a different way? >> i sure hope so, i do feel hope when i look at our younger generation. i think they are so involved, for example my daughter has been involved in the common movement, something that matters to her, we live in california and we were talking about this how we've had wildfires this summer

that have lasted so long the air quality is so terrible you cannot 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 there involved in trying to change that. i do find hope in young people when i wake up in the morning this is the question i asked myself how can i be the age of change i don't want to be a person who watches it all without getting involved. >> does your daughter still want to be president? >> no. >> that could change, she said that when she was ten or 12. >> she's in a musician, she's an

artist i think. >> that was conflicted for you because because of gender, race, a lot of things and a lot of feelings. >> i hope things are better by the time she's able to be president we have a few years to go. >> this has been such an honor, such a pleasure and i'm so grateful to have the opportunity to talk with you today. >> thank you so much for having me. thank you all for listening. >> this was great and everyone get your free copy of the book, that is amazing, that is wonderful. >> thank you so much for a wonderful conversation, thank you for this book, kate thank you for your questions and taking us through it. >> you are watching the tv on

c-span2, every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. book tv on c-span2 created by america's television company, today we are brought to you why these television companies to provide the tv to viewers as a public service. >> the american enterprise into and institute in washington, d.c. hosted an event with lynn cheney who discussed four of the first five presidents who all healed from virginia. here she waits on the debate over the removal of statutes of america's founders who owned slaves. >> i am not opposed to taking down the confederate soldiers, the confederate leaders, they were traitors to the union. i think to take the statues down is fine but i do, i'm appalled actually went statutes of washington fall for the d.c. government has a commission that

suggest if we don't start explaining the washington monument and the jefferson memorial better then maybe they should be moved to some other place. they cannot do this because of the statues and monuments are on private land but i am appalled at this and the hook for it is they were slaveholders. they knew slaveholding was wrong, i think they called it a stain on virginia and others spoke of it as a moral sin and jefferson called to a sin against god. they were fully aware of the dilemma in which they lived, the contradiction in which they existed but they found themselves unable for the circumstances were not such that they could achieve the full emancipation the justice

demanded that did not stop them once they understood what a unique place they were in, what a unique time they were in, they were all educated in the enlightenment and the skies, the ideas of freedom and liberty and justice and equality they were essential to that enlightenment in washington educated himself but the other three went to schools and learned this, they were perfectly ready to start a new nation based on the very high principles. and that is what they did. and you write a contradiction but i'm sure glad they did it. >> to watch the rest of the program visit our website booktv.org use the search box to look for lynn cheney or the

virginia dynasty. you are watching the tv on c-span2 on this three day holiday weekend. television for serious readers, future programs tonight include former german ambassador to the united states wolfgang issued your thoughts on the challenges facing europe and catherine flowers on her efforts to improve water and sanitation conditions in rural areas around america. find more schedule information online at booktv.org or consult your program guide. >> welcome to the heritage foundation the roadshow clerk series hosted by the fuller institute and the simon center for american studies. i am joseph of connie a director of the simon center and it's a real povich to be part of the series with the amazing influence of russell kirk. one of the most conservative thinkers of the 20 century.