writer and think tank scholars benjamin powell on "after words" robin d'angelo discusses her book nice racism, how progressive white people perpetuate harm she is interviewed an author and professor of american studies at princeton university. watch book tv every weekend and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. >> now one book tv afterward program robin d'angelo looks at how white people can and overtly cause racial harm to what she calls a cultural she is interviewed by eddie author and princeton professor of african-american studies the weekly interview program with relevant guest host interview the top nonfiction authors about their latestct work.

>> i'm so delighted to have this opportunity to sit down and talm with youou robin d'angelo i am o excited. >> thank you so much it's an honor. >> >>i want to begin it seems a basic question but it's a moment in the book where you are dealing with the tension between class and race and you told your story and i thought it was really important to begin with your journey of w this work, tel me a little bit about you and the way in which heray upbringig shapes how you approach antiracist education. >> sure i will talk about the aspects of my life and upbringing it is so relevant to the work that i do today. at two pieces one i'm not sure i read about in the book that my mother died when i was 11 years

old she died of leukemia this was the late 50s early 60s and at that time you did not talk about those things in it seem shocking to people today that cancer was a shameful thing and we were told not to speak about it and when she died we were told not to talk about it. "after words" either. it was a true vatican experience for me but i don't think i had to be that traumatic if we hadra been able to talk about it, i was 11 years old so from an early age i could've articulated it this way at i that time but i did understand the relationship between silence and suffering, the huge elephant in the room and i couldn't talk about them but i'm going to talk about this elephant now. i also grew up in poverty she was a single mother struggling with cancer she cannot keep a

job she could not keep us housed we were often blessed with strangers for long periods of time, she could not keep us fed or bathed, i'm quite sure i wasn't clean as a child and i had a lot of shame and i'll never forget that moment the all of that crystallized for me when she took my sisters and i to visit another friend and as often happens when adults get together the children begin to play and we were playing and then it came time to lean and i was the last one out the door and overheard one of the little girls ask her mother what is wrong with them, that's a literal question she asked, what's wrong with them and i stopped in riveted i wanted to hear the answer and her mother went like this they are poor. and i won't ever forget that

moment i even feel chills now tbecause it's when i realized that there's something about a sudden shameful and everyone can see it but nobody should speak of it. and i sure that because when i realized much later in life that i participated in someone else's oppression that was unbearable to me i cannot know the black experience but i can tap into the shame of poverty and discrimination based on an a form of that for anybody else. i also always knew i was white. i just have to look at white people who are poor or working-class and say they don't have privilege and i have to say, come on. i always knew i was white and i always knew is better to be white and in fact we knew black people to ameliorate some of our

class chain i can remember being hungry in the public in a park in seen food left out and reaching for the food and being admonished not to touch it because you don't know who touched't it it could've been te language at the time, a colored person, don't sit there you don't know who sat there could've been a coloreded perso. the message was clear how the person touched that it would be dirty, i was actually dirty but in those moments i was not poor or shameful anymore, it was a form of projecting our dirt and shame on the black people and it was a way that we align ourselves or realigned ourselves with the dominant white culture that are poverty separated us from. i don't have less racism because i grew up poor i just wanted my place of the racial hierarchy

from a different class position, i would've learned it thereto, different lessons would've come home to me. >> i thought that was important to begin their and give a sense of your own journey the way in which you use your biography as a way to disrupt the false between races which is the most important but i think it's important that we start with your story there is a journey to this work, talk a little bit about the actual book talk how life fragility changed your life, this is been extraordinary and is been the new york times bestseller number one, how has it transformed you a lot of the stories in the new book, out of your travels around the country

doing thisor extraordinary work with education. >> a lot of white people, white people who experienced a form of oppression in their life and of course we don't experience racial oppression but we experience other forms and for a lot of us we have thought long and deep of how unjust life is for us but really i was in my 30s before i considered how i benefited. and then the large part allowed me too navigate my poverty i didn't go to college until it was in my 30s but once i got there i fit in and i was reflected everywhere but all my teachers in the curriculum and i graduated not knowing what i do and gotha this position as whate called in the '90s the diversity trainer and i been doing this kind of work for

about 25 years, i went on to give a phd and i been writing andd publishing on racism and white racial identity for decades, mostly in academia and i know you're an academic and does anybody read the articles that we write. sometimes, maybe grad students. and i'd written the article white fragility about the frustration of trying to talk to white people about racism. being a diversity trainer going day in and day out going against which most people are taught not to talk about racism and every day i walked into rooms filled with white people and said we will talk about racism. most often standing side-by-side with the black debilitated which was only the person of color in

that room and just being stunned at the hostility to the conversation, we can be really mean on this topic and driving home with the h facilitator anda bearing witnessss is why never having to bear witness to the pain of racism on black people and rarely being held accountable for the pain that you cause black people. so that experience in academia brought me too be writing in somebody somewhere quoted from white fragility the article and it exploded i apparently captured in language the dynamic that has been for million and the black people also familiar to white people and is harder to deny a shared experience. i was getting e-mails from around the world about that

article and i knew it would be useful toan develop it more further and make it accessible because it's an academic speak we know how to do that so my favorite way to write but you kinda have to do in academia i i wanted to make it assessable and more plain language. so i went to a non-academic publisher on nonprofit social justice profit to be decompressed i knew there would be an audience for the book based on the reaction but it's still on the list it's been three years who could dream about. i wasn't prepared for the backlash from all sides of the spectrum i expected it from the right you expect that that doesn't get to you in the same way but i did not expected to that degree from the left so

that's been a process. rachel: that's interesting that you did not expected from the left and there's a sense in which the left is i wouldn't want to say it and generalize too much but this is been the crosshairs in the sense in which i remember this moment when he was testifying before congress and he said something to this effect that he was skeptical off the white liberal and skeptical of those who wanted to do something for him as opposed to which him and he had seen how they responded to the cold war and the mccarthy era, there is a deep suspicion as well as doctor king's letter from the birmingham jail at the very beginning of thef book. say a little bit about nice

racism, what is this into her these people who are the nice races that you'rere talking to. >> it is me we have to start with the basic foundation of systemic racism, let's proceed from that premise that racism occurs in explosive acts but it's a structure that is infused across society and it is the norm it's not an aberration is reproduced 24/7, 365 it's an adaptive system, look where we are with voter fright, we thought 1965 we had settled the and were in a very serious place right now so it adapts to challenges and keeps on keeping on. if it's a system we are all

shaped by appearing so those of us who are white we have to change her question from if i'd been shaved fromav the system to how have i been shaped by it, you cannot be exempt from the cultural water that use women so nice racism is meant to capture the well intended white progressive, the moderate who is more concerned with the lack of conflict was more concerned with comfort than racial injustice. there is so much handwringing about white people feeling guilty for me that's a great example, all my goodness white people feel something unpleasant in looking at racism and working to compare that to what we watched in front of her own eyes the summer with george floyd the

mod are brief, the reason i say thinking sterman was moderate and it was liberal, today was progressive i actually think we would be the most daily and i don't want to speak for you you can correct me if i misspeak. but odds are in a daily basis are not interacting with white nationalist and if you are interacting you're aware that you're interacting with in some ways you know how to protect yourself, on a daily basis in academia you are most likely interacting with colleagues just like me and we are the ones that send you home often exhausted, those thousand daily cuts the maddening insidious, i can get my fingers on this but yet again we reproduce racism and outcome,

and are hiring interpublic base. it is a smile on the face, it's the gas lighting, the denying. >> in the book you make a distinction between shame and guilt talk a littlee bit about the. >> and just the version guilt is generally what you feel about have done and feel responsible for in shame is something that you feel you inherently are, just as i did that in shame is i am bad. my area is the analysis and language is political language is not objective and not neutral in language shapes perception. i'm very concerned how we frame the conversations and how we position ourselves in conversations and i noticed that white progressives that would

voluntarily attend to watch a video like this will talk about feeling shame and i don't know what to do but not guilt. as a sociologist i think patterns are on the insight and how does it function, it's like you're guilty and i'm responsible for something and a repetitive action would be to somehow address what i have done, if i feel shame i'm just bad and there's nothing i can do i'm of all from responsibility and shame tends to elicit sympathy support, if i said the shame is not such a bad person

are allll inherently good, thiss a popular mantra. it function in the environment in ways that actually i think gardener more capital. >> in some ways the fact that i feel i bad and establishes thati am a decent person, i'm a good person. but what's interesting as you know in certain political theorist is the absence of shame inner politics that represents a certain kind of problem, he writes about the fact that people thought shame could move from a around and there's no feeling of shame but on the right is the action of shame that allows them to do x, y, and

z and it seems to me that it's a prevalence of shame and on the left binary in the prevalence of shame on the left that actually enables and i found this talk about the feeling of guilt has really a critical intervention because there seems to be in my work in my conversation by any stretch of the imagination there is an intention in which we cannot sit in our discomfort because we find ourselves not only feeling guilty but feeling shame. in this sense and we can't get to where we want to g get to. >> shame is an unpleasant feeling and i with guilt nobody

buck up to barrett and can we build our capacity to feel it and move through it, that is the key there is a question that has never failed me in my efforts to unpack how do we keep getting out what we get, fortunately every white person that we talk to even those caught on camera engaging in racism will claim that they're not. how do we keep getting racism with racism without racism. the question that has served me trying to figure that out is not if it's right or wrong, isn't right or wrong that you feel shame? >> no that we can be here forever, how does it function and how does it function in thee context and if it functions to motivate you to build your

capacity to move through it and to change the way that you understand what you said then it's functioning in a constructive way but if it's functioning to excuse your inaction and the reason youou don't engage to cause everyone around you to walk on egg shells and be so careful andnd don't sy this and don't say that, then it's functioning to protect the racist status quo. >> longest chapter ins the book and it's a detailed account of what you call the move of right progressive. i found it fascinating from credential to out woke and i was thinkingnk about the context of some of the dates that we saw in the bernie sanders case between bernie sanders, the campaign a black lives matter or some of

the conversations we overheard on wall street. and it's taking off lock lives matter and we are wondering why weren't these things coming together it's like abbott notion is him and free soil where they going in different directions. talk a little bit about the move and why you thought it was so important, i didn't have language and that's fascinating, that is familiar to me talk about that chapter and layout why in some ways it's in the heart of the book. >> i appreciate you if i understood you correctly acknowledging this you have experiences move in the receiving end of these moves. i'mn an educator and to think oe of the things is breaking it down and showing when it looks

like here's how i can help you understand what you are doing and how this is functioning, the book is about the waves in which we perpetrate racial harm, i need to make that very, very clear i have been observing it, receiving it, participating i'm not outside anything that i write about for 20 plus years and i just wanted the opportunity to say let's take it apart, what do we do, credential is a really big one it's so predictable that the moment a whitee progressive encounters a black person or engages in a cross range they need to establish that they're not racist. and unfortunately most of the ways that we seek to do that are not remotely.

i've been in a conversation with a black colleagues and friends who say our eyes are rolling on the inside. another piece would be you're making a fool of yourself and making a fool of ourselves, would you want to know i would want to know if iam came out of the bathroom in my skirt was tucked into my pantyhose and my bottom was showing and you came up to me and said heads up i would be like oh my god, thank you so much and pulled my skirt down i would not say how dare you knowdn it isn't and everyboy better proceed as if they don't see anything. and of course that is white fragility. i see two overall categories of credentialing of colorblind, white progressives are less likely to going to colorblind were gonna go into proximity and have you noticed how often white people will use proximity to

black people as evidence that they are free to racism. i had a black roommate in college, i went to the school and i work in a diverse team and i traveled the world and i lived in the big, big city and when i try to help people say if you're not racist you can tolerate proximity, you can walk down the street in a large major city and past black people and not lose it. in order for that to be good evidence it has to not be possible by somebody who is racist. otherwise that is not good evidence. so apparently races can't have proximity to black people come over here we see that's ridiculous that is absurd and we

can go back to days of enslavement and jim crow and the white races have proximity. pretty intimate proximity at times to black people. so i want them to see what they're doing when they do that and they're not convincing anybody. and to reveal the underlying framework that they'rel operatig from and we cannot get where we need to go from that framework that says racism consists of individual acts of intentional meanness. that is the most white people definition. while most white people will say they're not racist and why do support their case, the frontal say how nice they are, he's a nice guy is mutual. >> i had this experience on television with my good friend

senator claire ended a moment in missouri describe before the people act and senator manchin, his version his response to them was stacey abrams endorsed joe mansions compromise described as stacey abrams bill and someone said obviously what is trying to do isck put a black face on this in the response, he's a nice guy and it's exactly this language talk about a lot of folks are experiencing this today talk about how woke. >> i had a thought about that. >> that's where i take notes

it's a move that white people make to show i'm more dumb than you are on no more about this than you do i read your book and now i feel i'm more down than you and i'll call you out and i've been studying this for three months and i'm going to tell robin d'angelo how wrong she is so i just got that. sometimes i'll go to youtube and five reasons why robin d'angelo was wrong and she says all right people are racist, can you believe that. what i want to ask pretty much every white person to do is to take a moment and defined for yourself what is the criteria by which he would grant by which somebody is racist. what is the criteria. i don't think many white people. have thought deeply about that. if you are astounded that all

white people are racist then tell me what do you think it takes. it's probably going to come down to some version of individual conscience meanness across race and that framework and paradigm cannot be more effective at protecting racism because it exempts all white people, guarantees deceptiveness, guarantees that nice people could not possibly participate and then we end up with racism without racist. let me be clear when i say all white people race what i mean we live in a society in which it is infused racist ideology is circulating all the time, the vast majority of white people with segregated lives in not only feel no loss of all thought which for me is the deepest

message of all that i could go cradle-to-grave as most white people will win no authentic relationship with black people. . . . as gaming value virtue the absence of black. >> was a good neighborhood next what's happening when a neighborhood is growing up? what's happening when it's coming down parts readily talking about when it violent crime happens and somebody has to stay on camera? you wouldn't believe that would happen here. it begs the question, what should

>> this is the key play and in my own work i talk about what i call the value gap. this belief that some people ought to be valued more than others. and that valuation presents itself on the distribution of advantage and disadvantage where some people are treated with generalized sense of disregard but that accumulates over time and this is not the result of loud racists but the result of or it is sustained over time by how we are capitulated. all of us are having treated to live the values, these racial habits at the heart of our way of living so i've had this in nice racists, i've never really thought about it in this but we know that our social groups are homogeneous for the most part. ,that when people talk about

network racism, you're talking about the fact that atour networks are so homogeneous that opportunities are passed along but they're not strong. other networks because they are robust, i'm not playing golf when i'm 50, 60 with my friends dad and the like so there's this segregated world, white world which of course courts all these benefits and advantage, almost as you put it earlier this is the water youswim in . you can't come out of that. so it reminds me of that moment in wendell berry where he says racism comes to him as natural as language. >> it's such an important point and this gets us up against it because this gets us up against individualism

which causes lots of white people to meltdown into white fragility. you don't know me, how can you say anything about me? and it's true, i don't iknow all of you, i don't know most of the white people i'm talking about. that's on each individual one person to look at how have i been shaped bythis ? what's my class position, what's my gender within the society that no, i'm just going to go here. white supremacy, the idea that white is the stand-in for the ideal human and the further you are away from that standard, the less human as he argues, it's really an argument about species. at the white body is the standard by which all bodies should be measured , i'm quoting now. so the further you are away from that whiteness, the less

humid you are. .that's the society you live in and where all shaped by it . that's why i shift the question from if the how. as far as gender, i don't think anybody would argue that the moment a baby is born and the declaration is made, boy or girl, a whole set of socialization's kicks in and you cannot avoid it. it's the blanket they wrap you and is going to be shaped by whatever gender they see you as . and you can resist it but you're going to have to resist it and you're going to have to resist it every step of the way from everyone you meet. they're going to be responding to you consciously or not as a male or female. these categories are being challenged but no one is exempt from it, from gender conditioning. yet we think we can be exempt from racial conditioning.

if that framework ishelpful i would offer it to white people to use . >> go-ahead. >> i had a thought because i can remember, i can imagine the yeah but.white folks are listening but yeah but eddie said he lived a segregated life overall two. the difference is black people who may also live separate from white people, one, that is the result of decades and decades of policies and practices that were forced on black people. this idea that people prefer to live with their own, i don't think people prefer to live with their ownwith all the resources and some prefer to live with none of the resources . so now it seems natural but it is the result of those policies. and you're not sitting at the table as a homogeneous group

of people. can you see that picture in your mind of the governor of georgia signing the voting restriction with the picture of the plantation behind him? so yes, the biden administration will be the most diverse administration we've ever had but not one person listening right now was raised in a society in which biden's administration has been gone and all of our en conditioning doesn't unravel the moment some diversity comes up . the people and acting these policies, whether you and i could be happy with conversation on a college campus, who has the power to ban these conservations? not your group, my group. >> just listening to you that reminded me of a moment in the book that i found really interesting and it's these

deeply personal moments. it's my social group or predominantly because it's exhausting attimes . right? then you have to make the decision. you wrote about it pin the book . there are people in your closed circle who happen to be white, who are white. you make a distinction and there's a distinction between being white and happy being white.wh you have to make a decision in those moments. do i risk our friendship to tell him or her what hejust did or what she did . do i let that slide or do we move on ? i have to interpret this today, that is always being g

asked to account for why a, b and c. there's a sense in which there is not only the broad map of questions but there are also these internal demands that are placed on relationships, interracial relationships. and i got this since in your own book when you found yourself doing certain things, you would call your black friends who do similar work and they would have to walk you through it . and what kind of labor that is. that's an additional kind of labor you don't have with others. does that make sense? >> there are two concepts that are useful for me and one is our static load in that reverse to chronic stressors. lots of people carry our static load but racial weathering is the result of

allostatic load. all that agony, here i am, i just said that thing, it's coming from a racist dysfunction. it's coming from a society that i'm oblivious to it and i say it and i carry on, i had a great time at the party and you are agonizing is it worth it to talk to him? will i risk losing a relationship ? how often has this gone well for me? you know what, it's not worth it. unfortunately as i argued in white fragility, often the punishment gets worse, not better. so that's why i see white fragility as a kind of everyday white racial bullying. a form of everyday white racial control. so we have this interaction and you have to think about whether it's worth it to talk

to me and maybe you just decide no,it's not. i've got to get through the day, i got to take care of my family at home . so i didn't getcalled in, i wasn't accountable . racism got to slide, you got to bear the brunt of it and we keep on keeping on mewith me being comfortable andyou being uncomfortable . i want to share a powerful moment that drives this home. i was in front of a group back in the day. i had gone over white fragility and all these dynamics and i posed a question to the people of color in the room . i said how often have you tried to give a white person feedback on our inevitable and often unaware racist habits and assumptions and did that go well for you? they laughed, they rolled d their eyes and the number one

response is never. the number two response is rarely . and i followed up by saying, asking what if you could just give us that feedback and had us receive it with grace, reflect and seek to change our behavior? what would that be like and i'll never forget this gentleman raises hand and he said it would be revolutionary. revolutionary is a really strong word. that's how difficult white people are that that is a revolution? give us the feedback and have us receive it with grace, reflect and seek to change, that's how difficult we are. on the other hand that doesn't seem like a very tall order. it really doesn't but it is a tall order from the current paradigm. that says only bad people can

be racist. that guarantees i'm going to have to defend myself and you're going to be in the position of deciding whether to. >> this is a wonderful way of handling it out because the work seeks to these interracial relationships a kind of personal interaction, how they run aground, almost as if our allies are approaching this as a philosophic issue not seeing themselves, and they go through all the likeness. >> .in a moment where he seeing this work in very clear ways. so senator tim scott declares america is not a racist country. vice president kamala harris echoes where not a racist country but wehave to deal with our racist past . critical race theory as a

catchall phrase for the kind of work that you do. the kind of work that ibrahim kendi does. the 1619 project. all these are an attemptto tell a different story about our beginnings, about who we are . confronting wrongdoings and the like and we see the depth of the vitriol. we see the intensity of the response. we see it broadly across the country at large so pin the ngtwo together for me. talk about where we are as a country in this moment which was supposed to be a moment of profound possibility and transportation.

>> i think precisely because it is a moment of profound possibility we are seeing incredibly amplified efforts to stop it from being that moment so carol anderson so beautifully argued in white rage, every inch of black progresshas been met by a white rage . i think k the current moment is a backlash to the obama presidency. this blocking of critical race theory is a reaction to what happened this summer and that more and more white people are being awoken and galvanized to get involved. the forces that are invested in racial justice or deep. but the forces invested in maintaining a racist status quo are also very deep and for the most part have the reins of power so i see both those sites if you will absolutely amplified.

and i don't believe those who want to protect the racist status quo can come out and say that, they can't so they have to find a bogeyman which they havealways been effective at doing . the southern strategy where you manipulate the white populace into racial animus. you cause them to be afraid. you reinforce this idea of scarcity, that any gain for you is a loss for me heather mckee talks about that in the sum of us . weston talks about it in dying of whiteness. so critical race theory and whites call it conservative race theory. it's the stand-in for anyone who acknowledges this is real. but it's the perfect stand in in a way to cover that.

so you have a word critical. a lot of people here that as meaning criticism and that sounds bad. within academia, critical thinking means thinking deeply with nuance and with education. and then you have the word theory. that sounds like some radical crockpot thing. if it's just a theory that it's not true or established and it's such a perfect little meme to dismiss the conversation. and it's been very effective. there's a part of me that doesn't want to talk about it because it will reinforce the legitimacy of his crt right or wrong? maybe clear, true critical race theory comes out of legal scholarship. like kendall crenshaw's work and derek bell so i'm not a

critical race theorist. but of course it's been applied, supremacist. that racism is structured into thesociety . at absolutely. >> like you switched the question, to how, with regards to the critical race theory debate, i want to ask a question, why? why critical race theory, why now? when it seems to me these moments to assert that america is not a racist society, to attack 1619, to attack crt. all this is aimed as we said at the beginning of this conversation is aimed at arresting change.limit the scope of remedy. you're not bad so we can't engage in this wholesale

transformation of who we are. where not that, where this. instead of debating crt on its merits because most ey people don't even know what it is. we need to ask ourselves why it's being asked what i want to get to this. it seems to me that this is where nice racism is done, at the level of politics because you have the two sides as you describe them. and i don't want to make all of those persons on the right, the daily caller subscribers or white nationalists or the like. there's differentiation there but they seem to be, there seems to be some level of sosolidarity with regards to the idea that america must remain a white nation. on the other side, you have nice racists.

those who are fighting for a more just america, who claim this is what makes your book so interesting to me. at a certain level is that among those who are cogently fighting against those folks you have the joe manchin's and the like and you can use your text to see what he's doing at the real-time the level of politics so talk about what it means for these people to be on the side of a more just world. >> i hope white people keep fighting. i hope nice swhite people are out there fighting. unfortunately i haven't seen that the energy that we saw last summer is being sustained. you know, running down to protest on some level is exciting and exhilarating but the daily work of putting

racism on the table, looking at your policies and workplace, n the challenging one another , that's the hard stuff. and in case i don't say it earlier later, it takes courage. it takes commitment and it also takes courage. and niceness is not courageous. so my point around that is that so many white people see the presence of niceness as an indicator of the absence of racism. and the culture ofniceness is actually one that prevents us having difficult conversations about racism . it's generally a culture that's nice for me but not necessarily nice for you. there's an idea that the way i experienced the world must be the way you experience the world usso i find our campus to be a tvery welcoming place so wouldn't you feel it to be a welcoming place for this idea

that if a policy looks like everybody is scared, the outcome is not going to be the same. so it takes a lot of commitment and courage and that i want to be sustained in this ties back to the moment that i arrive i'mgoing to be complacent . i'm also going to be sensitive about any feedback to the contrary. this is why one of the chapters is a chapter called there is no fire. the moment i think i'm the fire i'm going to be part of the problem. there's a level of humility that white people need to have, a level of understanding that this comes from, it's hundreds of years old at this point. it's nuanced, it's complicated, it's charged, it's not impulse. it's not going to change just because we are friends. and so my learning will never be changed.

but what about my trauma, robin? >>. [laughter] i'm curious, you teach in college campuses and you seesome of these moves . though there's a chapter called what about my trauma and that's a pattern that i often see among progressive white people that as soon as we start having lots of hard conversations where they become implicated . like, how can we talk about it out here, i'm not going to talk about everybody else. we're going to whatever we talk about were going to ask about it in connection to yourself but what does that look like in your life? the number one question i get is how do i tell my friend aboutracism ? and i replied like how would i tell you about your racism?

the question always implies that it's not me. i'm good to go, i have to go forth andtell other people . as soon plas it starts to implicate us, many people move into their own chain. maybe you can imagine it starts getting hard, i start getting implicated and i'm going to talk about growing up or and how those people said that think about me when i was young and how that hurt me. and now i'm going to be a victim. or i'm going to say this conversation is bringing up my old traumas and i can't continue in this conversation and i wanted to call that in. and again, ask people how this dysfunction in the conversation? what happens to the conversation when you moved to that place and i also want ce to push, people have trauma. i'm not denying you have trauma but i am going to hold firm that talking about

racismisn't in and of itself traumatic . >> so here we are, we had this wonderful conversation. people have come to you, they've read white fragility. they're going to read nice racism, hopefully they're going to read some of those articles to . that's the scholarship that informs it all. rcwhat is the source of hope for the work that you do and what you've seen over the years from doing this work, this is a way not that we have to end with hope because it's an american narrative but talk a little bit about what you see on the india horizon as you continue to do this work? >> i'm an educator so i'm going to say a little bit about the policy before i say what gives me hope. i think hope is political.

because it drives behaviors and responses just like i think emotions are political because they are informed by he the framework to which we are making meaning which is why people hold me 20 years ago what you're doing is racist, i would have interpreted that in a particular framework and would have a set of emotions and they would have triggered some responses which would have been white fragility and today i have a different view of if you would have said that to me. it doesn't function the same for black people as it does for whitepeople . i can't your relationship to that concept but what i can tell you is after 25 years of doing this work and seeing where we areright now , do i still feel this? yes i do. and i cannot go there. as a whiteperson, i can't go there . i cannot come to its because the moment i do, great, give up. and who does that serve, what does that serve?

because it's a system that benefits me if i give up hope within it. if i give up hope to fight it . i collude with it and continue to benefit from it. on the other hand, too much hope can make me pollyanna. and can cause me to be complacent and there were lots of white folks who felt completely hopeful following the civil rights movement of the 60s and look where we are. so it is something i navigate . i have to push through it. but what gives me hope? there's a couple maybe concrete things that on the stage, the world stage of the democratic debate, reparations for black people were discussed with absolute legitimacy. i didn't thinkthat would happen in my lifetime . the article in the atlantic on reparations is brilliant

and powerful and started to make headway in the culture. there was a time when you couldn't critique capitalism. and there's a time when you couldn't say white supremacy and now from the presidents office, talking about biden, he's saying systemic racism and white supremacy are among the mosturgent issues of our time . that's incredible and it gives me hope. and it's tempered by the fact that we will see what happens when he isn't president anymore whether that be four years from now or 12 years. >> it's been an absolute delight and i'm reminded of a phrase, hope is embedded and if you have to invent it every daythat means you're battling every day , it's a low-key fight though it's been apleasure . >> thank you so much.

>> "after words" is available as a podcast. to listen visit c-span.org/podcast or search c-span "after words" on your podcast app. watch this and all previous interviews at booktv.org. just click the"after words" button at the top of the page . >> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual piece. every saturday american history tv documents america stories and on sunday tv brings you the latest on nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more including charter communications . >> broadband is a fourth for empowerment and that's why charter has invested aliens building infrastructure, upgrading technology, empowering activity in the community is big and small. charter is connecting us. >>