certain language within her work you know down to my family living room growing up where my mom dad and i often had those conversations of, you know, using patois and saying things, like ms.. johnson and realizing that's rooted in language that. you know, we were taught during enslavement and the way in which we've created it, like it's ours now. but the roots of it, we we have to contend with. and so that from you has me wanting to my gears on several things as well as i

the presiding officer: the senate will come to order. the clerk will read a communication to the senate. the clerk: washington, d.c., november 10, 2022. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the hon ooshable owe honor oobl mark r. warner cialtion a senator r. warner cialtion a senator >> the u.s. senate holding these brief sessions between now and the november midterm elections. no votes are planned until monday, november 14th. and as always, find the senate live here on c-span2. and now we take you back to our booktv programming.

>> it's really an honor to be here. b i've been listening to what the speakers have been talking about and thinking about my own, my own o experiences that led me to writing the shadow kings about mussolini's invasion of east ethiopia and then attempt to colonize it. and a piece, a couple of things. i was thinking about the books that i had read or things that i, as a child, a black girl growing up here in the united states, a relatively new immigrant at the time, i didn't really have any books that introduced me to myself. it wasn't until high school that hii read anything that a teacher had brought to me. and it was one of the first booksan was, a writer -- our

sister killjoy, and in that book a story about a woman moving from ghana into europe, into germany. i suddenly began to understand my own experience of blackness. r that sense of disconnection and longing in an a kind of nostalgia and the way that blackness can be commodify can be essentialist and used against. the black person. but it wasn't anything i read. but one of the most distinct memories i have and i was relatively new in the united states was sitting in front of the television watching the news at one point and it was in the news clip came on of the fires and from adelphia, the move movement when when the home was

burned by police. and i, i saw and i saw that that the state violence there and suddenly connected something with what was happening in ethiopia during the revolution. and it brought home to me the way the experience of violence and the experience of racism and bigotry crosses borders, crosses it, affects all of us as black people around the world. i will never forget that. and i think one of the first the most moving representations of it that i have seen lately was on lovecraft country, when there was an episode that depicted this and i think it was lovecraft or watchmen, but it it it spoke to me back then about a kind of diasporic existence that

i understood very well coming from ethiopia. but i wanted to think about in novel, the shadow king of this state, violence that is often under the cloak of colonialism like. martin you were talking about and the way that that violence continues, whether it's in language or what continues to exist in the archives, because if we were forced to be forgotten at the first encounter with whiteness, with colonialism we been continually moved out of the of remembrance through what exists in the archives the archives are. history is contested territory and archives themselves are the documents of history that continue to leave us out of out of world and global. when i was writing the shadow

king of the things that i wanted to do was put black people into the conversation about world history, not just african history, not just black history. world history. we been there from the beginning. if homer is writing about princess leia, a black woman who charges against achilles and she fights so bravely that he weeps when he's he kills her. he's not making this up. black people have been there from the very beginning. and when the greek tragedies are talking about the chorus, their chorus is in the greek tragedies. it's not because the greeks made them up. it's because i can trace that through ethiopia, through north africa, through sub-saharan. we've been the chorus we have done these things. and the greeks were only

emulating a culture that existed for a very, very long time. and i speak of greek tragedy because it was also one of my first encounter was when i was a kid when i picked up the iliad and i see ethiope and i'm like, holy --, been here from forever black people have been here. so when is telling me in my classroom, why are you reading the greeks? this doesn't belong to you and i can tell them i'm here. where are you? we have been there forever. and the those experiences are have continued to inform my writing and i. i those echoes in writers. toni morrison in the works of. baldwin am beginning to hear some of those things that i was recognizing a child, that they are also within with some of the

questions that that i have and i use them as teachers but more than put us on that front page put us in the books and didn't care about centering anything else and as a young as a youngster, when i stumbled on her, it felt like the entire parameters of my world had been shifted and reshaped. and i really informative ways to kind of stop there. erica, thank you. i'm here very quickly. wow. thank you so much i would like to quickly remind our audience that the last 30 minutes of our conversations are reserved for questions. so please, please, any buttons and questions as the speakers are speaking and the comments using our chat feature.

next up, we can load jibran muhammad. thanks. this is a lot of fun and it's wonderful to hear how there's so much overlap in everyone's story, the sort of origin stories that what motivated there. there were the writing that created energy. my path is, is runs really through a couple of currents that that i think will add to conversation. so i mean, i grew in chicago where i have no memory of, any representation of blackness other than mississippi. and that just in the way that i would be exposed to later in life, west indian or african immigrants as as be true. when i started visiting new york city as a as a teenager. but the reason i mention chicago is a kind of origin story is, you know, growing up basically

as part of the nation of islam, black nationalism was like the water i was swimming without realizing that i was a fish and that i was different in that. and having the final call in muhammad speaks or my own relatives in these cadences of a black pride of a kind of alternative history, of a commitment to, black entrepreneurship. i didn't understand these things. and i often say to people that for me that experience was like being a preacher's kid to some degree, because you take for granted all of the scaffolding that makes the experience for the worshiper or the follower a very visceral experience. interestingly, though, my parents divorced, i was very young and as a consequence, i grew up mostly with my mother's side of the family.

and these were people that i lovingly call today blues. i mean, i literally had the matriarch of my family been married three times. her second husband was a boxer. she owned the bar and was famous for getting -- naked and dancing the bar drunk. so this kind of i want to meet her. i'm like, i'm here for it. she was really the closest thing i had a grandmother because my own grandmother, my mother's mother, died of a drug overdose when my mother was not in an orphanage. my mother and her three siblings, they subsequently grew up with their grandparents. one of whom was a ostensibly white guy from, mississippi, who married my charcoal black great grandmother. but it turned out that he wasn't really a white guy because he was like third generation of a former slave holder. so i say that to say that. one of the things that was so

clear to me as a kid was that my understanding of blackness was always heterodox. it was very real for but not in a diasporic sense, as a sense within a working class to middle black community where i could see the full round rainbow was always apparent to me and enough i was a i was a reader as a kid. but don't remember reading black writers so much as a kid. and the first encounter i had my father handed me beloved 1987 when the book came out and. that was my first real struggle with black fiction in the work of toni morrison, and light bulb started to go off. i started to see in the complexity of her own historic historical accounting of black life connections to my own. and then it was later song solomon, which i read as a senior high school and the very first class that i would call african-american literature was an elective in my high school.

the only time i was actually in an english class to read black writers. and so it was formative moments that i moved this experience from, this lived to seeing in morrison's a reflection, a of my life that i could actually start to, see some of my own relatives know from drug dealers to people who had done crime to soap box orators to, nationalists. you know, it was it was all there in her work. and that was very powerful. me, i will say that it wasn't really until that i encountered dubois for the first time. and in that way i started find a kind of. i guess a muse, someone whose own wrestling with this, both as intellectual and, as a, as a partizan and someone who began

to think about the work of fiction and nonfiction as inseparable tools in an effort to defeat white supremacy. and for me that became inspiration in ways that shaped all of my work to this day. i mean, it just so happened that while jelani and i had been friends for 30, 30 years now. but, you know, we were both trained by the same guy. who was the dubois biographer? two time pulitzer. and so there's no way to separate my exposure in college, to my graduate training to my own really powerful understanding, adding that dubois, while he didn't grow up like me he grew up in a white world, he came through education and through literature to and appreciate blackness in all of its complexity. and so, you know, i wanted to say that for my work, focusing on the myth of black criminality really became a way to use

nonfiction as ways to expose the fiction of social science. the fiction of eurocentric scientific of category ization that that categorization itself has been a tool of the colonized or of settler colonialism, of violence itself. and dubois was the person who opened all that up to me. you know, i cribbed this quote that inspired my, my, my book condemnation of blackness. but but this to me just sort of says it all. so dubois writes, murder, swag or theft may rule and prostitution flourish and the nation gives. but spasmodic, intermittent and lukewarm attention. but let the murderer be or the thief brown or the violator of womanhood been a drop of -- blood and the righteousness of indignation the world. nor would this fact make this indignation justifiable. did we all know that it was blackness, was condemned and not

crime. and so it was. it was from him that. all of my lived experience, my college experiences, struggles with reading the kind of literature that morrison and others were writing at baldwin to. but i'll also say, know i read those story when i was a graduate student on crime. crime and punishment and i mean, it was life altering to me because. the interiority of the person ascribed to criminality was another way to upend the violence of categorization, to see in the form of literature that, you could recreate a a life inside that couldn't be seen from the outside. and of course, the entire point of social science is to reduce or to centralize people to what what their quote unquote essence is. so so that's kind of my origin story. and i will just add for fun that