sense of not being the right kind of black person. and i talk about that in the introduction and i come an educated family. we were not rich, but we were not. and, you know, there was i didn't have to experience drug or violence in my home and when i read around and i read a lot there's so much that our society and our culture wants of black people that is so different from my life. my life at my formative life. and also the life i just told you about. it doesn't fit in a narrative of hurt. so i've always taken sense of individual specificity into my

writing of history and also that's why biography is so interesting, because each of us, even when we social identity these that our society, our society wants to make into what we are once just some us as our social identity. each of us has a and a history and a family and a dumb brother in law. so whenever people start talking. white people or superior black people or superior or are superior, i remind them that everybody has a brother in law and those brothers in law do away with any idea, any of super rewarding because everybody spread their in life. well understood.

so specificity is really important for me and that's really the basis of biography with such a truth. i started thinking about securing truth with the question. and this was first published in 1996. so it's a 20th century but at another there would often an image of truth on the door of studies or african-american. and there would be some words like, you know, you're woman or do this to me or do that, you know, sort of black power. sojourner truth. and then you would see the photograph and it was this bourgeoise. she wasn't snarling wasn't a

carrying on about having been enslaved or no, she's very gentle, very gentle. she's respectable. and also she's. so how do you put those two together? that was where the book came from. so that's what i did in sojourner truth. a life, a symbol. and that's what i'm doing again in centering your was in new york and didn't say that because after this quarter century so many people have paid no attention to what said about how sojourner truth didn't say it. francis gage made it up 12 years after the fact fact. so something still to be said. but i'm going to go even deeper into. securing her true specificity,

including her being, the new yorker, and taking advantage of new york law to her son back from having been sold illegally into perpetual slavery, the south. this was something that harriet jacobs never have done because the law of harriet jacobs's north carolina not made and in north carolina, it was not just accepted that it business to transfer children it was business to turn people into financial. this was not case in new york. i mean it happened but it was not the case. new york law in north carolina. it was routine. if it happened in new york and, it happened. it was illegal.

thank you. to a lovely essays about sojourner truth and jacobs in the book. obviously, sojourner truth, the biography worth checking out, but thank you. since we're speaking about stereotypes, stereotypes about women. i thought we could talk about your your wonderful 1992 essay on anita hill in the book which feels very prescient in a lot of ways. when i read it, you know, i, i was very young when that happened. sure. you were. i was. yeah, i think i'm older than i look. and i, of course, didn't the entire hearings, i absorbed the atmosphere of. yes. and it was so negative and so horrible and violent towards

anita hill. but your essay just there's so much clarity and humanizing her and also just analyzing the trial spectacle and showing us how thomas was able to was was able to manipulate manipulate using different stereotypes and basically deploy the stereotype the black woman prior to the race. yes. he was able to use those stereotypes to his advantage to to proclaim his victimhood and anita hill was not able do that because of the limited and rigid stereo types associated with black women. yeah and i wonder if, you know, you think that we still if those are only images still available

to black women or if in 24 we've sort of moved beyond those? i think we've we have moved beyond those categorizations. i am not a natural pessimist. i do not subscribe to widely popular. narrative of in lives per minute black hurt. i don't subscribe to that which says things not only haven't fundamentally changed they cannot fundamentally change. i do not agree with. so for instance i think an anita hill figure or i mean clarence thomas is kind of the same person as he was in 1991. but i think the society around is more able see an educated black woman as a person in a way

that i mean, my i was teaching at princeton at the time and my my students in my graduate students were all tearing their hair because they could see her as an educated woman, ambitious and so willing to. a miscreant because was the way to further her career. but i think that that sense of black women as traitor to the race as tearing down black man which circulated in 1991 so. maya angelou for instance wanted us to coalesce around clarence thomas and of my students stood up and said no. but i think we would have

thousands of americans up and saying, you know, i think i think white people can just in the marker, white people's change was 2020. i think somebody i didn't up the phrase i'm going to share with you was the great white awakening. and i think millions of white people can see that of race now in a way they couldn't before 2020. and certainly not in 1991. i think clarence thomas portraying himself as a lynch victim now, would be laughed out of out of the out of the senate. so i think we should we should wrap up.

okay. thank you so much. and we can open up to the audience for questions. if if you do have a question, just raise your hand, bring you the microphone. start. i'm going to start right here. i so admire your thought that you're living in 1980, 74, too, i feel as i'm living in 1935, germany. and how that affects my attitudes, obviously 1874 affected your attitudes about of things. no, no, no. that was kind of a cloak. i threw over myself, you know. so if you me now to sit down and write. 5000 words, i'm not sure would

say the same thing. but anyway, your why is that is why wouldn't you write thousand words? because times change times change and sometimes with you in. 1933, but not usually. and i'll tell you why. our country is gigantic. and there are millions and of people and we live in a news industry that gets our attention, gets our eyeballs and gets our eyeballs on advertisements, out with stories of atrocity and stories that scare us to death. the stories that scare us to death are generally national stories. i don't follow the politics of

pennsylvania here. i know something about the politics of pennsylvania and i wonder if you would feel the same way if you only looked at pennsylvania, would, you know, i come through new jersey, so i feel like, okay, we're in the same state. we're in the same state. yes. people that i know, lancaster county, you know, know of or read about, etc., have some german background. i mean, it's a wonderful mix of, german and irish, german and italian, german and something. but there there also german. and i am polish and lithuanian. so i am such a foreigner in this area, even though lived here since 1969. so my is more international than national. well, let me bring you back to new jersey, though. would you feel what would you grew up east orange is it very

different? yes, i agree. but would you feel the same if i limit you to new? same as what that is 1935. it's 1933. oh, doesn't matter where i would be in the united states, i think we're living. no, no, no, i. i want to keep you in new jersey in jersey. yeah. with chris christie or what i know murphy is a governor right now, but we have chris christie on our backs. no, we don't. he was running for president. he's not anymore. thank goodness. it's. it's so complicated. and you know that. i'll tell you why. and pestering you like this. it's because my view of what's going around us is limited to state and local and i feel, you know, we to newspapers every

day. paper papers. when is the new york times and when is the star-ledger and the star-ledger has all kinds of things going on. i've learned all about beach erosion, instance and a lot of new jerseyans murdering their family members, but i don't feel 33 age in new jersey. if you want me to feel 33. yes. you put me in the new york times facing the national news. so what i'd like you do to feel better and save your stomach lining, would you spend? more time with new jersey and your county and town and maybe you have something to worry about with your school board. i don't know. things happen there, but i think we need to remember how our

information comes. us and the industries that give it, send it to us for us to buy. yeah. also is a lot of local outlets are shutting down and there's well yeah if you want to worry about that and that's something should worry about but don't just worry about it do something about it. yeah. do something about it. so a friend of mine is the marvelous jelani cobb, a journalist who is now the head of the columbia journalism and of course, is very aware of what you're talking about, about the of local reporting and state reporting. and so one of the things that his on is making journalism school tuition free.

so do something do something. just don't sit at home and read the national paper pay attention to the national news. worry about what hell is going on in florida unless you go florida and you vote for local school boards in florida. i so i listened recently to your interview with debbie millman on the design matters podcast. oh yeah. and i really enjoyed it. i actually have a connection with debbie was one of her grad students for several years ago. yes, i lived in new york, but this is my home here. so yeah, i loved the interview and just hearing about you and your process through creating your art and kind of how you kind of had to. become one with it and feel like

this is something you knew that it was good, but, you know, getting to that space, yes, i can definitely relate to that. we didn't really talk a little bit we didn't talk about your artwork, but you talk a little bit about it tonight and where you are now is here with your art. yeah. um, so i just keep talking is full of art and some of this old art that i made in art or i've made since then. i graduated from the rhode island school of design in 2011, which already is a long time ago. and as i was putting these essays together, so one part of the process was about the words making that i didn't repeat myself too much. i didn't publish something was clearly very dated, you know, talked about something. well, i do talk about something that happened a long time ago. the i think it's the first essay in history is about affirmative

action. and it's something i published 1981 and it reads like was written yesterday but anyway so the process putting together the text was one thing but there were some image issues i wanted to put in as i mean and this book has illustrations. did you, were you in art school? yes, i did photography and then kind of you know, now that we're in branding but yeah. and i do illustrations, so, you know, okay, you know, the between fine art illustration. so i'm illustration even though when was in art school what exactly. yeah. and i was in painting programs so it making paintings and fine art and you supposed to be autonomous in sense that it relates only itself.

illustration relates to something of it and so much of black art had been dismissed as illustration because it talked the society, it talked about history, it talked people, it talked about white supremacy and racism was an illustration but in. 2022 i did a residency at. and i got to know a professor of illustration and he taught me a term which is editorial illustrator issue so i say that's what i was it it looked editorial illustration because it responds to text but it also thoughtful with visual meaning but it me a long time to pull

together my art made my hand and my compute to do with the words i to use. so in this book you will see some very wordy pieces and those are some of the later pieces. so when i had together the collection of and this would have been around 2000 to i realized that there were some things i needed to capture visually. so i had a residency at yaddo and i had a big wall and so i made my art and i put it up on my wall and. you'll see it. the process of putting together the essays was one, and the process making and putting together the illustrations was another. so i used a wall to put up the pieces that i was not of the

ones on the wall made it into this book think. i am curious about what you said about afro pessimism and why you think it's so widespread. why do you think it's so durable? and if there's an antidote, oh, those are hard questions to answer. one reason i think it's so attracted is that there is so much it. i mean, we keep having police brutality, we keep having discrimination, we keep having white supremacy. we keep having all the bad things that happen to black people. those things keep happening. so for instance, when when i say to people i don't think we're going to get to to have to deal with the trump presidency. they said, oh, i'm so relieved

you're an optimist. i said, no, i'm not an optimist. i've lived too long, black in the united states to be an optimist i cannot be an optimist. but on the other, i see that things changed. this is one of the i mean, one of the early responses to i just keep talking the book was a list of. 45 of the best books this spring by author women of color. and i thought. 45 in the olden that could never happen. it couldn't live. i mean, just to get 45 books out in the world by black women authors would have been amazing. and then to limit it to one

season and then to say, well, are the best ones. so that couldn't happened. so when children are truth of life, the symbol came out i'll give you another index to some of you remember maybe three years ago when it was big news that sojourner was able to go to court and get her son back and. the archivist had found the actual artifact. you remember that. it was big news. take my for it. well, there were three scholarly biographies of sojourner truth around the time i published mine was one. margaret washington was occurred to me. this was another all three of us. six explained this. we all said, this is what happened. she went to court. she got her son back. it was not news. the people who cared about that

story were us. and then a years ago it was national news. so people ask me, why are you writing another book about sojourner? to say sojourner truth has changed so. that's one big reason. and another reason that the people say these things are really writers. they are such good writers. they really. so there's there's enough bad stuff. they're really good writers. and we always explanations. so we have a hunger and i think for younger people who don't this decades long. i mean can i can remember half a century ago i mean real well but i can remember half a century

ago and younger people don't have. i'll give you one last example so i go to a senior strength trainee class in the montclair y and the guy who runs it his name is john nice old white and he plays music from before the mid-sixties. i can't and it because and i said to him john, this is horrible. this is what's the matter with it? i said, that's the music from segregation time. he says oh, i never thought of it that way, but i segregation i grew up in california where there segregation time. this is not to take us to the hard states in the south so things have changed young people

thankfully didn't to live through the fifties and early sixties. and there's some really good writers who are giving us this narrative. i talked about. anita hill yeah, i just wanted to say i can vouch for was lindsey was during that time. but i also wanted mention that, you know, we were going through this election right? and we see a lot of disillusionment amongst people in general about voting and from my perspective, it seems as though people put too much faith in voting they don't what i mean is they don't seem to understand that that's the beginning of the process and that how things really get changed, that it

takes more than just voting. and i wonder you had any thoughts about that? well, i agree. you and new concern. i agree with you. 100%. but i think i would put less emphasis on how it has to be the first step. i think i would say the essential step, but i would agree with you in how it all turns out. yeah, absolutely. so for me to be so to thank you both so much. enjoyed both of your books immensely so thank you. i wanted to ask a historian's so i wanted to ask in your long and distinguished career as a historian what the what your favorite developments in black history have been as a field and where you're excited about the field is going.

that's like asking a mother, which is her favorite, and usually it's the most recent. but i always said that my favorite book, which know this is not exactly what you ask, but this is how i'm going to answer it for a long time was hozier, hudson. this was the book my class editor turned because when hudson and i went to see hudson lectured him about how the republicans and the democrats are just the same thing and you're not going to make any difference. you vote communist. he did not target wen's heartstrings, and he was still very much alive. you know, this is what it is that this is like the seventies is the late seventies. so this is like antebellum

america. and my editor said, but he doesn't tug at heartstrings and in those days a black man had to tug at one's heartstrings to get published by alfred aiken off, you know. any other questions questions? okay. well thank you so much, nell and zindzi, can we give them one more round of applause.