thank you. [captions copyright national able satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] ! tonight, the annual march for life really a any in washington, d.c. we'll hear remarks from several speaker, including vice resident mike pence. kellyanne conway. joni ernst and me rey love. earlier today, president trump had his first news conference with theresa may. you can watch that briefing

tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span 2. earlier in afternoon at the pentagon, prosecute trump attended ceremonial swearing ins for defense secretary james mattis. the president explained an executive order establishing a new vetting measure to keep terrorists out of the u.s. here's some of what he had to say. president trump: i'm establishing new vetting measures to keep radical islamic terrorists out of the united states of america. we don't want them here. we want to ensure that we are not admitting into our country the very threats our soldiers are fighting overseas. we only want to admit those into our country who will support our country and love deeply our people. we will never forget the lessons

of 9/11 nor the heroes who lost their lives at the pentagon. they were the best of us. we will honor them not only with our words but with our actions and that's what we're doing today. >> just some of what president trump said earlier today at the ceremonial swearing in for defense secretary james mattis. you can watch the entire event tonight at 8:30 p.m. eastern on c-span 2. for the next hour, a book tv exclusive. our city's tour visits san diego, california. to learn more about its unique history and literary life. for five years now we've traveled to u.s. cities bringing the book scene to overour viewers. you can watch more at

c-span.org/cities tour. >> i think some of the first things that come to mind when people hear the words "dr. seuss" are the amazing range of book titles that they probably have reeled to their children, possibly have had reeled to themselves by their parents, by friends, whatever, and what a whimsical person he probably was. he was not born in this area, of course. he was born in massachusetts. started coming to san diego on visits in the late 19 twerts -- 1920's. eventually moved to san diego, continued to live there for over 40 years. mrs. guisele continues to reside there today. the two of them were very active when ucsb began, which actually was not until 1960. they were very involved with the

medical school and then eventually, and this was after ted guisele died. mrs. guisele has been very much involved with the university library hear. ted guisele was a student at dartmouth college in the 1920's thinking he would be a writer. majored in english literature. he happened to be very adept at drawing and did lots of drawings for the jack o. lantern, the darts moth numerous, year books, things like that. at that time he actually used his own name. he had -- he and some of his a little t of had run-in with the dean much because they drank a bit too much and he was banned from working on the paper and started using the name sues so he could get his little ca toones into

the appearance. well, sues is really his middle name. theodore sues guisele and sues was his mother's maiden name. he became more and more interested in drawing and one of the wonderful things we have here in the collection is his notebook from oxford university and i think if you look influence it, you can see he spent a lot of time making little cartoons and doodling on his page. perhaps more of that than he was at taking notes. i think he and then his first wife who convinced him i think that he was perhaps better suited to a live lie -- life of an artist rather than a writer. came back, when they came back to this country trying then to make it as an artist and he did. the first children's book he

published was to think they did it on mulberry street. 57. wasn't until 19 he did do illustrations for early authors early on. i think "the cat in the hat" really saw his publishing career take off. it was an incredibly popular book and it made people think about a different way of teaching, of how children learn. it was very different from a lot of the children's books that were popular at the time, such as the kind i might have read when i was a child. sort of the see spot run, that kind of very simplistic approach to children's literature. his approach, "the cat in the hat" was much more miswhich he vows and i think appealed to the

adults as well as the children who are reading it. we have the dr. seuss collection here at ucsd. can it was a gift from mrs. geisel in 1995. ted had died but it was his wish that the materials be here for his devoted fans worldwide to be able to come and use these materials and to have his legacy preserved. the collection is about 18,000 of ted geisel's original drawings. it spans to the early years, the 1920's, some of the erlings drawings he did, all the way up to the last children's books he published. most recently some other drawings were discovered at the house. those books are now being published by random house. ted geisel's longtime publisher.

now is the fun part and i'm going to show you some of the things actually in the dr. seuss collection. hat." ng the "cat in the because i think that's a title that most people are familiar with. these are some of ted geisel's first sketches. and you can see they're very rough sketches as he's working out the stories. he treated these like -- here are some rings from a coffee cup sort of on his desk and you can see how rough the sketches are and just as he's getting an idea of how it's going to look on the page. you can see when you get over here that he's always working on a two have-page spread. he has his words at the time sort of cut out from other people and pasted here where he thinks they might go on page. graduated from the

rough sketches, he would tend to make more finished drawings in ink, black and white, and i think you can see the difference . there's the very rough sketch of the house. this is the first page. the sun did not shine. it was too wet to play. so we sat in the house all that cold, cold, wet day. then, when he's happy with that, he's added what would be called a color overlay to the story board and this tells printer what color to use and what percentage of the color to use. blue. would be 100% 100% red. here's another story board. you see the black and white drawing. but here this fish is only going

to get 40% red as opposed to the 100% red down here. so the cat in the hat, quite familiar. these are some of the earliest known drawings by dr. seuss. these are from the 1920's. you can see this is again, he's used ink and pencil. tough dragon a -- tufted dragon looking quite evil, i think. this is a very funny sketch, romulus and remus. you see the seven hills of rome. there goes the wolf. we have no idea for what purpose those were drawn other than perhaps his creative urge. they're not in any books. but one of my favorite things in the collection is dr. seuss's notebook from when he was a graduate student at oxford in

the 1920's after he graduated from dartmouth, and you can see -- these are just a couple of pages. we've taken care to preserve them but i've taken these out of the notebook and you can just see that while he was taking a few notes here, he was really actually quite happy drawing all sorts of little dogs and hounds county the side of the page. this was a class on poetry. keeps. re's another one -- the poet keats. here's another one where he's drawing dogs and doodles and all kind of things. even within the covers of the notebooks themselves, all sorts of little drawings and doodles that he made. i've also put out some of his political cartoons.

ted geisel worked as an edtorial cartoonish for p.m. magazine, 1941 to 1943 before he himself went into the army during world war ii and a lot of these are quite tiny to. -- funny. this one with sort of the nazi spy dressed as a palm tree, being dropped from an airplane into the jungles of brazil. using charm and ingenuity he immediately married some evolved palm tree with advanced groundwork as much as this. my advanced -- is practically in the bag says adolf hitler. i think the cartoons, although the earliest ones deal mostly with the war, the war effort. the anti-war, america-first initiate you've. a lot of the later cartoons, i think, are as appropriate today as they were in the 1940's when

they have to do with do-nothing congresses. high taxes, inflation. think the geisel collection, ted's orange drawings are really important to have here at usd. researchers can use them. whether someone is teaching a class in american literature or someone teaching american history who might want to use the political cartoons of the 1 40's. u.c. san diego was a very heavy science and medicine campus and i think having the dr. seuss drawings here also adds again an element of whimsy and nonscience. you can think of the cat in the hat kind of running around through tall of these yupe

eucalyptus trees on campus and maybe causing a little bit of mischufe. i think dr. seuss is very important to history. his children's works are very popular throughout the world and have been transported for many, many languages. i think sometimes that throws -- does not transfer too much in translation because it throws the rhymes off but i think his genius will endure. >> in my book i tell the story of i was at the university of connecticut, i was a first-year professor. ph.d. from d my connell university. i thought wow, i've made it and i was looking through this book of cartoons and there's this cartoon, and it's in the book. i think it's a british magazine. phillips-starks humor magazine

and it's a sleeping mexican, or a sleeping spaniard. doesn't matter, the joke works for english people who hate spanish, it works for angelos who don't like mexicans in panel one he's asleep outside on the street. what we do, right? and his aurm alarm clock goes off, i think in panel three. he turns it off, goes back inside and he sleeps on his bed. [laughter] this guy is so lazy. he sleeps on the street. his alarm clock goes off. he's got a big sombrero, of course, so you know that he's latino in some way. the alarm clock goes off and he walks and goes to bed and something happened and i -- something snapped and i started to think this really essential question, which is actually fill so have cal. why do we laugh?

-- philosophical. why do we laugh? what is the or jane -- what am i laughing at? what is that? this is the funny thing about stereotypes. they don't have anything to do with intelligent. they have to do be recognition. even a monkey can recognize a square block and put it into the square hole. and humans aren't that much more sophisticated. we see something sb and we feel smart when we see it again. oh, look, there's a sleeping mexican. i've seen that before. ha ha. we laugh because of that recognition. there's some endorphin, some tickling in the cognitive area of our brain where we are rewarded for seeing something we've seen before. the logic of stereotypes won't ever be seductive. and i say this in tex-mex in my

book. don't think you can eradicate them. you'll just fool yourself. what you can do is inoculate yourself. like chickenpox or something. you have to get a weak version of the disease and then maybe you'll be immune to that stupidity because it really is not intellectual. it's just recognition of that we've seen before. i've seen a drunk mexican before. that's not a slur. so mexicans like to drink. i like to drink. that doesn't moan that's my essence. that's the wicked side to have stereotype, that for lazy people, which is most of us, that stereotype becomes a place holder. let's take the most rabid storeo type of the mexican, which is as a voracious rape esteban indict, which has been popularized by our bewigged, orange-skinned friend donald trump.

poncho via invades the united states and because he's a jokester, he invaded columbus, nem. take that, columbus. here's your european invasion. but that wasn't funny. some people got killed in columbus, new mexico, and the united states government sent 25,000 troops, including macarthur and patton, who had just gotten out of west point, to find our good friend, poncho villa. so 25,000 troops go. they didn't find him. they didn't catch him. right when that was hopping, two things were going on in the united states. vaudeville houses for closing and motion picture houses were opening everywhere. motion picture houses showing news reels of dead mexicans,

thieving mexicans. that to me is the tragedy, that at the birth of the motion picture, these news reels and imagerds crystallized the of the mexican as the other dirty bandit other. i was trained as a ph.d. to write about latin american fiction. i threw that book out the window. i never published it. it's a very good beautiful. it's available as a dissertation. i started writing exclusively about the structure of ethnicity in american pop culture. to "touch of evil" orson welles' story about the border. to the mexican spitfire. there's a tradition of mexicans doing the equivalent of step and fetch, vaudeville.

vaudeville hnic routine that crystallizes our meaning for people in that culture throughout the last century and this one. we can turn to robert rodriguez's filmmaking with the ma cheta film series. robert rodriguez is one of our mexican superstars. inton ontario teen'sed by -- tarantino's buddy. they're hanging out. it took on all the ugly, scary stereotypes of the mexican band it with danny tray ho is the actor. it produced a film and kind of twisted it. like i said, you can't eliminate the stereotype and what robert wanted to do was to twist it and give it a new spin. but i don't even argue that for

a lot of people, they just don't , ve that nuance, that danny the actor remains a pretty scary mexican. don't get near me with that ma cheta, please, ma cheta. -- ma chetty. leave me in peace. also, everybody's favorite latina. there were ways you could see her past lupe, the mexican spitfire. she was an early 20th-century lucille ball. she was funny, she could dance. she was mexican and then you get so feara vergara in the 21st century on "modern family" and you think he's -- she's rich, she -- in some ways she repeats

all of the stereotypes. she's incredibly sexy, i don't hold that against her. she's also a producer, a savvy woman. but her skin, her pelt. in my book sometimes i talk about actors and the kind of skins they way wear, like -- like a pelt. you don't know where the costume stops and the soul begins. you have to do so much as a atino or latina just to get on stage, just to get in front of the camera. you don't have time to be progressive all the way. i have pills to pay. my agent told me i have to take this show. so image while there is progress there's also a lot of backsiding and my fro two friends who made the "bordertown" series that was recently canceled -- thanks, fox. canceled by fox. they tried to make this show that would be comedic,

progressive, would be set on the american-mexican boarder and they did all that but they didn't give the show time to evolve. the first year of "seinfeld" the timing was off, the characters weren't there. sometimes for a comedic team for collaboration, it takes over a year for them to find their way. the first year of if the -- "friends "was the same way. the first year of "louie" worked. louie c.k., mexican, by the way. he was a genius. but they didn't give that show, "bordertown" the time to evolve. it's funny thing in the here and now. in order to get produced -- and i can talk about this because my own show i tried for two years to get on. if you try to be too progressive, the audiences don't recognize you because you're not a stereotype, he said you're not marketable.

stereotypes are profit rble -- profitable because you know that people will pay what they've seen before. like the old freak shows. every year when the carnival came around and the people knew i'm going to see the two-headed baby. the rapest mexican. the hot latin bombshell. we've seen these before and will pay to see them again. so if you try to come out with a show just a little bit different that's intelligent and breaks mold, you're going to pay for it. you're not going to get on broadcast. the impact for ethnic communities is huged. t is internalized. a great writer frank -- teaches us that the net result of gative stereotyping is the consciousness of inferiority.

it means you dream about your loserness. it means the mirror that shows you as second rate never goes away. it's almost already there. so the consequences for not intervening where spear types appear is yet another generation of self--loathing americans. right? i first moved to san diego and this was this great newscaster. rio. me was leonard villa rowo. i'm leonard villa his name is villarrial. but in order to pass in san diego, i guess, when i moved here in the 1990's, san diego was very, very conservative. it was just starting to thaw. he had to become leonard della rio. he had to mispronounce his name in order to pass. during the world series i texted joe buck. hey, it's not pa-rez.

it's perez. since the beginning of time english broadcasters have said perez. roberto perez. so i'm texting joe buck during the world series. other people are screaming about the cubs. i'm texting joe buck. he didn't respond. what that comes from is a need to aingely size spanish-language names because they're associated with mexicanicity. just today a student turned in some work to me. i had done a festival on campus and they were talking to me about the description of the hispanic holiday. it's not a hispanic holiday. it's a mexican holiday. mexican becomes a pejorative in american culture. people are like oh, i don't want

to hurt his feelings. no, i'm a mexican american. actually, i have a little part italian but these efforts to water down mexicanness in an american context is absurd. we're the largest population of immigrants now in the united states. americans of mexican descent. not l for latin -- and apologizing for being mexicano. the book is highly auto biographical. there are some parts of what i suffered through in the book. "seductive ha lewis neighings of mexicans in america." and these seductive hallucinations are delightful because they're memory ranlable and they're memorable because they're delightful.

i think the book terrorize to exorcise hollywood history. my sister works in hollywood. . i'm a big mass media fan. i'm nonan either nicks professor that attacks hollywood as the big evil person, right? it's not a black and white book. it's a book by an english professor who was basically raised by a television set who was milk fed at the teat to have internet. so it's very much a book for people to want to laugh about things that are serious. i'm sorry but before me there was a whole generation of mexican-american scholars who had to fight in the trenches and they were called the intellectuals and i'm post intellectual, which means i ride on their shoulders but it also

means we don't just have to be black and white, brown and white. this is about the myth. if you read my book, read it for the pictures. you might just learn something. >> it doesn't look like it but this is a broad river valley and in the winters when we get rain storms, it can flood quite significantly and i came down here in 2008 to do a story about these thousands of car tires that wash into the united states from mexico during any significant rain. and the thing that was interesting about that is that those car tires actually originated in the united states. when we buy a new set of tires, we leave the old ones at the dealer and pay a fee to have them disposed of appropriately but most often they're sold to mexican middlemen and taken to baja and used and when they're discarded that i just left in

the watershed and when it rains they just wash back into the united states for free. and i was here at the kinsy ranch talking to the tynans who operate the place about the car tires they were picking up at that moment and putting into a big dumpster? there were hundreds of car tires after one storm. and we were talking about the circumstance layerty of it. here are california car tires coming to us from mexico and terry tynan said yeah, it's just like the bicycles and i said what are you talking about? he said come over here. we talked around the 200-year-old barn and he had a giant pile of bicycles. he said he collected a thousand bikes in the last six months and i said where do they come from? he turned out and pointed auto this hill because tijuana is 300 feet higher in elevation than the american valley below and he said the mexicans. t turned out that every parcel

along monument road that i went to after that had a pile of bicycles. from the state park to the gomez place down here. there's the county park and other ranches and the people of the valley were just collecting these bicycles that were abandoned by migrants. rarely did they see people on bikes. it happened at night or happened when people weren't looking but day after day bicycles were accumulating. this experience is very interesting because, as i mentioned, it's a very rural community. people are making money off of horse ranching, renting out stalls. there's organic farms, commercial farms. and yet they're dealing with these international issues right on their back door and the whole story of my graduation follows

kimiko patterns, so when we have a boom like we did during the housing -- during our housing bubble -- there was quite a bit of crossing. a lot of mexicans and central americans crossing to fill the low-skill jobs that were in demand at the time and along this boundary, people have crossed in every imaginable way and when they do, they encounter the regular americans who live right here. and the locals are quite pragmatic. you know, i wouldn't say ideal only cal. and they -- ideological and they trailed interesting stories. in fact, this is a river valley and in the winter, it often floods and right over here, this rancher that lives in this parcel actually told me that he

found a man who had crossed on the river on a boogie board but then got stuck in a tree as the river retreated. there was a lot of serious bouncing around when i first came upon all of these aban don bicycles in the river valley. some people thought it was just cosmetic, that the idea that someone was just casually cycling along with migrants would blend easier. some people thought it was prosecute speed because you could cover the distance it would take you -- it would take you nine minutes in one minute but it actually has to do with technology. every technology that the border patrol brings to bear on the border, be it laser trip wires or infrared cameras or the barriers themselves. every technology has a hack.

they all have a weakness. for example, the laser trip wires, the infrared cameras. box we use in our quite often here and become utterly useless. in the case of the bicycles, the hack had to do with a string of 18,000 assignment systems that the border patrol relies on. they're seismic. they detective earth-shaking things. pounding, running, walking. and traditionally there are a migrants who run and walk whereas the border patrol rolls in jeeps and trucks so the bicycle technique reverseed that trend and suddenly migrants were able to cross over ground that

in the past they would have easily been deteched. the san itionally, diego sector was one of the busiest along the entire border and according to an author named seph nevin, the experience a mexican you have population meeting a traditionally white population in san diego, that that lent to the whole debate a certain kind of politics. so this has been one of the hot nest terms of crossing but also politically and so this is the most enforced five-mile stretch of our 2,000-mile boarder and we've had quite a big border .atrol presence in recent times

-- in recent times, a lot of agents have been shifted to the desert, to arizona but still there's a huge presence here in san diego and you can see on a daily basis that everywhere you go there are border patrol agents and trucks watching the boundary. you can see them in their jeeps, on foot. the name of the game in terms of smuggling is creativity. you know, agents will say that they're on the creative defense and the smugglers are on the creative offense and sometimes it's really funny the things that smugglers will come up with. this stretch here -- your average mile cost $3.5

million on average to build. if you go to youtube, you can find a video of smugglers using a $24 carjack to jack that fence up almost to the height of a man and the smugglers cross under the fence and then they just kick the jack out and the fence falls back into place and on the video the smugglers are laughing the whole time. just the sheer creativity involved in smuggling can make for some pretty interesting stories. this valley right here is called smugglers ch and have been using this since the 1800's and they've been smuggling everything from, at one point, lacy undergarments were highlyy -- highly taxed and they smuggled underwear to everything

to everything else, alcohol during prohibition and even cattle at one time. fence act of 2007, during the construction of this wlaall here, engineers failed in this entire valley with this giant berm. and totally changed the watershed here, so they could but a fence on top of it. i don't know how many cubic yards it is, but it's vast. the interesting thing about this, though, is that there hasn't always been such fortifications in the boundary. right over here in the bush, under a juniper tree, is a plaqu e the boy scouts put in place to

celebrate the fact that father mexico sera crossed from into the united states through these valleys, either here or just over the hill, and establish what became the andfornia -- system, basically san diego itself. travelingots in across this boundary go to our -- are ancient. i think when it comes to this debate about border enforcement, seemingly everyone is willing to have an opinion, but so few are willing to inform themselves. and so, one of the hopes i had for this book is when the

readers meet the characters, they are meeting people who live on the boundary, whether it is people who involved in enforcement, people who just make their livelihood here, or people whose career it is to cross that border illegally. migration numbers have been down since 2008, and negative even. going backople are to mexico and central america then are coming across. and also, studies say that people tend to cross in a certain age range, from your late teens to early 30's. age,u don't cross and that you are not likely to. mexico went through this youth boom early in the century and people are crossing. now they've aged out. not only have we had negative migration numbers for 10 years, but we're not likely to see another boom.

so, when we look at spending billions of dollars on defending this boundary that is not going to be a crossed in the numbers it had been, that money is our bridges and are roads. that is our schools. if we're just going to be pouring it in the desert, i think people should be aware of what they are defending. ♪ >> early in the morning i will rise ♪ theiscussions about abolishment of slavery have to do with the way slavery was re-fabricated through criminal sanctions. ofyou look at the language the 13th amendment to the u.s. constitution, what it says is that slavery is outlawed except as punishment for a crime.

whole my book i do a chapter on the debates around that amending. that amendment that is rightly considered one of the most progressive moments and whenlegal history in 1865 slavery was abolished. i go to those debate in congress to tease out how is it that this really important moment for human rights and civil rights in u.s. history had this exception clause that basically allowed for re-enslavement of the 4 million africans who had achieved freedom. it is interesting, you know, the expectations of black people after this amendment was passed is actually we will live as citizens of the united dates for the first time. and what the reality that set in especially after reconstruction and the birth of the kkk, but also the way in which white supremacy was not just a matter of the kkk, white supremacy was enshrined in the law.

afterack codes, and even they were outlawed, the only thing that was outlawed when the black codes or done away with was racially specific language. before would say, if you were a black person, you got caught which was hog, related to hunger and dispossession, we can put you on a chain gang. all they had to do to do the same thing was removed the word negro from the law and it would pass constitutional muster. the expectation on the part of the population was we could now be full kind of participants in layu.s. nationstate, we can claim to rights with the 13th and 14th and 15 amendments, but there was a quick realization that that application -- evocation of rice did not equal actual translation into the existence of black people. and racial apartheid is what occurred. i write about a woman from a place from georgia.

she writes a letter to the president theodore roosevelt at the time and says to him, basically, i expected to be a free person after emancipation and what myself and my husband jackson and my whole family have a condition of slavery. she says to him, and basically a 10 point letter that is numbered, and gives detail by detail how her husband through being charged with a petty offense and not being able to pay the fee was threatened with a chain gang and then a white person came and bought him out of the chain game by paying his fee and he was basically auctioned off to this person. whonel smith, a colonel ended up being a big player politically in the state of georgia, bought him out. this person ran a 20,000 acre plantation that has people that the courted out of

system like jackson morrison and had black women that were leased out to him as the runner of one of the prisons in georgia. and it had people that were supposedly free laborers, sharecroppers. on this very space you had every example of the re-fabrication of black freedom. what she says to president roosevelt is, you need to do something about the situation. she ended up working in the same plantation because the owner of the, had promised her if she works like her husband that it would go towards the ending of his slavery sentence. and in actuality, not of the counted worked was towards incentives. they extended it out. he ended up staying there and being whipped and enduring a lot of the things we associate with and what sheery says at the end of the letter is, this person, colonel smith whips hia slaves.

this is not what we counted on for everything that we have done for this country. so, i think that encapsulates both the expectation and then the really horrifying reality of black people enduring during stilleriod but are enduring today. in terms of -- the example the jackson morrison went through, or criminal surity where somebody could come to a court and pay your fine and buy you out is that you not only would have an extension of your time, people would basically cook the books, and you would never get out of that debt. also, you have the threat of being killed or imprisoned if you were to try to leave. so, it was not only the extension of the time, the temporal aspect, but there was also the real terrorism that black people endured as a result that ended up in mass killings sometimes, rape as a de facto form of punishment by the master or by the company because we know that companies like u.s.

steel took part in this neo slavery formations in places like alabama and tennessee. so, this was a large complex of not only labor, the acquisition of black labor but also terrorism against black people, a re-fabrication of white supremacy which is very important not only the fact that it was happening in the southern u.s. but this was all validated by the national government structure and by the very amendment to the u.s. constitution that supposedly outlawed these practices. ♪ caller so, t chainh gang system mostlye was a county level consort of the state level system which was called leasing. convict leasing was legal from

the reconstruction period all the way through around 1930's. was ae chain gang system county level consort of that system. what that meant was for a misdemeanor, a petty offense, you could be put in a system where you would be put in what i call the rolling cage. i write a chapter on toni morrison's novel " beloved," where one of the main characters is put on a chain gang and tomblikeinto this structure, and she to show how this was like a structure of living death, actually puts the cage underground. wereality thate cages movable and mobile. and the reason why they were mobile was that these neo slaves as i call them in the book or prison slaves were at work

building the entire southern infrastructure that had been decimated with the civil war, but also trying to move the south into the new paradigm open industrializing more in the northern image of an industrial kind of formation. and so, the railroads, the ing,ways, turpentining, min all of these new industries were largely made up of workers per se that were actually prison slaves. the chain gain system was mostly for people who were convicted of misdemeanors, sometimes you could not pay a fine. so, eventually what was criminalized was your property, landless and is and dispossession. yut it was very much a can operation. the people that ran the states and sometimes the governors of those states would actually be players in the events -- in these institutions, whether it be the county chain gang or the felony level of the convict

lease system. the convict lease system was a system where if you are convicted of a crime you could literally be leased out to private corporations as a result. so, what was called the prison system originally in the southern states was actually private enterprise taking over the job of controlling the black population. and even after that was outlawed, i have a chapter in likeook on how a space angola prison plantation, the state penitentiary of louisiana, started out as a slave plantation. then after the civil war it became a convict lease plantation, bigger in area than the island of the area of manhattan. outlawed, it was the state became jealous of the profits of the person who owned that space. it outlawed convict leasing and turned it into the state penitentiary of louisiana, which

it is to this day, as you and i and otherslack men are in the same fields that african slaves in the 19th century picking crops as we speak. so, you have that real symbolic neofestation of what i cal l slavery in that history. one of the main things i want people to take away from the book is the degree to which slavery, and i'm talking about pre 1865, is not some sort of dinosaur age, pre-capitalist system. that slavery, rather than being the exception, an original sin we have gotten away from, is actually foundational to our current predicament of police brutality and terrorism, of legal repression, of political disempowerment, of economic disempowerment, of lack of educational access. all of the things that people find so important right now are

again grounded in the original, um, kind of problematics associated with slavery, which in my work as both someone that writes and teaches, oftentimes i find that even though slavery, you can add genocide being so foundational to u.s. history, so many of our most talented and brilliant youth and students have very little knowledge about that system. and if they do, they will believe in the myth that slavery ended in 1865. and everything i found in doing research for the book and the scholars i mentioned before, david ocean city, alex looked inside and angela davis. us in their work, in their international bearing towards this issue of there being 2.4 million people or around that number locked up in

supposedly the most democratic society on the planet. everything that we learned about that history from 1865 to the present tells us that that narrative of slavery abolition is a myth in large measure. that part of what we see is a re-fabrication rather than an ending. that is not to say that all of sacrifices and incredible sacrifices that africans and others made to abolish slavery by the time 1865 wreren't, important but it is to say that the myth of progress is something we have to be critical about. ♪ >> profanity is a powerful

technology. words themselves aren't intrinsically bad. it is the cultural beliefs surrounding the use of those words that gives them the power and makes them good or bad the reason that profanity has the effect it has on our bodies and our psyches is because these words are ones we have been trained since childhood are special. our parents have told us these are words you cannot say in public, words that they censor themselves are saying around us. and maybe we even got punished for them as children. we've learned week these are really powerful, emotional words. the context in which we -- are often quite emotional and we learn that as a function of our exposure to language over a lifetime. so, the emotional reaction that they evoke is a systematic set of bodily functions. heart a quickening of the rate, sweaty palms.

a release of a general and. -- of adrenaline. it is part of a fight or flight response, it is the same system that gets activated in the brain, and that produces the various effects profanity has. it allows us to tolerate pain better. it allows us to set our hearts going for a moment and then that allows us to get over it more quickly. there is a whole suite of things that happen when we use the special words. the premise of the book is that profanity is a type of human behavior that we should be studying for a couple reasons. first of all, because at the -- as a scientist i want to know what humans do. how did they get to be that way over the course of evolutionary time? over the course of development a cognitivee to be a dull. universality is a

dimension of human experience. it is worth understanding that dimension of human experience. but more than that, profanity is special. when it comes to language, we have got lots of different aims we do -- we inform, we remember, we talk to ourselves. but one thing that most language is not very good at is conveying and evoking emotions. as a result of that, as a result of the fact that it is taboo and there are all sorts of social concerns surrounding it, it works different league from the rest of language. and that means there are scientific discoveries to be made about humans that you can only get by looking at the dirty side of language that you would not get from the rest of language. most words become profane over the course of many generations and centuries, following a relatively common pattern. it goes something like this. they start by meaning something totally anodyne. something completely monday. maybe they refer to a female dog

or a donkey or hitting. the overn the course of, natural language change, they gave new meanings. and this happens to every word in the history. if you think about a word like cell. it used to refer to a place that contained something and then a concert -- referred to the smallest biological unit. now the device in your pocket. words change meaning. so, profane words are no exception. they gained additional meanings and those meaning usually belong to one of four categories. they refer to religious concepts, the example of hell. they refer to sex. you think of lots of profane words that revolve around sex. bodily functions or body parts. or activities involving the upkeep of those bodily functions. and then finally, words relating to other groups of people. once it gains a meaning like one

of those, then it's a candidate for being profane but that does not make it profane. there are lots worth about sex that aren't profane. they are words that you would use in medical contexts or with little kids that describe excretion and bodily functions and those are not profane yet. there is this turn that happens, and that turn has to do with people deciding that this word bothers them, that they do not want to hear this word. maybe it is because of how the word sounds. profane words tend to sound a particular way. they tend to be short and have lots of consonants. kuh and puh and kuh. maybe it has something to do usinghich people are those words. sometimes a new generation of people will use a word with a new meaning and older people will decide, we do not like how you are using that word. it offends us. socialult is there is a agreement that we are not going

to use these words in a certain circumstance. we are going to punish people who do, teach kids they can't. the consequences a whole generation of kids grow up thinking these are bad words. they are not intrinsically bad, but a generation of kids grows up with that lesson very deeply learned. and the consequences that when they are adults, they teach those same lessons to their kids. over the course of a lifetime of a word, it will eventually peter out. the words we think is the strongest profanity in 100 years might not be anymore. in shakespeare's time, the f word was not quite so bad as it is now and there was a completely different word, swive that served the same fortune. it was the f word of the day. it has completely died out, along with a whole host of other words like zounds and gadzooks and tarnation. words that don't do anything to the modern ear, but were judged to be quite taboo. there are different degrees of profaneness and you can see this

from surveys. if you ask younger americans who are english-speaking, you find that they are pretty reliable in which words they think are the worst words and which ones are not so bad. for example, at the lowest level of profanity, the words that are kind of bad, maybe you would not say them are on your grandparents according to millenniums. you have words like hell and shit does not seem to bother younger americans much at all. and as you move up, you get words that relate to bodily functions. then you get words relating to sex in particular. but the worst words, according to americas nowadays, at least the survey data i have seen are words that denigrate people by sexualace, ethnicity, orientation. slurs are judged to be the worst words. if you look in the list, it is

going to be mostly populated, the top 10 are mostly going to be slurs. so, that's something new. that has not always been the case. exactly why this is happening but it is certainly true that the way that people consume media, especially young people, is playing a role in it. the media landscape has changed. over the last 20 years it has gone from the case where all the meter you consumed was censored by someone. someone decided because the fcc regulates broadcasting television. someone decided that word is not appropriate for this audience at this time. and now that's not true. all you have to do is pull out your mobile device and open up twitter or get on an online game. younger kids nowadays are exposed to so much language that is uncensored that goes straight to someone else's phone that they become inured to it. 100 timese the f word

before breakfast. the result is that, the f word isn't intuitively bad. a lot of people don't like it but there is nothing about it that will directly cause harm to people. but younger adults notice that. they don't see anything particularly wrong with it. they find it to be another word funny orex to seem accessible or casual or seem emotional or major point. -- or make your point. at the same time, social media is showing us how people who are very different might find it different words to be harmful for them. so, one thing that caught me totally by surprise talking about undergradshere is the word retard. the word retard did not used to be taboo, didn't used to be profanity per se. i'm 40 years old. when i was growing up, it was a way to insult people but no one

would come up to and say, that is offensive what you just said. and that has totally changed. why they 20 rolls find that word, why they call it ther word. - why they do not want to hear it in the classroom, they say it is because it's on video. they saw a video where they saw a post by some friend or friend of a friend that talked about how they have a brother with down syndrome and that word hurts them. that sort of bubbling up of individual experiences with language and specifically with slurs that, younger americans get exposed to more now than sa y, they would have 20 years ago is part of the reason that they find those words, those slurs to be the most offensive. using profanity has consequences. the more you use it, the less impact it has. so, we know this because when you look at the effects of

profanity has on the body, the physiological impact of swearing on the body, people who swear more have less of an impact each time they do it. there was a great study that shows that swearing can alleviate pain. what they did, this was a research group in great britain. they had people come into the lab, and they had to cause these people pain but not to harm them. the protocol is to have them stick their hands in cold water. ice cold water. itck an open hand in and hurts a lot. then they reported how much it hurt. they could do this while swearing or the other half of the participants, while they were saying random words. what researchers found was that the swear words, the ones that were randomly assigned to swear could hold their hands and 50% longer. pain relieving effect of swearing. but if you then ask people how often do you swear?

what they found was that pain relieving effect was greater for the people who swear the least in their everyday lives. there is an impact on your body of swearing. you use it up. there is also an impact on how other people perceive you. right? so, there are social consequences of being a person who swears. for example, in the right context, you can be perceived to be funny. that is why so many comedians work blue. you can seem powerful. in the right context you can seem accessible. in the. right context you can seem out of control or unhinged. you can seem really emotional right now, angry or excited, elated, whatever. so, the perceptions that people bring to bear on someone who swears are there he much driven by the context. type of context

where i think someone could get away with swearing and be funny? is this a context where i think the only reason someone would swear is that they do not know the social rules and therefore our person not to be trusted? so, like everything we do that is social, swearing has complicated social constructs. take the most important thing to take out of the book is that profanity is a human behavior that is scientifically valuable. i think as someone who studies brain, i takehe it for granted that people will have the same attitude towards human behavior that i have, which is that there is a wide wideay of it, that -- variety of it and that it is revealing and that it is not really to be judged so much as to be described and understood. and if people can take a little to of that to use -- view profanity, i think it will go a long way, because taking something as objective, taking something as a scientific object itstudy, leads us to fivgive

less control over our lives. a lot of people are stuck on this idea that this word is harmful.. you cannot say this word around me or i will have a knee-jerk reaction. inflamed by word. i think people are stuck on the idea that if i say, if i ever utter this word around my child, he or she will be permanently harmed. there is not evidence for that type of thing. i think allowing us to detach ourselves from our magical about abou -- beliefs aese words and treat them as human behavior that we can manipulate for good or bad or for our purposes, gives us more control over language in our lives. our visit to san diego, california, is a book tv exclusive. we showed it today to introduce you to c-span's citiestour.

for five years we have traveled to u.s. cities reading the book seem to our viewers. you can watch more of our visits at c-span.org/cities tour. earlier today, thousands gathered in washington, d.c. for the annual march for life. we will have that next on c-span. after that, paul ryan talking about the congressional agenda and for republicans in the days ahead. and later, a look at president trump's first week in office with daily beast correspondent elenor clift. pro-life supporters were in washington for the annual march began 44an event that years ago to coincide with the anniversary of the supreme court wade.on roe v. attending the march, kellyanne conway, members