new exhibit "every eye is upon me" first ladies of the united states. watch american history tv tonight on c-span3. as the year comes to a close, congress continues in session debating on whether to add more dollars to covid relief. a new congress. convenes on sunday at noon. join us as they swear in nearly 60 new members. sunday at noon eastern time. watch the house on c-span and the senate on c-span2. watch online at c-span.org or listen on the c-span radio app. poets claudia, terrence

hayes and dawn martin discussed race in america. the library foundation of los angeles hosts this event. time when our country feels more divided than ever, we are confronted with and cannot ignore the systemic racism that has always existed. we are lucky to have these remarkable writers talk about it. race and discuss identity. claudia is at the center of this conversation. in american conversation. she says, i was always aware that my value is determined by my skin color, first and foremost.

to converse is to risk the unraveling of the said and unsaid. she is a poet, essayist and playwright. .his finishes her trilogy citizen was a new york times bestseller and the winner of -- inus awards, including 2016, she cofounded the racial imagery -- she is a macarthur fellow and a professor of poetry at yell. andence hayes is a pellet -- poet and educator. he has been awarded numerous naacp awarduding an for outstanding literature.

recipient of the macarthur. martin -- dawn martin is also a poet. acknowledged.een she is the cofounder of the third wave foundation. welcome, all of you. please, continue. >> i am so excited to be here. i am going to interview this your gorgeous and challenging

video: and drawing, the african living. >> the african rain the lizard. black people are descendents of the african rain the lizard. , they werefrica stored in the hair of kidnapped africans. i have the information why it carries, having seen the losses it saw onave ships -- slave ships had a window lizard is guaranteed to appear on a table between the hot dogs, ribs

and canned sodas. some african made the lizard possess a heightened taste in music, cinema and art. others have a gift for reading people. it can survive on a diet of fire and and fireflies, lady bags -- ladybugs, flies and mother's day flowers. some black working class middle. working-class -- middle working class parents -- they worked themselves to death, naturally. folk black as beatles and i saw a black child put a beetle in his mouth. joke and smokek in the mouth. the african rain bill this.

. outside, about a mile from the sea, where the african when the lizard convention convened, and actual waybill lizard has never been. a number of elderly folk and ran children attend. thene is allowed to mention rainbow lizard when they convene. the largest and most powerful african waybill lizard are often cannibalistic, devouring their young, according to page 174 of the life of the rainbow visited. lizard --n rainbow the mother runs a hair salon out of the house. the father runs a fish market.

shouts his name. fish guts in the buckets. driveseer him on when he the streets. women wear their hair elaborately leave. african rainbow lizards do not have white people for bosses. to witness beautiful changes in our family is about making enough to live. their cousin was not my father. lived in fear. if a lizard can talk, it is guaranteed to sing beautifully. someone -- i saw someone stumbling in the doorway. the mother was screaming. likeather's tongue was waybillthe african

visit. overhearing the dream, not the mother screaming as she fight -- bites her lip and wields a knife at the father or the son. several of the daughters screaming, mama, mama. died clinching a nickel. 300 $20 bills0 or in the sock drawer. of 10 or 20.e coins in the closet. found. all of it stinking like the guts of fish. stinking still.

the pistol stunk of fish. tiny, greasy, granular scales. the mother worked herself to death. the father died with his face so tightly.lled no one could say whether it was clenched.cales he is the first thing. we might be able to get back and talk to it. i have been trying to combine some of my drawings and poems. earlier. a little -- justuther king jr.

trying to figure it out. i never thought i would have the opportunity to share it in this space. read claudia's book many times. powerite man's notion of and does everything else fall in the middle of that? maybe. we can talk about the other stuff later. i was trying to figure out, back when i made this video. i was just trying to get this problem underfoot. let me be it first. in memoriam, martin luther king jr. won. turned to monsters, , america.o kill

yesterday, exacerbate, despoil, disfigure, the deadly burned the wildlife rainy riot sunshine, sheltered blank,he limit, assassinate and backing up like bullets. deactivate the springtime, terrorizing. they sleep who know a regulated some according to universal stage direction, obvious. we share an afternoon of morning. mild reversal. long munching.

deplorable, abortion, more and more. that is from things i do in the dark. this is me trying to think about it in a video. ♪ >> in the memory of martin luther king. mercy of the usa. violate, --ldren to america, america, that, -- america. tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow --

[indiscernible] ♪ >> or tide, or changing sky.

we share an afternoon. [indiscernible] ♪ >> we share an afternoon of morning. amidst the long ritual of fright and sanity. ♪

terrance: i think we are back. she claps her hands

at the end of that thing. anyway -- >> hopefully we will have time to talk about that work and that conversation, for sure. i love what jordan does with syntax and that pollen. it makes me think about how syntax can approach talking about something that makes no sense. .he just locates us . am not sure what to say i will be excited to hear what you might say about it. now, we are going to turn to claudia. from a provocative new book.

book -- it is a book that deserves way more than one meeting. pleased to welcome claudia to read an excerpt from this collection. claudia: thank you. thank you for that amazing piece. section from just ask called ethical loneliness -- us called ethical loneliness. i will time myself, so i do not go over. the playwright. with a white,play

female friend. she is interested in thinking about whiteness. this play is interested in thinking about race. they are covered in all directions. near the end of the play, the fourth wall is broken. a character asks the white members of the audience to get up from their seats and walk up on the stage, which has been transformed into a dining room with a staircase to the second floor. faces will be revealed, composure tested. .ffort must be made the black actor holds black people in a way that the world does not. the request is presented as a conditional. what if?

what is the audience in this space of the imagination can enact something that does not exist in our world? segregated space as the black actors join the blacks in the audience. has center stage transformed into the front of the box or is it now a white only board room? in the moment, no one knows what is really being proclaimed. a white man in the seat behind -- nonetheless, he makes his way to the stage. a white woman i am with remains in her seat. i am getting tense. i am a black woman. have what itay to has requested. what i assume that it needs.

identification to the playwright because she is black wharton artist? it is impossible to dissect. it couples with my assignment building against my white friend. i feel betrayed by her. i am not the playwright. playwright might be waiting for a black person to get on the stage with the white people. none do. she might want me to think it is divisive and walk out of the theater. not a black stage, a white stage, but a united stage. they might have calculated what percentage of the audience would not comply. our my invariable feelings because i come in black member of the audience, remain inside the play? the playwright might think, why

are they listening to me, as more and more white people fill up the stage and people of color stay seated. hold all thee white people? this is what is troubling me. the playwright might have said exactly what she wants to happen. i am trying to listen to the actors speak the closing lines of the play, composed of quotes from famous black writers. my might think of is find's non-complying presence in her seat. why will she not do what she was asked? i do not understand why she cannot do such a simple thing. why can't she see that it matters. a refusal seems like an insistence of ownership on the entire theater.

i am feeling pushed out of my own seat by the last few minutes of the play. i want to run. away from what? an embodied refusal that i cannot help but see one that surprises me. my own mounting frustration in what i perceived as literate. a friendship error, despite how i understand how whiteness functions. we do not share the same privileges. be still, my beating, breaking heart. when the plane finally ends, i say to my confounding friend, i did not know you are black. she does not respond. given the irritation in my voice, it is not a comment seeking a response. performance felt like no

solidarity, insofar as i come the black person, dropped away as the requested plate dropped away. she must understand the play is made in response to the world where black people's requests do not matter. she not recognize it as an offering of black feminism? are in the habit of checking in every few days. we speak of anything about this day. i cannot stop returning to the image of her, glued to her seat. why does the beverly continued to infuriate and perplex me? why am i not able to read this moment? why am i not able to stop reading this moment? why am i not been able to settle

down and file it away. move friend's refusal to and move that she needed to make? is it a message, a performance of why me? is she telling the black audience, you do not get to look at me, you do not get to see me, as a white person? a white specimen? fucked up, the man behind me said. they be my friend cannot be told what to do. where it started and where it will end has little to do with her whiteness, or everything to do with her whiteness. blind spoton of a around racial dynamics could lead to a larger discussion of white feminism and white entitlement. they be im only responding to her whiteness because the play is constructed to perceive

unequal racial positioning. maybe it is such a stretch that it will snap back to hit me in the face. the sting lingers. i cannot let it go. i will not let it go. what do you care? i ask myself. from this moment forward, how slipy will the pronoun we from my lips? i asked my friend, this white --an speaks of understanding [no audio]

what does she see in my face? he did not want to. is she speaking about exhaustion? exhaustion, i can understand. it is tied to fatigue and addressing the onslaught of regenerating racism brings forward fatigue and all of us. or is it this simple? i do not have to do what a black woman tells me to do. i am white. don't you see that? to.d not want but i want is what matters. i am a white woman. i am the one that matters. . did not want to

are these the unspoken sentences that i am to defer to? thank you. end there.to join dawn and terrance. hi. say howt want to excited i and for you. i missed you. outuld love to be hanging and talking. [laughter] thank you, claudia. i will jump right in.

we will have a conversation. i have no direction what direction it will go in. the conversation will go in whatever direction it wants to go in. actually,start -- this is a good segue. this was a section of the book that really struck me. i have also seen that play. there is a lot to talk about in terms of who gets up and who doesn't, in terms of the white folks who go to the stage. askingant to start by you a question about rage and restraint. in poetry, i would suggest other art forms, too, we value restraint, the holding back of something in order to let something else loose. after we had our preparatory phone call the other day, that

brief call, i went back and watched some dave chapelle the opening ofnd snl the other day. i watched also the outdoor summer show a pretty 6:00. .- 8:46 -- i appraised how much was surprised how much rage came out of him. we know, as a word comes from madness. so, i'm hoping the both of you could talk a little bit about rage in your work. how do you in various forms and genres in which you work grapple with or manage rage? visit fuel? is it -- is it fuel?

is it disruption? is it something else? i love these pieces. one of the things in the second one with the poem was the way the starter worked -- the stutter worked as a mechanism. we enter, we enter without being able to pass through. so, that video -- where was i video from, by the way? terrance: i made it. the video with the kid? i found it on youtube somewhere. just a couple of seconds. say again? claudia: what is happening in that? terrance: there in mcdonald's and get into some sort of fight about his order and he starts tussling about it. sometimes i will pull that stuff and put it somewhere, and it made me think about the jim jordan poem, the syntax.

i would not have known how to read the poem without making the video, if that makes any sense. i am thinking about my rights, trying to get at stuff i cannot always get at, if that makes any sense. but i thought about it again with you. it is not the kind of thing i think about. it had me thinking about that tussle and moving around it. it is that is dynamic. on the other end is power. or the guy on the airport, or the guy who is behind you. that is what the first thing was. we wereonversation having, i bring that up. i will ask him where we fit in that spectrum, or how we

participate in that rage, to go back to this question of when you bear witness to rage, what is your role? to intervene, participate, walk away? all these questions come up around the struggles. dawn: and also, what is rage itself? as an emotion, this notion that entitys this other standing in between people. the peoples alive as themselves, as an emotional field. and i feel the restraint around the rage has to do with slowing it down so that you can actually negotiate it and see it, and not actually need it necessarily with counter

rage -- and not necessarily meet it with counter rage. claudia: you-- terrance: some people call restraint craft. some people call it tricking us. some people call restraint metaphor. when you think what dave chapelle is consistently doing, do you think it is more rage? claudia: i am talking about the way in which the rage is so palpable in his body and his speech. it is not really a standup routine, i don't think. isis telling stories and he tracing us through this history of black death. i think the craft and his performance is still there in the storytelling. complicated, right? thathat rage, i watched and i had a lot of feelings that i could not necessarily reconcile.

i was thinking about that and what you do with rage in your work. claudia, when you were just talking about slowing it down so people can really have a chance to grapple with what it is that you are writing about, there are whereoments in the book there is anger underneath attempt toin your have conversations with white people about white supremacy and their own culpability in it. craftthink there is a restraint happening there in the

way it is actually rendered in the work. way i think about it is management. it is on both sides. i think that the people in conversation with me are also managing their feelings as well, and their feelings sometimes come very close to rage, if not itself rage. that is what i believe conversations are. of thehe management person in front of you, their emotional feel, their tonal f eel, all of that. and then the language is just another thing. sometimes the language is the least of it. the unbearable is being to hold what

communicated is the thing that needs the most management of all. but never mind what the language itself is doing. so, i tried to just kind of map it out. terrance: the last time we talked, i think i said in response to that notion of management, a really important word for me is intimacy. it is also the management of intimacy. fighting is a very intimate thing. it is not just this notion that it has to be all "positive." when you put management income of the word comes back to me because it is, about closeness, too. some of it is on the others. you have seen them, and

something happens. it is reciprocal. one move solicits another move. and that is the intimacy of the thing. way it it is the registers itself in the body as rage, it is still intimacy denied or intimacy complicated, you know? dawn: i have actually been feeling -- i think this is from you, the definition of intimacy that i really love and i bring it into the classroom, which is i think you said intimacy is the act of touching without being touched. claudia: did i? [laughter] dawn: i think a lot of us are writing these poems and making art that emerges from this place of pain around white terrorism and black death. sometimes, for me at least, it

feels like a plan. the only people who will end the murder of black people by police and random white guys is white people. and we know -- you mentioned the board room before. we know that when it is them in the boardroom or in a faculty meeting and they are talking about, say, promotion, they are talking about a black person like they are "driving miss daisy," this person is not going to hurt you. this black person would not hurt a fly. sign of blackrst as monster, but it is still discursive virus. i will bring david's chapelle back into this space. david, like i named him. dave. [laughter] he says, i am tired of explaining to people what is so

goddamn obvious. what is the conversation that can be had in this moment? there is a range of stuff we can talk about when we talk about this moment, and what is the conversation that can actually do something, make change? i told you the question i've had all week, so this is where i'm going to put it up there. let me tell you what i shared. i have a view of things and then i have a question for us here and everyone listening tonight. the first would be the first video. wanted to get at in the first video and the poem itself is these are people who did not have white people as bosses. my relatives in florida, my stepfather's relatives in florida. the whole thing is about this world that is absent of white people whenever i visited there from south carolina. .t wasn't segregation

they might have engaged when they needed to come but there just wasn't that need. my view of utopia is people doing their thing, the legal system works as it should. you vote. you lose a little bit, you gain a little bit. that is the world they have themselves. then you add to that idea of working himself to death and that notion of only being able to cling to the money. i am not saying it is a full on utopia. my answer to all of it is just let me be with my people. the rest of it, i just can't really deal with, not even in a poem. that is why i am an activist. what i can touch is what i will try to effect. are we right now at the brink of some sort of civil war? you can call it a cold war if you wanted to in the same abstract notion of what that cold war was. are we right now at the brink of the civil war?

or are we at the end of the civil war that may be started when barack obama got elected and we just had no clue? there were forces moving in the direction. we have got to catch up and realize the people are not giving up power is because it is more. it is not politics, it is a civil war that we have a history for. are we just realizing and waking up? that question complicates my first response, which is you cannot have that kind of peace when you have war. i feel like this particular moment is different. me question is pressing on about can you really be left alone? previously, that is what i believed. ,our power, your own community all of that is your real power. now i don't know. it seems like stuff is burning. terrance, i wonder

about this idea that there was ever any true sovereignty. community, we can have constructions where it looks like we don't have any white buses, but we are -- white bosses, but we are still inside this country. mitch mcconnell is still in the senate. we still have a supreme court that looks like what the supreme court looks like. it really depends on where you start the bosses, you know? terrance: these were not like my people. that is not exactly what i had the other times of the year. when i say their own independence inside of that, whatever their role was, i did see it as close as i have seen to a kind of power, like they

could determine what to do with it. he had his fish market, she had a hair business. they knew what they were doing in terms of constructing financial independence. but as i said, i only come around the corner of what the consequence of that is. when i say they don't show up to things our kids are doing because they are working all the time. dying early, heart disease, all these things. that is a different kind of question to what you are saying. i think it was a kind of power. i would be satisfied with that kind of power they had in the 1980's and 1970's, which is, i make money, i take care of my people. and everything that goes into it suggests that we have a world that we seem to be on the brink of, and maybe we thought barack obama was the fulfillment of it. i do agree with you, but it is the two points. what i witnessed i considered a kind of power, but there was a consequence at the end.

barack obama was elected by black, asians, and latino, and like 40% of white people. but the minute he got into that there would be no movement. , it was like tried -- the senate. trump'shavior -- behavior actually began -- others in the senate began behaving like trump, getting up during the state of the union, calling him a liar, doing all kinds of stuff. that is why i am asking you right now, are we not engaged in some kind of civil war? i can't say where we are in that spectrum, but maybe it started then, that there was a large portion of the culture, this

american culture, that decided that all costs things had to go back in the other direction. -- is it something that has always been there? we can have another civil war. we have had one before. i am saying this to myself. look at the 1960's. . look at reagan, nixon, clinton. you disagree? terrance: all kinds of precedents has been set. he is justifying what is going on, but he is not creating it. terrance: it is on our. the notion -- it is an arc.

it.re here, we are in people are talking about, if we don't get this right, blah, blah , blah. we are here. 20/20 is the consequent of everything you are talking about. what kind of brakes are happening here? even the way the election is being held. so many precedents are being set in terms of systems being undermined, for everybody, not just black people. the whole notion of whatever we think this place is seems to be dramatically rewritten. claudia: i think that one of the things we have seen recently is how fragile the system of our democracy is. you get one power-hungry crazy guy and you can tilt the scales vote not and have the gone the way it did, who knows,

given he had been stacking all the courts with the help of mcconnell and all of everything. i am not going to list everything. back and people did come out and vote. the checks and balances are not anding inside the judicial the legislative branch, but it is working in terms of the american public. we are the ones who came forward and said no. terrance: i know you have another question, but let me say this one thing. it was made by people who look like trump. in the constitution, there were no artists, there were no women of color. it was made by the people to keep it in power. this is a correction in the direction of the makers of the

constitution, and we are the people trying to revise it. we are not the people saying these words are for us. we know that wasn't the case. trump is right because it was businessmen and soldiers and landowners that created this text that we think applies to everybody. so, we are trying to draw it back. again, who is correcting what? dawn: i think if we are encroaching on some kind of civil war, it is not going to be recognizable to us in the same terms in which we think about, thought about civil war in the past. i think that is one of the tricky things about it. what i kind of hear you saying in some ways is about the that there is a limited impact in terms of the conversation that can actually make change across a broad swath

of people who call themselves americans because of this divisiveness that you are talking about and referencing, right, terrance? claudia: i think the protests were a kind of conversation. that was a form of conversation, and that did change. that grassroots effort between black lives matter, say her name, showing up for racial justice, all those people have been working for years to be ready to come out actually when floyd was killed. movehat was a coordinated that functioned like a public intersectional conversation with the american public, and it is changing. now, we don't know how profound the change will be going forward and how deep. but just about biden. the words that are coming out of

this white man's mouth are not words i have ever heard spoken by a president-elect ever. that all that me work that people did did not make a difference to the conversation that people -- terrance: i think that is true. protests is a form of democracy. the notion that it is written into it is the definition of democracy does not always line up. all of this is a process that suggests democracy is underway. but we are still sitting here with the uncertainty. i was really happy last saturday, but tonight, i don't know. there are still things that are happening. whatever is happening is not democracy. has a precarious arc to some

kind of change. and: there is the protest, then there is the white supremacist backlash. moments ofhaving two protests simultaneously, which goes back to your notion that perhaps, terrance, there is something about civil war that we can talk about. there is a question from the audience that is related. if we are in the middle of a civil war, what is the role and responsibility of the public? might have arybody different role, if this is what it is. me as a poet, love is the weapon, communication, intimacy, this thing we are talking about tonight are what i think anyone who cares about language's role is. it seems to me we are at a point where people try to tell us -- we say one thing, it means thing else. -- it means something else. we need to make sure the words are tools. i think.

i have: i have -- dawn: a thousand questions for you all. i will plant it will ask thend question. i was reading a conversation they were talking about this relationship between the inside and the outside, and how to get outside. how does the imagination get outside? does it depend on being in the hold. i can't say for everyone in the audience, you can think of the as what chapelle calls a nightmare. in an imaginative space, thinking about the role of the poet, get outside into this other place? i am just going to leave that as moveught, thinking as we

through some of the questions from the audience. askingre multiple folks -- oh no, that is something else. do yourdering, experiences in the past four years change anything in how you issues and view our country? terrance: if you are doing a would september 11 be the marker for that one? something happened in the era of barack obama, so let's marked that. what do you think about the work those books could do? how do you think about those books over that slightly longer spell, but in a trilogy? how do you master that?

in retrospect, "lovely", but i think was a book that had to do with to have the same but ay we have now, that was of cheer institutionalized and justified because of the attack on the twin towers. people,suddenly arab anybody who was wearing a backpack, anything. we were walking around -- that sort of texture in the ear was one of the things i was interested in in "lonely," and how we were pulling ourselves

, from trust in each other. "citizen" focused in on anti-blackness in society and policing, and very specifically racism from small to large scale. "justice" i think is an attempt to say we cannot look at these other things without looking at whiteness, without engaging whiteness. because at some level, the people who make up the institutions that govern us are also our neighbors, are also the people we work with. they are the ones who end up on the jury. so if we allow segregation, which was put in place by the founding fathers, white supremacy and segregation being

the foundational parts of this democracy, if we allow segregation to become the norm, then we will never actually be in the room to affect the changes that need to be made. we cannot allow that imposed separation to be the thing that we conform to. because white people have power in this country. they have a lot more power than the rest of us, even though they are numerically backing up. it is not -- for me, the question about functioning inside or outside becomes sort of irrelevant because we are

here, and the consequences are real. so, if the consequences are real, then we have to show up. we have to vote. we can't not vote. we can't be subject to this without showing up. terrance: the 75 million, i think it would need to be a blowout so i could be more confident with that statement. when i look at the uncertainty that we sit with even tonight, it ain't super encouraging. i do agree. i can do it for my kids, for my daughter. you vote and you still see this uncertainty that emerges at the core of democracy. i just need a blowout so i can stand more firmly. claudia: you can't have a landslide and have reality at the same time.

the reality is we came in very close. we have people, you know -- look at the numbers. white people did not vote for barack obama in a landslide way. they did not. and when we finally get the numbers this time, we will see again -- already, we are being told that white women, despite everything, despite the misogyny, despite the dismissal, showed up again for trump. so, what is that? i didn't expect a landslide because you knew it was going to be tight, you knew it was going to be a fight even though biden is with the popular road.

you just cannot expect -- it is like when people say, why didn't barack obama do more? barack obama was one man inside a government by people with different interests. he was not put there to act unilaterally. terrance: i will do the poet thing, like what do poets think here. i have been thinking some sort of definitive outcome, and the republicans would have to come up with another name for themselves. it has happened before, just in terms of what the precedents are in history. they are so embarrassed, they are so distrustful that they have to call themselves something else, and we proceed. that is how i was thinking about it. you have this notion of correction. the absence of that -- i still feel like it is the same thing, you just have to make me super confident in how i talk to my daughter about the system. is that democracy?

it doesn't look like it when it breaks, when it is so close. again, i talk about -- it is what it is, and i talk about the uncertainty i feel right now. what i what i fabey -- say. [crosstalk] dawn: i would ask, how do you talk to your kids in this particular moment, whether it be about white terror or whether it be about the particular political situation, the threat of a coup? also, i want to circle back around to this -- to the title of your book, claudia, "just us," and brought to that place in the book where you say we can never slip on sameness. so, how do you talk to your kids, say, about who this "us" is? who is the us? what are our response to this particular political situation and white terror?

terrance: i talked to my daughter when barack obama was in office about the notion of what alliances were. it was a period of micro-aggressions. my daughter is now 21 and she had these white girls at her school who would befriend her and i would be like, that is the thing. i said to her in the barack obama era, there will be another time when you have to know who your solidarity is. we talk about that now like, here we are. she is at howard, so the notion of what the beliefs look like when you think about conflicts emerging. but it is the principal,

adaptability, slow to react, but react. it comes up in how i move in the world and how i talk to my kids about it. i still go back to the cause for action is not always going to be about writing poems. sometimes it is about democracy, and sometimes it has to be about something else when you're trying to get changes to happen. that is how we talk about it. claudia: also, i think -- i think there has been such a move on the right to deny the real, to deny reality, to deny science, to deny climate change. and maybe what is even more surprising, and this is the thing that surprises me a little bit, is that the commitment to that is their own lives. they are willing to die for a

lie. when people are willing to die for a lie, there is really not much you can do. terrance: that's where i get to this question. people do this when they think they are engaged in a war. not when they think there are engaged in a political system. they are thinking of some other outcome. they are not acting like this is politics, they are acting like this is war. claudia: or religion. dawn: i think this -- it has me thinking about your video, claudia, "situation 11," which has a lot of images of white women and their rage, and it features amy cooper and her constructed fear in central

park. this question is on the other side of that a little bit. it says, what are your instinctive responses to the expressions of white rage by our allies and accomplices that is often labeled as white solidarity with the movement for black lives? how much of this seems to you as performative? claudia: i would not use the word performative. i would use the word defensive. i think it is in line with what terrance is saying. people are holding on tight to a system where they have been centralized and privileged. so, the idea is that -- what is ironic is the language around equity, everyone is using that now. but if you have put everything in one pile in order to create equity, you are going to have to take some things out of that pile and move it over.

and that is the terror. that is the rage, actually, that they cannot be anti-racist and also lose anything. one of the things that i have been watching lately and writing down, i have this list going for people being racist while they are trying to be antiracist. so, the thing i have been hearing from a lot of students, for example, is that they are being told -- they would get a job, white students. they would get a job. we are being forced to hire black people. people are saying this officially.

they are sending emails saying, dear susie, this position would be perfect for you, but we are being forced to hire a black person. this sense that suddenly they are being made -- not any language about the sameness of who is in the room at present and what is lost, but all about what they are being forced to do, and all in the name of equity, all in the name of this, all in the name of that. that is too bad. it is too bad. it is disappointing. and it is revealing. i see the defensiveness and an inability to understand that everything went one way.

they still are holding onto this narrative of -- it is a kind of mix of exceptionalism and deserving of things because they worked hard, but how is it that they are the only ones who are exceptional and work hard ? there must be something in the system that favors that. i think it is a complicated mix that has to unpack itself emotionally. [crosstalk] dawn: this is the five minute warning, so i wanted to give you all a heads up. terrance: this is an interesting thing that parallels covid. it goes back to the notion of solidarity. when you see somebody wearing a mask and when you don't, that kind of communication. the notions of nuance. solidarity does say, do we agree on science?

ok, let's move forward. do we agree on that so we can move forward? we don't have to agree, but we need to talk. the people who are not wearing masks, you say, there is a penalty for stupidity, so i cannot make you smarter than you are. that will be a large number of people. and i say that in the spirit of, what can you really do about that? but it is symbolic and it is very clear where your solidarity lies. if your performance is to put a mask on even if you are complicated about where it comes from, if you are wearing your mask, good, we can move in the same direction. that is a good starting place for me. it is a metaphor for how do i understand these complications about race right now. we will just talk about that journey. claudia: the conversation can only be had if the person is willing to have the

conversation. terrance: absolutely. claudia: that is the other part of it, which is what you are saying. you can't talk with somebody whose back is turned to you. which then means we need to bring our full capacity to manage everything that will come up within that conversation. terrance: you said it at the beginning and it is still true, this notion of restoring trust. how do we restore that? dawn: i have one or two really easy questions to end on. is it possible to love [indiscernible] terrance: it is a good exercise. .t is more productive not everything is going to get answered, but it is a good exercise. claudia: we have parents. we know what that is like sometimes.

[laughter] dawn: when you are pulled over by the police when driving or you have some other encounter with the police, what hopeful get out of jail card do you play, if any? and or what have you rehearsed in your mind when it comes to these encounters, real or imagined? terrance: if they are going to shoot you, make them look you in the face. that is a gesture of intimacy. eyentact is anything -- contact is a thing. dawn: you don't have an imagined get out of jail free card? claudia? terrance: you look them in the eye. claudia: i stay in my house. [laughter] terrance: there has been many instances where the only thing i could do -- you've got to look them in the face. sometimes you can get out of this. laugh at it to keep from crying,

so to speak. same idea. make them look you in the face. claudia: i think if we are going to survive, we have to get out of the way sometimes. dawn: i love you both. i am so glad we did this. i wish it could go on for another -- claudia: we have got to stop. terrance: we have been talking for three hours. [laughter] dawn: our organizers have noticed in the chat it is starting to wrap up. thank you for your beautiful new work, claudia. thank you, terrance, for your beautiful new work. i cannot wait to see more from that series. it has been a pleasure, as always. and i think we are turning to jessica, who is going to bring us home. terrance: you did great.

it was so good to talk to you tonight. jessica: hi, everybody. that was an amazing conversation, and we need more conversations like this one. thank you for that conversation. i wish we had three hours and we could keep talking. we need to keep talking, and we need to keep having conversations. to the members for joining this evening, thank you for being here. and for all those who if this is their first time, please come back. there is more wonderful conversation and important conversation to be had here, and support the library foundation. if you consider becoming a member, please go on to our site at lfla.org/support. thank you all, and have a good night. thank you all for being here.

>> the senate returns today on continued debate over or two the bill. if that passes there will be up to 30 more hours of debate. if they do not have a agreement, setting up a final vote on saturday. a veto over right requires two thirds of those voting. have beenose vetoes overwritten. the last successful override was in september, 2016 on legislation vetoed by president obama allowing families to sue saudi arabia. watch live coverage when we return on c-span two. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2021] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> today we are brought to you by providers who bring c-span as

a public service. >> live coverage sunday, noon, eastern time. orch online at c-span.org listen on the radio app. >> governor kemp urged residents to act