And so when i would speak about that book i would encourage people to be antiracist. I would encourage them to move away from the racist ideas that had been ingrained in them and so the more i spoke about being in antiracist the more people were like, tell me a little bit more. Okay. Antiracism stuff because as you know, people are taught in this country to be not racist. So this construct of being antiracist was new. The more people ask how to be antiracist, the more i realize that this was a book and i felt like i could potentially answer it. Thats really interesting because its almost as though you had it necessarily plan to write this book. I was thinking, its in a extraordinary book you are historian through and through and there is a kind of risk associated with writing a book that has like really immediate implications. But he felt called to do this and talk about the distinction though that you draw because you draw it in a very clear and cogent fashion. One of the things i noticed is that so many of the authors of light concurrent books on race that are considered really critical have all written this extraordinary praise of this book which is an indication of how important it is that the people who have thought deeply about race, yes we need this book. What is that distinction . Whats the distinction between being not racist and antiracist and why is it so important . First and foremost, lets think about how this term not racist is emerging currently and how is it emerged historically. People typically say im not racist when they are charged with being racist. A defensive gesture. I dont think even wellmeaning people, even people who are trying to be part of the movement against race racism recognized the history of this term. When you genitivea now today even white nationalists are saying, im not racist. No matter whether they are in the white house or planning the next mass shooting. I dont think people realize how much fundamentally this is been a term of denial that it has really, all ive been able to uncover of its meaning has been this sort of way to deny and ones own racism while antiracist has a clear philosophy, it has a Clear History just like racist has a clear philosophy and Clear History. I think its really interesting, powerful about that move, is that it gives the reader and potential person operating and community shaped by this book out of the question of sort of guilt. So the point is it really whether or not you personally are a racist. The point is what are you doing about how racism pervades every possible aspect of life in this nation. Precisely. I think many people say they are not racist because they think racist is like a tattoo if they say they are racist somebody puts a racist on their forehead theyll never be able to escape it. They think it is a fixed category. They believe is little fundamentally a bad person. They believe a racist is a person who is hooded, white nationalists. Who is a segregationist. They are like, im not any of those things. Im a good person, im against the clan. Im not racist. But its a descriptive term. It describes what a person is doing in the moment. When a person is saying that a particular racial group is inferior, when a person is doing nothing in the face of racial inequity, they are being racist. When a person is literally supporting persons and policies and power that is creating and reproducing racial inequity and injustice they are being racist. Thats important too. You are getting the category racist out of this question of sort of kind of the personal indictment and making this claim. You say that beautifully in the book that this is a descriptive, offering an account of pavers that are part of the process of inequality. So stop being so emotionally invested in this term essentially. Precisely. I think that emotional investment in people feeling like they are being attacked also i think people dont realize the origins of that. The origins of the idea that racist is like the r word. Right. Its the worst insult. Its a racial slur. That is a pejorative. In fact, actually white nationalists particular have been parroting that idea for decades. Because what they wanted to do was they wanted particularly to get white people do not recognize their racism and if they dont recognize their own racist ideas than white nationalists would be able to easily organize them. To give an example, Richard Spencer two years ago who organized the night the right rally in Charlottesville Virginia which led to of course violence in the death of heather higher, he wants said, as a talk about in the book, that racist is it a descriptive term. Its a pejorative term. Its the equivalent of someone saying, i dont like you. Wow. Right. This is an important thing to confront. Just shifting gears and want to come back to that question and actually to think about if you can offer account of what it means to be antiracist in detail but also one of the things that i think you do quite powerfully in this book, there are a number of elements but is that the title is, it gives an indication of a kind of instruction you are offering that has personal implications. How do you discern how you operate in the world in a way whether or not you are actually sort of participating in this structural logic and the processes of racism or actually working to dismantle them. At the same time, this is personal element but at the same time, you talk about structural issues. You talk about gender you talk about sexuality you talk about capitalism, all these sorts of things. I think its really powerful and important and i want to ask you why. This is also in light of stance. In the midst of you having the sort of deep account of the structure and history of white supremacist thought and power that you decided to talk to people at their imperial level. Yes. I didnt want to write this book this way. Because when i say this way, i did not want to speak to people through my own personal story. Because as a historian and a scholar this is not the way we are trained. Right to communicate scholarship or even communicate ideas. So i was deeply hesitant and deeply personal and private. So to really put some of the most shameful moments of my life on the page for all the world to see was obviously very difficult for me to do but at the same time, these ideas and structures and policies and powers at its core impacting people. Or impacting individuals. And individuals are either part of the forces that are challenging racist power or unknowingly supporting it. So fundamentally because of the impact and because each of us are supporting or opposing racism, ultimately i wanted to sort of show that and how that operates on a daytoday basis step how that operates conceptually and even all the complexities within that. In my case, for most of my life i was actually supporting and opposing. Without even knowing it. I feel the best way to do that was to through my personal story. I want to talk more about that because maybe its good to start with, i want to talk about your personal journey but to start with what i think will probably be the source of most of the pushback you get about the book, which i think is really important argument that you make. Which is that black people can be racist and you talk about it in several different ways. As one way you talk about it is actually the ways in which black people can adopt white supremacist ideologies and also the other people of color and also the relationship to sort of white racism as a sort of largescale phenomenon and the encounter with the individual who might be antiracist. Can you talk about both why you thought that was important to include and just what it means. Hi obviously for very long time thought black people could not be racist. And i wouldve argued cuba down to anyone who made that case. I dont think i believe that until i started researching for stanford from the beginning. Until i conceptualized, first defined racist idea and i defined it as any idea that identifies a racial group is superior to another in any way and that book was about antiblack. I went in search and ultimately one of the things i tried to do with that book was take prevalent and prominent and popular ideas today and really sort of figure out its intellectual genealogy. What was unavoidably the case was that black intellectuals were a part of the intellectual genealogy. I couldnt even though i wanted to exclude them or go around them, i just couldnt. We take the case of one of the most dominant and harmful antiblack racist ideas of the 20th century was the idea of the broken back family and the patriarchal black woman. I should say matriarchal was farming the black family. In the black community and so on and so forth. That idea of course was popularized by the daniel patch monahan. In his report in 1965 he repeatedly cited a black scholar frazier, who wrote the famous book on the negro family in 1939 who also praised dubois who said a similar thing is one of his black family studies. I could not wrap my head around the fact that this idea about the broken black family was largely coined by a black scholar. I think everybody now recognizes how harmful that idea is, how it justified the assault on welfare ab justified so many assaults in the letters part of the 20th century. Ultimately im saying that i think that was the first recognition of it. That i could not separate the intellectual genealogy of some of these ideas but i think what was critical was realizing ab no matter the racial group, when a person was antiblack, when a person thought there was something wrong with black people, they spent their time intellectually and even in terms of organizations trying to civilize black people, attacked black people, attacked everything but the real problem, which was racism, which was white supremacy. Thats how it literally function and thats on the ideologicals perspective. And then obviously when it came to power and policy i think it is absolutely the case that black people have limited amounts of power. These are the way people particularly within white to premises society. To say that no black people have no power. To also say that even 100 years ago when we did not have all these black elected officials. When we did not have a black person on Supreme Court would do you not have so many black professors. We all had the power to resist. Some of us use that power and some of us did not. Typically those who did not, did not because they thought the problem was black people. It was sort of working through all of that that ultimately caused me to realize that black people can be racist too particularly to black people. And that ultimately internalized racism was the real black on black crime. You tell a story about a speech he gave as an adolescent. You deconstructed for precisely that, the kind of internalization of the narrative of locked efficiency. I think its all powerful in part because the rhetorical devices that you describe are actually quite common you call into question that practice which is a longstanding widespread practice. And i wonder its kind of a question thats a little bit off to the edge but i think its interesting is why do you think that has such persistence, even as i think a amost of us black people think that we are antiracist in some form or another. That we listen and not do and apply to these lectures where theyther they come from chris rock or our pastors. I think first and foremost, the speech that i gave when i was when i was a senior in high school it was among the king oratorical contest. I was one of the finalists ive won my School Competition and i was 1 of three finalists across the country. Basically my speech was a litany of antiblack ideas statistically about black jews and it is said things like black youth of the most feared in society as it was his fault. I said things like black youth dont value education, which was very prominent idea. It still athat. Black youth keep climbing the high tree of pregnancy. All these ideas about what was wrong with black youths and ironically as you know if there was ever a decade in which seemingly everyone was coming down on the heads of black youth it was 1990s. Thats the decade in which i came of age and i consumed those ideas and reproduce them. To your question, if it is a combination of data across the ideological board it is acceptable to say those ideas. I thought i was radical. Obviously black conservatives will say that i think they stated a different type of way but and i also realized in some other work that not only in terms of the ideological popularity but ultimately black people regularly see individual black negativity and what we have been led to believe is that we can generalize that. Right. Everything we say we know they are feared because you are feared. Because we know individuals like that, we just assume that that is part of the problem, not some sometimes realizing theres white youth who dont value education. There are white youth who are extremely violent. Not realizing, let me just say i think one of the things i tried to emphasize is what makes black people equal to other racial groups is not our sort of great black people and our great attribute, its our imperfection. Right. We are human. I think connected to what you are just saying, theres also the piece that you talk about with respect to class thats really important because all of those things that you describe abbut thats not an accounting you can give of working class black kids thats across the economic spectrum. Its also sort of challenging what many a regents is accepted as gospel. Stone traffic in these ideas of something being deficient. I think i was trying to really anchor the book in a way on this class perspective by making the case and by showing how i was largely raised in a a black home in the new black class of 1980s understood themselves as a distinct racial group that was distinct from black poor people in that my parents were taught to a certain extent believed that they were members of the black middle class because their own hard work and ingenuity which meant that people were still poor because they work working hard. When we think of racial groups and Racial Disparities and racial distinctions we dont think interracial distinctions. We dont think about how there such thing as white trash that white elites have created to substantiate their beliefs in their own white superiority because we have to say. They must be some other. I think that class is absolutely sort of critical in understanding the way race sort of operates and i think that when we speak about being antiracist its not just saying sort of black elites were equal to white elites is black elites recognizing that theres nothing aand all they need is resources and opportunities i also say that i think one of the most difficult things for people to realize, and it took me a while to accept this, is this idea that oppressive conditions literally are not just dehumanizing but actually make people into sub humans. That poverty literally depresses the behavioral and cultural attributes of black people that they are acting pay dearly deficient because they are poor. What we dont realize is that black elites like white people and other people are creating their own standard of how people should act assessing blacks from that standard and saying they are not reaching a standard because they are poor. When the fact sometimes behaviors seen as deficient are in fact logical and mechanisms for survival or resources accessing resources that are necessary when you have very limited resources. And that speaks to, i love the way that you tell the story of folks as a kind of social Movement History because one of the things that we miss in the Public Discourse is sort of what happens after civil rights and black power. And how its so easy to fall back into the groove of the racist society even hoop people who came to the movement because of the way the world is organized. I just think the vulnerability is so refreshing im turning the gaze on me and my world and not just externally. At the same time, you do this thing that i think is rare and elegant where you talk about moving through a series of ideas where you confront whether its isis papers or posttraumatic slave syndrome or moving through a series of ideas as you are trying to figure out, what is this race thing. You leave many of them aside but you dont do it in a form of attack of other thinkers. You just say that wasnt right. And i find that really refreshing in terms of intellectuals. We all have these convening ideas and we try to approximate approach the truth and you get the sense that those were useful for you to go through even if its not ultimately where you ended ultimately i was trying to figure out what was the problem. Right. Initially i think when i graduated high school i thought that the racial problems was largely black people. I thought also that it was racism but what was predominant was i thought it was black people. Then a few weeks into my college life at pham you in tallahassee like black folks across florida experienced the election of 2000 where pretty much the Voter Suppression was pretty much through the election to george w. Bush in the faces of black people. Those firsthand and secondhand stories of peoples votes being spoiled or people being turned away were flooding into pham you because pham you students were representing the whole state. I heard racism racism white racism is adequate. Its undeniable. And ultimately caused me, i didnt really see it actually is racism at the time, i thought it was white people. Because almost all of the people who were engaged in these acts were right. So then i went from, the problem is but people into a certain extent racism to the problem is black people and a certain extent racism and white people. And then i was like, whats wrong with white people . Thats when i went in search of all those books trying to figure out what is wrong with these people . Why are they engaged in these types of racist acts . And ultimately finally when i really started engaging in study particularly through taking courses in African American history did i begin to see that ultimately the problem was racism. And it took me a while to get to that point. I want to take that up in this question sort of of white people. There are some readers who will think you give space to white people to not be categorized as racist. The whole school of thought, all white people are racist because they are raised in a racist society. What is it that you are trying to alert white readers to in terms of the possibility like their potential in this vision of Antiracist Society and also what do you signal to black and other people of color readers about how to navigate white people in this struggle . I think as it relates to white people i think one of their anthems as it relates to races, im not racist. Obviously i wanted to confront that very head on. And say theres only two options here, theres no such thing as being not racist. Theres only being racist and antiracist. Also, there is such thing as a racist. Antiracist. Its not a fixed category but if you Say Something thats racist you are being a racist at that moment. And you have the capacity to change. Even though you were raised to be racist and i suspect the vast majority of white people in this country were raised either consciously or unconsciously to be racist. You still have the capacity to change the confront your upbringing, to confront what you in a way are addicted to. And to be different. But in no way to be different to be antiracist is to be a constant struggle. Its almost like a personality characteristic that we decided as adults we dont want to be that way anymore. Its not as if we can wake up one day and be like, okay im no longer a not that way anymore. You literally on a moment by moment day by day basis have to constantly self critique, self examine and strive to be antiracist. Thats obviously what i want white people to do while simultaneously i think i talked about this early in the book obviously like many other writers its critical for them to recognize their privilege in so many different ways. I talk about how poor white people have privilege. But then also for them to recognize why so many people of color are angry. Not only angry about racism but even can show anger toward them. They understand how its difficult for a person of color to pick out the good antiracist white person in a crowd of racists so when they see that and hear that and feel that, they are empathetic. Thats alsosomething i think thatscritical in the book absolutely. And i guess relatedly , the feeling i get when i read through your journey is that theres kind of an ethical mandate. When you describe this question you continuously ask yourself, that theres also a mandate for becoming violent. So as you go through the book and youre reading and youre thinking you get the feeling i think as a reader all right, im supposed to be having this position where im studying and thinking and trying to make sentence of this. Because its both my deed and my development and the path to becoming an antiracist and one of my favorite parts of the book is when you talk about the temple with two of our mutual friends and because you talk about one, obviously because you bring the question about sexuality and gender into talking about being antiracist which to infrequently enters the conversation but also its one of the multiple places where you talk about the individual encounters that were part of your personal development. Talk alittle about that. So the way that they are now in which they are pretty unapologetic obviously about antiracism, about their feminism, about the sort of queer people and of course it was the same way then as graduate students at temple. And i was coming from an experience at famu which i never really understood and engaged with black feminism. I never understood or deeply thought about black queer theory and i dont necessarily, and i talked even in that chapter about my parents didnt necessarily raise me to be homophobic but they certainly did not raise me to recognize that there was nothing wrong with black queer people so because of that in many ways i assumed many of the ideas about black queer people andcertainly about black women. And so i arrived, i guess at temple i was pretty much a homophobic sexist and didnt even realize it and they allowed me to realize that because they created a community in which certain themes were not going to be tolerated. Attacks on black women, attacks on black queer people were not going to be tolerated in their presence and i sort of, it was interesting is they would if somebody said something, about particularly those two communities, they wouldnt jump around and scream at them. It would of course engage them but i felt those sorts of attacks and i felt those as attacks and i had to recognize why i felt those as attacks, even when they were talking to me. They were obviously talking to me but what was beautiful was even though i had these homophobic ideas, even though i came there with this sort of gender and queer racism, they sort of opened themselves up to me to mentoring me, to befriending me which i felt was absolutely critical in my own personal development so any sort of gender critique that i had, any sort of critique of homophobia that i had, i 02 those two women. Thats beautiful and i think its beautiful on multiple levels. One because you describethe cultivation of a community. But on the one hand, thats tolerates bigotries but also did get file. Thats a slippery slope. In substance thats what youre suggesting in the entire book, how do we do that . How to think about how to do that, to have transformation , to work through the moment, the feeling differences and being under attack. Thats precisely the process that essential. And i also think its really important because it is, you provide in that chapter an example of the combination of the scholarly endeavor both extraordinary scholars and the work of community. So often for those of us who are academics with scholarly endeavors sits off apart from our interpersonal interactions, but youre talking about sort of bringing those pieces together and similarly, you talk about the personal, your personal encounters and some rather difficult once with illness, and i wonder if we can talk about that because you, part of what you set up is you do provide a accounting of all of the effects of racism, including the physical ones. And then you talk, you write about both for you and your wife, encounters with serious illness. One of the things that happened after San Bernardino when i started thinking about it and people started reading it is people would say to me like, this was so difficult for me toread. Reading 500 years of people dehumanizing black people in every way imaginable, obviously is very difficult for people who either care about black people or who are black to read and so they would say it mustve been that much harderto write. And i would just, it would just go in one year and out the other is i didnt even want to think about that. I was so focused when i was doing the research, as you know to finish the book and i wasnt thinking about the impact that it was having literally and then combined with the fact that i was writing this history of antiblack racist ideals as a black person. And you know, the book ended up being 500 pages and i probably collected thousands and thousands of pages of ideas and many of which i have this, sort of sit through and in how to be an antiracist i talk about these astrashbags, that i had to consume. In order to basically make it legible for the reader. And at the time i was doing that i was also caretaking my wife who had breast cancer. And she was very young, early 30s and when you contract a disease, any disease, its hard but when you contract is a disease you dont think you should contract because of your age, its even more difficult and so obviously it was a very difficult process. Caretaking for her. And i in no way wanted to focus on my own physical health at the same time, my wife had a serious illness so obviously i did not. So and then a few years later , i was diagnosed with stage iv colon cancer. And friends asked me, do you think that in some ways was the effect of writing, of taking in all of that they didnt use the term track trashbags but in taking all of that in for the good. And i didnt know. Will never know but certainly that could have been the case. As you know, scholars are finding out that literal Health Effects of racism. Absolutely. And that question of the variety of ways that racism marks us in the body, whether or not theres kind of a direct correlation in the way that we talk about it in the terms of science , or a sort of larger environmental phenomenon so for example with you being a scholar and an enormous public profile, and a father and a husband and director of the center, that you are serving the world and serving your family in a multiplicity of ways and even that has potential costs , a sense of calling that has a sense of cost. That we can read in part as connected to think about what is the consequences ofthis mission . And related to that i do want to talk a little bit about your work and developing this antiracism center. I was thrilled and honored to be at the book festival that you organized i think was one of the most extraordinary festivals that i have ever witnessed and both because you have this fantastic array of speakers, but also a real sense of community and investment and people who were thrilled to be there with you, right, in the space that you have created but can you talk a little bit about the connection that you see between your work as a writer and a scholar and your work as an educator and someone was cultivating a think tank ofsorts . Of course i can never thank you enough for coming and then sharon about your incredible murphy of course of lorraine, but we envisioned the Antiracist Research and policy center as a space that convenes. Theres so many writers for instance right now who are writing on racism who are trying to sort of get us out of this kit that weve been in for hundreds of years and as you know, we typically go to a book festival and there are only a few of us there. Or of course we speak alone, but its rare that we come together. At a festival. And share our ideas. So we felt that okay, what if we convene some of the most impressive intellectuals and writers of our time each year who are writing onthis topic . That part of a Larger Mission to sort of convene and team of specialists. To really take a more scientific approach to sort of how were solving i should say, how were examining and solving this racial problem. In other words, we should be building teams of people. We should be convening people to ask and answer some of the most intractable racial questions of our time and often times as you know we do this in isolation. And we know part of the answer. So were like okay, what if we bring those different parts together whether its to have those conversations at the national antiracist book festival, whether its researching policy teams that will literally conduct the research, issue policy and ultimately design campaigns to change policy or whether its literally convening specialists in a field to create policy where it doesnt exist. Thats what were trying to do because ultimately to be antiracist as you know is to not just sort of think about and view people as equals, we literally have to be a part of this movement to change, whether or changing the narrative, whether where changing policies or whether where changingpower. And i think thats absolutely right. And its so important and it brings me back to this really powerful point in the book where youre talking about capitalism and racial capitalism and the way in which our economic order has been so common in the united states, so profoundly tied to the structures of racism and you say well, if theres a way to redeem capitalism, its notin place. And that what you say, im so used to, and im so inclined to talk to you about these commonplaces, conversations that we have in black communities because you provide such aninsightful analysis but one of them you hear all the time is we got to stop doing all this talking and reading and act. And i think thequestion , i always find that troubling because i find that statement most people must know before theycan act. So this wealth of producing knowledge and imagining policy and i actually am curious, how you think about or do you think about this in terms of stages . What i mean is, does the work of being antiracist meaning at the level of beingan individual . Does it need to be government policy . Does it need to be revolution in mark you know what i mean, those questions like what do you do with questions of citizenship. How do you imagine the scope for someone who would say for like one of our professors who comes in wanting to change the world. And then realizing weight, i might not be able to dothis by myself. Whats thevision for them . I think its up to the individual. Every individual is standing in a different place and space so not every individual is like president kerry was an International Figure i can have these national and International Conversations and questions and be at these tables. You have people who bear sort of standing in their place at their church and theres policies that govern that church. There are ideas circulating in the church and are you a part of the movement in that church to dismantle racist policies . To object racist ideas from the church . Are you, you have people who its just there sort of local neighborhood and their local neighborhood is gentrifying. And which part of that struggle are you on . You have people who just have a home area dont necessarily have time to sort of join an organization because theyre working 60 hours a week but they do raise their children. And so they can be raising and training their children to the antiracist. They can be sending a dollar or two dollars to an Antiracist Organization thats fighting againstracist policy. Thats possible, there being antiracist when they do that so i think we should all think very clearly aboutwhere we are in the world. What places and spaces are we most passionate about whats in mark what do we have the capability to do and to formulate sort of our action plan around. I find that really powerful and meaningful and particularly because the part of the political spectrum which we occupy diminished the individual need but given that racism is a product of culture and policy and repetition of decisionmaking , that the disruption is important. Even at the individual level that you might turn the ship and that even to imagine a different kind of future, both kinds of disruptions have to take place. Its not you have a Structural Analysis but youre not a structuralist in the sense ofthe end game yet. Its about how do we move towards them , towards something and a way of living. I just dont understand how structures are changed if theyre not changed by individuals. Absolutely. And not onlyindividuals but their mobilizing and organizing of individuals. And so we have to simultaneously assess and push at the individual and structural level. I dont understand why we have to, because as you know, theres some old people who just want to look at the individual and hide the structure and say we need to take that possibility and to me that flawed in the discourse. I think i personally know this from reading your work but i am interested in asking who are your, like if you were to your intellectual genealogy, who are the figures that most as scholars of previous generations would you see yourself most directly in the tradition of . I know this question came out of left field but because your historian and all of your work is so deeply grounded in a tradition of thinkingthrough questions, i cant resist asking that. I would say as i think now in certain kinds of ways, im seeking to challenge policy and the state. And i think in that typeof way , someone as unapologetic as malcolm x. Obviously someone who i admire in the sense that is not only apologetically critical of the state, but he also through his autobiography and many of his speeches is critical about himself and hes critical of black people when there sort of being racist. He used that sort of term. And then obviously in terms of journalism, as an essayist , as a writer for sort of popular mediums id say ida b. Wells. I wrote today, i can almost feel her staring down a lynch mob and not moving. And in many ways she wrote that way. And her focus was to sort of write for and to the people. And a willingness to say and do whatever to sort of challenge white supremacy. And to tell the truth. And not be willing, not backtracking and i think as a sort of all of that together obviously is the voice and the ability to simultaneously be involved in organizations to the essayists, to be scholars. Obviously i think more than any other scholar i look up to the boys and at his time, even personal narratives was something that was utilized. Particularly like by black scholars and in many ways weve moved away from that and i think only now were really starting to move back. Its such a good point and i thought you were going to say dubois and partially because, i think the malcolm makes a great deal of sense but with ida wells, the process of discovering the truth and going to the data, that groundlevel work. And i wonder and im thinking about this is you talk about malcolm, do you see this book as a conversion story . I do. And i see it as in a way both confessional and conversion story, that i was constantly confessing and converting to someone new. Just to someone so that being more antiracist. And i think about that in terms of of dubois as well because so often when we teach historic figures, we teach them as singular, at a particular, if anybody is an example of moving through a very long life, trying and through personal crisis and tragedy and trying to get closer and closer to the truth and instead of saying, thats his life and so you pick up practice which i think is sort of in the best of ourintellectual tradition. Some of those essays as you know that he wrote and the speeches he gave in the 1930s and 1940s, when he was critiquing himself, to me thats just some of the most powerful things he ever wrote. And i think that as intellectuals, were supposed to be critical. Were supposed to be critical of ourselves. And fully human. Which i think there is, it isnt just saying because there is that, you talk about this. And you talk beautifully about sort of in particular when you talk about the process of going to graduate school. So we see black studies emerging from social movements and the desire to, and yet theres also this pressure to be kind of dispassionate intellectuals. And i think you are a really important example of what we are in the brawl of on this moment is saying one, with all this afflictions and that we are called to both the regress and understanding the history in our analysis but also to be fully human in the midst of which means we have to be fallible, which means we have to be vulnerable. Without question. I told the story in the book of one who came up in dissertation advisor and her sort of lecturing on basically theres no such thing as objectivity. Which i love that moment. I was trained as a journalist at famu and i was thinking when i was turned into sort of a scholar and sort of this objectivity in the way as scholars to. Its almost internal and so i asked her okay, so i dont understand. If we cant be objective, then what should we strive to do . Shes not a woman of many words and she looked at me and said just tell the truth. Tell the truth, which is the matter of areas study. And i was in our moment in 2019, i hope it resonates that much more. Our job as intellectuals as journalists, as really as human beings is tell the truth. Even when the truth is selfcritical, even when the truth is hard to say. If we cant find the courage and even the clarity to tell the truth , then what are we doing here and mark. I also want to ask a question about craft. I also want to ask a question about craft because one of the things about the impact that you had is about the beauty and you tell stories anecdotes in a way that are riveting because this end, and you know, for you what part of this journey to sort of consuming the world is this, to take up babars quote, the job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible. What part of your work in this regard is innocent about . The beauty of division in the writing, the craft . I think for me, i sort of have begun to distinguish between a public scholar and public scholarship. And so for me, i view it view a scholar as somebody known by the public but i dont want to be known, i dont just want to be known. I want to produce public scholarship which i view as our ship that literally impacts the lives of the public. And so when you talk about impacting and in this case changing how people see the world,changing racial narratives , you have to make the book successful. You have to be able to the people. You have to presented in a way that people will consume it. Especially when you think about what were up against. And the story, the ideas , that is presented are also riveting in a different type of way. This idea of just this massive invasion of people sort of coming to destroy america and i am their savior. Thats a pretty poor people who think that theres something wrong with latino prints, its riveting and this is what were up against right now were up against these obviously fictional stories that are presented as nonfiction. And i think thats part of the difficulty which often times racist stories have been sections so when you write fiction, i love to write fiction because you can just say whatever. And in a way, thats what were up against. Were up against fictional stories so when we present an alternative sort of view thats more accurate of the world, we have to produce it at that level. And so thats really what sort of drives me and i feel like if i tell a story, that doesnt rip people, if i share an idea that people dont understand, im to blame so while others would okay, these people dont understand good storytelling or they dont understand this idea, no. Im always to blame at least thats the way i understand. I go back tothe drawing board and figure out a new and more successful way to tell that story. So to this clarity, theres truth and theres also beauty. That are all working simultaneously. Final question. I could talk to you forever. What are your hopes for this book and it seems clear to me that your hope and your vision is not about bush one because theres a lot of pressure to be selfishly motivated inthis world. That i would hope sort of what you want to get to the world but what are your hopes for what this book will do. I think the visual means some of the best responses that people have said to me is when they said Something Like this book is liberating. And in the sense that it allows them to no longer be confined by racist ideas. By this desire of a black person to represent the race well. This belief that because of what they said and did in the path that they can be antiracist tomorrow. And so im hoping that in a way, to remove those shackles. The conceptual and even those shackles that allow people to really understand themselves. Ultimately, dismantle racism and white supremacy. I have the same pole. Thank you. Thank you so much. This program is available as a podcast. They can be viewed on our website book tv. Org. [applause] thank you. That evening. Thank you for coming. So wonderful to see so many of you here. I would like to welcome everyone they will be selling andys new book and he will be signing them for you. Some of you may remember that andy was here three years ago. It was august. Our august meeting. I guess