Host so they introduce us and they told him that we are. So we can just Start Talking about your wonderful new book. Think of us we do that is to talk about its author because its a book that makes an argument that depends on the life of the author and so we need to look at but who you are. Just in case, lets talk about that. You might want to talk about how you think of your own life. Lets start with you grew up in new jersey and you grew up how did your parents get to new jersey and who were the traffic on the sun of a black man from the segregated south. My father is 82 82 who was born 1937 1937 in longview texas and raised in galveston under jim crow. He moved to the west as soon as he could and was running war on Poverty Programs under Lyndon JohnsonsGreat Society initiative. He met my mother who was nine years his junior in san diego where he was heading up war on Poverty Program and she was fresh out of college. She is the daughter of evangelical christians. Her father was a minister and he was very much a part of this Mainstream American Society that was certainly opposed interracial marriage in the late 1960s, early 1970s 1970s. Host you didnt use the word white. [laughing] guest i should specify that. My mother is white. He was really unhappy when my parents got together and so they eventually moved up to oregon and Washington State and then denver. My fathers job kept taking him east, until 1981 when i was born in new jersey. Host okay. And the job in new jersey, what was he doing . Guest by the time that i was born my father was running s. A. T. Preparation. He was tutoring students but, to the house to study privately with them for the s. A. T. , lsat, math and science, and he was really, thats how you supporting the family. My brother and i became catlike captive livein students in this house that was just very small, very modest onestory ranch house but it was packed from wall to wall with books. He has about 15,000 books. We with him on the weekends and in the evenings and through our summer breaks. Thats basically what made up for the kind of mediocre in a parochial catholics that we host why did you go to Catholic School . Guest for a variety of reasons. I think by far the blue the discipline would be better there, though it really wasnt. I think that he wanted to get us out of our neighbor to we live in kind of informally segregated part of new jersey where there was a white site the town and a black side of town. I grew up in san would new jersey, and so as a kind of silent protest against the realtors attempt to scare us to the black pocket, we lived on the white site of town. That came with come in the the 1980s and 90s that came with some racial dynamics my father wanted to get us out of so we went to a Catholic School a couple towns over. Host but not in order to become catholic . Guest not at all. My father is an atheist and my mother is a protestant. When the school would go to press my brother and i would sit back and read our books. That was an early experience of standing apart. Host was it just you two . Was it a significant difference, all the others between the two you . Guest just the two of us. Know what else. Not a single other person abstained from going to mass. Host is that guest i wasnt even aware meeting job of other faith outside kristy and it only got to in 1999 tremont site would to a Catholic College . Guest and ended up going to a jesuit school. It wasnt until i got to in what you had been outside of catholic education. Host how did it go . You said it wasnt sounds as though you think you got the best part of education at home. What happen in the schools . First of all, since were going to talk about race, whats the composition of the School Population . Guest my mother is technically a white anglosaxon protestant but shes not what people think of when they think of that as connoting some type of social elite. Our faith is protestant. She is derived from anglosaxon stock but thats about as far as that goes. That was my experience with that kind of whiteness and i grew up in new jersey around about whay parents would refer to as ethnic whites. Polish kids, italian kids, irish kids, greek kids. That was my experience with whiteness, even portuguese and spanish kids. They tended to be catholic. They tended once i get to college i realize they tended not to be at all this kind of elite white. Host they were not collegebound. Guest many of them were not. Trim these are the kids in your neighborhood but also to get in your school. Guest thats right. Host what percentage of kids in your school were black . Guest up into high school i was one of a handful of black students, and usually aware that i was kind of, i could interpret it and perform a racial hatred as a kind of wanted to because there wasnt much racist of judging. By the time i got high school it was a deliberate choice. I chose to go to school that was much more black and latino, probably half, you are offered a choice treasure i i couldve ge to a pretty good all boys Catholic School that wouldve been pretty white and had a very good best multiand i am obsessed with basketball but i very much wanted to be in a social area with black girls today. I chose to go to a school that was inferior in terms of academics and in terms of basketball but i believe i was good enough for battle to make up for that added to my father was going to be making a a stuy with him no matter what site didnt really worry about my s. A. T. Prep. I ended up going to school that was heavily black and latino as well as ethnic white. Host and all catholic . Guest it was catholic. Host all options catholic. Guest only catholic. Host how series were you about guest i i was preachers ino those a conflict with potentially leaving the school and leaving my High School Girlfriend behind to go and play somewhere else. I was serious enough i tried out a few times with Saint Anthonys in jersey city, and the trials went well and he invited me i couldve transferred schools and tried my luck at being on the team when i was 15, 16 here but at the last moment i decided i couldnt, i didnt have a desire to leave this girl i was madly in love with. Kind of enormously influential in my racial self conception. Host you talk about tells what that means. In a way you experience of blackness household is lets say eccentric, unusual. But she was your kind of access to which my call normal blackness. Guest part of what i realized in retrospect was different about my family was my father was fleeing the segregated south in many ways, a texas upbringing that cause some pain. And my mother was fleeing a kind of stifling racism coming from her own father, and they were searching to create their own family on their own terms. I brother and i were raised outside of the context of extended family members on either lack or white site. Our house was really, we were a foursome unto ourselves in a didnt did realize that different than wishing all of my friends until i became a parent and i saw for example, how many cousins my children have and how important it is to them. My racial identity was kind of always, directly for my father but also from my mother. My mother agreed with his idea. My mother agreed we were a black council. My brother and i grew up with a white month and a black dad but it wasnt that, get a question for us. We were black. White kids when you didnt think we were white and black kids were used to estimate the all kinds of ways. I had an allocated i realized to be on how i behave, how i dress, how i comported myself, my blackness, others could perceive a more authentic or less authentic racial identity. I kind of threw myself into the idea that a girl i was with kind of was also the fulcrum upon which i hoisted up the sense of myself. Host who was she . Guest shes a a girl i referred to as stacey and both of my memoirs. She was a year younger than me. She was actually from a household that was pretty middleclass but she was in the neighboring black town of plainfield which is unless affluent town. She lived around more of an innercity experience even though she was not directly in that. She exuded, kind of intoxicating cool that it was shocking to me. It was a girl that didnt ever take the s. A. T. Test and was in concert about. No one asked her to come no one told her to. She cut school. She seemed extraordinarily free and just not host what was her life plan . Guest she didnt have one. She needed one, but she didnt have one. There was a spell when i was a senior and she was a junior, my father try to prepare her on his own for free for the s. A. T. And he would stand, i think she was one of the first that he ever worked with where he just couldnt reach her. She just didnt care. I think she exuded what Orlando Patterson my call, she example find that. Host and that was attractive tragic at the time is really attracted me. Very exotic and very different from, she was completely outside of the context i was going up in the home but i was also really try my best to leave the kind of double life. I didnt really share the kind of home what i had with come in my social context at school and on the Basketball Court. Host they didnt know you are studying weekends . Guest most of them didnt understand what is going on. It was a shock to many of my friends when senior year rolled around and i had suddenly invitations to go to some schools that are dont think they ever knew i was preparing to go to. Host you said you didnt have the kind of extended family that you mightve had if there had not been good reasons for your father not to go to the segregated south and her mother not want to hang out with family that wasnt super happy about her being very to a black tray guest my grandmother was the opposite. She was not at all races. She would come visit us every year. Ive only in retrospect realized her husband couldve come but never did and never called. She made the effort. Host but you knew her your place . Guest thats right. You did know her other grandchildren . Guest knew them from afar. Not in a way that impacted my sense of myself. Host they were not close anyway. All young people have struggledh people they define themselves by so who were your, aside from your girlfriend who the other strictly i have a vested i call charles in the book, and his mother was puerto rican and his father black american. He was one of these kids that just extraordinary smart, things can easy to them, really good looking, really popular. Some of our he latched on to me and started coming home because of the much closer to school and he did, started coming home with me in the afternoon. So my father, saw what my father had access to through all of these books and saw the some type of life of you might he had not seen elsewhere and said i want to purchase it in that. He was the opposite of my High School Girlfriend. So we started coming over to the house every day. That helped me, the two of us studied every freshman year through senior year of our sats added extra prep work outside of her classes. He aimed at making a huge success of himself. He ended up, he did a little bit worse on the s. A. T. , went to a slightly lesser college, studied very hard, got straight as, went abroad to oxford and they went to the Top Law School in the country and work at one of the Top Investment banks, you know, and he just made a smashing success out of himself and i think his encounter with my father was transformative for him. So that was something that, we were like brothers, but he was also come he was also, he was a coswitcher and extraordinarily cool. Host okay. Were you coswitching . Guest i was trying my best. I felt like my social life depended on it. Host and so you think, you sort of had a sense the way you were at home just wasnt going to work. Guest it didnt translate into what i felt my peers with value. Although in retrospect i also wanted, i was projecting that perhaps they could cut of more than i was willing to share with them and i really dont know. I felt as though i had to hide that. Host and so did your friend. Guest he did, too. Host shared a judgment. Guest either memory having done well on like the s. A. T. A writing exam. I got a perfect score and the principal wanted to honor me and i got so afraid that everyone was going to tease me and would make be uncool and i went and it did this thing anybody in home and watched it. When he stepped out of holly i braced myself for the teasing but nothing ever came. No one even acknowledge it one way or the other. It meant nothing to anybody. That hit me like a ton of bricks because had i didnt dwell on the Basketball Court or even just had a really good pair of new tennis shoes, that wouldve registered much more to it meant nothing. Host how many people from the class went to college . Guest that im aware of . It depends, there are different definitions of college of course. Host course. Host how many of them stuck with high school . Guest i think quite a few. I dont know the numbers but for example, my girlfriend, she simply got practice and that was it. There are multiple students like that. Host so what did the school think about this . The school must have added you about come here you were, you and your friend. Guest the administration very graphic some of them would ask my dad, why is thomas dating this girl and things like that. I would be very defensive about that as my father delicately not trying to put too much pressure on me but he was concerned as well. Host by the time you go to georgetown, you are distant, separated from guest took the year after college and come home should gotten pregnant by guy who was selling drugs in new jersey and she is going moving within. She kind of scolded me, it was awkward date the first time i was back on break and she said those white have you bug and youre tripping, what happened to you . I i realize what a came home tht there was something that i realized i was able to express about myself and who i really was that at georgetown that it did want to kind of concealed anymore. So we split. It was painful but we split and realized that was kind of the best thing that could happen. Host you were at georgetown. You have a bunch of friends and who are they . Because you are arriving at georgetown a young black student with lots of high schools and academic stuff, because you are intellectually engaged. Who are you for the people who meet you . Guest so i was living on the floor that was pretty diverse. One of my best friends was a guy from new jersey, and both of our roommates were white and lived across the hall from each other we spent a lot of time together. Host the format of you . Guest mostly the four of us but my friend henry. First i just didnt even like pay attention. Ive nothing against my white dorm mates for anything. I kind of moved to the world as though their reality didnt apply to mine and mine didnt apply to them and i preventively kept myself off from having any real intimacy with these other students and i dont know why. I really threw myself into the segregated tables in the cafeteria. Cafeterias often break out among identity. I also went over to howard with my black friends on the we can and so i this larger white reality was something i swam in but had nothing to do with me. I wasnt of it. One night i was really ill in the dormitory and i was having an asthma attack and we could take a shot in the middle of night and is coming back and as one student on the floor who still awake and he was two doorstep for mine and he invited me to have some tea. He was listening to jazz and use a jewish kid from brooklyn named matt. I realize that meant it was first time id ever talk to. We lived next to each other for six months and is playing music i had never paid attention to. My friends and i growing up we kind of behavior as the black culture began in the 1970s with hiphop and does nothing that preceded it. None of us listen to jazz. None of us even read many books from [inaudible] my dad basically didnt have music on in the house except for every now and then when we were good he would place him james brown. It had never really listened to jazz. So matt and i became friends or just and he started introducing me to all the other musicians that i started to love. I realized he was the first jewish guy at ever met. I had never been aware of knowing a jewish guy before. There were indian guys on the floor, people from all over. I gradually kind of started realizing that my friend group much more diverse than ever let myself to have in the past, and are stealing all the richer for that. Host so you have a friend also from new jersey was also some of the might of had a top kid relationship than race than some people because he was connected with an african identity to 100 rooted in guest thats right. He definitely come in america was made black and his social reality would be legible to a lot of other black americans, but he had ingested traditions in his house. He put on traditional clothing from time to time and his family was of modest means that they did go back, they knew where they came from. They didnt have this kind of, i think yet a lot of selfesteem that came from being linked to this other culture. All of his brothers approached school with a kind of, not with the kind of cool post culture that took out all of my classmates but they approach it with the kind of tenacity of the immigrant and all his brothers have become physicians and scientists, in their family in one generation really became successful. Host right. You talked about his sense of being rooted somewhere makes you want to step back and ask what your parents, given that your parents took it for granted that you are black, what did they think you should know about black history . Guest i mean, my father did his best to get me to reach james baldwin, to read a letter from birmingham jail for Martin Luther king, truly understand a larger tradition but he also somewhat in the way you write about, always believed my identity didnt begin or end with the social reality of my blackness. He kind of had his life saved by being a fatherless black boy in texas without anyone needs them have an education, but he stumbled upon plaintiff dialogue at some point in his childhood picky picked it up and he tried his best to read it and it did make sense to at first but he was very early on aware that there was something out there that linked him with a towering greek mind, and that if he could access it he could potentially access the wider world and he would refocus by himself in his closet with a flashlight and his family would say what he doing . He would get yourself in trouble. Dont read this book. But very early on, aesop stables were huge for him. He always come he would give me how he always had a sense that you can see yourself in many different come in many different places and in many different figures and so identity is not just being black. Host so you have gone through a phase in thinking that blackness is about the cool clothing. Guest a fair narrow understanding of the black eye, even though guest i thought he was eccentric. Host that comes with you to college but then this experience of a more Diverse Community of fellow guest and calls it was the first time it black students through a variety of social economic backgrounds. College was where i met the children of doctors, black americans, not just i realize the black experience with socially and economically a lot more diverse than id ever known in my Little Corner of new jersey and through getting into jazz and starting to read all these other writers more seriously, looking at art, i begin to wonder why my friends and died such a narrow conception of this really rich cultural tradition and what i thought that my father was some outset of fiscal of the schooll in many ways he was just exemplifying it. Host right. Now, you did write a book before this and that book you were talking in a way about a sense of identity that had to do with this coolness. And then how you came to change her mind about that. Maybe we dont want to spend too much someone time on this but m interested in how you think about how you got from your high school framing of these things through to the college ones, to the ones that in the book which is slightly different again. Guest i really grew up believing in the allamerican victim that the drop of black blood make someone like. I also accepted that the something essential about racial identity and that there are also more and less authentic ways of enacting the identity. And so my first book was a comingofage memoir in the beginning to question that racial identity but beginning to question the narrow frame that i came to see was being sold to my generation in the hiphop era. My father and i had to make very different experiences being black man in america and i began, i wanted to write a critique of what i saw as some self sabotaging values and habits that i i sorely participated in in the wider social host for example . Guest for example, the kind of extraordinarily ungenerous ways that we attract with opposite the opposite sex. The way that malefemale relations were always kind of a form of getting over on the other domination. For example, that became something that a really regretted and i tried to do with in the book. But also extraordinary emphasis on material possessions and success as opposed to inner freedom and the lights of mind not to say the hiphop is some monolith where there are brilliant lyrics and real quest for knowledge but the mainstream we all my arguments on was really the kind of, whidbey will offensive to someone of my dads generation actually. So the book was a rejection of that but it was not yet a deeper questioning of the racial construct itself. That came later. Host at that point what youre doing is taking your being black for granted, but fighting for a different conception of what it is . Guest thats right. Host and i mean, i presume, i should have done the research and look at the reviews but i assume there are people who didnt like that. Guest thats right. But surprisingly i did a lot of talks at historically black colleges and communities, and surprisingly a lot of black readers, many who were not necessarily lead to college or going to elite colleges agreed with the book. It was more an elite basis with the toughest christian men who said the, the white liberals might say you dont understand. I do think we have agency. We are making, there are bad choices that go on in the community. Host presumably, with that the hiphop culture itself is the kind of results of an antisexist strand. Guest there is. Its just not the dominant strand. Its not the lucrative strand. Host in with the critique is, you could say, some of the critique or maybe even all of it at the critique of the term is also hiphop. Guest theres always been that. And i should stress, the book is not about music. Its not saying that jazz has been in hiphop. I still listen to hiphop. Its saying that hiphop is a means of spreading and glorifying and monetizing this secular religion that impacts peoples entire lives. Host we are getting you out of georgetown. You got your first degree. You have traveled much yet. Guest thats right. Host sure about to begin to be all a bit more of a world traveler which presumably is also guest absolutely. Host lets talk a bit about that. Where did you go . What happened . Guest i always struggle with the french requirement in school, and the summit for a graduated i went and study for two months just to get the credits. Had a really intense relationship. I didnt know what to do. I kind of wanted to take and she found me a job teaching english in france the next year. By the time that camera, we had broken up. I said let me go see whats out there. There was a northern town called on the border of belgium. I felt a freedom i never felt before. I had just enough to pay my rent and to buy a couple of meals. I sent in cafcs all day. Clichc stuff but really world opening things too. I wondered to myself, can i be a writer . I can try this. As my year came to an end, my father told me you need to come back home and figure out what you will do. So i took the gre and didnt get into the program i wanted and decided, ive got to get a job. I was a paralegal for two years at a midtown Corporate Law firm. I thought id do that and go to law school. It was absolute misery. It was terrell terrible. I decided i had such bad experiences that i need to actually try to be a writer. So i applied to nyu, to the writing program. I got a fellowship. I approached that with a kind of nacvetc as though i had to come out of that with a deal. The way you just told it, you thought you might be a writer by vocation. It was sitting in cafcs. Yeah. Writing about what was happening to your. That sense of freedom, its really a troop in the writing of africanamericans about europe. And just realizing that not everybody was reacting. I would often eat at kebab shops. And i remember walking into one kebab shop one late night and the men speaking to me in arabic. He said speak arabic . I said why . He said why didnt your parents teach you our language . He said what are your origins . Rex i said my dad is from texas and my mom is from california. I said im black. He looked at me with incredulity and said youre not black, Michael Jordan is black. Society around me reflects back. It was a very diverse. That was my first kind of, that ive been mistaken for anything other than what i thought i was. Someone who except my own self definition. Probably the most thing about me was my americanness. Not my racial ness. So here you are. You are becoming a writer you think. Getting the you are writin , do you already know what you will write about . Not at all. I was taking a course in my second semester. The teachers assignment, her assignment was just to write anything take an argument and write it forcefully. I was thinking, why is this culture that im so immersed in so much richer than what i thought i had access to growing up. Its conflated with history identity that is a very narrow aspect of black culture. She read the assignment and she said this is pretty good. I think this could be published somewhere. The beautiful thing about going to these graduate programs is that professors [indiscernible]. They said wait until theres a news event. Out of frustration, i went home and i sent it blind to the Washington Post on their website. And they took it. And it ran. It generated enormous amount of comments. I said id love to expand that argument because it was just about 800 words. So then my professor introduced me to an agent and i took a semester off of school and i worked on a proposal. But the time i finish my degree, i sold my book at auction. And i was nacve to think thats how it worked. I didnt have any family money so i knew i had to actually support myself by my writing. I really approached it as though i had no options. I couldnt even begin freelancing. I needed a book. So you have a contract and an outline. In fact you have a published statement of a thesis. Thats all i had under my name. Are you had to go somewhere and do this . Thats right. Initially i go back to my apartment with my longterm girlfriend. A woman who really taught me about the complexity of identity too. Shes a mixed girl. Her mothers family comes from the north of italy and her fathers family comes from nigeria. She grew up above Washington Heights around mostly dominicans. Looked at dominicans, spoke spanish fluently. What was projected on her was a like tina identity. She spoke japanese. She identified as black. But my fathers blackness was completely foreign to her. So she showed me identities are really complex things. She didnt consider herself have anything to do with southern italians. She thought that was completely foreign. [indiscernible] exactly. Shes living her life and you are living with her. And we are beginning to grow apart. We begin to break. A friend of mine allowed me to borrow his apartment in paris. I went back to paris and i felt free again and i banged out like three chapters. I felt energized. When i came back, i no longer have my apartment with my girlfriend and i had this amazing situation. I got on the plane and went to. 0 series and worked when a when a buenos aires. I guess there was an englishspeaking community. And there was. I was just obsessed with the literature of. [multiple speakers] you did most of the finishing of the book. I got through much of the book there. One of those situations where you just didnt have to worry. It was a fraction of the price of living in brooklyn. Thats the true competition of writing. You get paid in freedom and you can do it where you want to do it. So the book is done. You get these reactions. How do you end up [indiscernible] when i was waiting for the book to come out, i was not yet sure how to make it as a magazine journalist. I took a job at a French University flying around the United States picking meetings with high achieving American High School students to say have you ever thought about studying at they have a program in english now. It was a wonderful job. I came to paris a couple times a year for that. One time, through friends i had been making from when i graduated college when i was writing my book, i met up with friends at a bar. One of them brought my future wife around. We talk to each other a couple minutes but kept in touch. When she came to new york, things moved from there. Before i knew it, i was proposing to her. She moved to new york for a year and a think we quickly realized shes a writer as well as two writers would do better in a social democracy so we moved to paris. From the point of you as an american. A black man marrying a white woman. And that was very much my point of view when i met her. Part of what happens when you get to france is that you discover its the way people can think about it. I was always struck that people didnt just accept the fact. The logic that i thought was selfevident. Even before i had children. My wife is french but she is blonde haired and blueeyed, fair skin. And people would ask, i do you say your black . Why dont you say your mixed . Many different ways you can describe yourself you i would explain the law of the a descent. I noticed there was a resistance to buying into that that i never noticed in the United States before. Never . Not really. I never met somebody who identified as biracial until i went to georgetown. You didnt have the option of checking that box until the 2000s. Barack obama has very eloquently explained, the world sees me as black. I am black. There was very much my reasoning too. We got married in 2011. And by 2012, i was starting to realize that if we have kids. My kids might look pretty light. So i wrote this oped in the New York Times which in retrospect think is kind of club. Everybody saying like it would be black, period. I was writing that for an audience of one. It was a kind of moral obligation. That i even prevailed upon my life to accept this view even though it was foreign to her european mindset. She said okay, im going to have black kids. Cool. I put that aside and buy myself live more months of unexamined life. By the time we were in the delivery room, i can honestly say i walked in one person and left a completely different person. Its not because i had white children. But the presence of my blonde hair blueeyed daughter shattered my ability to believe in the fiction that fiction in my consciousness. Do you think it would be different if she had a different genetic lottery and had darker hair . Its the fact of knowing she is one fifth subsaharan african descendents. And when we travel to visit friends in sweden, passes as a local. Its that absurdity that shattered my belief in our situation but made me realize these categories dont explain anybodys full complexity. Theyre just most visible. So you could say im a black man with a white child. So what completes the argument and what is the argument . Who are you now . Whats the position you are arguing to persuade others to let you are too occupy . This my belief in the racial categories was deeply damaged. In my way of working through questions is to write about them. I wrote an essay for the virginia quarterly review called black and blonde. It was questions. Not answers. I was wondering, what does it mean to change the race of a line of people. What does it mean to be the decisionmaker in the chain of decisions that actually steers the train onto another track. I didnt know. But that essay was grappling with this fear i was feeling. I felt like metaphorically slayed his black dad. What is the moral implication of that. What would it mean to have 2030 years down the line, children and grandchildren that could potentially just toss off the comment amongst a room full of white people. I had black ancestry once. Has no emotional significant. And no cost. That essay was grappling with those questions. And i realized i didnt have enough and i wanted to write a book but i didnt know where it would conclude. Theres no such thing as riches but racism creates rates and not the other way around. I would have thought about that as a fault you could have had if you had been to the right classes at georgetown. I was studying german idealism. That seems to be the approach. Its been an argument about that question. Even if i had paid more attention, he is making those points. Albert murray is making those points. And i went back and reread them and saw these points already, these argument were already there. But this is not a theoretical. It became very specific to me. None of that got me to the point of understanding how i would finish this book. Until i profiled the artist and i introduced you to the village voice. [multiple speakers] the transition article was edited by my who was one of the awho persuaded her to write it. A woman who had black ancestry on both sides of her family but her family was so light that he received to purchase tickets to birth certificates. Many people didnt know what to make out of adrian. Blacks questioned her blackness and whites could get enraged when they felt she was black and she had tricked them. And shes a graduate student of harvard. Says youre about as black as i am. It shatters her idea when he questions. In 2012, she did this art gesture. She publicly retired from being black babe i read that i was astonished by this. I wanted to write about her. She was interested in doing much press. After two months of going back and forth in emails and have increasingly interesting conversations. Im at her twice in berlin. And we had these long conversations. Something in talking to her released something in me. And she gave me the she wouldnt say she gave me permission. But you know what, i want to step out of this allamerican skin game that operates on the fact that theres a white black binary. That lumps jews, sometimes even arabs, anglosaxon, italians together as opposed to to this permanent black underclass but i wanted to step out of that system. That just dont blend into monolithic whiteness. I said to her when we were having dinner, the thing that gives me pause and scares me is i think maybe my children will have this ancestral pain and guilt that i think attaches me to a community. I wonder if thats a form of disloyalty if they were to lose that. She said if they dont have to be burdened by guilt, why would you want to burden them with guilt. They can know where they are and where they come from but isnt the point of struggle is to someday at some point, not have to struggle anymore . Ive never had a conversation with Somebody Just straightforwardly questioned what i assume to be a necessity. What you are asking, you are retiring where you and adrian from raised. That means youre also trying to raise your kids, not as white kids. So the real practical challenge is, whats possible for you and whats possible for your tool children to children. Its going to depend what other people do. In other words, at the very minimum, it does require me and my children to be in this. But in a way you are suggesting all of us would be better off if we left the game of raised. I think our society would be much healthier if we did. The response will be of course from some people, that theres a risk of leaving behind the worst off black people who need blackness as the one thing theyve got to create solidarity and resistance to what is still a pretty racist society and maybe a racist world. I dont know. Frankly, most of the people who are thinking about them will think that will be a useful thing you are denying them. Most of them arent going to read your book. If youre not in the business of making this kind of argument or responding to this. I guess i will have to make it for them. So what is your view about that . What is your sense of the best case as it were for the other side . Sure. I think americans to race very sloppily and badly. Often times we are talking about ethnicity and class and culture. I dont think subverting and resisting racial categories means you have to lose touch with your community or the cultural traditions that matter to you. I think that black people and people rendered nonwhite in this society have the least intent to uphold the race that keeps it going. Oftentimes the book gets misconstrued about a book against blackness. This is an appeal to whites that are necessary, subverting their own whiteness. Understanding how their race has been made in achieving a perspective that resists that biracial identity. Its an appeal to whites to reject rates. How is a way to do that . Theres a few ways. One thing you can do off the bat would be to use, to treat language as if it really matters. Many think language describes reality but language creates reality. The word choices we make create reality. You might stop saying your why and get a much more to specific conception of where you are. Are your mothers and fathers family come from. Genealogical research. Dna research. Most things will find things that contradict their simplistic perception of themselves and you might incorporate that into your idea of who you are. On the one hand have logo. Racially, im a member of the human race. Its the most accurate way to describe yourself. Im not sure everybody would laugh but you mention when you made the argument against certain features of hiphop culture, i suspect, hope that youre finding there are people everywhere who want to do this. There are. The challenge i think is that racial identity like all identities are made by us together. Its got to be a team effort. While you dont have to bring everybody along for it to work, we have to bring an awful lot of people. Thats right. You need sufficient numbers for norms to change. I dont think you can stumble by accident into a Better Future that you can first envision. It does have to happen when it seems like a long shot. James baldwin said we have to defeat the racial delusion. Im paraphrasing. Im asking the impossible but we all our children nothing less than the impossible. Race is a delusion and we have to defeat all dilutions. You are going back to france . On saturday. Thats home for now. Whats the next book . Thats a good question. Its not going to be another memoir. If i do a third memoir before the age of 40. So its a novel perhaps . Maybe i will try a new novel. What i think i might want to do is step outside myself and get into reforming. We stepped out of our time. Its been very good talking to you. I wish you all the best for this book and the project of helping us all perhaps, escape from raised. Its been a pleasure. Thanks so much. The house will be in order. For three years, cspan has been providing america unfiltered coverage ofcongress, the white house, the Supreme Court and Public Policy events from washington d. C. And around the country. So you can make up your own mind. Creating by cable in 1979. Cspan is brought to you by your local cable or satellite provider. Cspan, your unfiltered view of government. Booktv covers book fairs and festivals around the country. Heres whats coming up. Our 2020 festival season will kick off with the Rancho Mirage writers festival in california. Followed by one in savannah, georgia. Then in march, we visit arizona. Then later that month, the virginia festival will take place in charlottesville. For more information on upcoming festivals and watch previous festival covers, click the book fairs tab on our website, booktv. Org. Now on booktv, we are live with author and radio talkshow host, sebastian gorka. Former Deputy Assistant to President Trump is the author