Need to know a little book about who you are. Im sure people do but just in case lets talk about that. You might want to talk about how you think about your own life. Lets start with you up in new jersey. And you grew up how did your parents get to new jersey . Who were the . Guest im the son of a black man from the segregated south. My father is 82 years old. He was born in 1937 in longview texas and raised in galveston under segregation, 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 is nine years his junior in san diego where he was heading up poverty programs 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 laidback and 60s, early 1970s, you didnt use the word white about anybody. [laughing] tragic 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 took my file this job kept taking them east, and until 1981 when i was born in new jersey. Host so the java new jersey, what was he doing . Guest by the time i was born my father was running s. A. T. Preparation, he was tutoring students that, to the house to study privately with him for the s. A. T. , gre, the lsat within subjects, math and science, and he was, thats a he was supporting the family. My brother and i became captive living students in this house that was just very small, very modest onestory ranch that it was packed from walltowall with books. About 15,000 books. We studied with him on the weekends and in the evenings and through our summer break. Thats basically what made up for the kind of mediocre in a parochial Catholic Schools that we host why did you go to Catholic Schools . Guest for a variety of reasons. My father played the discipline would be better there although it really wasnt. He wanted to get us out of our neighborhood. We lived in a kind of informally segregated part of new jersey where theres a white site account and a black side of town. I grew up in sand would new jersey so as a kind of sign a protest against the realtors attempts to steer us to the black pocket we lived on the white site of ten. That came with in the 1980s and 90s that came with some racial dynamics my father want to get us out of so we went to a Catholic School a couple towns over. Host but not in order to become catholics . Guest not at all. In fact, my father is an atheist and my mother is a protestant. When a school would go to mass my brother and i would sit back and read our books. That was an early experience of standing apart. Host you mentioned that in your book. Was it just you to . Was it a significant difference from all the others . Guest just as to you, know what else, not a single other person abstain from going to mass. Host is that because they were mostly from catholic families . Guest most were. I wasnt even aware of meeting children of other faith outside of christianity before got to georgetown in 1999. Host say which a Catholic College treasure i ended up going to a jesuit school, yes. Host how did it go . You said it wasnt a sounds as though you think you got the best part of your education at home. Its one to be talking race, whats the composition of the School Population . Guest my mother is technically a white anglosaxon white person but not what people think of when you think of that connoting some type of social elite. Her face is protestant and she is derived from anglosaxon stock thats about as far as that goes. That was mikes. With that kind of whiteness and i grew up in new jersey about what my parents would refer to as ethnic whites. Polish kids, italian kids, irh kids, greek kids. That was my experience with whiteness, even portuguese and spanish kids. They tended to be catholic. Attended one second to college i realized attended not to be at all this kind of elite white. Host they were not collegebound. Guest many of them were not. Turn these of the kids in your neighborhood and also the kids in your school. Guest thats right. Host what percentage of kids in your school were black . Guest up until high school i was one of a handful of a black students and was really aware that i was kind of, i could interpret my racial identity as a wanted to because there wasnt much basis of judging. By the atomic at high school and there was a deliberate choice i chose to go to school that was much more black and latino, about half. Host you were offered a choice. Guest i couldve gone to a pretty good all boys Catholic School that wouldve been pretty white and had a good Basketball Team and i was a success at basketball but i very much wanted to be in a social airy with black girls to date so chose to go to to a school that was inferior in terms of academics and in terms of basketball but but i believe id enough at the hospital to make up for that i knew my father was going to be making the study with a no matter what side didnt 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 not catholic . Guest it was catholic. Host all the options was catholic trejo all options were catholic. Host how serious were you about your guest i was pretty serious edge of the was conflict potential leaving the school in leading my High School Program guide to go play somewhere else. I was serious enough i tried it a few times with Saint Anthonys in jersey city and the tryouts went well and he invited me i couldve transferred schools and tried my luck it being on the team when i was 15, 16. But at the last moment i decided i couldnt, i didnt have the desire to leave this girl i was madly in love with, the kind of enormously influential in my racial self conception as well as my kind of host tell us about what that means because in a way your experience with blackness household is that say eccentric, unusual but she was your kind of access to what you might call normal blackness. Guest part of what i realize my father whistling the segregated south in many ways, a texas upbringing that caused some pain, and my mother was fleeing a kind of stifling racism coming from her own father, and theyre searching to create their own family on their own terms. My brother and i were raised outside the context of extended family members on either are black or white side. Our house was really, we were a force them into ourselves and he did relies how different that was from all of my friends until it became apparent and i thought for example, how many cousins my children have and how important extended family is to them. The racial identity was always coming directly from my father but also from my my mother agreed. She agreed we were a black household solar brother brother and i grew up with the white man and a black dad but it wasnt that the couple could a question. We were black. The white kids we knew didnt think were white and the black kids were used to like its looking all kinds of ways. I had an uncarpeted sense of myself but i realize depending on how i behave, how address, have comported myself my blackness, others could perceive a more authentic or less authentic racial identity and so i kind of threw myself into the idea that the girl i was with kind of was also the fulcrum upon which i hoisted up my sense of myself. Shes a go of it for two as stacey and both of the members. She was a year younger than me. She was from a household that was pretty middleclass but she was in the neighboring black down which is a slightly less affluent town and she lived around more of an innercity expense even though she was not directly in that. She exuded a kind of intoxicating cool that, it was shocking to me. It was a girl that didnt ever take the s. A. T. Test, wasnt concerned about it. No one told her to. She cut school. She seemed extraordinarily free and just not host life plan, what was guest she didnt have one. She needed one but she didnt have one. There was a spell when i was a scene and she was a junior my father took her aside and tried to prepare her on his own for free. She was one of the first kids he ever work with where he couldnt reach her. She didnt care. I think she exuded what might be called she exemplified that. Host that was attractive. Guest choose completely outside the context i was growing up in in the film but s really leading a double life. I didnt share the kind of home life i had with come in my social context at school and on the Basketball Court. Host they didnt know you were studying on the weekends . Guest most of them didnt understand what is going on and it was a shock to many of my friends when senior year rolled around and then i had suddenly had invitation to go to some schools that i dont think the avenue i was preparing to go to. Host you said you didnt have the extended family that you might have had if there hadnt been good reasons for your father not to want to go to the segregated south and your mother not want to hang out with the family that wasnt super happy about her being married a black man. Guest my grandmother was really not at all a racist and she would visit us every year. She came to us but ive only in retrospect realized her husband couldve come but never did and never called. She made the effort so i knew her. Host you knew her at your place. Guest thats right. Not at her place. Host her other grandchildren, for example, you didnt know . Guest knew them from afar. Not in a way that impacted the sense of myself. Host your circle, all young people of the circle they find themselves in, so who apart from your girlfriend who the others . Guest i had a best friend i call charles in the book. His mother was a puerto rican and his father black american, and he was one of these kids that just extraordinarily smart, things came easy, goodlooking, popular and some a very early on he latched on to me and started coming home because i live much closer to school needed, started coming home with me in the afternoon. Saw my father, some of my father had access to through all of these books and saw there some type of life of my he had not seen elsewhere and said i want to participate. He was opposite of my High School Girlfriend and so we started coming over to the house every day. Help me, the two of us studied everyday freshman year to senior year for sats and get extra prep work outside of her classes. He ended up making a huge success of himself. He ended up, he did a little bit worse on the s. A. T. , which a slightly lesser college, study very hard, got straight as, study at oxford and then went to the Top Law School in the country and then worked at one of the Top Investment banks, you know, and he just made a smashing success out of himself and i think that his encounter with my father was transformative for him. So that was something, we were like brothers but he was also, he was extraordinarily cool. Host where you code switching . Guest i was trying my best. I felt like my social life depended on it. Host you had a sense that there was a way it just wasnt going to work . Guest it didnt translate into what i felt my peers would value your couple in retrospect i want to say perhaps i was projecting that on them and perhaps they could handle a lot more than i was willing to share with them and they really dont know. I felt like i had to hide that. Host and so did your friend, so is a shared judgment. Guest yes. Ive one memory of having done well on like the s. A. T. , a writing exam. I got a perfect score in the principal wanted johnny and i got so afraid that everyone was going to tease me and it would make me uncool and i went and did the thing that everyone in home and watched it. When he stepped out in the hallway i braced myself for the teasing but no one even acknowledged it one way or the other. It meant nothing to anybody and that hit me like a ton of bricks because had i i done something well on the Basketball Court or even just had a really good pair of new tennis shoes, that wouldve registered much more but it meant nothing, comedy people from the class went to college . Guest im aware of . It depends, there are two different definitions of college of course. Host how many of them stuck with high school . Guest i think quite a few. I dont really know the numbers but, for example, my girlfriend, she simply got pregnant and that was it. There were multiple students like that. Host so what did the school think about this . The school must have added you about here you were, you and your friend. Guest very proud. Some of them would ask my dad, why is thomas dating this girl and things like that. I would be very defensive about that and my father would delicately not trying to put too much pressure on me but he was concerned as well. Host so by the time you go to georgetown, you are separated from tragedy took a year after college and realized she got pregnant by guy who was selling drugs and she is going to move in with him. She kind of scolded me the first time. It was an awkward the first thomas back on breaking she said those white, have you bugging and tripping. Whats happened to you . I realized when they came home there was something that i realized i was able to express about myself and who i really was down in georgetown that i didnt want to conceal anymore. We split. It was painful but we split and a realized that was absolutely kind the best thing that could happen. Host youre at georgetown, you have a bunch of friends. Why they . Because you are arriving at georgetown as a young black student. Lots of High Schoolers and academic stuff. You were there because you are intellectually engaged, academically excited. Who are you for the people who meet you . Guest i was living on the floor that was pretty diverse. When the my best friends was from new jersey. Both of our roommates were white and we lived across the hall from each other we spent a lot of time together. At first i just didnt even like pay attention. Ive nothing against my white dorm mates or anything but i kind of mood to the world as though the reality didnt apply to my and mine didnt apply to them and i kind of preemptively cut myself off from having real intimacy with these other students and i dont know why. I really threw myself into the segregated tables in the cafeteria, College Cafeterias often break down along identity and also went over to howard with my black friends on weekends and stuff. Just thought this larger white reality was something i swam in but have nothing to do with me. One night i was really ill in the dormitory and i was having an asthma attack and it would to take a shower and a middle of the night and was one student on the floor who still awake and he was two doors down from i mined he invited me to have some tea. He was listening to jazz and use a jewish kid from brooklyn named matt. I realize that was the first time id ever talk to them. We lived together for about six months and is playing music i never paid attention to. My friends and i growing up we behaved as the black culture began in the 1970s with hiphop and is nothing that preceded it. None of us listen to jazz or even read many books. My dad basically didnt have music on inhouse except every now and then he would place in james brown. But i never really listened to jazz. Matt and i became friends over jazz and he started to introduce me to all these other musicians that i started to love. I realize he was the first jewish guy ive 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 started realizing my friend group was much more diverse than ever allowed myself to have it in the past and i was giving all the richer for that. Host so your friend who is also from new jersey was also some of what mightve had a more complicated relation to race than some people because he was connected with an african identity and it was 100 rooted in guest thats right. He definitely in america was made black and his social reality would be legible to a lot of other black americans. But he had traditions. He put on traditional clothing from time to time and his family, his family was of modest means that sometimes they went back. They didnt have this kind of i think that he had a lot of selfesteem that came from being linked to this other culture. All of his brothers approached school with the kind of, not with the kind of cool culture but they approached it with the of tenacity of the immigrant and all of his brothers went on to become physicians and scientists in one generation really became successful. Host you talk what with a e of being rooted somewhere makes me want to step back a moment 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 lack history . Guest so much. Black history. My father did his best to get us involved, to read a letter from birmingham jail for Martin Luther king. To really understand the larger tradition but he also somewhat in the way you write about, he always believed my identity didnt begin or end with the social reality of my blackness. He can have his life saved i being a fatherless black point in texas without anyone in assam having an education but he stumbled upon plato is dialogue at some point in his childhood and he picked it up and he tried his best to read it. It did make sense to him at first but he was very early on aware that there was something out there that linked him with a towering great greek mind, and that if he could access it he could potentially access the wider world and he would read books by himself in his closet with a flashlight. His family would say what you doing . Youre going to get yourself in trouble. Dont read those books. Early on, aesop fables were huge for him. He always come he would give me, he always had a sense that you can see yourself in many different places and in many different figures, and so identity is not just being black. Host you have gone through a through a phase thinking blackness is about being the cool host guest and a very narrow understanding. But he was eccentric. Host that comes with you to college but then this experience of the more Diverse Community of guest in college it was the first time i met black students with socioeconomic backgrounds. Colleges where i met the children of doctors, black americans cannot just immigrants. I realized the black experience with social and economic with a lot more diverse than id ever known in my Little Corner of new jersey. And through getting into jazz and reading baldwin and all these other writers more seriously, i begin to wonder why my friends and i had such a narrow conception of this really rich cultural tradition and wife of my father was some outside of his cultural tradition went in many ways he was just exemplifying it. Host right, 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 i came to change your mind about that. Maybe we dont want is been too long on this but im just interested in how you think about how you go from your high school framing of these things through to the college one to the one thats in the book that is slightly different again. Guest i really grew up believing in the allamerican victim that a drop of black blood makes a person black but they could also be white or practice except that theres something essential about racial identity and that there are also more and less authentic ways of enacting that identity. My first book was a comingofage memoir, beginning to question that racial identity but beginning to question the narrow frame that i i can decee was being sold to my generation in the hiphop era. My father and i had two 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 certainly persisted in an that wider social host for example, . Guest the extraordinarily ungenerous ways we interacted with the opposite sex. The way that male and female relations were always kind of a form of getting over on the other, domination. For example, the became something i really regretted and i try to do with in the book. But also extraordinary emphasis on material possessions and success as opposed to inner freedom and the lights of the mind, not to say that hiphop is some monolith where theres brilliant lyrics and the real question knowledge, that the mainstream version with all models are identities on was really a kind of something that would be offensive to some of my dads generation actually. The book was a rejection of that but it was not yet a deeper question of racial construct itself. That came later to life experience. Host you were at that point what you were doing is taking your being black for granted, but fighting for different conception of what it is . Guest thats right. Host and i mean, i presume, i should have done the research and look at 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 in communities and surprisingly a lot of black readers and many were not necessarily going to college or going to elite colleges agreed with the book. It was more in elite spaces with the toughest criticism came and people said, white liberals might see dont understand the black experience and a lot of blacks came up to me and said this resonates with me. I do think we have agency. There are bad choices that go on in the community. Host presumably, within hiphop culture itself theres result of antisexist slant. Guest its not the dominant strand. The most lucrative strand. Host in a way to the critique is you get to some of the critique or maybe even a a little bit of the critique is also in hiphop. Guest yes. And i should stress the book is not, its not about music. Its not saying jazz is better than hiphop. I still listen to hiphop. Its saying that hiphop is a means of kind of spreading and glorify and monetizing the secular religion that impacts peoples entire lives. Host were getting out of georgetown. Youve got your first degree. You havent traveled much yet . Guest thats right. Host you are about to begin to be a little bit more of the world travel which presumably also is lets talk about that. Where did you go, who did you go with, what happened . Guest always struggled with the french requirement school, and the summer before he graduated to finish by credits i went and studied for two months in tour just to get the credits. What happened was i ended up falling in love with this country. Just the freedom to sit at a cafe, order a glass of wine. Cliche stuff. Just a delicious bread. I had never really been very daring in my culinary pursuits prior to that. Begin to taste different things. They were good. I liked it. And i came back from that experience and begin dating briefly a French Exchange student. We had a really intense relationship for short amount of time but during the time she found me. I didnt know what to do. I wanted to take a year working and she found a job teaching english in france the next year. By the time the camera we had broken up but i said to myself, ive got this job, ive an interest in this country now and let me go see whats out there. So i lived in this northern town on the border of belgium and it was rainy and gloomy but i felt the freedom i never felt before. I taught english for ten hours a week. I had just enough to pay my rent and to buy a couple of meals and cook the rest of us that in cafes all day reading. Cliche stuff but really, really, like world opening things. I wonder to myself, i was keeping some notebooks. Can they be a writer . Maybe i can try this. As my year came to in my father told me look, you need to come back home to figure out what youre going to do. I took the gre and didnt get into the program i wanted and decided you know what, ive got to get a job. I was a paralegal for two years at a Corporate Law firm and i thought maybe i would do that and then go to law school. And it was absolute misery, terrible. I worked 36 hour a day. I decided i had such a bad experience there i decided i need to try, i need to actually try to be a writer. Thats what i i want to do i nd to try to do that. I applied to nyu to the writing program, cultural reporting and Criticism Program in the journalism school. I got a fellowship and made it possible for me to go. So then i just approach that as though, with the kind of naivety as though i do, that with the book deal. Host the way you just told it, the first moment when you thought you might be a writer by location was sitting in the caee writing what was happening to you. Guest yes. Host that since the freedom to talk about, its a sort of familiar trope in the writings of africanamericans about europe. W. E. B. Du bois talks about this, arriving in germany. And just realizing for the first time that not everybody was is apart of the freedom . Guest that took been more years to realize, to fully be able to articulate but when my first expenses was i would often eat at kebab shops, and i really walk into a kebab shop when late night and the man speaking in arabic and i can look at him and he said speak arabic. I said why . He said why did your parents teaching their language what i said what delinquents he said what are your origins . You often get asked what your origins. I said my data syntax and my mom is from california. He said what are you from . I said im black. He said he looked at me with incredulity and he said youre not black. Michael jordan is black. I sat there and explain to him that the one drop rule and things like this but those the first time i realized the way i think of myself is not necessarily a change in white him. Its not necessarily what the site around me reflects back or interprets or sees. Host so that happened there was a very diverse part of france and my phenotype looks more like the african phenotype there. The first time id ever been mistaken for anything what i i thought i was. Identity, someone didnt accept my own selfdefinition. It was also the first some i realized probably the most salient thing about me was my americanness, not my racial miss. Baldwin writes the best about this. Host so here you are, you become a writer you think. Youre getting the qualifications of a young writer. Do you already know what youre going to write about . Guest not at all. Not at all. I was taking a course on polemical writing in my second semester, its a three semester program. The teachers assignment, her assignment was just to write anything that you want to write about, but just take a position and argument forcefully. I was listening and reading a lot of walden at that time. I was thinking, you know, why is this culture that im so immersed in right now so much richer than what i thought i had access to what is going up . I wrote a piece that was arguing that black culture in the hiphop era isnt black culture. Black street culture. Its been conflated with a street identity that is a very narrow aspect of black culture. She read the same as that this is pretty good. I think this could be published somewhere. A beautiful thing about going to the graduate programs is that your professor actually know somebody that they can give you a deal. I sent it to the New York Times and are interested and at some point they said its that fresh enough so wait until theres some news event. Out of frustration i just went home and i just sent it flying to the Washington Post on the website and they took it and it ran and generated an enormous amount of comments both for and against it i said i would love to expand that argument because its just about 800 words. So my professor introduced me to an agent and i took a semester off of school and work on a proposal. At the time i came back to finish my degree i sold the book and i was naive enough to believe that so writing worked. But i just approach to as though, i knew i didnt any family money so i i knew i hado actually support myself by my writing. I really approached it as though i had no option, couldnt even begin freelancing. I had to have a book. Host so you have a contract and outline so you know what the book is about, and, in fact, you have a published statement of your thesis. Guest and thats all i have to my name. Host you had to go somewhere so where did you go . Guest initially i went back to my apartment which i was sharing with my longterm girlfriend from college. We had a bit of time off when i was in france but to my early 20s, a woman who taught me about the complexity of identity. She was a mixed girl. Her mothers family comes from the north of italy and her fathers family comes from nigeria and she grew up above Washington Heights around mostly dominicans. Spoke spanish and had his identity dash of what was projected under was a latina. She spoke japanese. She lived in japan and check in a fight as black but my fathers like this was completely foreign to her, the southern lactose. She showed me identities of the complex and she didnt consider self as having anything to do with southern italians who mostly populated where we lived. She thought those completely foreign. Host shes doing living her life. Youre living with her. Youre starting to write. Trendy we are beginning to grow apart and we begin to break up. A friend of mine allowed me to borrow his apartment in paris. I went back to paris and it felt freethinking. I banged out like three chapters in six weeks in paris. I felt energized. When i came back to your i no longer have my apartment with my girlfriend and i had this amazing situation where your paidup front for work that you will complete a year later site just without knowing anything about i i got on a plane and wt down to buenos aires and rented an apartment for a few months and just worked like ive never worked in my life. Host you say that in the book. You dont say very much about how, i would like to go three months to buenos aires, dont get me wrong but its a rather bold thing to do. I guess there was an English Speaking community. Guest there was. I just, it was such, i was just obsessed with the literature. Host it was the literary guest i was either going to go to mexico city or buenos aires. I had a friend who is living in both places. Host and that was, you did most of the finishing of the book . Guest yes, i got through much of the book there. Its one of the situations where you just didnt have to worry. Its a fraction of the price of living in brooklyn. The best and true competition. You get paid in freedom and you can do it what you want to do it. Host so the book is done. Comes out and you get these reactions. How do you end up as a permanent frenchman . Guest so when i i was waiting for the book to come out i was not yet sure how to really make it as a magazine journalist, and it took a a job working for a French University flying around the United States picking meetings with high achieving American High School students and say have you ever thought about going and study in france. They have a program in english topic it was a wonderful job at a travel around and they came to paris a couple times you for that. One time to these friends ive been making them since when i i graduate from college when i was writing my book i met up with some friends at a a bar and onf them brought my future wife along and we just talk to each other for compliments are kept in touch. When she came to new york things moved from their and for a new i was proposing to her and she moved in your for your and then i think we quickly realized she is a writer as well and two writers would do better off in a social democracy so we moved to paris. Host okay. Now, from point of view youre an american, a black man marrying a white woman. Guest and that was very much my point of view when i met her. Host that in a way part of what happens when you get to france, you discover its the only way people can think about it. Guest when it really begin to live in france the second time, i was always struck the people didnt just accept this fact the one drop logic that i thought was selfevident. Even before children, my wife is french but but i should say liy mother she is blonde haired, blue eyes, fair skin. And people would just ask, you know, why do you say your black . Why do you say your mixed or there are many different ways to describe yourself. I would explain to them they would basically okay but i noticed there was resistance line into that that i never noticed in the United States before. Host never . Guest never. I never met anyone who identified as biracial until georgetown. You had no way of checking whether one box on the census until 2000. Barack obama periodically explained, were i not the president , i doing something with you would say theres a black doing something wrong. The world sees me as black, im black. That was my reasoning and i found it didnt get a lot of resistance to that in america. We got married in 2011 and by 2012 i was starting to realize if we have kids my kids might look pretty, look pretty light as i wrote this oped in the New York Times which in retrospect is kind of glib what about this arguing my future children would be black, period. But i really believe it, or i was writing that oped for an audience of one and i was the audience. I was arguing to myself publicly that your kids must be black and is a kind of moral obligation. I was arguing so often that it even kind of prevailed upon my wife took steps to see even though it was very foreign to our european mindset. Until you said okay, im going to have black kids, cool. I can put that aside and bought myself some more months of unexamined life. By the time we ended up in the delivery room i could on to say into the delivery room one person and that they completely different person. Its not because i had white children. Its because the presence of a blonde hair blueeyed daughter shattered by a blue to believe in for the first time in a way that even living with a white mom and the black dad couldnt. Host do you think it wouldve been different if she just happen to have had different genetic lottery and darker hair . Guest it mightve been. Its the fact of knowing that she is onefifth subsaharan african descendent, and when we travel to visit friends in sweden, passes as a local there. Its that absurdity that shattered my belief not in our situation but maybe that may be realized these categories dont explain anybodys full complexity but theyre just most visible on the margins. Host you could have responded by saying okay, im aa black man with a white child. Tragic that was insufficient i realized. Host what completes the argument and what is the argument . Who are you now . Guest and trying to argue, you could perhaps join me. Host everybody all right. Guest this is not an overnight my belief in the racial categories was deeply damaged, and my way of working through questions is to write about them. So i wrote an essay for the virginia quarterly review that was really, it was much more about, it was questions. It was not answers. So i was wondering what does it mean to change the race of alignment people . What does it mean to be the decisionmaker in a chain of decisions that actually steers the train off one track onto another track . I didnt know but that as it was grappling with this kind of fear i was feeling. I felt like kind of metaphorically slept with his white mother and have black dad. What is the moral implications of that . What would it mean to have 20, 30 years down the line children and grandchildren could potentially just tossed off the comment among the roomful of white people that owe, i have black ancestry once upon a time. Isnt that funny the way my classmates used to talk what having cherokee blood. It has no emotional significance to them, a funny quirk, and no cost. That essay was grappling with those questions, and again i realized i didnt have enough space in sa and wanted to write a book but i did know where the book would conclude. I wasnt having an argument yet and i started reading about and i was reading race craft which makes the brilliant argument that race lunches in our society the way that witchcraft functioned in previous societies where theres no such thing as witches but you can die at the state if youre perceived to be a witch, thats a paradox. And racism creates race, not the other way around. That was a funny new insight. Host i wouldve thought that you could of had it been in the right classes at georgetown. Guest hagel wasnt i was studying german idealism. Host right. Because that seems to be in a way theres an argument and africanamerican about the question of racism and race tragic even if i paid more attention, hes making those points and allegory is making this point and Ralph Ellison is making this point and it went back and read that and i saw this point already, these arguments all were already there but host , uid feelings about it because you had a daughter tragic it became outside the realm of abstraction. He became very none of that still come to the point of really understanding how i would finish this book i was searching adult profile in 2018 the artist, the conceptual artist adrian piper who , who by the way i interviewed twice. Guest you beat me. You did though. Host i was very interested to see that. In fact, the transition article that you quote was edited by my husband. Guest wow really . Host who persuaded her to write it. Guest yes. It was an astonishing piece for me to read. A woman who had black and sister both sides of her family, but her father was so light that he could pass in the military and received two birth certificates in its infancy. The first that he was white and the first said he wouldnt have white birth certificate. Many people did know what to make out of adrian, her whole life question of blackness and whites could get very inmates when defendant she was black. In the elite spaces like harvard host shes a graduate student at harvard. Guest they say youre about as black as i am. Fish have her idea of harvard being a a place where this kinf questions wouldnt interfere with the life. But in 2012 she did this art. She retired from being black and what i read that i was astonished by this i wanted to write about her and she wasnt interested in doing much press but after not too much going back and forth and have been increasingly interesting conversations i met her twice in berlin. We had long conversations, and something in talking to her opened up, it release somethig in me, and she gave me kind of, she wouldnt say she gave me permission but, for example, gave me permission to say you know what, i want to step out of this kind of perverse allamerican skin game that operates undecided theres a white lack binary that is real and the monolithic whiteness that lumps of jews, sometimes n arabs, anglosaxons, italians together as opposed to this permanent lack undercut. I want to step out of that system and want to question i want my children to support that. I said to her when were having dinner, the thing that gives me pause and that can skip it is think my children wont have this ancestral pain and guilt that attaches the to a community and im wondering if thats a form of disloyalty if there the to lose that. She said look, if they dont have to be burdened by guilt, why would you want to burden them by guilt . They can know who they are, where they come from what isnt the point of struggle to at some point not have to struggle anymore . I never heard anybody say that. I never had a conversation with Somebody Just so straightforwardly question something i assume to be a necessity. Host but you are asking, so you are saying, youre retiring from blackness, retirement home somewhere where you and adrian piper guest not just blackness but from race. Host that means youre also trying to raise your kids not as white kids. Guest that is absolutely right. Host and i guess we have like five minutes left but so the real practical challenge is whats possible for you and whats possible for your now two children and maybe your brother and his have russian children . And the response, of course, from some people that theres a risk there of leaving behind the worst off people who need blackness as the one thing theyve got to create solidarity and resistance to what is still a pretty racist may be a pretty racist world, i dont know. Whats your i mean, and frankly, most of the people who, people are thinking about when they think thats going to be a useful thing that youre denying them, most of them arent going to read your book. Theyre not in the business of making this kind of argument or responding to this kind of argument, so i guess somebodys going to have to make it for them. Or, i mean, whats your view about that . Whats your sense of the best case for the other side. Im a philosopher, i want to know what the best case is for the opposition. Guest i think that the america americans, often times when were talking race, were talking ethnicity and class and culture, things like this. I dont think that subverting and resisting racial categories means you have to lose the cultural traditions that matter to you. Thats off the bat. And an i think that black people, rendered nonwhite in the society have the least incentive out there to hold the race craft that keeps the whole thing going. This book, often times its misconstrued as against blackness, but for whites without sufficient numbers of wellbeing white people and with that whiteness and resist the racial identity. Its an appeal for whites to reject race. Host and how, in practice, are they to do that . Theres a few ways, one of the things you can do right off the bat is to use to treat language as though it really matters. I think that many of us think that language describes reality. It creates reality. The words matter and create the world in which we inhabit. You may say youre not white, but you may get conception where your mothers family comes from, and your fathers family comes from and you may do some dna research. Most people that dig far enough find a contradiction of who they are. You may have a hyper sense of yourself and some say racially, im a member of the human race. People laugh at that, but its the most accurate way to describe yourself. Host you mentioned that when you made the argument against certain features of the hiphop culture, it turned out there were africanamericans who were going to go along for the ride. I suspect that, im hoping i hope that youre finding that there are people everywhere. Guest yeah, there are, there are. Host who want to do this. And im just the challenge, i think, is that racial identity, well, all identities are made by all of us together, and so its going to be a team effort and while you dont have to bring everybody along for it to work, we have to bring an awful lot of people along. And you need sufficient numbers for norms to change and norms can and do change. And i dont think you can stumble by accident in a vision. Theres an element that has to happen before when it seems like a long shot. And james baldwin, it means a lot when we have to defeat the racial illusions. Im paraphrasing. He says im asking the impossible, but we owe our children nothing less than the impossible and race is a dilution, we have to defeat all dilutions. Host youre going back to france . On saturday, shortly. Host and thats home now. Guest thats home for now. Host and whats the next book . Thats a good question. Its not another memoir. I think, first of all, upset if i do a third memoir before the age of 40. Host so its a novel, perhaps . You said were you working on a novel in the book. Guest it didnt come together the way i wanted. And maybe ill try a new novel or maybe step outside of myself and get into some reporting. Host well, weve stepped out of our time of the were end of the Time Available and its been very good talking to you and i wish you the best for this book and with the project of escaping, helping us all perhaps to escape from race. Guest its been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Host good. Youre watching a special edition of book tv. Now airing during the week while members of congress are in their districts due to the coronavirus pandemic. Tonight, america at war. First historian, Megan Kate Nelson looks at how the civil war impacted the west as they fought for the territory. And robert plumb looks at harriet tubman, harriet barton, harriet beacher stow and others had an impact on the civil war and look at 1774, lead up and the beginning to the revolutionary war. Enjoy book tv now and over the weekend on cspan2. The intention of yesterday, a 50,000 year history of human culture, conflict and connection