It. Or signup online. If youd like to ask the speaker or something look for the q a button. We will get through as many as time allows. And then to have a more public reunion. We greatly appreciate any and all support and lastly as you may know technical issues can come up. And now i am so pleased to introduce novelist and journalist and is a finalist for the work of fiction teaching at condi university and previously taught at yale to celebrate college the nonfiction work has been featured. Katie odonnell is a Senior Editor and a National Book award winner and began her career. [inaudible] tonight discussing the latest book a more Perfect Union a captivating portrait which those of reconstruction from the civil rights to the warning and protest with the incremental progress. The result is elegant and crafted. [inaudible] thank you so much. How are you doing tonight . I am well. Thank you for doing this with m me. This will be great fun. Im excited. Is this was Just Announced we started working on this in 2017 and she has been invaluable. We wanted to start with some First Principles or assumptions we can make because we have another conversation and another reckoning as we know for a long time. So lets make some things clear. We dont have to talk about or explain to believe black people or all people of color in the us. We know how Structural Racism works in this country. Theres probably other things you want to add to the list. Correction. We think that we know because feel forms us we are aware of the idea of systemic racism i went to begin with people who are intelligent and who know that racism is bad but think deeply and have prior knowledge about race and history and American Culture to avoid the repetition because the fear of enlightenment that begins with the revolution itself the years leading up to the constitution on constitutional congress. Now we are realizing the race problem again and again and what we say has been said before i began the book assuming that we know these things. They are on the record. You can read baldwin and write and mostar about race but how we move forward is a more active question than some of the other questions. Why integration and why that word we talk about diversity and inclusion and representation and desegregation but we are very clear about integration is the role. Talk to me about that. It was his and intuition that integration was the real goal and because race makes no sense what is this really about . Integration. You go through the record that is where malcolm and martin and douglas end up. De tocqueville writes this and says they must part or integrate. Thats it. And then styling further back there is a lawyer from the 16 hundreds who points out we can and slavery but how do we integrate these people . Thats where everyone was stuck you can be an abolitionist and still harbor negative racial stereotypes against africanamericans. You can be a liberal and still build a life that segregates you and it was not assimilation that reduces or flattens the black sell for diversity like we are the world now we have diversity. It is integration and i mean making available and accessible for american society. That is what that countries historically shy away from with africanamericans. Talking about the g. I. Bill, the new deal, but not for them. Even now in the National Conversation to say make things better for black people we dont think its a giving up of european immigrants there is enough for everyone. We create opportunity but with africanamericans it is the assumption of the zerosum game and is a competition and i want to push past that with the psychological barriers in the mind of all those who have colonized. How do you move past that . You have to go to the material conditions and the structures where race or those that create race with the hard side of law and economics and the narratives that we learn and the things we hear in private and then interpersonal relationships how i think about myself and how you think of yourself that is all race talking about diversity, diversity, post racial or colorblind you find people want to move beyond it. 90 percent of the country supports the principles of racism. But when you come down to those mechanisms, people stop. Why do they stop . As this book shows the top half delves into the history and then but so defined america is that we have a hard time imagining what this country is without it. So talk about that. I would correct that slightl slightly. In the beginning one goes back to england. You dont have the structures of race so in shakespeare there are shades of skin color , degrees of hair texture but its not raised in the way that we recognize. That it is constructed with the slave state and Frederick Douglass says anything made can be unmade so why do we stop . There are two essential mechanisms and one is a real resistance on the part of the american and conservatives beginning in the revolutionary. It continues with the civil war and snaps back there is nothing said in the current moment that hasnt been said before they use the new tools and they pass us down from generations but is true on the left in a different way because race becomes a religion. It is the thing that shapes us and is consciously used to create an american melting pot. All of thes new people and immigrant groups coming from europe. So talk about david nassar and one of the things you see happening is you give a likeness these phases where the price of admission and you can go to a ballgame or the theater. The ball park is segregated. No black players the theater is showing minstrel shows later literally so the culture gives you the narrative to tell you that you are not that it is not black or brown or yellow. And and then when you say im not a racist. That two people in North Carolina talking about the need for basically a final solution and then say but we are not racist. On the left we say as long as im not that im not racist but you can see we have the narratives of race constantly reinforced every time you open a newspaper, go to the cinema. We have performance of race that we do in public because it socially unacceptable to be racist. And then we have another conversation and to his credit and says i grew up in a family they werent what you call white sheet racist but just a sense they want to take what you have. And everyone has grown up with that. Yes. So how do we get out of this way we have defined ourselves . So then we keep having the same conversations over and over again. How do we have a different conversation . Focus on outcomes. What i was thinking about is walking through new york city and all the states that are integrated and then say we are adjacent to one another asking the question how integrated is this truly . To what extent is it representative and to what degree am i looking through racial frames . Thats the esoteric question that go into a restaurant wiser only one kind of person in this restaurant . You go into the employee pool or distribution of power. They are all racially segregated spaces. Thats what people saw because it means going back and becomes the interlocking system. Im the manager of the company. I would like to increase my pool of africanamerican employees. So they are not coming from the high schools so we push it back and then you go to the high schools and say in the case of new york city to pass the most selective schools. The problem is always somewhere else. In fact it is all of these places. How long have you been thinking about this book . You said you want to the city and think new york city is a melting pot and is integrated that it is anything but. That word adjacent sticks out to me. 20 yearlong prod ive been writing about what it means to live in a multicultural Pluralistic Society and also a means to inhabit a black consciousness that isnt performing or selfconscious. W. E. B. Du boise says what americans dont yet have the full awareness and agency itself, and i ask myself what does it mean to have a fictional world in which one does. I was talking to a brilliant friend that knows a lot about books and he said you were too far ahead of people. These are your answering problems people dont know they have. I sat with that and wondered what is the disconnect. And theres this frustration. I talked about a whole society in my fiction and went to talk about the relationships and connections between america and the rest of the world. I had the idea that its always been a multiracial space and theres always been a black presence. I cant get there until a move past greats. Look at the conversation we were having about race and a frustration as someone who grew up reading baldwin and w. E. B. Du boise has done a lot of research in history that we are repeating ourselves now. We may not be saying it as well the second time or third time as we did in the first instance. Not only that, but the conversations themselves are being captured, and they are being captured economically. So what do they mean by that . It becomes a performance, and weve talked about this a little bit. There are necessary performances in some cases they hope people and our cathartic. Baldwin makes this critique in the 1940s or 1950s about protests and how protests are devoid of life because all you are doing is reacting against. And there is so much more than that. I wanted to make a book that spoke to the whole self. That was as much a part of mind and consciousness, and to do that granted it meant what does it mean to talk about these problems in a cool way, and then i came across the quote from freud and civilizations and its intent. Lets pretend brown is an official entity in which nothing nothing that comes into existence will cease to exist meaning you go to your therapist and talk about your feelings and dreams and animation all of the six this exists. If i am just protesting against police shootings, i i am not talking about the whole soul for the whole society. Everything is pleased. How do you move past month simply that harm to the body but that harmed the spirit, that harm that have been sick the day in major and minor ways. The only answer to that is integration. And it took a lot of digging. You go back and Read Everything and dig through the history and go through the culture and breakdown. I was, above the academic silos. If i know history i dont necessarily know the literature or sociology, but also we compartmentalize our conversations and now we are going to talk about the race problem and after this we are going to go watch football. [laughter] host we are not going to talk about music or pop culture. Guest right, not the way the cities are organized or towns are organized. We wont talk about these things, just as abstraction called the race problem. We will learn the language and format and hope that it takes us where we need to go, and it never does. Host so in investigating in the book, you made some choices. You told us the story of someone mike ben montgomery. I didnt know this story and i wonder if you can talk a little bit about his story and what it represents. Guest i love the story of montgomery. So, one of the first black tones in the countrtownsin the countro existence right after the civil war, and found her this man, montgomery who was born in virginia, is sold Thelma Ritter and purchased by a lawyer named davis, who is Jefferson Daviss brother, the president of the confederacy. Montgomery runs the plantation and turns it from a operation to the fifth or third most profitable plantation in the state with a lot of profitable plantations. During the war he is running Jefferson Davis is plantationss well. During the war, he is getting the money and drive the plantation out right for i think it was 8 million in current dollars in cash. After entering every concession he loses it during the davis clan and moves the town north. But this idea the story is fascinating to me because was a remarkable man to thrive under these conditions. The relationships that he has with these people is, the people being davises nearly equal, hes a slave that is respected. He tried to have a patent issued for one of montgomerys inventions and thought this is exceptionalism. This is something that we now whereby when we see throughout the history of grac grace i k about that as a way of showing theres a completely racial state and davis thought he was d considered himself a benevolent master and enlightened mississippian for his place and time, arguably he was. As we consider ourselves enlightened. Two things come first is what it means to be enlightened is always so subjected and socially circumscribed i might think i am enlightened and still be part of something that is small and abject. Thats always something whenever we look back at history we think im more and might end. In my tent. I dont make those mistakes. But we all make similar mistakes that we dont examine because it begins to threaten the ego. The second point was this notion of exceptionalism. When we hol pulled up africanamerican celebrities and africanamerican politicians, and you say if you do these things, you can have these outcomes these are destroying people. Why cant every one has a decent shot at an outcome . That some of the things in integration as part of the theater of grace is holding up the exceptional, praising the exceptional, and those are special people we should celebrate special people, but why not everyone else . Host what we did with obama, and also you spoke earlier about the need to move past grace, which is different from the Postracial America that we were all living in during obamas presidency. Talk about the difference between those. Guest postracial is kind of funny to me because looking at the time and decorative about this in an essay for harper, but see all these people go and cast a ballot and say wow, now we are postracial. And its a trend to the notion of color blindness that exists on the right and its almost as if we do this one thing or if we play make believe hard enough, then this problem goes away. I can cast a ballot and suddenly we are in a postracial state endeand the 30 of africanamers who live in poverty dont matt matter. Now whats the narrative for those people . If we are postracial. We are talking about people like barack obama and Michelle Obama that has had extraordinary opportunities and made much of them. Not everyone gets those opportunities. Everyone is and that brilliant or that disciplined, that willful. Just ordinary people. Like those hanging out on the stoop when you go to work in the morning. Shouldnt they have an opportunity . Supposed racialism says i dont have to do the work, we dont have to do the work. And one of the things and one of the places, its very much about america, but there are two things, to global phenomena i wanted to highlight and one of them is nationalism, these notions of ethnic nationalism which exist all around the world. These are notions for the world in which people are not moving to the decrees and to the extent people in this world and certainly this country are. So you make a nation by telling people they are german and this is the german flag and you should love it and this is the American Flag and you should love it and if you do these things then you belong and everyone else doesnt. Versus a country in which not only is more complex and nuanced and we participate in all these shared or overlapping spaces. We have all of these overlapping selves. And when i talk about integration, i think i want is to be in many ways the public spheres are lies. How do we participate in opportunities as a country and its citizens, equal citizens. What do you do in private and this is why i shy away and have a little patience for some of the language of grace because it becomes more and more esoteric. It becomes like a National Therapy session, which admittedly might be needed to focus on the outcome. Lets focus on the things we can see, feel, touch, because thats where the problems are. Host we will probably move to a question soon. So i encourage people to get their questions in with the qanda button at the bottom. Guest i have a question for you. So, useful fo this book to end a half years ago, you saw the proposal, it was 50 pages that were not as welldeveloped as the book. And you said i have a feeling about this. What did you see . Youve worked weve worked a loh materials, political and sociological material before, so im just curious. Host thats a good question. I think it was that i had not heard an argument for integration before in the way that youve articulated it to. You were very clear about that being the goal and the only pathway to a full democracy which we have never had in this country. And i think it was partly the link between integration is the goal and democracy, and i think that it was partly talking to you, i remember the first phone call. I think part of how my great grandfather was a sicilian immigrant to brooklyn [inaudible] the idea that he just loved these revolutionary figures and you and i could talk about that and fred hampton wouldve been something to those of us. That had to have meant so much to you growing up in chicago. And having represented is so mucso muchabout it, about integd the potential of it. So that probably convinced me. Guest thats your favorite chapter, isnt it . Host probably. Guest we should take some questions. Host it looks like we have two questions right now from the audience. Im going to take this one from deborah who asks what are your thoughts about reparations as a strategy to begin to decrease and its pretty . Guest i think reparations are one letter of a more complete solution, and certainly the only thing it addresses as well. You can write someone a check and leave them alone, and they are still not integrated into the citizenry of the country. The Civil Rights Movement when people started really pushing for integration understood that it was in itself a kind of reparations. So, they are not mutually exclusive. I would take both host thank you. Here is a question looking at the pieces of your book and arguments in general, its different from a lot of the discourse [inaudible] looking for a further explanation on what integration is. Guest there arent a range of arguments currently being aired, but i would argue that they tend to be reactive responding to an immediate harm and state of oppression. What must we do to complete this democracy, and there is a deeper question in this book. If they keep in mind that the u. S. Is one part of the former colonial system that encompasses the entire world or much of the world and things function here as they do throughout much of the former British Empire as they did in india and nigeria and south africa. And none of those places have yet been made whole. Its the question can we feel they need coquille from such a deep wound, to ourselves, to our country, to our world. And i argue that integration in the american case is the thing that fulfills and you see the world looks to us for leadership on these questions, or it didnt. It looks at the discourse about race in europe and much of latin america. It is patterned after the discourse here. People were happy when obama won. That struck a world of greater freedom. People who were protesting around the world with a blacklight smatter movement. Its everywhere. And already the challenge for us as americans is to get out of the reactive stance and stop, i dont want to say to ignore, because you have to deal with them, but stop being so excited by everything that the right does to push buttons because they did exactly two push buttons. Indicates us in a reactive stance. It lets them control the conversation. If we say that the conversation is the completion of this democracy, now we have a vision. Now we have a place to go. Kings said iv that ive been te mountaintop, and thats how you get there. Host related to that point, and related [inaudible] the questions are revolving around what would that look like or what would you imagine. We have a question related to a current protest about moving away from the language in the blacklight smatter movement and the integration into what i would look like in the future. Guest two answers to that. This is a quote from king that i love. Its one of the few interviews with him that you will find, and it is ten months before his assassination. Someone asks him a question and he says there isnt a man, woman or child in this country who doesnt know what he or she can do to further the cause of Racial Justice in america. We have notions of what integration looks like. Its under the name of diversity, and which 87 of us have of another race. We know what that looks like. We work with people. The talk to people. We see very shallow interactions, and it doesnt extend to everyone as it must in a full democracy and fully integrated society, so what it looks like is bringing everyone into the fold of the american opportunity. After that, free people do what free people. Host also related to that, quite a few questions are coming in about affirmative action, which i know you talked about. The question is how do we move from affirmative action and promotion of diversity in our communities [inaudible] guest it created a larger upper class that stopped the expansion of the middle class and began to move it backwards. So, the question would be why move away from those things that work if you go back to the Civil Rights Act and 64, they address the art of housing and employment and education. They have solutions for both these things and they were. Because they worked, they were attacked. Nixon comes in and says how do i roll this back and so you start slow walking things at the agency level or surface resistance you create a backlash against affirmative action which works and you start to repeal the Voting Rights act and became a policy under reagan. The gutting of the Voting Rights act has been central to the roberts court. Resistance to any kind of affirmative action in education has been a central obsession i would argue. To this date you cant use federal funds [inaudible] if you look at the site of neighborhood, we do have segregated neighborhoods and so on and so forth so much clothes from there. So, i think that is fine because the new deal was affirmative action and these are things that were created with the class of so many immigrants. We are going to give you help going to college and make education available to everyone. We are going to give you a loan to purchase a house and thereby black people were written out of all of these things. Host [inaudible] defended historical denial of in that assertion can you identify the beginning . Guest i dont know enough about the education is a field. Certainly it is intuitive that the funding play a real role in new york tend to equalize funding still with unequal outcomes. The problem is youve created special schools for black and proud people. In which they are undereducated. If you integrate the schools funding would probably take care of itself because you see everyone arguing for resource or their children. Those with access to those with means indexes and Educational Opportunities are going to advocate for their children. Host great, thank you. Heres a question asking what are your thoughts or feelings about the truth and reconciliation to [inaudible] dig deeper into the collective consciousness . Guest i think it is a beautiful goal and a very subtle goal. If you look at places where true reconciliation happened, its cathartic. But the real work, the hard work, ive told the truth and reconcile, i forgive you, you forgive me, now can we integrate the schools backs now can we restore the Voting Rights act . Now can we make an Employment Opportunities available. Theres the fear of resistance from the 30 that think that it was right and things along that spectrum, but i want to talk to the people that accept those things as home. Those who feel a certain truth and are intellectually or emotionally reconciled but nonetheless captured by these systems of segregation and systems upgrades. As a writer, i understand how it can be used to clarify and to obscure, how rhetoric can be a substitute for action and how it can activate action. What i want to spea this book ts activate action. One of the spaces when participating in, how do i change them. It happens with large governmental levels. They have been at the work of local and school level. They have been in how you spend your leisure time. All around. Host weve gotten a couple more questions that sort of identify as the outcome of the macro versus micro publicpolicy and integration. How do you view integration politically and also on the topic of private integration it comes time to the conversation. Guest i want this idea to become a very political conversation and part of the cultural conversation as well. First we have to say this is our goal, we wish to integrate into complete this democracy by bringing everyone in this country and this democracy. We have to begin with that. And then you go down the line hell do i do it in the state, how do i do it in this space. There are things that are easily achievable and that will take a couple of generations to achieve, but it has to be the goal. In other generations have moved forward. They focus not on one thing but on the whole thing. Voting rights, education, employment. Residential segregation, one of the things we talk about in the book, part of the republican strategy and suburban strategy. People that will vote with republicans that dont want you grew up in the suburbs and you were just implicated in those things without knowing who wweare recreating segregation n reverse. We have gone from the segregated suburb to begin to reciprocate areas. There was a message i think they wrote the blueprint of it as colonization when he first issued the call for people to move east and revitalize new york. Revitalization so all these things get moved forward. It is the language integration if we focus on the whole system. If we stop comport with analyzing and say its the whole thing. What is our plan for education and housing. What is our plan for employment. Its the policy and the stated goals of the left in this country. Host i think we have time for one more question. You have experience teaching in germany. [inaudible] guest i should be careful with this because there is a sort of Cross Cultural argument about the differences in comparing football and baseball. One of the things that seems to have worked people are taught that what the country did was bad in a way that if you grew up in the american south, you were not. If you have a textbook from texas to South Carolina you are reading about a whole different history. And as long as the country is engaged in personal truth, selective truths which is a form of denial, that makes it harder that you see 30 of people are going to continue to engage in that. The rest of us have to say these are the facts, this is the truth. We will not hide from it or deny it. It is our history and upon which we stand we want to change that, because we are people of free will. In the magnificent agency. We can change that. Host thats a Perfect Place to end this evenings event. I want to thank you both for joining the conversation ended and take a moment to thank both of you and those in the audience for spending your evenings showing up for authors, publishers and the incredible staff here at the bookstore. We appreciate your support now and always. Please make sure to check out the link in the chat or visit the website directly. Thanks again for your time and support and spending your evening with us. Thank you