Transcripts For CSPAN2 Author Discussion - Telling Our Stories 20221110

Charter communitions, along with these Television Companies come support cspan2 as a public service. Welcome again to the 16th National Black writers conference. My name is Erica Buddington and as you for of langston league, a consulting curriculum from the specialize in cultural affirmative Chuck Schumer materials and writing for latenight segment called how to begetter . Speaking of how we got here, we are all here for a roundtable discussion entitled the souls of black folk telling our stories. Todays roundtable title is taken from w. E. B. Du bois Landmark Book the souls of black folk and in this regard todays speakers will discuss how their work speaks to the publics expense of black people throughout the African Diaspora through fiction, poetry, drama and acidic each writer featured here today will illustrate the ways in which his or her work speak to the complex experiences of black people in the literature and beyond. I i know at the 16th National Black writers conference, but the speaker youre about to listen to are not solely living by the pen. You will be witnessing the unraveling of whitewashed history the eyes of the stories like dolen perkinsvaldez whose work into american soil and pull that narratives that are imagined and to all at once. You we look at executive producers like jelani cobb whose influence ranges from the newly released lincolns to look. You can listen to scifi and fantasy tv comic book conus is like marlon james whose work will be splashing across our screens in the coming years and it will be no surprise any of us. Youll hear voices alltoofamiliar because youve heard them several times before like Khalil Gibran muhammad whose word of grace many document is a Media Outlets shaking the speakers and archives simultaneously. Youll see Maaza Mengiste who not only the and if that wasnt enough, here are the speakers formal bios. Jelani cobb is the director of the center for journalism and civil and human rights at Columbia University and a professor at columbia Journalism School. Hes been a staff writer at the new yorker since 2015 and in 2018 was a finalist for finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and commentary hes an author and editor of six books include the recently published a matter of black lives, writing from the new york. His 2020 film whose vote counts receive the peabody award for new documentary. Hes the author of the essential Kerner Commission report which came out in fall of 21 with his or her about the substance of hope brock obama and the paradox, progress was reissued in 2020. Marlon james aborting to make in 1970. Easy author of the brief history of seven kelly to the book of night woman, and jim crows devil. His most recent novel moon which spy became the second novel and james dark star trilogy about the confederacy was published in figure 2022. 2022. Hes recipient of the 2015 booker prize, the american bok award and man still what book prize for fiction, the literary peace prize and was a finalist for the twindemic and National Book award and he is a fellow yachting. Maaza mengiste is a recipient of the American Academy of arts and letters award in literature as well as Los Angeles Times book by spineless and was named the best book of 2019 by New York Times and other publications. Beneath the line to gaze was selected by the guardian is one of the ten best contemporary african books. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the awardwinning author of the commendation of black disk of race, crime and the making of modern urban america and is a contributor 2014 National Research council study, the growth of incarceration in the u. S. , exploring causes and consequences. He is coaching a National Academy of sciences report of on reducing racial inequality in the criminal justice system. He cohosts the pushkin podcast can some of my best friends are, and is a frequent review and commentary in National Print and broadcast Media Outlets such as the washington post, nati, National Public radio, pbs newshour in a cbc, and the new times which include its essays for the 6019 project on sugar. He has in a number of featurelength doc music link the recent release amend the fight for america oscarnominated 2016 and slated by another name, 2012. He is an awardwinning teacher at harvard and has received numerous commitment to publication such as ebony par 100 of the distinguished Service Medal from Columbia University teacher college. He serves on several boards including the very institute of justice, the museum of modern art. Dolen perkinsvaldez was a finalist for two Naacp Image Awards and her stimulates it werent for fixity in 2017 harpercollins release is one of eight of us had limitededition that included he received a d. C. Commission on the arts grant for second novel which is published by harpercollins in 2015. In 2013 she book introduction special edition of 12 12 yeaa slave published by Simon Schuster which became a new times bestseller. She is currently chair of the board of an foundation as a professor in the Literature Department at American University in washington, d. C. The next section ive asked our speakers to speak for five to seven minutes on the following question as relates to the past or forthcoming works. What literary works, comic books or films and tv shows illustrated the complexity of the black the story for you . Which one and how so . Howdy upbringing, or person like experience shape your writing and what monolith or falsehood about black people in the diaspora are plucked apart or negated in the pages of your work . The last 30 minutes of our conversation are reserved for audience questions. Please use a q a button to ask questions as a speaker speaking to the chat feature can be used to make, and i will reserve 30 minutes for questions to be answered. Its something resonates with you or if you have an alleluia or indeed please drop it in the chat. Jelani cobb will start with you. How did i know i would go first . I see my good friend Khalid Mohammed there who i would eagerly pass up initial duties to come actually really just happy for you. I did not use the board. Hope you can give you me lip limiting membership. Some happy to be here with you all, happy to be able to participate in this conversatio conversation, you know, as a panelist, particularly given the fact that this conference was so integral to my development as a young writer. I attended this conference as a young person. It is where i made many of the formative relationships in my life, my career. Notably my first interaction with Stanley Crouch was at the conference in 1995 or 96. He and i and i got into ad argument as anyone who knew stanley would do automatically, and we continued to argue with an increasing degree of affection over the next two decades, more than two decades, until his untimely passing. But i say that to say that this conference is doing the crucial work of building the foundations that will enable our narrative and our contribution to the global thread of literature to continue and move forward. Now, to answer that question about me specifically, i think that theres a book that is not terribly well known but had a tremendous impact on me, and its a book by invited by the name of Maurice Lemoine called bitter sugar. And it was assigned to me my first year at howard in a class called black diaspora which all students were required to take. And what follows the experience, chronicles the experience of haitian Migrant Workers in the Dominican Republic. And not only does it tell the narrative of the individuals who are experiencing the bitter exploitation that happens in that context, but it connects this narrative to transnational corporations, you know, wealth and western indices that are based in north america, and explicated grip that they have on labor throughout the diaspora, particularly in the caribbean. And in reading that book it made me cognizant of threads that were in front of me my entire life. I grew up in queens, new york, which is statistically the most diverse county and the United States. My nextdoor neighbor was from jamaica. I neighbor upstairs, downstairs was a family from trinidad, and the building next to them the neighbors were a family that it come from haiti, you know, to the United States. And i remember then explained me the significance of the fall of the regime in the 1980s. And so what that book did was give the context for me to be able to understand the relationship between children in haiti and the Dominican Republic and cotton in georgia and alabama were my parents had grown up. And its part of this nascent sense that there was this global thread, interconnected, that there was at this thing called diaspora and that, my mind is never tired of trying to understand the ways in which our lives are interconnected and the ways in which the dynamics that begin the moment they begin taking us off of the slave ships in different ports of destination, and have made the incredibly complicated and crucial tapestry of relationships that we see between those two experiences, of these myriad of experiences to this day. Powerful. You know, you talk about being a part of the National Black writers conference all this time and i myself grew up here in this Conference Since i was a teenager and watched many a heated debate about numerous topics i was there for hakeem and cornel west i remember that. Okay, you were there for that. I was 19 and i was blown away, right . It was amazing. You know, i also had the realization that the narratives id grown up with, i grew up brooklyn and long island, were making its way into the literature and i was blown away to the connections ever happening between what i learned growing up, the red line and all of the different system issues in the way which they made into work. I would love to ask, like those neared its you grew up with your neighbors nextdoor, the systemic things that were unraveled for you growing up, what works do you feel like those items are centered in the works that you, what narratives, which narratives that you have grown up with are centered in that . It informed of the content that i think it shows up most family and work ive done at the new yorker. You know, in talking about the ways in which many of these communities overlap in many of these histories overlap, and so the history informed everything that ive done. And so i would probably say that, you know, like it just comes up in all of the things that i do, particularly most commonly in my journalism. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Next up we have marlon james. Oh, my god. Why did i know i was going to be next . Your turn. You are in the hot seat now. First of all, for me, just the existence of black literature, black art. Black sites, Like Research and all that was complicated. I was born, what, eight years after jamaica was independent, but i still had pretty reduced colonial litigation, and i was still sort of trained in empire. So things like language, i was raised to think that part of that was broken english many have something to need to be fixed. Most of the books i read, and i still love them, i love dickens, i love all that but thats what i was raised literature for me was victorian literature. The idea, went to school or where race to be gentlemen, the gentlemen were modeled on royalties. Its where, with a lot of people tend england and so no blacks, no jews, the irish. Oh, so they dont mean me then. So what im saying is i was, you know, one of the things, youll still get people from the caribbean say theres things like in jamaica its not racist class. And, of course, we say that because colonialism taught us. Meanwhile, it never occurred to me that the nightclub in kingston wont let me in for wearing a tshirt by phil that all the tourists in was a race thing. It just didnt occur to me. I was like well, i need to put on a shirt next time. So what im saying is a very existence of black american art complicated things. The very existence of song of solomon, for example, or you know, a jamaican black brother men. 1988 what event public enemies it takes a nation of millions to hold us back and nwa straight out of compton which between the two of them made my head explode. And not just because i got to say a lot of f words, but also because i have never interrogated relationship between police and institutionalized power, considering i come from a cop family. It never occurred to me, this idea of blackness as as a so, cultural, political identity. Where would ive gotten it from . So lot of those works created this sort of awakening in me. Sometimes its something as people dont talk, maybe never thought about like a different world. Its the evolution of seeing, even show so we may have low opinions of like good times, missing evolution from good times two different world two other shows which that man was talking about. But the idea that black was not a monolith is something that i wasnt raised to know. So you know, you know, one of the things that like the novel like say the color purple did was for me liberate my writing to the way it is. Thats how i was raised. What else would i write to . You know, i remember when there was this saying, ive set my second book of night women to british publisher that shall remain nameless, viking, and they sent me back a letter saying yes, this is good and its great and so on, but would you reconsider rewriting the whole thing in english . Because if you dont, britain and the rest of the world may not like it. The book became a hit in the uk, but that was the kind of thing i was still expecting, and its interesting to me reading, even presentday criticism, british criticism of my work on just how unsophisticated it is because there is still this taken for granted that if you are writing literature, surely your writing to white views because that is what literature is about. And it took me a while, and man, i dont know where, black american and art, because one of the things that it did was then had me turn back some jamaican art. For example, until reggae came along, the idea of using jamaican patent law to speak to power or to talk about complicated issues, to talk about grief, to talk about the consequences of violence. A bob marley song that johnny was. It would never occurred thats not what right photographic even summary like claude mckay who is crucial to the harlem renaissance couldnt get past and romanticizing of english and couldnt get past a romanticism with certain type of english. It took me a while to realize every time i open my mouth, a song popped out. Thats the language we were taught. Its not just in the black and African Diaspora. Nigerian writers tell you the same thing. We have to completely throw away this english we knew all along. And if it wasnt for Toni Morrison and alice walker and James Baldwin and ice cube and the qtips, we wouldnt have known it. So for me that, those are the works for me that illustrate the complexity of the black experience. Merely showing me that it was complex, that, you know, a soul album is so far removed from and nwa album. But is this something that i s obsessed with both of them equally. Because i just never, that sort of complexity with something that was never taught to me, and something that culture and africanamerican culture taught me. And it continues, that spills over in my work. I think thats a different question. Thank you so much. That is really powerful. I mean, im learning, i learned about thorndale hurston wish of the same sort of pushed back with using certain language within her work and going up or my mom and dad and i often had this conversation of using hot water and saying things like this johnson realizing thats rooted in language that we were taught during enslavement and the wind which we created it come like its ours now but the roots of it we still have to contend with. So hearing that from you as you want to shift my cures to several things, so thank you. Some of the things, a very simple thing, about jamaican and petrol and nigerian pidgin. Verbs are always present tense. Because action is always present tense first for us. One of the reasons why white people cant understand we talk about slavery we speak in the present tense here time is a continuum and thats one of the things thats essentially african. It didnt occur to me, i thought it was just bad english, that it didnt say he went. I go, you know . Him go, even where he go ego. Thats because a lot of our language is like verbs remain present tense. Action is always active. Why wouldnt action be active . But that is just another example of one of the things that a slick ship couldnt drum out. But i had it listed as oh, thats another thing i need to fix. Thank you so much for that perspective. Giving lessons today. Next up, marlon. Thank you, maaza. Thank you, erica. Its such a pleasure to be here and to be, dolen, i i think yu and i had one of our first book events on our first books a long time ago marlon is such a good friend of mine. Jelani cobb, truly an honor to be here with you. Ive been listening to what the speakers have been talking about and thinking about my own experiences that led me to writing the shadow king, about mussolini is invasion of ethiopia in 1935 in an attempt to colonize it. A couple of things. I was thinking about the books that i read or things that i as a child, a black girl growing up here in the United States, a relatively new immigrant at the time, i didnt really have any books that introduce me to myself. It wasnt until high school that i read anything that a teacher had brought to me, and it was one of the first books, it was provided by the name of our sister killjoy, and in that book, a story about a woman moving from ghana into europe, into germany, i suddenly began to understand my own experience of blackness. Sense of disconnection and longing in an a kind of nostalgia and the way that blackness can be commodify can be essentialist and used against. The black person. But it wasnt anything that i read, but one of the most distinct memories that i have and i was relatively new in the United States was sitting in front of the Television Watching the news at one point and it was and the news clip came on of the fires in philadelphia movement, when the home was burned down by police and i i saw that and i saw that the violence there and suddenly connected with what was happening in ethiopia during the revolution and it brought home to me the way that the experience of violence, the experience of racism and bigotry crosses borders, crosses languages and affects all of us as black people around the world. I will never forget that and i think one of the first the most moving representations of it that i have seen lately was on Lovecraft Country when i watched it episode did or watchman, it talked about a diasporic existence and this is often under the cloak of colonialism that you were talking about and the way that violence continues whether its in language or what continues to exist in the archives. Because if we were forced to be forgotten at the First Encounter with whiteness, with colon ialism and out of the realm of the archives. But archives are history of contested territory and archives themselves are the documents of history that continue to leave us out of worlds and global history. When i was writing the shadow king, one of the things i wanted to do was put black people into the conversation about world history, not just african history. Not just black history, world history. We have been there from the beginning. If homer is writing about a princess, a black woman to charges against achilles and she fights so bravely that he weeps when hes killed her, not making this up, black people have been there from the very beginning and when the greek tragedies are talking about the chorus, when their chorus in the greek tragedy its not because the greeks made them up, i can trace that through ethiopia, weve been the chorus and the greeks are emulating a culture thats existed for a very, very long time and i think speak of greek tragedies one of my First Encounters when i was a kid when i picked up the iliad and i see ethiope, and holy we have been here forever. And why are you reading the greeks, and they dont belong to you. And i can tell them ive been here forever and those reading experiences have continued to inform my writing and i find those echoes in writers like Toni Morrison, in the works of baldwin. I begin to hear some of those things that i was recognizing as a child that they are also working within with some of the questions that i have and i use them as teachers, but morrison put us on that front page, put us in the books and didnt care about centering anything else and as a young writer, as a young student, when i stumbled on her, it felt like the entire parameters of my world had been shaped and reshaped and in really informative ways. Im going to stop there. Thank you. Im here, where are you . Well, thank you so much. I would like to quickly remind our audience that the last 30 minutes of our conversations are reserved for audience questions, so please if you want to ask questions of the speakers and in the comments using our chat feature. Next up we have Khalil Gibran muhammad. Thanks, erica. This is a lot of fun and its really wonderful to hear how theres so much overlap in everyones stories, origin stories that motivated their work, their writing, their creative energy. My path is runs really through a couple of currents that i think are will add to the conversation. I mean, i grew up in chicago where i had no memory of any representation of blackness other than mississippi and it just wasnt in the way that i would be exposed to later in life, west indian, or african immigrants as would be true when i started visiting new york city as a teenager. But the reason i mention chicago as a kind of origin story, growing up basically as part of the nation of islam, black nationalism was like the water i was swimming in without realizing that i was a fish and that i was different in that sense, and having the final call of muhammad speaks or my own relatives in these cadences of a black pride, alternative history, after commitment to black entrepreneurship, i didnt understand these things and i often say to people that for me that experience was like being a preachers kid to some degree because you take for granted all of the scaffolding that makes the experience for the worshipper or the follower, a viceral experience. Interestingly though, my parent divorced when i was very young and as a consequence, i grew up mostly with my mothers side of the family and these were people that i lovingly call today blues people. I mean, i literally had the matriarch of my family has been married three times and her second husband was a boxer, she owned a bar and was famous for getting butt naked and dancing on the bar drunk. [laughter] so, this kind i want to meet her. Im here for it. And she was really the closest thing i had to a grandmother because my own grandmother, my mothers mother died after Drug Overdose when my mother was nine and orphaned my mother and her three siblings. They subsequently grew up with her grandparents, one of was an ostensibly white guy from mississippi and married by black grandmother, and he wasnt a white guy, but he was Third Generation from a slave holder. One of the things clear for my kid was my understanding of blackness was real for me, but not as a diaspric, but not in the middle class where i could see the rainbow and interestingly enough, i was a reader as a kid and dont remember reading a black writer and my father handed me beloved in 1987 when the book came out and that was my first real struggle with black fiction in the work of Tony Morrison and light bulbs started to go off and started to see the complexity of her own historical accounting of black life, connections to my own. And later, solomon i read as a sore and the first class i would call africanamerican literature, an elective in my high school and i was asked to read black writers. It from the formatives, lifted to the experience, morrisons work, a reflection and i could see some of my on relatives, from drug dealers, to people who had done crime, to nationalists, and it was all there in her work. And that was very powerful to me. I will say that it wasnt really until college that i encountered deboise for the first time and in that way, i started to find a kind of, i guess a muse. Someone whos own wrestling with this complexity both as an intellectual and as a partisan, and someone who began to think about the work of fiction and nonfiction as inseparable tools in an effort to defeat white supremacy. For me, that became inspiration in ways that shape all of my work to this day. Just so happens that while jelani and i have been friend for 30 years. Stop, stop, stop. 30 years now, but we were both trained by the same guy who was dubois die ogg biographer, no way to separate from graduate training to my own powerful understanding that dubois himself, while he didnt grow up like me, he grew up in a white world, he came through education and literature to understand and appreciate blackness in all of its complexity. So i want today say that for my work, focusing on the myth, became a way to use nonfiction as a way to expose the fiction of social science, the fiction of euro centric scientific models of cat gorization, that its a tool of colonialism itself and dubois open that up to me. And in my book, this to me sort of says it all. Dubois says theft may rule and prostitution flourish and the nation gives a moderate or intermittent solution. Let them be black or brown or a drop of negro blood and indignation sweeps the world. And nor would it make it less justifiable did we all know that it was blackness that was condemned and not crime. And so, it was it was from him that all of my lived experience, my college experiences, my struggles with reading, the kind of literature that morrison and others were writing, you know, add baldwin to that, but i also say i read stoiski when i was a student on crime and punishment. It was life altering to me because the inferiority of the person ascribed criminality was another way to upend the violent categorization, and you could live a life inside that couldnt be seen from the outside and the entire point of social science is to reduce or centralize people to what theyre quote, unquote, their essence is. So thats kind of my origin story and ill add for fun that while nonliterary influences to are me, Like Television and film, were a big part of my childhood, you know, i can still remember to this day reading not reading, watching car wash, and which way is up, you know, two movies that i probably saw a dozen times each. [laughter] which i dont know what they meant at the time, but there was something about Richard Pryor and those comedic roles rather than standup stick out in my childhood memory, but i will say do the right thing at 17 and boyz in the hood at 19 speaking to questions of black criminality, about state violence, about white supremacy, about the role after black writer taking on and exposing all of those myths. Thank you so much. You speak about dubois and literature and i remember listening to the autobiography and theres one section he talks about an article, i believe, and kind of dd you know where he heard about items that were inappropriate i could literally hear his voice as if its happening. And childhood memories. So thank you for that. So next up we have well, the best thing about going last, i know i can go quick so we can get to our conversation. And im so happy to see maaza and marlon. And jelani, and with conversations about my first novel. Six degrees of separation and great to be on this panel. I love that were talking origin stories. Mine is probably the prototypical southern origin story. I am originally from memphis. Both of my parents are from the historic black neighborhood of orange mound and both of them went to melrose high school, which is historic black high school in memphis. Both of their grandparents came up from mississippi, both of their parents, my grandparents. So my Southern Roots are deep in that soil and i would say that my earliest black literature did not books, mine was oral story telling from the elders in my family ands also come from a family of black southern preachers. When i say im prototypical southerner, its all there. One of the things that preachers like to do when theyre not preaching is talk and sundays at dinner id hear the stories. And the thing that struck me when i was grog up, hearing the stories about things theyd endured and talked a lot about jim crowism, and talked a lot about indignities theyd endured and the thing that struck me as i was listening was, one, they talked about these things in a way that in a way that was sort of jovial. They had somehow managed to craft a survival mechanism of humor around these stories that in my mind were quite horrific. And i remember looking at them and looking at my grandfather and my grandfathers day, men wore hats and i remember how he would put on his suit and he would put on his hat to go out to the Shopping Center and walk out of the house with such dignity and i wondered how did he do that . How did he do how did he manage his daytoday and walk around with such dignity, but he had such dignity and the other thing i noticed in a lot of the conversations is that the women were silent. And i wondered what were their stories. And as you know, in that sort of church culture, in that Traditional Church culture, women were not even often in the pulpit. So i wondered what were the stories that women had to tell. So as i came into my own as a reader, i still didnt have a great deal of exposure to black literature, but when i was in high school, i was a clarinettist in my High School Band and i had a clarinet teacher who was his name was jim goldston and the principal clarinettist in the orchestra, and a black man, and i think he was the best clarinettist in the country and i think many agreed with me and he gave me when i was in i want to say 9th, 10th grade that i was a reader and i took it home, i cant make sense of it, but he wanted me to have that book and expose it to me and i went back to him and i said what is this book about . I couldnt make sense of it then he said, keep that until youre ready for it and then the biographer of alberta hunger, a blues singer who had been in had made the comeback at the end of her life in the 1990s, 80s and 90s and he wanted me to know about Alberta Hunter and that book i was able to read so he recognized although i wasnt quite ready for the black folk, but i was ready for a woman like her. And i have tried in my career to unearth those stories about black women that my family didnt talk about. Ive always been interested. My daddy went to tuskegee, he graduated from tuskegee in the late 1960s so i grew up learning about Tuskegee Syphilis experiment and it went on for 40 years and that people knew about it, but when i learned about the two little girls in 1973, the ralph sisters, who were 12 and 14 years old at the time, i was curious about why more people werent talking about that and why no one had written a book about that and then i learned about, in college i had learned about Jay Marion Sims, this early doctor who had done the horrific surgeries on black women, enslaved black women, these public surgeries in alabama and medical students had come to witness this and he had developed this very painful operational technique, fistula repair and i learned lucy zimmerman, the enslaved women who no one knew who they were, but to the extent you call Jay Marion Sims the father of modern gynecology, you have to call these women the mothers of modern gynecology because it was born in their babies. And i want to stop so we can get to our conversation, but for me this has been the driving factor for me, shedding light on some of the stories of black women that arent being told that should be told and that are really open secrets in the south in the same way that the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment was an open secret for 40 years. Wow, thank you very much for your research. So i want to i have a question and honestly, anyone can answer this. Often we have to create, you know, context for complexity that isnt necessarily there and im talking particularly about erasure. When were researching for a novel or article, sometimes there are items in census records or photographs, et cetera, that youre not going to find written narratives. Youre not going to find that whole history and you have to kind of recreate these, you know, based on what you find, what is there. So i would love it if anyone could speak to what that looks like, right, when you are confronted with either no historical record and you have to speak to black experiences or you are confronted with a historical record that you know is whitewashed. It does not necessarily speak to the full picture. What does it look like when you have to shape that experience or put it into your work . I mean, i could go first because, you know, im writing these speculative novels, for me, honestly, in my head i was writing historical fiction and its a historical fiction without sort of a Judeo Christian point of view. Theres a lot that had to be done to write the books. If it a history on africa written before 1978, it was pretty useless. And a lot of that i read really just for comic value. And its, you know, or anything about africa religions, its getting over the colonial gaze and the racism itself was pretty one of the things that the books do, they dont just change what you read, they change how you read and i have to change that as well. Its not just what i read, but how i read it. So, something that i would take as hearsay, like somebody transcribing from a grill, i had to take that as authority and the book written from 1952 as having one or two things of use, maybe. So there was a lot of that. There was a lot of going back to original sources. Theres a lot of going back to oral sources. Theres a lot of trusting modern research and present day historicalions, preferably from the continent or the diaspora. And, but at all times, not just looking at all of this new stuff im reading, but realizing i have to read it in a different way. So, to train myself to read about certain things. One of the things that i had to stop myself from doing, when youre writing an african fantasy novel is to always look above the sahara. Its like, yeah, throw some pyramids in there and so on, these are fantastic and yes, we should talk about pyramids and so on, but sometimes what that does is that it still caters to a white gaze because its like, let me show you that we can build multistory buildings, too, when theres nothing wrong with a hot meal in the and i used to romanticize the vikings and whose ways of living were hardly what anybody would call sophisticated or romanticize stonehenge and so on, when britain was one of the biggest backwaters in europe. It was me not trying to do the whole, let me show you how western africa was in the story. Because that still means i failed the exercise. It was realizing the value and the ingenuity in what i was seeing instead of trying to do a kind of european novel in black face and so that was so thats one of the things thats one of the big things, i think, going and doing the work and reading stuff and also, changing my idea about what i was reading. How that helped to contribute to what i wrote. Does anyone else have anything to add . If there are other questions, erica, we can okay. So i have a few audience questions that were going to bring to the front. The first question how will the crt impact students of color and learning about black history . Thats the question comes from. Yes, hes ready. That looked like i was ready to fight although i mean, quite honestly the way that these people have disrespected derek bells legacy i should whip off my jacket and invite people to step outside. So the thing about this is that, lets be clear about definitions. So Critical Race Theory is, you know, primarily a body of legal scholarship of which seeks to understand how racial hierarchy and marginalization is adaptive in the face of litigation strategies and legislation that was intended to uproot it. Highly specific body of legal literature that has had subsequent influence in other fields of study. Crt is not black history. But for the purposes of its convenience in order to do what patricia williams, a legal scholar, the great critical race theorist definitional theft, they turned Critical Race Theory of this hodgepodge of ideas of basically anything that opposes racism and then built a house of cards argument about how terrible and racist it was in order to trice terrorize white people who were never the idea itself. On the other side of that, i see black people defend crt, but using the definition that hostile white people body of thought. And what crt is and crt is not. That said, under the banner of stopping crt, people have been able to ban books, to impede the access that students have i mean, ban Tony Morrison and James Baldwin. Like, i mean, its bad enough they always wanted to already wanted to pat down the black literature to make sure it wasnt carrying any concealed weapons, but now like even a nobel prize literature is not enough to get you past security. And so theres that portion of it. Theres a portion of it that will impede what students are learning in high school. Just on the basic level of sip civics, the way the laws are written now are so vague and abstract, i cant even teach where the briefest compromise in the constitution comes from or what it actually does without running afoul of the idea that these people are saying are divisive and harmful to the delicate and psyche of young white children. And theres that. Theres another effect i dont think were talking enough, the Chilling Effect this will have on young scholars, people whose work is steeped in the traditions of Critical Race Theory or which deals or whose work deals with crt in some way, shape or form. If you are and weve seen this with nicole hitta jones. You know, as prominent a scholar she is, prominent journalist as she is and the Journalism School at university of North Carolina turned her down for tenure or tried to avoid giving her tenure. We were part of this here sitting in the Columbia University graduate school of journalism at this moment and immediately dashed off a letter, which, you know, thankfully very many if not all of my colleagues signed saying that, you know, as the preeminent Journalism School in the country we would tenure her. Dont know what you all are talking about down there, but we would which then was picked up by many other institutions we saw around the country. If you are a young scholar who is untenured and you could see what happened to nicole jones, despite her mccarthy and her pulitzer and went through the list of her awards that, would be a great achievement for a department. If the department had that many awards, you would say thats a premier department. Nicole has those in her pantry, on her shelves by herself. And so, if you were a scholar thats emerging in the field, the sign would be dont do this work because you were incredibly vulnerable. So its all of those things that we when we talk about dr. Woodson, if we talk about dr. Bu dubois if we talk about what they wrote black folk under, and talking about people trying to reinstate and impose on black scholars, black writers, black students, and really, students across the board, anyone who is interested in knowing the actual truth of this nations history and its functioning. Can i just add a quick addendum. I mean, this to me is just so obvious, but this entire convening would be outlawed and banned, wed be in some version of Margaret Atwoods distaupic gideons by virtue of the infrastructure, representing black literature, so when you asked the question what the impact on students of color, its devastating because we ourselves are the consequences of the exposure and the importance of black literature regardless of how right wing lunatics have defined it as crt. And we know as marlon and maaza had articulated so beautifully today, you get to exceed the scaffolding of colonialism so therefore, the possibility for dismantling it is exactly what comes with that exposure. Thank you. So our next question is, the panelists have talked about various genres of writing, fiction, nonfiction, im curious how we think of genre in telling our story. Ill just jump in. I just feel like every Single Person on this panel right now seeks to the multiple genres in the stories of blackness and i think you were talking with the oral Story Tellers in your family and i think we all have that. And i dont remember any stories that my family told that didnt involve the supernatural, that didnt involve history, that didnt involve, you know, within one story could be a mix of so many different elements. And in ethiopia, i absolutely was convinced because this is one of the stories that i grew up with, that men there were certain men who could turn into hyenas, and this is how they managed to evade state police. But this is also how they managed to run into the mountains and hide and create revolutions. I believed it. We had these things, so i just to say that i think those genres are they have been happening for a very long time. Whether we call it that or not. And also, maaza, you are a photographer so, you know, theres all modes of narrating the black experience that we can tap into. I feel like for me, and i know we had an earlier question about encountering a silent archive about the black experience. I feel like for me, i feel liberated by fiction and by the novelistic tradition when it comes to telling black history for the very reason that sometimes you encounter that silence in the archives and i feel that that allows me to tap into those stories that my family told me that are not in on the record, right . Theyre just stories that were passed down. And it allows me to tap into the emotions of those stories as well. And i dont think my stories are any less true than what the reports state. I believe that i can tap into that truth. I remember encountering for the first time Richard Wrights 12 million black boys. My mentor in graduate school a Richard Wright scholar jim miller and i remember talking to him about collective memory and i wanted to write the paper of collective memory of black people because i thought that was going to Richard Wright was tapping in especially in the earlier work and i delivered this paper at a conference in Vanderbilt University in nashville and i remember giving the paper and i remember my dad was in the back of the room just watching quietly and i remember being challenged by the white male scholars in that room very aggressively about the impossibility of collective memory. And i had come with this, and used maurice, the experience that i thought would get their respect and no, i got zero respect in the room and i knew what i said was true and afterwards i remember going to my dad. I was a graduate student, young, and he said you were right, you were right, and you need to just take hold of that. And so, i think that these genres, allow us to tap into things that arent necessarily in the record, but there are no less true, that we know to be true and i hope everybody listening has confidence in that. Absolutely, i agree. Thank you so much for your question. Our next question comes from billy no, dr. Brenda green. What can you do with scholars and writers to evade this racism and sexism . Ill state the obvious, that you have to keep writing and, i mean, the labor of producing, whether it is out of whole cloth imagination or whether it requires hours in the archives is taxing on its own terms. And to add to that labor within the context of what feels like an existential threat to you and yours, can make it feel pretty easy to simply retreat into nothingness and ill speak for myself. I certainly struggled the past several years with this because of the context in which ive tried to continue to work and to do things. This is, you know, not to get a little too much on the couch, but you know, i had found making a podcast to be more liberating in that way than the act of writing because it is for me a way to be engaged without the rigors of the written word, but, you know, that would be my response in addition to Everything Else we could imagine politically. Thank you so much. Our next question is from billy wade. Billy wade asks the plethora of writing work shops and retreats are taught by white writers, where is the technique and howto for black literature . Can i jump on that . And i interviewed Walter Mosley the night before last and hes written two books, you know, on this. Not specifically about, you know, writing nuances of black literature, but hes a black writer very steeped in the black literature and howto books and i also think that there are things that are universal, you know, there are some skills that you have to cultivate and develop, you know, that you pick up from wherever you picked them up. And you know, for me, and you know, i imagine probably im not the only person here today that comic books had a huge influence on my perspective on writing or my idea of how a narrative works. For me as a young person, you know, these were overwhelmingly, especially back then, written by white people. I was taking what they were using for one purpose and applying it to my own end. You know, or when you think about fret Rick Frederick douglas using those crib books that he found, those alphabet primers that he got access to, never intended to fall into the hand of any negro and Frederick Douglas using them to craft some of the finest literature this country could ever humbly hope to lay claim to. And i think its important, while its important to acknowledge our tradition and see that there are black people working in that tradition. Some testify, you can take what you can go from where you can get it. I was trying to think of how to answer that question. One i was like, read this book. Craft in the real world and this is the korean, koreanamerican writer. And a lot of it is also dismantling the idea that we dont we have that normalcy is white. And i was on a panel yesterday and a student asked that, said theyre afraid to be white in their class, theyre afraid, and the question i had for that student is, youre sure youre whiteness because i havent read it, what is whiteness . And i know whiteness in the context of racism and superiority and i know whiteness in the nonentity, you dont see color, what is it . And i havent read that novel. You think you have he written it, but you havent. Even that, i think, should be interrogated. I was at this writing conference and Robert Hoover kind of interrupted it and was just, he was so emotional, like when are you going to write the literature of the oppressed, write the literature of the other people, when are we going to do that. And i said you know those people are writing their own books, and its just to everybody, and they really could not figure out how the process so they moved onto other topic and you know, so its still theres a lot of unlearning and theres a lot of that going on in these classes. A joke, i remember my school was you know, applications for jobs and sent in writing samples and got to the point where a reading or writing sample until they learned where they came from. So there is, that said, there is a lot going on, the this book has been a game changer in a lot of writing work shops, theres a lot happened and still a lot that needs to be done and a lot of that needs to be dismantled and there are still people out there who still think your whole purpose, your whole purpose of coming to a creative writing class is to be wallace stigner and sort of stuff that needs to be dismantled and sometimes it does become a matter of knowing who not to listen to. And if youre a writer, if youre a writer of color, you already know this from a writing workshop who you dont listen to, and so on. And sometimes its still, you know, unfortunately, sometimes it still comes down to that, to know how to listen. And one more thing i would add to that, marlon, and i really appreciate everything you said, is that i dont think that we should assume that being in a workshop of black writers is not in itself, that you wont receive different kind of challenges. Black literature or black writers are not on the list, not everyone thinks the same. The same questions you might get with white writers, you might get in the workshop with black writers, because people are coming from so different so many different experiences. And i tend to find that the work shops where you have other you have writers who are white, you have writers who are asian, you have writers of different religious backgrounds, tend to be the ones where maybe the conversations will be the kind of things you should expect once your work is published, also. But, yeah, so thank you, marlon, for that. I just wanted to add this other part. Thank you. And, you know, ive also found that you can find some of that howto in literary, tony mar morrison and memoirs and creator dangers. And so, i just wanted to add that as well. Thank you so much. Next question, again, from dr. Green, your origin stories your origin stories and multiple voices on story telling reveal the complexity of the black experience. How do you to include the very genres you represent . It kind of feels just like writing them forces the parameters to expand a bit. I just feel lick even the conversations that we have here is around for another generation thats already coming up, thats already doing the work. Were not the only ones doing the work that were doing. And im excited to see the new crop of writers that are coming forward and i think theyre expanding, wherever weve left off. Yeah, and sometimes it boils down to just teaching, just teaching these books, you know, and expanding expanding that, and expanding the stories, but also, encouraging interrogation of those books as well. You know, yes, read song of song, but also entear interrogate this, read books that are in print or out of print and read, and discuss them, i think, as we would these kind but also, i think, it also means reading some of these works with different eyes as well. One of my absolute favor thing, neither writer is black, but one of my favorite things to have students do, read jane eyre, and also and bayo wolf and brendle. And the whole reading one book continue to read the other book and thats one of the things, two ways in which that can expand, is one, reading more books, but reading these established books in different ways. Thank you so much. And wed love for you to continue and asking questions to you, that says when will we see brief history of seven killings you know what . Its being developed by netflix and ever hopefully soon. Oh, wow, thats amazing. So another question that we have is from dr. Green again Walter Mosley talks about speculative fiction being a natural genre of black writers. Your thoughts . You all are going to make me answer first. [laughter] maybe jelani can answer this since just had a conversation with him. I would say i dont think its ji more of a natural genre any other than any other genre. My feeling is that all the genres are good and they all bring different ways of framing the story to the table. I think that Octavia Butler was tremendously influential on science fiction, and fantasy writers, but i also feel that she was influential for me as a historical fiction writer. So, i feel that the genres are interconnected in more ways than we often speak of them. I like what some of the young well, im going to call them young and i hope they dont speak that, but somebody like victor la veil with genre, blending genre, and i like with someone like matt johnson or, you know, there are lots of writers out here who are actually hybridizing things because there are so many possibilities, so i dont know if i necessarily agree that its more natural than any other genre, but im curious what you think, jelani . I dont think so, i cant speak for walter, certainly, but i do think that theres a certain surreal element to our existence in this country and you know, i think it shows up in all of these different ways, you know, in the narratives that we tell and the perspective that weve had. You know, on the United States. You know, even when we talk about the most traumatic elements of our existence here, its they sound fictional. If we wrote about what happened in lynchings, we would say, those a horror story and which is why i mean, it took people a long time to realize that, you know, to get out could be, you know, the basis of a story, a horror story, this is like, no, no, this is stuff that you all do. Or were talking about Jay Marion Sims and what he did and the torture of these enslaved women. Or, i mean, if someone said that theres a president of the United States, he owns 600 people and including the half sister of his deceased wife who he has impregnated multiple times. Wait, what, what . What genre of story is that, you know . And so, i think that all of these things have lent themselves to like these wild interpretations only because the underlying realities of it is that, you know, i cant speak for khalil, but ive certainly had that experience in graduate school as we were moving deeper into the narratives. You know, all of these points which we would engage the history is almost seeming like some sort of genre narrative, you know, that what genre does this history that were writing fall into as literature because the thing of it is, just playing straight reality is difficult to digest. The thing about made me think about several things, one just, what is if theres such a thing of speculative, then were saying something is real and im not sure that that line we would draw, but i think i get where walter is saying, and sometimes i think that maaza answered the question, talking about the oral stories and theyre always fantastical, and using elements in them. And i think that thats one way in which we tell stories. And always, always, its mythmaking, and weve always turned to these myths, mythologies to answer deeper questions and certainly turn to them to answer the Big Questions about ourselves. We always thats why mythology is there and always in there, but i also think that speculative appears in, you know, in just sort of pushing the boundaries that we didnt impose. To this day i believe that inaudible i still think he did and no one can tell me otherwise, that guy flew and the fact that morrison leaves is open, to even this idea of speculative versus real, that thats that i dont think necessarily exists for us. When, you know, my grandmother tell me things about seeing her, you know, seeing grandpa years after he died, i absolutely believe her then and believe her now and you know, these are stories that i file away in the delusion thing, to me, theyre real and thats why it may seem, why he, it feels like a natural genre, because first, i think its not a genre. One of our audience members brought up the fact that theyre very excited that jelani brought up comic books and i know that thats a particular passion of marlon and perhaps somebody else on this panel that im missing, but i do want to for you to cite maybe a book, you know, for me in my curriculum work before ive asked the question, ive been trying to get schools and educators to center graphic novels and comic books as core instruction. I think theyre equally important and gateway to a multitude of things that kids can explore. So i would love to hear some of your favorite works, marvel d. C. , et cetera, that have inspired your work as well. Oh, wow. Well, the xmen. I used to say reading the xmen is a lot like being an xman. Especially growing up as a nerd, you know, and if youve grown up as a nerd and doing the cool kids homework and kicked out of the club as soon as youre done, im an actual mutant. And xman and the world, im a mutant. Growing up also in the 70s, the original black panther comics, powerman, they call him luke gauge now, and powerman and even, you know, even the stories like kung fu, and i read as orientalism, but at the time these are stories that, you know, we took ownership about in many ways, it was a big thing to see black lightning and wonder why we didnt see more of them. But, there is the very best of these comics tap into this sort of outsiderness that happens. Certainly when im reading most literature. It blows the mind when i cant read this because i dont have identify this. I said well, welcome to a black persons life, 99 of the books we read and we got past it. And like, i mean, were and come up in this panel, so, Tony Morrison talks about tolstoy it wasnt writing for a black girl in ohio, but anyway. I think that comics in a lot of ways came closer to speaking to me than the literature that i read and still love, but it was a just one theres something about spiderman that brought me closer than the literature that i read. I was an xmen person, too. And interestingly enough, you know, early on, i identified with magneto, you know. [laughter] get that. You know, and in my very like Nascent Development as a teenager, i felt like magneto was like malcolm x, which is a point a lot of people made, a lot observation a lot of people made. But you know, i was attracted to, you know, the fact that the story telling in comic books was often, you know, more sophisticated than, you know, the kind of story telling wed see in other places, youd have heroes and antiheroes, youd have villains who were complicated and you know, and you could easily summarize their motivations and you know, this person is doing this thing which on the surface appears to be wrong and is actually more complicated than just that. And interestingly enough, i did not identify with the black characters in comic books explicitly because there was something i didnt have a critique like when i was 10 or 11, but i remember the luke cage, what they call powerman then, powerman and iron fist, you know, comics didnt appeal to me because tony stark and captain america and you know, and the vision and all of these other characters, they were fighting to save the universe and the black characters always had, to my mind, smaller stakes. You know, with the possible exception of black panther, but they had smaller stakes and i remember there was one issue of powerman where the whole thing centered around him trying to make rent on his office. [laughter] and it just spoke to like the parameters, like now it would be like, now, thats heroic. Like a brother who just got out of prison making rent for his office. Thats a hero. As a young person, that was that didnt appeal like to the sent of fantasy i was trying to get and then now, still engaged with the genre, the most recent thing i love loved was tom kings run of the vision, which was just a kind of astounding approach, you know, to the comic book story. And so and of course, alan moore, you know, the watchmen graphic novel, which is incredible and is honored to finally and then also has the kind of interesting point that when the hbo version of the watchmen emerged, which was inspired by alan moore story but certainly inspired by but certainly was not what alan moore created. It was one time i seen something that was as brilliant and a comic book form that had been done on television, and i think the watchmen was why my blinking on my brothers name . I knoww the director. Yeah, yeah. All right, ill come back. Hes going to be mad at me, but anyway. There gratian of watchmen was one of the most brilliant things ive evers seen on television n my entire life. Watchmen episode five i thought was a greatest episode of American Television ive ever seen, which was directed by a jamaican who went to my high school. T to adddd to that, theres a rect tour in xmen this been interesting and a lot of the alltime writers have problems with come because the basic context is humans are never going to change. They are never going to accept us. Theres no justice. L just as so lets form of us. They get their own island and go off until the world these are our terms you can either agree with it but will no longer faith that were going to bridge our divide. We know and have faith that you will learn to accept us so we going to go off and do her own thing, which surprised a lot of people, a lot of traditional people including the creator, one of the creators of xmen objected to. I remember having lunch and i said the same thing. Dude, after 26 years of Martin Luther king, he got to go malcom x at some point. Thats an been interesting to watch, i mean, how the whole comic has turned. Thank you so much. We dont have time for any more questions but so me people were asking for all of the books that you mention and a just wanted to say that i create 16 tabs right here of all the books that were mention from burning sugar to the Alberta Hunter biography. I will send that and it will go out in some sort of emails i want to make that promise. Alberta hunter on vital is amazing. Thank you. I just want to say thank you so much for joining us today. Im honored to be here. Once again ive been doing this, i been coming here every year since as a teenager and dissent amongst people who arere gifted their books to family and friends who ive delved into your words across multiple Media Outlets, who have sent me down wormholes of research, who i sat in front of as 21 euro teacher at harlem juniorcollege and her speak and literally rocked my curriculum framework, im so honored to be here. Thank you, thank you, thank you, again for your work. Can i say one thing . Yes. Co writer, i would not be able to like him if i didnt mention, you know, cord. So cord is a cowriter for that series. It was a pleasure, everyone. Thanks much for having me. Booktv every sunday on cspan2 features leading authors discussing the latest nonfiction books. At 8 p. M. Eastern massachusetts republican Governor Charlie Baker shares his book result where he offers his thoughts on how to move past politics and get things done. At 10 p. M. Eastern on after words sociologist lks of the future of retirement and whether working longer provides better Financial Security in her book overtime. Shes interviewed by Wellesley College economics professor courtney coyle. Watch booktv every sunday on cspan2 and find a full schedule under Program Guide for watch online anytime at booktv. Org. We can so see that you are an intellectual feast. Every saturday American History tv documents americas stories, and on sundays boov brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. Funding