Maryland library for the blind in handicap, we welcome you here this evening. It is my pleasure to bring to you Sean Robertson who is a Career Development trainer for the center for urban families. He will introduce this evenings guest speaker, michael denzil smith. Sean. Good evening. How is everybody. Its a privilege to introduce this young man. I told him i spent four hours reading his book. If you havent read it, you have to. Its every mans education. To that degree, to the further extent its actually a womans education as well because when you read his book and you see how rich his perspective is, you get an idea of what it looks like for folks in this generation to really have a global perspective on what it looks like for justice. He has written, i just want to do a quick excerpt excerpt of something he wrote that struck me. He said anger is what makes our struggle visible. It exposes the hypocrisy of a nation that fash is itself a moral leader. Consistently you see things like this. He challenges the way we consider a womans role, injustice in the family and in society and its an awesome book. If you havent read it you need to get the book. Were going to be honest and authentic about this. One of the things that strikes me is how unassuming he is. For someone who writes with this kind of power, who has this level of ability when it comes to writing, you would think he was a lot more boastful or proud or what they would be a level, but i think he understands humility comes before honor and he takes that very seriously and he is unassuming. I told him how good his book was and he said thank you, i appreciate it. Without further ado, i am going to introduce you to michael denzil smith. [applause] thank you so much. Hopefully i live up to it. Thank you all for braving this rain and coming out to hear me read a few selections and talk about the book. Thank you to cspan for filming this. I would say, theres some language in the book and since im going to be reading, i would say this is my first time cursing in a library, but that would be a lie. Please bear with me. Im just going to read a few selections from the i hadnt prepared for life at 25. I believed i wouldnt make it that far. I didnt know how to do that. The other man came to the other side broken. It emerges as living proof of the lies they tell about black boys and men in america. I was doing the same. I knew no other way. Then they killed trey von martin. I looked at the face of the boy who became the symbol and one amor. I wanted more for them between a choice between martyr and token. I wanted more for him them just an opportunity to create himself. I wanted for him, for all the trey vons, a world where he didnt have to grow up broken or not grow up at all. I wanted to figure out how to create that world. I looked in my own life and asked how i made it to 25. I asked to influence me to think the way i did. Were they most important in shaping my worldview or who challenge me to see it differently. I asked myself how did you learn to be a black man. Then i wrote down some answers for the martyrs and tokens, for the trey vons that couldve been and are still in waiting. Im going to read one more section and a little bit. The next section comes in chapter four of the book. The book jumps around in time quite a bit and deals mostly with my College Years and the years immediately after that. Part of the book, part of this section is situated around 2007 or 2008. I dont know how many people remember these six boys in louisiana who were charged with attempted murder for what was essentially a schoolyard fight. That was a spark for me in my activism on campus and the work i was doing as editor at the school newspaper. A lot of the chapter deals with that. Where i am starting gets us right back to zimmerman and trey von martin. There is a question i wanted to wrestle with. We will jump back and forth a little bit and include some later stuff with ferguson and Michael Brown. A few months after George Simmerman killed Treyvon Martin i got my third tattoo. I put invisible man has the whole world watching, albeit from a hiphop. I wanted to do it for a while in the timing felt right. The song, most speaking specifically to the idea of hiphop ringing unfounded attention to the invisible man, he charts black mens rise through labor and commerce. We went from picking cotton to bebop and hiphop and. They have the blue stock option. The invisible man get the whole world legend. It came back to me with home new meaning in question. They extend basic humanity for our integrity or sanity. They didnt choose their visibility. It was thrust upon them by the same system that made them invisible to begin with. Death became a full view of fiber and liquid and death and blood. The price for humanity was their lives. As black man, must we always true, can we not live free with our humanity and sanity intact . Are we destined to be forever the invisible man . Invisible to whom he asks . Growing up i heard nothing about his novel but i finally read it. His question, the 1i didnt hear until watching in late 2013 conversation with a novelist had never crossed my mind but its the most important question to consider while reading invisible man he wrote im invisible to understand because people refuse to see me. People didnt mean every person alive across the globe. Invisibility is established through white people having the inability to see them as a whole person. Being invisible to these systems has consequences. The response to our own question, not me that reveals the novels greatest flaw. It. [inaudible] a year after Michael Brown was killed, i went to ferguson to be a part of a weekend of commemoration. Was only my second time in ferguson having don in november right before the announcement that he would not be indicted on any charges related to shooting and killing brown. The atmosphere was much more tense than when i returned. The anniversary weekend was a time of reflection and in some ways celebration. It was a tragedy that took Michael Browns life but it had resistance that encourage young people who had, one year earlier, decided they would no longer allow the fear of Police Violence to control their lives. There were so many young people out in the street. Twentysomethings down to babies born in the interim year. Whether or not the movement produce substantial changes felt secondary in those moments. I heard five and sixyearold chanting around that black lives matter. They would know regardless of the Political Movement that someone thought their black live mattered. Thousands of people had come to their hometown to stand with them in their right to live free. That was a revolution in itself. Mostly boys. The younger ones running through the streets with their shirts off in the older ones cracking jokes. Those boys are receiving the message. Their lives matter and when those lives are being threatened someone will stand up for them, not just someone, black women. Black women have always been on the front line and behind the scenes to fight for Racial Justice in america. Theres also nothing new in noting that Racial Justice movements tend to focus on black men experience is but they become. This is something that constantly push back against. What hasnt been settled. [inaudible] she was shot and killed in michigan will seeking help after crushing her car on november 2, 2013. There there was no walltowall cable News Coverage of burning a cvs stores after the church right Police Department special team invaded the wrong home and shot a sleeping 7yearold on may 16, 2010. The names and stories reach and remain in our collective consciousness only because social media, twitter insured they would not be forgotten. Being an honest black man and a good writer by saying social media and twitter, those are incomplete. There are black women who force us to Pay Attention to stories that are here and all the rest. Theres black women organizing the early vigils and protest while the stanford Police Department couldnt decide if shooting an unarmed teenager wanted arrest under the law face war to uphold. Those women led the marches and protesters against Police Violence. It it was black women who noticed the wounds from bullets and cared for those breathing teargas. They had safe houses to sleep in. While running through the streets shirtless and carefree learning to love themselves, they also learn to love the black women keeping them alive. She listened through my anger. She coaxed my doubts about being able to step into the role of editorinchief. She stepped up to write her biggest roi. I leaned on to reassure me it was okay to us say Hampton University hates black people. My campus activism kicked up and i would come by a dorm room and worry about her as she stood in a doorway attentive and affectionate and how i repaid her by never saying i love you. I barely said thank you and i never repaid her. She was making time for me, a black boy in louisiana who shared my name. There was pressure to maintain straight as in all the postgraduate nation in my emotional distance but she was there. She saw me. There was deep regret that im unable to say the same. Such is the story of black women standing behind and by black men through the most challenging parts of our existence and black men looking behind and beside ourselves and not seeing black women standing there. We dont even have to ask black women to sacrifice, they do so without request. We dismiss the concern of those and we fail to see their pain as real or in need of our attention. Thank you. [applause] with that i will open it up for questions and discussion. My book is not fiction in that regard. Invisible man is a novel. It is wrestling with the same ideas around invisibility in terms of how we are viewed by the world in that theres an architect and understanding of blackmail life that gets repeated and the interior of our lives are never acknowledged, the ideal that we have feelings and emotions are not acknowledged. Looking at the effects of that, living as an invisible man but also challenging the concept of that invisibility since the novel deals with that particularly through a white gays in asking what does it mean to be so obsessed with the white gays that you believe yourself to be invisible when there are people within your own community that see you but also having this idea of your own invisibility and how can you render others invisible by only focusing on your identity. [inaudible] [inaudible] what about the visibility of president obama and does that impact black identity. What it does, it forces the conversation. His visibility forces us to have the conversations we have now. Being a transformative figure in so many ways, its meaningful whenever he speaks, especially about black people and fatherhood and black political participation. It forces us to have a conversation that if john mccain or mitt romney had been in office. I think this particular era we are wrestling with all of those ideas and unpacking whether or not they are healthy. A lot of them are conservative ideas that harken back to an establishment of a patriot model of family that renders, it doesnt take into account new versions of family that we have been forced to or want to because you do to speeding man and woman is challenging. He serves as a symbol and a token because it pushes us to have that conversation, he was elected in november 2008 but not even a month later oscar grant was killed and i think Something Like that puts it ins stark reality that there will be so many oscar grants than there will be barack obamas. You you can exceptional lies barack obama in these ways and say the problems have dissipated. The problems have disappeared. We have to ask if there are going to be more oscar grants than obamas, what will we do to fix that. We do have to ask what it would be like if he had not been visible in this office. [inaudible] [inaudible] what did you learn about yourself . Thats a very good question. The purpose was to unpack what it was i was learning about myself. I think the biggest thing was my gap in the understanding of what liberation politics look like throughout my life. Being politicized around the time of 911 and the iraq war and seeking out black radical thinkers to supplement my understanding of the world. So much of that is steeped in charismatic blackmail leadership. I read malcolm x. I wasnt reading Gordon Collins and there was a very specific idea of black intellectualism that i believed was the right one. Throughout my life, in that. It has been challenged consistently. I think i learned i will always have more questions if i am committed to this work because there will always be more challenges to wrestle with. I learned to be more honest. That passage about my College Girlfriend and the work she did for me and the way she supported me, i couldve written a very differently, but to admit to myself that i wasnt there for her and that love wasnt reciprocal, to admit to my own faults and later chapters, to wrestle with Mental Illness and anxiety and depression and what that taught me going through that experience. So much of it was teaching myself to be honest with myself and i think its one of the harder thing for people to do. Not to say that ive perfected it but i know now what it takes on some level in order to produce the answers im looking for there will be a need for more honesty. I have kind of a messy question. [inaudible] [inaudible] how do you think being visible is also shaping political discourse. [inaudible] we are trying to figure that out right now. This is an unprecedented level of hyper visibility. There are always moments, we said that in 1999 speaking specifically speaking specifically to the idea of the explosion of hiphop in the global export of that and what does it mean for those particular images, not necessarily a testimony of hiphop but all these images that are being projected to the world, how are we wrestling with the truth of the artist expression and recognizing that truth is sometimes born of a form of oppression and stereotyping and flattening the identities. How can we reconcile all of those things at once. That is a very difficult thing to try to do. To respect ones truth and know that its influenced by something you may not want to be a part of. I think the attention of that hyper visibility is the Central American question because of the necessity that blackness is to the american identity. In order for the United States to operate the way that it does, it needs a bottom. Its a system of hierarchies. The capitalism is that. The needs and exploitive class. Blackness provides, White Supremacy renders that bottom class and its consistent. You always have that bottom class were blackness is always there. We create new ways to demonize. We have the tinos and muslims and at different points, ethnic groups that are now considered white were part of that. Italians and irish, they were all exploited classes of people but their escape was that whiteness needed to reproduce itself to form strongholds to be embraced in that role and ensure that blackness is always at the bottom. Theres a need then to flatten those identities and demonize, to make invisible blackness, the humanity of black people, all of the different postcard that depicts black men being lynched, eating watermelon and exaggerated features and calling us lazy, all of these Different Things are the work of ensuring the humanity of black people remains invisible but we also need to be seen in terms, during slavery only one of us was a status symbol. Having it be domestics and servants was a measure of ones worth within society. Theres always that tension of the actual act of being seen but also having your humanity denied and that is what the concept of invisibility is trying to get out. To answer the question, the central question and we just havent gotten there. [inaudible] i think, i say this all the time, i think the three best riders on the planet are jasmine ward, lehman. Jasmine ward is known for her second novel which is situated in prekatrina mississippi right before katrina and tells the story which each of a young girls comingofage in her interactions with her family and men like her brothers and father and coming into knowing her sexuality and her position within that. Theres a beautiful novel about where the lines lead to deal with the set of twin boys also in mississippi who, just the different paths that are on offer for young black men coming out of high school in the rural south living through poverty and one gets caught up in selling drugs because hes depressed that the other was able to get a job but its not the job that the one wants. All of those emotions wrapped up into her own experience of four black men in her life who died and had a big impact on her and the expectation is that, 11 of them being her brother and the things that happen to produce those. I just think she is probably the best writer right now. Lehman is also incredible. I think of him as a craft standpoint and, in a way they are in viewed with so much funk, its no accident that both of them are black southern riders that love that tradition and are proud of it and speaking to it both from mississippi. I think rachel is the best essay working right now. Dave chapelle is incredible, she wrote about beyonce and the beehive, she really tackled a lot. She takes the big pop culture moments and provides incredible contacts. Its like how did you have time to read all of the things you read and also weave the narrative in a way that i like that is not always linear and jumps around. The way that i try to do this, a lot of that is just me saying what riders are like in terms of influencing my prose. A lot having to influence my thinking. Theres a book called nobody and thats been a huge influence on me. Melissa harris perry has been a good friend and has taught me quite a bit and challenged me in quite a few things. All of these people that are in conversation with constantly and help me push myself into areas i didnt anticipate. [inaudible] with all of that being challenged on twitter. [inaudible] [inaudible] i think what the internet generally does and social media, it democratizes the number of voices and provides immediate feedback if you are writing these stories and only taking pictures of the men that are organizing and doing this work, there will be someone there to say how is it that you missed us. How is it that youre making us invisible right now. Tell me if im missing the point of your question here. I think the problem is not necessarily that their work has never been done. Certainly there were women during the time of the Civil Rights Movement who were saying how is it that you were the ones always getting the prime speaking spots, how is it that you are going around getting paid speaking engagements and that work was being done. The difference is the men not paying attention and being in the position of relegating women through subservient roles and now 50 years after that with the corrective narrative being established for some people, having that work been done for decades with the combination of social media and the more forceful and radical voices coming to the floor, theres just not, with the attention with more women in terms of, to have offering space for women to do this work, i think its just the shift has produced by the seeds that were laid then. Thats not to say that its new, its just that its more visible to us now because of the age that we live in. Who is your biggest musical influence and id like to know why, theres so much information and amount of political discourse but not more pass crossing. [inaudible] when i was in high school in my ear early years of college i saw happening. Are we just not seeing it of those voices not out there . Or is it not happening . I think its happening, to look at what beyonce has done and to think she has it been influenced politically, to look at what what Kendra Lamarr did and his response when he said some things that people disagreed with, those things are happening. I think that is happening in part because of the access that we now have two these artists very directly but also these artists wanting to be in touch and. Guest the moment and i think beyonce is a very clear example of that. She has the mothers of Treyvon Martin and Michael Brown and the fact that the poem that got her through that, im listening, he said theres a rapper name yg whose last album is just straight gangster rap. Then on the next one, they have a song about police getting away with murder and hes being influenced by this time. And feeling a need to speak back to the issues. Theres a sharp young rapper and so many different artists who are doing this. When i say its happening, it may not be like drake, but there are artists that are challenging that and are being part of the conversation and understanding their role within this Movement Space to know that its going to come. As far as, if it was just talking about the book specifically, obviously the title comes from an album that has been with me for quite some time. The thing that i listen to before i have to do any sort of public speaking because it still makes me nervous is jayzs blueprint album. I think thats the thing that helps me gain confidence. You asked that very early on when the book was in a book and when it was just an idea and had a different working title and i was sitting down with my agent discussing how to write this book. What i told her was i want to essentially do a literary version of good kid bad city. I wanted that snapshot of black male life that he captured within that. I was also trying to copy his narrative structure in jumping around in time a little bit. What i was hoping to expand upon was that kendrick, on the album is is doing a lot of work thats not discussed around issues of masculinity and the performance of it. We listen to the art of the pressure. Just the idea that he is doing something out of character to perform for his boys. How many things are young black men doing in terms of that just because theyre trying to impress someone else, and trying to impress the men in their lives and what behavior are they. Dissipating in that are potentially damaging. Hes doing a lot of that work. He doesnt deal with women very well. Most black men arent equipped yet for having that discussion. I think he falls into the madonna who are complex a lot and one is acceptable to him and one is disreputable to him and he cant see how those ideas serve for the gender oppression. My ultimate hope is that kendrick picks up this book and has to have a reckoning with that. Maybe in his next album using the imagery of black women as another attack on black men in that he asks himself to a few more question about what his revolutionary politics are going to look like. [inaudible] i dont know. I dont know if she has read it yet. I know she has a copy. She hasnt let me know what she thinks yet. [inaudible] what we want to do is be able to translate that to individuals who dont have the resources. To some degree we know those resources exist. What are some ideas you have to make that transition where we start to engage folks who may not be thinking in this way . I think everyone is thinking about these things. I think thats the first thing, to know that just because the language is different doesnt mean the ideas are not being wrestled with all the time. I think that learning that language, for someone who wants to engage, its important to not impose what you think to be a more high form of intelligence because you think its better to learn the language of the people that youre speaking to and know how these issues are playing out in their daily lives. I think thats one thing and thats personalizing these things a bit. Recently, speaking at morehouse on a panel about Sexual Assault on campus and talking about issues of consent in the ways in which black women often do the work of protecting black men in these instances because of a communitywide system to protect the black male who is constantly under attack and that leads to a lot of personal sacrifices on the part of black women particularly on a College Campus in which the good black men exist and to not tarnish his character because theres so much out in the world. Then theres the brother who didnt quite get that. He sang what about back in my neighborhood where theyre not thinking about protecting good plaque men and the men believe that they are in charge of and things like that. Then tell me how many women in your life do you know have been sexually assaulted. You cant tell me why because they been silent on it. Tell me how many times you have heard the conversation around, dont call the police because he does take care of his kids. Thats the language that someone understands and that the example and real life antidote that someone is familiar with. Thats where you start that discussion. I think that comes to all of us and for trying to take them somewhere else. This process of writing the book thrust me into a level of visibility that i hadnt experienced before, talking to you and having this light shine in my face i do live a more public life now that is up for scrutiny and i have to be cognizant of that but at the same time the way in which i engage that visibility, i feel i have more control of dictating what i want to present to the world and what pieces of the world that everyone else gets and what i can keep for myself. Then there is the threat because i have now written a book and im engaging Mainstream Media in a different way of having my own experience, having my identity flattened because i can sit into a narrative that serves someone else and navigating that is something that im still trying to figure out because im in the early days of figuring out my career. On that continuum, i dont know, i wouldnt necessarily put a gradation on it but i am somewhere between the idea of having the whole world watching and keeping things to myself. Yes, maam. I sat down very early in my career which i started being published in 2010 and had breakfast with my friend and mentor who told me you are telling us what it is to be a young black man in america right now and thats your book. Ive only been published for about four or five year months so i wasnt ready to write a book just yet but it was in the back of my mind. Thats ultimately what the goal is and in 2012 after Treyvon Martin was killed, it lit the spark to say okay, i need to work on this and produce this and get it out to the world. Mmi agent toward the end of this year and we started working on a book proposal that took about two years to complete and then we sold it and it took about a year for the writing and another for five months which felt forever to do the editing and laying out of the book so its been a long time in the making. The writing of it took about a year. One more question no more questions . Im from virginia beach. [inaudible] tomorrow i go to d. C. Im focused right now on getting this book out into the world. I wanted to get it in as many hands as possible. I think today its my best work that ive done and im extremely proud of it. I want as many people to read it as possible. I will figure out the next thing once im too exhausted from all this traveling and speaking. [inaudible] ultimately what i hope for the book is that young man gets a sense of what it takes for self interrogation, to ask questions of oneself and ones identity and position in the world. I think there is a pretty established narrative of what it is to be a young black man and experience racism and White Supremacy. If think have a body of literature that deals with that. We have the folklore and the oral history of what that looks like. I dont think weve worked on enough for young black men in thinking through what it means to experience that but also be in a position in which your identity may be denying someone else humanity to be a federal such call black man and to exist within the context of a patriarchy and all of these things. How is it that you are wrestling with your position within that and your come the city within that. To save my friend says all the time, its easy to recognize whose boot is on your neck but its harder to recognize whose neck your boot is on. To question that and to say had a wide divest myself from that one my identity, who i am at my core was shaped by all of these experiences and these systems. How can i, how can i truly fight for equality, Justice Justice and liberation for all people, not just those who experience the same position and identity as i do. Hopefully thats what it starts to get young black men thinking about. I guess with that, thank you so much. [applause] we have books in the lobby for sale so please go out and purchase this thoughtprovoking book.