Why americans become disenchanted with their political leaders and how to re forge the relationship. And on wednesday at books incorporation Antonio Martinez will provide it inside look for the future state of social media. And then on friday at barnes noble and southlake texas Nicholas Irving will discuss his a look at some of the programs that theyre covering this week. Many of these events are open to the public. Look for them to air in the near future. I do want to let you know who is going to be introducing. Did you introduce yourself . She hold a phd. She is the associate professor. Thats here. She teaches courses and latin american. Literature. Literary theory and in all related areas. She has a manuscript currently under peer reviewed. History in the 20th century. This is extensive. It is in your program. So if you want to get rid the program and get the rest of the information from the program. In that case i will do this. Just briefly the honoree for this 13th National Black writers conference. Her parents fleeing. They were able to settle in Brooklyn New York why they have to remain behind after years of correspondence. They met two new siblings that they did not know. During the as limits. We are blessed to have her memory and National Book award finalist. The immigrant artist at work. And clear of the seat light. Most recently published in 2013. Though her parents wanted her to focus on medicine she went on to study french literature. Later earning a creative writers degree from brown university. It was released in 1994 as a debut not all a story that follows jerk a girl from haiti. The list of which i have already catalogued for you the haitian citizens in creating vivid and switching for trails. It is a 1998. They receive the National Book award. The Academy Award for literature from the American Academy of arts and letters. It was there. A literary scholar. He created and hosted in 1970. Johnson is at the university of washington in seattle. Lets get started today. So again i just want to thank them for being here today and im just gonna read some introductory remarks that will frame what i expect to be in invigorating discussion. We are getting gonna go through for about 45 minutes to an hour discussing the various points that hopefully will race some punctuating marks in the conversation and then we will open up her for questions for the last 45 minutes. Okay. So lets get right to it. Our panel is meant to address the risk writers take while working under political contacts thats the summary in the program under the title create dangerously. The current challenge as i see it right now is the framework of our nation which produces its a Barack Hussein obama elected twice to his office and exceedingly militarized police force in addition of course we had been experiencing the increasingly vicious of a white system primacy unmask in the current public candidate donald trump and although ted cruz and the rest are perhaps even more dangerous. This is not the first time weve experienced this savagery a people of color in United States. In the post Civil Rights Era it is the first time that White Supremacy is putting on the backs of people of color. I am a member of the first generations of post civil rights generation. I never thought as an adult i would be looking at this kind of political and cultural landscape, having been the recipient of the benefits of civil rights and the social revolutions of the 70s, affirmative action which was murdered in 80s. I grew up in this attack on black lives in black experience speaks to the position of the black artist and cultural work in a particular way. The subtitle for this paper as i suggested for my remarks as i suggested might be how do we kill right supremacy. I would like to quote from the essay of the 2010 essay create dangerously she writes the immigrant artist shares with all other artist the desire to interpret and possibly remake his or her own world so that we may not be creating as dangerously as our forebears that we not be risking torture, eating and execution. Still, while we are at work bodies are littering the streets somewhere. People are buried under the rubble somewhere. Masquerades are been dug somewhere. Being dug somewhere. In the essay i think you draw clear connection between a state of violence upon the bodies of the inserted into the immigrant artist desire to remake that world. Whose work might save someones life as they reach on because they have given up the passport making us honorary citizens of their culture. In another more recent essay that she was generous enough to share with charles and i earlier this week entitled our right to be here. They trace her relationship to our mid century Jeremiah James baldwin on the violence of racial terror and the necessity of discussing it with her daughters. She also draws the can next in the piece in the current racial terrorism of black men and women in the continental United States. In this essay she speaks that the african immigrant are here in america because our lives meant nothing to the powers of where we come from. Then we come to realize that our lives mean very little here. Charle johnson passed they find the work really invigorating and i think my students find some of the most powerful lies in that novel precisely those which i think allow us unpack how White Supremacy actually get started and how it actually works. The problem of that suppression is actually at the root of western thought and Charles Johnson argues through a character in Middle Passage who is the captain of the ship republic that it is a bloodied structure of the mind subject and object self another these ancient twins are built into the minds like the stem. We cannot think without them. They are signs of a transcendental fault a deep crack in consciousness itself. Mind was made for murder. Slavery if you think this through is the deeper dash deeper arctic wind. Articulate. There has been a lot of work recently. Reminds me of that. The collection of poetry. Because white men cant police their imagination black men are dying. And of course we must always include black women in that sentence as well. I think between this and Charles Johnsons work we have a great introduction into how it works. And i think maybe we can start discussing the position in the dismantling of White Supremacy. And what is the relationship to these challenges for the artist especially in the framework of our current contemporary political moment. If you think about it, White Supremacy secures itself against the order of language itself through that dualism. The passage i read from Charles Johnsons work. It structures western thought. It wants to keep different at arms length and thats why we are here. We are the difference thats meant to be kept at arms length. Therefore if white can distance itself from different to murder and oppression it can keep itself from dying. The violence is being enacted at the back of the other. Its already necessary to the system but it is necessary. My question to you both is how do you understand what now is necessarily as it has always been the project of murdering. And of course i dont mean that literally. I mean that theoretically. Im not calling for actual murder of people as murder of a oppressive mind set. They organizes militarized state violence. How does the artist accomplish this especially in the light of the history. They find themselves informed by particular histories here in america and also reflected in the savage problem which you work through roses. We note that the blood runs in the street and that we know for sure it always has. I think right now has to be how does our work address that. First of all good afternoon its really wonderful to be here and back at this great conference i think to start off one of the things that i grabbed onto as you were talking is this notion of policing the imagination and i think one of the ways that we had been able to crash us and whether its through if youre from out of this country through these occupations is by crushing the imagination and one of the ways that i think that it is also exploded this type of oppression is through art through the things that we had been able to create out of both necessity and that of resistance. And so one way as you know addressing the question questionable one way to kill White Supremacy is by reclaiming our imagination and i think in many ways its been done instinctively starting with spirituals or the different art forms of religions that have emerged out of the new world religion you cant practice your religion after practicing catholicism. And then we have the other mix of the two. Is now a religion. I think the explosion of the imagination by not just artist but individual people who are just trying to survive is one way that we have always tried to kill White Supremacy. Im here really to listen to it. I think the question that you bring up is probably the most profound question that underlies every other question. Who am i into our you where do i end and where do you begin so i find myself unpracticed for this. Reflecting upon this matter very often. And some of you put it very well long time ago and raised the question it was James Baldwin when he said the only reason im black is because you think youre white. This is something that is happening in the imagination the construction of identity and it requires the construction of a black identity so how do we address this. I think as you said art freezes up from these unchanging definitions of who we think we are. Art always does that its groundbreaking and radical but this is something i think we all had to concern ourselves with on a daily basis. How do we approach the other. Whether it is race, class or gender. My feeling is that we approach the other with listening. No presuppositions no assumptions no projected our fears no projecting of our racial fears onto the other but listening deeply to this person and their parents and how they speak it will inform us of who they are. That is with listening. It is a part of Something Else which i call humility which is not making assumptions about the other i think others are great mysteries. Our approach other people only with the idea that i want them to reveal to me who they are through their speech through the action and its on that basis that i will make a provisional judgment because new evidence will require that i change my opinion. She can still surprise me. I havent been inside her had every moment for 40 years. Its something she never talked about because the subject never came up until last night. So i get a whole different perception of her. One of the reasons ways we kill that is we give up our judgment in assumptions we approach the other with listening and that is what i think i love. Thats terrific. Just to respond to your comment about reclaiming the imagination specially in religion that touches a chord with me. It is a puerto rican which actually does that. What i find fascinating about the recreating of the imagination is that in all of the cultures that ive had experience with and read about and lived through theres always a focus on the body in a particular way that demands a resistance to the language it seems to get broken down in different ways in these alternative and the oppositional systems. I really appreciate you mentioning that its not just artist but actually individual people who are living in the world who are also themselves struggling with this current political context that we find ourselves in the head to find and reclaim their imaginations through reclaiming a different language. I was just thinking about that as you were talking about it. And you know, when you speak about not having any assumptions thats the first order that every philosophy that they bridge their students. Leave your assumptions at the door because assumptions will always tell you more about yourself but one of the things you have to learn how to do at the thinking. And hopefully you can continue to reproduce that in the social world there is a certain kind of privilege that i think that people who invest in it can tend to want to draw from their bank that makes it a different language. The reclamation of our imagination. There is no magic bullet. How do we get out of that subject. Is in the body. Where do we find it in the west that is so rigidly structured by these polar opposite. And everything in between. I just wondered if you would expand a little bit more. It doesnt have to go in order. I dont think there is a single solution for everyone and i think thats why so many of us struggle especially when you dont have Young Children to explain this world to them. If there were a magic solution we would arm them with it and say go for it. The class privileges there are location and geography where you left. I think the second thing. Lets say we have it tried to shed these assumptions. Still the problem exists. If it does so what does one do its a philosophical problem but its also a very real problem of going out in the world and expecting harm to be done to your body which is very similar. Is kind of what it looks like for my parents. You dont know what can happen out there. I think there is still the figuring out of that situation and the practical way every day which leads to these talks and as a parent you get the talk as a child. You are shocked by this utility of it. There is ultimately i think thats where the body realize that in the videos they have given us that prove they are vulnerable in church, on the bus on the street. Thats when we been hearing so much about the concentration of the body. One of the billion bodies on display. Every time we see one of those videos. I have nothing more to add to that. But isnt it part of the problem in the era of technological revolution everything that was already happening but could upon underground before these things to some degree it went underground. There is probably a lot more violence occurring that we didnt actually had visual access too. Is it that part of the problem that you are saying they have to keep that. It is necessary rescission had there is a vulnerability on the other side of that equation also which gets covered over by the same violence. I was wondering in the piece that you shared with us this past week spoke about president obama that he would be considered the way he was received during the campaign of someone who is not american someone who is questionable. Would he be thought of as a refugee. They made even more vulnerable by the kind of passport that is supposed to be part of your birthright or when you become a citizen. The definition of the citizenship is from the beginning and the creation of this nation is that its not gonna be equally. And so the state starts it out and the citizens follow. And the structures followed. How do we not reproduce those structures. I think thats a problem that we have emancipation. Not to reproduce the hierarchies. Do you think its possible to end racism . In my lifetime or in general . At the end of civilizations even if we erase all of the differences in the world the human genome would find a way to oppress somebody else. Even if we erased all differences of social class. I dont know if i fully agree with that. It is discontent. I think sometimes we talk about giving a talk and where we are in 2016 in terms of how much progress we have made as a people in this nation during 244 years of slavery. With everything since a Civil Rights Movement. I do think we have made progress i do think that our predecessors they were performed in a heroic fashion. They faced victimization demonization physical violence attacking the black body and they emerged from the creating this country indeed the creators and co creators of this country. I dont want to diminish that or resist that. Every year what were they say if he was here. In the 90s said something that was really important in addition to same we should do something about it. None of the violence was intended. As a way of life thats what think we said. We need a revolution of ideas he was there. Its been two steps forward and one stepped back. I dont give up on that hope because i cant give up on from my children and certainly not for my 4yearold grandson i have to head him have a confident about himself that is his inheritance. I dont think we can do that. I think it is incurred in the human ego. And its a very difficult thing. And until they figure it out there is can be somebody discriminating against and treating poorly or pressing someone else. You have to go to the root if you want to be a radical and i can think of anything more radical than addressing that. Thats the next question that comes up. Im just gonna take a moment to announce that there are slips of paper going around for the audience members to ask questions. It is supposed to start in about ten minutes. You are supposed to write your name on a piece of paper we will be collecting them in about ten minutes. I hope i havent come across as some sort of pessimist. I do think we have to be careful with this certain type of optimism because you have to keep that history. That you catalyze for us. And the reality of the current experience. It brings us back to the question again of well how does anindividual, how does a productive individual, how does the artist in the African Diaspora continue to sort of chip away at the set up this the set of this, this huge problem of the ego or a huge problem of what they think of as White Supremacy which is a bloody problem. How do we continue to chip away at it . Charles has suggested always surrender your some shins and leave your assumptions at the door when you meet someone and as your comments have suggested a kind of consciousness about what it means to produce while death is all around you with vulnerability, the potential vulnerability. How might we continue to chip away at that problem that we are consistently faced with which is not just our problem but everyones problem. Bardem is picking junior, his sermon called unfulfilled dreams , i think thats the one and he talks about the difficulty of trying to make his court and finish a bowl and the other person is life corazza who said the one thing we didnt teach the young people is that we have done certain things, accomplish are good things in the Civil Rights Movement that they would have to fight all over again. None of it is permanent. Theres nothing permanent and it can be reversed, it can be rolled back and so what you see perhaps in that movement is the awakening to the fact that those fights have to be done all over again. People are, they do the same thing from one generation to the next. They dont learn so you can think things are done once and for all. I remember when i was writing a book about a massacre of haitians in the Dominican Republic and one of the things, when i was talking to people who were doing this work they would say you know freedom is a passing thing. Someone could always come and take it away and thats one of the things that they stress and you are right, and i think this new generation of activists is reminding us that its an ongoing struggle and its important. Its important that they had are doing it on their own terms in their own ways that can better address things in the moment and i think thats very powerful. I was looking forward to the black lives matter literature and poetry you know and the cultural work that will come out of this moment. I think it will be extraordinary and bold and as powerful as we are seeing manifested. I dont want to prescribe a path of two artists. I dont want to see you and perhaps you are an artist so you have to do this. I think its important for us to also leave room for that because then we dont fall into this trap of this monolithic story about who we are. I think the more, to be an artist by definition is to be free and that freedom can be taken away but whenever there is a flareup of a Movement Like the moment we are seeing, i am always eager to see what the cultural work will be. I think im very excited by the marriage of that kind of thing gaetz meant that is so inyourface and so powerful and to see what poetry comes out of it so that excites me. I also dont dont want us to assign everybody that task. C absolutely and thats something we need to be, we constantly discussed the fact that certainly the black lives matter moment the body is reentered areas in the poetry and the literature in a way which challenges the problem of language in the west and interesting way also but when i discuss with my students this idea of what constitutes a placard and what constitutes black culture in who gets to define it and who is the political artist in the black community. We can look at so many people who were written off as a political and first of all thats an unfair assumption to make so i appreciate what you are saying about not assigning it the particular task to the artist whose work may very well be political but people come to what is politics and which series of assumptions. You are preaching to the converted so i really appreciate , i really appreciate the fact that there is a certain kind of freedom that should be you know generously proffered at the reading, at the performance at the level of the production but for some shins are made because at some level with immigrant artists and black artists especially in this moment it seems like we are always as you said as he wrote in your essay their body is somewhere. There are we seems to be if you are conscious about it, there is a politics to your producing in that state because we are always at the limit of death. I think theres a way in which death is experienced in the immigrant artists world, certainly this particular moment in the diaspora arts world that again goes back to what White Supremacy is trying to do by forestalling its own death. But on that note, let me ask if theres anything else you would like to say generally before return to the questionandanswer session. We are going to open it up to the q a session. I think that there were slips of paper being handed out for people and i think someone is collecting those downstage. [inaudible conversations] we have about five more minutes. They need a mic closer to you. I wanted to say where you talked about i think its worth stressing that whether its on the terms you are talking about, very individual level, thats always been there. The entire idea of an artist creating something is a fight against mortality. We do this not to die so i think the presence of death is when you act to it these other social elements from racialized killing or dictatorship killing, theres an urgency, theres a further urgency so i think that size embedded in a way in the Creative Process, just creating in order to live in other kinds of ways. That is the authority against which the author is always creating against, absolutely. It seems to briefly wrap up this portion of the panel, the point seems to be a kind of consciousness about your assumptions as you greet the world if i am paraphrasing you correctly. Being sort of hypervigilant as you greet the world and also understanding that the history as he stated especially in the continental United States, the history is always reproduced in the documents of citizenship or that aware of. Its always reproduced in the social and political world, social political world that we move through so that is why its so important to have some level be able to our rest or dissolve assumptions when one meets the other, whoever he or she may appear to be. I really liked the emphasis on the ancestor. I think that in the African Diaspora the ancestors for me are at least as powerful as judeochristian living gods as its reproduced in the church, in the church dogma so the idea of ancestors having a kind of direct conduit with them is particularly powerful which also speaks to this idea of the vulnerability of the experience in the former ability of the body but also the strength of it and the strength of that history, that her wrote history which is people oftentimes said why do we have to talk about slavery and i say we havent even gotten started. We havent even gotten started yet. We have generations of young people who dont have a particular Historical Context of slavery and i think returning to the path is as cliched and as trite as it may sound but returning to the past in a real way gets you to a kind of selfconsciousness about your presence and a productive hopefully a more productive future. Its a difficult balance to strike i would say. So on that note im going to, where is our person with the questions . She is still there, okay. Organizing the questions, okay. I just have to ask you, do you guys feel that you are when you sit down to write or even to think because Critical Thinking always preface is critical writing or any kind of creativity. Do you guys feel that you are creating dangerously which is the title of the book and the book of essays which i encourage you to read and i have another question. Do you feel that it is a kind of dangerous Creative Process to engage in . Not always which is why i make that very clear distinction in the essay is that certainly they were creating more dangerously than i was, the riders who came before me in the air that my parents grew up during the dictatorship people had to bury their books and writers were exiled, were imprisoned and there is just this one story of one writer who, there is a period where people would be killed and their bodies left on the street. They decided to stage a play which is about a woman who is trying to get off the street and it went on and the henchmen came to the place and there were a bunch of people in tow this. This is happened before in times past so you know it makes me feel less whiny. I cant whine about my writers because the people i came before me have much greater obstacles but its also term i myself that there are people that still have those obstacles. Im not creating as dangerously as my forebears but i think it still requires a certain level of courage to create anything, to overcome the other instinct inside of you or that others may have been telling you that its not what we do. Charles do you think you are creating changes . That goes back to the fundamental question, why right . There are lots of Different Reasons for writing. I think that sometimes when art is at its best it liberates our perception. We can never see the same subject again the same way. We come out of the story, we come out of the story not as clean as when they went in and thats true for the writers. The writer has to go through a process of challenging himself or herself and you dont come out of the story as clean as when you went and so its a transformative process for the writer as well as for the reader i would like to leave open the possibility that we can create all kinds of art so some of it is maybe just entertaining acus we need moments of joy and laughter and so forth not just always tears and feeling our lacerations. I think that sometimes we create dangerously and other times we create for the joy of the reader perhaps the most dangerous creation is the joyful one, especially with, in the history of this particular nation and our history, the history that we are discussing. Perhaps that is the most dangerous, the most dangerous undertaking to sort of catalog human joy, respect, love. My students are reading all that is reflected in that novel i would say. On that note, im going to. A list of names of people whose questions they are going to ask. It looks like if i have mispronounced her name i apologize in advance. It looks like chris said Ricardo Janelle laud. If you could come up to the mic as these names are being listed off. Ricardo, hazel, janelle, merlene , karl mccaskill, Michael Dasher, dalia elliott. Christian. I mastermind you to be short. We will have about 30 minutes left for questions and answers. And maybe a little bit further discussions so take it away. How are you doing question is is its it predicated on selfpreservation and if it is or why people merely trying to survive . Can you repeat that . Are white people what . Merely trying to survive. Do you feel White Supremacy is predicated on selfpreservation . On selfpreservation. That selfpreservation all too often involves others in their survival and thats been the problem from the very beginning. Its about the ego. It doesnt want to be subordinate to others who do not look like them and its partly the way the eagle operates. I agree and even as you take it to a global context imperialism, it is about the conquering of other lands like your kind especially when it feels threatened. It is based on selfpreservation but its not new. If we were free to do whatever we wanted to do and we all are just out there procreating, 100 years from now would be one color and the old colors would blend out so so they would have to force themselves into world to make black padded white right and so on and so forth so on and so forth and give you this ideology to not destroy white. If you destroy it than they want access but if you spend your life trying to be white people will destroy you. I feel like whiteness is there for a reason that i use to think about race and his harsh but its actually kind of sad once you think about it because its trying to exist. In the sense that you know if we were just procreating it would be one color. So i feel that family with way they could exist. I want to see if you agreed with the theory that i was working on in my head as well. Thank you, appreciate it. Its also an issue of power, who has power and able to carry out all these things that you are talking about and it says much about maintaining power. If you are the slave master, talking about procreation you get the white woman and you get the black woman to. If im not mistaken in terms of the World Population right now im going to give you a conservative and a liberal estimate. The conservative place is why people in 17 of the worlds population is full of color but the liberal statistics is people of color make up i think 70 and white people make up 30 . If you get out of the western fishbowl and that we swim around in its mainly white, predominantly white. You get the idea of what the planet is like. When you when the fish goes in the ocean these people say we are in the minority and they been worried about this for a long time. Look at gatsby, the characters are worried. They are constantly worried about the racial other overwhelming them so thats what that flight is about. You cant maintain that in the world. And perhaps our particular moments of violence is directly connected to that hysteria. As the numbers in the United States become increasingly larger on the people of color that violence, erupting is certainly connected to it. Good afternoon. I was touching back on the basic question. So through literature there is knowledge and my question is, how do you penetrate the mindset or the ego as you put it of White Supremacy and do you think your voice will ever be heard by them through books are for your work . Do you feel those that practice are reading your work . Will that ever touch them . A good question. They dont. My work ill bet you. They dont read much at all. Can literature change the world . We hope. Are we taking turns hear . Thank you for your work and thank you for your service. In the context i am Michael Dasher and the concept of antiblacklist against racialized bodies how can writers change the nature and the content of the talk that parents give children . How can parents teach, i think thats something that im wrestling with is apparent is how warning your children about being careful, about certain prejudices, how to do that withoutalso seeming to limit their imagination, their possibilities with that sort of wanting to be careful building a cage for them too so they arent i can go out in the world. I think if you transfer that to their work, we also want to just write about ourselves. You arent always writing with a white in mine. We want the freedom to speak to each other and i think how parents have to talk to their children about the world is how we want to also talk to one another about who we are so that everything we are writing is not written with that shadow over our heads. I think that also would be at tragedy of White Supremacy if every thing we were riding with died at ive got so how do we do it . I think its being free within ourselves as was said and also, to also allow ourselves that privilege of not constantly having that in the back of our minds or in the background of our work. I have often used the metaphor in terms of what you are talking about. I have a daughter and she is now 34. She has a child and uis have to give the talk to them as some point. My daughters got it well and got it early. The way he used to describe it to myself sometimes i would say if you are black in america you understand that when you are young and looking at here life you are looking at a minefield and this minefield is even by white and black circumstances, you know they are going to blow you up if you put your foot down in the wrong place at the wrong time. We have all sorts of stories of people. The thing you dont want is for your child is a well hell, im just going to sit right here where i am an not me can effort to do anything for myself because it has already faded. But heres the problem. The problem is your ancestors and your predecessors in your mothers and fathers and grandfathers since 20 century, 18th century paid to clear path through the mindset. Some of it got blown up. We know who to lineup. Some got halfway through but they left a map. If we are listened willing to listen to the wisdom of our elders. [applause] when we dont close them off and say their theories dont matter to us. You might very well put your foot down on the bomb and that is what parents are therefore and grandparents are therefore. I dont think we have enough future generational ways that we used to have. We used to have that. I think we need to have more of that. You dont want to poison your kids conscience. You are not going to lie to them. You are not going to lie to them about whats out there. Thank you. Hi. My question is more directed to the subject of the conversation then to White Supremacy. We here in new york city which is the center of the financial world in the media world, the entertainment worldposts White Supremacy, what would that world be like . [laughter] thats a big hypothetical. Absent the White Supremacy win the schools here [inaudible] what is the world we imagine once its there . My sense is the world we live in whether White Supremacy is here or not will still be the same. What are we saying when we say we want death of White Supremacy. What you mean the world would be the same . These are based on we cannot do anything without oppressing you so we talk about death of White Supremacy and what we should be saying is we should live differently. Its the fact that we are ordered to this whole complex. We get our garlic from china and we bind to that we bind to the system. Are we willing to give the system. Its oppressive. Somebody is losing, right . Yeah so how do we prevent that loss . Excellent. Amen, im buddhist. [laughter] im serious. I want all living beings to know happiness and freedom from suffering and that is the way i try to approach it. Thats animals, the whole world is our community and our beloved community. That was the goal for kids. It was the beloved community. There was integrating with lunch counters lunch counters. Maybe that is what you would find in a postWhite Supremacy world. I think thats what baldwin wanted. I guess i very much appreciate what you are saying and focusing on one type of supremacy, that there are different types of supremacy. Therell these different types of supremacy without neglecting White Supremacy that overhauling the whole system is what you are suggesting. Not to prolong it that i would be very blunt Bernie Sanders wants to break up the banks. The banks are not the problem. The problem is walmarts and the problem is everything has gotten so big that it can be valued. Walmart killed smaller farms. We need to figure out how to make everything smaller, not bigger. The enemy as they mbaa, not White Supremacy. How do we build and not things that are more efficient. Thank you. Hello. My name is ricardo. Im with the Shadow League and ive been writing for 15 years professionally. Ive written dozens of racial pieces however nothing in comparison to what you have written and each one is laborious and heavy. What i want to know is how do you insulate yourselves emotionally and do you have any suggestions. Is that one for me . Thats for anybody. You were talking about the reaction you never see to to your pieces . No im speaking regarding insulating yourself from knowing the socalled secret, you know being aware of for example when you learn what nixons advisers said yeah as black people it drove me crazy. I wrote about it and still i feel the residual. When i wrote about travon and when i write about dirty cops, everything stays with me and ive heard myself in my own way but still its just so nasty. Have you insulate yourself from the process . In 1998 are wrote 12 stories about slavery called africans in america. There was a compendium volume of a fourpart pbs series. It was very powerful especially bad for show on slavery and i wrote them because Patricia Smith actually wrote the text for that based on the series but a short story writer to dramatize the records. I put off writing them for over a year. I had to research and go through it. I put it off for year because i knew was going to happen to me. I told my wife and son and daughter im going to be gone for a month i will be physically here. My mind is going to be in the 19th and 18th centuries in i knew at the had to do to myself. I had to feel the most profound suffering. If im going to write about People Living in the slave experience. I dont like to hate. I dont like to hate. That does more damage to me than it does to the hater. In order to do the stories i had to feel hate, murderous hate. As a matter fact the last chapter is called merger is spot. I did three weeks so i didnt have to stretch it out over a long period of time and that was 1998. In january i wrote the stories in a month. There is still they are still part of me thats damaged, i know that. Something will come up as a subject and i will experience hatred but heres the difference. I have mindfulness which means i know im not my thoughts and i know im not my meetings my feelings. I can be aware of them. If you want to hang onto it you can and you can increase your suffering but you can also say why am i feeling hatred towards that person . Maybes because he reminds me of the character wrote about. So if you step back from your own find you realize you are not your mind. Your mind is conditioned eye society and its been conditioned by parents and others and you can undo that if you are willing to practice. That might help. Every time you book in a book, if it bleeds, it leads in journalism. We have a lot of bloody things we can talk about but that wont ease your conscience. I think its important how you would feel, thats how i think how you would feel if he didnt write it. I will feel horrible. Exactly. Also i try to think in those situations what its like for the person living it. Its much worse than writing about it so i think its important to do selfcare. Selfcare is something in the talk of activists and its very important. So you dont get ptsd over what you do. Its important to do some kind of selfcare but also i think those of us who are drawn to those kinds of stories would be worse off if we didnt write them. Thank you very much. [applause] hello. I agree that racism will never end, therefore we are left to navigate the society. What suggestions do you have to assist us in this process . Could you repeat that . I agree that racism will never end, therefore we are left to navigate society. What suggestions do you have two assist us in this process . I have got a thought. I think we should see ourselves the way immigrants do. We know we created this place. We cocreated america so we should also be aware of why we are here. That is to say ask yourself why are you here in this country and what you want from this place . If you can figure out how to get it, then when you have got it are you prepared to realize that youve got a . In other words you dont want to get attached and you have got to be focused and you have to get your kids focused early two. The important thing is just like the attitude of the immigrant that comes over, you have to say to yourself why am i hear . What is this place up with another place does . I remember in college there was a guy in journalism with me because i was a journalism major. He was from, and he said to me the thing i like about america is no matter what you want to learn there is somebody here who can teach it to you. That is the way he put it to me about why he liked america. I always see america as a place that there are skills you can get my want to get them. Its a lot easier for me to publish here than some other places. Ask yourself why are you here . What do you want from this place and then have the awareness to say okay maybe ive got it and maybe its time now to back off. In terms of your navigation through this life. We have about 10 minutes left and we have a few questions left. Edwidge did you want to answer that question . We are going to ask. [inaudible] my name is myrlie in and i have a question about cultural responsibility and the black experience when writing. I wanted to know how do you navigate as writers when theres a pull between your identity in meaning me being black but also being a woman and wine to embrace the aspect of writing that may not include me as a woman . How do you deal with that . We have another question. I name is christian and i have a question regarding White Supremacy and its different or diverse forms in the International World to scholars such as bill einstein talk about the importance of polypersonality the truth of people around the world and the dangers of providing one prescription to one single issue. How can activists and allies expanded understanding of polyversatility . We are going to be practicing some folly polypersonality blending these questions. I think we have one more right here and thats her last questioner. Go ahead. News Edwidge Dandicat and mr. Johnson, im a Senior Citizen but you are my ancestors. I am blessed by your work. Your work is elegant, heroic, profound and its always a blessing to be here. I paid her to say that. [laughter] its just incredible. My question is this. For those of us who have completed work, what do we look for in choosingeditors and agents that will be supportive to us and our experienced . What should we look for and where are they and also what would you say about advising us for the courage for that journey . I dont know if im asking for you to lay hands or what but its such a difficult process and it requires so much and especially for those of us who have been raised in the 50s, that our First Priority is family and our race and our children, our husbands, our grandchildren. How do we get to a point where we can do this with all that we have to, that we are responsible for and all the many people who look to us . Thank you. Thank you. Im not sure out into the question. I think we came through the same journey if you were growing up when i was growing up and family was really important. The family unit was a survival unit for the longest time. How do you combine that with artistic productivity . Polypersonality. To the last question, trying to work backwards, i think you know when we talked about some of that dangerous creations but also being bold enough to take on this task, to be vulnerable even standing here and talking about that is something that i think you can return to the work. The only part of it that i feel like we have not even told control but more all over is what we are doing, the writing itself. I think you want to try to get that to the best point that you can and then to attend things like this and to make connections and to send the workout and finding out the way the people are doing it these days which is mostly on line to really inform yourself about where your work might find a home but first you do the best work that you can. Thats really the only part of it that you can control and to not be afraid to be vulnerable and at network and do the best work you can. To the johns question about the diverse truths of people around the world, i think now in the discourse we hear a lot about internet intersection l. Ab and thats one place we can take that global. We were talking about earlier for example one thing that has been fabulous for me to see in my lifetime is that usually we have two develop issues in different ways. Yet the feminists and he had the immigrants and you had the people who were concerned about violence and now miami where i live its dreamers to our young people whoare who came here very young but are still very much involved in black lives matter and very much involved in whats happening in haiti and brazil and all of this and more and more the new generation is realizing we have these intersections where your struggle is my struggle and if we really can see like the gentleman was saying we really can have change without one another. And the merging of identities, that is what writing should be. We do it sometimes for this reason that the most wonderful thing about it for me writing is becoming somebody else and so you should really feel free within your imagination so you are not thinking, if you want to write thats whats great about some unlike octavia butler. Its like escape. You can go to the past, you can go to the present but you can also go to the future and write about different people. You can be a black woman writer. Im going to write a book and if you can feel free to do all of that. Which actually brings us back to the beginning of our discussion, the discussion of the intersection now they seems to be the roadmap that our ancestors had for us. I think thats a roadmap we have to follow as we move into the future. So i think we are done. I think thats it. Ladies and gentlemen i want to thank our panelists, Edwidge Dandicat and Charles Johnson and all the Great Questions in your attention. Thank you very much. [applause] yes, thank you so much. I want to leave with this quote from Charles Johnson. When odd is at its best it liberates our perception. I love that quote. Thank you so much. Given other hand pleas for our panelists. [applause]