Her experience as a ged teacher at rickers prison. Rebcca solnit offer her opinion on changes in the feminist movement. This program contains language some may find offensive. [inaudible conversations] good evening, friends. The latest in the series of events produced by the friends at berkeley arts and letters. We are privileged to have them as a regular contributer to our cultural events. Evan is the boss and you have him and his volunteers to thank for all these wonderful events. [applause] how many of you have been in this hall before . A fair number. That is good. How many havent and havent a clue what this place is . Okay. That is great. I am going to take 30 seconds to tell you about the club. It was founded in 1898 by a group of berkeley women who were concerned about the plans the city fathers had for laying a grid over this thing and paving and grating. Instead they got active, civically active, we think we need more of that these days but they were able to get the city to turn out the way it has and in large measures it is one of the most beautiful cities in this part of the country, i believe. In 1910, that gentlemen under the two lights famous berkeley architect named brenard may back designed and built the first clubhouse. Unfortunately it burned down in a fire and 80 of his clients homes were burned down as well. Bigger than the oakland fire. His brother in law, another architect, john white, built this structure and it has been our clubhouse every since. We have a long tradition of involvement in civic and cultural activities, we do concerts and talks like this and dancers and dinners. If you are interested in joining the Hillside Club, membership applications are in the hall. It is Great Organization to become a part of and help contribute. If you are also, shameless plug, we actually rent this hall for certain discreet events. We dont do fraternity mixers but birthday parties and such. Rentals hillsideclub will get you there. If you have devices in your pocket turn them off, please. If there are any empty Seats Available raise your hand next to an empty seat. A couple. Are we looking for seats still . I think we are good. All right. I am going to bring evan up. Berkeley arts and letters and let him take over from here. Thank you very much. [applause] hi, everyone. Hi, bruce. I want to thank the Hillside Club for hosting us. We have been around for seven years. We host exceptional authors and thinkers with new books. It is a Pretty Simple concept. We have hosted everybody from patty smith to michael kazny and you can find out more about our Upcoming Events at berkeleyarts. Org. Tonight we are excited to be hosting Rebcca Solnit in support of her new book, the mother of all questions further reports from the feminist revolutions, and with her is jeff chang. Very pleased to have jeff back. Anybody here in november when we hosted jeff earlier . Awesome. You are very excited like me to have him back. I just want to thank both rebecca and jeff for being here tonight. These are these guys are asking the hard questions for all of us and fighting on behalf of all of our rights and i want to just give them a round of applause from the beginning. [applause] i am going to read a little bit about them and then get out of the way. Just in case there are books you dont know about. Rebcca solnit is the author of 16 books about environment landscape, community art, politics, hope and memory including the National Bestseller men explain things to me, hope in the dark, the far away nearby, a paradise build in hell, a field guide to getting lost, wonder lust, a history of walking and a river of shadows for which we received the National Critic book award and the landon literary award. A product of the California PublicEducation System from kindergarten to [applause] she is a contributing editor to harpers. As you probably know, the mother of all questions is a new collection of feminist essays. Joiningrebecca is jeff chang. Jeff has most recently published we going to be all right which is a total mustread collection. I should mention we have all the books, not all, but we have a bunch of books in the back. Amy is waving at you right now. It is organized by a bookstore in San Francisco and we would be happy to tell you books tonight. Jeff has written extensively on culture, politic and the arts. His second book was rereleased in paper book under the title when we be a cultural history of race in post civil rights america. He cofounded culture strikes and color lines and serves as the executive director for the institute of arts at sanford. He is a winner of the north star news prize and named as one of the 50 visionaries changing your world. In 2016, he was named as one of his 100 list of those shaping the future of american culture. You guys mind helping me welcome them to the stage. [applause] i didnt want to spill it. I think david was laughing at me for pulling books out of my bag. Thank you to letters, the book smith staff, to the Hillside Club and to all of you coming out. I get the honor of asking you questions tonight. I dont rap. I am not going to rap. I am not going to rap tonight. But shall we start . We shall. The last time we got to talk you had just gotten back, if i remember correctly, from Standing Rock. Was it that long ago . Yeah, i went down there in september and just was a real sense that, you know, that was the center of the world and i wanted to see what was happening. It was amazing being there. I was lucky i went when the weather was balmy and i have so much admiration for the people that stuck it out through the winter. It is one of those things and like occupy, the arab springs, black lives matter where nobody knew it was coming. That is one of the things and i know we are supposed to talk about this book but we could talk about this one, too. Oh, we definitely will. So much about Standing Rock which felt like it wasnt there to address one pipeline but to really remedy and turn half the millennial of disposition and i think in meaningful ways it has done that. We dont know what Standing Rock as done in a lot of ways because it will take decades to find out. But yeah it was amazing being out there. Moderator also, if i remember correctly, when you were coming back from north dakota, you were sitting next to a trump supporter . Guest yeah, this is what happens when you are from San Francisco. I have had two conversations with Trump Supporters. You know, my friends in nevada and new mexico i think have had a few more. I dont know what you remember. But what i found fascinating is both were voting for man who was fictitious. It wasnt even official trump propaganda but their platonic trump. Moderator who is this platronic trump . Guest i sat by a wheat and soybean gmo farmer whose sons both had addiction which you know you are in america with the agarian junkie them. Was this before the grab them by the pussy . He thought the scandals were fabricated and thought trump was more like him than any evidence would suggest. Every four years my amazing friend who organizes this radical progression and it is my sacrifice to try ward off evil. I was in a bleak place ten miles south of reno doing get out the vote. A woman was there badgering me. She was doing get out the vote for trump. She had two things she was committed to. She was convinced undocumented immigrants were preventing her family actually she was egyptian. Undocuments immigrants were preventing her family from illegal immigration. There is a weird relationship there because in some ways you could argue that undocumented or not undocumented approach but the governments approach is the reason she hasnt been able to do it. She was legal and wanted her family to come and claimed people dont get visas or whatever paperwork to become legal grants because of illegal immigrants. Moderator before this the main issue was the quotas they put on countries to get people documented. They got rid of them mostly but it limits the number of folks that can become legal. If you are in the queue and filipino or mexican, it will take you 2030 years to get to the head of the line so to speak. She is right in a weird way but for the wrong reason. Guest she thought it was a numbers game as well. Another thing she told me was that she believed in Climate Change and trump was going to do the right things and not favor fossil fuels. It is like where did you get your information . Like can just go ring door bells and hang door hangers and escape from you because she wanted to argue. Those are my two Trump Supporters except were all the men on facebook. Moderator who are busy explaining. Guest there is variations on the theme. Host i dont want to relive november but i wanted to ask how you are feeling now. Guest you know, after the 2000 election i joked i wanted to open a booth at fairs for people who told me there is no differences between the two and i can there are significant differences. There are five golden sacs people in position of higher power and there is an argument there is no difference and then an argument he is less mainstream and beholden and it is like come on, the guy is wall street. Somebody once told me they didnt Like Health Care because she hung out with rich and powerful people and i was like trump is rich and powerful people. So, i dont think if it is surprising except the beauty and intensity and courage and res t resistance. I thought it might be like life after 9 11 when people were intimidated and afraid to speak up but we are not having that problem. People are ferociously energene energetting and beautifully out spoken. You talk about the loudness of now and i want to get into that but i want to talk about what this comes out of. We have this beautiful essay called the short history of silence in the book. So i was wondering if you could Start Talking about how you think about silence as opposed to quiet. Yeah, the english language is full of synonyms and words that overlap. Violence in terms of not listening to traffic noises or something but there is the act of being silenced which i thought could really stand for being iscounted. There is always for the purpose of the essay, i thought it was voluntary removal from noisyness and silence was enforced and you could use that as a summary condition for what feminism has tried to address. The silencing you know that suspends your right to consent or not consent to what happens to you that is agency and the right to vote we finally got in 1920, most of us, and had to fight for all over again in the south for men and women. It was a very interesting essay. I set out to write about the ways women are silenced and i realized gender is a system of reciprocal reciprocal reciprocal recip recip reciprocating. You had to look at the system as a whole. One thing that i think is different about the book is it as much about men and children as it is about women but it is all feminism. Moderator can you about about the ways in which women are silenced and the ways in which men are silenced and how they are different . I am thinking in particular i work at Stanford University so the brock turner case seems to illustrate so many of these things. I am curious if you could unpack what you think are the main differences in the silences and how those silences are overcome in different ways and what that means . I think of male silence as all the things men are not supposed to do, say and like. I recount a conversation with my almost five year old nephew and his favorite colors who three were pink, purple and orange and i knew pink was about going to stay with us. I asked him why he didnt like pink anymore and i know pink was girly and he could not like girl things. He is not yet five. It is not coming from his parents. It is ambiant. I know many tried to keep their son from guns and war things but it is ambient. I went shopping for my notyet born godson in the Clothing Department and the gendering of newborns clothes was shocking. Boys clothes were rocket ships and astronauts and cowboys and Football Players and dinosaurs and reptiles and all this cold active distance stuff and girls were intimate stuff like kittens. We know boys dont cry, men are not supposed to express weakness and doubt and i think that, you know, there is a great deal of deadness. If you go to brock turner to be able to do something horrible to another person, whether it is of any kind of violence, degrading or abuse you have to shutdown empathy. And i have written about it other places that you have to kill off part of yourself before you can become a killing machine. There is a way mens bodies are weaponized as well. They are not tools of experitential and sensation. They are weapons. You see all that in the brock turner case which then had all these interesting wrinkles when the victim spoke up in court and became maybe the most well heard rape victim ever with that incredible letter she wrote. It really kind of turned the able from the power dynamic. She was given a chance to have a voice. She appeared imperfectly because she never revealed her name and there was the threat of stories following her. She read this extraordinary thing that made him sit just with justice diminished him into nothing in a very powerful way and spoke with empathy of all other victims to similar crime and by having the voice and empathy and strength she wasnt destroyed by an act meant to dehumanize and destroy her. Moderator you wrote, if i may read this it is just beautiful, violence against women is often against our voices and our stories. It is refusal of our voices and what a voice means. The right to selfdetermination, to participation, to consent or descent, to live and participate, to interpret and marry. Guest those are what it means to be human. We can talk about physical and Property Rights and economic rights and things like that but at the very core having a voice is what it means to be human. We look at jim crow. There is a lot of ways there is a possession of native american and genocide. You know, the criminalization of homosexuality, the disappearance of the disabled. Feminism is arriving at voices. And it is exciting to see griffin in the audience who is a great feminist heroine. [applause] and a great sort of muse and role muddle. The feminists kept writing about silence. Audrey road andsusan wrote about it and kelly olsen. In the essay, i name a dozen works from feminists who were addressing this. They were clear what was at stake and it was the right to participate, have agency, have a voice, the right to show up and not be silent. Moderator there is a beautiful part of your book wonder lust which is the meditation on the idea of walking where you suddenly short of shift gears up and talk about marching and women marching. And it just sort of is a powerful chapter and one i use a lot with my students. I guess i was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your journey into femnism. Male violence is what made be a feminist. I grew up thinking i needed to escape, escaped and moved to a neighborhood where home was safe but nothing else was. There was massive street harassment and not just like hey baby stuff. That is where the implication is you might get raped or murdered. What was outrageous for me, and still is because young women are still facing it and i am past the age of harassment except certain blurry eyed bums in new york city but you know it is that, you know, it is really a loss of basic freedom of ability to move around to be independent, to you know to be a full participant, to be a member of civil society, to be in public. It is really, really hard to get people to treat it as a civil rights, human rights issue. You know, as a young women i was told i should describe myself as a man, i should buy a gun, i should learn martial arts, i should never leave home alone, i should move to a white suburb, i should make lots of money and have a car, i should be with a man at all times. The fact you are targeted is a problem you need to solve. It is like we dont tell victims of lynching what were you wearing . I think it is a comparable crime. It is hate crime. I think there is an incredible new wave of feminism that is addressing male violence with a refusal to seed ground and kind of collect a voice through social media like we have never seen before. But it is still really hard to get a lot of people behind the idea that the ability to walk down the street without being threatened is a basic human right and one that many people dont have enough. It happens enough and you never feel safe anywhere. Itis like an initiation ritual to tell you that you dont have full rights, billions of people may want to harm you because of your gender, you should think about this in the parking lot. You should think about this in the elevator. You should think about this in the campus. It is deeply damaging. Male violence is what made be a feminist. Moderator there is a beautiful essay i like around these sets of questions. On the one hand we are rigoro rigorously debunking the myths and narratives that silence women and on the other hand there is the hope thing. You sort of there is a way in which i feel like a lot of your writing is about the awe and wonder of what happens when folks come together. When you see parallels between the Natural World and building of movements. I am wondering if you can talk about that and the hopechange thing