[music] i titled it the Promised Land because even though we may not get there in our lifetimes, even if we experience hardships and disappointmentsalong the way , i at least still have faith we can create a more perfect union, not a perfect unit but a moreperfect union. [music] good morning and welcome to a very special edition of Washington Post live. Im michelle noris, opinion columnist for washington pos and founding director of the race cd project and for this special conversation this morning i enjoyed by my dear friend elizabeth exander, poet, scholar and president of theandrew w mellon foundation. Good morning elizabeth. Good morning michelle, its wonderful to be together. It is wonderf to be together and together we both welcomed our guest for ts conversation, the 44th president of the United Statesbarack obama. I assume you recognize that guy there, good moing. Hey guys. The Washington Post brought outthe big guns for this. Are so excited to see you. I am very gratef that you
Update there are two i want to start with. One is this monumental biography of Frederick Douglass, probably the definitive biography of Frederick Douglass especially with what is going on in the United States in terms of the fight for Racial Justice nobody was more consequential and has been more consequential on the question of race in america than Frederick Douglass, way ahead of his time. He was not only in abolitionist and passionate abolitionist as a former slave but he insisted from the earliest time in the 1840s right through his death toward the end of the Nineteenth Century that equality was the goal and he would brooke no deviation from that. Very clear what the goal was. So many of his words ring true today and i really recommend the biography. It is a long read but really powerful. Guest one of the things i learned about Frederick Douglass is he was also a very active suffragist. Absolutely. Very consistent and had a distinguished career and was able to talk to a mixedrace
That. If you have a question, you will see below our speakers here the ask a question button. Simply type in that question, youre not disturbing anybody else, theyre not seeing what youre typing at the moment, and youll have that question in the queue when we get to the q a portion of the evening. Another interesting part is you can look and see what other people have asked. If you like the question they asked, you tap a little like thing, and that sends it up higher on the queue. To if a lot of people are interested in a question and theyve clicked on it, thatll be the question weve noticed first to ask professor smith at the end of the evening when we get to the q a portion. Finally, buy the book here, you click on that, and even after this event is over, theres a button that takes you right to our web site where you can purchase a down of chicagos great fire. A copy. Big box Stores Like Amazon and target and walmart are all doing really well right now during the pandemic. The places
Im sarah and im in harlem. I wrote the yellow house to answer what is a basic and also annex substantial question about who belongs, whose stories get told. I wanted to speak a voice into the literature. I wondered why the stories of me and my family and my nieces and nephews didnt exist in the narrative of new orleans. I wanted to make a book that was the beginning of an answer to a question about how our lives matter and how we deserved to also be on the american map and in the citys stor cities story. This book is not only a book about the house i lived in and loved and that in certain ways remains a part of me but its an attempt to think about what it actually means to belong to a place, what it means to feel that you have somehow come from a place that has shaped you and made you into the person you are. For me, American Ingenuity i understand because i come from the city where jazz was born and so what it teaches us is we pull from all the disparate pieces of the world the things
Across the United States. We will speak to members of the Standing Rock sioux and Navajo Nation and go to north dakota, which has the highest covid19 death rate of any state or country in the world. Then democracy now cohost Juan Gonzalez looks at how the Corporate Media missed the real story about latinx voter turnout in the 2020 election. Juan the main story is that in an election which saw historic tnout, people of color, and especially latinos, had an unprecedented increase in voting. And they, not white voters, represented the bulk of that increase. Amy plus, we will speak to antiracist activist bree newsome bass and princeton professor eddie glaude about the election of joe biden and Kamala Harris. We have to get about the work of responding to the problems we face as a nation at scale and not returning back to some sense of normalcy, which in some ways laid the foundation for the disaster that was and is trumpism. Amy a that d more, coming up. Welcome to democracy now , democrac