editor after reading this to go and retell this story in a different way. is that how you read it? it doesn t really feel like a first novel or first draft. i think it could have been what we are seeing. the skeleton of the first draft might have been there. we see some passages that really reproduce verbatim in to kill a mockingbird. it must have been a draft at some point, but she must have gone back to it and done significant revisions. there are just so many places where there is a clear assumption that we ve already read this book. pop out of the book for me into the real world. people were having all the feelings about the fictional white hero or whether he actually is or not. really? in the midst of black lives matter we are all stressed out whether atticus firchl might
right as white people, yet they are arrested shook down and it s actually an effective way to get the attention of people who think to themselves, oh maybe this is sort of part of a system that is more racist or has disproportionate effects. so it can be effective. i would also suggest, just to get everybody mad at me here black lives matter is great as a kind of testimony of individual worth in the face of a system that for too long has not valued those people and the media hasn t covered this. they re doing it now because there s video and facebook and twitter, and people can root around that but as an organizing tool for changing criminal justice policy i m not sure it is as effective. you re going to take some fence sitters on this and say, look i want to change the system but you ll call me a racist. what they will say is we have a set of laws on the books that are not enforced fairly. the laws of marijuana are not
three sort of books. at the end in that third part you do get to the politics of it you do get to the idea that at the moment you re finally beginning to see a light, nela has come home you re starting nursing. having a child born to seizureurrogace and then nursing and the feeling a mother has about similac, your privacy gets outed. i know an awful lot about you all now, having read this text. how do you make the choice to go further public after being exposed this this way rather than just pulling back? i definitely had an instinct to cower in shame when all of this happened. and part of that was my own sense of being a failure somehow and having not kept my own baby safe. i literally failed to hold onto
girls all the way through women are viewed are often perceived as unruly as wild. when we get older i know i ve had it calling me the angry black woman, so these perceptions, then when they re turned into actions leads to unfortunate circumstances. and so and too often we forget because we think that the numbers of black women who are killed by police are lower because we disregard it. right. really what s happening is black women are dehumanized in the same ways and sometimes sexualized on top of that and we forget that story. that question then of how we even as we are insisting that black lives matter think about the different ways and different formulations of black life, would an older black life would a younger black life they are seen as distinct and yet still create vulnerabilities?
but part of the reason there is this ground swell is there is a national concern about what s been going on. let me ask you this are you able to characterize in any way for us what that dash cam video shows? well, it shows that she stopped. it shows that there is the officer that goes out and makes contact with her and initially after getting the license and goes back to his car and writes her up it seems or at least he alleges that he wrote her a warning, and then after asking her to get out of her car because he was, from my perspective, irritated with the manner in which she was addressing him, he then opened her door and was looking to force her out. so, again, the real question is why is it that he thought it was