Came about your book. I was sent this book by the good folks at cspan and they were like, we have this new book coming out. The mind if we send it to you to check it out . Id love to check it out. And i read your book and i was blown away by it. Just the power, the honesty , the critique of a larger structural challenge thats taking place and how it impacts individuallives. So it is really a distinct pleasure. Host guest youvery much. Host and even before, i had so many questions i wanted to ask and i didnt prepare to sit down with you, even before that i love to talk to you about your process. This is a new type of, its not your first book but its a new type of book then what youve done before. What was your process to getting to the point where you were like, i wanted to tell this . Guest there are a lot of different pieces to that in all honesty. Michael was an amazing person and he himself was a very talented writer. He had a hard life that ended early but before he died, we always thought he would tell his own story so in the back of my head there had been a question of how to tell michaels. At the same time im a professor, i live in universities, i had an invitation from professor at harvard to give a lecture called the do boy lecture so this is a famous lecture series and the purpose of those lectures is to try to Say Something about africanamerican experience at whatever time the lecturer is speaking and i agreed to do these lectures and i kept referring to the date of them and i kept getting these abstract titles, race and equality, and so forth and as they get closer we finally had the dates on the calendar and i thought i couldnt possibly try to talk about africanamerican experience in contemporary america without telling the truth of the story of my cousins life. So that was the first big thing was committing to doing it and the second thing was reaching out to my Family Members and saying can i have your permission to do this because its everybodys story, but especially michaels mothers tory and i needed to interview people to put the pieces of the story together and the most important thing, one of the hardest things is its embarrassing to say but my family never talk about what happened to michael. Sorry. So when i went around to interview my Family Members it was the first time, it had been years since he died. It was the first time we tried together to understand and that seemed to me the worst thing about these events in peoples lives, the fact that we dont bring the stories to the surface and never achieve understanding. That was true in our family and i think we are a microcosm, thats happening all over the country. But as a result of that we have a profound failure to understand whats happening with young people. Young men of color in this century and im embarrassed that it took my family so long to talk about this story so the process at the end of the day, you asked about process was about a family coming to understand itself. That was the core of what writing thebook was about do you feel like now the process has become to this beautiful tangible , inclusion if you want to call it that, where is the family now . Im so grateful. Its really my aunt in particular is an incredibly strong woman and from the beginning she said yes, tell michaels story, come talk to me and im grateful to her for her openness and willingness and grateful that she has said that for her this has been an experience of liberation herself and that its brought her piece finally along a number of different dimensions and whose siblings have also expressed gratitude and for all of us, all these crazy things, everybody had a piece of the puzzle and everybody was wrestling to try to what happened to this wonderful child and when you put all the pieces together you can make sense of it and there is absolution in that kind of sense making. Host i was struck by the title because in some ways i feel like the title is this beautiful double entendre because its cut. Thats my cousins, thats my family but its also because. Almost like the cause. Can you talk about that and how you felt about even the title . Guest thats a great question and it does does go back to process, a writers process. When i was a kid i loved poetry, more than anything else, i wanted to be a poet when i grew up and thats the single biggest and i wanted to be. Im not a poet, i didnt do the work you have to be but poetry has always stayed with me andgiven me access to making sense of my world. So as i was wrestling with the need to tell michaels story, it literally came to me one day that the story was called cuz. Thats it, it disappeared and i knew what to do. I understood that i was answering those why questions and i said what are my why questions . Why was he killed, why did he end up on that Street Corner holding a gun trying tos take somebodys heart. Once i knew that those were my questions, i had a way of approaching. But it was, it was just poetry gave me the title. Theirs is. Host theres a section of the book id like you to read if thats okay. Its this paragraph here on page 60. And i have highlights all over the book but that paragraph there where you see the scar, if you could read that paragraph. Guest okay. Just where it starts here and not the line below . Okay. Eight years after i got grounded for sneaking to class in a friends car, my 15yearold cousin, Michael Alexander allen who also didnt have a drivers license was arrested for the first time for an attempted carjacking. A fewmonths later after he turned 16 he sat in california in court , that standard kind of swinging gate inside the doors of the courtroom, wearing an orange suit. December 1995 and january 1996 the judge determined he would be charged as an adult. Host its the story of children. Guest yeah. It is. Thats what struck me, i was a kid in Southern California, i wanted wheels. I wanted my wheels to speak to my classes. But anyway, i wanted that mobility and i was not allowed by my parents to ride a car, that was one of the rules and my cousin wanted mobility, he wanted wheels, in context one of the worst neighborhoods in los angeles so i pursued my mobility in a way that was not viewed dangerous so i was lucky, i got grounded and my cousin pursued it in a way, taking this car and ended up in prison. Host when he started going through this process, you do the detail about what that history did to him. Where almost like a conclusion of michael because you come to a complete conclusion of your brothers life where it had almost been like this has been baked in a long time ago. What was that like for you watching that happen in realtime to your family . Its clichc to say but its a different living through it from looking back on it. Looking back you know where it comes out and you can see the trajectory. Living through it, all your energies are directed towards the trajectory and a direction other than the predictable one. And the nature of hope is that you have to concretely imagine an alternative trajectory, you have to. So i think thats part of the challenge because you cant actually proceed without hope, yet hope by definition pushes against the most clear eyed view you might have of reality. You have to separate from that. I think its a really hard thing in that contrast between what you need in order to hope and move forward and the sort of dynamics of predictability and so forth that you are trying to overcome and ultimately you dont overcome. For the people who are going to watch this who havent yet had a chance to pick it up and read the book, can you talk about your background and your childhood . Sure. Im one of two kids, i grew up in a college town in Southern California, younger older brother so im faculty brat, my mother was a librarian there. And in many ways our Nuclear Family was the kind of essential academic family. Lots of clubs, going to conferences, this kind of thing. Parents in the summers and so forth but my dad was from a big extended family. He was one of 12 siblings who had grown up in southern florida, an africanamerican family, many of them had ended up in Southern California so we had lots of cousins and i used to say i cant count the number of cousins i have and family holidays and things like that and we had one set of cousins and we were close, my dads youngest sister karen and her children and a lot of time with us. She, a single mom worked her way into nursing and was a very hardworking, consistently working single mother but she was a single mother and its hard to stretch the time and space and resources around three kids so their lives did not have the stability that my mother and i had but we did spend a lot of time together growing up. Talk about michael background, who was michael . Just a beautiful kid, gorgeous mouth. First thing everybody always said was this incredible smile. He was a motormouth, super talkative kid. He had a stammer when he was little that you always felt like the stammer was he had so much he couldnt get it all out fast enough. And he just was a very loving kid, very gentle kid. This is one of the crazy things about his story is he ended up inprison or arrested for a Violent Crime and attempted carjacking, yet he is not a person who had been violentin our lives, in the lives of friends. Theres nobody that we knew growing up , he was a very gentle personality. Host how did that happen . How did the person who everybody would say this is not a violent person, a person who goes out to hurt people but ends up involved in a Violent Crime, what was that like west and mark. There are a couple things to say, i did a lot ofwork , i had this information act request to get documents from the Police Report to arrest and some of the judicial records so one of the most amazing and important but recognizable details in the Police Report was the witness , the victim of the carjacking testifying that michael had had his gun pointed at the ground the entire time. Thats right, this is not a kid who was shooting at somebody but why was he there in the first instance . I think you have to compress it into a very small answer, it is that when he was 10, his mother met and married a man with high hopes of course for the future but he was violent and it was a destructive and unstable relationship and in a period of five years from the point of meeting and marrying him, the family moved frequently and michael went to five schools so he went to five schools and five years with that happening in the middle of the Academic Year and that 10 to 15 period, critical age that we are all going through. Its these hormonal changes in trying to figure out who you are and so forth. I was thinking if he was very lonely and isolated in all the moves to different places so when they landed back in los angeles, when he was 14, then there was a world of gangs i think providing an opportunity for connection and affiliation and as a stranger to that territory, he was obliged to prove himself in ways that people who came up in those neighborhoods work always happy to do. We know that combination of being in a community and being an outsider made him vulnerable to the sort of recruitment of the gang culture. Host was it ever a topic of conversation amongst a member . Guest this is what i mean about the tragedy of our failure to talk and see and know. We had no idea michael was involved in gangs. I learned this by working on this project, michaels mother did not know. She was surprised to learn what i learned. And this is what i mean about having to put the pieces of the puzzle together, a couple people have knowledge about things he had been involved in but they thought thats all there was, they didnt know about the other piece and when you can put it all together you can see a kind of increasing level of involvement in this period from late 13 to 15 and that completely fits the sociological literature. Theres this dangerous period kids start to get involved with and then they have their first arrest, thats a common pattern and it fits michael to a t but literally, none of us knew and thats sad again, just to speak of the question of embarrassment and shame, the fact that we didnt know, theyll to see that, failed to talk or coordinate care for this person we all loved. Theres no question about that, weve had to come to an understanding. And then when hes still just a teenager. Yeah, i think it was. Well, i mean, it was that period in the 1990s in california where california had just in the preceding year to 18 months past the three strikes and youre out law and the judicial system was still figuring out what thatmeant and it was also being used in ways that would be surprising to people. Host just so you understand, three strikes youre out, convicted. Guest convicted of three felonies and its 25 years to life but what people often dont know is you can get more than one l h art from a single incident. The attempted carjacking had to felonies in it. Just in one incident. And those both count when you are adding those up, and after he was arrested, michael confessed that in the preceding couple of days he had also attempted to rob a couple other people and so because he confessed to those, those were other charges they added in. So what the judge said was basically, you get convicted on all these things and you can test all of them, thats three strikes so you are looking at 25 years to life. That was the framework , the rhetorical framework for inviting michael into a plea bargain. Thats the point of that kind of structure. That all depended on the fact that it was a different judge that had made the determination that he be tried as an adult in california, it was in that period and lowering the age, it was very trying youth as adults so michael was caught right in that nexus and got a sentence that when you stack it up to other sentences, retrospectively its unfortunate and disproportionate but i think the experience of living through it was one of being surprised by discovering that the legal train was different then we understood it to be. So just thinking collectively within the family, we just didnt gather forces and resources effectively to respond to the situation. Host and it also feels impossible for him to be able to prepare. An almost unfair. Theres no question that the use of mandatory minimums in sentencing and the three strikes youre out law was produced all kinds of absurd sentences in the american Justice System and the country needs to recognize that. We had an incredibly distorted criminal Justice System where the proportionate injustice is huge and as a society obviously lots of people know that and are trying to talk about it but we need a broader wake up on this topic and yes, i think when you are thinking particularly about kids, offenders and so forth, there is literally, thats probably overstating but it does seem to me impossible that a young person sent to an adult prison is going to come out better off and able to live a productive life. It does not compute because its a brutal place and when you put a young person in their, first arrest, first conviction and they are very much in development as a person, they do have a chance of going in a different direction, you are cutting that chance all i believe so i think juvenile justice is a place where we should completely reorganize and we need to recover the commitment to rehabilitation and development for especially three juveniles. Host you really try to help the reader who if they dont have experience with facilities, if they dont have experience with the Justice System, you really try to in the book make them see it. Make them visualize it, make them understand what we are talking about. Help our viewer right now, help them understand what we are talking about. Guest theres so many little details. You can one end of the spectrum would be to talk about michaels efforts to get an education in prison which in the 90s again, states and federal government just even serrated opportunities for inmates to pursue an education beyond a ged. Theres no access to College Courses and they didnt support to programs for taking College Courses but thats a big structure of everything but i was supporting michael and setting up for their privately paid College Classes in university and you go to enroll for the classes and you learn in prison the only classes he can take are ones that have softcover books. If a course has a hardcover book, you cant take it. Comics, those were always big textbooks so we were reduced to two classes that were viable on this criteria so its a tiny detail and it doesnt the violence of prison but it speaks to the minutest of the control and the just number of hoops you have to work your way through to get anything at all done, even a small thing like enrolling for english 101. So or, just a different example, one of the details that stayed with me is prison life is very structured along racial lines. Whites, latinos, blacks, people are housed separately and theres incredible intense social structure inside a prison and the world of prison is connected to the world of on the streets so things there can affect the dynamics of life inside prison so fights break out and they typically break out along racial lines and so i remember michael telling me one time that he had a latino dance partner was how he described it that when a fight broke out, they would find each other and they would act like they were fighting so that they didnt get hurt and nobody would think that they werent not on the side they were participating on. Thats a key detail about what it takes to survive in a place like that. So theres a lot more i could say but i hope that helps give something of the sense. Host its those small details about survival there that i think are really important to people to be able to understand where its impossible for someone to enter into a situation like that and come back the same. Not necessarily saying irreparably damaged but it is impossible for them to come back. How was he doing . Guest gosh, thats a good question. The camera was gone. The stammer was gone, thats a definite thing, the stammer was gone. He was quieter, more astute. He still had his capacity for gratefulness but where as a child he was just, joyful was his middle name, you could never say that about him any longer. He brought light into social spaces after he was out also but there was definitely a kind of much deeper quiet underneath everything. And i think the other thing is, he was very protective of his mother. It was stronger over time so sort of a real gentle kind of attentive, caring directed at his mother. I think that was, you will often hear that people say fol