Signup for a newsletter. This event concludes with time for your questions that if you like to ask the speaker something locate the q a button wherever it is on your display or you can submit your questions. We will get through as many as time allows. If you go to the chat section we have included a link to our website we can purchase a copy of another if youre we have book or would like to contribute to the series with also included in the chat link. We appreciate any and all support. Lastly, as you may know if you purchase to participate in virtual large gatherings we apologize in advance pick the thing that can still does occur will do our best to resolve any issues. And now im so pleased to introduce two nights speaker. Calvin baker is a novelist, journalist. Is author of four acclaimed novels including race a finalist for best fiction. He currently teaches in Columbia University graduate school of the arts and is taught at yale university, middlebury college. His nonfiction work has been featured in publications including harpers, New York Times magazine and elsewhere. Katy odonnell is a Senior Editor at bold type books wishes work with authors [inaudible] she began her publishing career at the overlook press before joining bold type books and 2015. Tonight will be discussing the latest book, a more perfect reunion. [inaudible] spanning the first constitutional conference to reconstruction from the civil rights to a present moment. [inaudible] the instrument of progress americans have made not be confused with [inaudible] the result is a book that is eloquently crafted as it is time and responsive, a book which the publisher calls a rich account analysis of just history, politics and culture. We are so honored to host this event today. Without further ado i will not turn over to calvin baker. Thank you so much. Calvin, how are you doing tonight . I will. Thank you for doing this with me. Of course, of course. This will be great fun. Im excited to have this conversation. I knew i would get you to do one. Katie was the editor of this book and weve been working on this in 2017, so shes been just invaluable in the process of making it a joy. We wanted to start with some First Principles or some assumption that we think we can make in this space because i think we have been come into smaller where were having an of the conversation, another National Reckoning and talking about race in america. Weve been doing that as a know for a long, long time. So why dont we start, lets start in the middle or lets start and make something clear. One of the things i wanted to say is we dont have to talk about or explain that we believe in the humanity of black americans, like people, all people of color in the u. S. We believe and we know about how Structural Racism works in this country. Theres probably some other things want to add to that list, calvin. Correct. We think that we know because the field of forms is so aware of this idea systemic racism i do want to begin this book for people who are intelligent and dont need to be told the things that you just said, that racism is bad, but who think deeply and have some prior knowledge about ways, about history, about american culture. And to avoid the repetition because the spirit of employment is one that begins with the revolution itself, in the years leading up to the continental congress. People realize they had a race problem and we have realized weve had a race problem again and again and again, and were realizing it a new. The things we are saying have all been said before and i began the book assuming that we know these things come they are on the record, you can go back and you can read de tocqueville. You can read douglas. You can read baldwin, and so forth. And that, the question how do we move forward is a more active question. And i think some of the other conversations that we wanted to avoid. Right. So why integration and why that word . We talk a lot about diversity, inclusion, representation. We even talk about desegregation but you are very clear about talking about integration, but that is our goal and to define any particular way. Talk to me about that. It was an intuition, someone who long studied African American history, integration was the real goal, because race makes no sense, because race is a construction. So what is it . What is it the Civil Rights Movement is really about. Its integration, and you go back through the record and you see thats where malcolm in sup, thats were martin inset. Thats what douglas in the de tocqueville writes this in the 19th century where he says there are two ways for these people to go, you must wholly part or wholly integrated. Thats it, thats it. And then styling further and further back theres a lawyer from the 1600s who points out and theres a lot of revolution figures point out we can end the slavery but how to integrate these people . Thats what everyone was doctor thats with abolitionist were stuck because you could beat abolitionist and still harbor racial feelings come negative racial stereotypes against africanamericans. You could be a liberal and still build a life for yourself that segregates you. For me integration was not assimilation, right . Because that reduces or flattens the black south, not diversity but you can hide a lot of things in diversity. You can put a we are the world, people gathered say now we have diversity. Why integration i mean making available and accessible all the tools and opportunities in American Society to all its citizens. That is what the countries historically shied away from when it comes to africanamericans. When we talk about things like the new deal or the g. I. Bill, its always but not for them. Even now in the National Conversation people saying im willing to sacrifice to make things better for black people. Unwilling to give up we dont think its a giving up when you talk to anyone else. When we talk of european immigrants coming here we sit theres enough for everyone. That is what we do. We create opportunity. But when it comes to africanamericans its always an assumption somehow a zerosum game, so its a competition and i wanted to push past that because there are all of these psychological barriers in the american mind, in the mind of all those who have been colonize or who have colonized. Where it comes to race. How do you move past that . You have to go to the material conditions, the cultural conditions, the interlocking structures where race is, that create race. The heart sites of law and economics, the softest sites, culture and education, but the narratives that we learn and the things that we here in private. And then our interpersonal and interpersonal relationships. How i think about you, how you think about me, how we think about myself, i think of yourself. All those places are race and we talk about things like diversity or you talk about postracial or colorblind, you find the people want to be on did. 90 of the country supports principles of racism but when you come down to those mechanisms that we know create greater opportunity for africanamericans, people stop. So why did they stop . As this book shows, the first half of it really delves into the history of the country and the moments at which we have stopped. And part of it is race so defines america, has always so defined america that we have a hard time imagining what this country is without it. So talk a little bit about that. Why do we keep getting stuck . I want to correct that slightly, and in the beginning, if one goes back to victorian england, sorry, elizabethan england, you dont have these structures of race. In shakespeare that are shades of skin color. There is radiance of hair texture but its not race in the way that we recognize that, and race is a thing that is constructive, constructed hand in glove with the slave states. Frederick douglass says anything made can be unmade. When you ask the question of why do we stop, you are talking why dont we i make this . There are two essential mechanisms i would argue. One of them is a real resistance on the part of american conservatives, and this begins in the revolutionary period. Theres very little and it continues in the civil war and then snaps back and theres nothing being said in this current moment on the right that is not been said before your they are not original thinkers. They use the new tools and they pass these down from generation to generation. Its true on the left as well in different ways. Because race becomes Something Like, i call it a belief system, Something Like a religion. It is the thing that shapes us. In some cases its very consciously fused to create an american melting pot, and there are things come all these people, new immigrant groups as a did at the turn of the 20th century, over from europe. Well, how do you make when people out of them . I talk about david nassau was an amusement book, and one of the things you see happening is you give them and their did of whiteness. How to create whiteness . If you have a price of admission you can go to a ballgame, you can go to a theater. When you see the ballpark a second, there are no black players there. They theater a showing minstrel shows, literally. This extends to advertisement as of this is the culture itself is creating, giving this a narrative of racism. The grading africanamericans and telling you you are not bad. Whiteness is at the construct exists in opposition to that which is not black. It is not brown. It is not yellow. And so to go directly to the question, if thats negative shapes you, its hard to let go of because, and even in ways you say like im not a racist, someone had some heinous crime, im not a racist, there were two shares in North Carolina talking about the need for basically a final solution they say but we are not racist. Right. And on the left we say as long as im not that, then i am not racist. We had these narratives of race that are constantly reinforced. They are reinforced every time you open a newspaper, go to the cinema. They are also told in private. So we have a performance of race that we do in public for the benefit because it socially unacceptable to be racist, however, we have another conversation, other conversations in private. And you say things that i use the david chase example here, when he says to his credit he admits it about its also completely unaware when he says i grew up in a family. They worked what you called white sheet racists. But it was just the sense that they want to take what you have, or they are this, that or this. Everyone is going up with that. Yeah. I guess the question then is how do we get out of this rut or this way we do find ourselves . We have grown up with this. We cant imagine a world beyond it so we keep having the same conversations over and over again. How do we have a different conversation . I think youre to focus on outcomes and one of the things that i was thinking but as i was writing the book, walking through new york city and looking at all these spaces that we would say are integrated, and then going a bit deeper and sitting actually this is simply a performance. We are adjacent to one another. And asking the question of every space in which you participate, how integrated is this space truly . By this i mean to what extent is it representative of the peoples of this country lacks are those people free to be themselves . And what degree do i, am i looking through racial frames . Thats an esoteric question, but you go into a restaurant, like why are the only one kind of group or only one kind of person this restaurant . You go into an office and you look at the employee pool, look at the distribution of those in position of power. All of those are racially segregated spaces. And the way to move beyond that, to desegregate all of these spaces, and fats were people stop. Because it means going back, it becomes an interlocking system will. I am the manager of the company. I would like to increase my pool of africanamerican applies but theyre not coming from universities i recruit from. So you just move that down. I they dont have the test scores, or theyre not coming from the high schools we recruit from so you push it back and you go to the high schools and you say well, in the case of new york city they didnt pass Admission Test to get into the most selective schools. The problems in the middle school and the problem is always somewhere else. In fact, it is always places. I want to talk a little bit about how long youve been thinking about this book. You were just saying you walked through the city educate that new york city will be both live is a melting pot, is an integrated city but it is anything but and you move your spaces and that word adjacent wooden sticks out to me. I know in your fiction you have been working through some of these questions for a long time and trying to understand what a free consciousness really means. But why this book and how did you start feeling like this is the book i need to write . Ill tell the story. In my fiction, and this has been a 20 year long project, and i have been writing about what it means to live in a multicultural Pluralistic Society world and also what it means to inhabit a black consciousness that isnt performing itself for white but this is w beat the boys said black americans dont yet have full selfconsciousness wb the boys. Agency of itself and thats that show what does it mean to have a fictional world in which one does, i was talking to a brilliant friend who knows a lot about books and he said to me one day, calvin, youre too far ahead of people. Youre answering questions that pop to problems people dont know the half. And i sat with that, like whats the disconnect . Oh, i get can also this frustration that i was talk about i want to talk about a whole society, a wholesale in my fiction. I wanted to talk about the relationships and connections between america and the rest of the world. I wanted to talk about the ideas always been a multiracial space, always and as ive been a black presence. I cant get there until i move past race. Look at the conversation that we are having about race and just a real frustration, someone who grew up reading baldwin, grew up reading du bois compassed a lot of research in history, where we are repeating ourselves now. We may not be saying it is wrong the second time, the third time as we did in the first instance. Were beginning to have to have conversation and not only that but those conversations that sells are being captured, being captured economically. So what do i mean by that . Its a performance. It becomes a performance and you talked about this a little bit. They are necessary performances in some cases. They help people. They are cathartic. Baldwin makes isolate 1940s or early 1950s, about protests and how protests the news or flattens at the sill. It is devoid of life because all youre doing is reacting against. The cell is so much more than that. I wanted to make a book that spoke to the whole self, that was as much art as might come as much mind as consciousness, and that meant what does that mean . What does it mean to talk about these problems in a hallway . Whole way . I talk about a quote from freud, and lets pretend that rome is a physical entity, a technical one in which nothing that as one comes in existence will ever cease to exist. Meaning that with these layers of our theology. You go to your therapist can you talk about your childhood, talk about your dreams. Like in an nation all these things exist, right, and race is infecting all this point. If im just protesting against police shootings, im not talking about whole self, im not talking about a whole society. Because everything is policed. How do you move past not simply that harm to the body but that harm to the spirit, that harm that happens every day in major in minor ways . The only answer to that is integration. It took a lot of digging. Now i have reasons. You go back and read everything. You dig through the history and you go to the culture and you break down a lot of the silos, or a lot of the academic silos. So if i know history, i dont necessarily know liturgy. I dont necessarily know sociology but also we compartmentalize our conversation about race. Now were going to talk about the race problem. After this we will go watch football. Right, right. Were not going to talk about music or popculture. Right. We were not going to talk about public commons, the way our cities are organized, with our towns are organized. We wont talk about these things. We just going to talk about this abstraction called the race problem. We will learn a language, perform it, and hope that it takes us to where we need to go. It never does. Right. So in investigating this in the book, you make some choices. You told us the story of someone like Benjamin Montgomery who i, despite having read some, not enough history but worked on history in the space, did not know the store and i wanted you could talk about his story and what it represents. I love the story of been montgomery. One of the first black towns in the country, comes to his existence right after the civil war. Its founders, a man named Ben Montgomery who was born in virginia, is sold down the river, is purchased by a lawyer named davis who was Jefferson Davis is a brother, the president of the confederacy. Montgomery runs the plantation. He turned to from a backwoods operations to think the fifth or third most profitable plantation in the state with a lot of profitable plantations during the war. And his running Jefferson Davises location as well. During the war he is lending both Davis Brothers money. He eventually buys the plantation outright for her, i think it was 8 million in current dollars, in cash, and then after, during reconstruction he loses possession of it, a challenge from the very large davis clan. Emus the town north. But this idea, davis was fascinating to me because, what a remarkable man to thrive under these conditions, the relationships that he has with these people, the people being the davises, is nearly equal. He is still a slave but he is respected. Jefferson davis tried to have a patent issued from one of montgomery inventions. You say oh, this is exceptionalism. This is something that we know whereby, if this is something one sees about the history of race. I talk about that as a way of showing, you can have completely racial state, and davis was utopian. He considered himself a benevolent master. He considered himself an enlightened mississippian for his day and for his place and time. Arguably he was as we consider ourselves enlightened, what it means to be what it m