Maryland library for the blind in handicap, we welcome you here this evening. It is my pleasure to bring to you Sean Robertson who is a Career Development trainer for the center for urban families. He will introduce this evenings guest speaker, michael denzil smith. Sean. Good evening. How is everybody. Its a privilege to introduce this young man. I told him i spent four hours reading his book. If you havent read it, you have to. Its every mans education. To that degree, to the further extent its actually a womans education as well because when you read his book and you see how rich his perspective is, you get an idea of what it looks like for folks in this generation to really have a global perspective on what it looks like for justice. He has written, i just want to do a quick excerpt excerpt of something he wrote that struck me. He said anger is what makes our struggle visible. It exposes the hypocrisy of a nation that fash is itself a moral leader. Consistently you see things like this. He challenges the way we consider a womans role, injustice in the family and in society and its an awesome book. If you havent read it you need to get the book. Were going to be honest and authentic about this. One of the things that strikes me is how unassuming he is. For someone who writes with this kind of power, who has this level of ability when it comes to writing, you would think he was a lot more boastful or proud or what they would be a level, but i think he understands humility comes before honor and he takes that very seriously and he is unassuming. I told him how good his book was and he said thank you, i appreciate it. Without further ado, i am going to introduce you to michael denzil smith. [applause] thank you so much. Hopefully i live up to it. Thank you all for braving this rain and coming out to hear me read a few selections and talk about the book. Thank you to cspan for filming this. I would say, theres some language in the book and since im going to be reading, i would say this is my first time cursing in a library, but that would be a lie. Please bear with me. Im just going to read a few selections from the i hadnt prepared for life at 25. I believed i wouldnt make it that far. I didnt know how to do that. The other man came to the other side broken. It emerges as living proof of the lies they tell about black boys and men in america. I was doing the same. I knew no other way. Then they killed trey von martin. I looked at the face of the boy who became the symbol and one amor. I wanted more for them between a choice between martyr and token. I wanted more for him them just an opportunity to create himself. I wanted for him, for all the trey vons, a world where he didnt have to grow up broken or not grow up at all. I wanted to figure out how to create that world. I looked in my own life and asked how i made it to 25. I asked to influence me to think the way i did. Were they most important in shaping my worldview or who challenge me to see it differently. I asked myself how did you learn to be a black man. Then i wrote down some answers for the martyrs and tokens, for the trey vons that couldve been and are still in waiting. Im going to read one more section and a little bit. The next section comes in chapter four of the book. The book jumps around in time quite a bit and deals mostly with my College Years and the years immediately after that. Part of the book, part of this section is situated around 2007 or 2008. I dont know how many people remember these six boys in louisiana who were charged with attempted murder for what was essentially a schoolyard fight. That was a spark for me in my activism on campus and the work i was doing as editor at the school newspaper. A lot of the chapter deals with that. Where i am starting gets us right back to zimmerman and trey von martin. There is a question i wanted to wrestle with. We will jump back and forth a little bit and include some later stuff with ferguson and Michael Brown. A few months after George Simmerman killed Treyvon Martin i got my third tattoo. I put invisible man has the whole world watching, albeit from a hiphop. I wanted to do it for a while in the timing felt right. The song, most speaking specifically to the idea of hiphop ringing unfounded attention to the invisible man, he charts black mens rise through labor and commerce. We went from picking cotton to bebop and hiphop and. They have the blue stock option. The invisible man get the whole world legend. It came back to me with home new meaning in question. They extend basic humanity for our integrity or sanity. They didnt choose their visibility. It was thrust upon them by the same system that made them invisible to begin with. Death became a full view of fiber and liquid and death and blood. The price for humanity was their lives. As black man, must we always true, can we not live free with our humanity and sanity intact . Are we destined to be forever the invisible man . Invisible to whom he asks . Growing up i heard nothing about his novel but i finally read it. His question, the 1i didnt hear until watching in late 2013 conversation with a novelist had never crossed my mind but its the most important question to consider while reading invisible man he wrote im invisible to understand because people refuse to see me. People didnt mean every person alive across the globe. Invisibility is established through white people having the inability to see them as a whole person. Being invisible to these systems has consequences. The response to our own question, not me that reveals the novels greatest flaw. It. [inaudible] a year after Michael Brown was killed, i went to ferguson to be a part of a weekend of commemoration. Was only my second time in ferguson having don in november right before the announcement that he would not be indicted on any charges related to shooting and killing brown. The atmosphere was much more tense than when i returned. The anniversary weekend was a time of reflection and in some ways celebration. It was a tragedy that took Michael Browns life but it had resistance that encourage young people who had, one year earlier, decided they would no longer allow the fear of Police Violence to control their lives. There were so many young people out in the street. Twentysomethings down to babies born in the interim year. Whether or not the movement produce substantial changes felt secondary in those moments. I heard five and sixyearold chanting around that black lives matter. They would know regardless of the Political Movement that someone thought their black live mattered. Thousands of people had come to their hometown to stand with them in their right to live free. That was a revolution in itself. Mostly boys. The younger ones running through the streets with their shirts off in the older ones cracking jokes. Those boys are receiving the message. Their lives matter and when those lives are being threatened someone will stand up for them, not just someone, black women. Black women have always been on the front line and behind the scenes to fight for Racial Justice in america. Theres also nothing new in noting that Racial Justice movements tend to focus on black men experience is but they become. This is something that constantly push back against. What hasnt been settled. [inaudible] she was shot and killed in michigan will seeking help after crushing her car on november 2, 2013. There there was no walltowall cable News Coverage of burning a cvs stores after the church right Police Department special team invaded the wrong home and shot a sleeping 7yearold on may 16, 2010. The names and stories reach and remain in our collective consciousness only because social media, twitter insured they would not be forgotten. Being an honest black man and a good writer by saying social media and twitter, those are incomplete. There are black women who force us to Pay Attention to stories that are here and all the rest. Theres black women organizing the early vigils and protest while the stanford Police Department couldnt decide if shooting an unarmed teenager wanted arrest under the law face war to uphold. Those women led the marches and protesters against Police Violence. It it was black women who noticed the wounds from bullets and cared for those breathing teargas. They had safe houses to sleep in. While running through the streets shirtless and carefree learning to love themselves, they also learn to love the black women keeping them alive. She listened through my anger. She coaxed my doubts about being able to step into the role of editorinchief. She stepped up to write her biggest roi. I leaned on to reassure me it was okay to us say Hampton University hates black people. My campus activism kicked up and i would come by a dorm room and worry about her as she stood in a doorway attentive and affectionate and how i repaid her by never saying i love you. I barely said thank you and i never repaid her. She was making time for me, a black boy in louisiana who shared my name. There was pressure to maintain straight as in all the postgraduate nation in my emotional distance but she was there. She saw me. There was deep regret that im unable to say the same. Such is the story of black women standing behind and by black men through the most challenging parts of our existence and black men looking behind and beside ourselves and not seeing black women standing there. We dont even have to ask black women to sacrifice, they do so without request. We dismiss the concern of those and we fail to see their pain as real or in need of our attention. Thank you. [applause] with that i will open it up for questions and discussion. My book is not fiction in that regard. Invisible man is a novel. It is wrestling with the same ideas around invisibility in terms of how we are viewed by the world in that theres an architect and understanding of blackmail life that gets repeated and the interior of our lives are never acknowledged, the ideal that we have feelings and emotions are not acknowledged. Looking at the effects of that, living as an invisible man but also challenging the concept of that invisibility since the novel deals with that particularly through a white gays in asking what does it mean to be so obsessed with the white gays that you believe yourself to be invisible when there are people within your own community that see you but also having this idea of your own invisibility and how can you render others invisible by only focusing on your identity. [inaudible] [inaudible] what about the visibility of president obama and does that impact black identity. What it does, it forces the conversation. His visibility forces us to have the conversations we have now. Being a transformative figure in so many ways, its meaningful whenever he speaks, especially about black people and fatherhood and black political participation. It forces us to have a conversation that if john mccain or mitt romney had been in office. I think this particular era we are wrestling with all of those ideas and unpacking whether or not they are healthy. A lot of them are conservative ideas that harken back to an establishment of a patriot model of family that renders, it doesnt take into account new versions of family that we have been forced to or want to because you do to speeding man and woman is challenging. He serves as a symbol and a token because it pushes us to have that conversation, he was elected in november 2008 but not even a month later oscar grant was killed and i think Something Like that puts it ins stark reality that there will be so many oscar grants than there will be barack obamas. You you can exceptional lies barack obama in these ways and say the problems have dissipated. The problems have disappeared. We have to ask if there are going to be more oscar grants than obamas, what will we do to fix that. We do have to ask what it would be like if he had not been visible in this office. [inaudible] [inaudible] what did you learn about yourself . Thats a very good question. The purpose was to unpack what it was i was learning about myself. I think the biggest thing was my gap in the understanding of what liberation politics look like throughout my life. Being politicized around the time of 911 and the iraq war and seeking out black radical thinkers to supplement my understanding of the world. So much of that is steeped in charismatic blackmail leadership. I read malcolm x. I wasnt reading Gordon Collins and there was a very specific idea of black intellectualism that i believed was the right one. Throughout my life, in that. It has been challenged consistently. I think i learned i will always have more questions if i am committed to this work because there will always be more challenges to wrestle with. I learned to be more honest. That passage about my College Girlfriend and the work she did for me and the way she supported me, i couldve written a very differently, but to admit to myself that i wasnt there for her and that love wasnt reciprocal, to admit to my own faults and later chapters, to wrestle with Mental Illness and anxiety and depression and what that taught me going through that experience. So much of it was teaching myself to be honest with myself and i think its one of the harder thing for people to do. Not to say that ive perfected it but i know now what it takes on some level in order to produce the answers im looking for there will be a need for more honesty. I have kind of a messy question. [inaudible] [inaudible] how do you think being visible is also shaping political discourse. [inaudible] we are trying to figure that out right now. This is an unprecedented level of hyper visibility. There are always moments, we said that in 1999 speaking specifically speaking specifically to the idea of the explosion of hiphop in the global export of that and what does it mean for those particular images, not necessarily a testimony of hiphop but all these images that are being projected to the world, how are we wrestling with the truth of the artist expression and recognizing that truth is sometimes born of a form of oppression and stereotyping and flattening the identities. How can we reconcile all of those things at once. That is a very difficult thing to try to do. To respect ones truth and know that its influenced by something you may not want to be a part of. I think the attention of that hyper visibility is the Central American question because of the necessity that blackness is to the american identity. In order for the United States to operate the way that it does, it needs a bottom. Its a system of hierarchies. The capitalism is that. The needs and exploitive class. Blackness provides, White Supremacy renders that bottom class and its consistent. You always have that bottom class were blackness is always there. We create new ways to demonize. We have the tinos and muslims and at different points, ethnic groups that are now considered white were part of that. Italians and irish, they were all exploited classes of people but their escape was that whiteness needed to reproduce itself to form strongholds to be embraced in that role and ensure that blackness is always at the bottom. Theres a need then to flatten those identities and demonize, to make invisible blackness, the humanity of black people, all of the different postcard that depicts black men being lynched, eating watermelon and exaggerated features and calling us lazy, all of these Different Things are the work of ensuring the humanity of black people remains invisible but we also need to be seen in terms, during slavery only one of us was a status symbol. Having it be domestics and servants was a measure of ones worth within society. Theres always that tension of the actual act of being seen but also having your humanity denied and that is what the concept of invisibility is trying to get out. To answer the question, the central question and we just havent gotten there. [inaudible] i think, i say this all the time, i think the three best riders on the planet are jasmine ward, lehman. Jasmine ward is known for her second novel which is situated in prekatrina mississippi right before katrina and tells the story which each of a young girls comingofage in her interactions with her family and men like her brothers and father and coming into knowing her sexuality and her position within that. Theres a beautiful novel about where the lines lead to deal with the set of twin boys also in mississippi who, just the different paths that are on offer for young black men coming out of high school in the rural south living through poverty and one gets caught up in selling drugs because hes depressed that the other was able to get a job but its not the job that the one wants. All of those emotions wrapped up into her own experience of four black men in her life who died and had a big impact on her and the expectation is that, 11 of them being her brother and the things that happen to produce those. I just think she is probably the best writer right now. Lehman is also incredible. I think of him as a craft standpoint and, in a way they are in viewed with so much funk, its no accident that both of them are black southern riders that love that tradition and are proud of it and speaking to it both from mississippi. I think rachel is the best essay working right now. Dave chapelle is incredible, she wrote about beyonce and the beehive, she really tackled a lot. She takes the big pop culture moments and provides incredible contacts. Its like how did you have time to read all of the things you read and also weave the narrative in a way that i like that is not always linear and jumps around. The way that i try to do this, a lot of that is just me saying what riders are like in terms of influencing my prose. A lot having to influence my thinking. Theres a book called nobody and thats been a huge influence on me. Melissa harris perry has been a good friend and has taught me quite a bit and challenged me in quite a few things. All of these people that are in conversation with constantly and help me push myself into areas i didnt anticipate. [inaudible] with all of that being challenged on twitter. [inaudible] [inaudible] i think what the internet generally does and social media, it democratizes the number of voices and provides immediate feedback if you are writing these