today we are joined by some esteemed panelist skis'll bro abuse tremendous briefly. jonathan holloway is a professor and teen of yale college the author of a number of volumes, most importantly, jim crow wisdom we're also joined by marcus hunter marcus hunter holds appointments in african-american studies at yale and professor in sociology joining the attend of ucla this fall right? he is the author of the phenomenal back, "black city makers." how the philadelphia anything grow changed urban america. walter moseley is here. the phenomenal novelist, whose book -- [applause] -- whose books are too numerous to mention. so we'll move along to the wonderful, brilliant delightful, ammann any perry, the author of two major books on racial inequality in the united states and prophets of the hood politics politics and poetics in hip-hop and finally but not least, the author of most recently ross unbound and he is unbound in that text. a writer in his books and a staffer at the "the new yorker." our moderator is my generous and brilliant colleague, kendall thomas to my right. den cal is the cofounder -- a nash professor of law at columbia. please welcome kendall thomas. [applause] >> thank you rich, and thank you so much for your vision in organizing this year of the harlem book fair on the great james baldwin. [applause] >> james baldwin as you all know, was a son of harlem. and it is so fitting that james baldwin provide the inspiration for our discussion this afternoon of james baldwin and american morality. we have with us a stellar collection, i would call them a dream team. i could not have come up with a better staff of panelists to discuss the question of baldwin and american morality than the one you see before you and i hope that you're as excited as i am at the conversation we're about to have. my job is a very easy one. i get to ask the questions. theirs is a hard one because they have to offer, if not answers, responses to questions that are suggested by this extraordinarily powerful topic and by the life work and example of the great james baldwin himself. so we'll start with an obvious question. and that is this. is there an american morality, and if there is an american morality what is the nature of american morality? perhaps i should start with you claudia. >> well, i -- i certainly think there's an american desire for a morality, an american sense of itself as having a morality, which always seems to be, however, little bit ahead of news getting achieved. it's been tragic, the lack of achievement, considering what we were on paper over a very long period of time, but i wouldn't say there's not an american morality. i think baldwin thought there was, or could be an american morality. i think the title given to this very panel achieving our country, was very important to him. he thought that could be done. unfortunately it wasn't done in his lifetime died in 1987, at 63 and he was very bitter hat having put in more than 60 year skis his promise unfulfilled. he never gave up, and i think our country as anyone knows from the fire next time for all its warnings and dire pretickses what could help when and if this nation didn't come to terms with its racial problem he did say if we come together to paraphrase it, the more conscious whites and the more conscious blacks and together we can help create consciousness in these others, and if we can do that -- and he actually uses the term money like loves" with welcome do that like loversing are, we'll end the rate nightmare and you achieve our country and achieve something that never quite existed before. something that takes more -- unfortunately more than a lifetime or two lifetimes, burt i think little by little, with a lot of pushback you see more rights being accorded. you see self-interest challenged and beating back against morality but it's present and it's hard and it's better and it's a fight and a constant struggle, but if you don't believe that it can happen think baldwin thought you were lost. you had to believe it could happen if you just -- not in house lifetime, not to say there isn't rage about what hasn't happened and what did happen to him, but you have to keep pushing. you have to believe it's possible or you fall into despair, and for him that was the worst thing. >> walter moseley, is there an american morality? >> i hope not. sounds awful. just the question sounds awful. because if you had one morality lots of people would be in trouble, because we don't all fit in the same cast. you have someone like baldwin. he was one of the few writers of his time who is like equivalent to a jazz musician, meaning to say he is head and shoulders before the rest of the culture of america and so his -- the way he thought, the way he saw the world his -- rather been being biracial, he is bicultural, being black and gay. he understood a world, a possibility, of freedom that we could have in which we might think and feel different kinds of things but the idea of having a solitary morality sounds kind of fast fast fascist, and you know like, you're morality depends on where you're coming from. if you're coming from -- a child who has been through a prison-like school system and then ends up going to a prison, you're morality is like, i don't snitch and i hit back whoever hilts me because that's it. you might be raised in a middle class community in new jersey where that kind of notion is counterproductive. and sexuality alone -- a lot of times morality is applied to sexuality, and so then you have people like langston hughes and james baldwin and many others who have that part of their life has to be -- i remember when i was seven, at victory baptist day school in los angeles not the neighborhood you're living in. i remember they had a church, and we all had to go to the church. i didn't want to go. and on every seat there was a -- the fire next time, and bald win came to address us and it was so wonderful because there was a sense of transcendence. the words and the arguments were good and well but there was a sense of transcendens that we had to gestured and we were in different plays. >> imani perry, there is an american morality? >> so, i think there is in the united states an ongoing and deep and pervasive practice of immorality and amorality, reacting from genocide's to enslavement to jim crow to what we have now kind of absolute mass incarceration, all these forms of devastation, and i think that what it occasions the kind of encounter with depth of both immorality and amorality, occasions a kind of interior interrogation if one allows that to take place and that is part of baldwin's genius in terms of being able to talk about this sort of large social dynamics and then bring it to the level of the individual interior examination and then see the prospect of transformation there. my second book comes from a talk that -- the title is from a talk that baldwin gave to teacheres and part of what he says -- it's 1963, and he is saying to teachers, we have to stop with this mythology because by the time a black child is seven years old he has already had so many doors slammed in his face. we need to tell the truth about that social reality in order for that child to create something anew and i guess for me that's a particular -- i think that's a particular challenge of this moment, given that we are mired in all kinds of injustice around the globe, as a nation and also have a kind of ongoing deep practice of injustice, and i think of the book that resonates most for me in this moment is "no name in the street." and in 1972 and baldwin is despairing and the book reads almost friend net include all this death of friends, and he is thinking not just about the united states, thinking about the global color line and that kind of despair is instructive because that is what it takes to even begin to imagine that we might have a more moral set of social arrangement or egg cal or justice. >> marcus hunter, how do you come out on this question? is there an american morality? >> i would add, due du -- boise's name and i would argue -- i thought about "nobody knows my name" in part because i think baldwin would offer there is an american morality and part of how you find it is when you start talking about what black people are doing. and that is when you find out there are moral shortcomings apparently. the way that black people organize their lives, always outside of what american morality that exists, and in part i think what he is trying to get at is what i call either strategic or slippery morality. if it's moral until you're a witch in salem. now you're outside of it and eeven makes mention of that in "nobody knows my name. ". people fall outside of morality and they become the new o'sed, and the people who used to be part of the outside of the morality crowd are now inside and they're the ones giving out scarlet letters calling people things, how the irish became white they accepted a certain type of white morality and then bought into the idea that black people were less than they were. so part of what he is getting at there is in fact one and unlike previous countries with a longer history, like he estimates with france and england what you have in america is a place that is always changing and part of that is tremendous possibilities for what can happen, often people say america is the last chance at freedom. right? so there's these great freedom possibilities but at the same time because it is always coming into itself and making adjustments and changing just when you thought black people were free, you have mass incarcerations. just when you thought that people value black families, all of a sudden there's a welfare queen. so i think mart of what baldwin reminds us of is that much of what he says still rings true tied. why? because the cycle of segregation, poverty imprisonment, continue so when you read his words it's as if he is talking about american morality right now. so, for me, it's both a question and a problem. i see in that question you ask. >> so, finally, jonathan, is there an american morality? >> when it's fascinating to go after four people answering this question. so thank you for that. when i think of morality i think of issues like original sin, and i think of issues like progress, as we began the conversation. when i think of this country and original sin, the logic of the country we now live in is built in the moment of racial -- is built in the logic of racial slavery and understanding of liberty and freedom, it's something not that. if you start building a country with that as a founding logic, or morality, as it was built into the system, and you build institutions and structures that re-affirm that, sure, there's an american morality, but is it moral? that is what i think bald win kept coming back to. no matter which baldwin you're talking about. the baldwin who was trying to make piece with his childhood preacher and his break with his father or going through the baldwin of despair later on and i don't want to focus only on desspay -- despair but i'm rivetted by this quote, but it's a very angry, disappointed ball win, towards the end of his life. he has been waiting for progress, and he knows all these things in the match nations of an american morality that said blacks aren't quite human, don't deserve certain things, and he says to an interviewer, who suggests to baldwin, these things take time. and he spits back -- this is a paraphrase -- it's taken my uncle's time, my aunt's time, my grandfather's time, my brother reside brothers fathers, and nieces time. how much time do you warrant -- this is the killer -- for your progress? how much too you want for your progress? like baldwin is waiting for a white american logic that createes this system in the first place, in the colonial america, to catch up to its own promise. i like to say that -- and baldwin's wake we have come to that place. we just know we haven't. so a system of belief system a logic that suggests to many americans we're an exceptional country and we are therefore quite moral but i think -- i know there's a structure built into this, undergirding it all that sis something quite different. >> so, we have gotten five fascinating and overlapping but very different responses to the single question. claudia, you say there is american -- an american morality. >> a dream -- >> a dream of an american morality which has not yet been achieved. >> absolutely. >> walter, you can test the very idea that -- you contest the very idea that an american morality is something we ought even to want because as i hear you, you're committed to an idea of pluralism. many different american moralities. perhaps as many different american moralities as there are americans. immani, you want to reminds of the ways in which in order to even talk about the possibility of an american morality, we have to be mindful of the ways in which that morality has as its close cousins, immorality and amorality, right? and that we're talking bat moving -- about a moving target in one sense. if we look at the actual history and the current realities of life in america the idea of morality in that sense is internally contested. right? so it's not just something that there are many different forms of as walter says but it's internally contested. and marcus you offer the very valuable insight that if you want to know whether there's an american morality and what it is you would do well to look at the experience of african peoples in america in a very important book called pie the miners canary" by two legal scholars who say if wow want to take the pulse of racial justice in america you would do well to look at the conditions under which black people in this country live. so if you want to know whether there's an american morality, and its state of health marcus is suggesting, you should look at the situation of african-americans, and this border region that we occupy, even in this age when the white house has been turned black, of being inside and outside at the same time. and jonathan reminds us that the very idea of america is an idea that was baptized in the original sin of slavery. and a moral institution an an immoral economic instewing, -- institution, which i one of the founding pillars of american national identity, and the history of america as a nation. so the story i hear is a story informed by baldwin's vision story of contradiction. is there an american morality? the answer i think would have to be yes and no. right? now, looking at the situation of african-americans, in 2014 i think it's worth asking, if, like baldwin we are committed to progressive change, in the lives of people of african descent in america and thus in the lives of the nation as a whole, right -- is morality the practice of morality, talking about morality, engaging in collective action that is informed and aspires to achieve or live out a certain moral vision, the way to go? is that the way to go? to the extent that we have not yet achieved our country whether we're talking about political democracy economic democracy, social democracy or cultural democracy what are the uses and limits of morality of moral language in undertaking the project that baldwin describes as such. he once wrote, any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it. the loss of all that gave one an identity the end of safety. so is this project of breaking up the world as we know it in letting go of, and perhaps refashioning entities of leaving the refuge or the harbor of safety, is that in some fundamental way a project that is moral or that can only take place through the use of moral language moral ideas and moral practices? i'll let you jump in. i won't call on you this time. >> i will. baldwin is a success story because of his realization of the world through language and even when he was like despairing, even when he is unhappy, even when he sees most people can't keep up with him doesn't matter because he is left a legacy, but whenever i hear that quote, i think of the -- what i've been thinking lately the thing i realized outside of the notion of the impact of capitalism, which has something to do with race but things to do with other things, too -- is the fact there's no such thing as white people, and for me that's the place that needs to be broken. you realize that white people were invent by colonization. especially in the united states, where there was a red enemy that had to be destroyed in order to take his or her land and then there was a black slave that would work the land and in the middle were these europeans who had no race in europe. they had cultural identities national identity us regional identities, but they didn't have language -- but they can't have a color identity like white people. like black people, the what doocy and the pignies. there are all kinds of different people but in america they became white. and asking people about black people or of black people or for black people, otherwise to say to white people, once you realize you don't exist as white people, we'll be fine. once that you can no longer use that as recourse to say, oh, this is what white people thing. no such thing as white people. to begin with no such thing as white people. you have white paper and held it up and saw a guy who looked like that, you would run. zombies really exist. and the idea that there's -- that color is defined cultures or people ordain it's crazy. -- or dna it's crazy. black people know that and hispanic people know that and all kinds of people know that. white people just don't know it. they get interest off that. they have advancement they can have in the world. that things that they did, like people said we invented electricity. man, you didn't invent electricity. tesla invented electricity. edison lied about it but tesla invented it, the use of it. it's like there's -- if we recognize and embrace the difference, then we can -- that would really break up the whole notion of what america is, and that would allow us to move forward in a way that makes more sense. >> so you're talking about this radical loss. as i hear you say it -- recognition of and rejection of the idea of white racial identity. >> there's no such thing. it's a rejection of it. but it's more than a rejection. it's like real that i'm going to get rid of it. it's not arrest it doesn't exist. no such thing as white people. it doesn't exist. that's a made-up notion from colonization and people don't want to accept it. no i'm white. i'm white. but your pink you're tan, your olive. you have this kind of nose or these eyes or that hair. you're all different. don't you understand that? if they did, then that would be -- i think that's true. it's like a thing beyond morality. it's true. they decent exist. and -- but they made it up and hold it against everybody else, and in a way against themselves. >> this -- i want to just jump in. reminds me about how much you learn by leaving what you know. this is something baldwin learned how american he was when he goes off to europe years ago, 14 years ago now i was teaching a one-week seminar in china, just for an american studies program, an exchange program and my one-week seminar was on american civil rights, and these chinese students from all across china were getting a one-week introduction to these themes all speaking english, they were studying u.s. had a certain familiarity with it, and the week was going fine with the predictable stumbles then on the next to last day one student made an observation that in other words me, and your comment made the think of this. we were talking about race and civil rights and citizenship and she simply said, and it was a statement, without race, america has no meaning. it just disappears. and she stopped me in my track with that observation. and that gets back to my earlier comment about onlyism and the logic of this country. so from a thought experiment that's brilliant. but we can't ignore the realities that have grown out of that of these decisions people made; so that this racial codification we live with is the construction. but it has had material life and death consequences and it stays with us today. so, it would be a terrifying notion to many people, maybe everybody in some ways to break that... having lived through our recent past. would he say we should give up race? >> why people should give a praise. don't think you would urge you about that. okay. you know, that would be fine. i don't think he would mind not you know. it doesn't get us one way or the other for black people are hispanic people or asian people give up their ident t., for women to give up the notion of gender. maybe he words. i don't know the guy. i met him once but i was a little kid. he was nice. you know it would be a wonderful game to play. i think i've let it play out a little bit. claudia. >> i think it depends than you catch him in his life. he said later on there's a lot more after the death of king, a lot more dark as to bitterness. even at the very end, even in the 80s it sounds not so strong when i say it when i paraphrase him. but he was an artist above all things and he needed this kind of empathy to write as he said he or he grew up with a lot of hatred and had and he tells you this very clearly early on. i couldn't function if i hated with my father, my stepfather hated. it destroyed him. hatred destroys you. because he was so dedicated a writer come with hatred that will not be a will to write. you have to deal to imagine even your worst enemies so to speak. if i present the awful way sheriff has a stereotype come i'm not an artist anymore. one of the things i found fascinating is the compassion for all people that he felt was necessary for him to be a writer is also what he brings to the political scene. even after all this despair and hatred and bitterness in the biographers talk with and 84 for reading an essay in the 40s and just raging in say nothing has changed. and yet, in these last essays is an essay about mandatory van. he said i still believe we are all black and white. we are all male and female. these categories are false and alive. if we could other -- this is something he says from 1951 on. if we could take advantage of what we have of our horrible racial has recovered that is aspiring to the europeans racially homogenous white country for black people are a disturbance if we could realize that the african-american contribution is and what it does for the way people and it's the way people he's talking about the quote you read about how hard it is to remake your world to break yourself open, give up safety. that is trying to extend himself to say this is why it's so hard for them. they're too afraid to take the next step. they are scared. you don't have to think about race. you can think about the images we saw last week in the arena texas. people showing up at the border terrified about guatemalan children be brought in. people are terrified about taking a step out of their safety. i think he did look forward. he says someday this country could only take advantage of this racial past because the outcome of the flipside of that and that your student made about is about nothing but not about race was baldwin himself say in the context in the history of white or black in this country however horrible it then it most significant and powerfully good thing about this country if we can ever get rid of these old ideas about the non-homogenous old church and take advantage of what we've got. >> suing away what i am hearing is to the extent that we can speculate about what baldwin would say today based on the legacy that he left us of his life and writing, he would invite us to do something that particularly at this moment of your name in some quarters for the post-racial has been dismissed and devalued. he would invite us to think about race is an affirmative resource. and not to get anxious in the face of the fact the truth that without race, america has no meaning and to engage to engage this history to engage this vast complicated internally driven contradict hurry idea in the history of race in no way that puts it in the service of freedom right? that makes it a resource on which all of us can draw to move towards that place of achieving our country that requires what the late french historian and philosopher called it politics of discomfort great? and here i suppose we might want to shift a little bit. we've been talking about morality and it will stay with us. but i want to talk for a bit about democracy and focus a bit on some intimations in baldwin's writing that the veryssibility of achieving democracy in america is connect to and in some important way to love. he writes again and again about the importance of love. what do you make of that insistence on baldwin's part? that love is a crucial resource given our history for the achievement of racial democracy in america. >> i want to go back for a fact in the come back to the question of love because i do think part of the reason a question like that is faxed as i think because of a particular political and economic moment. so if we talk about in the context of kind of contemporary neoliberal capitalism for every arena of life is a market ties where our policy, our jurisprudence is organized around maximizing opportunities for competition and how that pushes people who are on the margins even further into positions of marginalization because there's a reduced sense of the common good that we are all supposed to be entrepreneurs in the world even prisons, every arena. and so for me a call for the centrality of love isn't part about a conception of who we are as human been in the context of the nation or the context of a world that is kind of a comprehensive humanity. if we think about law for example, based on reason. resend masher dispassionate analysis. when you have that combined with an order that makes everything about whether you are successful on the market and not about the common good not about the public welfare and the life, that there's a kind of cruelty that grows up and also an incentive for people to take advantage of long-standing take a tree. if you're trying to maximize your competition, of course you want to take advantage of what you have. the sense of responsibility to your fellow residents are said to stand with the people around you for your neighbors to the south falls by the wayside. i think kind of a cent to the ethics around love his entire defense of responsibility to engage with other beings as full of bees. not as numbers. not as commodities. not as opportunities to maximize n. alike. for me in this moment we read it now. it is a call to go back and was always deeply flawed, but at least in previous eras there was a sense of the common good and i think that's an essential part of it. >> i would add that my reading of baldwin relevant to the notion of love and politics is in part out of his biography. so part of what you get is his sort of coming to terms with his love of america. coming to terms with his love of black people and culture. coming to terms with his sexual orientation and part of what is important particularly from politics and black liberation is in many ways it becomes part of the black political kool-aid you have to drink in order to get ahead. the ideas we've been taught to not love ourselves. when you get into the continuum that is black as, we are told that people didn't exist until yesterday when they wanted to get married, when in fact i often say to his units when they see the great migration and this and that i say black people were migrants as well. what you have been baldwin is this conundrum this paradox of trying to reconcile that in the way he comes to that in the way in which he invites his love is self-love understanding that with americans, black americans there is this unrequited love for america, so you often feel like the bob marley song you are waiting in vain for love. 300 years i've been sitting at your doorstep and you're wondering are they going to love you. i think unemployed about a required love on the idea of waiting in vain, one very powerful moment for me and what i was thinking about writing was this idea that at some point black americans pull along the south seaboard and say you can go to liberia if you want and many people stayed. many people stayed good part of the ati card eucom to terms with being in love with the place you built that doesn't include you. what he wants to do is say the opposite of love is hate. hating only gets you so far. what if you love more than you cannot our love before an part is getting there is loving one another. often times loving the continuum that is black people. black people are not just stand up preachers doctors and lawyers. also, strippers and all sorts of people. to understand love is to understand all of the flaws and all of what that means and take it on its own terms and move forward with that. if you can't do that, you will not have the america you are looking for. >> i always like a moment of silence on a panel don't you? just to let things sit and marinate for a while. i am intrigued by this observation for the connection you make between all the wins ratings on the ethics of love as a public value. because he is not talking about private relations, intimate relations. he is talking about love is a public value. you seem to type that in part at least to the fact that baldwin was a man who loved and that is unique experience. he first left harlem and then he left america. he wrote one and this is a sentence which has been very important in my own intellectual life that he criticized america because he loved her. and i suggested that our love, for example, as gay men for black america demands no less. we criticize and sexism in the black community because we love black america. so let's stay for a moment with this idea of an african-american morality or ethics of love. a black american affix of love which goes into directions, right? one direction is towards our fellow americans. but the other is an award. the love that we bear towards one another. and love becomes a resource for the development the nurturing comments in mutual support and sustenance of a black public, which can then engage with the larger political society to argue about debate, deliberate and make decisions about the race proved the code. our common welfare. is that a useful way of thinking about what baldwin can offer about the ethics of love at this moment in the life of harlem in the life of the united states. i'm using harlem for a name of what we call black america which is itself an imagined construct a pain. >> i like to point you brought up in a passage on a native son iran for that particular part because he ends it and i think baldwin as a social scientist in particular. among a lot of the terms gives way to social concept on the one of them that he had the biographical note on that is very moving is what goes on internally for people while we don't value within our society, we think of it as a parenteral issue, but were fully important committee suggest that is exactly why we live the way we do. your internal strivings, your internal sense of love is because it's about the next journal and internal cons that. his ideas that gets expressed on other people. this is the inability to progress whatever it is they're trying to go. what he's trying to put bears to reorient the ideas so we don't just think about it is what we do to each other. i love you. do you love yourself? when you don't you find it has real political ramifications come other people don't think of certain people is american. they don't love them that way. part of it is in many cases there's something going on that makes them feel outside the american perspective. part of that is the earlier point i was making about how elusive american in the first place. people barely feel about themselves and they project that to other people. what he's trying to say is we are here on the same body of land. black people as they want after slavery so would become as culpable in accountable for everything else and what happens if we hate each other not at each other, were not going to get very far because we can argue every day but we are still here in this place taking ownership of whether we like it or not. >> an american figure in american writer is really important to emphasize i think. even in the great letter he writes to his nephew which is to begin a next time he lays it out very straight and very harshly in ways that would ring true right now. they give you nothing but mediocrity to live up to. but the important thing is you never think this is your fault. racism is why pat balaji. it's not your fault. the most important and in this goes back to saying you have a chance to leave. as we know left. he kept coming back and then he kept leaving the minutes from far away that i get to see america, but he couldn't area. what he says to his nephew is doing american adult let them tell you you're not. he said that comes up in different ways throughout all its writing. as one of the first americans to be brought here. we have made contributions here. we are the americans here and don't let anybody tell you otherwise. >> i love that letter beautiful and provocative. but ailsa read it as a dare. a dare to imagine a world that can't imagine you. you've got to do that kind of work, whether it's recuperative work, fantasy, just hard work or policy work, you've got to do it. thinking about love and self love, i can imagine never having the honor we demand, but just cracking a wide smile that was also -- that have a lot of anger in it too they would issue a dare. you are to love one another. it's a great quote. i think you mentioned it earlier before the session started. goodness, i'm blanking on it now, that speaks to how much in common that white and black is a much in common that we are prepared to believe in it yet and he wanted to dare us to do that and that could be within the black community and cross any line you want to. but that love is not -- is not a romantic love. you know, it is a love filled with passion. it's an angry engage robert frost with the world kind of love. that is hard. it's hard to sustain an hard to get other people to believe in it because it requires a lot of self reflection in the way people don't want to do. the baldwin was such a master of the internal -- working things out all the time. for all of us. i think inviting us to join him on that journey. >> that love giant sweetheart in another country. love love, love. beatles song. you know i'm a little confused you know because it seems to me and i think there's three levels. number one coming in no i'm preparing baldwin to joss is a good to do. it's just like your incoming and no, the longest amount or maybe for now west one day and asked them to be in a state that is great. what was great? tommy. when it comes to corvallis hard to remember. you know what it means? you have to go -- you have to you know go there. so the possibility of listening to the dalai lama telling me how into it i'm going to approach the world. i said that the dalai lama talking. he might be able to do it or at least he believes he can do it. does love cause conflicts? to me i think love causes conflict as much as been nelson the world world. the same thing that kind of got lost a little bit and there was the notion of democracy because i love my candidate to make kennedy says he lives me or she loves me and i might vote for him or her anonymous love and so there's a good chance they're going to represent me except for the 250000 lobbyists that corporate america and the corporate world hires that lives in the washington d.c. area to visit him every day and say listen, whatever you like, whatever money, when you leave the site had a million dollar job for you doing what i'm doing right now. i never talk to them because they are in d.c. e-mail part of the thing as let's talk about love, but let's not be like crazy and think we are enlightened and that our love is going to be accepted and not going to bring us conflict. secondly, to understand the practicality of democracy. democracy is owned lock stock and barrel by capitalism in america and it's the fastest capitalism. it's not the free capitalism work and sell candy bars out of the box. i'll get arrested for that. it's the kind of capitalism that people that have the most money in the most power and the most people in apartheid, that's a democracy there talking about. there's a few in my mind listening to this to think of my feelings are pure enough, my love is strong enough, that will make a good democracy. i doubt it. >> when we talk about democracy, this is a walter mosley he says. when the talk about democracy we are not talking about love. we are talking about power and interests. and that love acts of us love is another name for concern and respect for the other. other regarding. >> which are flawed. love and respect for the other than my own terms which are flawed. that i am able to love. even the same that might not be true. >> at the same time he says the impossible is the least one can demand. so love is the name for an aspiration. and not the harder they is the deep humanism. it's the same humanism perhaps that is that the idea that people are people only through other people and that the possibility of knowing him to be my room humanity is dependent on the extent to which we are willing to recognize and honor the humanity of the other or of another. and not active mutual recognition is part of the same moral field if i can use that word as love. even if we might not sophisticates that we are, why to use the word love. love is the name for a whole complex constellation of ideas and practices and challenges or dare says jonathan put them. if i take us outside of the understanding of democracy as the only about power and interests. >> i'll stop in just one second. i'm willing to love but there's also a question of whether you're capable of loving or this person, this person, this person do they all have the same capability for love? again, i doubt it. >> i think what might be useful or is useful for me to think about this question in the context of baldwin's life which is spoken a minute ago about his return and if we were called bair he returns because of being inspired by the civil rights movement. he says on multiple occasions various forms of the artists are important, but the revolution has to come from the people. there is a sense in which i think is part as i would love particularly in light of the kind of hides and celebrity popularity he achieved far apart instructor for this question with respect to capital and power. in 1963, he goes to have this meeting and belafonte is there and lean or am alike and rfk is hoping this is the might of the birmingham campaign and rfk is open is black political leaders for their prominent leaders will be able to quell unrest in the cities and they turn this group of people turned the question back and say first of all we refuse to go out and off for two black people in the question is instead what are you prepared to do? i think that is the practice of love that is not dependent, so there is not in that moment a concerned individual accessing the kind of hype they might obtain by doing the service, but instead every moment continuing to be kind of unflinching and ethical in terms of the kind of values of what that kind of world would look like. >> i like that. that's nice. >> i don't think love government you lay down and smiled my people roll over you because you love them. you fight injustice with every ounce they use god and a great meeting as i recall, they ask rfk, the attorney general that would walk one african-american child into a school. that's what they wanted and he wouldn't. .. some point later on about how do we get our children and antidote for all of the poisons that are being fed into them come and then for one moment, and it's a rare moment he says do we really want and antidote packs maybe they should -- it is a very rare moment for him when you can almost feel the anger that he's constantly camping down and reasoning with and pushing away because he can't live with it and it's not helpful. in the heart or in the. spin on the question of love perhaps we will leave it and i will leave it by simply noting that we are having a discussion on the stage in the schaumburg center about love and politics. in our collective political life in this country at least when it's no longer possible to think of the person as we say on the other side of the aisle under the conditions which the very possibility of democracy must contend with a language into practice in which we treat one another as americans as though we were citizens of different countries there is something to be said for the recuperation of the political ethics the political morality written so powerfully for many of us persuasively about in terms of the idea of a love and speaking of the city in which this conversation is taking place yet be still lived in a society and we live in a city whose public school system is the most racially segregated in the united states, in the united states. a city that arguably prides itself on the celebration of difference and cultural and other kinds of pluralism. >> we just go to places. >> i have a question. it looks like it becomes very complex. i think that baldwin was a really great thinker and as somebody that's one would want to just her words. when i'm living in a place like everybody in here has a cell phone so we can't really complain about, go because you all have cell phones. we all are wearing all kinds of clothes and have all kinds of stuff made in china and they pay those people like $16 an hour for the stuff we are buying and there is a notion i call my mother and i told her i love her but the problem is that there is such -- you have to be so big to take these motions. baldwin took those motions and did that. he was great at stuff like that. i can't pretend that i'm here with him. i can see that the yankees great but i am using my cell phone and i'm looking at this new smartphone i want to buy and so that means this many women are going to get raped because many are going to get killed and i know and we said diamonds but there's also good chocolate, on everything that comes out but we are talking about the diamonds. we are doing it too because we are involved in the economic optics that is pressing the entire world. [applause] and it's all good and well to talk about baldwin but it's hard and that's why i was going was daunted about coming to this thing because you can talk about it but i can't play the piano. and that seems to me to be the problem. to understand the world and the length we would have to go to make that world a better world that would become a big issue and that is the question i think i did ask -- >> i think that there is something to all of this fiction so for example you made the point earlier about the way that we treat each other as though we are enemies and those are happening right in the midst of the wealthy distributed upward growing for the vast majority of us and so there is the sense that we live with so many fiction or we demonize one but not the other and not our implication, and so i guess i think that there is some value in the beginning a practice of telling the truth. and telling the truth with humility understanding we are all deeply implicated in justice. but that alone seems to be a precursor to the process of trying to do something better. >> on this idea of truth telling because truth arguably is like morality plural. there are many different truths. each of us perhaps have our own. >> like hunger and violence. >> of the. >> the truth -- this practice of truth telling if we think of it as something that is purposeful. it's directed towards a specific purpose, mike that purpose given what our brother and a sister at the end of the panel are saying about capitalism today, capitalism and democracy, neoliberal democracy, and the threads and the threat that the neoliberal capitalism poses to the idea of democracy, this practice of truth telling which perhaps walter mosley would agree is a special calling of the writer this practice of truth telling a bad creating or revising and giving new life to renewing the culture of solidarity which may be a pragmatic way to think about what we've been talking about in terms of love, this idea that our faith has reminded us they are linked. we are all in this thing together. we are all going to face the scarcity of clean air, of clean water. the 1% can run, but they can't hide from the hatred that we are showing towards the very planet. what's the relationship between this hard work of telling the truth, not just about the other person but about ourselves and our cell phones and clothes that are made in sweatshops. what's the relationship between that truth telling and solidarity. that would be one question. and those of us that write do they have a unique location that regard trying to tell as best we can the truth about the way that we live now in order to create the conditions for at least a conversation about recovering this very fragile and precarious tradition of solidarity at the black civil rights movement among other social movements in this country held up the bloodstained banner to champion. >> i would offer the point of truth and relate my own experience writing my book. i'm from philadelphia -- it is the city that doesn't love brothers. [laughter] >> i grew up up not too far from the neighborhood and so for people who are not aware it studied 1899 following after he left after the publication i bring this point up to say not so much of what i found was a complete revelation to me because i didn't realize how fragile black truths are. the 40 acres and a mule as long as we can remember they've named the production company and what i found in the research is that there was a thing called the freemen spend that close in 1874 that was upwards of a billion dollars of black people's money and i would like to underscore a billion dollars of the money by today's estimates and also just to say on that particular point but only do i find it was difficult to recover that particular piece of information but that the black press and black media become very integral in trying to recover what should be a black truth or the truth about america more generally so we started talking about campaign promises and cash money that was an event that people never got and i think about it as black people's first money. the money you are allowed to have booker t. washington and denver agreed about anything. they all agree and i would say it extrapolates at the moment the reason why black people don't use banks is because of this inherent mistrust but there are these opportunities that occurred where there are economic opportunities for people that are looking ahead to truth telling is necessary that we get off of some of the existing that we play all the time called black truth and really think about some of the other ones that have an impact on what we do today. the mortgage crisis so distinctly tied to the bank of 1865 to 1874 but many of us don't know that. we just know that we got a subprime mortgage and now the own money and have to move out of our house. we don't understand why grandmother put her thoughts under the mattress or why when i grew up it was called the birthday club you give money to the church, go around, put money in and get a big check and double the way of doing savings and are other people disrespect to the morality play these are things other people choose to measure the black morality. they go to check cashing places. we don't know what we don't know until we don't know. [applause] >> i'm intrigued by this idea of the production. [laughter] the work of continuing to produce at the time when the very idea that we can speak the truth that is rooted in our unique location and location in the society is being challenged in which others presume the location is in the law school and i read all the time recall the time the supreme court opinions in which the supreme court is telling me. the vote is not being denied committee valued or were denigrated anywhere in these united states of america. we can vote as easily as any other citizen or that our schools are as good as the schools in any neighborhood anywhere in the united states. there is a strange sense in which, again, as someone who follows the supreme court, the current supreme court comes close to increasing the idea from the note reads 1896 opinion in ferguson that if black people assert a truth in which we continue to be marginalized and excluded disadvantaged, discriminated against it's because we are paranoid, because we are imposing the false perspective on the ballot. realities of life under a black president. so what is the special work that we as writers can do to articulate the specifics and two insist on the value of getting specific about the truth of black life in america at a moment in our history where even some of us are ambivalent about the idea that there is a distinctively black perspective which arose not from our skin color, but from the shared lived experience the material realities one might say of life for black americans of all classes. >> what you mean by writers quick >> anyone who puts words on paper or throw words out into the digital public sphere. >> i just wanted to make sure i understood what you mean. >> people engaged in public conversation others are reading. >> there are a lot of people who don't read so much. people read it and in-depth knowledge gets out in the world further and further and if you write things that you feel are true and to the point you realize you're going to do less well than the economic market that is a painful thing that anything that i think you have to go with. but also there are a lot of people who just speak out. there are poets speaking about what's going on in chicago. anybody that uses language i would move it out a little bit because if i remove the writers, then i cut down who my audience is and i know that there is already an economic system against audience in general. so just trying to figure out how that would work i think that i -- personally i write work that i think talks about america the way that i see america which is close to the way it is probably not exactly but close to it and i think that is helpful but i don't think it is enough. >> enough to do what clicks the >> to have anybody take their cell phone out of their pocket and think this is the same. this should be the 11th same in the bible. to really understand who we are in the world and what we are doing they criticize what kind of other all kind of other people in the stuff which is easy to do just who i am and what i'm doing that is to actually identify the writer and the reader with a central truth. >> you asked what we need to do as writers taking up walters caveat to mind what can we do to offer some sort of truth were raised consciousness or something like that? i make a trained historian. this country is good at ignoring history and we all are complicit in that project so if we actually dare to become even moderately decent historians so we can understand how we got to this point many of you know the essay in the atlantic on reparations it doesn't matter what your opinions are about reservations that what he calls for is a recognition in terms of how we got to this point and why he thinks the call makes sense. he says you must realize policies, human beings who make policies a long time ago or even in the g.i. bill or insurance companies, people make policies that have shaped the way we live our lives that create narratives that the market was to create narratives that make presumptions about how lazy black people are or how they are welfare queens were consumers of the worst kind. they have no sense of delayed gratification. there are policies that are driving a kind of logic and a presumption about who we are as individuals. if we do not take the time to know what these policies are the creation of the g.i. bill the commitment to make sure blacks can't live in certain areas, funneling towards those other areas even the black middle class more than any other class of white middle-class for instance. if we don't open our eyes to the past and to decisions that made us put us where we are today, we are going to be stuck. speaking from my own industry as a historian, we have to actually take the time to explore our own past work and all to have an honest recognition of how he got to where we are. >> where are you buying that responsibility? spec i think in this specific location they have that responsibility so i am being a bit of liberal in the sense that i think that consumers have the responsibility as well but actually taking the time to pick up books. >> if we don't make the effort and try and tell our students and children to do this work, another kind of work is going to be done for us. so it is on all of us to do hard work. it's hard and may be impossible but if we go back to people like frederick douglass you can't grow crops without understands you can't do it. and anything worth having, and i'm speaking in trite phrases i know that a lot of reality to it, anything worth having shouldn't come that easily. it's not about you then. think in -- creating the logic in a system that ends up with a permanent underclass and people who are searching for fresh water, that is hard work to get to that point that somebody ends up in the time it made those decisions and wrote the practices and now are at the point where this is not the race speaking, this is just cultural practices into this wall does not have a disparate impact that is just happenstance. we are going to create a law that does xyz. that's just happenstance >> one of the points that you mentioned is the sociology part is around but he charges where you have a special attitude and then later he calls this his specialness that when you and counter words that don't include you, you can't identify with them as though they did things between what was with you in on the page was paul laurence dunbar "-close-double-quote as ms. baldwin calls it a special attitude which means that you look at shakespeare and you already see that you are not a part of it so what he sees is that to take take a special the special attitude and then in many ways use the imagination and the possibility to put yourself there. what happens and this is in some ways what gave birth to funk music. if we are not included in this and they don't expect people to play instruments what if we just came from the mothership and we landed here in the bay area and they had a bass guitar that even though you're not included in the special attitude were often it is to stay to bring bob marley back in some ways he has this idea that if you are a big tree we will cut you down. the idea is the special attitude you can cut it down so you're not included comments were not there the church of at the church of the writer at least in my reading is to appropriate that special attitude can use it as a way to interrogate yourself what you see missing and put it forward to people so that they can receive it. >> i think that is right with -- command something that is also believed to the university of the of the literature with all the heart and soul. he often that i write about race because i have to get it out of the way to write about other things. and coming to know when rosa parks was going to montgomery and baltimore finishing giovanni's roomba has no characters in it at all and for him and that is the kind of freedom, not to be combined with the freedom to be the person he he wanted to write about whoever he wanted to write about it whatever he wanted to write about and that was absolutely crucial to him and i know also there was a firestorm music away and william and a white writer wrote a book called the confessions of nat turner they were living in connecticut finishing some work and he said you go ahead and do that we can imagine what we want and they should be able to identify beyond what you already are and why are you reading the book. it's literature that in largest and i think that he believed very deeply. >> although that isn't uniquely other folks can do that too there is something unique because what distinguishes us is language. there is something unique becoming a witness to and a participant in the work of the experiments that the writer undertakes of imagining the human condition and that sort of act of projection into the shoes of the other and in possible as it is is a crucial resource perhaps in this project of building and nurturing solidarity. if we belief that solidarity is an indispensable component to the work of democratic progress. >> i agree with everything that has been said although i have a particular interest in asserting i think of it as it is not a containment or combine it and it has a depth and breadth and i think even as an object of study and the question slightly differently not perhaps the responsibility of the writer but the response of the intellectuals. for me part of the responsibility of the intellectuals for example when writing when they wrote the book on race and what it looked like it's actually a kind of rigor and examination. there are dominant ways of talking about race, one of them being that perhaps we live with the vestiges of the past but not talking about the ongoing actresses and for me that meant not just reading in sociology and philosophies and politics ended near science and economics but to understand that there are patterns that go along and there are narratives and patterns in the cumulative practices if you go to buy a car everywhere you go in life when you look at the patterns black people are disadvantaged and they are disadvantaged based on the individual decision-making. as a people have learned to treat like people in an anterior fashion. so, for me, looking at that particular problem of how the racial inequality works today opened up all of these other pathways. and i think that there is this kind of aspiration to transcend the particulars of who you are but also to go deep with the particulars to eliminate things that are necessary for the world to see particularly around questions of the persistence of of injustice and inequality in the way that even when you survey black folks, the way that people talk about racial inequality is such a small fraction of how comprehensive it is. and every aspect of our lives. >> i agree it is wonderful and when you see black intellectual that becomes a much larger kind of thing there's a whole bunch of intellectuals that come here that don't have a degree or anything else but they've read all these books had a no stuff. they know stuff that i don't know and they don't know the ways i don't know which is wonderful, but i was thinking i can think of an example of something i don't exactly how it is used because listen if you want to talk about books that is all good and well that people watch television and movies and computer screens and stories are being told to them and we have to be aware of that. and i'm trying to be a lot of stuff that it is based on a character i wrote the crime novel and the people who are producing it called me up and said we would like for this to be open going to the main character because there is no reason for him to be black. there's no reason for him to be black. [laughter] it's like if i walk up to you and say there's no reason for you to be black. [laughter] >> but they are powerful because they have lots of money. they've done all these shows that you have watched many times. and they were asking me a question that they were not really asking me a question. [laughter] so i said well you know he does have to be black. he can't be open casting. of course that means he's going to be white. so -- [laughter] then they ask me why asked me why and i say because i'm walter that's why. [laughter] now they could have said nobody ended up saying yes. it's really there is a moment of importance like that work to be confident. people are not going to worry about you. that is pretty much a fact. we live in america. but the idea is that we have to go beyond that and say that but it's very difficult. you asked about writing. it's kind of bounces off of my head like this. it has to do with movies and records into television and you have to actually stand up and i said to them look if black people have read this book into the book and the speed on television they are going to be mad at me. [laughter] i don't want these people being asked me. [laughter] i'm supposed to be writing about heroes so he has to be black. that's the important thing to do. [laughter] >> well you raised a very important idea that some black intellectuals have criticized that it's the notion that the black intellectual has a responsibility to the black public. the black intellectual has responsibilities to the broad public, but the black intellectual can stand on and assert an unapologetically a commitment to the notion that she has a specific responsibility to the black or african-american community. and i just want to emphasize that. walter mosley just say that the african-american intellectual can choose and that is a choice of the difference between the intellectual practice or intellectualism of intellectual practices under the capitalism which are market driven and which are about maximizing your investment specifically in the human capital that is your intellect in the market relationships in order to further your self-interest and a different vision of the intellectual vocation whether it be writing or seeing or whatever which is connected to a notion of solidarity. that doesn't mean the community calls the shots about what you put down on paper but it does mean that you are mindful that the work you do even though you are doing it in the privacy of the study is connected in a productive and fruitful life enhance a and we can't all mindful that we engage in this conversation together, what we are doing is connecting to a broad public, broad racial public made up of some black folks and also with others which is connected to us solid. [laughter] >> how about that? even though we don't know them and we will never meet them. and we don't need to apologize to anybody for engaging as members of black civil society. of the black civil society again in which not all of us are black. we are just committed to the idea that we are doing work that advances the condition of freedom, the possible conditions of freedom that we can no in this country as african-americans and the folks in other countries can no as well. so, it is in that spirit in the spirit of recognizing that we are all intellectuals and we are now going to turn to the next and final piece of this afternoon's discussion, and that's a discussion in which you are all responsible for participating. >> these books will be outside signing right outside of the panel. i would invite you to join this incredible roundtable conversation. >> there's one microphone here. spinach deepened questions. >> if what you say is not in the form of a question, i will let you know. [laughter] >> good afternoon. thank you very much for a brilliant enlightened conversation. your spirit and mind and soul putting it into focusing it for your intellectual capability. in q4 that. i would like to ask very simply, our capitalism and democracy completely incompatible. >> they are not the same thing. q-quebec i don't know if they are completely incompatible. capitalism is about both the distribution of wealth, so it's not just the same thing. the question is to what degree does the democracy control capitalism and vice versa. that is always the question to be asking because if capitalism is naturally a fascist organization it supposedly works against them so you have a problem. >> i. the >> i just wanted to go back to the quote any change that implies the breakup of the world as we know it and leaving the refuge of the safety and i just wanted to say what did it take to get rid of slavery that killed more people than any other war up to that time? and what was cataclysmic and east central i just wanted to post to the panel going beyond the solidarity thinking of good you do anything that would ameliorate any of what we've been talking to today short of a revolution and i don't think it is because people don't want to give up their cell phones or people the people don't have any sense that another world is possible that would be a world worth living in. and i'm for the revolution books. there is such a strategy and people should come and talk with us about it. spinach is there an alternative to the revolution wax is that the only way? >> can anyone on the panel can you do the shorter revolution and then talk about the positive possibilities of making the revolution and getting to the world where it isn't doggy dog is and don't eat dog and you don't have capitalism -- >> thank you. i think we have the spirit of the question. is there another way called revolution and what would revolution look like? would it have to be a violent revolution? spec that reminds me of the claim that evolution actually isn't about 4 p.m. previous convention and the sword of inserting of new ideologies which is very scary to people because as much as race is a problem and its organizer lives in such a way it's very disorienting for people and so i think part of it isn't necessarily thinking about the revolution with a big r. but it's something i completely agree with what if we just lived in the world we thought that it was a capacious term all-black everything just to borrow from hip-hop that you could be lacking something else and that actually is not a limitation. so for example what if that meant an expansion as opposed to a contradiction that we that we think about it so the answer to the question is thinking about those deep-seated realities and ideologies we take for granted and thinking about the world we don't have those and i think that for many of us that is very scary. why don't we live in a world where there is a house father told baker that scares many people so some of it i think when we hear revolution we think about taking over russia when in fact i think that the act of revolution where her example there are transgender people who are blacks and vibrant fruits of our community. that's what the revolutionary to me so this is the key revolution in the context to give up the conditions and the strength of the sweetly over ourselves that do not require the meeting just to the things they do to each other and we change those practices and it is revolutionary perhaps with a lowercase or. >> i'm always concerned about the utopia thinking and i think often times we talked about revolution and we have the end in mind and i'm much more interested in how we engage with each other so the movement was much more interesting to me. i was in jackson and solve these extraordinary organizations putting together movements that were progressive on multiple fronts and i do think that the lesson of the early and the late movement is that movement allowed -- it's not just a the capacity to transform the social relations that can transform internally with the sense of the capacity so that i think is something that moves us somewhere good whether or not we are focused on what the end exactly what look like. >> question is in the backdrop is it possible to expand on the m. adjectives that gives black folks agency in empowerment and specifically i'm thinking of -- that was the question. [laughter] >> how can we empower the agency? >> i'm thinking about book market you talk about the foundational. we often think of the sunset areas and cities where things happen to them and all these other things happen to black people that but you gave the agency that gives power and i'd thinking about this i thinking about this more specifically around baldwin's contingent so in the contemporary how could the movement gets agency could agency for the revolutionary transformation politically in mobilizing and bringing the political? >> what we are going to do with your permission i speak to questions at a time. so, we have one excellent question and take a second one for someone who seems to be wearing a and i love columbia law school t-shirt so this better be a really good question. [laughter] >> no pressure. >> my question hopefully is worthy of my school. basically so how do you deal with this? we talked earlier about love and how do you deal with loves masquerading or how have you had the opportunity to masquerade in the implicit bias because i think for us as a black community we love each other more than i think of her before coming and what that does also allows that criticism that we do and also it allows the politicians to say in the spirit of love and in the spirit of trying to include our agent, we are also going to be very critical and points the finger at us and so when baldwin says that it doesn't -- these politicians say we are going to grow a spine and points the finger at your community in the spirit of love, and i think that that is disingenuous but it also seems to be what we are advocating for. >> and it's certainly happening. i put to you simply the figure of someone a colleague of mine calls horse watering chief who seems to have taken upon himself a special location almost every upper trinity that he's going to speak to the black audience. i would emphasize to the point of fiction particularly of black men so that is a very good question. >> i am a sociologist by location and training as well and part of what's interesting there at the start of my comment the black experience can be used as a barometer or litmus test in these ways but part of what is interesting is that it's also also the ergometer or the litmus test that doesn't require for you to gather black people and ask them what they think you should do. instead here is the policy called urban renewal but to study them and see what happened to them and part of what i think is important especially if you were a philadelphia negro where ever you might find yourself that everything that you do especially in your commitment to place his agency you are staying somewhere and that has ramifications on why the city looks the way that it does that is and how learning and it's also disempowering does it also means we are comparable in some ways for what we are seeing. the existing paradigm and the great thing about not having people is that you can throw your hands up and say what it is doing to us and some of this is vast and we can't tell you how many times even in 2014 you go somewhere and it doesn't include a number of people, single mothers, teenage mothers, adopted kids wards of the state. it is a particular person we are talking about and then as the black politics and actors we see why aren't you all being inclusive? the inclusivity must begin with us. we aren't including all of the people in this group how how do we expect somebody that is not us to acknowledge this? it is a very dangerous connection that the agency point is meant to give the wave to the idea that where you lived in the city that you live in as long as you've been there you matter and with great power comes great responsibilities of the for the idea of the city maker sounds like people are walking around with i want this i'm changing this, i'm doing that but it comes with a great responsibility because when you because when you look at them via which is now no longer 98% black that 15% black and declining there is a more complex story that involves with black-and-white people are doing in the city at the same time. >> if i could jump in quickly i work on the university campus so i will tell that story. i can't tell you the number of times i thought the need to talk to black and brown students going to a meeting or something. the narrative comes out while other students basically tell us in many ways large and small we don't belong here and i getting greedy every time i hear that because they are now biting into the narrative they did not write that tells them they don't belong. you can take this from the university campus to the nation and i said you were obligation to tell them that you do. and since your obligation to not listen to that and you do belong. in fact you got in after also you belong. also this is not to ignore or let people get off the hook for telling the terrible narrative but there is also hard work that has to be done by saying i do belong and you can't tell me otherwise. that's frankly what has to happen every single day and it's not fair but this is the world in which we live, so i think that this kind of speaks to an important agency that black folks often say to everybody white, straight black whatever, i belong here. whatever my conflicted idea is i belong here. >> piece that i have nothing to prove. the world also belongs to me. i would like to respond to the brilliant columbia student question. for me anytime somebody says love, i get nervous. i really do because i believe in the hallucinatory qualities of love. i remember there was a girl that was defying gravity and he came out of the woods i was in vermont and he saw this girl and i watched him fall in love with her. he didn't know her or anything about her except she decided crafty and he was just like wow and the power of the feeling was so strong that she couldn't resist it. it was interesting at the end up leaving together. she couldn't help it because he was so in love with her. it's like the idea. for a lot of people you have to question where it comes from and how you are feeling for other people. i think about this and i can only really think about him when he's playing because other than that, it's beyond me. but one of the simple things i can do is question what that love is because really we are black people in america as we like a lot of white things and european things. for unconscious reasons not conscious reasons. you have to actually really interrogate why do i think this or why do i feel so strongly about this or why do i feel i should kill people in iraq and afghanistan because of something that happened not think about what we've been doing forever in iraq and these other places. >> first i need to make a five-minute statement apologizing to the country of iran for what we've done to them for so many years. and they said you can't do that and i said why not? they think they are but they are not. even -- well, anyway. i said why not? they said because we are a writer's organization. we don't represent all of those people. i said okay fine. i'm not going to read. [laughter] but, you know, we have all of these feelings and it's really important to question our love and being loved and how it works and what impact that has. it's really important. >> iem piggybacking on the wonderful studied from columbia. i brought it to get back to the love. it we insist on or create the consciousness of the others do not falter in our duty now he may be able to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country and changed the history of the world if we do not endear everything the fulfillment of the prophecy be created from the bible in the sleeve is upon us. god gave the rainbow sign. no more water the fire next time my question very briefly is what can we do as human beings going out into this world to help bring back the love or solution and i want to start with a good story. [laughter] i also mention i am in african studies? >> what proactive thing can we do? find ways to get our children to turn off the screen and read books. i know we are a visual culture and i know i might have caused pain to my friend at the end but i think reading is fundamental. so, start there. i have to do one just one. >> i don't have to convince kids. we live here. it's like it's not going to happen. it's not going to happen. not that many people have ever read -- >> let's just gave more to read. >> i will take the larger point about developing literacy. there are many different kinds of literacy and different ways to develop literacy. the value of developing literacy in addition to its own sake is that it becomes a tool for the development of the critical consciousness and i think we are all on board here as being huge fans of critical consciousness. one final question. the stack we really only have time -- >> it's urgent >> i'm an immigrant from nigeria. i feel like when you keep referring to the experience you are referring more to the african-american experience so i'm wondering how do you incorporate the experience or at least african immigrant experience into this conversation? >> we start by recognizing that the experience is an african-american experience and it is a different african-american experience banned those who were forced emigrants in the country but it is unfolding with and connecting and powerful and productive ways with the experience of the people of african descent who came here before and it is an experience that challenges us to think comparatively about this thing. >> and you are right you have been exercising the conversation. the same thing goes for those who mentioned above marley once or twice. and, you know it's true that african-americans have really been isolated because america is such an isolationist nation from the rest of our experience into and there is a lot for us to learn. >> i would say that if you look at the history of the black intellectual life consistently up to the 1970s there's always been an international concern and to extend connection and global connections and so blinding that, i think it's an important card and restoring that. >> one final question. .. >> >> and half a sobriquets brought together. [laughter] laugh but to people together and if he could bring together the carter from mexico and an african-american and lawyer we could do the same thing here and brooklyn and harlem. so i am asking you to hold me to do it because it is urgent. >> that is the challenge. >> it can only have been thrown down here. it is a challenge not to those sitting on the stage by to each and every one of you in this room because we're all stakeholders in this community however you imagine the communities of the sister i would invite you to join me as we begin a close discussion and a conversation. >> let me say something i can put you in touch with the person that is so successful after words. >> that is very practical. >> i have a very easy e-mail address. anybody that emails me she has the curriculum and the template. >> this has been a wonderful conversation and is my privilege to share with these extraordinary folks. let's conclude this part of this time to fully acknowledge and thank them for their generosity. [applause] again and props to all the sponsors of the book fair and we will see you again next year. thank you. [inaudible conversations] ♪ eighty very much i appreciate this conference very much i have been speaking or helping else's 2002 but this is