Was saying, we cant have change without one another. The merging of identity, what the writing should be, we do it sometimes for laughter, sometimes this other purpose. It is becoming somebody else, you should feel free within your imagination, if you want to write that is what is great about octavia butler, helping out with space travel and futurism, you can go to the past and the present where you can go to the future and write about different people, you can be the black woman writer, you are free to do all of that. Which actually brings us back to the beginning of the discussion, the destruction of that dualism, intersection out he seems to be the roadmap, that is the roadmap we have to follow as we move into the future. I think we are done. I want to thank our panelists, all the Great Questions and your attention, thank you very much. Thank you so much. I want to leave with this quote from charles johnson. When art is at its best, it liberates our perception. Thank you so much. Give another hand for our panelists. [applause] the next panel from the 13th annual National Black writers conference is a conversation on race and gender. There is language used in this panel that some might find offensive. I am going to start by giving basic information while panelists are preparing. Those who just got here i want to make sure you know who i am because i dont want you to say that lady. If you think i wasnt that good dont think about my name, forget about it. But if you like it you will remember. I am doctor, you got the doctor part . I got to tell you i may laugh and joke, doctor Linda Michelle baron. I will be a associate professor at york college, thank you, your College Community where i had been the chair for four years and a wonderful job of teaching preservice teachers and preparing them to teach our children so i am here to introduce our fourth panel for today but before i do i would like to give you some information. You are pretty good for being this late in the afternoon. Those who are videotaping are from cspan booktv. I hope you watch cspan booktv. It saves you from some of the mess on television. Can i get a witness. Sometimes late at night i dont want to talk, want to make time for the speakers. We also want to make sure even at this point when this part of the program is ended and before the videotape there are authors who will autograph their work. You want to keep that value, keep the artifact with you. Go to the area where they are selling the books, the official bookstore, sisters uptown bookstore. Dont forget about them when you are in harlem, you are invited today to this evenings award program. It is open and free to the public. Did you hear that . Free . We hope you are able to do that and to attend the benefit reception and concert this evening. Before i introduce them i want you ready for this. We have been sitting for a bit, some of you have been here since 10 00 this morning like i was and i thought it might be nice to have you prepare. A little poem. Your job is to say i shake. By any means power, mention power, we are going to do this real quick. I will introduce the moderator. It is the drum. Imitation, gods creation, righteous feeling, the drum. The heat of us, the move of us, the drum. Am 80 home, talking to you, beat the drum. It is a drum speaking in tongues, past and present. I am hearing it. I am all wrapped up, i am wearing it, the drum. Stopping and unfolding the power and passion of who we are, and beating out the drum of me, the drum. It is the drum. It is the drum. I said bring that energy when we introduce this panel who will be speaking on the politics of race and gender in the literature of black writers. This is in your program, it also does in the age of president obama, the question that comes to mind, and was left racially divided, 15 or 20 years ago, and because of president obama, that is another story. And introduce the moderator and the institution, professor ford was appointed chair of the Public Administration department in january 2014 at maker evers and the master Public Administration, the candidate at columbias university and other International Another institution. We want to make sure there was time to speak, a contributor to the black lives literary magazine, you hear him on tv, he will keep this Party Started and keep it going. [applause] thank you for that. Good afternoon. We have an exciting conversation about to take place, told to remind all of you that slips of paper are being distributed so if you have questions they will be collected. I would ask you to frame questions in a way that our panelists will be able to have a conversation with you. That is the whole idea. What we do over the next hour and 15 minutes, hour and a half, we have three hours, doctor green. Is that correct . We have three hours, is that correct . We will be here. Let me, first of all, you know what the topic of discussion is for today. On behalf of National Black writers conference committee, i want to thank all of you for participating and making this the historic event that it is. Having said that let me introduce our panelists briefly. You have their presentations in your program but it is useful. To my far right, mister paul beanie, his current novel the sellout about Race Relations in america won the National Book critics circle award for fiction, you can give a round of applause for that. He is the author of slumberland and the white boys shuffle, it includes a big bank take a little bank and joker and he lives here in new york city, please join me in welcoming him. [applause] to my immediate right, guess who that is. Ms. Daniels. Mcdaniels is an author and awardwinning journalist, the author of inflight conversations on race, politics, sex, money, ghetto nation, work has appeared in fortune, the New York Times magazine, usa today, heart and soul, mens fitness, she is a contributor to essence as part of the journalism faculty at new york university, native new yorker who lives in brooklyn and a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University school of journalism, please join me in welcoming miss daniel. [applause] we had a panel revolt take place in our preparations. We asked our colleagues to make Opening Statements and they refused so we will not have Opening Statements. We will just begin and we will begin and i ask the panel to begin with this notion. Both of you i would say, writing nonfiction and fiction area have this one characteristic that could be called the reverend. On very serious topics but taking them from another angle. When we talk about this particular path, literary path, what is the value of the reference and what do you hope to elicit from your readers at the end of the day when they close your book and say what is it your irreverent path is supposed to get out of your readers . This revolt cannot continue. I think when you are writing about issues of race and gender, reverence is necessary. Too often when we are talking about topics that are uncomfortable, is acceptable. And further the dialogue when you make people think. And let me Say Something, i want to challenge peoples assumptions. And matt moved the dialogue forward. And something successful. In your book the sellout, the protagonists, brought on trial brought up on trial restoring slavery to the United States. The same question for you, and what was available for writers these days. For me for me, when i started writing and thinking about what i wanted to say, one thing i thought about is the way me and my family, me and my friends talk about these topics was tonally so different from the way i read about the topics and everything was on one note, very serious. When me and my friends would talk about it or me and my sisters we talk about it with an extreme level of seriousness but also some irreverence, some cynicism, as in the title of your book, some frank in politeness that was part of the discussion and for me made the discussion i dont want to say more honest but definitely more wellrounded and a little more genuine. That is an important thing. With this latest book, me pushing these discourses i would hear about and going if black america was so much better under segregation as some people say what does that look like in todays context . That was a challenging and fun idea to explore. We actually had comments to that effect during this conference. With that in mind, the set up for what we are here to talk about, two elements, this whole notion of race, politics, gender and how you approach that. Racial policies we are looking at have to be seen in the context of the election of the first africanamerican president and since january 2009, one can argue that the whole discussion about race has changed because of the reaction we see both in the white community, some of us may not have expected the level and consistency of opposition we have seen and the black community and the level of criticism of president obama may be different than we expected. Let me put another part on that that has to do with gender. If we were having this conference five years ago the discussion of how you write about gender in your fictional and nonfictional works respectively would be mailed female issue. Five years later we have a much different notion of how gender definitions at this point and the question becomes as you write today and as you will write in the future how do you take into account this perhaps nuanced and fragmented notion of gender in the first place . What do you think . We shall flip a coin. I dont think about any of that to be honest. I am not trying to be flippant. I take that stuff very seriously but i dont think about it to the point of can i do i have to address all these things . I cant do that so i dont try. I try to address what is important to me and hopefully in a way that is sometimes frankly can be construed as disrespectful but hopefully in a bigger context it leads to a different understanding. My girlfriend said something to me that state with the, how do you write when thinking of writing about saying about women that i interpret to write about something that i dont know, she was saying make sure your character has fun. It is something i tell my students because they want to explore, take some risks to write about somebody who is not like them. Whatever that means in the context of the story we are telling and for me if it is so important, it just expands the range of how you think about the character, and the piece of advice that stayed with me doesnt shape how i write or what i say and i have taken into consideration when i say seriously, things people will think of as offensive sometimes and sometimes i have to say to myself that is not my concern. That is the story i want to be told. And i am not trying to offend. And being irreverent the level of opposition we see from the white Political Community to barack obama, historically unprecedented. And someone selfdescribed the reverend would be pretty rich material for you someplace along the line. The black disrespect has been insane. He has been disrespected from any number of people. We talk about this earlier. I dont think we are more racially polarized than we were 20 years ago at all. And in front of the microphone in the privacy of their house. And i think what is different is what we are talking about, the level of disrespect, that is why people feel comfortable saying these things out loud because there is an inherent level of disrespect. President lincoln was called a baboon, Franklin Roosevelt was called a traitor to his class. There does seem to be Something Special about criticisms and disrespect cascaded on this particular president. From the black side and the white side, what is the uniqueness . There is a genuine disrespect for black people, he is a black guy and that flows all kinds of different ways. For me, one of the small things, it is my bias also. They are always interrupting him. No matter who it is. I dont know if i remember clinton hitting interrupted like this all the time. Or george bush getting interrupted like this all the time. There are Little Things i see, if i was still in grad school i might take time to do a study to see if it is just me or if it is true. You say a special disrespect, i dont know what that means. It is special because he is the president. It is a new kind of disrespect for a black president as opposed to disrespecting a black professor or black Police Officer or black doctor. It depends what you mean by special. It feels different. It is the object of scorn from some side or another, it is a special little sharper perhaps more personalized, i dont know. What do you think . I dont know. I am thinking as i am talking but does it even matter. Does it matter by how much . They are screwed up ten years ago and they will tell you. I dont know if it matters the degree to how screwed up it is. If the racial polarization we see today from a societal standpoint or a political standpoint, pretty much that way all along instead of being articulated to a greater extent, is there some way it changes over time or it is the rut we are stuck in as the United States as americans, what do you think. It depends on the day you ask me. But i think what changes, politics and economics, dont know if you can change hearts and minds. You can teach people there are certain ways not to act but that doesnt mean they transformed and that is what i feel if i am locked into that if you ask me i feel cynical. What changes is what is acceptable. People might not change what society accepts, that can make daytoday different. Lets pivot for a moment because the other element we want to discuss has to do with the issue, the concept of gender falls in to a political standpoint or societal standpoint or the standpoint of where you fall or write about, and the notion of gender is a pretty binary notion we were discussing five years ago and you have a number of things, a woman seriously running for president for a second time in this country, we have the same sex marriage has been pretty much codified by the Us Supreme Court throughout the country and a number of other changes we have seen with respect to definitions of gender as well as what it means to be in any of these gender categories. And today or yesterday, you have been commenting on these matters. What are you seeing in this . What do you feel are some useful areas of comment and perspective . Everything that i write i am always writing from the point of view of a black woman. That is who i am. I cant separate today i will write the gender thing and today i will write the race thing, intertwined identity. I never separate them out. It is impossible. In terms of being in an age where we have prominent president ial candidates who are female, people of color and all types of diversity going on in this election, in this race, it surprises me, how much resistance there has been to the candidacy that people contribute to gender. You are talking about Hillary Clinton. I never go down the dark hole of twitter but for some reason i was reading through twitter stuff and charles posted this comment, the email he had gotten, it was a Bernie Sanders supporter who said if he couldnt vote for bernie he was going to vote for donald trump to blow up the gop. He was commenting he got lots of these emails recently. My mind was blown. You can vote for whoever you want but to say you are going to switch over to trump if you cant vote for bernie, to me gender, i am not to completely put on my harness, not as a Hillary Clinton supporter, but to not acknowledge gender is not shaping that decisionmaking, you cannot bear the thought of voting for a woman candidate that you will vote for a racist, is that any better . I dont get that. So, surprised about as much as gender has been talked about how much has not been talked about, we are not admitting how much gender is affecting our choices. What do you think . I agree. Because he didnt say i wont vote for that whatever, you can read that as a genderless crime i guess. I agree. It is one of the little outs that being polite has always given us because when you pretend to be polite by not saying something then you havent said it. I was having this conversation, another thing that wont make sense but a similar thing online for someone calling someone out and using their last name, rosencrantz, a thing that was antisemitic but can be construed as antisemitic, call them a jew or say this but these other same thing you get, i wasnt being racist, never said x why and the but you know what it is because it is not spelled out or starred, it makes the conversation so difficult, because even the deconstruction of the comment, there is a nuance to this that is hard to pin down but you know it when it has been tweeted. I dont have an answer to this. At the same time i dont feel it is necessarily my responsibility to address all of these things. That is a quote by popeye. It is an indication of progress, and i am not dealing with this today. Couldnt have that advantage. To make that decision would cost me Something Else it might not cost me today. I dont have a solid way to talk about these, that is the fun part of doing it. When you were asked about the binary and different genders, the nuance of the moment we are in, that is the challenge that makes writing about these issues fun at this point and it also is empowering because there is a diversity of black points out there. We dont have to write about every single thing, there is a whole auditorium of us out there that can write things from their point of view and we shouldnt have the same point of view, and when we get to the point that they dont have the same point of view. We hear the womens movement, people like and that in many instances to the civil rights struggle, the struggle of black americans, the same analog being discussed with the notion of the lgbt queue community and people in that community and those communities seeking validation and rights and so on. Do you see those comparisons as being apt or appropriate or do you have problems with that, like that . Any marginalized c