 Hello, and welcome. Thank you for joining us for our program, Online Mechanics Institute, for Read Until You Understand, the Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature. I'm Laura Shepherd, Director of Events at Mechanics Institute, and we're proud to co-sponsor this event with the Museum of the African Diaspora, MOAD. And before we begin, I'd like to first introduce Elizabeth Gessel, Director of Public Programs at MOAD, to talk about what's coming up at the museum. So please welcome Elizabeth, and then we'll continue. Good evening, everyone. Thank you, Laura. My name's Elizabeth Gessel, and I'm the Director of Public Programs at Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. MOAD is a contemporary art museum and our exhibitions and programming inspire learning through the global lens of the African Diaspora. We're thrilled to be partnering with Mechanics Institute on tonight's program. MOAD is open to the public. We have five stunning exhibitions on view through February 27th. So if you're in the Bay Area, come by and see us. And we continue to present a variety of virtual programs. Tomorrow evening at 6 p.m. will be our monthly open mic series with featured Daryl Alejandro Holmes. And on Thursday, February 24th at 6 p.m. will be our group reading with six poets who have written original ecphrastic poetry in response to our current exhibitions. And that will be online as well. So you can learn everything about the museum and our virtual programs at moadsf.org. Thank you. Thanks, Elizabeth. Once again, it's great to co-sponsor with you. And for those of you who are new to the Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854 and we're one of San Francisco's most vital cultural and literary centers in the heart of the city. And we feature our General Interest Library and International Chess Club ongoing author and literary programs and our Cinema Lip Film series on Fridays. So please visit our website and also come down in person to 57 Post Street. I wanna make mention that this program tonight is part of an NEH grant, Civil Rights, Artistic Diversity. Historical Reckoning, exploring the film literature and lives of marginalized communities, which as mentioned is part of the National Endowment for Humanities. Also, if you would like to purchase books, read until you understand the profound wisdom of Black life and literature by our guest, Cara Jasmine Griffin and also books by Julie Lythcott Haynes who is our host tonight, are available through alexanderbook.com. So, let me introduce our guests in this elegant blending of memoir and a close reading of a wide range of works, including novels, poems, speeches, music and art. Cara makes connections across genres and across generations, expanding the reader's experience of the words that bring us close to the human experience, mercy and justice, rage and resistance, democracy, love and death, grief and beauty. Her work brings us into her personal life and also into the words and inspirations of African-American literature, which offer us resilience, hope and strength, especially during these times of racial injustice and social reckoning. We're in the company of two amazing writers tonight. Cara Jasmine Griffin was the inaugural chair of the African-American and African diaspora studies department at Columbia University, where she is also the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature. Griffin is the author of Who Set You Flowing, The African-American Migration Narrative. Also, if you can't be free, be a mystery in search of Billie Holiday. And she's co-author with Sully Washington for Clawing at the Limits of Cool, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever. And she co-authored Uptown Conversations, the New Jazz Studies and also Harlem Nocturne, Women Artists and the Progressive Politics during World War II. I'd also like to mention that she is a recipient of the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. Congratulations. And she comes to us from the Big Apple. So welcome from New York. Thank you. And Julie Lithcott Haynes is the New York Times best-selling author of How to Raise an Adult, which gave rise to a popular TED talk. And her second book is the critically acclaimed and award-winning prose poetry memoir, Real American, which illustrates her experience as a black and a biracial person in white spaces. Her third book, Your Turn, How to Be an Adult has been called A Groundbreaking Frank Died to Adulthood. Julie serves on the board of Common Sense Media, Black Women's Health Imperative, Narrative Magazine, and she's also on the board of trustees of the California College of the Arts. And she serves on the advisory boards of a learnin.org, Parents Magazine and Baldwin to the Arts. Julie lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her intergenerational family. So please welcome Farrah Jasmine Griffin and Julie Lithcott Haynes. Thanks so much, Laura, for having us here to the Mechanic Institute. I'm truly honored to get to be a part of Professor Farrah Jasmine Griffin's visit, air quotes, to the Bay Area tonight. We'll take advantage of time zones that are mysteriously magically happening to make this event possible. It's an honor to be here at the Mechanics Institute to know that Moad is a co-sponsor. We're grateful, I know, to the audience members who've chosen to spend their Wednesday evening with us. And of course, I'm just delighted to get to be in conversation with Farrah. So let's get started. Farrah, usually when I have the opportunity to be in conversation with a fellow author, I like to begin by asking, tell us who you are such that you came to be the person who wrote this book. And it feels especially apt tonight, given that your book, this incredible book, is called Read Until You Understand, which was a message imparted to you by your father who passed when you were quite young. Of course, I appreciate you may have some friends and some colleagues and fans of your work in the audience who know the origins of you that led you to pursue this field and the work that led to this book and the book itself. But for those who may be new to you, can you walk us through the arc of you becoming the person you are who is so devoted to Black literary thought? Oh, wow, thank you. That's just a wonderful and generative question. First of all, thank you for taking the time to be in conversation with me. And like you, I also wanna thank the people who brought us here, the Mechanics and Moad. It's wonderful. Even virtually to be in the Bay Area. So I think that, as I say in the book, my love of African-American history primarily and in culture came through my father who shared, read to me and shared the excitement of reading and learning about our history here in this country and also outside of the nation as well. And I, you know, when my father died, I really kind of out of a sort of father hunger, you know, read the books that he left behind, began to read them and then began to collect my own books, mostly things that I thought my father would be interested in, things that in some ways, ways that I departed from him, he was a real history buff. I fell in love with literature. I fell in love with literary prose and poetry and just, you know, it was one of those sort of a life-changing things, the way reading can be for you. Even then though, and I always wanted to be a writer from very early on, I wanted to be a writer and luckily I came of age when there were all these extraordinary Black women writers, Toni Morrison, Tony K. Bambara and Tozake Shange, Alice Walker, Paul Marshall. And so they were joined to the kind of formal reading that I received in school, which were mostly Western canonical writers. But even then, knowing how much I love literature and how much I wanted to write and how much I felt that particularly literature by Black writers was very important to understanding this country, I never thought that I would pursue it professionally. It just wasn't an option. I thought I was going to go to law school, in fact. I had every intention of going to law school, but I had two professors in college who suggested I think about graduate school and that I consider getting a PhD, which was completely foreign to me, but I investigated it and I thought, how self-indulgent to spend my life reading, writing and teaching, like that's what I should do for fun. But I did and have been teaching at the university level for the last 30 years, primarily African-American literature, but also cultural history, intellectual history. So a passion, I think I've been fortunate that a passion actually became a career for me and the teaching, the great teaching that I received from my father, I think has certainly fed and nurtured my own teaching as well. So in a nutshell, that's how I get here. I love it, I love it. We're glad you're here. We're glad you chose this path. You are of tremendous inspiration to those of us who have the privilege of reading your words. I raised my hand when you said, people suggested, you thought you were gonna go to law school, I raised my finger because I went to law school. And I think what law and the pursuit of historical analysis and writing about history in a literary way have in common is this really love of the power of language, the ability to wield words for impact, two very different paths professionally, but they do have some important things in common. I was also struck when you were talking about your early influences as you spoke about Toni Morrison and Toni Cade-Bombara and Tashaki Shange and others, I found myself picturing Lucille Clifton, who was my touchstone to black life, black female life, mothering body, being biracial, I have a white parent and a black parent, my mother happens to be white. And so I lacked a black mother and found in the poetry of Lucille Clifton, a literary black mother, such that my heart or my spirit said, as I was marking up, good woman, which was the first text of hers that I was reading, my spirit said, if she is possible, if these words are possible, then maybe I too am possible. And so I feel this profound gratitude to a writer who came well before me, but whose work was so intimate, whose work revealed such an intimate aspect of her life that it felt entirely plausible that it could intertwine with mine and help me develop as a human. To me, your book, you mentioned Canon, the Western literary Canon, and we know what that means. We know who's faces and hair and skin color is included typically in the Canon, who's is not. And I really feel that your marvelous book, Read Until You Understand, is disrupting the Canon or is soundly making the claim that a whole lot of other folks belong in the Canon. To me, this is a literary historical text. It is a thorough compendium of the Canon of black thought selected and presented in such an artful way that it feels like a treatise that reads like a novel. We see how Phyllis Wheatley is the predecessor in thought of James Baldwin, who is the predecessor in thought to Toni Morrison on the subject of mercy. And we see how the founding documents of America, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence make their way into the rhetoric of the Black Panthers. And we see you as a young black child whose father is taken too soon, facilitated by racism and indifference. We see you coming of age through black literary thought. And we see through your recollection of it, Tana Hesse Coates, talking about how all these people in our ancestry were not all on the same page. He called it a brawl of ancestors, right? So I wanna ask, you've done so much with this. I imagine you are trying to move the needle with this book, but I wanna ask you if that's true, if you are trying to move the needle, what needle are you trying to move? And why this particular approach? Wow, you are a dream reader. And what you say about Lucille Clifton is just it proves exactly what I'm saying here that we form relationships with writers and the words that they give us and that the words that they give us become part of our inheritance and our legacy. And we define ourselves alongside or sometimes against what they've given us, but it's a very intimate, it's an intellectual relationship, but an intimate one. So to answer your question, when you write a book, you're writing it in a specific moment in time and you're hoping that it will speak to a future, but you don't know what that future is. So this comes out of a lifetime of learning and one of the reasons why I take the approach that I take is I wanted to say, yes, I've learned how to read about and write about to do literary criticism and literary theory, but my passion for this body of work did not start in graduate school. And I was taught that it had a level of importance beyond the intellectual or beyond the academic. Before I ever became an academic, it was an important work. So it was important for me to give that personal narrative. I started writing it during the 2016 election before the results were in, but during that election. And I thought, wow, this tradition about which I know so much and that has shaped me has a lot to say about this democratic experiment that Americans would do well to listen to it. And it's not all they've talked about, but they've had some important things to say and have been invested in it reaching its ideals in ways that some of our fellow Americans have only been invested in word only, but not in action. And it was clear in 2016. I finished it in the pandemic. I finished it with the kind of uprisings around George Floyd, which meant that what I had been writing about resonated even more. And now I find myself talking about it in a period when they're trying to ban a lot of the books that I write about. So it always seems urgent and important. And it's one of the things that I tell my students when they take African-Americans literature class with me, I say, you might not know it now, but I guarantee you something is going to happen this semester. It's gonna make this literature even more important. I wish it didn't happen, but it's gonna happen. Yeah. Right. It speaks to the essential role writers play in documenting, explicating, describing, prescribing. Giving us language for understanding what we're feeling. Yeah, absolutely. Not to pat ourselves on the back, but you know. Everyone here loves writers. I know that. Okay, so I've been reading your Marvelous book and telling everybody about it. Oh, what are you doing, Julie? Oh, I'm getting to be in conversation with Jasmine Griffin. And I'm reading this book and let me tell you what it is. I've just had you with me for a few days now. And as you said, I'm struck by how your material that is out in 2021 feels to be in direct response to what I'm reading in the news today, right? And to this very moment of refusal in some places to teach, to learn, to discuss, to understand our history. But I also know that books are not written overnight or in weeks or in months and take years in fact. So the 2016 election, you know, I too had a book come out that was written in that time, my memoir, Real American. And I remember in my memoir using the term white supremacy to describe this drumbeat that I was hearing grow louder. And I worried a little bit that people might think I was overreacting. Don't call it white supremacy. Nobody tried to stop me, but as I went through the process of the manuscript becoming a book, I worried and I did get a little bit of pushback, but, you know, they were encouraging, keep going. And of course, now nobody would bat an eyelash that we're talking freely about white supremacy. So let me ask, how does the fact of this book being so steeped in 400 years of literary black thought, how does it speak to our present challenge of the banning of the books and of the refusal to remotely understand what critical race theory is? Is this in some ways a solution? Is there a way that this particular approach that you've come up with can serve us in this moment? I think it can. I mean, I think it, you know, I mean, just the fact that, you know, so many of the books are books that are being banned, right? And what I say when I'm interviewed about these things is I say, look, nobody's trying to teach beloved to a seven-year-old, right? They're teaching beloved to a high school AP student if they're lucky and I can guarantee you that's not the first time they're learning about sex is in beloved, like it's a guarantee, right? But the truth of the matter is I think what my book shows is that I read everything when I was a little girl, like, and nobody, my mother wasn't saying you can't read that, it was on the shelf, I read it. And if I didn't understand it, someone, some adult in my life, my mother, my father, my teacher, the librarian would talk to me about it, right? Every opportunity is an opportunity, like we're so afraid of talking to our children about difficult issues. But I also know, I think that the book and all the books I write about Julie and what you write about, I think it does speak to the moment, but the people who are most hysterical about banning books are not readers, right? Readers don't ban books, right? These aren't people, the books that they wanna ban, they haven't even read, you know, they've taken a passage out of context or something. So that there is a kind of hysteria that I think is almost, it's just very difficult to rationalize with, but we have to bear witness to, your kids are gonna be okay, and you're gonna be even more okay if you let them read, and you let them read about, truthfully about the experience of how this nation came into being, you know? And, you know, I think about a young person who picks up your memoir, won't have had the same exact experience that you had, right? It's a unique experience to you, but there will be things that they recognize that you give meaning to, the nervousness of going out on the dance floor, you know? I mean, the embarrassment moment, the concern, there will be things that you have given, you've given such humanity to that little girl who they might feel they don't know that they will connect with her. So yes, all of these books speak to our moment as books throughout time always speak to all of our moments. That's why we still read Homer for God's sake, you know? Yeah, thank you for that. You know, when you mentioned certain things being taken out of context by people who may not be reading at all, or have only read the tiny little thing, it reminds me of the part of your book where you acknowledged that the controversy that reverend right experience as Barack Obama's pastor and Obama experienced as he's running for president, you know, and he has to address that. So many of the people who were condemning Obama for the audacity of having had this preacher in his life had only read a snippet or two, you know? He was totally being read out of context and how Obama had to figure out what the truth of that was, figure out what the politics of it was, figure out how to thread this needle that Obama chose to thread the way he did around race and our history. And, you know, it's sort of history becomes a collage. What happened? Who had the privilege to write it down in the first place? And how did they narrow it to it, given their biases, right? Did that last through time? What snippets of it do we have? You know, we regard, it really opens up big questions. I think like what is truth and what is history, right? I should ask you, what is your definition of history? Well, I mean, I think there's the history that we write, right? And it's in the historiography, which is fascinating, that is fully and always shaped by the moment, right? So our interpretation of the past, right now we're going through a period where people are thinking more and more outside of the academy about the history of the reconstruction period. Right. We know how reconstruction was, you know, there was reconstruction that happened. And then there was the ideological interpretation of it in order to, you know, take back all the wins and gains of reconstruction. You had to say that it was a fool's errand with a bunch of idiotic black people and their opportunistic white allies in order to take away their vote and disenfranchise them and roll back all of those gains. And then you have someone screaming in the wilderness like a Du Bois in 1934 saying, no, you're wrong, but that doesn't become the dominant way of understanding it in the academy until many years later. And Eric Foner writes that record. And now we have PBS giving us the documentary that says actually some really progressive things happened and had we stayed that course, we might not be where we are today. So there's what happened and we say, there's who writes about it, how they interpret it, how they use it to justify what they're doing in the moment. Yeah. Right? That's what it is. And PBS has a documentary that's basically saying had we not stayed the course, we wouldn't be where we are today. In other words, we made some progress then that put us in a better position now than we would otherwise have been. Right. Okay, I was gonna say the opposite. No, I think that's what it, yeah, it's the opposite actually. The opposite, yeah. Had we stayed the course, we would have been, got you. Yeah, because what, you know, I have to admit that I felt both tremendous hope and optimism and also a bit of despair in reading the cyclical nature of the rhetoric of what was happening to our people and what was being said by others about us. And so one of these efforts, you know, you bring up reconstruction and that has been top of mind for me in the last two years. That is we seem to have had yet another capstone event if the emancipation of the slaves and the end of the civil war was the sort of capstone event of the 19th century regarding race. And then we had reconstruction for this brief period and then it ushered in this tremendously long period of violence and restraint and sorrow. I see the parallels to Obama's capstoneing the civil rights movement of the 20th century and becoming elected and the concurrent rise in white nationalism and white supremacy and now the restriction on voting rights. And it just feels like my God, whomever said those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it is sort of holding their hand on their forehead right now looking at us humans like, come on. But I think what I also can appreciate is history is unwieldy. It isn't all recorded accurately to the extent there is any such thing. It isn't all recorded broadly. We only write up the history of the victor and their loudest detractors. And so it is an unwieldy thing to know our history so as to not be doomed to repeat it but we have to start somewhere. Frankly, I think we should start with your book. I think it should be assigned in every high school. I think every teacher should have to read it. But I do wanna ask you, if we were trying to stop this moment that seems to be upon us of, it feels like both an encroachment and many, many, many steps back all at once it has this velocity, it's moving forward and yet it's an undoing. How would we take these thinkers, these writers, these words that they use and help people like, what would you point to as the moment your book can illustrate? Like, look, this is where we're on the edge of this cliff and here's how we know, cause we've been here before and I can show you the language that was used before and we now look back at it and say, oh, if only. Yeah. Like what? Yeah, I mean, you know, that's so hard, Julie. I mean, I think you're so right. Like for instance, I think that there are things that we take for granted. I think that some people took for even if they, for whatever reasons they didn't wanna vote in 2016 or they didn't wanna vote a certain way or whatever. If for nothing else, one of the things that we had to think about was the courts. Like that was, if for nothing else, because this history teaches us what the courts can do. Yeah. And what, you know, this history teaches us like, what happens so you get a Dred Scott or what happens so that you get a Plessy V Ferguson and you get a Plessy V Ferguson in the 1890s that makes segregation the law of the land and it takes until 1954 for Brown to turn it back and still there's a backlash against that. So I mean, you know, so that's just one example. But the other example that I think is probably more pertinent is that, so that every time people pop up and fight it back or feel like we can't fight it back, I think that there are ample examples in the book that there is also a tradition of fighting it, right? That there is, and one of the reasons why I chose to write the rage and reach resistance chapter, the way that I did was that I was writing it, I was finishing it as we were going through the Black Lives Matter and things were happening in Philadelphia and different places. And I said, those young people out in the street in Philadelphia, I hope they know that they are standing in a tradition, that Philadelphia was always this place where there were these really sort of radical activists, anti-slavery activists, so that when the future of the slave law was passed, we talk about civil disobedience, when the future slave law was passed and there will be versions of that, you know? That there were people who said, not on our watch, not while we're alive, you can pass that law, but you're not going, we're gonna free a fugitive who comes to Philadelphia, you know? We're gonna get on the boat and take this woman off of the boat from her master because she is in a free territory and this was Black abolitionists and radical Quakers and we'll go to jail for it, but that's what we're gonna do. So that there's this contest over what Philadelphia is going to be. And I think that's the lesson. The lesson is that you can't take it lying down and you don't have a tradition of taking it lying down, right? That we've been fighting and that you have to compete, that each generation has to fight it. You have to fight something new. Yeah. And each generation. Yeah. And you move the needle a little bit further, hopefully. And each generation has had allies that's a relatively new term, but what you just described with allyship, right? Brave people putting their own bodies on the line with their privilege to go get this, you know, formerly enslaved woman whose slave master had come and claimed her again and keep her free. Always had allies. I mean, like, you know, that chapter I write about Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, who's one of my favorite, favorite figures in history. And, you know, she's on the road and after Harper's fairy happens, she writes to John Brown and she writes to his men and she says, first of all, thank you for what you did, what you tried to do. Because they're in prison. They're in prison. They're about to be executed, yeah. So she writes to them and she says, and whatever I can do for your widows, black, white, all of you, whatever I can send to your widows, I will send to your widows. And one of them, her letter to him is found in his belongings after he's executed. And you're right, these were allies in a genuine sense of the word. And were they complicated, of course, human beings are complicated. Absolutely. Yeah. But few of us derive a sense of being alive from complacency. You know, to really live is to serve, is to do the work, is to be of use to others, is to have that purpose and that passion, right? Absolutely. And there's a joy. I mean, I try to show the joy that comes with you. Right? Absolutely. It's not a joyless existence. You do, you do. Let's get to that. So the subjects in this marvelous book are, you've got about, I don't know, I haven't counted like 10 or 12 chapters and 10 chapters. And they, you mentioned one of them just now, rage and resistance, but it's legacy, love and learning. The question of mercy, black freedom and the idea slash ideal of America, the quest for justice, rage and resistance, death. These are all things about which thought leaders have opined, right? And you do this beautiful job of weaving together the thought leaders from earliest into the middle, into the present. And that's what makes it this incredible historical treatise of thought. But then chapters seven, eight, nine and 10 take a pivot. They're a little bit softer. The transformative potential of love, joy and something like self-determination, cultivating beauty and gardens and grace. And so I wanna know what choices were you making and of all the things you might have decided to reduce 400 years of thought and lived black experience down to, you chose these 10 chapters. Like what's the rationale behind this particular construct? Sure, there's a lot. One is I wanted to show that these are things that human beings have thought about throughout time since our existence on this planet. And we've thought about death and we've thought about love. We've, you know, that grace pops up in all kinds of spiritual traditions and joy is a part of who we are and what we experienced. So that was why I wanted to have it there to show that, you know, it wasn't only the Greeks and the Romans who thought about this stuff. But also I think, you know, there is a way that we can look at black life. And if we think about the truth of premature black death and violent black death and rage and fighting and prejudice, you know, it's a pretty dismal way of being, right? It makes being black dismal and being black is nothing if not dismal. I mean, it's full of beauty and creativity and innovativeness and joy and yes suffering as well, but it's all there. And so I wanted a reminder, a touchstone that these other parts of the human condition are in this experience as well. And I also, you know, I make my readers join me on some very difficult, painful subjects. And I wanted to give them a breath, a chance to breathe, a gift, you know? And I wanted to end on those notes. Those are the notes that, so you're absolutely right that there is a shift toward the end that moves us into beauty, joy, love and grace. Yeah, I can tell you in the most literal manner, I felt the insurrection coming. My body in the fall of 2020 began to fear the impending destructiveness of white nationalism reclaiming its country. I, you know, I'm not saying I could foretell the future, but simply that I was reading the news and paying attention and didn't have the luxury to not pay attention. And so much so that I called my niece, Shadi Liffcott. She's the CEO of the National Black Theater in Harlem, which was founded by her mother, Dr. Barbara Antier. And for 50 years, the National Black Theater in Harlem has been foregrounding black joy and our stories and our thriving. And I said to Shadi, I'm so afraid, you know, I'm so afraid of what's coming. I'm afraid of the people who are going to be hurt. I know I'm privileged in living out here in California. I've got this light skin, I'm upper middle class. I'm not saying I'm on the front lines of this battle right now, but I'm an empath and I ache for the people whose lives are gonna be lost to this violence. And she said to me, she breathed, she sighed and Joy filled her voice and she said, Julie, I hear your compassion for others. But if I may, your concern is rooted in oppression and I want you to root your concern in our liberation. And it was just a reframe of, you know, where, what will I stand upon in order to do what I do next? Is it gonna be fear and oppression and those memories or is it going to be memories of our continual ability to liberate and strive and thrive and find joy in our Black lives? You mentioned readers and I have to ask, as we are asked when we write books, who's your audience? And I do feel that there are, you know, some two distinct audiences. There are Black folk and then non-Black folk. For Black folk, I feel like you're saying, look, look, listen to us over time. Listen to our forebears and all the things they wrestled with. You know, you've got this, because look what we've, right? There's this sort of restorative nature of being grounded in the rhetoric and efforts of our forebears. And you also demonstrate what has sustained us through all of that. But then I think for non-Black audiences, there's this kind of look, look, you may not have been taught. Black people did this, thought this, capable of this. They didn't all agree. We weren't a monolithic group. And so I don't know who you had in mind or if you had a primary and secondary and tertiary set of audiences in mind. But can you speak to that? How do you write a book like this, knowing that almost any human might pick it up and what are you offering differently depending on who they are? Yeah, so I mean, I think that I thought about all those people. So, you know, I certainly thought about Black people, like, you know, this is your inheritance and your legacy, right? Just because I write about it is my inheritance and legacy. I thought about it as, you know, I was like, look, Americans, like we are, and like you, same thing. You know, we felt it in 2016. Like if they had listened to us in 2016, we were like, wait a minute, this is coming. Like we can feel it. We see it. We saw it in the Tea Party. We knew, we know what it is when we see it. And we're not being historical or irrational. And so I thought, look, if you really claim that you care about this place and you care about these ideals, you know, and you care about those buildings on the mall, right? You care about what they stand for. These people have helped to shape those ideas too. And they might give you a way to think so that you can preserve them and make them better, make them live up to what they're supposed to do so that these institutions are living, right? These words and documents are living because it's very fragile and there's a whole lot of folk who don't believe in it, especially they don't believe in it when we start applying it to people who are not white, when it really means freedom and equality for all, right? They would rather take it all down, right? They would rather go down with it, right? And so you should be listening to these writers too. And then I just thought, because I know readers, I'm a reader, you know, and I frequent bookstores and libraries. And so it was also a kind of love letter to readers, no matter who you are, you know, the nerdy kid who's a reader, all of us readers, those of us who read and write books. I thought, you're a book lover because this is a book about books, it's a book about my family, but it's also a book about books. So I had all of those audiences in mind and I haven't been disappointed because I've had responses from all of them. I'm sure you have. You definitely nailed it across the board. As I mentioned to you before everybody joined us, and let me just say as a matter of procedure to those in the audience, we're glad you're here. We're gonna open it up to your questions in about seven minutes. So don't worry that I'm just gonna keep yammering on, okay? You're gonna get your chance. But as I mentioned to you, Farah, and before everybody got out of the waiting room, I happened to be simultaneously preparing for this event, reading your marvelous book, while also reading a memoir that's coming out by A.J. Verdel, who's a novelist, and she's now written a memoir about her literary friendship with Toni Morrison called Ms. Chloe. And I discovered to my delight that A.J. and you were in the same place doing a fellowship and you know each other. So you were showing up in each other's books which was kind of mind-blowing and cool. And what I couldn't help but take away from your book and from A.J.'s book, is that whether we're talking about you or Toni Morrison or A.J. Verdel or frankly, Amanda Gorman, whose rise has taught us about her upbringing as a child, all of you as young black girls were readers. You were all very literate and leading a literary life as children and that cannot help but have transformed you. It is evident, it is obvious that reading begets knowledge, connection, belonging, intention and the power to wield words to make others pay attention. But I was struck in A.J.'s book, Ms. Chloe, that she says as a professor at Morgan State University and HBCU, so she's been teaching young people for decades as you have, that her task is to inspire them to hunger for what's available in books. And it's gotten harder with social media and technology making everything kind of bite-sized and quick. I wonder if perhaps you've noticed this in your years at Columbia. I think my question here is, how do we get our children? And when I say our children, I mean all children and black children in particular, how do we get our children to read, to hunger for the experience that you had and that led to this life of inquiry and curiosity and impact? How do we bring reading back as the thing, the portal that opens you to the past, to yourself and to the future? No, I mean, I think there's so many competing things now. We didn't have social media, you know? And social media has done something to our attention span. You know, I have young people in my life who can't even watch, there are certain movies that I love because they're slow and they're languorous and they linger on a face and they're like, oh my God, it's too slow, you know? Right, because they're used to, but I do think with very, very young people, I think the way you get them to love reading is you read with them and they love you, they love being with you and being with you means that you read together. And that was me with my father. Like, you know, like I love being with my father. And if he had taken me to the baseball field, you know, he loved baseball, but he never took me to the baseball field. He took me to bookstore in the library. So I think very young people, we read with them and to them, we have them read to us, we make it something pleasurable. What I've noticed with my students, the college students is the pandemic was actually interesting because it forced us to slow down, stop, I had to change my syllabus and instead of making them rush through books for an exam, I said, you know what? We're not gonna do all these books. We're gonna read very slowly together. And we were all so lonely and alone that we came together over a reading, right? And it created community. It created a sense of community and a sense of purpose. And so I think it's almost creating the settings in which we give books and reading to young people, whether they are students, little kids or college students, that sometimes we have to shift the way we present things to them. Start with a Lucille Clifton poem. Who's not gonna find something that blows their mind and knocks them off their feet at the same time in a Lucille Clifton poem, right? Start with that. You know, you also speak to music. In the chapter, I think joy and self-determination, you bring music in. For 180 pages or whatever, I'm reading about how words and books are the thing for you. And then you basically say, you know what? Actually, music even more so, right? You say, for it was not only the written word that shaped and formed my understanding of the world around me, in fact, it was not even primarily books, music, more than anything helped to define us in ways that were life-giving. And later in that chapter, you speak to the pandemic and something that the DJ, D-Nice did. Early in pandemic, early, you know, like March, May, early spring, 2020, he went live on Instagram for nine hours and all these hundreds of thousands of people participated. And I found, and then Kendrick Lamar years ago recently, though, won the Pulitzer Prize. Like we have, and we have the Super Bowl performance and, you know, these West Coast hip hoppers with their narrative. I wonder if music, because I see the power of TikTok and there's tremendous content on TikTok, if somehow music is the way back to the word, you know? Because we know young people love and will always love music. And of course, lyrics are tiny little stories. And it just got me thinking about is music a way for us to be a collective again, to be joined in joy and laughter and leisure and the snap of a finger and the swing of a hip and the collective recitation of a familiar lyric. I just saw a glimmer of hope somehow in music and wonder what your thoughts are about who in music today. I know this question may be a little out of left field. Do you feel is unifying us? Who are the, and maybe even broader than music if you want to just opine on kind of popular thinkers. Who are the prophets? Who are the wisest ones? Who are the unifiers right now? Yeah, I mean, I think that music always does that. Music always does it, you know, and like Stevie Wonder is a huge, you know, character in that chapter and DJ D'Nice just showed like we needed healing. We needed to be brought together. You know, we were alone, but we were together with what he gave us. And so I do think that the music does that. There's a young singer who's not a very popular singer but my students turned me on to her named Jamila Woods who has a beautiful voice and people out in our audience tonight want to look for a clip of her on, I think it was on Stephen Colbert and it might have been the night of the insurrection. She performs a song called Sula and inspired by and words from Morrison Sula because so many of these young artists are, they are readers. They're also readers, you know? And so they are interpreting the language and they are also, they're artists of language. Certainly the hip hop artists are, the hip hop stars are manipulating language and word and metaphor. And so I think you're right. I think that music is a way in, it's a way to bring us back together. Absolutely, I think so. Another watching Questlove's film, Summer of Soul did it for me as well because it was like, yes, the music is like inspiring but the artists are also inspired by and I'm also thinking like, what were people writing that summer? Like what were people reading that summer? Because what we're reading is always in concert with what we're listening to. They both are creating the moment at the same time. Nice. Well, we have reached the magical point where I'm supposed to give it over to Laura or someone else is gonna come back in and field some questions or Pam perhaps. So over to y'all. Okay, so we have a couple of questions in chat. One is from Eleanor Higginbotham. Dr. Griffin, I am using your book in a class I'm about to teach. I chose to teach classics in African-American art as a way of responding to what our country has witnessed these past few years. Then your book came out and I gave a name and gave a name to what I was trying to do. I am moved by it as by the texts about which you write so eloquently. My question is one of appropriation. Yours is such a personal story and response. As an elderly white woman who wants to do something, how do I use your book and these texts in a classroom for other folks of a certain age and good hearts? Oh, wow. I mean, I'm so grateful that you're using it and that you're finding it useful and that it's all literature belongs to all of us through time. Like, and yes, I do have a, I give a personal way into, my own personal way into so many of the text. But as I talk about, you'll find me borrowing similes and metaphors from Fitzgerald or saying that I fell in love with Edith Wharton of the way she wrote about class. And so I think that these books belong to all of us, that are there to shape our minds. We don't, we feel like we probably, and your readers probably have more in common with the writers about whom I write than we have with Ovid or even Shakespeare, right? Who still speaks to us nonetheless, right? And we claim, Ralph Ellison said that, I think, I get it confused. He talks about literary relatives and literary ancestors. I don't know which one is which, but there's one set that we choose, that we get to choose and they can be made up of people from all time and all places. So thank you for reading the book and for teaching it and take it as you will. Okay, the next question is from Jean Powell. May I add you to my short list of books I recommend when white people ask me about race. The others on the list are Toni Morrison, Source of Self-Regard and Isabelle Wilkerson, Castle. Yeah, so please, I would be honored to be in the company with Toni and Isabelle Wilkerson, Castle. I would be honored. You know, there's a body of literature that is out the kind of anti-racist literature. I know that became very popular and important during the moment, particularly following George Floyd. And it's very important literature. I don't consider my work in that body of literature, but certainly literature that is about black people and our humanity and therefore about human beings that can maybe shed some light on the issues of race in this country and in the world. By all means, I would be honored to be added to that group of people, yes. And Jean also asks, what influence did Belle Hooks have on your perspective? She moved from rage to love in her writing. Yeah, I do quote Belle in the chapter on love because it's almost impossible to write about love in the context of black Americans. And so I do all about love. I do quote all about love in that book. And I think in that chapter, she and Baldwin are the sort of figures that helped me have the architecture. And it's probably that chapter more than anything else where one could see the influence of her, the later Belle, the Belle who writes about love is there on my own book. Well, I don't see any other, maybe in another minute, somebody will post another question. I don't see any right now. Oh, but Trish Gorman, what can you tell us? Can you type in the chat what your question is? Oh, can I say it? All right, all right. Yeah, it's not really a question as much as a comment, which is the title of this book that you've written, which I will now read, really intrigued me after I saw it and signed up for the, it kept reverberating because as a white woman, I had conceived of myself as a person who was not a racist and didn't need to, I got the picture. This is talking about myself about three years ago. And of course, because of what's, I'm in two book clubs. One is a women's book club. And every other book we read in the last year had to do with black Americans. And then I'm in, I also manage a book club, which is the League of Women Voters of Oakland Book Club, in which we also are reading many books about race. And it's like, every time I read one, I'm like, oh my God, you know, I mean, it just goes on and on the depth of it. And then I think I'm a white woman. I'll never, never, never really understand, you know. Anyway, it's just a comment. And when I think about what's going on with this book banning, it really, it is like, it's a fear of white people, of understanding. Because if they understand they're gonna have to change, I'm gonna have to change, we're gonna have to change, we white people. So anyway, I just love the title on its own. It has really stimulated so much thought for me. Well, thank you so much. You know, the title actually comes from a note that my father wrote to me in a book when I was nine years old. And the book was called Black Struggle. And he said, baby, read this until you understand. He says, you may not understand it at first, but read it if you have questions, ask your teacher, she will help you, but read it. And then he would go through the chapters and say, start here, there's Ashley Frederick Douglas. And so he was telling me to read until I understand. And as a little girl, I thought he meant like, until I understood it, I absolutely, I would reach the point of understanding. And as an adult, I realized that it's a process of not a destination. And that if I read until I understand, it means a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of being committed to learning, and that the one thing, the more I learn, the more I know what I don't know. Right, right. And it's actually ends up, it can be very frustrating because I'm like, I'm never gonna know all of this. And it's not because you're a white woman, it's because we just can't know it all. The first is like, I'm never gonna know all of this. And then I think, wow, what an exciting life I'm gonna have because I'm gonna be trying to learn until the end. I'm gonna be reading and trying to learn until the very end. So, a lifetime of reading. So, Julie said that she'd like to interject a question. I had one question that was coming up, I'm sorry. You know, you made this lovely comment. You hope, when we write, when we do our work, we hope it'll speak to a future and we yet don't know what that future is. You said that earlier on in our conversation. And it reminded me that in your book, you talk about how Barack Obama said that the Constitution left the question of slavery to future generations. Whereas Frederick Douglass saw our liberation embedded in the Constitution, Obama said no. They really punted and left that very difficult issue for future generations. And so it makes me wonder today, what are the compromises we are making on our watch right now that we're punting to future generations? What are they gonna look back upon us having done and regard our behavior as having been unforgivable? I think, you know, some of those things will be around race, but even more importantly, they'll be around what we're doing to the planet. And our refusal to, you know, our waiting so long to do what we know we needed to do to save our planet. And to address climate change and to entertain people who actually entertain and compromise with people who claimed that it wasn't happening, right? That those are the kinds of things that if we are alive, if we survive as a species, I think that future generations will be very upset with us that we're punting on. And I think that we've punted on many things. I mean, I think every time we feel like we have a history in this country of making compromises on the backs of black people over and over and over again, whether it be ending slavery when we could have, when we wrote the constitution because the Southern states didn't want us to end it and not only didn't want us to end it, we gave them more power, gave them more power. You know, and to explain to young people what the three-fifths clause really means, it doesn't mean that a black person was three-fifths of a human being. It meant that they got extra votes for people who couldn't vote. That's what it meant, right? And so we, to look at all the time we make compromises like this voting rights stuff right now, in 1965 you probably couldn't have said that we would be where we are now. And yet here we are, and we are willing to make compromise, you know? So I think that those are the kinds of things but the stuff around the planet and climate I think is really gonna be one of our young people are gonna be. Yeah, you know, sometimes people say, what do we do? What should we do? What should we do? And a thought that I've been having recently is let's take the band books list and let's form book clubs around the band books. You know, let's have a book club reading for middle schoolers and high schoolers where we facilitate them in the reading of these band books. I saw some kind of social media image the other day that said, no child has ever died from reading band books but of course they're dying constantly in schools because we have this ramp and out of control gun culture, right? So- I have a reading culture. The thing is just about my AJ reading and my reading you know, my father didn't expect the schools to teach me black history. Like he didn't expect them to. Now we have gotten to the point where we're rightly so we want all of our children to know black history but my father read to me books that he knew I wasn't gonna get in school, right? That and I think that they're like there were book clubs and they were reading books and our librarians did it for us. Yeah. So I agree. I agree. Okay. I'm gonna get to work on you. You and I can talk all night. I love going to it. Yeah. You know Pam, there's a question here from Jeanie who says to Farah, did you consult any books of interviews with formerly enslaved people? Oh, yes. You know, I first read some of those interviews. Now they're available online but I actually read the volumes of them in graduate school. I read all of the Georgia WPA slave narratives and then I went into the Alabama. And so less so for this book, more so for my first book, I cite some of those narratives but those voices are always in the back of my head. Absolutely. Mostly here they're what I talk about are the books that were published. Right on. And I'm seeing a question here so some direct message made with the question. Robert Kaufman wants to ask a question. Thank you. What? I really just wanted to thank the two of you. This has really been incredible. And I also just wanted to say to Professor Griffin it's one of these rare circumstances where although it's virtual, it's a chance to say thank you for decades of work. I've been lucky enough to be a teacher of literature and to get to point students for years and years to your work. It's opened so many doors and ears and eyes for them and the crossings, the depth of the work on literature itself but its connections to music and both of them to history. They've just been so generative for so many of the students I've taught and before that for me and with them. So thank you both again very much. Thank you. Thank you so much. And also before we bring our program to a close, Farrah, I'm just wondering if you'd like to do a reading for us from your book, a short reading. We love it. It would be such a pleasure. Oh, wow. I hadn't thought about that. So yes, I'll do something. I will actually read to you from the very end of the book. It won't ruin it. My Aunt Eartha, my mother's middle sister loved yellow roses. When I moved back to Philadelphia as a young professor in 1993 and purchased my first home, a pair of adjacent townhouses in a gentrifying neighborhood within walking distance of my childhood home, she gave me a rose bush that promised to yield bright yellow flowers. So you will have something to remember me when I die, she told me. I believe because I did not want to think of a time when she was no longer in my life, I neglected the plant. And when I relocated my mother from our south Philadelphia row house to one of my townhouses, she rescued the bush and replanted it in her own garden. Now long after I moved from Philadelphia to New York and over a decade since my aunt's passing, the bush still blooms. The women in my family loved flowers and plants. After my father's death, my mother used some of his life insurance money for a variety of home repairs, including replacing the fence around our teeny yard which she had reseemented as well. My cousin did most of the work and he created a space for a garden bed. Two memories of my mother's garden stand out to me. The first isn't really about the garden, but about the wild honeysuckle vine that grew attaching itself to the row of fences in the alley behind our yard. And after a summer rain, the scent was thick and intoxicating. I remember the contrast that the alley, a place of danger that my playmates and I were warned to avoid could also yield such perfumed pleasure. The second memory is of my mother in her garden. And it stands out to me in its quiet power and significance. I was at the kitchen sink looking out the window at her as she watered her garden with a green hose. And afterward she stood there looking at the flowers. I saw her gently point her index finger and as if it had been summoned, a large, graceful butterfly flew from the clothesline to land on her finger where it seemed to rest for an eternity. Two inexplicable gifts, the serenity and beauty of the butterfly a gift to my mother, the entire scene framed by the wooden window like a painting, a gift for me. Flowers are objects of gratuitous beauty. And while I know there are scientific reasons for the variety of shape, shade, color, scent, nonetheless they seem to exist just to give us a glimpse of their glory. And noticing them, attending to them, admiring them is an expression of gratitude. Our attentiveness too and expressions of gratitude for them is a prayer of sort. They, like the songbirds overhead are a reminder that though the world is full of ugliness, meanness, hatefulness, there is always also this. Grace, unmerited reward given to humans by the divine, just gonna finish. There is nothing we can do to earn it. It just is. Is, right. Is the final line in the version that I'm... Yes, that's it, yeah. And there's one poem that I'll leave you with and it's from Rita Dove that's in this chapter. It's called Evening Primrose. They await until the world's tucked in and the sky's one ceaseless shimmer, then lift their saturated eyelids and blaze, blaze all night long for no one. So yes, that's it. Thank you. I wanna thank Farah Jasmine Griffin for her amazing book, Read Until You Understand. And thank you, Julie Lithcott Haynes, for moderating and guiding us through this conversation. And please everyone, continue your reading. Continue this conversation as we try to heal our nation and bring forth change that we need so desperately with everyone's participation and contribution. That's what we need now. So once again, thank you again everyone for your participating in tonight's program and join us as we go forward either on Zoom or in our meeting room at Mechanics Institute and continue reading everyone. Thank you.