 Good evening. Good evening. Oh man, how did that sound to you all, man? I mean, there's a lot of good energy in the house tonight. So, good evening. Good evening. That sounds much better. I almost forgot where I was. My name is Jack Hill. I'm the head of the middle school here at Cambridge Friends School. Can you hear me okay in the back? There's an echo, sort of an echo sound. Great, great. I'm the head of the middle school. I'm the assistant head for external affairs. And I am just so honored to be on this platform sharing the microphone with these four women who have done just extraordinary work around the country and around the world. And I want to say that they are not smart. They are brilliant in the words of Michelle Obama. We can clap for that. So, and it's really important for me to say that because I'm such a fan of all of these young women. And, you know, we strive to offer an outstanding education here at Cambridge Friends. And a lot of people put in a lot of work today to make this talk possible. And so I want to acknowledge Diane Margole if she's in the back. People can clap for her. David Tierney who's in the back. Our head of school is here. I would like to clap for her. Our teachers are in the back. Our parents, you know, just thank you to all of you. And so let's begin the conversation, yes? All right, so just to let you know, I start every talk the same way. I am the grandson of a Baptist preacher. Okay. And culturally, when we hear something that we really like. Dan, Dan, push that like. Push that over towards them and they can use it. Okay. Thanks. Is that better? We'll echo that later. When you hear something you like, it's okay to say amen, right? Let's call in response and that's okay. But that's okay with us, correct? Yes. Okay. And we're going to start the conversation. And I think the title of this talk is Our Deepest Concerns, a conversation on anti-racism in America. And so we're going to dig deeply into their lives, their work, and their deepest concerns. All right. And so I hope that you enjoy the conversation because I've been waiting a long time to have this conversation. And I want to also say that this is really a product of what a community has produced, particularly here at Cambridge Friends School. And we can clap for that. Really. It's been a hard way for Dr. Perry, Mani, and we were talking about just sort of the landscape and how things, some things look the same and it was sort of a sense of nostalgia. Can you guys hear me still? It was a sort of a sense of nostalgia walking through the halls and being back in the community with us. And we're just so proud of our alumni who are doing excellent work around the country. And again, it's my highest honor to be to be on this platform with all of you. And so welcome back. Welcome back home, I should say. Welcome home. You always have a place at home, as my father would say. So let's start the conversation. And again, I want to give a few introductions. First, we have Dr. Mani Perry, author and scholar. She really needs no introduction. She is a prolific writer, an award-winning biographer, a memoirist. I mean, you name it, she has done it. Please give a warm welcome. We got Dr. Carrie Greenich, who is a professor and author, a director at Greenich. I said, right, that's Greenich. That's correct, right? I'll make sure I'm right, because I got to get that right, then. I've been in independent schools too long. But director of the American Studies program at Southern University, a prolific scholar and author in our own life. And I'm so happy to have you with us. Give a round of applause. Kristin Greenich, who is a playwright and a award-winning playwright, has done prolific work with plays and has really just changed form and has really contributed to plays in such an essential way and has really captured black life. Let's give her a round of applause. And Katelyn Greenich, who is the baby. The baby of the bird. It's been about 40 years, but yes. Now, I didn't just find you that way. Somebody else mom did earlier, who is a prolific novelist, an award-winning novelist, a memoirist, and I say a storyteller and a truth-teller at this meeting. So happy to have you with us. Dr. Amani Pannery, Dr. Carrie Greenich, Kirsten Greenich, Katelyn Greenich, are in the building, y'all. It's a good conversation. And I want to start, and there's so many places to start in asking questions about your personal lives. And I want to be, of course, vulnerable for a moment. I was raised by a single mother of myself. I came from Baltimore City. And I think about her storytelling and the stories that she shared with me and what it meant, what Black Life meant in Baltimore and to appreciate the tools that she provided me and appreciation and affirming who I was as a Black male was so essential to my growth and development. And so I think all of you write about Black life and Black people because you love us. And that comes out in your work. And so I want to acknowledge that because that's really important because we live in a country where Blackness as a culture is celebrated, but America at times does not like Black people. So that's a, is that, can I hear it again? So we've got to talk about anti-Blackness in America. And I think that's an essential part to anti-racism. I want to frame that conversation. But I want to start with your feelings about that and really staying true to the celebration of Black life and culture. And any one of you can take this question. What should you take on anti-Blackness in America today in its many forms? And how have you used your work and your voices to dismantle a narrative, right? So a single narrative about Black people. So I'm really interested to hear on your take on that. I'm looking down at Dr. Carrish. But, but. So, you know, I think, so anti-Blackness is a term that in some ways gained currency in the last decade or so to distinguish anti-Blackness as a very particular dimension of American racism. One that even, I mean, and I just, as a professor I'll say, one of the difficulties about addressing racism in the United States is that Americans are very, as Baldwin said, addicted to a kind of innocence and an evasion of the recognition of their racism in practice. And so, and that has a very particularized dimension for Black folks. When you look at researching virtually every potential body, whether it's sociology, economics, schools, employment, market research, when you see racism in practice, it is always most aggressively practiced towards Black people, right? And we add another dimension that one of the lessons of Americanism and the racial hierarchy is that there's supposed to be, and a reward for distinguishing oneself from Black people, right? And as a consequence, you have these sort of layers of efforts to distinguish, so that you have sort of the generalized prospect of racism. And then you have layers of what I referred to as the politics of distinction, right? So, at least I'm not that, right? And that happens along the lines of class, it has along the various lines of racialization. And it becomes difficult, particularly in the way we talk about diversity, multiculturalism, to actually point to the full panoply of the ways in which racism against Black people is enacted, in part because it is not acknowledged that there is a very particularized animus towards Black people that is pervasive. And that, in fact, even some Black people hold on to. Yeah. I was just going to reiterate that by saying that if you take a historical view, and you look at all this stuff, it's part of the historical processes under which we all live. And oftentimes, particularly in 2019, we try to take everything out of sort of a historical context. And we try to act as though this political moment we're currently in is somehow abhorrent and new. And when really, from a historical perspective, if you're talking about anti-Blackness, that that's a feature of the way that American systems, American economy, American politics have functioned. And so once you start to look at that from a historical perspective, it starts to tear away at the idea that somehow anti-Blackness is sort of an anomaly, that somehow it's separate from Americanism. And it's not to be fatalistic, but it's to look at and reckon with the historical context in which we live. In terms of how it sort of affects my work, I would say that I was never somebody who set out to write the wrongs of all Black people in my work. But I am somebody who has always been interested in why it was that the stories I knew about Black people were not portrayed anywhere. The child, my mother who's an audience, was from Boston. My father is from the West Indies, and growing up in the 80s, it was very much that somehow that story wasn't told. I think I think it's changed a lot now, but that had a dynamic. We were from Boston and New England, and that wasn't told. There were dynamics of our neighborhood and the Black people we knew that I didn't often see told. And so I think one of the consequences of the blind-eyed Blackness as a historical process and as a construct generally is that we don't see a lot of, we have a very narrow way of what we think Blackness is. And so in terms of how it's informed my work, I would say it's looking for Black stories that otherwise wouldn't be told or wouldn't be told in a way that's nuanced and would only be told in a way that was not really justice to the fact that there's layers of African-Americanness and Blackness in the United States. Yeah, I would just say, building off of what Amani and Kerry have said, that in my own work, I sort of think of it in terms of who it is that I am writing for and the answer to that question has changed over time. I think right as my first novel was coming out, I was doing a lot of interviews with other writers and I had the real distinct pleasure of getting to interview Kasey Lemon, who was of course a really brilliant writer. And in his work throughout and in the interview, going on like, I guess like this was six years ago now, he said to me, I write for us and I write for, and that is the primary person who I write for at first. And to sort of have that freedom to know that I'm writing for Black people first and foremost means that the places where I go in my work have opened up tremendously. And I also sort of think of it in terms of I was also really lucky to do a project with and to interview the visual artists Simone Lee and her work, you know, she makes these figures and these figures of Black women, these figures without eyes, and it's also about the interiority. It's a very specific decision on her part. It's about the inward gaze back on herself and the freedom to be as idiosyncratic and as specific as possible. And for me, following that path that maybe is not understandable or resonant or recognizable to everyone, accepting this idea of universality, I think a lot of times in creative work and artistic work, there is a fetishization of this idea of universal, which I would push back against and sort of ask what I was saying as universal. And in fact, there is real treasure to be found in the incredibly specific and the incredibly narrow. I mean, just personally, that's one of the reasons why I read and look at art and sort of all those things. These are experiences that are different from my own, from perspectives that are completely almost alien to my own. So as an artist, following that path of particularity and the self is a huge part of how I think that my work sort of addresses this idea of a Blackness. Yeah, I think as an artist, I come to this question thinking about how I choose my stories and having to be very conscious of the stories I decide to spend my time on. I think rejecting this idea of universal is really key to piggyback on what Kate has just said. And I think in the theater, I'm constantly thinking about the white gaze and where my stories end up having to reconcile that I have to take into consideration the white gaze and the idea of anti-Blackness, even when that white gaze might not intentionally realize that it might have tinges of anti-Blackness within it and marry that with the type of stories I want to tell and people's internalized racism in how it affects the stories I want to tell and the stories I might want to tell in the future. I could someone explain the white gaze for folks who may not know what that means. How would you define the white gaze? The lens with which people who are not of color you are. Yeah, I think it also has to do with our mediums. So Kirsten, you're a theater artist, which means that you are both aware of your work, what you're creating in your mind, but then also what you're doing has to be staged and has the input of your director, your set designer, your costume person, your actors, your music stylist, the lighting people that you have like 25 different visions to mel to make your vision staged for a person. And then also you have a literal audience for your work that you see interacting with your work, which is very different from what I do, which is like I'm writing in a room by myself and I have an editor, but I don't have that immediacy of reaction and feedback. And so I think that also contributes to how you think about how those things come out of your work. It's interesting because I think you can interrupt the work if you're so focused on the white gaze. When I think about the conversation and thinking about Toni Morrison, who we recently lost and just was a titan and a cultural critic. Someone who just really understood how to present black life and culture. But it can also, as Toni Morrison would say, thinking about that and the production of work can interrupt how you present the work. She gave an example, which was a visible man in an interview and she said, well, invisible to whom? And so it gets to my next spot. And Kate, when I want to put you on the spot real quick, you write these very semi-biographical memoirs. I remember even telling your sister one time after I read one, I was like, man, that was dope. We just kind of threw that all together. And it really, it's a fresh voice, I think. It's a very simple but complex way of writing. If anyone who has ever studied writing to get a sentence down to the core and really say exactly what you want to say is so difficult to do. Yeah, and it feels like a memoir in many ways, but it has a purpose that's going somewhere. And most people say, well, most writing is always going somewhere. It has purpose to it. But it's very deep. And I want to quote something that you said in 2018. And the title of the story was, The Family History DNA Can't Reveal. And you said, for my mother's family, like all African-American families, the question of where are you from is a complicated one. And that's huge. To me, that definitely, that's the identity question. And that's where we are, which makes your work so dope because it really taps into identity politics and how, particularly people of color, how we are all navigating the world and sort of these identities that have been bestowed upon us. Well, where are you from? Like that can be taken in so many ways. Who am I? And it depends on what the world says I am in some ways. And for people of color, who the world has said we are, is a very complex one and a very painful one. And at the end of your story, at the end of your narrative, you said this, what if we map the strengths passed down for the things that helped our ancestors survive in a hostile world? So you were taking the focus away from DNA. Isn't that an echo of what we are looking for when we try to determine which tribe in West Africa we may have come from? Which kin group we might claim? Sometimes we're looking in our blood for a map from our ancestors when it has always been here and how we talk to and love one another. That quote, yes, you can clap for that. You can clap for that. It's great. It's great. And that is Tony Morrison, that Tony and so many others have struggled and wrestled with the question of love on a human level. But I have to say that that universal human experience is very different. I don't consider myself the same as a white person. I want to be clear about that. We may have some similarities. But my fears for my children are very different from a white person's fear for their children. My fears and hopes and dreams for my black son is very different from the hopes and dreams of someone who is white. It's very different. If you look beneath the surface in many ways, there's a difference there, but there's also this thing called love. When I read some of your work, there's the question of love. I want you to speak to not only love on certain levels in your work creatively, but it's not a new term. I've started to use this more, and Darno Moore has started to use this, which I love, which is radical love. How do you show radical love in your creative work, in your processes when you are sending a message? How do we as educators show radical love to our children because that's what we need? Someone could take that very courageous and brave question that I just asked. If you could explore the theme of love in your work, I would greatly appreciate it. I might even forget that y'all are out there. This is my question. Sorry I have to be so stingy and selfish up here, but that's a question for me because I struggle with that as a theme, but I'd love to hear what you have to say. And Dr. Mani, I want to get to you as well because your book really explores that on such a deep level. So, yes. You know, the point happens both in the work but also in the day-to-day commitments. I think I have the distinction being the one person on this panel is giving piggyback rides to everybody except Jack. It's very good for you. I'm still waiting though. You might have a long way to go. An example, early on. So, as a child, there was a very particular, and I loved being part of this community, there's a particular kind of affection that I had from black girls who were younger than me. That was about understanding even before it could be articulated by me in a sophisticated way. That we shared something. That we shared a particular kind of journey in the world. And so, when I saw them, it made my heart sing and I wanted to pick them up. And, you know, I think that that's, and to be able to be honest about that affinity, I mean, one of the things when I talk about what the most consistent thing that people have a problem with is one sentence in which I say, I have taught my children not to love white people. The sentence immediately following it is, and of course I'm not talking about individuals. I love many individual white people. But I'm talking about as a kind of, as a category that has meaning in this society both historically and currently that is based upon the exclusion and the marginalization of other people. So there's a distinction between the encounter, the intimate encounter with individuals, right? And the idea of whiteness, which I think, and I've taught my children not to love that because I want them to love themselves and who they are. And if you can't love both as a black person, you cannot love what whiteness means and love blackness. And so, for me there's a kind of, I mean, the radicalism is that we have a social order that is oriented around the refusal to acknowledge the complete humanity of black people, the love of black people, the embrace of black people, the whiteness of black people, right? And so it's radical because once you make the decision that you're going to commit fully to it, you have to be prepared for hostility at every turn. And I can assure you, even though we are in various ways celebrated on this panel, we have all experienced it multiple times. Yeah. Right. And the fact, yeah. Oh, I will just say, for both, I always, when I came in today and I saw Monty standing there, I was like, oh, like I went back to being like five in kindergarten and she was like old and the cool, like fifth, sixth grader and her running over and picking me up and I was very chiming, I was very shy, I had these huge glasses. And her like running over and picking me up and being like, like, going like this. But I think to echo what you're saying, I think that one of the startling things for me has been as an educator and as a scholar is encountering people who, and this isn't to say that my life is perfect or my childhood was a perfect part of it, but people who were not brought up to love, blackness, just automatically was something that it really was hard for me when I entered college and went out in the world and found out that that wasn't true. The other part about that though, was that I never had a desire to have to see whiteness as a default. I still don't see whiteness as a default. And so what that did was that it makes it so that when you go out in the world and even though it's when you say on the stage you might be celebrated, but I know that all of us, you know, I visited last week where somebody at Tufts defaced our African-American trail project with the Edward and I was also an African-American woman academic was telling us that neither of us should be professors. And that why were we professors at Tufts. So it became this big thing, but I think that what it does to be armed with embracing blackness and growing up never thinking that whiteness is a default and never thinking that whiteness is the norm, is that something like that is more my response is what is that person's problem rather than what is the problem with myself, right? And so I would say that if you're talking about anti-blackness I would push back a little bit on saying that it's about identity because I think we like to talk about identity and identity politics without really looking at the fact that all politics is identity politics. Everybody participates in the world based on whatever identity it is that they have been told that they had when they were talking about African-American people engaging in questioning institutions of power. So I would hesitate to say that identity politics or politics or is it our identity it's a way of being in the world and encounter the political systems and the economic systems in which you're interacting as opposed to identity. And so yeah, so I wouldn't do that. I haven't been thinking about this idea of radical love in my work lately and the type of work that I put on stage and I could be very specific so recently I've been asked to work on a play that is very old it's about 18, 20 years old and so I've been asked to that you wrote that I wrote that I wrote my kind of liberty to rewrite it and and the end well I can give away because we're all probably going to be here and not this is anyway an act of violence happens at the end of the play involving a husband and wife who are black and I thought to myself do I want to perpetuate this violence between this black couple do I want to have these images in this play and given where we are in this cultural moment I thought to myself no I don't want to do this so I changed the ending and in service of trying to have an ending that celebrated radical love as opposed to extreme violence against these two black beings on stage and one of the things that fear has power to do is effect change so we see these things on stage and they create catharsis within us and hopefully maybe by seeing them we are we want to effect change within our own lives or hopefully within a society within which we find ourselves and it wasn't the right ending there's something about seeing that on stage even though it is violent and horrible so it really made that sitting in this moment now and I hear right now artistically so this is a very raw place for me to be and be sharing with all of you this moment where I'm realizing I theoretically I'm with Imani but artistically I'm just like we need that image so we can get so I can get there so I'm in a whole I'm like oh I want to be where you are I want to be where you are so much but I'm in a different place and I had to glad go and rewrite the change ending back so that we can sell that hopefully I don't know this is a playwright you don't know it sounds hokey and strange but you can only effect maybe two people in the audience but maybe the right two people and they're going to lead us someplace really wonderful and those two people will lead us there I don't know I hope so but change it back that's where I'm at I have been thinking about it a lot in my work as well because the I've just been thinking a lot about how to write about love in a particular way and so I've been reading a lot about it I've been teaching for the last couple of semesters I've been teaching a ghost stories class so I teach a lot of Toni Morrison in that class because she has a ghost in every book and so we read love in that class her novel and she talks a lot when she talks about that novel about why she chose to call it love and a lot of her writing uses that word and in her own work she talks about wanting to use that word and how you write using words like love or peace or heart these words that she says come from parable that you're trying to use they are deceptively simple everybody has their own definition for them and then they also have these larger cultural definitions that are not always mean what we expect the word to mean in particular when she talks about the word love she talks about how oftentimes in our culture that word is actually describing a relationship of dominance especially when we're talking about sort of romantic love or heterosexual love or love within a family what we're really talking about is like a relationship where one person is submitting to another person is putting their will over another person so if you're a writer how do you use that word that may mean that to other people to mean something radical something that can mean something blow that notion up for a reader or confirm someone who hasn't felt love in that way who actually has felt love as a liberation how do we sort of write to affirm those things and in my own work I'm still sort of trying to figure out how to do that and sort of like person was saying how you both write scenes and work that is emotionally true and reads emotionally true to your audience while also opening up these possibilities for another way to think about what those emotions could mean or how people could enact those emotions so I don't know how you do that yet that's something that I'm working on right now thank you that was for me y'all that was for y'all you know it's interesting I want to go to an article September 12th of this year in 2019 and Amani the title read why Amani Perry doesn't like Jane Austin Navas and they really asked some great questions in that piece of the short we're entertaining piece before I before I get there though I want to define some terms that we'll use white supremacy and I know that sometimes we're at different places and I don't want to make any assumptions but when we're talking about white supremacy we're talking about an ideology we're talking about what Ardrey Lord talked about which is presumptive dominance so the forms in which white supremacy can show up is really hard storytelling is amazing in the work that you see before you that have been put on by these brilliant sisters up here but that's very difficult to have that show up in your work or to talk about that in such a way that is not only compelling but that also people understand what white supremacy is in all of its forms so I want to put that out there in whiteness which is the unspoken language of the perceived normal and that is anything else that is white is perceived as normal so it's the invisible language that white people have of normality that also advantages them if I wore a sweatshirt or hoodie I would say I have to think about that as a black male because whiteness would dictate that I come with a pseudo or someone might not take me seriously and I've had that happen as well so I just want to throw that out there and define those terms I think sometimes we use white privilege white supremacy and whiteness interchangeably and they have different meanings now to get back to my question do you prefer books that reach you emotionally or intellectually who do you most admire and respect that was the question that was asked of you and your response ideally both I think the best books unlatch something within and that requires both intellectual publication and emotional disarming that's what keeps me reading and in terms of playwrights she was asked who was our favorite playwrights it was Len Knaudich that you mentioned and it was Kirsten Greenwich that was mentioned as well their voices are distinctive but they both share Lorraine's gift referencing Lorraine Hansberry for an extraordinary cracking of ideas and arguments through authentic qualities and language their work is masterful yes yes I'm telling you for someone who can pick the right words at the right time I was like throwing my fist up in there I was like yeah I wanted to say that but you said it and I want you to speak to that specifically why you chose those specific writers and hopefully you can talk a little bit and we can go through that why that's so and that's a compelling argument but I also want you to talk about Lorraine Hansberry who was not often written about and you really took on a very brave biography slash memoir and it was very insightful and was powerful I switched my eighth grade reading list we put Lorraine on the reading list because I saw her in a very different way in a very complex way so if you could speak to that part and to speak to why you gave a shout out to your sister I mean right so who used to play play sister oh gosh the play that engages with luck of the Irish my god yes I mean so let me say it this way so I think that erasing the sun is an extraordinary play it demonstrates kind of mastery of the ensemble form what the love of the Irish did in addition to that and I will I want to say this and I don't care that it's being recorded it was a real failure to say that Clyde Vaughan Park was the re-engagement with it was luck of the Irish and what happens is because you emotionally engage with the white characters in a way that is not it's not an apologia but it's an honest sensitive treatment of people's motivations and desires and resentments and aspirations and that's what moves you so that there's both the argument about property and race and generations in some ways it kind of echo in another generation but then there's real people and so to me one of the things I think is always the aspiration for a creative intellectual and sometimes the distinctions between artists and intellectual drawn to hard is that you want to make people think and make people feel and so that's really what I was talking about I just want to go back to the point about white supremacy for a moment though because to be completely honest the response to the Jane Austen quote struck me as having a lot to do with whiteness because and I noticed there were European writers who I talked about in a piece but it was almost as though because she is a figure who is in the American Academy and it's seen as sort of a signature figure of literary excellence and so I had someone wrote a letter to the Times after the interview saying it's someone who's supposed to be a professor and how dare you not like Jane Austen I just don't like to read the like the taste has to have and there's a lot of research on the ideas of taste as being deeply embedded in ideologies around race this idea that there's a failure because my taste is distinct and there's a question about my intellectual and a scholar because my taste is not I don't, I'm not interested in parlor conversation I'm just not I love Moby Dick you know take me to the whaling ship but I don't care about the parlor and who she's going to marry it's not an extension but so this question I think there is a question about the idea of the production of art that is and I think it goes back to the point I mean the point made earlier is that there is an intervention even when it is not a kind of like it's not self-consciously an intervention but simply insisting upon a gradient landscape that's distinct from what is conventional has a kind of intervention that you can sometimes witness by virtue of the backlash against it I think even the fact of pointing to works that were done in translation that were not that were not Anglophone was a problem so it's not even just a question of race but the idea of a kind of we what it means to be an American intellectual I love it and so I have to go in a minute because I have to catch blank it's seven twenty one five minutes my next question is for Ashley for Carrie because you spoke to the store for a little bit and I'm teaching an eighth grade humanities class it's going okay y'all we're making it so we have an anti-bias curriculum and history is really really important and I come from a critical race theory background race is endemic and it is permanent and we have to consider that and we walk into the classroom with our kids and this is for everyone because everyone up here is an educator both in the classroom space whether you're mentoring or educating and I call it transferring that's what we're starting to use this term at CFS which is transformational education we are transferring information and we see that information as a political document and I've started with looking at the globe I've started to look at Africa and the continent of Africa and understanding what the European powers did to Africa because I believe that they cannot the kids cannot understand racism on a fundamental level without understanding the geopolitical landscape in which the European powers really and it still today has taken away from Africa can you speak to why history is so important for for students and the transference of power and information and helping them to understand racism in our world can you speak to that as a historian as to why that is important for them to have the truth and to be familiar with the stories that come out of that I know that's a very multi-layered question I would just say that as a historian I am often baffled by the fact that people have whatever conversation they're having if they don't know history that it's the first time they're having this conversation and if you have if you're a historian you realize that it's not as if where we are is new it's not as if the conversation we're having at the moment is new particularly when you're having conversations about race although it might be a new for the period in which you're in and so you have to make a distinction what you're talking about the issues isn't new right but the context in which you're talking about them are new I would say that history should be you're making me get on my silk lock but history should be taught in everything that students have it should be taught in math it should be taught in science it should be taught in English it should be taught in music class it should be taught in everything because once you have that grounding these terms that we use to talk about race and racism and inequity it makes it so that that's just part of the conversation and the way that people understand that the world functions so that by the time somebody turns 18 and I see them in college they're not shocked by certain things that happen they're still 18 and so they still are everyone's 18 and you have a reaction but it's a different type of reaction I was talking to Chris Hoey oh there you are who was a wonderful second grade teacher here for many years and his curriculum and the curriculum that he and Aaron do in the second grade is this I get it wrong anytime and it's basically all it is all here is the students learn how slavery produced the industrial revolution and the fact that at the end of the year all those second graders including my niece and nephew can give you it's in the second grade show but they can basically say they're already armed with this idea that the industrial revolution didn't just happen and black people are incidental to it or slavery is incidental to American history is that that becomes a part of the curriculum so my comment would be the reason why history is important is because once that becomes just the fact the historical basis a lot of the conversations that people have now can be done on a deeper level because it's as if we're having the same conversation over and over again even though it's a different context but where it's just the same conversation one of the things that irks me to no end is the fact that many teachers not being taught on how you teach history and the fact that you can have students be very complicated and yes they might not hold on a minute clap your hands clap your hands she came she conquered typical black open academic but wonderful history is the basis for everything and the sooner that we start to realize that the better the sooner we realize that children a complicated text you can teach it to kids reading texts and having to not understand it at the first time is fine coming back to it when you're from 7th grade and then reading you get in 9th grade is the way you learn stuff and so I think too many people have this perception that somehow history has to be like in a state it has to be taught in 3rd grade 7th grade, 10th grade and then 12th grade and not realizing that it's something that should be part of the curriculum and taught and the approach to history I think that a lot of the conversations we have, particularly surrounding race and inequity and class we would be able to have it at a higher level as opposed to just having the same sophomore conversation about what race is if people kind of had a historical grounding in everything I would just add that on my part when I get students I often see the flip side of that which is you know I teach writing for people doing creative writing is often the idea that their experience is the first time that anybody has ever felt these things and if people had this grounding in history our literature would be so wonderful because you would realize you aren't the first person to feel this feeling of alienation or this anger or this loss or this grief people have felt it before people have lived your particularity before and written from that before and in fact your writing can become richer if you read those people so building off of what Imani was saying Jane Austen is great but if that is all that you've read you are going to believe that perhaps to write about what it feels like to be X whereas if we sort of have the history and those narratives already in our curriculum you would know that you're not the first and you can actually be in conversation with those people and hopefully get to a place where you're saying something new since we're on the topic of education I want to continue down that vein because again all of you are also educators and I want you to talk about what is important to you about both educators and artists and what do you hope to teach subsequent generations about that particular concept that's tough even teaching eighth graders I want to teach writing but I also want to teach as a writer and for them to read literature as writers so if you could speak to that dynamic of artistry and education at the same time or being an artist and an educator at the same time well for me personally it's a really selfish thing in that when you're a writer you spend a lot of time alone so teaching and working with other writers is a way to sort of break up that sort of occupational hazard of spending most of your day just in your own head sort of writing stuff but then also I think it's important for students to see working artists to understand that being an artist is separate from and can exist outside of how we sort of understand career tracks and sort of generally making money it's sort of two ways I think it's good for students to see a working artist to see all the different ways that artists organize their lives in order to be able to do their art and then I also think it's important to understand that creating art and learning about how art is created can exist outside of this sort of results oriented idea that we usually have that has creeped into all of our lives that has creeped into how we sort of think about how to order our time and that there is a pursuit or a way of going through life or a way of making things that can exist that is outside of that that has nothing to do with how much that thing is going to be valued or what you can sell it for or even sort of whether or not more than maybe 10 people are going to find value in it that you can make something that exists sort of outside of that demand is I think increasingly more important especially with I think people coming up in this generation and the generation after there's sort of because of social media because of the internet because of all the different ways that you can create now and all the different platforms that things can go out into the world in there can be enormous pressure that you're creating should immediately you know have 10,000 eyes on it and engage with everybody and I think if you have an artist as an educator, an artist as a teacher in your school you can begin to sort of push back against that and that opens up the arts and the idea of creation to so many more kids who maybe just want to make something for themselves that's what you're fighting for for playwrights so playwriting is a strange it's a pretty odd occupation in that plays are definitely written I am a writer, I consider myself a writer but plays are also rocked so it's a craft and in order to perpetuate the craft of playwriting you learn from others who come before you and so in that sense it's really important to my mind to pass on any bit of knowledge that I may have I think it's nothing at all because I'm a writer and that's my purview but in other times because it's just been around for a while it can be a lot to the generation that is coming up generations that are coming up after me some of us playwrights or theater people or artists some of us maybe aren't that great at educating and maybe we should step aside but a lot of us do have a lot of knowledge to share and it is our responsibility to teach those coming up after us because the art the discipline will die out if we don't teach those coming up after us so those who can are able to teach that is what we should be doing that doesn't mean that you do it to the point where you can no longer do your own work and that doesn't mean that you spend 30 years doing it if you don't have the capacity but many of us do have and sometimes we give too much and we burn ourselves out that's not what I'm talking about but sometimes there is the ability to teach a workshop here or to write an article that might be disseminated widely that type of teaching is really important to make sure that we are passing the torch and creating responsible theater artists down the line which can lend itself to some of these questions and I'm thinking that they're inventing something new when perhaps there is scholarship there is literature to help those coming up after us teacher Kerry teacher Kerry I would just add that one of the things that I tell my students is that being a historian is a craft just liking history is not it doesn't make you a historian you have to be able to read the source documents and be creative particularly when you're dealing with African descendant people on what the primary source document is and be able to decipher it that way and then come to a statement a conclusion and an idea based on the primary source and on the literature that's been written before and once you have students kind of get those two things down so that you have to read a primary source and then you have to see what other people have said about your source and if you haven't read anything about it before then that's where you still have to respond to what people haven't said once you get into that I think that that's a very powerful way to teach students to have skills that are very valuable even if you aren't becoming a historian or getting a PhD in history which is that you're looking and you're deciphering what a fact or what a document is but it's very base level and then you're looking at what other people have analyzed about it I will say that I think that teaching is something that as an academic I enjoy doing because it requires me very selfishly to really break down what it is that I'm trying to say as opposed to being in the space of being a historian which can awesome be you sort of go down these rabbit holes and you assume that it's just sort of what you believe you know is fact and it is fact but being able to break that down at a very sort of base level I think is a valuable skill to have and being able to teach that to students I think can transfer into multiple things besides just being a historian can transfer into you know science you know having problems with something you know research it I mean you Google it and try to figure it out and you actually go and research it with primary source material and use the material that should be so I I think that teaching and being an academic and practicing the craft of writing history I think all of those things make me and make most scholars a better historian if you sort of are engaging with how people actually learn about history Kessel, what were they? I think what's also really important to you in addition to teaching is mentorship especially when as we talk about anti-blackness and forces of anti-blackness and particularly for artists of color and black artists is having mentors so people who you can call upon even if it's not every day maybe it's once a year maybe it's once every five years but people who have come before you who you can call on or who you feel you can call on who have come before because I think in all of the professions it can be challenging to be a writer of color a professor of color a historian of color whatever your other is it can be challenging and so there's the teaching and then there's the mentorship and so I think each one of us had mentors of some kind and then I think as I out all of us are getting older the wheels turn and now are able to serve in mentors for other people as well Now that I have the Greenwich sisters here to myself I can really talk about what it was like growing up and I want to frame the question that's where I want to go because I'm sure that growing up you've had certain influences I mean even looking at Imani's work and looking at Lauren Hansberry her growing up in Chicago being the product of a working class family and the impact that they had on her and her work creates authentic voices and characters in her work so if you could give me specific instances not only in your educational experiences that I've had a great influence on you but what was it like growing up and what were you influenced by it's a two part question and I want you to speak also to your creative process now or your process now and getting work done and I think everyone has a process and I used to be a journalist many years ago and I worked for a magazine called Black Issues Book Review I don't know if anyone remembers that that book review was a really popular book review out of New York and I had a managing editor and said why don't you tag along with us and write this out and write some pieces for us and I got to experience so many different people and spend time with them you know, Walter Moseley who in the morning before he writes he has to have breakfast can't write without breakfast breakfast is a champion and then he starts to read the Encyclopedia so that is the start of his process he cannot do it without that Nicky Giovanni has to write around books have a great relationship with Nicky and reading is so fundamental to the start of her process as a writer and she told me, I told her I want to write just like you Nicky and she said well you got to read Jackie I don't need Nicky that's the way Nicky was I had an awesome opportunity to host Maya Angelou who stays everybody knows this about Maya she refuses to stay if it's not a five star hotel she won't stay there for particular reasons and she has to stay there with a Bible she has to have a Bible and a glass of water so there's prayer and there's something about the ambience of a hotel people thought it was a status thing like a diva thing you buy a stand in a hotel it's a five star hotel she can't stay there and it's not that it's the way in which the room is spaced and created in a five star hotel that's very different from maybe the room on ahead right so I want you to speak to not only what influenced you but what is your process of producing such great work and I'm sorry to say that's a question for me too because the work that I've seen coming from all of you is fantastic work it is thoughtful work and there has to be a process to get to that level and if you could explain that in less than a couple of minutes I think we might be on money and I'm taking notes by the way I've got it Karen you want to start Kevin you want to start or sure I'll be really quick for me I don't really need a like a set place to write or anything I'm usually writing in between traveling to other places or so for nonfiction stuff usually it starts with a question that usually comes from reading essays or just sort of general opinion pieces around a particular issue or question or conversation where it feels like there are gaps or where there's been sort of a little left out and then sort of following that question towards where it might be and for writing fiction so far it's sort of been looking at different historical stories or notes or sort of footnotes that are really sort of fascinating and interesting that don't get sort of like a larger meditation because they're so odd and because they don't really fit into a larger historical narrative or because they are about people or places that are not necessarily triumphant but are containing sort of some other emotion and so those are sort of the things that drive me in the fiction side and process I try not to be too particular about process because sort of like life happens very quickly and so I try to be as flexible as possible I try not to get caught up on you must sort of write every day or you must do sort of like X things I try to recognize that as much writing happens sort of on the rumination and thinking about something as actually sort of seeing down in writing and especially for the nonfiction stuff I usually write most a lot of it or paragraphs of it in my head first sort of over and over again and then start to write it down and then start figuring out how to structure it and sort of write it on the fly email a lot of stuff to myself sort of as an employee about my day so it used to be that I I think I was a little bit more precious about stuff even though I don't think it wasn't like I needed a desk or flowers or anything like that and then I like got a lot busier I have kids and my days got filled up in a much different way and I learned a lot from watching my daughter at gymnastics and her team going to gymnastics competitions where sometimes and shows where I would you know these were really teeny little kids and sometimes like their warm up area would be kind of crazy and I would just be like I don't get all crazy and they just do their warm up and go through their routines and it seems like it's coming very late in my writing life to think about this but I was like oh yeah, they just get their SHIT done and do it and that was I'm glad you spelled that they just do it and that was very helpful to me especially and I think it was coming right at the right time when you know I teach so I oversee playwriting at BU I have a lot of students handing me their works I'm constantly teaching at a very high volume all the time and I have to constantly segment my day in ways that to get the writing done it's not like during the school year it's not long, luxurious amounts of time that people think a writer has you know that mean like this is what people think the writer's life is like it's not like that at all I wish one day it will be like that but right now it's not for most of my school year I have an hour to do it you get it done I used to not need things like complete quiet it has to be quiet it's even fans so right now there's a hum in this room that would not just get it done in a quieter place um there are certain things I do need to do before I can write and this might be a little bit of PTSD from 9-11 is I have to check the news like I kind of have to just be like are we all I know we're not cool I know the world is not cool but I need to make sure we're semi-cool not for me to be able to turn the phone like this to be able to write one thing that's really I find I get super distracted so I find modern life really difficult in terms of there's really it's very difficult to not have things digging all the time phones ding I hope no one here works for Google or wherever this is going do not come after me because Google didn't come after you all the time right is that the way that all our stuff it's almost impossible to turn everything off and I do need everything to be turned off and a lot of that is I don't know what it's like to write fiction I was really bad at writing fiction and I was really bad at writing history I was a history major it wasn't until Kate went to the same college and she was a history major and she started winning history awards and all of our same professors were so into her I was like there's playwriting especially there and I write ensemble driven pieces most of the time I've got like 8 different voices in my head plus sustained directions plus my Uber voice of playwright and I just cannot have all this other stuff going on in my head all this and I'm usually working on 4 or 5 pieces at once so it has to be quiet the only thing I will open the answer to the day 4 is if it's about my kids so the day 4 it does have to be on a little bit so that's perhaps in terms of influences so both my sisters are brilliant and read much loftier things than I do I'm like a sewer anything that comes down to play I'm like trash so I'm not even going to reveal what's on my bedside except for Imani's book is on my bedside it's bad I was revealed what do you mean although she will theoretically she holds a special place in my heart and I have a podcast about her on my phone so it's okay Imani and Kerry and I were just talking about this in terms of growing up we watched an incredible amount of television an inappropriate television an incredible amount there were times when we were told not to watch it and we obeyed those times like screen time was different it wasn't constant the way it is now we were like 4 channels but we did we did but we watched a lot that was when my daughter's not up in here the difference was that we would voluntarily then turn it off and then spend hours acting it out making news stories about it hours our radio programs we had radio programs I think that was the difference in terms of what we were then doing with the content was just a little different whereas sometimes when I'll try and get my kids to do it I'll be like let's do a radio show and my kids will be like no it's a radio show we would like to watch some youtube ok I'll take it away process I would say that since I was very small I read all the time and now I get my favorite thing is Audible I'm not a very technologically savvy as my sister's going to test to but the one thing I do is Audible so I listen to books on Audible as I drive because I live far out but I try to read two books in a week because I like to be able to get them like make an outline of it my dad is very bizarre but so like Volker Allrich came out with a wonderful biography of Hitler and kids the kids my niece and nephew kept on telling me why is that Hitler book all over the place because I was determined to finish it in a week so there's stuff like that I try to do that just because I can be very anal attentive so I like to be able to say I read a great work of nonfiction history and a work of fiction in one week and then move on to the next thing and I'm pretty adamant about that just all my my own weird things but in terms of writing I think maybe it's because I'm the middle child I need noise around me and I need noise that is not talking to me but there is like a cough in me around me so I write a lot in coffee shops in places because it actually makes me get more done I don't know what people are talking about but I can just hear them talking and so I spend a lot of time in coffee shops I also if it's not a coffee shop I need to have music on in some way in order to write but I don't know as Chris was saying we grew up watching a lot of TV we also grew up reading a lot and I think in terms of influences I think one of the things was that I always grew up hearing people in my family tell stories whether it was like stories about their life or just the way people would tell stories about they went to the store and this happened and always just having that noise of stories in the background I think was very effective in terms of influences I will say that I had really really good I was talking to somebody that as much as I was filled with angst in junior high and high school I had very good teachers who would just give me stuff to read and give me stuff to do and when I was in 10th grade I got mad at the history curriculum and I rewrote it because they weren't covering and that history trying to hit me at the school all this media my mother came in my poor mother was a single mother she had to come in and sit down she's trying to redesign this curriculum so much now talk to yourself but the good part was I was fortunate enough to have teachers that history teacher until I graduated from high school just would send me these history books and send me the call and you still had to cut things out so there was no rule or cut out articles on like the Atlantic or from the American Historical Review and just put them in my mailbox and be like we'll do these things like that people say if I had been in any other environment I would have been kicked out of school and don't read this thing but I think I was very fortunate of having people who probably didn't like me very much as a person because I was a little obnoxious like a teenager but I see this article just put it in your mailbox and I would read it I tell my students you have to read stuff like a big girl think that you like and even stuff that history I always try to read a history book that's not in my field so that I kind of get just grasp what other historians are talking about I read a great history of Australia recently that was just the straight history of Australia who is like an oceanist who studies this stuff so yeah I think our childhood was very much a lot of TV watching a lot of music watching Kirsten would make us do plays from the time we were very very tiny and organize everybody in the house and in the neighborhood and charge people who came over and my mother would be like you can't charge people money to come to our house but I think that one of the things was space even though my mother would say okay you have a half hour to do a play because it could go on for long you have a half hour to do this play and then it wouldn't even talk adult stuff but I think there was always a time limit yes so I mean I don't know I think but it's a different age now I was talking about this will be Manny who has kids and Kirsten has kids and Caitlin has a new baby where I think it's so and I don't have any children but I just see it like kids you can't just put your kids outside to play most of the time you can't just you know say okay you'll watch TV turn it off at four go to so-and-so's house and then come back by six like that's just not the world we don't live in that same thing so I think it's much harder now to cultivate that or you have to try to cultivate it in a different way because there is just a different and could you speak for one minute about your experience here as a CFS student and how that contributed to your work Jeremy and how that may have influenced your work now or who you are now as creative people I know that I I thought of myself as a writer very early on and when I was here I can remember and I think I got very interested in the form looking back very early on and I can remember in third grade my teacher was Debbie I was right there and I decided I decided that I wanted to create my paragraphs and I wanted to invert the indentation and the way you would see it was printed in a book and that's the way that I wanted to do it and Debbie, looking back now Debbie was a genius and very kind and allowed me to do that for as long as I wanted and what it did was it empowered me to think of myself as a writer and have ownership over the work as opposed to saying no you're not a writer this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen she did say actually this is how you construct a paragraph this is how a paragraph might look on the page so she did teach me how to do it and I remember I do remember the I think a few sessions having one on one sessions and wanting to do it a certain way and Debbie's showing me how to do it and she said you can do it this way this is the actual way and eventually I learned how to construct a paragraph but it was very empowering that I had agency over my own work and in my head it went on for like six months I really think it probably belonged to just a week but that was that was very powerful because I had spent two years in a different school where that I would have been shamed for doing that and I think I was also I think I was probably also testing is like can I get away with this because I think I had thought of myself as a writer since I was like two and that I would have been I would have been shamed and chastised and told under no circumstances are you a creative person or writer and this is horrible but it worked out so that I remember being very very positive here and then there are other teachers here who just affirmed that part of me from very very early on I was also not always that strong in that but I had a teacher named Erica who thought of us all as they could all do the work all problem solvers they're all problem solvers so that was also very powerful too so the teachers that I encountered here saw us and viewed us as thinkers and learners and affirmed us saw the light in us and treated us that way and that was really powerful here if you could say that one more time I just couldn't and I will say I went here from kindergarten through fourth grade I was very very shy I didn't talk to anybody I had one little best friend that we used to hold hands and walked through came across as very very shy very quiet and one of the things I remember going here was just she's not here anymore but my teacher in kindergarten first and second grade was named Lynette and she was just she used to just give me stuff to read and it could be anything it could even be from you know the third grade class and should let me go down to the library and just if it wasn't if other people were reading something else that may be that thing but then it should just let me read whatever it was that I wanted to read also the encouraging with writing I remember being very insistent that a paragraph was a thesis, synthesis and antithesis and that's what you never do and my teachers all my teachers Lynette and then my third fourth teacher was named Helen McElroy and she she was like okay you can do that but you can also be more creative with the thing I had there was like a phase where I thought that's how you had to structure things and she's saying yes that is but you can also kind of be more creative with it so I think my experience was that having this person saying teachers who sort of took you where you were and pushed you but also saw you as someone who was learning things and was experimenting with things as opposed to you're somebody who we have to get to do this task because by the end of the year you have to know this task right even though by the end of the year you didn't know the space but it was the emphasis was on something completely different and then as leaving Cambridge friend school and going to another school which was considered one of the best public schools in the state of Massachusetts I won't say which one which was horrible I know you're completely shocked that you know teachers would shame you because you know didn't get a certain you know they had told you to write in this line and you went slightly over and everything was being very very very regimented and that being really difficult just because I didn't understand why learning was made so miserable like I did I'm not understanding why that was something that was this is supposed to be fun but then it's miserable like why are you making these reading not fun so that was difficult so I would say yeah just the learning to love it sounds very hokey and it sounds like it seems like we're like being paid to like run get on the bandwagon but I would say you know it's a powerful thing that you know learning to love learning being able to learn to love writing and like liking those things in terms of experimenting and realizing that you know what you learn in first grade might change by the time you get to second grade might change by the time you get to fourth grade I usually end on a high note but I do want to end with a provocative question curious how like what through your parents can role you I carry was very shy and so it was very sickly so I had what oh sorry I'm just hearing all down but I was very sickly as a child and this was like the early 80s and no school would agree to give me the medicines I needed during the day because they said that they didn't want to be liable so my mother took me to the public school in our town and the woman my mother can correct me if I'm wrong but the woman said two things first she said that Kerson shouldn't become a scholar or something like why didn't Kerson just get married as a young girl and and the second thing was that the teacher said in this town we lived in you know that I didn't really need medicines that they didn't need to give me why couldn't someone just come in and take me out of school if I needed medicines so I think that that would be the impetus that my mother was looking for different options because she had to look for different options but yeah the it was during a school tour and my mom asked what do what do the young women do when they graduate from high school what's the trajectory when the answer was the person giving the tour and the principal what all the young men did young boys did and my mom asked what the girls did and the answer was she hoped that they would be at home helping their moms so my mom was a little bit worried so she my mom chose Cambridge friends for Kerry and she chose a different school private school that would operate for me and then I came along to this interview I was wearing an eccentric outfit that accepted my creativity Kerry it was not real close it was tight and I just talked and I talked a lot and they offered an application for me that is how I ended up here who during the my mom had a babysitter for me for that interview for Kerry what do you do with that reflecting your experience I didn't even have time but I thought you were here for a short time where did you go I went to public school up until seventh grade and I went to BBN for middle school and then to Commonwealth and many of our kids go to Commonwealth how was that for you Commonwealth was interesting I think it was probably the best place for me to go at the time and it was definitely a place where I got an excellent education short and sweet I like that did anyone have any do we have any audience questions before I ask the last question what was it like what was it like growing up growing up just in general well I don't know what you said I didn't hear any quality stories I have a question and we're here to discuss race I'm interested what was it like for me I certainly know that trans kids I don't know what I said minority I'm sorry I don't know I don't know about the case of experience but I'd be very interested in hearing the related to that question how was the school what would be important if this was important what things would happen when you were playing I think I think that now there is more intentionality in terms of discussing race anti-racist curriculum here which is really wonderful I think that that was for me intuited here when I was growing up here and going to school here I know that I felt like this was a safe place for me to go to school safer than the stories that I heard heard of my parent my mother going to school in the town where we lived I definitely know that there was the feeling of being and only here at Cambridge Run School but there is also the feeling often of being in the city of Boston and growing up in a suburb of Boston so that was not necessarily different than the town where I grew up definitely different from where I grew up in Arlington so there were many reasons why my mom was searching for a school to go to but medical reason there was prop 2.5 which closed the school that I was going to so I did not go to a neighborhood public school my mom solicited after that discussion about where the young girls would go after graduation high school graduation my mom had me go to a school that was one district over in second grade I had one racial incident where I was kicked by an older boy an older white boy and I remember being super embarrassed it was I felt shame I did not feel I had caused it but I felt shame and embarrassment that had happened and I told my mom and she was like well I am going to deal with it I was like oh my god please don't it was more like please don't do this she was like yeah so she called the principal who was a really wonderful old folk man and he was like no I am going to deal with it and how he dealt with it was he went and got the kid pulled me out of class and I am saying this I am conflicted about how what should have been dealt with not been dealt with I don't know I don't know as an educator I don't know as a mother I don't know pulled me out pulled him out and said to him did you kick Kirsten honestly I can't remember what he said it was true I didn't even feel like I could go back to Imani and Kerry's feeling of not feeling like I didn't feel inferior he says I know it's true I felt like my mom knew it was true and I felt like this principal knew it was true so I was like I don't care what you say but that incident in my mind whether it was one of the other reasons why my mom was like meet another place to go not the safest no was not theater it's just a series of events my mom was searching for another place for me to go to school back to particular class that I was in in second grade those children were wonderful I'm still friends with them when I left Cambridge trans school went to another public school for a year and then happened to go back to school to that met all of them met up with them and we were in the same like honors cohort going through high school and when I came back the first two classes were a little bit rough because my mom made me take typing best class ever so I didn't mean any of them in typing and I was like in because it was Spanish here I placed higher for Spanish didn't see any of them in Spanish third period I walked into third period all of them were like where have you been for like seven years it was a warm place but that incident was one of the incidents where my mom was like no and I would have probably ended up somewhere else but not there I will say in terms of me and race and Cambridge trans school I always had kind of this idealistic vision given what came after when I went into public school of being in a classroom and a school that was very accepting even though there were a lot of black faces my impression as a child was that everybody was something so this was like the 80's so we had kids who were from Vietnam and had literally come from Cambodia and didn't speak English and everyone in the class was told to go around this kid and make them feel like they belonged there were kids who were from Haiti in my class who were black kids even though it wasn't an all black school I never felt like I knew that you know there weren't as many black people as say other black people who I met out in public who went to like another school it never felt to me like oh you're in an all white space when I got that feeling was when I went to public school in again one of the towns that supposedly have the best health schools in the state and I was called the Edward for the first time by and the teacher in that school was very adamant that people in this town because they had money could possibly be racist and so that was my first that was much more I think consequential than being in a space where there weren't as many black faces because I always felt like I was being like there was like a support of some sort and that there were different kinds of people around me when I went to high school I went to a prep school it was a different thing because a lot of the kids I went to prep school I went to at the time were their parents and their lives were much more much less concerned about kind of the social consciousness piece of life and much more concerned about this competitive you know and so that was also eye-opening because many of those kids were would say just ignorant things about race and class it was the 90s so you know having this whole argument like why are you at this school an action kid all the time people would say in the 90s to people so there was a lot, there was that but I would say Cambridge friends for me my perception as a child was that I was in a place that kind of enveloped kids and that even if there weren't as many black people as when I went to hang out with my cousins or something there was like a place that was nurturing and a space where I belong I think it's, again I won't go back to the fact that I think everyone has to make decisions for their children and decisions on what's best for their child and particularly I think the education piece in this country it's like I don't envy anybody for having to make that decision because there's so few options for something that has such a big effect on your child's 5 to 18 you know I experienced really really bad public school situations really really bad public school situations with race, they weren't at Cambridge friends and so in the scheme of things it wasn't here it doesn't say it was a perfect utopia but it's to say that those issues that happened did not happen when I was here you know I went to an independent school as well and you know it's interesting that's where I was called the university and that was an awakening thing so I guess this is going to lead to my next question because those things do hurt but I want to give a final word because we're up actually right out of time but for me the question of this whole conversation is our deepest concerns right and if you could just go down the list and give a final word of your deepest concerns and I'll model it and start my deepest concern is that in our homes right now we are as a black American I do not feel safe when you think about what's happening in the news that I can be eating a bowl of cereal and I could someone knocks on the door I could lose my life or I get the same feeling when a cop pulls up beside me and someone knocks on my door it's the same sort of heartbeat given what's happening in our society today and I think that is that is very scary and it's not to say historically that people haven't experienced that before but I haven't experienced that to that level and I think that informs the work that we do that fear has led me to founding the white responsibility to problems and it has influenced my work what's your deepest concern as a last word and I'm sure that that will eventually influence your next work or your next book but echo the bodily harm the inability to see each other as human beings because for that to happen the light has to be completely extinguished for you to for that to happen in Texas what happened over the weekend you have to the idea that you would there's someone in there a person is in there to even say knock first and say hello can I help you something for that person that even skirt protocol those missing steps are body count so it's the duality of the bodily harm but then the inability to see each other as human beings is my deepest concern I think this concern is figuring out and mapping what we get free my deepest concern is what the future is going to look like with this level of ignorance that we have just floating around in terms of the world my deepest concern is what the future is going to look like when all this passes which is an historical pass but then the problem is what will we be left with Kirsten Greenidge I think we have books available I think we kind of ran over time there was supposed to be some signing of some books but I think because of time if you need a book or would like a book signed could you please see myself or Diane send us an email and we can have those books signed for you