 Good evening. My name is Lisa Schnell. I'm the Interim Dean of the Honors College here and on behalf of President Tom Sullivan and our Provost David Rizovsky. I'd like to welcome you all here tonight. I feel like I should welcome you on behalf of Mayor Murrow Weinberger as well. There are so many folks from Burlington's greater community outside of UVM and it's great to see so many folks from outside of UVM here tonight as well. Our distinguished guest, Ta-Nehisi Coates, is an award-winning writer and investigative journalist, a true public intellectual in this country and really in the world, who brings an important and impassioned voice to our time and especially here on Election Day. You know, when I made arrangements to have Ta-Nehisi Coates here as part of our first-year read program and I talked with his agent and we worked out dates and it just didn't even occur to me that we were choosing Election Day. And then when I put it on my calendar and realized that it was Election Day, I thought, wow, there's something kind of magic about that. So I'm just really, it's just wonderful to have him here to any day, but today's really special. His book, as many of you know, is Book Between the World and Me, won the National Book Award and the NAACP Image Award. It was the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Our first-year students at UVM this year were asked to read Between the World and Me over the summer and to talk about it when they got to campus. I'm a dean, but I'm also a teacher of first-year students and as someone who sat in those classrooms with students who had read the book and discussed it, I discussed it with them. So did lots of teachers on this campus and I read what they wrote about it. I can say truly with no exaggeration whatsoever that this is one, perhaps the most deeply affecting book that we've ever assigned for summer reading at UVM. I know the students would agree with me. Tonight we will enjoy a brief reading by Mr. Coates followed by a conversation between Mr. Coates and Distinguished, University Distinguished Professor Major Jackson and then there'll be some questions from students. I fully expect it'll be just an amazing evening. I'd like to first start by just thanking all of the partners of the university who have helped to make this event possible. It's a big event. There are a lot of people involved. The first-year read committee, which I am a member, the first-year experience committee at UVM and really the amazing folks in the president's office who organized these events. Renee Soutir, Kelly O'Malley and Susan Davidson, they worked so hard. It's so great to see this come to fruition. I'd also like to welcome members of our Ira Allen Society, generous supporters of student scholarships and academic programming at UVM. They're with us this evening and I'd like to thank you all for being here. Just before I introduce the speakers, our speaker and his interlocutor, I want to just have just a few sort of logistical things to say. There are so many of you here and so just a couple of notes about where you might exit, where we do need to exit. We don't expect that we will until the event is over. But you'll see that there are a whole bunch of doors over there and there are doors over here and where you came in. And just take a note of where the exits are. Please no recording of any kind, no videotaping and no picture taking. We have UVM video here and the video will be available for viewing through the library. It would also be great if everybody would right now turn off your cell phones because we definitely don't want cell phones to be dinging and ringing throughout the evening. Finally, just to let you know that there are books for sale on the table on the east wall and the same side that you enter today and you can access those after the event. And I think that's it for logistics. So let me introduce the folks who will occupy these chairs up here. University Distinguished Professor Major Jackson is my colleague in the English department. He's the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Roll Deep. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem Poetry Prize and a Whiting Writers Award. His poems and essays have been translated into Spanish, German, Italian and Chinese. They appear widely in distinguished journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Paris Review. Major Jackson is the Richard A. Dennis Professor of English. He serves as the poetry editor of The Harvard Review and he teaches our students here at UVM. Tauna Hasse Coates is a distinguished writer in residence at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is the author of the best-selling books, The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power and Of Course Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. Tauna Hasse is the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Fellowship. He's also the current author of the Marvell Comics, The Black Panther and Captain America. It is just an immense pleasure to have him with us. Thank you. Thank you, guys. It's a, you know, a book is like your child and I can say this now that I have raised an 18-year-old child. You struggle with your child and you go back and forth with your child and you guys have a hard time and a difficult relationship. And the only way you really see your child is within the confines of that house. And so you see all the foyables and problems of your child, even as you know, you love your child and you think your child is wonderful. And then like one day you encounter someone who did not raise your child, who, you know, doesn't see your child through the lens of all of those foyables and all of those fights and all of those problems and they tell you how wonderful your child is. And you're like, you talking about the same kid? And you can never really see the child in the way that the people outside, you know what I mean, who encountered that child see it. And the book is like this. I say it to say like, when I see between the world and me, I see pain and I see me being on my third or fourth draft of this book and I actually having to come up, I was coming up this way over to Middlebury College for the language school and I had to get this drafted between the world and me done summer 2014. And I was not convinced that I was gonna, you know, get it done. And the fact that it got done, that it got accepted by my editor that it would, you know, prove to be of, I guess, such force that, you know, you guys would be out here tonight is remarkable. I can't believe this is my child, stunned. I'm gonna do a quick reading, but I just wanna make a point about a couple of people who are here tonight. First of all, my friend Rachel Zealaz is, oh, she's right there in the front row. My friend Rachel Zealaz is here. And Rachel is so important because this book begins, you know, for those of you who read it, you know, with the death of our mutual friend, Prince Jones. And so for Rachel to be here, not just, you know, in support of me, which I appreciate, but you guys' present here is testament to the life of Prince, who was real to us, you know, who was not like a smartphone, you know, video. Who was not, you know, a hashtag, was an actual real breathing person who was taken from us. Second, I just, you know, me and Major are gonna talk, you know, in a second, but I'm just gonna tell you guys about Major for a bit. You know, it was a time when I was, you know, I told him when I saw him tonight that we actually had met before. And it was another era when I was a much, much younger man and slightly more delusional and thought that I might grow up one day to become a poet. I was disabused of this notion, thankfully. But, you know, among the, you know, a group of folks that I looked up to, you know, back then was, you know, a crew major was a part of, called the Dark Room Poetry Collective. And if you were young and you were black in the early to mid 90s, you know, these folks were like, you know, exemplars for who you, you know, wanted to be. And they would come down to DC and Reed, where I was, you know, in school. And I would see them, I would see, you know, I would see Sharon Strange and John Keen and all these guys. I just idolized, you know, these folks. And so it is a tremendous pleasure to be here tonight, you know, particularly to, you know, be interviewed by a major. You guys have a real treasure in your midst. Between the World to Me is a book about fear. Above all, when I wrote this book, one of the things I really wanted to counter, you know, this was, as I said, you know, in like 2013, 2014. And it was a period where given what was happening in the Ascendant Nature of Black Lives Matter, movement, there was a lot of talk about anger. And I thought that one of the things that people often missed about the African-American community was how much fear there actually was. And this was not like a way that we were traditionally presented. And so I thought I would, you know, flip it a little bit. So I'm gonna read a little bit about fear tonight. And I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I was afraid long before you and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age, the only people I knew were black and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my young life, though I had not always recognized it as such. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood and their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full length fur collared with leather which was their armor against the world. They would stand on the corner of Gwyneth and Liberty or Cold Spring and Park Heights or outside Mundarm and Mall with their hands dipped in Russell sweats. I think back to those boys now and all I see is fear and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered around their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived on in their practice bobbed, their slouching denim, their big t-shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the fear that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired. I saw it in their customs of war. I was no older than five, sitting out on the steps of my home on Woodbrook Avenue watching two shirtless boys circle each other close and buck shoulders. From then on, I knew that there was a ritual to a street fight, bylaws and codes, then in their very need attested to all the vulnerability of the black teenage body. I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped up from boomboxes full of grand boasts and bluster, the boys who stood out on garrison and Liberty, up on Park Heights, loved this music because it told them against all evidence and odds that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls in their loud laughter and their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. Keep my name out of your mouth, they would say. I would watch them after school how they squared off like boxes, Vaseline'd up, earrings off, re-box on and left at each other. I felt the fear in the visit to my nana's home in Philadelphia. You never knew her, I barely knew her, but what I remember is her hard manner, her rough voice. And I knew that my father's father was dead and that my uncle Oscar was dead and that my uncle David was dead and that each of these instances was unnatural. And I saw it in my own father who loves you, who counsels you, who slipped me money to care for you. My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt which he applied with more anxiety than anger. My father, who beat me as if someone might steal me away because that is exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had lost a child. Somehow to the streets, somehow to jail, somehow to drugs, somehow to guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey and would not hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had just received a GED and had begun to turn their lives around. And now they were gone and their legacy was a great fear. Thank you. So I'm happy you started with poetry. Uh-oh. So is there volume of poems coming someday? Kind of how I say, come on. You know, it's funny, it's, sorry, you know, back in that era when I thought I was gonna be a poet. You know, I was telling major, I went into this workshop up at Provincetown with the great Yusef Kulmanyaka and, you know, other tremendous poets. You know, in that workshop, Yonahavi, Terrence Hayes, Jodeus Ford, there's just a lot of talent in there and it became clear that I was in the bottom quintile of that talent. Now that's not so bad. I've been bad at things all my life, it's okay. I was, you know, if you love something, you love it. You know, I didn't feel like I had it to be, you know, number one, but poetry out of all the literary art forms is also the hardest to make a living at. And I felt like I could do one of those but I couldn't do both of them together. You know what I mean? Like I couldn't be at the bottom and also, you know, be scraped. You know, I could, you know, I pick one evil. I can't take both evils and it's funny because that was actually a summer that I literally got my first professional writing job. I think about, you know, me and Yonah joke about this. I think about it all the time but it just, I don't think people, and this was clear to me at the time, I don't think people realize the amount of discipline and sheer talent it takes to be a great poet and I'm not, it's not to blow smoke. I mean, this is having like actually tried to do it. You know, like it was really, really clear to me. Like how, how hard it is. Now, having said that, I actually think, I'm glad I did spend that time studying and I, like even now when I teach my nonfiction courses, I always start with poetry. Right. Because I think writers of other forms actually could benefit from studying poetry. Well, for me it's clear that not only between the world and me but so much of your work, evidence is your workshop in that particular, particular genre. I'm also thinking about the great tradition of writers produced that, Howard and the conscious, consciousness that is gained from being a student there and I'm wondering if you could talk about that tradition and you seeing yourself within that lineage of Toni Morrison and Baraka and Lucille Clifton and Sterling Brown. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's no place really like Howard. And when I was there, you know, people had taken to calling it the black Harvard, but that's not true. And there's no disrespect to Harvard, but it, Howard isn't the black anything. It's a unique, you know, particular thing. I think largely because of this period of Jim Crow and segregation. One of the perverse positive side effects is that all of the talent was kind of siloed into these, you know, small, you know, sort of these particular group of historically black colleges and universities and Howard being, you know, among the most prominent. So what that means is, you know, for that period, you know, basically coming out of slavery, you know, up until the 1960s, anybody who I loved, anybody who I had admired had spent some time at Howard. And a great many of them, you know, had had either taught or went there. Lane Locke, you know, had taught there. Tony Morrison had gone there. Lucille Clifton had gone there. I see Davis had gone there. Baraka had gone there. I mean, just so many of my idols who had been there and what it gave me was a deep sense of roots. I saw Tony Morrison give convocation, I think, in 96. And I like, I didn't understand this at the time, but it was like, Tony Morrison had been taught by Elaine Locke. Do you know what I mean? So it's like, she had a literal touchstone to the Harlem Renaissance. And that was just so, you know, profound to me. You know what I mean? It'd be like that, you know, that connected in. It gave me a deep sense of a literary home. Well, that is absolutely what animated the darkroom collective at that time. And part of the reason why we love coming down to DC and coming down to Howard because of that lineage. You mentioned being a teacher right now and congratulations on your appointment at NYU. I knew you were at MIT as well. Any chance of us bringing you to Vermont? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Joking. That's trying to get me in trouble, man. I know. Timáser won't tell you this, but he was just complaining about not being able to get his hair cut up there. See? So. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. It's a beautiful town though, it really is, it's a beautiful, it's a gorgeous, gorgeous town. So what do you hope to impart to your students? Because clearly one of the themes of the book between the world and me is that sometimes education in school does not address the inner needs, the emotional needs of certain segments of society. So what do you hope to impart to your students and do you have them call you Professor Coates or Tanahasi? I really try hard to get them to call me Tanahasi, I work really hard, they don't always go for that but I try really, really hard to get them to call me Tanahasi because I didn't graduate from college so I mean I don't look like a professor, I mean it doesn't quite work but and that's the other thing you know it's always awkward like whenever to be like why, like I'm teaching at NYU, I mean I could barely make it through, I didn't make it through Howard, you know what I mean, so it's always this sort of you know shock at being there, you know mainly I try to, I teach in the journalism school at NYU and the main thing I try to get them to do is to learn to respect the beauty of language and that sounds like something that everybody has or seems obvious but it's actually not you know I actually think this goes for more than journalists but for journalists specifically there's this notion that what you need to do and I mean even you know like literary long-form journalists the idea is to you know get the facts down get the you know structure right get the story across but again like one of the great lessons you know I learned as a poet was to pay attention to every single word you know pay attention to how they're you know strung together you know I always say like when I when I write I don't want to write things that people read put down and say hmm that seems correct you know I want them to be haunted you know I want them to go to bed thinking about it wake up thinking about it go to work thinking about it tell all their friends you know that they can't stop thinking about it and then I want their friends to you know go and read and feel the same way but I think that is as much as that you know part of that is definitely the story you're trying to tell but I think a large portion of that is finding the correct words and organizing them you know in a way that haunts people and speaking of haunting I mean that's definitely what happened with James Baldwin right he haunted you could you talk about that particular book yeah yeah fire next time yeah of course so I um I read fire next time for the first time when I was at Howard I sat and found this library and read it all in one day and it was like I didn't really like completely get it you know I mean I felt it is another another it was the same sort of thing like I could feel it I could feel the beauty of the words that I couldn't I was not quite at an intellectual level at that point why could grapple with everything you know he was saying and trying to get across and it's funny because what happened was I'm trying to remember why but for some reason around 2012 2013 and I'm pretty sure has something to do with Obama but I can't like you know make it quite connect I decided to go back and read fire next time and like it was more beautiful than I remembered and it's always a great experience when you have that things that you read as a young reader to come back to them you know some 20 years later almost and say wow this is this really was great like I wasn't you know crazy I didn't have bad taste you know I mean I knew I was right but then I could see it you don't like I could see all the layers and the levels and you know like I think a Baldwin like like I think a Marvin Gaye like I'm a huge Marvin Gaye fan and Marvin Gaye had all of these registers that he would sing and you know his natural voice you know his falsetto and he could you know do all of these things with his voice and Baldwin was for me like that as a writer he had this repertorial voice where he could you know say ghosts in that book sit with Elijah Muhammad say this happened this happened this happened you know then he had this analytical voice we could actually analyze you know I mean what you know the nation of Islam met he had this memoir reflective voice we could talk about his own experience with the church and religion and then he had this kind of like poetic voice that was like a thousand feet in the air you know when he could talk about Harlem and you know use these beautiful you know long what should be but were not run on sentences you know and you would just get lost in it and and literally when I was working on between the world and me myself and my editor Chris Jackson spent so much time looking at that book not you know because it wasn't gonna be the same book not trying to do what he did but trying to understand how somebody could sing like that but there's that's a level of truth telling that I think you've reinstituted and and to and to public dialogue and debate and there was also his pulpit voice mm-hmm that we also kind of admire mm-hmm I know that there are aspiring writers in the audience as well as journalists and I'm thinking about students and clearly your life is evidence of the writer can be heard in a in a democracy but what we're experiencing right now is an assault on the on on that very important bedrock of a democracy how do you how do you protect your voice and your kind of analytical mind from that assault how do you retain your sanctity as a writer when we have from the highest office in the land this idea that mainstream media is its own propaganda machine well I say off Twitter I left in last December my wife is like why you seem like a much happier person so I actually do think at least for me it became really important to control what was coming in you know not but and I don't mean that like to control like like not to read things that you disagreed with I don't mean it like that but some things are worthless some things intellectually just just have no words sometimes people are just obviously lying if I know that there's climate change and listen I mean listen I'm not this is just me it's just how talking you might have some professors here very wise very intelligent who would disagree with this if I know climate change is a reality I'm just not gonna spend an hour talking to a creationist you know I mean or global warming deny I'm just not gonna do it I'm not like act my mind is too sacred to me to subject it to that and and when you write about the force of racism in American in American history there are creationists there are a large number of creationists in this you know field who are not frankly qualified to have a discussion but because of the way power has flowed in this country because of a hierarchy in this country they get to talk about it I try really hard to stay away from that yeah because there are people like I want to be clear like that doesn't mean that you don't engage people who disagree with you but who disagrees with you right now at this moment is being defined in a certain way you understand yeah like I feel that you know white supremacy is at the core of this country and so there's a notion that I should therefore engage with someone who thinks it isn't but in fact there's a whole other set of arguments that come after I say that that I could also engage with you know what I mean on someone that that disagrees how does that work what is the manifest manifestation of that how does that work you know in terms of gender how does that work in terms of capitalism a whole host of other more interesting disagreements and questions I could be asking instead of spending time trying to convince this creationist that evolution is real you know yeah it feels like a tremendous waste of my own limited mental energy well so also a way of again as I pointed out dismantling truth-telling and I'm thinking about the role of editors and other staff that are behind your articles we see the finished product at the Atlantic when you were a national correspondent and Chris Jackson is a great collaborator of yours could you talk about fact-checking and that whole process right of your pieces coming out into the world yeah I was I was you know very fortunate the Atlantic I'm still very fortunate at you know one world I had a great team around me you know I mean if you are gonna put and it's funny how much the world has changed but in 2014 it was still radical to make a case for reparations on the cover the Atlantic and if you were gonna do that you had to you better be right and I mean you better be right like everybody has to agree with you you better be right but every name better be smell right every you know I mean like if you said it happened on this date that better be right if you say you know 60% you know of America's exports were you know cotton that went through slave hands I better be right that better be right it better not be off by a little bit inside you know like they put like five fact checkers on that you know to make sure every little thing you know it was good I mean what one of the most interesting and I think rewarding things though I took from my time there was that in fact you know those arguments which during a different time and I remember this well why not seen as you know sorts of arguments that should be in a magazine like the Atlantic a case for reparations yeah yeah yeah but but like they could stand up to all of that scrutiny you know they totally could like you could do it at the highest level you know everything fact-checked and everything you know all your you know tease crossing all your eyes died you know some of that old to your undergraduate years as a historian I was thinking about the Chronicle did this wonderful piece on you about pretty much celebrating your your cred as a you're a journalist but your cred as a historian I'm thinking about your engagement with the Civil War yeah well no you got exactly right I was a major Howard and Howard you know has a tremendous you know tradition in that in that history department and I just had people who I have always been lucky and I think I just started like with my mom and my dad but I have always been lucky in my in-house opposition if that makes sense I have always had like really tough people to argue with and and to fight with and that's just been true you know all of my life you know I mean it goes back as I you know said to my mom who used to you know make me write essays when I got in trouble you know and my dad who used to you know debate about whatever was on NPR and wanted to fight about everything and you know wanted to fight about this book and you know once I got to Howard you know and you know these history professors that you know when everything documented you had to go read journal articles and you know to when I left then you know my first editor David Carr and you know even the students at Howard you know I mean who were just so like up here you know I mean it's so eager to fight that I really felt like by the time I started talking to a broader you know audience by the time I you know I got to like the Atlantic or even before that you know I felt like I had been through it you know I mean because the fact of the matter is I had been through it because I had been arguing with the people who knew all the minutiae about black people already you know what I mean and so I felt like very much you know battle tested yeah that's a we call that critical thinking cultivating critical thinking in the academy but maybe maybe it's possible that this is what should have been more at your in your education as a as a young man that kind of yeah you know I thought about that a lot because I just I wasn't a great student I was a terrible student that's what's lurking in the background all of this like I didn't get to Howard and become a great student I was and become a bastard I was like a bad student in high school I got kicked out of high school I had to do this but I didn't have to but I did this this thing that Henry Lewis Gates does finding your roots and part of finding my roots was my high school transcript which was shown to me and somehow was worse than I remembered I felt English in 11th grade I got the Howard I felt American let feel brilliant just terrible terrible and the worst part about like I love to read I love to read you know that mean I just felt like I was gonna read what I wanted to read when I wanted it yeah I'm gonna tell me we also listen to a lot of music back then I did I did yeah I'll confess I read between the world of me on the airplane and Kamasi Washington's album had just come out the epic and so he was in the music was in my air I'm reading your words and I remember landing and tweeting oh my god that was amazing I want to recommend to everybody that if you're gonna read the book listen to this music at the same time mainly because you both of you interwoven my ear and imagination a long tradition a radical sound that I feel black the best black art and captures the struggle of African-Americans and I thought you know this would be a good question for you if you could recommend a soundtrack for your writings or between the world of me what would be on that playlist I was even gonna play music that I know you referenced and just get your so I mean the easy answer is like a bunch of hip-hop Ray Kwan yeah yeah a lot of Ray Kwan a lot of Wu-Tang a lot a lot of Nas a lot of rock him all of that but I really do think Marvin Gaye I really I think like like I really think I'm like like I play let's get it on a lot I thought you gonna say what's going on no no no I play let's get let's get it on which I mean what's good I mean but see everybody knows what's going on it's a great I mean and it's a but let's get it on it's so like raw I'm talking about the whole album not just the song the song is great but I'm just so raw and dirty and car and all and it's so from hand if you know the story about how I was made it's just really yeah we won't go there but like by the time you like get to like distant lover and like how like he goes as I you know just saying earlier from that you know falsetto to sort of moaning to like this deep you know sorta you know James Brown soul growl and he does it effortlessly you know what I mean like and I listen to that and I feel a sort of way and I feel like when I write I want you to feel that way like I feel like I like you know literature is not like music it doesn't you know have the same sort of you know visceral grab on people in the same way but even if that's out of my grasp in terms of the genre I'm reaching for it nonetheless and I think readers can feel it it's one of the moving moments that you talk about it being at Howard and something about the black body possessing a certain freedom and if you could write as well as these yes express themselves well as they dance yeah I wanted to write like they want a beautiful passages there's a lot of moving passages in between the world of me and one of them I'm thinking about particularly as you and Samori at the movie theater on the Upper West Side and Mike and you capture terrifically this kind of fierce passionate way in which black parents feel like they have to protect their children my colleague Professor Emily Bernard has written about this for the Atlantic about being the mother of twin daughters black daughters and I'm asking this out of curiosity how would your father or if you were Samori how would your father and or your mother react it to that situation wow so I mean again for those who haven't read the book basically we were coming from it was 2004 we were coming from how's moving castle and I remember this like it was yesterday I just got hired a time magazine and I was if this was a Sunday and I was starting on Monday and I almost got arrested on that Sunday everything could have been totally different I think about how many close calls and basically we were coming out of how's moving castle and we were on that escalator coming down and it was a lot of people and this woman pushed my kid and I'm not like an aggressive person I'm you know I'm not like a you know fight I'm not I'm just not that guy at all you know it never was she can't push my kid I mean if it's anywhere in me and you want to see it you know you just push my son and then we'll find out I kind of got into it with this woman and you know what really angered me was not her what angered me was there was a white guy who jumped in the middle of it and started taking up for her every year you got this four-year-old kid why are you not taking up for the four-year-old kid you know I mean like he automatically assumed that I must have been you know doing you know something to I don't know man my dad you know you know lived on a truck when he was like six years old you know my mom is you know from the project to West Baltimore I have no idea what they would have done it would have been worse than what I did talk right I think it would have been much you know much much worse you know at the same time you know I like like I think about that moment and I was so out of my own head I'm feeling like out of my own head and the only thing that brought me back was seeing Samari you see it's like for your kid who's like looking at you and it's like oh my dad's losing it you know and that was that was really the only thing that brought me back I suspect they would have had a similar or you know more extreme reactions yeah I have maybe a couple more questions and one of the UVM joined a number of schools across the country that assigned between the world and me as its common read and we've had vigorous conversations and debates and one of them was as you can imagine about the idea of those who believe they're white mm-hmm and I'm wondering if you could for me that echoes James Baldwin obviously a very important yes does article that he wrote in essence but I'm thinking about what what are the implications for people to just echo it I literally got it from there yeah and Baldwin does an amazing job of linking up whiteness to power and the privileges of that and you do that as well and I'm wondering about for folks who have a difficult time of it of thinking about whiteness in those terms not ethnically not culturally but in terms of power right speak about speak about that yeah I mean just give me a moment to unwind us a little bit yeah so that's a bubble which is remarkable and all you guys should read it it'll take you like 15 minutes it's really short it's called on being white and other lies and it is a powerful essay because it basically argues that there is no real anything called whiteness in America safe power it doesn't mean there's no you know group of people who check Caucasian you know on their census it doesn't mean that there is no group of people with you know blue eyes or blonde hair or light a skin or anything like that but the designation of white in other words the decision to exclusively call that group of people white is in fact a political decision it does not in fact reflect you know the ancestor in the biology that I you know just point it out and we know this to be true actually how do we know it to be true I am sitting here right now in Burlington Vermont and I obviously identify as black okay if I were living in New Orleans 200 250 years ago I might not I might be in a identified as something totally different if I were living in Brazil right now I might be identified as something totally different only a month ago and I'm ashamed to tell the story but I'm gonna tell it I was deeply assaulted but I'm gonna tell it only a month ago I was with my wife and Martinique and there was a sister there from Senegal and she was telling my wife who's a little darker than me just a little bit that she looked like you know she could be you know Senegal a she could be from Senegal so I look like I could be from Senegal she looked at me rolled eyes so you look like he'd be from Morocco which when African-American you know that I mean it's like because we think ourselves is black black black right as this real you know sort of thing and it became in this joke but the idea was we call ourselves black as a particular thing but it's a political decision that we've made here that is as you know results from history you studied the Haitian Revolution when the French are fighting against Tucson and his troops they send over a group of Polish mercenaries but a Polish mercenaries get over there and they realize that in fact they have more in common with the black Haitians there than they do with the French who sent them over to fight and end up actually siding with the black Haitian such to the extent that when the French Revolution succeeds desolines the clays these people black that community still in Haiti today it's a political decision an American political decision was made to draw the line that way so that white men could have as much access as possible to the bodies of black women but at the same time still produce the maximum amount of slaves possible you see in a mixture you know gives you a problem because what do you do about the child what do you do about the offshoot and if what you're trying to do is maximize the number of slaves as monstrous as this sounds you need the ability to enslave your child to that's what you need now we draw the line in a particular place but the one drop the one drop rule and that's what it's a reflection of but we only draw that line because of power has nothing to do with ancestry or anything people who we refer to as racially black and people who we refer to as racially white have been you know around each other since at the very least since the days of the Roman Empire before this idea of what we call you know white and black today actually existed so it's a political choice and once I understood that it just clarified so much and actually locked something into this book that I was trying to you know really get to because what we face in America largely when you're talking about you know the problems of racism in this country is the fact that in order to move forward people who consider themselves white people who believe in the importance of being white people who think being white is actually significant in their lives will have to part with that that was that mean doesn't mean they have to part with their skin complexion doesn't mean they have to part with their head I mean they had to part with anything that we would identify you know in the human genome it means they would have to part with the suite of privileges that comes with that and if you got rid of that why would white as a race even exist why would black as a race even exist the difference between us as black people and white people is we would very eagerly part with the idea of being a black race now we would still have culture we still had a way we talk we had a way we shake hands we still had a music we just thought of food we like you know I mean like we have a cultural identity just like within the broader you know white race you have a Jewish identity as culture within that Italian-American identity there's culture within that that that would still remain but the race piece of it it's only power it's only power and so when I when I wrote this book it was so important to me to write it in that way to not reify the lie that we have a problem between the races because the races don't actually exist we have a problem of racism in this country and to put it that way I'm thinking about maybe one more from me and then the students have some questions I'm thinking about how other interlocutors have very much desired in the age of black lives matter post Ferguson to hear you and you open up the book with this to talk about hope and and I'm not sure I'm I'm not sure where I fall on that on that particular spectrum but clearly you and I and and I think this is some of the reason why you and I represent physically a level of success that may and a black presidency also suggests you know even though he ran on that president Obama senator Obama ran on this idea of hope but I'm wondering why does the country need to hear particularly out of the mouths of black people why do they need to hear optimism why do they need to hear voice hope is there space for some great area and I asked this because the majority of people that look like us do not celebrate the same kind of privileges that you and I have so right now on this very day voter suppression is happening right now someone is being mocked because of their color right now so much is happening due to this so why hope particularly after Pittsburgh after Charleston after Charlottesville why hope why do we need that why does the country need that yeah so I think it did two different answers here so I think for black Americans one of the things you should know about me I wasn't raised Christian and I think this separates me largely from vast majority of African Americans there is a strong ethos in black Christianity of the meek inheriting the earth you know when Obama speaks about the arc you know of history like bending towards like like justice like or Martin Luther King you know we as a people will get to the mountaintop that is at the core of black folks I mean even you know as much as you know and I love fire next time but I think that like we end up in two different places you know I mean he ends up in this place of you know preaching the power of love of loving our you know white brothers and you know that love having the power to you know move us forward and I'm not repeating that mockingly or sarcastic I'm saying literally that that that's where he ends up in the book I really think having been raised outside of Christianity and really having been raised as an agnostic and ultimately becoming an atheist probably alters my perspective quite a bit most things don't end up well mm-hmm that is generally to you know the rule the rule of history what I find you know when I when I look across history is chaos is rule things might go well today you know they might not beyond that speaking specifically to African Americans what I find is the moment in which there's black progress tremendous black progress they usually is a moment where a critical mass of white people have decided that that's in their interest so it's not that people forget this you think about like the civil war right and emancipation and you know we bask in the glow of emancipation the great victory and it really was but Abraham Lincoln only won that election because in fact the Democratic Party was splintered into three different candidates I was able to win and then once he won and the civil war you know was effectively inaugurated in the first you know two years you know he largely does not want to make this a war about slavery when he becomes clear it is a war about slavery and that you know he comes around that's what he's making war against what is the country's answer to him he's shot in the head first president of the United States to be assassinated was assassinated not just by a white supremacist but by a white supremacist who wrote white supremacy is why I'm doing this people forget this about booth booth wrote a whole lot he explained it completely booth was not crazy booth was a Confederate and you made it you know you can as I said you know don't take my words what you know you get out here Google you know John Wilkes Booth you can find his ladder he makes it very very clear why he did it that's incredible I mean this is absolutely absolutely you know incredible fast forward a hundred years and it's like you know you know you think about Martin Luther King who this country valorizes king of love everybody loves Martin Luther King but what was this country's answer to Martin Luther King when he was alive in his time and the answer was not from you know a bunch of crazies down in Mississippi they had answers to but not from a bunch of you know a wild-eyed people down in the South but from the federal government was to bug him and to harass him the head of law enforcement in this country went on a years-long campaign to harass his guy that we you know now valorize as an American saint we've named out of the FBI building after this dude just think about this and your president signed off on it then then Lyndon B Johnson signed off on it Kennedy signed you know these people that we valorize they signed off on it and his treatment as country like Lincoln ends with him being shot like some difficult questions about that man like you really got to like think hard about that you got to think hard about you know as you know I'm happy as anybody that we had a black president but you need to really think hard about what it meant that half of the opposition party literally did not accept him as a legitimate president that is dangerous and scary that it's response to a black president who had to go to two Ivy League schools had to be headed a law review you know had to be morally about as sound as you can get and still be a human being you know had to be you know about as far as you can go and still be black the answer to this dude was like Donald Trump that was a response you have to draw some conclusions about this and you know it's like I thought about this like when I said you know listen maybe when America have enough self-regard and enough self-interest to not elect Donald Trump they don't have to love black people in order to you know that mean not elect they got enough self-regard that they would be like no not this dude he can't have that the nuclear coach he can't have a football not that dude to realize that he critical mass of people in this country who think they are white who believe they are white who that belief is of tremendous importance to would sacrifice themselves and their own children and the future and the future yeah yeah you know I mean strictly as a reaction to this and you know I know there are other factors but I mean the data is really clear at this point it's really really clear as to what this was man um that is scary and so I understand taking all that together and a large number factors which I have not mentioned why somebody might approach a guy like me and say man give us some hope brother give us some hope but I feel like as a writer and being true to that and being you know respectful to all of you who have come here tonight who I just I so much appreciate it would be wrong for me to read a bedtime story to you like it would be deeply disrespectful to do that you know like you can um I have to tell you what I what I think and then you can go and say well he's wronged out of how I mean you can you know I'm saying you got accepted but I can't give it to you just because it'll make you feel better yeah that's not how I was raised that's not you know what happened at Howard that's not you know what happened with all that you know in a locket is that that I've had over the course of my career before we ask the students to ask a question something that you kind of gently address is gender and masculinity and I'm thinking about several times have you how you talked about yourself as a soft teenager and to some extent I understand how the streets that can be a very dangerous space to occupy even though it's naturally you in writing this book and writing this book to your son did you think about those particular issues of what his what his humanity as a young man is in the range of that yeah I did it was tough though because he keep it was tough for me to get to it for him because he is like the world that he inhabited was so different than mine you know I was you know sensitive I am sensitive I was soft I am soft it ain't changed you know you know I mean I didn't really become a writer before you know until I could step into that and say you know that well this is what it is I think one of the things that happens on a broader level with a book like between the world to me again you know it's like I was saying with your kids like I was really I had this friend who had been killed and it had been 14 years since he'd been killed and I had been thinking about him every day and I had been for a long time really really angry about it and I felt strongly that I had gotten to the point as a writer where I could challenge myself and write something brief that explored the range of feelings that I had around that and I wasn't clear that I could do that you know I mean like I thought it was like a theory I thought I could my editor thought I could my agent thought I could but it was you know it was a reach it was a step and when the book was published you know it became this big thing and it and I would never wish this I think other people might tell you that it overshadowed a lot of other you know legitimate work and I think other people might tell you it overshadowed a lot of legitimate work from black women and what happens is I think because we're at this point in our history where we're always in search of the one black person or the one black book it becomes this thing of why does it you know this in fact is a very limited perspective on what it means to be black in America it is a limited perspective on what what it you know means to be black in America it was never meant to be what it became I mean who can tell you can you can never tell that you know it's actually gonna get elevated to that level and you know have to assume that you know on its shoulders you know I've thought a lot about that sense and one of the things I've really landed on is I couldn't really write it differently and I wouldn't want to write it differently and I wouldn't myself want to write differently what I want is as much as possible to aid the proliferation of voices that are much more different than I than me yeah and that you know goes yeah because it's a structural problem do you know that means a structural problem and so you know to the extent that you know I'm really you know taking it on you know in my mind to you know use whatever I have to make sure that you know black women you know writers you know who were doing this you know as they've always done it get heard you know in the way that they deserve preach preach I think we have some questions from students like many of us in this room today is likely the day your son is voting for the first time if not in future elections I realize this is a vast question and does not probably have a simple answer but I wonder how you felt voting for the first time and how the issues you cared about the most within Paris into now and how do you talk with your son about what it means to vote that's a great question because I didn't vote for the first time until I was 33 years old it was 2008 for Barack Obama and yeah she shouldn't clap for that though I'm actually I've thought a lot about this you know what I mean like why it took me so long and why why then and I think like I mean at that moment it just felt like it started you had to there was no not voting but I think I before that came from a place and maybe some of the young people in this room are in this place right now I can't replace her the whole thing is corrupt the whole thing is bad and if I you know vote I am somehow enrolled in the badness I'm somehow you know a part of it and I had a very radical but limited view of politics you know I was probably you know not probably I was someone you know who would have you know told you know well you know ultimately you know in a two-party system like we have you know you're gonna end up endorsing a lesser evil at best and you know what a professor recently you know she you know put it was professor Barbara Ransby out in Chicago she said yes that's true but I'm in favor of less evil nobody I had gotten to that point but I had never you know quite you know you know figured it out like that yeah yeah that's it you know because I think like you know where I was you know before them was I wanted voting to be this because it's kind of pitched to you this way to you know given the tradition and you know what what voting means in the African community you know it's supposed to be like this pure ritual or it expresses you know who represents me and who I believe in and you know how I feel about the world and this person represents you know the kind of world that I want to live in when in fact it often just represents the forestalling of evil the prevention of evil voting is taken out the trash man it's taken and you have to take out the trash you can't not take out the trash you know and just like taking out the trash is not the end of you know your you know process of hygiene and cleaning up and keeping a clean house voting is not the end of your political engagement it's an important part of it so really really like you gotta take out the trash got a vote you got to you know I mean but after you vote you have to do all those other things that allow us to one day hopefully live in a world where we aren't just confronted with going to the ballot and forestalling evil thank you next question hi my name is Joe Warren I'm from Williston Vermont this past May you wrote an article in the Atlantic about Michael Jackson and Kanye West and their complicated relationship to celebrity as African-American males you included yourself in those reflections as well can you talk a little bit about that and especially about what you think the role of celebrities in general might be in a democracy wow I need to talk to my therapist about that I'm dead serious it was like when I wrote that piece I you know I was obviously as I was like really upset at Kanye and I was really mad but again you know I go back to this like when this when between the world and me came out it oh my god I could tell y'all stories it completely altered like everything like it just like I was you know and I have been you know a relatively you know struggling writer I would walk down the street and no one you know really you know it was just normal everything was like normal and everything was not normal you know what I mean and in some ways that was like really really good you know people would come up to me and they would break down and cry and you know and that was the good part but I didn't even know how to receive the good part because in my mind I was just doing what I had you know normally done I was just you know sort of you know being me and then there was like the bad part and the bad part was a the sheer amount of things that people offer you that should not be offered to anyone I had people that would like write me and would say hey there's this secret meeting over here that you can attend and will fly you and your family out on a private plane and you can you know bring your family and you know you guys can sit around with all these other millionaires and billionaires and just sort of talk that sounds harmless it's not though it's not it's actually you know quite quite harmful I had people that would write me and say do you want to direct this music video by Kendrick Lamar and Mary J. Blott true story true story and I was like what what in my world have I done to make anyone think that I'm capable of directing constantly things would be offered now I was 39 going on 41 between the world and me came up I've been with my wife for 15 years some was 15 I was very set in who I was I knew I was I knew you know what was important but it was still very destabilizing you know is like to this very day still you know tremendously destabilizing and I thought what if I was somebody else what if I actually did not like my dad and my dad used to call me big nose you know and make fun of my African features you know what if you know my mom was my rock in the world and my mom had died getting plastic surgery and what if I felt completely cut off from my family and I felt like I didn't have roots and a basis and what if I was on top of that even though this wasn't confirmed at the time you know I suspected I didn't want to make a diagnosis in that these and what if I was struggling with mental health issues who might I be what might happen we're talking Kanye yeah yeah what might I say what if I had no one around me who ain't even loved me enough or just you know loved me and didn't had a ability to stop me and to say no people who love you that the highest calling is to tell you no and what if I didn't have a community around me to tell me no I mean you might see me tap dancing in the Trump White House up there you know what I mean it's possible it's possible you know and so I felt tremendous anger at Kanye at first and then and I feel this even now I just felt sad because like I know how this story ends I you know like I can remember you know and this is only slightly related like when you know like Biggie and Tupac were going back and forth and I can remember this don't end well like these dudes are like I saw the video for hit them up I know that's before most of y'all time but I was you know you go back and watch hit them up and you'll see you'll you will think this probably oh I see how somebody got shot you'll watch me and see it and as shocked as I was that both of them ended up dead like when you look at the events did not so much I was a journalist a music journalist in 2003 had just moved to New York and ODB had gotten out of prison and he was out of his mind on drugs and they had him at this press conference and people were asking him questions and lobbying these questions and he clearly had no one around him who loved him because he was completely incoherent and I thought this don't end well and he was dead like eight months later so I fear for Kanye actually like I fear you know for Kanye like I imagine people who knew Marvin Gaye like feared for Marvin Gaye it's a lot man it really and I'm not trying to condone obviously in that essay I didn't condone anything he said you know obviously I don't think slavery is a choice I don't think that's okay you know I don't think you know him you know doing that macho thing he did in the White House is okay but what I think is significantly worse is that there aren't people in his life who love him enough to put him in a headlock handcuff him and say no bro you need that yeah thank you maybe two more one more two more hi hi I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how your book might have been different if you'd written it to a daughter yeah I get that question a lot and the honest answer is I don't know because like you gotta like you gotta think about like how to book instruction and how it's built again like my friend who got killed was a black male and he was killed like shortly after I had had this black son who was just born and it is built on all of my time as a young black male and it's built on all of my time raising a young black male and that particular experience it's tough to unbake the cake do you know what I mean it's like you know wow this chocolate cake is really cool you know what if it was strawberry shortcake well I like strawberry shortcake but I don't I don't know like I don't know like how I would have done it I don't know what would have been different it's a completely different you know I mean formula it might have been titled something different I might have angled it differently I don't know or maybe I would have just done it like I did it you know it could be that it wouldn't have changed at all you know but my experiences with Samari are my experiences with Samari you know and so it's tough it's tough I mean but it really just takes me back to that point of saying we really really need more books we really really need more books you know what I mean I think it's like really important that people not read this book and feel like okay I got it that's black America you know I hope that the book is a entryway you know into you know the vast and enlarge larger black canon so last question hmm in what ways would you change your Baltimore education to diminish your view of the classroom as a jail of other people's interests hmm wow that's deep I don't know man I think like much of what gave me that idea then is still present in the kind of public schools that black and brown people go to black and brown kids go to today the most revealing thing for me was when we enrolled Samaritan school and it was very important to us or important to me that I not repeat what happened to me that that the school experience be different and with some amount of energy and resources you know we were able to duplicate that and like I can't remember like visiting schools Samari you know for middle school he went to this like private school in New York called the Manhattan Country School and I remember going to tour and I was like this does not look like anything I recognize as school where are the people you know clutching their number two pencils where is the single foul line you know I was invited to a lecture a few you know years back to this you know really nice school in DC Georgetown day school and when I went to give the lecture it was you know like an auditorium and they were levels and the kids just kind of like floated in and talked and you know that mean they weren't organized or in any sort of and nobody was yelling at them to get organized and they just kind of threw their book bags down and they just sat there and just sort of did like this and I thought about how regimented like black kids have to be and how black and brown kids are you know listen you got to get a single file go like this you know look like this you know do this do that no talking you know get your laboratory pass if you got to go to the bathroom like there's a heavy discipline ethic to it and I do not mean discipline in terms of being a disciplined learner which they had at the school I sent some I to which they had at you know Georgetown day school they certainly had discipline within the idea of study but and a lot of these schools you know it's discipline on an entirely different level it's a kind of regimentation a kind of shrinking you know of who you are into this like box man you know what I mean and you kind of put yourself in this box your classroom is a box you sit at this desk that's a box you know like I would go into Samarit's class they'd be sitting in a circle I've never seen that you understand I mean I saw like when I got to college I saw let me you know be really clear about that but I had never seen that in a like school like in a middle school you know he his first year there he was cutting school I'm sorry to embarrass you so much he was cutting school in the park and they brought him back to the school and the school called me up and say you know your son got you know brought to the to you know to school today by the truancy officer and almost blew my top I was going crazy I said oh my god he's gonna go to jail he's gonna be a drug dealer you know all are like nightmares and I got to that school and that woman looked at me she said calm down it's okay this is the first time the police have ever come to the doors of our school but it's okay everything's going to be okay so I was gonna go on his record he's not getting to a good high school it's all gonna go down no no it's alright it's alright and you know what it was alright it really was like the whole sort of panic attitude that I likely inherited from my parents and I likely inherited from the kind of teachers I had in the kind of educational system I was in was very very different there are the reasons why those schools all that way because those schools exist in an entire ecology where you know that's sort of control and regimentation actually very important it might save your life you know so it's not like the schools exist in the abstract of you know some you know broader society and I think like one of the reasons why you know Samari was afforded the sort of privileges that he had with his education is because he was in a completely different ecology it was totally totally different you know so I probably would not have changed the school I would have changed the whole dynamic probably you know if I if I could thank you for those questions I think I think most people here could probably stay the rest of the evening but we can't and so I want to thank you major I want to thank you Tana Hasse I want to thank you so much for coming to Burlington Vermont