 Good afternoon and welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. I am Beth Camara, a lecturer in policy writing at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and it is my great pleasure to have the opportunity to talk today with writer and cultural critic Rebecca Carroll as part of a couple of the Ford schools event series conversations across difference and narratives in public policy. Rebecca's most recent book, which is what brings her here today, is her powerful new memoir Surviving the White Gaze, which recounts her struggle to forge her identity as a black woman in America, having grown up in a completely white environment. She is also the host of a WNYC podcast recorded in 2020 called Come Through with Rebecca Carroll, 15 Essential Conversations About Race in a Pivotal Year for America. Understatement. And I understand that she also has a new podcast project that drops on April 8th called Billy Was a Black Woman, which Rebecca created. Her writing has been published widely and in addition to her new memoir, she's also the author of several interview-based books about race in America, including the award-winning Sugar in the Raw Voices of Young Black Girls in America. As I said, Rebecca and I will be talking primarily today about her newly published memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, which describes her experiences as the adopted daughter of two white parents and as the only black person in her rural New Hampshire town. The book also portrays her extremely difficult relationship with her white birth mother, whom she met for the first time at the age of 11 and who consistently undermined Rebecca's self-esteem and sense of her own blackness and provided her with virtually no information about her black birth father aside from derogatory stereotypes. I found the book to be deeply moving, nuanced, and really complicated in its exploration of racism and racial identity in America. And I am so grateful to Rebecca Carroll for meeting all of us here today in this liminal online realm. To talk with me about it, welcome Rebecca. Yay, thank you. What a beautiful introduction. I appreciate that. Before I ask you to start us off with a short reading from the book, just a kind of quick notes about format. Yeah, are you ready with that? While I talk about a few notes on format for today, we're going to dedicate some time at the end of the event for audience questions. So we encourage you to submit your questions as they arise during our conversation in the live chat box on YouTube. Or you can tweet those questions to hashtag policy talks on Twitter. With that squared away, when Rebecca, yay, you're there. Okay. Luckily, I have a whole box to start us off with a short reading from surviving the one. Thank you. I'm going to read from chapter one because it really does set the tone for the rest of the book and the narrative arc. Warner, the New Hampshire town where we lived, had a population of approximately 1400 when we moved there in 1969. And I became its sole Black resident. We rented our farmhouse from longtime Warner residents who owned a lot of land and property in town. The house sat on the top of a dirt road called Pumpkin Hill, which was lined up and down by a dilapidated stone wall of various size rocks and stones leading into different parts of town on either side. There was a shed connected off to the right of our house and a giant freestanding barn to the left separated from the house by the wide driveway where Leah, my best friend and I had played that morning. An apple tree with rugged splayed branches good for climbing stood planted squarely in the front yard, not another house in sight, nor a neighbor within earshot. After Leah went home, my sister Rihanna, who at seven years old, had already developed such a keen love for horses that it was almost all consuming. She decided it was time to play her very favorite game, the horse game. We made our horses out of chairs and used curtain sashes for reins. The solitary quiet of our house wrapped itself around our make-believe landscape so thoroughly that the damp dirt and honey scent of our horses filled the room. Our brother, Sean, older than Rihanna by just two years, had been playing outside all morning with his friend, Charlie, building and crafting and exploring and climbing. Charlie was kind and funny, skinny and curious with buck teeth and brown hair. He rode over on his bike from town where he lived with his reputable middle-class family in a decorous house on Main Street. He loved to climb the apple tree in our front yard and sit among the limbs, looking out at the world around him, but came down to join Sean in working on his latest invention, a go-kart with coffee can headlights and a dish towel covered, nailed, and a dish towel cover nailed to four pieces of balsa wood, somehow affixed with duct tape to an old radio flyer wagon. You're welcome to stay for dinner, Mom said, as Charlie hopped back on to his red ten-speed bike to head home, not too long after he'd arrived. That's OK. I'll be back, he said, with a wide grin, still high from his time in the apple tree. The carols, he sang over his shoulder as his bike wheels turned over the dirt and pointed him down the hill toward town, where kids are king. It's presented in the opening in such a kind of an idyllic way, and I'm curious, you know, since obviously that's intention with a title, right, Surviving the White Gaze, what was your intention in, you know, aside from sort of accurately portraying potentially what your experience was at that age, what was your intention in beginning a book titled Surviving the White Gaze, which forecasts so much kind of struggle? Beginning it in this idyllic way? Well, because I wanted to illustrate for folks without actually saying what the White Gaze is, that scene of ostensible idyllicism is actually crafted and created by the White Gaze. It was an environment that was, it was a bubble sort of curated from a naturalist perspective, a white lens, an artist's perspective, but also in everybody's mind, it was perfectly perfect, although completely void of blackness, but for me. So I wanted to be able to set that up so that people, whether they came to it right away or whether they could connect to it later on. Oh, that's the White Gaze. That's exactly what it looked like. And that it's insidious that it doesn't come on as something threatening, that it doesn't come on exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm curious, you know, I think throughout the book, you kind of consistently turn and complicate this idea of the White Gaze and show it in different sorts of forms. And it functions differently in your adoptive family than it does, say, in your relationship with your birth mother or in your relationship with your high school peers, right? But there seems to be a kind of a constant tension in this idea of the White Gaze, this reality of the White Gaze, that you are simultaneously being, you're sort of erased by it, you're unseen, but you're also excessively seen and seen in distorting and harmful ways. And it's also simultaneously coloring your own gaze. It's an unintentional plan to say coloring, but it's kind of influencing your lens on the world, even as it is sort of influencing how other people don't see you kind of over, see you in these distortions. Well, that is the insidious thing about it, right? Which is that it's not just affecting or influencing. I had internalized it deeply, deeply. You know, just as you were starting the question, I was thinking about how particularly Black women, as we are tethered to our tropes and stereotypes. But, you know, you look at someone like Stacey Abrams, right, who went from, you know, sort of just doing this good work and doing the work she needed to do, to being launched into this hypersphere of visibility and this kind of symbol for White liberals to feel good about connecting to Black folks when what they're doing is they are turning her into this hyper-stereotype, you know, where we have people tweeting like, White people tweeting like, you know, the NFL should hire her to be a linebacker. Like, just the kind of like egregious exploitation, because it's either unseen or hyperscene, but to sort of go back to the kind of insidiousness and the internalization, you know, when my fifth grade teacher said to me that I was very pretty for a Black girl, that was the out-facing racism. What really messed me up and what I really internalized is what she said afterwards, which was that most Black girls are very ugly. I didn't even realize how deeply I'd internalized that until I started writing this memoir, that it was like, wow, it's not the pretty for a Black girl part, it's that most Black girls are ugly. And so I took that well into my 20s. Yeah. And this feels connected to this idea of, you know, the notion, the notions that you are being kind of, or the narratives that you're being saddled with, right, that are projected by this gaze. They come in a lot of different forms, all of which are informed by racism, but it's what's interesting to me about the range of kind of narratives that you managed to portray, because you were surrounded by them, that include your adoptive parents' kind of myth of racelessness, right, versus your birth mother's sort of hyper-focus on race through and what she would not have characterized as, but what was a kind of an explicitly racist ideology. Yeah. I want to just say, I want to just disabuse folks of the notion that racelessness is a myth. It's actually a tool. It's actually a very specific and proactive tool to make Black folks and people of color feel like we are only valuable if you do not see something that is deeply integral to who we are. So it's not just like, you know, post-racial or, you know, racelessness is this kind of passive ideology. It's actually quite aggressive in trying to strip us of something that is so meaningful and such an identifier and something that connects me to an ancestry and a legacy that is critically important to my sense of self. And I appreciate the way that you articulated that feels to me connected to another question that I wanted to ask, which is one of the central concerns of the book is kind of how to claim your own sort of self-possessed identity versus having to navigate other people's imposed ideas about your identity. And throughout the book, this is another idea that sort of keeps getting turned is what constitutes Blackness, right? I mean, that's a question that sort of hangs throughout the book. And different people in the book offer different definitions of it that are all kind of toxic, right, in different ways, or some of them actually are not, right? I'm thinking about your birth mother, Tess's kind of insistence on the distinction between skin culture, sorry, skin color and cultural Blackness, right? This idea of like to undermine your sense of your own ability to claim your Blackness, right? This idea that you might have the skin color, but you don't have the culture. Cosmetically Black. Right. Aesthetically Black, right? And you talk about Cosmetically Black. Cosmetically Black, right? On the surface, right? As opposed to interberly. And that I think is also kind of reflects the tension between, well, I don't know if it does, and this is why I'm posing it to you. There's also this idea of race as a construct imposed by racist ideology from the outside versus, well, potentially a chosen identity or versus what I think ultimately is where maybe you land, which is like a communally shared lived experience, right? That it's a reality, that it's based on a real experience that incorporates kind of the way other people see you, skin culture, skin color, culture. You know, but I think that the book struggles with it, or that you, we see you kind of grappling with as you grow older, what constitutes Blackness? Is this something that I sort of get to choose to be? Or is this something that is inherently a part of me based on what factors, right? And that ultimately there is kind of a both a, it's a confirmation of a reality, but it's also a kind of a really positive choice to be able to decide that you get to decide how you identify. Is that fair? Yeah, I mean, I think it's fair ish. I think that, you know, once, once, once you sort of, you know, once you realize the kind of beauty and sort of psychological, intellectual community, experiential community, once you realize that there's really no other choice, there is not really about a choice, right? And so it's only, you know, Black folks who have, and I think, you know, I was somewhat intentional about including this in the book, but that, you know, Black folks showed up at certain pivotal moments in my life throughout my life, you know, as a Black dance teacher, even if I didn't know how to engage, I knew that she was easy reader from electric company, you know, notably my best friend and chosen family, Corinne. But I believe that the ancestors dropped those folks in for me to buoy me and to help me embrace what had been there all along. So it was only the white folks who misunderstood or misappropriated the idea of race that had me really grappling and questioning it, right? So when my boss in high school called me the N word, it's like, okay, so what you're telling me is I can only be Black in that, through that lens or in that way. There were no white people who were responding to my Blackness with any kind of honesty or purity or curiosity in not in a weird way. Except, but for a couple of very close, you know, female friends, Leah from the book who is a dear friend to this day and a couple of other friends from high school. I think that what the reason that I say fair-ish is because it sounded as you were articulating your thought that we are the only ones who get to decide. And the fact that it is, it is about community, it is about emotional fortitude and legacy and ancestry and history. You know, once you see the beauty in that, there's really no, there's no choice or no questioning it. Yeah, and so it's almost, I'm thinking about, there's the, one of the unfortunately many times throughout the book, right? When Tess is sort of pushing you on this idea of not sort of just undermining your own claim to your Blackness, right? Where she says, you know, this doesn't make you Black, that doesn't make you Black, right? In one case, it's taking a class with a Black professor, it doesn't make you Black. And your response, shouldn't I get to decide what makes me Black? But even when you, so I'm just going to read from that moment. It's shouldn't I get to decide what makes me Black? I said feeling agitated, under attack, bullied, as if even the most truthful explanation of how I was feeling came across desperate. It's almost like it's the white gaze that forces you to frame it as a choice. Oh yeah. That reality and that it's right, that having to defend your right, you know, your right to choose it actually is a distortion of the reality. I don't know if it's an Audre Lorde quote or June Jordan quote, and I'm paraphrasing, but it's like they'll kill you and then make you think that you liked it, you know? Right, it's like it's that kind of like pushing me into a corner and trying to please her by coming up with the response about my own identity, which is, you know, in retrospect, absurd. Well, this sort of takes me to this idea of, you know, so we're here as part of a public policy school, right? And that one of the reason why a writing instructor myself is the person who gets to speak with you today is because we're talking about narratives and public policy, right? And, you know, while reading the book, I was also listening to your podcast come through. And of course, like unsurprisingly finding lots of resonances between the personal narrative of the book and the conversations that you have about race and culture and public policy with your guests. When you conceived of the podcast, right, this idea of 2020 being a pivotal year in America, you were just imagining the kind of the presidential election. It was supposed to be pivotal. Yeah. So, but you're having conversations in that podcast with a lot of people from all different spheres, right? And the first person that you interview, presumably because it's the pandemic is now the context in which you're going to be doing this podcast is Dr. Jones, the former president of the American Public Health Association. And when she talks about the quote unquote mechanisms of decision making, right, she talks about the importance of making sure that the communities who are most affected by policy are represented at decision making tables and who are not only kind of most affected by the outcomes of potentially beneficial policy but also who are most harmed by the policy that exists, right? But those people should be represented obviously at the decision making tables, right? But this idea of kind of who is and who is not at the table, who gets to define the problem, who therefore gets to define the solution, right? That resonated for me with these themes that seem central to your memoir, which is who gets to tell the story. And you explicitly say at times like we were living inside my father's narrative or people kind of, you know, my birth mother's voice sort of rising up over mine and taking it over, right? This idea that who gets to tell the story is really, really important for, I mean, it's a power, it's power, right? Who gets to tell the story? It is power and folks who are tuning in don't know that earlier I had the pleasure to talk with a group of students. You know, this idea was also came up of who, how to navigate spaces and what does it mean to be validated by mainstream vis-a-vis white people, white people vis-a-vis mainstream. And this also speaks to my previous answer, you know, about my identity and choosing or not choosing to call myself black. I mean, I am black and it's not so much about choosing as it is about being and feeling certain and sure and ease in that being. And so I think what happens often in terms of, I mean, this is how racism functions, right? Which is that we get into spaces via diversity and inclusion or whatever the case may be or even without diversity and inclusion. We are in the spaces where the only person with the only black person, person of color and then we begin the real work, right? Which is not even the job that we're hired for, which is representing one, explaining for everyone, being the token, being all of these things that come with being the first, the only and so on and so forth. We haven't even started to do the job we're hired for. And that's depleting. That's really depleting. And so what I was saying to the students earlier is that come into spaces. And I would say this about, you know, being at the table in policymaking or whatever the case may be. Come into those spaces, you know, with the knowledge and the certainty that you are bringing something that is going to take you somewhere and other folks as well. Who are white, who are not thinking about or taking on the kinds of things that you are thinking about and taking on every day. Yeah. And, you know, so there's this question of like who gets to tell the story but then determine the narrative, right? But then there's also the question of who's listening and, you know, who's reading. And, you know, as a writing instructor in a policy school, right, I'm talking with students a lot about how either you're intended audience like your target audience if you're writing an op-ed or if you're writing something that's for like a general readership, or you're known audience, right? You're boss in this organization, a decision maker in a policy professional situation. Depending on who you're writing this to and what it is, what sort of agenda you are trying to achieve with this piece of writing or serve with this piece of writing. It's going to shape like all of your choices as a writer. It's going to shape what you include and don't include the tone that you use, right? The language that you use. And I'm curious sort of as you were writing this book, if you had one audience, multiple audiences, an ideal audience, right? Like in mind for the book and if that was something that consciously shaped the way that you went about the project of writing it. I mean, I have to start that the answer to that, that by saying, I waited a very long time to write this book. And there were several, I've always been a, you know, a somewhat obsessive devout journal, right? So I have literally hundreds of journals and letters, a pro letter writer, very, very into correspondence. So I have, I had all of this content material, you know, research sources, you know, first primary sources to call from. And yet when I sat down to write it, it was as if I'd never written anything before. So I will say that memoir writing is real craft work, right? I had never, I had written, you know, I've published five books. I've written outros and intros and interstitials and I've, you know, crafted as told to and all those kinds of things. I've written op-eds and reported pieces, but memoir writing is a very different beast. So I had to go through, you know, the mandatory shitty first draft, which really did feel truly shitty. And then had to figure out that anything and everything that ended up in this book had to speak to the central question. Does it, is it about surviving the white gaze? Because otherwise it's not going to make it into the book. So as soon as I had that thread to sew, it became a lot easier. And so initially I sort of set out, you know, I was writing it, and I wrote a piece in the Atlantic about this, you know, writing it for Toni Morrison. And Picola, Breadlove, because Picola Breadlove from the Bluest Eye, you know, I survived the white gaze because she didn't, right? Like I learned how to survive through reading the Bluest Eye and Sula and all of Toni Morrison's work. And Toni Morrison is the one who's how I learned. Got a cat back there. Toni Morrison taught me the phrase surviving the white, not surviving, but the white gaze. I didn't even know what it was until I had heard her say that. So Toni Morrison, obviously my child, my son, this is for him. And then for my family, my white adoptive family and siblings who are my white adoptive parents, biological children. And then me, little me, right? Like, I just, I wanted to write something for her and also something that would champion her because when I look back at those years, it required strategy and resilience and a kind of inner confidence that I didn't even know that I had. But the way in which I kind of, you know, held myself together, you know, when I look back at middle school, which is awful anyway, and high school, which is awful anyway. And figuring out how to navigate that, even though it didn't always feel truthful. And essentially, you know, presenting this book to younger me like you didn't just survive, you became. What does it mean when you say didn't always feel truthful? Oh, well, I mean, when, you know, there's that anecdote. When I see the black, the first time I saw breakdancers in the sixth grade, and I had made this connection. And then I got caught making the connection to a black boy and immediately cutting that off because I knew that showing any kind of allegiance or alliance to blackness in that context would render me invaluable, valueless. Yeah. And that felt dishonest. Yeah. You got caught. Well, I mean caught like a boy, a white boy. Yeah. Yeah. By white peers, right? By white peers. Yes. Who at that time sort of in your mind determined your value, right? I mean, it's that this idea of the. Yeah. In my mind, I think it was quite accurate. Yeah. Fair enough. You actually kind of was lovely as you have almost like this a range of responses by black women writers whom you quote throughout the book on their approach to audience. And I'm thinking of, and these are from, right? For, is it am I correct that the first interview based book that you wrote was specifically interviews with black women writers? Yes, that is correct. Yeah. Yeah. And so you, you quote the poet and essayist June Jordan saying, when I write essays, I always try to keep in mind a hypothetical adversary. I am trying to convert into an ally or a comrade. But then later she also says, I write my essays to galvanize my folks, whoever they are to go and kill somebody, you know, something like that. So. Right. And then you've got, you've got Entezaki Shange saying, I write for young girls of color for girls who don't even exist yet so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change where they live, not how they think. And I'm curious, I mean, so when you say you wrote this, I mean, you talk about this range of audiences. And I think we probably always have a range of audiences in mind when we're writing, rare that it's just for one person. Unless it's a letter, right? But in some cases, you know, when you say you wrote this for your adoptive birth parents, in that scenario, are they, are they allies? Are they someone you need to bring into allyship? Are they, is it just what is the, you know, what is the objective in writing this to them? Well, so it's been a, you know, it's, it's learning in real time what it, what I thought it would be for them, the way in which they've received it and how I need to process the way that they've received it and keep going, right? To keep it pushing. So initially I thought, this is a gift in some ways for them. All four of them, my parents and my brother and sister to, to have some insight into what it was like for me. Because they never asked really. And so I thought if I can do this to the very best of my ability to the very most honest to my core with dignity and compassion and give it to them, I didn't think that they weren't allies. I thought that they would be enlightened in a way that they felt closer to me. And in fact, that's not, that's not how it's been received. So, you know, I think about what Entezake said about not changing the way that they think, but changing the way that they live. And so I guess when it goes back to writing this for my young self, it would be to help change the way she lived, not the way she thought. Right? Yeah. Well, maybe I understand that. I mean, it's also how she thought, right? Or is it like, is it, is it bring that kind of retrospective wisdom? But I think, I think when you live, when you sort of, and again, this is sort of about that, that kind of weird back and forth about choosing and deciding and identity and race. It's like once I, you know, sort of, once I embraced a way of living that felt authentic and inclusive and open to the gifts that were being given to me by blackness, right? Then it wasn't about choice at all. And it, and my thought evolved organically from that place of where I was living. Yeah. Yeah. And framing it as a choice, again, sort of like denies that it is a reality. Right. Is your, you know, that is yours, right? Right. Yeah. And in writing it for your younger self, you are, you are also presumably like Antizake, like that you are writing it for young girls of color, right? You're writing it for, well, you actually yourself at one point and you pull yourself under extremely fraught circumstances. This is when you were being interviewed on Good Morning America by Joan London. Yes. In connection with, your birth mother was, had written a book that essentially co-opted your experience, right? That was about, about adoption and reunion. And you were still in relationship with her in a way that you were like writing the forward for the book, you were helping publicize it, right? Yeah. But you, you said to Joan London on Good Morning America, I'm committed to, she asks a question about sort of like what you hope to be doing with your, or how you're, how you're navigating your identity and you say I'm committed to helping and mentoring other black girls who might be struggling with their identity. I'm assuming that that is, you know, one, one of the projects of the book is that this book is also a project to other girls who are struggling with their identity, other kids, right? I mean your son of course as well. But of course your son is being raised under very different circumstances, right? Yes he is. Yes he is. But I want to just speak to that, to that, to that Joan London, I mean hearing, hearing you read it and I can picture it so, so vividly. And this sort of short runway I had of feeling so right about what I was saying and trusting myself and responding without thinking what would my birth mother have me say in that moment. And then, and then having it so wildly dashed, you know, like two hours later in terms of presenting myself as, as saying I was black and that I want to help other black girls and my white birth mother was sort of like you can't be black because you came out of my body, et cetera, et cetera. But what I say to my mentees and black, young black women and black girls and your students earlier which is that trust your instinct and contextualize it with language, right? So in that moment when she said how are you feeling now having been raised by you know white parents and having a white birth parent and this and that and so on and so forth and I said what I knew in my gut to be true which is that I feel like there are challenges with being a young black woman but that I hope to encourage other black women to own their selves and their authenticity. And so later when my birth mother sort of rejected that, I didn't have the language but the, but the instant spoke to my instinct which is almost always right and when it comes to race and racial identity I think you have to, you have to trust that instinct and find ways to contextualize it. And part of what your book potentially does is provide language for people. Oh yes, I hope so. Right, who have been. I hope so, yeah. But they will find the language through your language. Right. Yeah, well and I guess that gets me to and I know I'm not trying to put you in a position Rebecca to be a policy expert because that's not what we brought you here to be. Oh good. Frankly, I feel my expertise is more in writing than in policy myself. But you know in terms of influencing policy, right, because and you get into this on your podcast a bunch and in some of your other writing, right. Just structural racism, the reality of structural racism, the ways in which it is perpetuated by policy. There's a lot of different ways that we can through writing try to influence the creation of more anti-racist policy to expose the ways in which existing policy is harmful, right, and is inequitable. What do you think is the particular role of like personal narrative in potentially shifting policy versus, you know, writing that is more specifically targeted at the policy, the public policy, right. Well I think it's the same sort of hope or intention as with the podcast, right, which was that you have to have not just difficult conversations but you have to have a feeling that's not going to feel great, right. You know I'm not advocating that people need to feel bad all the time or that this is some kind of punishment but you have to feel something before you act and so what I hope that the conversations can come through, what I hope with all the work that I do, the podcast, the books, the writing, all of it is that it makes somebody not just think but feel, which I don't mean that in like a woo woo way at all. I mean like, you know, you know what it feels like when you're moved. You know what it feels like when you are, you know, anxious. And these are all things that will prompt change because you're going to figure something out. We want to feel good. Human beings want to feel good, which is one of the reasons why, you know, white folks and I'm generalizing clearly, you know, sort of privilege is lovely, like who doesn't want to feel privilege, right. But so there has to be a shift but it has to be prompted by a willingness to feel something other than good. Yeah, or you have to like feel bad enough reading something that it motivates you to do some, you know, you need a lot of motivation to do something that undermines your own kind of daily places of your comfort, right. I resist the idea of feeling bad because I don't want people to feel like I'm guilt-tripping or punishing or pointing fingers. I just want you to feel something, something that is, that moves you, that moves you to act, that moves you to power, that moves you to compassion because clearly guilting and, you know, pointing fingers, none of that works. It's just, it just begets defensiveness. So we have to build new language around how we prompt change and certainly in personal narrative and ultimately policy. Yeah, and it sounds like also, you know, you're, to some degree you're saying empathy is more motivating than guilt, right. Guilt makes people happy. I am saying that but I'm also, I'm also very much trying to build on the words we already use, right. Because I think that the language that we have used over time, you know, it sort of goes itself out a little bit. It's like diversity. It's like, you know, these words that were initially quite useful but then became kind of meaningless. So we, I think we should use the language that has worked in the ways that they have worked but then build on those and find new ways of articulating that sort of same thing. That makes sense. So we're in a time when a lot of people, certainly many people, a lot of people are struggling, right. And some people more than others, right. So it's become almost a cliche of interviews these days but I still feel the need to ask, like what is actually giving you joy these days? What is giving you, you know, energy ease, right, the things that I think people are feeling desperate for these days. It's a really it's a really weird time to be creatively creatively successful. It's weird for me to it's hard and weird for me to be receiving the accolades that I've received for the book and for the for the it's been a very creatively fulfilling time for me. So it's and it's weird because it's against this backdrop of it being kind of awful in the world. But I also think that there is the reason that that is the case in terms of what I've been able to create is because I have everything I need right where we are. Like there's something about this pandemic where, you know, it's the first time since my son was very, very small that I've been able to watch him grow in real time, right? I've watched his shoulders get bigger. I've watched his brain start to shift and create his own opinion. He gets to watch me negotiating deals, you know, talking with folks, doing interviews because our apartment is so small he can hear everything. He gets to hear his dad teaching his college students about race and social policy and history. And we have our health and so there's something and it's all in this, you know, in the garden apartment of a brownstone in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and there's something sort of inspiring about that. And I guess I feel just such a great such a great deal of gratitude and really deeply blessed. So I don't have to go far to find joy or inspiration because I wake up every day and here we are, the three of us are here and ultimately the three of us is what allowed me to write this book. Yeah. As the mother of a teenage son, I hear a lot of that very deeply. Yeah. What is next? I just learned before we went on air, right, that you have a new podcast that's coming very soon, which is exciting. It was a black woman. Can you talk a little bit more about that? And maybe also about surviving the white gays, I'm looking at this bio here has been optioned by MGM Studios congratulations and killer film and that you are attached to adapt and executive producers. So can you talk about what's down the pipeline that we do? Yes. Well, the adaptation of the book is going to be for a limited series TV and that is the Hollywood world and so we could sell it next week or we could sell it in a year or it could go nowhere, frankly just to be realistic about it. I'm familiar with this. Yeah. It's super exciting and killer films who are the goat in the independent film industry, Boys Don't Cry, Lux, all sorts of amazing, artistic, beautiful work. So I'm thrilled that they are on board with it. MGM has been deeply supportive and it's just an exciting idea to adapt and sort of figure out that muscle. I also have a couple of other TV projects that I'm working on, but the new podcast is in partnership with the Lee Daniels film The United States versus Billy Holiday and it is a podcast that sort of refracts Black womanhood through the life and lens of jazz icon Billy Holiday. So it's a four, it's a limited series four episodes that I wrote and created featuring guest Andrew Day who plays Billy Holiday and most recently and just won the Golden Globe for her performance which is beyond Laverne Cox, Mariah Carey and Dr. Angela Davis. That's great. Well that's very exciting and again April 8th, so that's really nice. And I do need to I promise that we would take questions and there's some questions piling up here so let me take a look. It looks like okay so we're going back to that first that first scene that you read and then I'll actually ask you to read another quick reading too. Someone asks why do you characterize the idyllic scene as somehow nefarious don't we all live in the culture of our parents? Is this a pushback? Is it nefarious? Maybe that was the mischaracter and I may be responsible for that mischaracterization is that when you present that in the beginning we are meant to feel that it is idyllic right? It was. It was and in fact I will just say at the end of the chapter just to because it was too long to read the whole thing but so that you understand and this is after I have described in the evenings we would have dinner outside at sunset and it was can I read it? Can I just read it? At dinner time dad and mom carried the dining room table into the yard just outside the house the tables for heavy wooden legs dug into the grass as mom and dad pushed them down further into the pliant soil to keep the surface steady. With the vegetable garden at our backs and the rusty but still functioning swing set off to the far side of the yard we sat in mismatched chairs much less steady than the table a family together at the crack of most summer days during our years on pumpkin hill gloriously ravenous after a long day of play quiet but for our laughter and conversation the field stretched behind us in a slow incline out and up where it crested to form a steep hill spread over with tall wheat stalks and patches of wild strawberries and wild flowers a bouquet of which mom had picked this morning and placed in a vase at the center of the table mom served us steamed summer squash fresh tomatoes with purple basil and steamed pigweed also known as lambs quarters all from the garden while dad drank a tall glass mug of amber colored Valentine ale at the head of the table glints of peach colored sunset bounced off our silverware and the air was still was still enough for the flames of two long taper candles to grow brighter dad at the head of the table held up his glass to make a toast his bare arm pale and fleshy in a worn white cotton t-shirt thick auburn hair past his ears and parted to one side like a composer from the German romantic era and held down by a red terry cloth headband to keep it out of his eyes I cupped my glass of milk with two hands Rihanna and Sean held their glasses with one mom's skin shone warm in the last sliver of sunlight as she raised her glass to it all clinked and some of my milk spilled and our chairs wobbled in the grass and we laughed look how lucky we all are dad said his eyes ablaze with satisfaction he looked at the garden its tall stalks of corn to one end neatly lined rows of tomato plants and green beans thick sprawling zucchini and summer squash vines out toward the broad fields beyond Lorette can you believe this dad said as if he couldn't believe it himself then he really pulled it off and created a life that looked exactly the way he wanted it to look mom smiled her face darling and spare soft and unweathered I know Dave she said it's beautiful just beautiful it was beautiful and we were lucky but beauty is subjective and luck doesn't care about the choices other people make yeah and so can you just talk a little bit about the import of that way of closing that scene I can can I just let my family in right behind me just too sad yes while we wait on that I will say that I hope that everybody will buy the book and that I believe that our events team is going to put some direct links one second Rebecca I'm just plugging the book and thank you so yes please buy the book and ideally buy it from your local black owned independent bookseller and I think that our events team is going to put some direct links for our kind of southeast Michigan region in the YouTube chat right now including to Blackstone bookstore on cultural center in Ypsilanti so that said Rebecca can you talk a little bit about sort of that ending of that beautiful and you know you affirm the luck you affirm the beauty right but there's that turn at the end can you talk a little bit about that turn for sure I mean what happened was when we left that bubble that idyllic bubble my brother and sister could sort of could use that grounding and that foundation to continue living however they chose whereas I began to have these incidents of blatant racism where that bubble didn't help me at all right and so it was two very different experiences from there and I guess that that's what the point of the turn is is that yes I was loved it was beautiful I am grateful for those years there's a lot of that time in terms of you know fresh garden vegetables and nature and wildflowers and like I love all that what's not to love about that but that didn't the wildflowers the bouquets that didn't protect me from racism yeah that I think segway is right into another question from a viewer I would like to know what your thoughts are on interracial adoption is there a healthy way to parent a child I'm sure you've been asked this before to parent a child of a different race what advice would you give well I can only speak to parenting a black child although I have many Asian American and mostly Asian American interracial adoptees who I know who are friends and colleagues you know I have long sort of stood on the outset of the sort of formal adoption community because I have obviously very strong feelings about what works and what doesn't work but I also now you know as a parent and as having been out with this book and having conversations and taking questions and thinking more deeply about it I think the main thing is that it can't be it can't be treated the same way the diversity and inclusion initiatives are treated it can't be treated in the same way that Black History Month is treated in other words it's not just a Serena Williams poster it's not just a black doll it's not just one teacher or mentor it's an engagement that is fully fully engaged and that's you know I think what I try to write and demonstrate in the book which is that there were these moments and and times when I saw Blackness but I didn't have any context or nobody around me to help me engage with it and to give it value because so much everything around me didn't give it value like it was I was embarrassed that I loved the whiz you know which is practically you know sacred in the black community that movie but none of my peers were watching it none of my peers were giving it value you know so I think the most important thing for white parents of black children is to not just find the black doll but to sit and talk and play with the black doll and have the black doll have a whole village and have a whole village yourself because the black doll or the black ballet teacher in your case there's an incredible moment in the book where you have this moment of first it's this delightful thing and then it's like am I going to have to go live with this woman what is my mother's because it's so isolated but that is the other thing too which is you can't suddenly start to acquire black friends when you adopt a black child like if you don't have any black friends in your life to begin with or any kind of black community I think that is you need to really question what you are prepared how you're prepared to parent and you know I spoke once to a couple of years ago actually to an adoption conference community and a white parent of a black child asked me or it was more of a comment she said I keep trying to become friends with black people and they just don't want to be friends with me they prefer to keep themselves as your dad's line so if you're starting at that point yeah I would be the same back up off me I see what your intentions are here we unfortunately have one minute and I don't know I know that went really fast so thank you for making it go so fast in the sense that like it was so kind of enjoyable that I didn't notice but we also do just kind of because this is a policy community we have so many policy students in the audience if I can ask you one last question and this may kind of repeat from what we asked today in the student session do you have advice for young policy students preparing to take jobs in primarily white spaces is there an opportunity in this moment of urgency around racial justice that could shape young people's approaches to entering these spaces shoulders back head high trust your instinct find language to contextualize it you are right thank you so much Rebecca it was really such a pleasure to talk with you I so much appreciate it on behalf of the faculty staff, students and larger community of the Ford School thank you so much for being here and talking with us today and everybody go buy the book thank you so much Beth that was really lovely really really nice to meet you as well alright take care everyone bye bye