 Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for coming. My name is Seth Panukin. I'm the Director of the Communications Forum. Before we start, there is a sign-up sheet over there on that table with a writing utensil on top of it. We do these events six times a year, three times per semester. And if you put your name down on that list, we will only email you for the events. We will not email you for anything else or give your email away to anyone else. So if you want to find out about these events, that is a very effective way to do that. Tonight's event will function like all through negation forums. We'll start out with a moderated conversation and then we will go to an audience Q&A. We also have three of Kevin's books on sale here and as someone who has read all three of them, I can attest that they are all great and well worth your time and money. So please buy away afterwards. So, Kevin Young is an old friend of mine and the Poetry Editor of the New Yorker and the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture at the New York Public Library. He's the author, frighteningly, of 13 books of poetry and prose. I know, right? Right? Chill out now. Yeah. Including Blue Laws, Selected and Uncollected Poems from 1999-2015, which was long listed for National Book Award. His 2003 poetry collection Jelly Roll of Blues was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. And his most recent nonfiction book is Bunk, the Rise of Hoax's Humbug, a plagiarist phony's post-facts and fake news. And it was also long listed for the National Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle. Carol Bell is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Affiliated Faculty in Political Science at Northeastern University. Bell's teaching and research focuses on the intersections of media, politics, public opinion and public policy with a particular focus on issues of social identity. Her first book, The Politics of Interracial Romance in American Film, is forthcoming from Rutledge. This communication forum is also sponsored by Radius at MIT, for which we are very grateful. And with that, I will leave it to you too. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming out and thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. I am excited to talk about this book. Okay, so, I was thinking we could start at the beginning. This book is deeply, deeply history. It begins in the 19th century with P.T. Burnin, but it also feels strangely timely. But given how much history there is in this book, I know that you didn't start writing it yesterday. So can you talk a little bit about when you did get the first idea, when you first had the idea, first became interested in hoax's and then first sort of like decided to actually write about it. Oh well, yeah, thank you. It's so good to see you. And thanks, Seth, for inviting me. And Seth actually makes an appearance in the book, not as a hoaxer, but as a cover of hoax's, which I'm sure we'll mention. But in a way, I was interested in the way we all are in kind of fakers and con men, which is, I think, a very American thing. I started writing in earnest what became the book. I guess about six years ago when I had finished the Gray Album, and part of that book was thinking about lying as a positive thing, lying as part of African American culture. And by that I mean that lies in black culture are another name for folktales, like we were up late last night telling lies. And Zora Neale Hurston writes about that, and so does Ralph Ellison. And so I had thought about that a lot in the way that it corresponded to what I end up calling the story-ang tradition, this idea of telling a story, because in Louisiana, my mom's here, so give a wave, mom. Louisiana's own, and Madapan and JP's own. But if you're down in Louisiana, you couldn't say to your cousin, much less a grown-up, like you lie. You would have to say you story. And so I started thinking about that. What's it mean to story? And Louis Armstrong Solo tells a story, and so this idea of story-ing as improvisation. But then when I finished that, I realized that there was a bad side to lying, apparently. And so I had these sort of ruminations on fake memoirs, especially. And I started thinking, well, what are fake memoirs really about? Because people often say hoaxes or fakery is about sort of this blurry line between fact and fiction, which I always thought was bunk. And I realized that they were about something else, and something more nefarious, and sadly something more American, which is to say race. And so that's how I started thinking in earnest. There's ways to go back even further than that, but that's how I started writing about six, seven years ago now. That's interesting. You're talking about how lies or storytelling is part of African American culture. But when I think about it, I also think about the place of lies and sort of like an outsider telling the story of Africans, right? Sure. Which is a lot of what happens here. But before you move on to that, can you talk a little bit about that first inspiration sort of years ago? Yeah, I mean, in college, I worked Let's Go as part of Harvard and adding this travel guide, which of course facts really matter, and you'd get letters from people that said, like, we were number one in the listing for Taos, and now we're number two, and I've lost a million dollars. I was like this crazy power you had just by ranking people. So you took it really seriously. Meanwhile, there was a managing editor at the time, and he came in one day and he said, you know, I have cancer. He broke up, and we were very upset. You know, everyone didn't know what to do. And his head was like ball like two days later. And looking back on it, I was like, that's not how it works if you have chemo or cancer. And then he went on, I learned later, to hoax a lot of people. He pledged money. He hoaxed Slate Magazine a couple times. He hoaxed the University of Oregon promising tens of millions of dollars that he didn't give, though they threw him a big party. And so I realized just going back that, you know, we had known this hoaxer. And it really brought home personally how that what I call de-hoaxing in the book process is really a shock to the system. And so, you know, you have to filter back through it. And I was like, oh wait, so I know he was lying about X, Y, and Z. Oh, was he lying about cancer, you know? And I think that kind of destabilization also was somewhere behind that. And he used to open the book, but then now he's in the middle. Oh, interesting. So that's another interesting point. So the book actually starts with P.T. Barnum. So at one point in the process, did you shift? Because he becomes such an essential, central character in this. So how did that come about? Yeah, I think it really helped to realize that there would be these characters in the book. I think at one point it happened in the middle, you know? And I realized that I think I was fighting a long time that it was a history. And that was kind of wild to realize that it was this history and not just, you know, a story of a bunch of different hoaxes. And I was really resistant to it just because I'm not a historian. I didn't feel like that meant something else to me. But what it really helped is once I realized that, is that I got to tell the story of the hoax. And really the kind of biography of an idea. And the fact that now it's biography is wildly everywhere, you know, is an interesting thing. I was just riding over here in the cab and watching on our little tyrannical devices. You know, a rant about fake news from someone's president. We'll get to that. It started with Barnum and that really helped because I realized it was an American story. It was a story that, you know, had a lot to do with entertainment, with what he called homebug, but then also had to do with where we are now. So P.G. Barnum is most famous for spectacle, right? For being a great showman. But in this book, you know, I'm sort of embarrassed to realize that I had only known him for that. And that I had, you know, honestly one of my earliest memories is going to the circus, Barnum and Bailey Circus with my dad. And after reading this, I felt almost really ambivalent and almost ashamed that I didn't know this other side of him. But of course there's a reason, right? I don't know this other side of him. So could you talk a little bit about historian and how, sort of the role that he plays? Yeah, Barnum, I think it's a fascinating figure. I mean, he is, I think still one of the greatest entertainers and certainly captured something about American life in the 19th century and the fact that he lived so long across the century and worked so long I think gives rise to a lot of things. I mean, he pretty much invented the circus. He certainly changed the museum, which used to be a kind of private enterprise to the kind of public enterprise we think of though, a museum in Barnum's day. He had a thing called the American Museum, which he maintained for a long time. And partially he bought that from a gentleman named Peele, who's been Peele's museum, was sort of the first trying to show natural history and the advance of civilization. And he almost kind of purposely, he had to buy Peele's museum and then he just disassembled it over time, kind of like cannibalizing the father kind of thing. And what interested me is he was such a huge figure, but then also a lot of his most famous first show, exhibit, if you will, was Joyce Heff, a woman who, as you may know, was claimed to be George Washington's nursemaid. This is 1835, which would have made her 161 years old, which he proclaims. There's a hand bill for that in the book, which I own. And it says really remarkable things about her. And what I think is interesting is it depicts her as a remarkable thing, being. Sometimes people would say, oh, she's made of rubber. And then what I think is brilliant about Barnum is he would incorporate any critique or question into the show. Is she made of rubber? Come see. She's an automaton. Oh, is she real in different states? He would sort of think about whether she was free or not. She was an enslaved woman. We think so, yeah. We think that she certainly had been enslaved, and we think Barnum purchased her. There's also stories that he might have taken out her teeth to make her look older. It's a troubling moment, but at the same time, there was this notion that she was honored, at least in part, by being connected to the father of our nation. And people want to touch him through her. That has its own problems, but it is a different view than I think even later in the century for Barnum himself. So here's Joyce Heth, this figure of perhaps ambivalence, but also of honor. And then when she died, Barnum brought her body back to New York and had her, excuse me, autopsied in a medical theater for money. People charged admission. With that, he then revealed, of course, that she was a normal advanced sage, and then he said, well, you know, we've all been hoaxed kind of, you know. Very, I think, that to me is the most troubling thing, is that he, you know, alive or dead, he owns her and anything that she does, whether she's a slave or not, is owned by him and any form of the story. And we can kind of see how that plays out now. And that stories, you know, get stolen, get borrowed, get taken. The book ends with sort of plagiarism writ large. But also this way that, you know, Barnum, I think, was really brilliant at incorporating the hot button issues of the day, because here we are in 1835. Slavery is at the center of life. There's a question, of course, of George Washington is now becoming a cult. He, in one show, is embodying this American history. And he would go on to do that with his sort of later show called What Is It, which we can talk about. Right. So if it had only been about Joyce Hath in terms of his relationship to displaying black people, enslaved people as sort of, you know, curiosity, and even, you know, her autopsy is another sort of like shocking moment of exploitation in which, you know, 1,000 people or something, I think you reported, watched her. Right. So he's making this tremendous money. But that wasn't the end of his use and exploitation of African-American people. Sure. And it was, they were African-American, not. Yes. Right. But he, for the other people, he said that they were not. Right. Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, it's a, I became really fascinated by sideshow culture and the sideshow as a facet of American life. And Barnum, you know, did not invent the sideshow, he perfected it. And so in the 1830s, he comes to kind of perfect what, and I think his genius was to take things that might have been the sideshow and then put them in a museum setting. And by museum, you know, there would be an operetta, there would be like a lovely fountain, and then there'd be, you know, like a two-headed monster, you know, quote unquote. So, you know, he really was able to kind of create this sense of all these things of family entertainment. And we should understand that, that it wasn't like, you know, a specialized thing. A sideshow was the whole family would see what, at the time, was seen as kind of wonder, what these kind of miraculous births of people born different, you know, did have a kind of place. They were called monsters, but not in the sense that we have now, but monsters as a creation of God's wonder or prodigies of another name for such births. And those people often found lives, careers, money as sideshow entertainers. And so it wasn't strange for people to have been displayed in this way. I think Barnum perfected that and made it, you know, which isn't to say the sideshow doesn't have a troubling history. But we do have to grapple with that and our attraction to that. And I think he sort of centralized that. But it is true that the stories he then told become really troubling because he would take normal people, quote unquote, and make them exotic just by being black or brown or whatever or slightly different. He would claim they're from Australia or claim they're from the wilds of deepest Africa. And the person he did this, I think, the worst with is a figure named what is it? It's capital I.T. question mark. And one of the things I stressed in the book, and I found this in Harvard's archives, I had suspected that it was not what is it, but what is it. But in Harvard's archive, and one of the Harvard librarians is here who helped me, Kate. So, you know, like, it was really amazing to find he's on the cover of the book. His name's William Johnson. He's on the right here. And he's on the inside. You can see him not, you know, designed. But what I think is amazing about him is that he was pictured by Barnum in 1860 right after Origin of the Species as the missing link. So what is it? You're supposed to go in and see and judge for yourself. And this troubling kind of form of democracy that he created I think is really telling. And I think he offered up this idea that anyone could be an expert. And you too could decide for yourself, is this person human? What is this being? And in fact, it's not even a being, it's an it. And I think that troubling language is a lot of the problem. But as I trace in the book, he has a kind of interesting afterlife and goes on to interesting things. And one of the figures is sort of in a petting to zoo type situation? Well, you know, certainly Joyce Heth was handled in touch. I don't know how close you would get to what is it actually. He's usually depicted in a kind of caricature form. I think he were just viewing him because he was wearing a furry suit. You know what I mean? Like you weren't. I don't think you would get the same like, what is the right term? Like, no, electric charge from being that close to that person. At first he was supposed to be ferocious. Yeah, he was kind of ferocious, but you go in and have like a stick and stand in there. And I think the thing that's fascinating to me is part of even people reclaiming him and thinking about him in a new way was talking about him as being microcephalic. And my conviction is that he wasn't even that. And at the end of this box I saw at Harvard there he was smiling at us. And I don't picture that in the book. And he just looks like a dude with a weird haircut. And you realize it's a little like Emmett Till in all seriousness where even in our reclaiming narrative we kind of assume that Emmett Till, maybe he did something. Like we can't just let go and say maybe those dudes in Starbucks just, I mean I don't have that, but there's a dominant narrative. Maybe they did something. And maybe he had, there was some reason that Barnum could make him an it. And the truth is that I think he was just a performer. And he famously says at the end of his life, well we fooled them a long time didn't we? He lived 65 more years after this. So he lived a good long while and he was seen by something like over 100 million people by the end of his life. So really a lot of Barnum's reputation and wealth came from this sort of the way he treated race, right? And put it on display, but we don't really remember any of that. Well we remember quotes that he might not have said like there's a sucker born every minute. My favorite quote, which he did say is there's a, every crowd has a silver lining. Which is one of my favorite. And I think that crowdness is a big part of his appeal and a big part of why we're in this fake news moment. He appealed to the kind of crowd sensibility. And he let you as individuals feel like you were making your own discernments, but he really played to the crowd in a broad way and that you too could participate and you know it was a little like being at a rally or something. You could participate and feel like you're making your own individual choice, as guiding you to your decisions. And he was shaping your story. He would famously at the end of his show say this way to the egress. And if you thought it was another show, there you'd be outside. Interesting. Alright, so bunk the title. Yes. There's an interesting story behind that. Should I hold it? Another thing, sure. Your copy is so nice, mine's beat up. It seems bigger than yours. I don't know. Revised, nice. So one of the many things I learned was that that term, right, so many of these hooks do have these political underpinnings. Certainly Barnum's work with freaks and with blackness couldn't have existed without the ideologies, the opinion ideologies that fit so well with the American story. But it was interesting that even the term bunk originated in political discourse. Tell us a little bit about that. It comes from the Missouri Compromise in 1820. Someone from the House of Representatives floor, the question's been called, everything settled of course to make Missouri a slave state. And this person says, well, I need to give one more speech. I say, look, we're done. You don't need to. He says, I need to give a speech to Buncombe, being his home county, which is actually where Asheville, North Carolina is. So it's a beautiful place. I can see why I wanted to say that. But that quickly became Buncombe and KUM, because it's Buncombe. And then it became Bunk. And it just meant political, you know, muckity muck. Yeah. Signaling. Frippery nonsense? Yeah, like kind of extended BS. Right. But it has a political and racial origin. Right. And so when it presented itself as a title, which was pretty late in the book, it had another bad title for a long time. Ooh. Yeah. Okay. I won't tell. It really made sense because it's such an American word, Bunk. And, you know, again, I was interested in this as an American phenomenon. Yeah. I mean, it's funny because there were no cameras back then in that hall. But, you know, politicians do that sort of thing. That sounds very, like a very modern thing to do. Oh, yeah. You can absolutely imagine people doing for season 2 now. Yeah. Why would you stop? Right. Okay. So one of the things that I thought was really interesting also was that it seems like you're making not just a history, but kind of a typology. There are a lot of different types of falsehood that are covered in this. Could you talk a little bit about some of the distinctions and the commonalities? Yeah. I was interested in Barnum's definition of humbug because he really is trying to get us to think about humbug not as, you know, true or something like that, by no means. He's admitting that he's the prince of humbug. Yeah. But a humbug means a good show. Like, you're being fooled but well. Yeah. You know, if the person is a bad fake even or even like a good fake but not a good show, that's a bad thing and not humbug. Humbug is the successful hoaxing of someone, really. And I try to think about that with Edgar Allen Poe who talks about it himself. And so it's a fascinating kind of American notion like the con man as getting over because I think part of the notion that is certainly the con artist or Poe are trying to think about as getting over is part of the joy. Right. Like he says that, you know, it's not complete until there's, he calls it diddling. Diddling is not complete until grin at the end. Okay. You know, if you're in bed later and you fooled someone, that's when the grin happens and you're, you know, that's when the act is completed. And I think we still have that and sometimes are drawn, you know, in say political forums too. You know, people who promise big and deliver at least entertainment. So I think we, we experience a kind of mix of feelings when, you know, Barnum says there's a Fiji mermaid behind this curtain and you go and it's a monkey's head sewn onto a fish's body. You have to walk out and say, well, why did I believe in mermaids? Right. You know, and at least, and the kind of the jokes on you when you have to at least sort of participate is part of what he's asking us to do. And again, I go back to this kind of democratic idea. We also have to remember that Barnum's first hoax 1835. It's a really complicated moment where the penny press and technology are starting to change media. The penny press being a penny paper versus a 5 cent paper. And the idea was a lot like the internet I liken it to where, you know, the internet too was supposed to be nearly free and promise these great things, but both the penny press and the internet are filled with hoaxes. And that technological shift I think gets represented by the hoax. And lastly, I think the hoax too, Barnum's hoax in 1835, it's the exact same moment of blackface being invented. And this invention of blackface sort of mirrors all these other questions pretending to be someone else. Transforming what Ralph Ellison calls an exorcism of sort of the white mind and white guilt over slavery into this other form of entertainment. And so you see that those trains are still running. So there's an interesting connection there also when you're talking about the penny press to Barnum again, because I also didn't know that he was a journalist when he started out, but right, he switches. He goes into journalism and he is, you know, the same kind of fabulous in that field that he is later. But it gets him in trouble. Yeah. So then he switches. Yeah, just make your own paper. You know, I think that what's interesting too is then he runs for politics for office later on, you know, and I think that kind of link between journalism, fakery and politics is very much with us right now and something we're thinking about a lot. Yeah. I could run a circus, be a journalist or run for office. I think it's more like and yeah, same difference. Okay. Great. Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about journalism. Yeah. That's okay. So I thought that that was sort of one of those interesting parts of this or they're all interesting, but the connection, you know, we talk as though fake news and the concept is something that obviously it's an overused term now, but as though it's something we just started talking about, but really the hoax in journalism has been going on a really long time. Yeah, I mean with the Penny Press that year, 1835 was publishing hoaxes and papers. The most famous sort of early hoax, the moon hoax happened in the same press that later would cover the same paper, the New York sun that would cover Joyce Heth. So it's bound up I think into technology. I do think that we sometimes, especially like with the moon hoax, regard earlier generations as somehow being naive. Like, oh, how'd they believe that? Right. You know, that there were people on the moon, which is what the moon hoax claimed. And I think it's because it was well done as a hoax, first of all. And second of all, it mirrored back to us what was happening on Earth. It was a way of displacing some of our arguments. And the hoax often is. So actually, I thought that that might be a good place to read because it's such an interesting story. Sure. You want me to read about the moon hoax? Yeah. Let me see. I'll just start with this. Excuse me. Few people remember that in 1835, men first walked on the moon. That year, however, it was all anyone could talk about. The famed reports in the sun describe men with bat wings, verspiteo homo, unicorns, and biped beavers as viewed on the moon's surface. Leading to much speculation and vast newspaper sales in New York and the rest of the relatively new nation. All the city's papers printed extracts or rebuttals. As with our current headline worthy hoaxes, anyone remember 2009's balloon boy hoax? Every outlet had to weigh in. The news of life on the moon spread like riots had the year before when mobs of white New Yorkers hit the streets, looking for blacks, abolitionists, and amalgamators. The name given to those who they feared were in favor of race mixing to intimidate, beat up, or worse. Needless to say, none of these discoveries on the moon prove true. A guy named Locke. Locke's moon hoax would seem not just a parody of science and faith, or a prank on a gullible public, but also somehow a transference of some of the energy that led to those riots. Many white readers would rather embrace lunar man-bats than their fellow human beings. As detailed in his book on the moon hoax, The Sun and the Moon, Matt Goodman writes that Locke helped make the sun the one paper in the city to come out against slavery in a state that while it no longer sanctioned slavery, by and large supported in the south and partook of its spoils. I'll jump ahead and read one last part of this. This only supports the question of satire that surrounds the moon hoax. Some people say it was a satire. Others say it was just kind of a lark. Though I would insist that intent doesn't make something a hoax or not. Locke's motives seem as complex and unvaried as the canvas of the alleged moon landscape. As an anti-slavery tract, the hoax is too obscure. As racist propaganda, it is not obvious enough, given the extremes that surrounded it. Phrenology and the rest of the racialist sciences then coming into being in the 1830s were mere allegories in the end. Finding one-to-one correlations written on the body that determined the subject's intelligence perceived lack thereof. But wait, there weren't just man-bats on the moon, but also superior race of beings there. That they lived on the veil of triads indicated that they were third-highest of the three kinds of upright beings on the moon. It is tempting to see the lunar human oids as hierarchical in the ways that white eugenicists characterized races on Earth from biped beavers, metaphoric Native Americans, to woolly man-bats, Negroes, to this last group in which, quote, nearly all the individuals in these groups were of larger stature than their former specimens, less dark in color, and in every respect an improved variety of the race. These last are first. They were creatures of order and subordination. Interesting. So moon hoax. I thought the War of the Worlds was sort of like the first of its type, but clearly not. No, yeah. No, I mean, I think Locke's moon hoax is really fascinating. It's beautiful to read, and it's kind of constructed, as I talk about, almost like Genesis or something. He first sees the sort of firmament. He sees the atmosphere. And he starts to go further and further in, and then he sees people by the end, these kind of man-bats, and then the superior race of beings. And it's really brilliantly done. And he also sort of used an actual astronomer, famous astronomer Herschel, who was known to be off in South Africa, viewing the moon from there, from the Cape of Good Hope. So he kind of knew enough about the science to make it seem scientific, and then many people say that he helped invent science fiction. Doing so. That sounds about right. Sounds about right. Great. Okay, so I'm getting a little bit obsessed with the journalistic side of things, but I do have one. Well, we can talk about it because I think it's really important in this moment. Like you said, fake news is sort of this weird word. And what I love about Seth's book, Hard News, which is a really great book. You should get it if you don't have it. It's about, you know, Jason Blair, one of many hoaxers in the past 15, 20 years. Gosh, it's longer than that almost. Is that? I mean, he was 2003 for you. But Stephen Glass was 96, mid-90s. So that kind of level of fakery, I think, in some of the highest-most-regarded papers is really troubling. And I think that all of them involve race in some weird way. I think Stephen Glass and his hoaxing at the New Republic, you know, pretended race was all. And Jason Blair did it in a different way, too. Yeah, so. So I'm thinking of the connection between, oddly enough, some of the types of fake news that has been used politically of late and spread through social media and fake news pamphlet that was distributed during the re-election campaign, Abraham Lincoln's re-election campaign in 1864. So can you tell us that story a little bit? Yeah, it's called, the pamphlet's called miscegenation. And that's where that term just arrives from, which is, I think, you know, for race mixing. And it's funny for me now, knowing that when people use it unironically, like anti-miscegenation laws, well, those existed before this pamphlet that claimed to be for miscegenation. And Barnum himself and his humbugs of the world talks about that as a brilliant hoax because who would have been in favor of that? Or who would have thought Negroes were equal, which is part of the pitch of the absurdity of this pamphlet? And its political stamp, I think, is very familiar to sort of some of what the Russian bots, for instance, did in the last election, which is claim an extreme, in quotations, position, ascribe it to your enemy and then try to sit back and watch what happens. It didn't change the election in the case of miscegenation in 1864, but it seems to have certainly had a big effect on our elections. And sort of the weaponizing of one's worst fears or the worst fears of the other turned against the other person, I think, is chillingly familiar. Yeah. So I love that story because I'm writing around the politics of interracial relationships and the idea that this pamphlet would stand out to abolitionists so that, asking them, so what do you think about this idea, but it's a great thing for races for black and white to mix. Right, so that they could write back and say, oh yeah, that's a great idea. And then he could say, see, that's what they really want. Right. Which he didn't really want, I mean. Which he didn't really want. Well, abolitionists were like... He was anti-abolitionist. Yeah, yeah. And the abolitionists even weren't really like, they were sort of like, oh, okay. They're like, slavery's bad, but I don't know about how good black people are. But I don't know about how good that mixing thing is. Or just black people, period. Right. But in terms of poking the bear, it really has everything that we're talking about now, including trying to stir up, make the most of conflicts that are already there. Oh yeah. Like with the Irish, right? It specifically singles out the Irish. Yeah. As who had had, you know, the draft riots about the Civil War and not wanting to serve. And, you know, had all this resentment against blacks and racism and says that Irish would be improved by them. Yeah. Right? I mean, it is, I don't know, the word shitter, sort of, I don't know if I should say that. There's mostly adults here. I mean, 2016 is, we've got nothing on that sort of. No, no. I mean, the scary thing is one of the myths that I started to feel really troubled by is our myth of progress. Which I realized that I still, even though I feel like I've worked on some of the other myths and read of them, we still have this notion that things are getting better and different. Right. And my thinking about the hoax realized that, you know, from sort of the 1860s where you see what is it, there's another hoax that Barnum started called the Sarcassian beauty, which is a fascinating other one. We don't have time, I think, to go into. All the way to, I think, to the 20s, you see this kind of mix of things, as it were. And then by sort of the 1920s, I really think the hoax becomes a figure of horror. And it used to be kind of onerific. Even what is it, he's trying to kind of at least have him be, not magisterial. I think it's pretty bad. But the progress notion, you know, across even Barnum and across the century and a half really goes worse, in my opinion. And the hoax now is not only there's more and more intense hoaxes, they all sort of about worse and worse things. Right. It's not enough to say, you know, they're going to marry your daughters or something, it's also like, you know, pizza gate. Like the worst horrible horrors. But the hoax always, as I realize, plays on our deepest divisions. And that's one of its engines, it's one of its points, it's one of the things that lets it be believed. And I started out the book thinking about why we, to see each other, but really ended up thinking about why we believe these things. And why we believe the worst fears about the other person. And I think the hoax really gets in there and messes with that. So yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about Happy Birth of a Nation is the kind of film that is all about a hoax. Like a hoax, a hoax is history, right? Yes. But... And people know it's about the founding of the clan as a kind of mythic American... Heroic. Yeah. By D.W. Griffith. Yeah. I used to teach film, and I watched that film like three times. There's like a shortened version, I watched like the whole three hours. And then the third time, I brain imploded. And I wrote this instead. I mean, you know, I think that they do take a lot of... I mean, it's a question I have. Like, is cinema, or are reality shows like taking from hoaxes, or are they just mirror hoaxes? You know, they're not hoaxes in the true sense. It's a spectacle, but it really mirrors history and really sort of is almost like a forgery. And I think what it's hard for us to reckon with is our entertainment value that I think Barnum nailed. That we want to see some of these questions worked out. And it is a bit like the more typical definition of a monster, the hoaxes. It's a thing that we've created that we then want to kill in front of us to sort of purge, but often they aren't killed. They often just live on and on like Jason and like Friday 13th, 8 or something, you know. Okay, so I want to talk sort of really fast forward and talk about why you do think... It seems that you do think that things have actually gotten worse, right? Not just that there's no, you know, there is in progress. But why and how so? Well, do people think it's gotten worse lately? But knowing the history, not knowing the history, why do you think it's worse? Why? Because I'm used to just the, you know... Yeah, it feels worse, right? Well, I think that there's many reasons. The reason I sort of stumbled across the best explanation is the kind of narrative crisis that we've been in. What I end up calling the age of euphemism. And I think that right now there was a lot of the stories that bound us as a nation came into question, whether it was the presidency and Watergate or the truth with Vietnam or the civil rights movement and our notion of being one nation under God, however you want to think of it. Those kind of things were being pulled apart and the hoax kind of steps in in that instance. In the absence of one story, a fake one, a somewhat good one will do. And not even a terribly good one. Just any story. And I think you see that in recent politics. I think you see that across the board in different ways. And I think it feeds the hoax this narrative crisis we've had. And anyone who stands up and says, well, this is, I'm going to give you a direction. And this is the direction we're going in. And things are, you know, because things are terrible but I can make them better is a better story in a way than things are okay. You know, it plays on the hoax, the hoax atmosphere. It's harder to believe everything's better or that person over there is a person. It's easier to say that person isn't it. And we've been in that cycle, I think, for a while. Now the only hope I have is that hoaxes get worse in certain times and they do get better, I think. But I think they require us not being cynical, ironically. I mean, I think at first I thought if we were cynical enough, we'll get past it. But the idea that everything is fake, which I think is the ultimate cynical position, which I think is very dominant now, actually makes you more susceptible to hoaxes. It makes you believe something because you're like, nothing's true. You're like, well, this seems true to me. It confirms my fears. As opposed to a kind of journalistic skepticism that I think is really useful. We have this kind of American cynicism. What Mary Carr, the writer says, the American religion now is doubt. Because you don't want to be a sucker. You want to be like, I doubt you. I want to doubt before you doubt me. But if no one has authority, the scientists don't have authority and the journalists don't have authority. Then what? Then what? You can tell anybody anything, right? I mean, I tried to make a list, bringing it forward because I saw so many commonalities between 2016 election and President Trump and some of the sort of hoaxes that have been part of his story along the way, right, from birtherism. But that's not really, right, that's not really the first one in terms of being a showman. The one that I thought is kind of the funniest is him being his own publicist. Yeah, I was just thinking about that. I wish I'd written more about that. Barron or something? Yeah, Barron, which he then named his son. Yeah, someone just made that connection for me. I was like, wow. That's amazing. You don't have to say anything about that. It writes itself. Or saying when he first wanted to be on the Forbes list that he was worth hundreds of millions and apparently he was worth five possibly at the time. But I mean, I think that there's a very American notion in that we value success, but more than success we value the appearance of success. It's why, there's something almost admirable in the most pure, if we can stand back and, it's like why rappers show money like, it's not because they have money necessarily, like the cars are rented, but it's like here I have money and then you make money because people think you have money. It's kind of this alchemy of, and even a painter like Jean-Michel Baskette who I think was really brilliant about such things, he started drawing money on his paintings and he said, like, and then I started making all this money after that. And it's this kind of alchemy that they're trying for, I think. It's very almost American. Certainly, it's African-American in its improvisational qualities for Baskette. I mean, I think he is trying to fake it till you make it. Right. Which rap, rap. I mean, it's always doing like that's why you put that in your video and then eventually, hopefully, you have that. I mean, the next video, it might be your money. Right. So we should do that right now. Let's pull out our wads. Yeah. Big bank take little bank. It's interesting also how sort of switching to the positive component or at least the positive functions that hoaxes can serve. So sort of the myth, I think of it as sort of a hoax of American exceptionalism is really interesting because that coexists the idea that America is this land of equality and absolute freedom. Sure. And it's being founded on that at the same time it's completely dependent on slavery, which is the ultimate taking away of freedom. But that myth allows us to feel good about American identity. But even more, that's sort of like not quite a positive, so switching to more of a positive. We heroize some of the most successful acondiment. Absolutely. So are there, I was thinking about popular culture. Sure. And how we love, like when we see them in the movies or in television, right? We love some of the stories. I wanted to write even more about Gatsby, who I think is a perfect example or in a fictional sense of this kind of American art of reinvention, which I do think plays into our notions of hoaxing and why we sort of can tolerate some level of it or entertain by it. And I think Gatsby is a brilliant fable about that because he reinvents himself as Gatsby. What's he say? Sport. He calls everyone good sport. And this idea of him sort of adopting that is still yet not enough. And it's a fascinating film that I think we were talking just before about Mad Men. That to me is the other modern version where you take a dead man's identity and you're always faking, but maybe in that you become yourself. And he does, right? So in Mad Men, is he a hero or an anti-hero? Wow. So you're trying to make me write another book about this, aren't you? I think that he's a kind of American anti-hero, I think, sure. Can we give spoilers? How many years has it been? It's been a while. We're safe. I'm sure that people haven't watched it here. But I think that his arc into American iconography, the VW bug, the Coca-Cola, all the tobacco. The tobacco. And the tobacco thing is almost more emblematic of this literally American product that is native to us and that then is being sold as this Cure All. And even though they know it's not. That kind of is perhaps even more deadly metaphor than in Gatsby for what fakery can do and eat at you. So we have this beautiful, heroic character, sort of heroic, anti-heroic, deceptive character, and the Lucky Strike account where they're trying to sell tobacco as being healthy. This one's toasted. Yeah, it's toasted. So, clearly it's being healthy. There's much like that. We have these contradictions and what was interesting to me is the way that the hoax because it's fake tells us the truth. Because once it's gone away and revealed, we are only left with our belief. So we have to kind of reckon with that. And I thought that especially with say, Steven Glass. I mean, there are other people who I think this is an example of, but his hoaxes were so pinned to race. Why did we believe them or did certain people believe them? Why James Fry was he believed as this figure he faked his first memoir and then his second memoir which is called My Friend Leonard. Has anyone read My Friend Leonard? My friend... Yeah, you did. So the first book, of course, he lied about being in prison when he was in jail for like a couple hours. But the beginning of My Friend Leonard is in prison like month three. So the whole of My Friend Leonard is just a total fabrication and the beginning of it is him getting in a fight with a big black guy named Porter House. So this is all from his imagination, of course. Right. And then he teaches Porter House how to read because, of course, Porter House can't read as big black guys in jail that you make up. Can't. And can anyone tell me the guess? And if you know, don't say what book that he uses to teach Porter House how to read. Correct. What's funny is, I think it's about 75% that people guess correctly. I mean, the only other option is Uncle Tom's cabin but that would have been too on the nose. Too on the nose. Yeah. So he had to move it up a few decades or a week. But that kind of... I think I call him a kind of abolitionist on safari kind of thing. And I think that that quality... White savior absolutely. Yeah, I mean, of course. And so once that's revealed, with just his belief or our belief or his invention that, you know, why did that pass for true? And so in that reckoning I think we have to think a lot about these kind of deep American stories. Right. A lot of what passes for true passes for true because it's... or we want it to be true either because it's self-aggrandizing to the person and they're attractive or it's self-aggrandizing to us right, to the American identity or to the audience. You know, we have this prisoner. Who's that self-aggrandized? I guess it's the fraud. To Frey, right? Because he's the hero. But I also think it's because it's super tragic and messed up. It speaks to our need for what I start the book with all the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending. Yeah. And that idea of the tragic but then at the very end is I think much more what it's about. So it isn't simply that it's aggrandizing excuse me, it's exotic it's questionable it's troubling but then at the end you get a little bit of reading is fundamental. So there's one person that is in this book that I have an aversion to talking about but I would love to hear. Oh no. You talk about. Can you guess? I can guess but I want to say. Actually, I wrote down her name because what is her name? You don't make us wait. The new name? Rachel Dolezal? Rachel Dolezal, she has another name? Yes, she has a new name now. I finished my essay and luckily didn't have to read about her anymore. So tell them about it but I'll give you the name because the name is such again stealing identity. It's Nicki Minaj or something? No, I'll tell you in a second. It's African sounding. African sounding, that's awesome. Well as you remember Rachel Dolezal was the white. Nikichi Amari Dialo. Sorry. That is the current name that she's using. I mean I couldn't make that up, that's too good. I couldn't make that up. Huck Finn would be proud. I guess she almost troubles me most because she is a white woman who of course darken her and claimed to be black than was the head of the NAACP in Oregon. I mean she couldn't have done that in Harlem where the Schaumburg Center is. That won't work. So I think that she like picked her place to do this. And I wonder if it's a little like when Gene Wilders in Blackface in what's that movie? Silver Streak. Yeah and everyone, all the black people know. I wonder about that. What was happening with that? Whereas of course she got much more attention for being not black than black people often get. She was on the Today Show a whole bunch of times. And then a week later was the Charleston murders. And it kind of pushed her off the whatever front page or first second half hour of the Today Show. But I started thinking that and I end up writing about this that the killer and her both had similar kinds of misunderstandings of blackness. And that they both thought of blackness as this tragic thing because Rachel Dolezal was attracted to the horror, the blackness as being like tragic. And his and I'd redact his name in the book on purpose. His point of view couldn't be swayed by these very much people praying in front of him and praying with him. He couldn't then change his input. And I feel like she too misunderstood blackness as tragic and the difference is she wanted to be that. He wanted to murder that. But both have this similar problem with it. And I really wanted to think about allowed about this problem with race. This wish to be someone else and what occurs in the book it occurs more like toward the plagiarism chapter because there's a kind of plagiarizing of another person's pain that you see over and over again in the 20th century whether it's fake Native Americans which someone called pretendians which I think is a great term or like fake black folks or blackface you have two poles in blackface it's tragic or comic and ultimately they're the same thing. There's no tragedy that isn't ridiculous and no comedy that isn't a little bit sad really. Mami being the song from the jazz singer being sort of the ultimate example of that. As opposed to say the blues or actual African American inventions which know that within you're laughing to keep from crying and they aren't modeling there. In fact deeply funny you know you've been a good old wagon but you've done and broke down is a philosophy you know it's a way of thinking about the world and it provides a kind of answer and a way of pain to move past it and that's so different than plagiarizing pain and living in it and trying to make it your existence. One is a form of resistance and one is a form of I don't know what. So there you mention the nice lady who in every church like there's one like nice white lady who shows up in every black church. Right but she never tries to show up in black. Yeah in my church at least. But Rachel wants to show up and not just claim it. Yeah she wants to be the center of it. She wants to be the center of it. And the question I have is why do you if you feel black what she says why do you have to look black. Also you know in the telling I'm really interested in the telling of her story because one of the things that you talk about a lot of people don't when they talk about Rachel Dolezal is the fact that she's not content to just say okay I want to look black. I want people to believe that I'm black and I want to be able to tell to have authority. But she makes up an entire tragic backstory for herself. So her level of deception is so deep and it's literally stolen pain. Yeah I think that's the difference. Sometimes people ask me what's the definition of the hoax. I think there's a number of them I sort of think of return to is it's lying with explanations that it keeps going on and on. The more I read and the more I saw that's not surprising. People often have to invent not just their tragic backstory but others around them a whole host of people someone like JT LaRoy who pretended to be a man pretending to be a woman. It was only tragic and again I returned to this American notion. Would we have what she had gone as far if she said I was a black person. That wouldn't have been as selling for her. She complains about colorism being beaten. Oh lord. It's like she's telling a color purple but it's the color what? I personally love all the names that came up. I thought she was going to be a black Twitter which I talked about and we came up with all these great names for the autobiography and I don't remember who said their eyes were watching Oprah. I think you made up a few too. Blackish like me was one of mine. Blackish like me. Did I do the Oprah? I might have done Oprah and then I think Victor Laval said the imitation of imitation of life or something. So that's kind of a I felt like maybe that was a little bit more of a personal story because the voice seemed different in terms of the writing style. Yeah it was toward the end and as I say in the book I thought I was done at catalog of these hoaxes and then I got asked for a book by Jesmyn Ward The Fire This Time To Write an essay and I wrote on Dolezal and partially I was writing out of fury that I had to keep thinking about this. So partially what happened for me is I realized and told my editors I said look I got to stop because there's going to be another hoax next week if I keep going and sort of once all the stuff with fake news happened I literally just would like add a sentence because so much of it I had already sort of if not predicted then sort of prophesied or somehow thought of in some way and so Dolezal was like brought too many but I then and then my editor kept saying you need to put it in the book or should you and I was like he was very gentle but I was like I don't think so I don't think so and then I was like oh I have to because she really helped end the book and tell this kind of story that goes on and on and let me be a bit more personal and I mean I think at one point I say I could read from that part and then we could turn to questions from you guys. I did read a little from that essay it kind of jumps around on purpose it's called blacker than now it was never easy for me I was born a poor black child the beginning of Steve Martin's the jerk still makes me laugh with its twist on once upon a time the dissonance between what we know of the white comedian Martin his relative success and his obviously false declaration sends up not only the tragic show biz biography but the corny black one both the worse are the better it also suggests his character's transformation is overcoming after all he's clearly white now not to mention his current lot in which he's smudged bummy apparently destitute his isn't black face but his face half greased is certainly part of the effect it's a familiar one in other words to black people used to watching white people only claim blackness as a poor me stance now why does this jerk remind me of Rachel Dolezal here's the thing I'm talking about when Rachel Dolezal's fraud first broken was simply a joke on black twitter which as you probably know isn't a separate app but I identified some of my favorite twitter titles from the inevitable anticipated memoir their eyes were watching Oprah that one's mine imitation of imitation life from Victor Laval blackish like me mine too now things done got serious there's a long tradition of passing of crossing the racial line usually going from black to white you could say it was started like this country by Thomas Jefferson one of the best things about being black is that barring some key exceptions it's not a volunteer position you can't just wish on a dark star and become black it's not paid either it's more like a long internship with a chance of advancement after the killings in Charleston several things happen Dolezal's story went back to being merely ridiculous talk shows moved on to something else and those who somehow will Dolezal sublime retreated flags flew at half-staff except the confederate flag on South Carolina state house grounds it took a black woman Brittany Newsom to climb up and take that down they gave the assignment to a black man to raise the rebel flag back up like Sally Hemings he might not have minded but he certainly couldn't have refused thank you so I guess that's a good place to Sally Hemings yeah Rachel I mean can I ask you one last thing yes you can ask me did it ever feel as though history was just making the stop up for you I mean sort of like the world was sort of conspiring to make this this particular moment for this book to come out Rachel Dolezal 2015 the election in 2016 yeah I mean I'm really glad that I had said before then that I would stop you know in the summer of 16 I said you know I gotta finish this book because there's gonna be another hoax next week and the election was on my birthday so I had to go away and like write this coda but it was kind of more a horrible thing to be right about you know and I say that in the coda like I hated I realized you know then that I wanted kind of tragic story with a happy ending I wanted this to end in a kind of well things are looking up you know but you know CNN had a year of the hoax it had you know declared all these things about hoaxes in a few years in a row and then they just gave up you know the Washington Post had a hoax tracker they just gave up you know it just got really dark there for a while as it were I feel a little more hopeful now that I think I do in the end of the book but I think that's more because I think people are starting to talk about this problem and I hope my book helps that so now you guys have to do some work so Kevin I have a question for you is someone who writes nonfiction writes poetry do you have a separate process for doing that and how or does working in one genre influence and interact with the other yeah thanks Seth I'd say yes it does it's not so direct or obvious to me how definitely nonfiction requires a different kind of attention poems though I think poems are intense and they generally you can think about in a session or look through a manuscript in a book like this you have to just it's every day plugging away and you know I revised it quite a bit over the years and I have to turn this giant chip around like you know two times a year took a lot out of me but you have to be sort of there physically for it even with computers and all that and what was interesting is it requires a lot more reading the same amount of introspection but I really especially for a book about hoaxes I want there to be you know notes and bibliography and believe me there are books I read about hoaxes that had no notes you know and I was like this feels like a hoax itself like it's so weird and you know I admire you as a journalist making that really clear here's who I talk to here's what I listen to here's what this is from and that's you know it's not just I think people sometimes dismiss that as sort of intellectualism when really it's the trail that someone hooks into footnote number 50 and wants to find out more you're laying out you know how you got there and I am super you know my process not like a share of it like I'm reading these totally disparate things that don't seem to make sense even sometimes to me but once I follow my nose there they are and I want you to be able to and maybe you'll come to a very different conclusion that's that I think both Bunk and my new book Brown which is just out is a book that of poems but they're both interest in history and the way history touches us all and that we're part of history whether we admit it or not and that kind of connection I think I almost felt maybe because of Bunk I felt more comfortable with in Brown but at one point there was sort of the public poems in Brown the poems about athletes or Arthur Ashe or you know Lead Belly and then there were sort of poems about me and my love of music or my love of sports and my growing up in Kansas in part and living in the south when I was writing it so my goal by the end was to make those things together and I think that Bunk sort of helped me understand how to tell a history in a certain way and to not keep those strands so separate yeah so so there's some obvious parallels going back in history as you noted and I'm just wondering what you might think is different is there anything about the way things unfold now the way we communicate the technology we have is there anything about the way that these hopes are perpetuated now that it's different and is that in some ways more or less hopeful you know in terms of like moving forward did you say hopeful at the end I did so I was I gave you an opportunity for a hope there you don't have to take it well the two things I think is that hoaxes can be propagated faster just with a click and suddenly you know it's a simple thing made by a guy in a basement or say for nefarious reasons in Russia and then suddenly it's targeted to specific people as opposed to everyone and I think that is really troubling and I don't think we've quite reckoned with that I sort of was starting to say in my book here's what technology could do and it's problems I wouldn't have thought that the hoax could be kind of weaponized in a way that it clearly was and it's clear and clear every day but what interests me is that that targeted exactly these same divisions I also think it sometimes can be you know I try to say in the book that journalists catch journalistic hoaxes the internet catches internet hoaxes you know it's not simply that the internet is a vast place of conspiracies and dead ends though sometimes it feels that way so that is important and I do think that at the same time you know it's really harder now for a hoax to go away completely sometimes and I think you've seen people now start to try to say in journalism include like birtherism the claim sometimes gets reported as if it's a claim without saying that it's a false claim and I think you see people now much more saying this false claim is was repeated you know but it can be I think harder to dissuade people who don't want to be dissuaded I was on a talk radio thing and a guy called in and he well two guys called in one called in and he said he had started a poetry prize and there was it was sort of like March Madness there were brackets and people got really excited and invested and who won and then he declared a winner and then he also admitted that he had written all the poems that were in the bracket and I was like oh what that was pretty wild you know and I'm like you got some explaining to do no wonder people are upset at you but then someone else called and they said come at him in a separate program but they said oh well the reason that there's so many more hoaxes is because Obama passed that law and I was like what are you talking about it's like the law where you can just hoax people now that's legal I mean we laugh about it but this person didn't just think like it was completely serious and you know in a weird way was not in a hoax in the sense that they were being hoaxed but they were not operating in that realm they hadn't been sort of that and that was really interesting and then the commentator was like what do you think of this law you know but said you know like what is the name of that law you know you have to be able but our capacity to say oh here's the name of the law that goes back to sources we don't have a good sense of sources and a good sense of what is a good source and a lot of things can seem the same and I think that you know physics I mean civics class helps and I feel like we lost that and libraries I think are this great place where you get neutral information and you know I work in one so I think that you can find anything there and actually a lot more than the internet thanks for your question so I am interested in the whole the 1830's and the sort of because you say at one point you said democracy and you just sort of as a thing that was part of this and you know of course that's like right after Andrew Jackson's elected this crazy populist election where it's the first guy who wasn't some serious guy he's a guy who waves his pistol around so what was it about that the idea of the connection between populism and democracy and how that lends itself to hoaxes and yeah this loss of we don't have the king anymore but then that means we don't have party figures anymore who tell us things so talk about I think you know there were hoaxes when kings were around of course but the hoaxes would usually be like that person's a prince you know I'm a lost prince you know I'm the lost sirena you know that was very common but obviously in the states you don't see that as much I was really interested in the ways that that played out almost with and you see it even now with a kind of claim toward nativeness both like I belong here but also kind of often literal I am native you know by especially white folks saying that they were and that really interested me as a kind of tactic going back to the Boston Tea Party you know and what it meant to put on this mask an American mask and how did that play out over time I do think that populism I find an inexact term this is just me personally I mean populism gets used to refer to a kind of elite bashing but by elites so by people richer than God and so it becomes a kind of strange term you know growing up in Kansas there was a kind of different notion of populism I feel like a kind of farmer based like you have your opinion I have mine let's you know make good fences good neighbors kind of thing so I don't know I feel not totally settled on how populism plays into except for there's this idea of the mob versus the crowd versus the populist that you see play out in the 1830s a lot and around riots around the penny press itself and I don't know how that is with us now certainly we're being in it and being a fish in the water not knowing how wet we are it's hard to talk about but I can't imagine that we won't look back and think about Black Lives Matter and that movement on one hand and then it's seeming opposite and the other and how that the hoax kind of knitted those things together or tried to make sense of it but I don't have a good total response for you it's a big question it is a big question everyone's trying to make me write third book about the stuff I like it thanks I have two that I think are related is there a history of fact checking and sort of calls for corrections and then current day just given the technology they sort of talked about I'm thinking about the tipping point when we all recognize something as a hoax and does it take an authority figure usually white to say that or is it snopes.com and we all sort of move on are you saying now or in general I think yeah it just seems like of course that was a hoax but who decided how do we come to that well it's a little like I guess what I would say it's always a hoax and the question is when does it recognize I mean why now are there like more flat earthers than there were like why is that happening now not just like because I think the world is round and you know Kyrie Irving is like I'm a flat earther you know but he did that to manipulate the media he was making a point but that's so crappy you know it's sort of like Kanye West all over my timeline and then like whoops that's a different thing I don't know I have a hard time with if you hoax and then pull the shade away are you still not a hoaxer you know I think you actually are a hoaxer that's the definition of a hoaxer so I have a hard time sort of letting people off the hook especially about what they hoaxed about you know and admitting you hoax doesn't get you out of that and that's what I was trying to draw attention to with these hoaxes about race and then the larger kind of question is of course that race itself is a kind of hoax which is to say a fake thing pretending to be true this doesn't mean racism is fake quite the opposite and I think it's almost it's intractability comes from that it isn't from this real thing so the first part of your question I actually don't know the answer to it's a great idea I do think that I became really interested in objectivity in journalism I don't know if that helps or hurts us as to debunk these things because yeah it's a fairly recent phenomenon objectivity and other ideas of journalism don't have it exactly it's a kind of American notion as opposed to say accuracy which I think should be the point of all journalism but it isn't objective to present like two sides of climate change debate but you see that happen regularly on shows especially makes good TV you know or back when Oprah would like entertain the clan for like an hour you know I think that there's this kind of weird mix between accurate attention and then also ignoring the total crap and how do we balance that I'm not sure so birtherism right like do things get debunked because even after you got an apology well I mean it was kind of a winking apology but a lot of people still believe it but birtherism was never the idea that Obama wasn't born it was never about what it was about so to kind of say like can we disprove that there's never going to be a proof enough to say that a black guy belongs and if we start with kind of that trouble idea I think would be better off I mean if Morgan Freeman can't have convinced us that there are black presidents then how can Obama I mean you know I think that there's this kind of weird fact of that and I end up writing about that in my review of Ta-Nehisi Coates is we were eight years in power so I was really interested in this black president idea and so was he you know he's really fascinating about that and then I think the thing he said most powerfully in that book is that Trump is the first white president he says and what does that mean and that these two things go together and one follows the other the thing that really convinces me of what you're saying right that it's obviously never really about the birth certificate or where he was born is that Trump said at the time because he's number one birther okay well I'll give a charity this millions of dollars if you show me your transcript right right because you're an affirmative action president that's how you got in well and also then the same person won't show their taxes right so it's never about what it's about I mean it's about power and I mean I said that about plagiarism too plagiarism about power it's about aspiration there ends up being a lot of Harvard plagiarists that I talk about and what interests me is only that seems the only explanation for something like Melania Trump plagiarizing Michelle Obama's speech I mean that's the most crazy moment that would have sunk anything else but it was you know like she didn't own her words and that was because but it's also more nefarious than that I can steal from you but also I need to steal from you that's a really deep moment yeah so I worked with I've worked with youth in different capacities and I'm also just thinking about what that means in terms of like history that's being taught I'm thinking of how so much of our education systems like in history classes it's completely like white washed versions of what slavery looked like and that idea of our education system can sometimes be a hoax in itself and that not everything is relevant and true and I'm thinking of how I hear from students or people in general racism is ended slavery is ended and when you look at the incarceration rates of African men how much there is so I'm just thinking of your thoughts on that and how youth or even for me I think about how to go navigate about unlearning these things unlearning these hoaxes and trying to better understand the truth of it all yeah it's a big question and a good one you know I work at and direct the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and I feel like there's many reasons for it to be but it's initiating reason was that one of our founders Turo Schomburg was told as a young man he's black Puerto Rican and Puerto Rico that there was no black history and he sought out to prove that person wrong he amassed 10,000 vindicating evidences he said and um but what's interesting is he also is trying to go beyond what he calls this the idea firsts you know which I think sometimes we reach to explain but I don't think we should you know it's a tough thing because what I love about Turo Schomburg is when he writes about it and the Negro digs up his past his famous essay he's kind of blind pretty easily he's thinking in the 1920s about some of the same questions that dog us now why we should study the past why we should know it and for me history is the way to kind of help people navigate and what you're saying is what if history is is taught as bunk and what if history is falsified I think that's all the more reason you have we have places like Schomburg which now those 10,000 items are 10 million items and we have there that you can see for yourself and you know I sound a little like Barnum but um you know for different reasons you know like you come see the documents you come and study for yourself and see and I think it's so important for young people to see their history not just you know hear about it or read about it um that unmediated kind of history I think really speaks to them now what I think libraries and archives like Schomburg do are provide context for that so when we have a discussion a conversation about race that whole you know century almost of history 93 years we've been in Harlem since 1925 speaks to so when people come and we have a black comic book festival it's not like we just invented black heroes you know last week or with Black Panther or and in that when we're having the black comic book festival people went up stairs to see the black power exhibition and saw actual the black panthers from the 60's you know and that kind of history I think is so important for people to see first hand um it gets me excited because I see what happens when you put a kid who thinks they're not part of a history book because there's two ways history books I think can screw with us one is you're excluded one is you're included but so unimportant that you think you are I mean it's almost worse you know like you know when when a true Schomburg was being told that he could prove instantly you're wrong here's two books you're wrong but when you have a book that is artfully trying to you know disenfranchise you from within I do think you have to work a little hard but I also think it's important to go these places and I hope there's one near you where you can take folks and show them this history walk around a place filled with everything from Phyllis we lead the Crispus Attucks way back when who speak to these long history of revolution and change um so uh you know how we're working on for instance a hip hop curriculum um and I think that's going to tell help young people where they are think about this history um and so you know to me it's a combination of show them the past but also connect to them and their present and where they live and help bring them that's how I learned and came to it because a lot of what I learned I didn't learn in school yeah thank you thanks for your question this question is kind of for both you and professor bell um and goes along with that question um yes like um if we if you look at someone like the political science literature it's a little bit more pessimistic about presenting facts to uh countering hoaxes so how do we draw people into the things like the Schomburg center or maybe some people who are more resistant to listening to the other side like is the point of history to try to convince people who don't want to be convinced I'm curious yeah well now that's part of my question is like is it even worth trying to get some people just totally unreachable and um the and in my other question as somebody who studied poetry is how is this book if at all has it informed your writing of your poetry now sure let's start you can answer that first part so some of the political science literature has been really pessimistic about the possibility of persuasion happening um but there have been recent studies that have shown that there are strategies so sometimes the presentation of facts over and over again that are contrary to somebody's prior beliefs uh makes people dig in further right um because they feel defensive um of that uh but there are other times right and there are strategies um as Kevin said you need to present if you're going to repeat the lie first of all repeating the lie can reinforce it but if you're going to repeat it you have to frame it as a false claim and not as you know a claim that's that's made um or um Lakoff who's a cognitive linguist suggests that rather than repeat the claim you could just actually say what the truth is right what a crazy idea that's insane yeah and so rather than spreading and reinforcing reminding people of the false claim you talk about uh you know Obama being born in um Hawaii right and and his biography and just you say you tell the story that doesn't you know remind them oh you don't believe this right but you know you you just sort of like you don't confront the thing that um is causing the problem in the first place yeah I mean I think about this sometimes with bunk because you know it's a book that I hope by the end you know I wasn't just trying to convince someone who didn't believe the story I also was trying to uncover a story that might not have been known um and I had the sort of experience and maybe I wanted to kind of recreate that of starting out thinking well maybe the hoax it seems to me a lot about race and by the end I was like oh my god not another racial hoax you know and like or a hoax that you know it seemed like the same thing by the end um even in places it seemed far far flung from it um and so I wanted to kind of recreate that feeling and it was important for me to structure the book so that people understood and discovered with me and I guess that's another way of how I try to frame these things is you know not just um here it is you need to believe it but also like here's how to discover it and also teaching people how to discover things what is a source you know here are the sources that could go you know here's some links um I think you see this in a positive way with something like the Charleston syllabus say where people are not simply saying like um here's this event here's why it's bad but here's also a context for understanding this event and I'm not sure how much that works but I think it's a really good effort and important part of it uh in terms of my own work um you know I think poetry uh and prose aren't so far apart uh I don't know if I would have said that a few years ago um I do think that what I like about Bunk and people have said this to me is that it feels like for me a poet's book in the sense that I'm making these connections between things that may not always be obvious and to me that's what a poem does is it takes one thing and says it is the other and is like the other um if not just makes that leap and those connections I think are really important in what I tried to stress in both the books I tell you it was a secret helpful um place of persuasion though that I think might be controversial for you uh because you mentioned the term edutainment right as being like this this terrible thing but I mean Sesame Street is edutainment like it actually oh sure I mean I love the word edutainment because Boogie Down Productions put out a record called edutainment and like 89 okay anyway um but you know people can use fiction right fiction teaches and people can use fiction to um fiction sort of like reduces the barriers reduces counter arguing so people aren't on alert um so I mean I think it's not fiction but hidden figures I think I was going to say hidden figures is a great persuasive film for me you know like I feel like you know when I rewatched it recently with my son and it just is an amazing well done film that sweeps you along and if you don't feel anything when she's like I have to go a mile to the bathroom um then maybe you have a piece missing and I don't want to talk to you um but you know like that's where I'm not against persuasion quite the opposite in fact the thing that I came to realize and I argue in the book is that not hurt facts but they hurt the imagination and they hurt our ability to believe that something made up can move us you know and we we tend it is kind of a companies this autobiographical biographical impulse that I think especially as Americans we have um and you see it more and more what sort of nonfiction means and um you know there's nothing like a good story or a good tale and that's very American too and that has truth in it that's sort of the opposite well that's what my first book is about it's about the truth with an F awesome should we end with that do we have any more we should end with the truth alright thanks everybody thank you thank you