Events & CalendarsPresident’s Colloquium on Race and Racism

Biography: Hilton Als

Als became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1994 and a theater critic in 2002. Week after week, he brings to the magazine a rigorous, sharp, and lyrical perspective on acting, playwriting, and directing. With his deep knowledge of the history of performance—not only in theater but in dance, music, and visual art—he shows us how to view a production and how to place its director, its author, and its performers in the ongoing continuum of dramatic art. His reviews are not simply reviews; they are provocative contributions to the discourse on theater, race, class, sexuality, and identity in America.

Als is the author of the books My Pinup (2022), The Women (1996) and White Girls, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Lambda Literary Award in 2014. He is currently working on a new book titled I Don’t Remember (Penguin, 2023), a book length essay on his experiences in AIDS era New York. Als has curated many shows including “Alice Neel, Uptown,” along with an accompanying book on the artist (2107) as well as “God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin”, a special iteration of the exhibit will be at the Mead Art Museum from February 24 - July 9, 2023.

Als won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2017. Among his many honors, he also was awarded a Guggenheim for creative writing in 2000 and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism in 2002. Als is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan, and Smith College. He lives in New York City.

Transcript of Between You and Me: Thinking Politics and the Self Otherwise

- Hi, good evening. I'm Michael Elliott, president of Amherst College. It's an honor and pleasure to welcome you to the President's Colloquium on Race and Racism, and especially an honor tonight to introduce our speaker Karma Chavez, the Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor and Chair of Mexican American and Latino Latina Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. I know that this evening will be thought provoking and engaging and I'm so delighted that Professor Chavez will be in residence on campus all week as a presidential scholar, offering you many opportunities to continue this evening's dialogue. We will also have time for questions and answers or these questions, I don't if there are answers, being Amherst College at the end of the evening's talk and we have a microphone over here to my left, in your right, and then you're all of course welcome to stay afterwards for refreshment in the lobby. Methodologically rooted in rhetoric and rhetorical studies, Professor Chavez's scholarship is informed by the Queer of Color Theory and Women of Color Feminism. Fundamentally interested in what brings people together, Professor Chavez studies and writes about social movement building, activist rhetoric and coalition politics, evergreen topics that seem somehow even more urgent today. Her first book, "Queer Migration Politics, Activist Rhetoric and Coalition Possibilities" was published in 2013 and examines coalition building at the many intersections of queer and immigration politics in the United States. Her second book, "Palestine on the Air" published in 2019 presents a series of interviews that Professor Chavez conducted related to Palestine while hosting a radio show on Community Radio WORT-FM in Madison, Wisconsin. Most recently, Professor Chavez is the author of the "The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance" published in 2021. This book traces and document strategies of resistance to the alienizing logic by which HIV AIDS was mobilized as an opportunity to further marginalize the already marginalized migrants, Black Americans and others during the 1980s into the early 1990s. Collaboration is not just a scholarly subject for Professor Chavez, it is also something that she practices. She's a co-editor of four different volumes on subjects as diverse as queer and trans migrations, keywords for gender and sexuality, feminist practices and communications and innovations in rhetorical methods. In addition to her academic work, Profess Chavez has a deep interest in audio, which we enjoyed talking about over dinner and is a regular host of two podcasts at the University of Texas, Austin, the Latino Studies Podcast, LatinXperts, and the LGBTQ Studies Podcast, Audio QT. She's also worked closely with community-based organizations on issues surrounding queer, racial, economic, and immigrant justice, and is a co-creator of GRIDS, an initiative at UT Austin designed to foster relationships and solidarity among those working in gender, race, indigeneity, disability, and sexuality studies. For a talk entitled, "Between You and Me: Thinking Politics and the Self Otherwise," please join me in offering a warm welcome to Presidential Scholar Karma Chavez.

- How are y'all doing?

- [Audience] Good.

- Yeah?

- [Audience Member] Excited.

- Okay, that's good. I don't know if that's a good thing or hopefully it is. So thank you. No, seriously, for... Thank you for being here. I really appreciate you coming out on this rainy but quite warm evening, so thank you for that 'cause you know I'm a baby coming from Texas, so I appreciate having some nice weather and thank you to everyone who had a hand in making this possible. I know these things are huge undertakings and so I'm really grateful. I'm grateful to lots of people, some in particular Darryl Harper and Beth Bouloukos, and Amanda Huhmann, Rebecca Kennedy, Austin Huot, the other folks who are on the committee to make this happen, those affiliated with CHI, with Amherst College Press, of course President Elliott and all of you for taking the time. I'm grateful. And so, you get to a certain point in your career when you've kinda like, you know, you've done the thing, you've published the books, and then they somehow promote you to full professor and then you get a chance to reflect on what you wanna do next. So I'm at that point, which is nice I have to say. And so what I'm gonna do tonight, I hope you'll humor me as I give you some, some snippets of some essays that I'm working on towards a next book project that is different than some of my scholarly work. It's more in the genre of personal essays and this is the first public reading of any of this and so feel free to throw tomatoes, that's okay. But yeah, so, so you know, we'll see how it goes. But again, thank you for being here. So if you check out any of the many grammar books available to you or any of the grammar guides online, you'll find any number of admonishments against using the second person in formal writing. One of these experts writes that, "Second person is cautioned against because people have a tendency to use something we call the generalized you when they aren't addressing a specific person or group of people but are instead making a general statement." Another laments, "The indefinite and imprecise you is the most troublesome because it is too vague and informal for academic writing," and yet another suggests "The second person point of view is used fairly often in writing, but it's unusual for a story to exclusively rely on it. Just think about it, would you wanna read a 200 page novel that forces you to be active the whole time? Probably not, as such very few novels have ever pulled it off." Now you may very well agree with these critiques. You may not be surprised that the rhetoric professor who authored this talk has made similar suggestions to her students for over two decades. Yet these essays you'll hear, which are personal in nature, are written in second person from start to finish. There is an author here, an I which is me, which is to say these essays are written from my perspective, let me insert her here. I'm not universally opposed to the I, to myself or any other I. In graduate school I had a colleague who had put a giant red X across any student's I in a class paper and she would write in the margins, you do not matter. Although we were earning degrees in human communication, she fashioned herself as a communication scientist and science is objective, replicable, and within such a worldview, the scientist herself does not matter. Anyone with the appropriate methods can do the science regardless of their personal standpoint or biases or at least that's the lie social scientists tell themselves. In graduate school and into the present day, I became a fierce defender of the I, insisting that you do in fact matter, that no one else would do this study in the same way you did regardless of the methods and no one would ever write the report in the same way you did. I believe this to be fact, to be objectively clear, I matter and you matter too no matter the pursuit. If you dig deeper into this conundrum, you'll see that the tendency to overemphasize the I can be a grammatical and a political problem. A Spanish teacher I had years back introduces the class to the concept of yoismo, or the idea that when English speakers use Spanish, they often neglect the cultural norm to drop the pronoun since it's implied by the verb as well as the context of the sentence. Instead we use the Spanish I, yo, in excessive and awkward ways. Her view is that many Spanish speakers saw yoismo not as a language learner's quirk, but as reflective of predominantly white English speaking cultures that tend to overemphasize the importance of the individual in the self over and often against the collective and the other. To me, this rings especially true in what academics would call the neoliberal era. There are a lot of great books written about neoliberalism, but I'll give you the 50 cent version here. Neoliberalism is not merely an economic philosophy that values free trade, deregulation, privatization, and personal responsibility, it is a life philosophy that fits in all too well with the US American myth of meritocracy and the popular belief that if you work hard enough you can pull yourself up by your proverbial bootstraps. You can find one result of neoliberalism in the gutting of social services and community responsibility to your fellow humans, relegating responsibility instead to the individual, your family or your church. Another result has been theorized by several cultural critics that I'll turn into my favorite of them here, the US based queer immigrant writer, Yasmin Nair. Now Nair is concerned with why social movements on the left continue to fail. Across years of writing, she insists that neoliberalism has invaded movements for progressive change to the extent that rather than fighting for systemic changes such as universal healthcare, wealth redistribution, or even a guaranteed universal income, these movements have turned attention to individual issues that place people in a position to help themselves and their immediate families. You could find the best example of this in gay marriage, a movement that many would call a success, but Nair argues that the gay marriage movement privileged the most privileged gay individuals by giving them access to each other's health insurance, estates and powers of attorney without addressing the fact that such benefits might be better doled out without a patriarchal institution that reinforces the privatization of them in the first place, or that leaves out those of you who can't or won't conform to that relational formation. Nair also critiques the ways that progressive movements rely on individual stories to advocate for mere incremental changes. Here, Nair suggests that the dreamer movement of undocumented youth is an exemplary offender. You might recall a push in the early days of the Obama administration for the best and brightest undocumented youth to offer their testimony by coming out of the shadows as undocumented and unafraid. Their stories of triumph and achievement against tremendous odds served as a rationale for passing the DREAM Act, which would've given a select minority of undocumented youth, an arduous path to US citizenship, nevermind the violence of the entire immigration regime. And you can find a similar claim from the Indian American Australian writer Sujatha Fernandes, who argues that the primacy of individual storytelling for political change has been prompted by moneyed elites. The people you call philanthropists who dole out millions to movements with many strings attached. To advocate for structural changes is far less fundable than to produce a program where the oppressed tell you their individual stories of empowerment in the hopes of achieving modest reforms. If you're persuaded by Nair and Fernandes, and I happen to be, then you can see that the prevalence of the personal story in modern US political culture is not merely the choice of individuals who've determined that this is the best strategy for change. Instead, progressive but capitalist interest in preserving the existing structure has dictated to the oppressed the only acceptable form of public address. Now if you're not persuaded by these concerns, then you're not alone. In her essay, "In Praise of Navel-Gazing," the US writer and professor Melissa Febos insists that the maligning of personal narrative is embedded in a sexist view that you might find familiar, men think, women feel. In this cultural view, women writing stories of themselves are less than, unserious, merely writing in their diaries. Febos goes as far to suggest, "I don't think it's a stretch to wonder if the navel as the locus of all this disdain has something to do with its connection to birth and body in the female." Now my best friend is a performance studies scholar. She's here tonight in fact, and she writes a lot of personal narrative. She sent me Febos' book for my birthday, I think to push me to move from the either/or position on narrative to a both/and. In other words, she's challenging me to accept that Nair and Fernandes might be right, but Febos is too. As someone who has spent a career pushing her students to reside in the complexity of conflicting ideas, I'll grant you that I concede my best friend's point. In this work, I actively work to engage this tension by both writing essays from the perspective of the mixed race, formerly working class Chicana feminist dike professor that I am, and by deploying grammar in such a way as to disrupt the individualism inherent in the first person singular. My viewpoint is my own, mistakes made are mine, but I'm in community with enough people from diverse relationships, from diverse backgrounds and points of view to know that my worldview has been constituted by those relationships and coalitions. And so what I think, feel, and believe is not my own. Moreover, and you might find this a little pollyannaish, but I'm guided by a belief that your life chances and your politics are interwoven with mine and everyone else's and we are all well served to find ways to enact meaningful, collective ways of being and thinking in the world. Now you might be asking yourself, does the second person alleviate the concern with individualism? If only, but I believe that my use of the second person can put you, the listener, into the position of being implicated in my stories and criticisms that when the you feels generalized, it suggests that I directly ask you and others around you to be implicated too. Put differently, I'm asking you to contemplate the ways you already are implicated. The second person invites you to consume these words from a place that challenges the critical distance often enjoyed when listening to someone else's stories. And more than that, my hope is to use the genre of the personal essay to expand the notion of the personal altogether. I don't use the second person simply to be difficult, although some of this listening may be difficult, I invite you to inhabit these experiences and viewpoints for the duration of this talk to risk your own implication. Now, if you think this invitation sounds a little outlandish, you're not alone. As much was suggested to me by my partner, a mixed race Black woman and professor from Philadelphia. Now there are many meanderings of higher education and shared intellectual interest in a one time proximity at big 10 universities that brought us together. See, it makes me nervous to even say I drink water bottles. That's a story for another day, but our lives for the first three or so decades could not have been more different from one another. So to me, Philadelphia, like all large cities on the coasts is fast-paced, elitist space of danger, rats and filth. And to her the place of my birth, Nebraska, well Nebraska wasn't even actually in her vocabulary. She's aggressive and opinionated and frequently laments my Midwestern niceness and conflict avoidance. Early in our relationship, when I was driving home one holiday, I texted her to say I just crossed into Kansas, which though unstated meant that I was only a few short hours from home, in earnest, she told me, "Welcome home." When she got her first job in Minnesota, she had it confused with Michigan. She still refers to the vast majority of the landlocked United States as the middle and it's become our favorite exercise for me to place a US map in front of her and quiz her on the middle states and I think maybe she's about 70% at this point. Now, when I told her that I'd completed a draft of a book of essays and the essays were all written in second person, she balked, "I'm nothing like you. How am I or anyone supposed to relate to that?" After she said it, she paused, realizing it was too late to catch the words that had already exited her mouth. Now it's not that she's wrong. I mean you get where she's coming from, right? 90% of US Americans live in urban areas of the United States and most of those urban areas are not in the middle, but, and she came to this conclusion before I even had a chance to get defensive, there's something powerful about the way that the middle, the bread basket, the heartland, Middle America, constitutes so much about everyone's existence in these United States. The quintessential American in political discourse is so often not the blue blooded white elite in New England or the mixed race kid from Philadelphia or the naturalized citizen of color in New York or Miami or the environmentalist white vegan in California, the quintessential American lives somewhere in the middle, often rural America, the meat and potatoes Christians, the married parents who attend high school football games on Friday nights, the working class plumber or teacher or physician's assistant, "The quintessential American clings to their guns and their religion," as Obama infamously said. The quintessential American, this famed figure of US politics is a white, straight, heterosexual US citizen struggling to provide for their family, takes a single vacation to somewhere in driving distance each summer, and grills hot dogs on the 4th of July. These are the people I grew up around. They were my friend's parents, my teachers, my coaches, my local police officers. These are the people that are the butt of coastie's jokes and whether you like it or not, those that dictate the terms of the US imaginary itself. So what do you think? Are you persuaded? I've written a series of essays from the perspective of one who is not of these people in the sense that I'm not necessarily one of 'em, but I'm from these people. They were all I knew growing up and that fact continues to constitute how I understand the world, no matter how much I have raged against that worldview, no matter how different I am from it now, and no matter how much it is a worldview that hurt me and continues to inflict harm. I think in the polarized political times that we live in, you accepting this invitation to inhabit a worldview that may be very different from your own is not only worthwhile, but I think it's vital to any possibility of a shared future. But to return to one of the critics above, would you want to read a 200 page novel that forces you to be active the whole time? Despite my justifications, your answer to that may still very well be no. And if that's your final answer, by all means you can leave now. You can trash me on Twitter. You can refuse to buy this book when it comes out and still leave a shitty review on Amazon. But if you've made it this far, I ask that you give it a chance, this experiment in thinking of politics and the self otherwise. All right, so now I'll dig into some snippets from some of the other essays. There's only one place in your hometown to fill up a gallon water filled with filtered water and today that machine is out of order. You hate to grab an extra plastic gallon but you hate the taste of the water at your parents' place more. Water from a too shallow well your dad dug 40 years ago when they moved out here to start a life. So you grab a fresh gallon, a 12 pack of non-alcoholic beer for your pops and head over to the checkout. There are only three checkout lanes in your hometown grocery store and this is the last store remaining. The one you preferred growing up closed down some years after you graduated high school. The building still stands there. The old food pride sign, which covered the Jack and Jill's sign before it both long gone. This grocery store, the one that still remains was always more expensive, probably only pennies more, but those pennies mattered growing up and it's too small there with tight aisles and a tiny selection of everything from fresh produce to laundry detergent to cigarettes. The big bodied white woman who checks you out is named Courtney, according to her name tag. She's pleasant to you, tells you she's sorry about the water machine, that she's not sure what's wrong with it because she just started her shift, might just be out of water. You confirm with her that it's the only place in town to fill a jug. The white man in front of you is buying his dinner for the night, a package of hamburger patties wrapped in plastic, a sack of frozen tater tots, a couple bags of string cheese and a bottle of Sunny Delight. You loved that stuff when you were a kid. Courtney knows him, calls him Jared. He shoots the breeze with her while she drags his items over the scanner and loads them into the flimsy plastic bag. They share pleasantries. He notices the NA beer on the conveyor belt beside you. "That's probably a good idea, isn't it? When it's hot and you want beer, but you really don't need the alcohol?" You're wearing a KN95 mask, one of your dad's camouflage hats and mirrored aviator sunglasses, even though you don't need them inside. You're the only person in a store wearing a mask, the only person you've seen anywhere in rural Nebraska with one on. You're happy to have the disguise because even though you haven't lived in this town for more than 25 years, it's common for someone to recognize you and you're not in the mood to be recognized. In this place, you're always waiting for something to happen, some recognition from a vague acquaintance, a disapproving look at your mask or your hairy legs or a conversation you're just not interested in having. "It is for my old man," you tell him, your Nebraska accent seemingly as thick as it always was, "Says it's the only one of them worth drinking, tastes just like a regular beer." "I wonder how they do that," Jared ponders, "Hopefully don't pack it full of chemicals." Jared is tall and thin probably in his early 30s and he wears a well worn red MAGA hat. You think it's curious that he's concerned about chemicals given the number of chemicals that farmers dump into the ground to get a high yield on their crops? You don't know if he's a farmer, but there's a good possibility that he is in this town. "Hard to say," you offer. Jared grabs his dinner, tells you and Courtney to have a good rest of your day. Courtney asked for your ID to buy the NA beer. "I know it doesn't have alcohol in it, but I still have to check." "Oh, there's a little bit in it," you tell her and she looks at you like that makes no sense, but she doesn't protest. You thank her. Grab your items and head for the door. You pass the mother of one of your sister's best friends from high school. As you leave, she greets you like she'd greet anyone else, but thankfully your disguise works and you avoid further pleasantries. As you walk to your car, you realize that you haven't actually seen anyone wearing a MAGA hat unless they've been on TV or part of an anti-abortion protest outside the Plant Parenthood in Austin. You know it's not unusual here in rural Nebraska, but you're still sort of taken aback by the boldness of it all amid the ongoing hearings to lay out a case against Donald Trump for the January 6th, 2021 attacks on the capitol. But then you remember guys like Jared think the whole thing is just a witch hunt, part of the big steel, in any way, they're not airing the hearings on Fox News. You decide to go across the street for gas at the Fill and Chill station, which used to be called Uncle Neil's. Your first job was at the Uncle Neil's Deli when you were 14, you had to arrive at 6:00 AM to start the deep fat fryers for the gizzards and burritos and french fries people would start ordering mid-morning and pull the pre-made packages of breakfast items for the early rush. You made just over $3 an hour at that job and you'd leave every day stinking of grease. You liked the lady who ran the cash register, Stephanie, the mother of one of your classmates who also worked the deli and who walked with a limp after her older brother accidentally shot her with one of his dad's guns left unlocked. This place smells exactly the same way it did 30 years ago. The layout is more or less the same too except the aisles that used to hold the movie rentals had been replaced with some booths for people who eat at the taco joint that replaced the deli. You wonder if you're trying too hard when you think that this store is a metaphor for the town. When you go to pay for the gas, you think about telling the new cashier that you used the work here as a kid and that the place smells just the same, but when you get to the counter, she looks at you with mild hostility, steps away from you like you're contagious. So you just tell her the pump number and she rings you up with no further words exchanged. You spent the morning sitting outside with your parents surround the fire pit your pops carved from an old propane tank beneath the thick umbrella of deep green trees by their house. You're trying to get your mom to walk with you, just a short walk up and back on the long gravel lane. Her body is failing her, a hip and a knee replacement last year. Now bursitis in the other hips, some sciatic on her lower back. She's got rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis to boot. She's in a lot of pain. You try to tend to her and give her the kind of attention it seems your father isn't capable of. It's not that he doesn't care for her or tend to her because he does, but he does it without any compassion. Like the pain in her aging body is an afterthought to the menial chores her condition requires him to perform, but he thinks of himself as the epitome of compassion. You haven't tried to give him the compassion talk on this trip home because you've tried several times before and he just insists in that way he does by talking faster and louder than you, that he is the most compassionate person he knows. Old dog, new tricks, it's a thing with him. And anyway, this family, as much as it's changing with each passing year is completely entrenched, not only in not speaking the truth to one another's face, but to insist that doing so is a bad thing. It's better to keep the peace, which just means talking shit behind everyone else's back. Your dad puts it to you in the form of a critique, something he's never been shy about with you despite it rarely if ever giving it to the others. Your problem is you don't have a filter and that this is why your younger sister has not only not spoken to you in almost a year, but she's apparently blocked to you on her phone. You're careful not to get heated with him when he tells you this because that just feeds into his narrative of you that you're hotheaded and elitist and you don't have kids and you live 800 miles away so you don't understand and you just need to learn to keep your mouth shut. You recount to him precisely the conversation that led to your sister's behavior that in one of her anxiety ridden moments about the environment, you told her the truth that having kids is the worst thing you can do for the environment. Now both of your parents surely feeling defensive of their choice to have five kids take her side. I mean you get that telling her the truth that having kids is the worst thing for the environment was a bit insensitive, especially since she was pregnant with her fourth child at the time. But you've since apologized several times. "It's ridiculous and immature," you tell your parents, "If you can't speak the truth during a conversation about something you both care about in a strong relationship, then that's no relationship, that's bullshit." You get your hardheadedness from your dad and you used to get your conflict avoidance from your mom. You're growing out of that though and you moved away and what used to seem so normal now just seems pathological. You can tell the conversation is going nowhere so you add a last point letting them know that you have talked at length with your siblings who are mental health professionals and they both agree that this mode of communication is a problem. So your dad changes the subject, you let him do it as your mom shifts awkwardly on her sore hip. Your parents' old farmhouse has three modest bedrooms upstairs. Your childhood bedroom, which became your youngest sister's bedroom after you left home is now the toy room for all the grandkids. The larger bedroom was the sister who's not talking to you's bedroom and now has a window air conditioner and the world's most uncomfortable bed. When you come home to visit, you used to stay at one of your sister's houses, but neither have spare rooms any longer and well, one is not talking to you, so for the first time in a long time you're sleeping over at mom and dad's in the room with the the uncomfortable bed. The room is full of ghosts or bad energy, something that keeps you awake. That first night you're sweating intensely because for some reason you've never been able to sleep upstairs without the covers over your head. You've always been scared of the upstairs. You know rationally that this is because of what happened in the third bedroom. Your parents got this house for free from your mom's first cousin shortly after his wife blew her head off in there. He was gonna burn it to the ground, but your parents needed a home. When they moved it on the back of a semi-truck trailer, the two miles from his homestead to the bear ground where your parents will build theirs, you remember seeing it travel slowly down the gravel road. It was a big event and you were four. You knew she killed herself in the house even if most everyone in the family said it was a drunken accident committed by this expert Mark's woman the night after you'd all spent Thanksgiving together. Your parents didn't believe it was accidental. You don't know what the truth is and you hardly knew her or remember her now. But either way, having a childhood bedroom across the hall from where a woman killed herself is probably scary for most kids and you had a tendency toward fear the way it was. Your parents swore you to secrecy as your other siblings came along so you would be the only one to carry the secret until your youngest sister was about to graduate high school. What you didn't know until the secret was fully revealed was that when your young mother opened the door to that room in a house that was now hers, her cousin hadn't cleaned up the mess at all, blood stained the walls and empty mattress from the tragedy months earlier. You're still not sure how mom managed to clean that mess with a bucket and rags without you noticing, but she did as she was 29 then. So you've always been unnerved by the upstairs and now as an adult alone and plagued by your own ghost, you can't sleep worth a shit. The first night, every moment of REM sleep you're able to muster is terrorized by dreams of your ex. The next night you try again and you have a nightmare so real that you sleep the rest of the week on the couch in the fully lit living room beside your snoring mother who sleeps in her recliner. In the dream, you're startled awake by something that shakes the bed. In the dream you jolt up and everything appears just as it should, but you look to the door and see from the crack beneath it that the light has been turned off. You never turn the hall light off. You're instantly terrified and angry with your father, assuming he cut the light, you race from the room and fly down the stairs with a lightning speed you'd perfected as a kid always too eager to get back downstairs. You run into your parents' bedroom on the first floor and slam yourself on the bed waking your father, chastising him for shutting off the light. He tells you it wasn't him. It's at this point in the dream that you are startled awake for real. You jolt up just as you had in the dream but more disoriented in waking life. You look to the door and see from the crack beneath it that the light is on. You're not exactly relieved as you realize it was just a dream, but it is better than the alternative. You lie back down, cover your head and toss and turn to the remaining hours of the night. When you go downstairs in the morning, your dad asks you how you slept. You tell him the truth. Say that upstairs needs . The whole house needs one though they don't like to talk about it. Over the years when your dad has been in the basement refilling shells for as many guns in the man cave, he hears someone walking slowly around the kitchen above. When he hears this, he's learned not to check whether your mom is there because she never is. Guns are a way of life in your family. They always have been. Your dad had a BB gun in your hand before any other tool. You never took to it as much as your brothers did though, the only living thing you ever shot was a toad and you felt so badly watching the blood beat up on its head that you were distraught and lost interest in any possibility of a hunting trip with dad. But you've never lived anywhere in your adult life without a gun. Your dad is inclined to be a more or less single issue, Second Amendment voter. But outside of voting for Bush over Gore, an act no one has ever let him live down, when he gets to the ballot box, he always votes for Democrats even though he is worried they're gonna steal his guns. His analysis is relatively simple. If the military and police have guns, then the citizenry must have the right to bear arms in equal force. When you tell him that even his AR is no match for a missile or a tank, he tells you that you're going to the extreme. But then he says your example is even more evidence for why the ordinary man must have access to whatever weapons he deems necessary for self-protection. "This is especially the case for people of color," he says. It's on this last point where you find convergence because you're against the military and the police. And since the state doesn't do its job for the people, especially people of color, you can hardly think of a good reason for the state as we know it to exist. It's on this premise that as a feminist, a woman of color, you've always kept your shooting skills sharp and never disavowed the right to bear arms in its entirety. Because you drove home this trip, you could carry all three of your handguns with you to shoot them with your dad and have him clean them for you afterwards. He loves it when you bring your weapons home and before you even arrive, he's decided which other guns you'll shoot and has target set at 25 yards for most of the arsenal and 100 yards for the AR. Although you don't admit this to most people, shooting an assault rifle is thrilling. You feel a thrill when you shoot any gun, a thrill tempered only by your fear of what the weapon can do and your commitment to absolute gun safety. Absolute except for the fact that at your house you can't go out back to shoot at your makeshift range without a beer in hand. No one's drunk when you shoot or even slightly buzzed, but shooting an array of guns while sipping a beer is the tradition. It's the only exception to absolute gun safety. Dad starts every shooting session with a reminder of the three rules for handling a weapon. Treat every gun as if it's loaded, never point a gun at anyone, and do not touch the trigger until you're ready to fire. At 25 yards, whether it's with your 22 revolver, your 357 snub nose revolver, or your semiautomatic nine millimeter Luger, you only hit the target about 50% of the time. When you walk up to 10 yards, what your dad calls the actual range for which you need accuracy to protect yourself in a home invasion, you hit the target better than 90% of the time. Even the times you miss the paper circle, you still hit the box it's taped to. You're a decent shot. At 100 yards, peering through the AR scope down to the fence line where the target is taped to a box in front of a large pile of old tires to stop the speeding bullets, you're precise as long as you shoot slowly. If you fire rapidly, your aim falters. And unless you're truly an expert, everyone's aim does. You're more invested in accuracy than the thrill of rapid fire. But you always take the opportunity to fire a couple rounds off and fast succession. The first time you shot an AR, it was the gun of your uncle, the felon. He shouldn't have an AR, any gun, but he has several and you don't ask how. His felony comes from drug trafficking in his 20s or so you've been told, and he's been free of being found out for his law violations ever since, protected by his whiteness, his dad's money and his good guy personality. Your uncle's AR has a nicer setup than your dad's, which you learn on this trip dad occasionally uses for deer hunting. Your uncle's AR has a fancy scope and it rests on a tripod attached near the thin barrel. This allows you to steady the weapon and hit the target with precision. You've shot guns that jerk and that quality is especially true of many rifles. The AR hardly jerks at all despite its power. You secure the butt tightly into your shoulder and when you pull the trigger, the butt pushes into you like a strong hug. Nothing more. You get why people like shooting it. You shoot for more than an hour with your dad stopping between sets to check out the targets and analyze whether a particular gun is shooting too high or too low. Your dad can do this for hours on end. It's not lost on you that you are almost late for a Zoom meeting at your university about how to support those who survived the Uvalde shooting because you were out back shooting with your dad. You ran up to your computer for the meeting, hands still stinking of gun powder and with tiny flux of black residue still stuck to your sweaty cheeks. You feel like an asshole. There's no other way to feel in this moment, but you also know that shooting with your dad and debating with him about gun control while doing it, it is one of the only times throughout your life when you genuinely feel close to your dad. These are the times when you don't fight him. Instead letting his expertise guide you and you truly learn from him things you would never know on your own. It's intimacy with him at its purest level and you refuse to give it up. Some dick murdered 19 kids and two teachers in a small Texas town called Uvalde. It's 82% Latino with a $41,000 annual median income. This on the heels of 10 Black folks murdered by some dick in a buffalo grocery store on the heels of, on the heels of, on the heels of, it never ends. Only your friend Jesus Valles, a poet and artist who sees more keenly than anyone else has anything poignant to say. Near the end of the lament on his Facebook page he wrote, "This morning, I looked at the sweet faces of some of the now gone. They're teachers and I needed this world to end. Here's the fine line I live with. There are those of us who want an apocalypse, a revelation, an uncovering that will end the world as we know it so another is possible, a new knowing that would make a way to more life. Then there are those who would want an Armageddon, a great suffering, calamitous and made of fire and bursting flesh because they have been assured this is how their God will free them from people they see as aberrations." You wish you disagreed with him, that things weren't so stark, but you don't, and they are. His diagnosis is dizzying, enraging and you don't know what to do with it. But even your anger feels contrived, manufactured, as if it too has gotten stuck in supply chain bottlenecks. It shouldn't be sadder when 10 year old kids die, but you guess it is for you. Some narrative you bought into against your better judgment that youth is innocent and precious and unjaded. And you can remember being 10, what it was like in fourth grade. Your teachers were white. I mean all the teachers were white, but that year you liked them all very much. You had Mrs. H who was pigeon toed and snorted when she laughed at her own jokes. Mrs. B, your good friend's stoic mom who seemed to find you mildly charming, and Mrs. R, who is gray haired and widowed, who took your intelligence seriously, lived in a condo near school and is now long dead. In your school, fourth grade was the first year in C.L. Jones Middle School, the first year out of East Elementary, the first year in proximity to the teenagers in eighth grade. It was the first year you felt a little grown up. The tiger beat posters of that soon-to-be Christian fanatic Kirk Cameron covering your bedroom walls, your bedroom you'd only recently started sleeping in alone through the nights, at least mostly. It was the time when you still thought maybe you wanted to be an astronaut when you grew up, when you thought that the nine year gap between you and Mike Seaver, Kirk's character on "Growing Pains" was not that big. You don't actually remember much about fourth grade. Your understanding of politics was limited to the fact that you lost student council to a boy named Mark by one vote. It was the only year you lost student council and you lost because your best friend and campaign manager who made posters for you that said Vote for Karma, she's a farmer, a slogan that could have worked in Central Nebraska, voted for Mark instead of you. You remember hearing that the stock market crashed that year of this thing called the Iran-Contra affair, and Oliver North and John Poindexter being all over the news. But to you, Poindexter was the genius nephew to the professor in one of your favorite cartoons, "Felix the Cat." Fourth grade was a glorious time before too many boy crazy hormones consumed your friends, before boobs and team sports, before middle school band and term papers and algebra. It was still squarely in the time when you got to be a kid. When Judy Blume's "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing" seemed to encapsulate your woe so perfectly. Another of Blume's books, "Just as Long as We're Together" about middle school girl friendships and their challenges had just come out. You loved that book so much, you still have a copy. All things considered, you were lucky in fourth grade even though your family was on food stamps and you got free lunches, you had a home and a car good enough to get your mom around town and these were still the days when because of his lack of seniority, your dad worked on the road during the nice parts of each year before being laid off for the winter, which meant that nine out of 12 months were just mom and you kids at home. Dad had a temper, so it was better that way. You could still crash storytime with your little brothers before bed. You were the only Mexican American kid in your class. But in fourth grade, the others' racism wasn't yet fully formed. And since your pops was never around with his black hair and brown skid, you were just a tan kid that the others envied in the winter months when they'd grown pasty. And no one had yet learned the epithets, beaner, wet back, and spic, that would haunt you in later years. Yeah, fourth grade was in your memory anyway, quite idyllic. Your little sister was born that year. Ronald Reagan was president. And while you knew from listening to your parents that he was bad for poor people, you didn't know why. You hadn't even heard of AIDS then, you had no sense of the Israeli occupation or that the Palestinians launched their first Intifada that year. Even though your friends now joke that your generation is the one that made it okay to seek treatment for your mental health, you had no idea that the FDA approved Prozac for the market during your fourth grade year. The closest you'd come to losing your innocence or being depressed was watching The Challenger explode on an elementary classroom TV in 1986. You drew a lot of space shuttles after that, but you didn't get the magnitude of it or that that teacher Krista McCullough wasn't coming back. You fashioned yourself as a girl version of Alex P. Keaton from the show "Family Ties," not realizing then that he was a piece of shit character meant to indoctrinate the youth with his bromance with Reagan. You just liked his confidence. That was the year you decided it was cool to use your middle initial as part of your official name just like him. And you've carried the R ever since. You wonder what hair-brained ideas about their identities, those now dead kids in Uvalde had about themselves, what careers they thought they might like to try. What heart throbs they Scotch-taped to their walls or their 21st century versions of trapper keepers. Your mom was 33 when you were in fourth grade, her Jesus year, which means nothing really except that it's a point in time to compare your fledgling adult accomplishments to his and feel bad about your immaturity and lack of ambition. Your mom seemed to lack neither at the time, though you're sure she felt she lacked a little of both. You keep looking at the faces of those dead kids and you can't imagine from your adult vantage point what their parents must be experiencing. How your mom would've crumbled beneath the weight of losing her fourth grader, even if she somehow would've had to keep it together for her other three little kids. You read a story about the husband and one of the dead teachers, a father of four who died two days after she did from a heart attack. School shootings weren't a thing you heard about when you were in fourth grade. The movie "Heathers," which glorified young white male angst turned high school violence in which you still secretly love wasn't even out yet. You vaguely remember the Paducah Kentucky school shooting. You remembered it happening when you were in high school, but you were already in college. Columbine was when you were in college too. You knew a couple kids who went to that high school and recall watching the coverage with them on the TV in your dorm lobby, but you didn't even get it then and you were 21. You're of the generation that was too young for classroom cold war drills and too old for the school shooter ones. You experience all of this at a distance without the palpable knowledge of that fear. So all you have to reckon with this shit is some angered about gun control despite the loaded handgun you keep in your nightstand, a steadfast analysis of white supremacy even as your friend, the cultural critic, says that analysis has grown unequipped, and the raw human emotion you try desperately not to grow numb from, which is watching massacres happen to unsuspecting people living ordinary lives over and over and over and over again. You're among those who want an apocalypse, a revelation, an end to this world so that another one is possible. You fear that those who prefer Armageddon, the side of a final battle between good and evil fought with the tools of their Second Amendment rights are larger or at least louder. You think about how Kirk Cameron, your fourth grade crush and a young atheist turned evangelical Christian, transitioned from "Growing Pains" to "Left Behind," a series of mediocre films based on mediocre books about the biblical apocalypse from the Book of Revelation and the resulting arm struggles we might think of as Armageddon. You think about how he's become a fringe zealot to you and a patriotic warrior to others. How just weeks before the Uvalde massacre, Kirk announced his new documentary, "The Homeschool Awakening," which declares public schools as public enemy number one. You think about the intertwining of these ideologies, pro-gun and anti-public ideologies that a fourth grader can't begin to grasp. And yet that culminate not just in a murderous classroom but in explanations premised in good and evil and calls to reduce the safety of children to arm teachers and school guards or the homes of their mothers. When you were in fourth grade, almost every night your legs throbbed from growing pains. You'd ride on the couch as one of your parents slathered your shins and knees in Bengay to soothe the ache, assuring you that you'd grow out of this. Well, there's no growing out of this collective pain. No soothing balm, no height you'll reach causing the ache to subside. I mean, we can't even agree on the source, let alone the solve. You are among the aberrations that those seeking an Armageddon hope to eradicate. You too want an end to this world, to this pain so that something else is possible. But what is possible when their hope includes no future for you and you're not sure what future you can imagine for them? Thanks.

- [Audience Member] No tomatoes.

- Thank you, I appreciate that.

- Thank you. We forgot the tomatoes.

- That's good. I appreciate that.

- Thank you for that. It's powerful, it's great. It's beautiful. I'm working on a similar project, so it was very inspiring to listen to that. I didn't expect it. The moment that most impacted me, and I know with we were looking at each other is the the gun moment, right? Because it's probably the least, the thing I least expected from you.

- Yeah.

- And yet and yet, yes right. And then it makes sense and it's beautiful to be able through that literary style, expose our contradictions in ways that make them human and understandable and I don't wanna say normalize them, but just makes them grounded in daily experiences because it would be so difficult to explain the same thing in a theoretical book, right?

- Totally.

- So thank you for that, for exposing yourself and for giving space for all of us to expose this how we are on the two sides when there are binaries, when there are goods and bads. And to go back to the end of your chapter, we cannot exist for them and we cannot see what future they can have. And then we go back to, you go back to that divide, right? The end of that chapter, which you keep crossing throughout the book. So it's just a comment as people gather their thoughts.

- Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you. I identified hopefully what I'm trying to do, but yeah, the gun stuff is like super awkward, especially to an audience like you all in Massachusetts, I assume that's not most of your experience but I've tried to get at, I mean, my parents are very liberal in their way, my mom's white, my dad's Mexican American, so they're mixed race in rural Nebraska, which is very, Nebraska as you might imagine it. But I think there's, what I'm trying to do is just kind of that like use that place to push out some of these tensions, see if there's ways we can connect with each other better. So yeah, thank you for your comments. Everyone wants cider.

- You talk more about the 1980s as a historical moment that you were reflecting on there. And I was thinking about it in relationship to where the frame, the prologue where we were talking about neoliberalism. The 1980s are such a key moment for the growth of neoliberalism and all of the economic and political movements that come out of it. And you reflect on that in some ways obliquely in the second half of the piece. And I'm just curious, do you think of yourself as a scholar kind of born of the '80s?

- Yeah, I mean, I think of myself as like a baby gen Xer. You know, I'm still born in the late '70s so I think I still get to count it, unlike you people born in their '80s. Yeah. So I mean that's I think where a lot of my cultural references come from and I think it's interesting to, I have a lot of cognitive memories of the '80s, so, unlike the '70s, which I don't remember at all. And so I think it is interesting to kind of think of the innocence of those experiences, but actually what was being formed culturally and I think like have gone back and watched old episodes of "Family Ties" and it's like, what was I thinking? Like how did I think Alex P. Keaton was like this cool dude, but that was his total point, right? Was to, you know, get kids to relate to him and like he, you know, he had like a picture of Ronald Reagan, I think on his nightstand. Is that right? So just like, but it was, you know, he was like this relatable character. And so I think thinking through those things that seemed kind of ordinary, but how they were just planting seeds culturally in that we really see come to fruition in the '90s is interesting. So yeah, '80s are an interesting time to think about. I've been thinking about them in my scholarship in a much different way in writing about the AIDS pandemic. So this is a little bit lighter in some ways and not in others. Yeah.

- I don't know whether I'm gonna put this together. So while there's so much in this that resonated with me, and I want to just thank you for the opportunity to sit and kind of be in the space of the narrative that you shared. I think that as you were using the you, it really was interesting to me as a listener because you're saying your mom was white, your dad's Mexican American. So I'm white, my husband's Mexican American and my son was a mall's major in your department. So thinking about the way in which I think one of the challenges and there are many things in family, right? And in being a parent or being a child. But I think one of the ways in which what you shared really connected me and expanded the way I think about things is the way in which it evoked the complexity of parenting or parenting or being a child in this complex place that is America across those boundaries, right? Which are very policed and very set. So even though I'm in a different position within that triad, I'm the white mom of the Chicano kid, I don't know, that really meant a lot to me. I don't know if I have a question. It just, I think that it took me a minute as I'm not a, you know, rhetoric person, so it took me at the beginning I think that the you and the I, I was trying to figure my way through, but I feel like it did something different, right? Like it just was sort of unexpected. I'm not entirely sure what it did, but for me it did open up those ways of seeing in a way that I think living within that complexity for now two decades, it takes time to do that, right? To think back to others' experience. So I really appreciate the you in that. So, so thank you.

- Thank you so much for your comments and thank you for wearing your longhorn gear. I appreciate that. I feel, no, I did feel home right away when I saw that you had that on. So, and I'm glad that your kid was a mall's major as well. I hope it served them well, but yeah, it'd be fun to talk more thinking about like the different relationships to that complexity. I mean, I talk to my mom about this stuff all the time and like, what did you do mom, when we were dealing with racism and like, you're the white mom coming into the school and how would that shift things? But she's working class and so it's complicated. Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah, we should talk more. Thank you.

- Hi Karma, I'm Sheila. Thank you so much. That was really incredible to listen to. And I have a lot of residences because I grew up in Nebraska too.

- My condolences.

- I was born in 1970. I am a real gen, not a baby Gen Xer. I remember the Jack and Jill in Lincoln and my dad is Indian, my mom is white. And I think to your point, or at some point my mom asked me if I identify as a person of color, which is an interesting thing to have a, you know, that's the way we grew up in a very white setting. So I think, I'm not sure exactly what my question is, except that I always have so much just admiration and astonishment for people who are progressive and live in Nebraska still and stand up for what they believe in. And I remember I had an English teacher who put a black teardrop on his shirt that he wore every day when Ronald Reagan was elected. And I think he kind of saw the writing on the wall of what this was going to lead to. And the rest of us, we were juniors in high school and we were like, "Oh, what is that?" But I just think about there's something about existing in the middle and being invested in the middle and still being your full self and not retreating to the coasts. And yeah, I think we have a lot to learn from those people who are there doing it as well as from having some relationship and some more openness or finding ways to be in conversation with the people who can't imagine us in their future and we don't know what to do with them in our future.

- So thank you.

- Yeah, thank you for sharing your experience. I'd also love to talk to you more about it. But yeah, I mean I've actually, that's one of the things I've been doing right now is just kind of reading a lot of memoirs from the Midwest just to see how other people are thinking through it, what their experiences were. And there's not a lot of like, it's mostly like white queer stuff, predominantly, some Indigenous stuff. And so, yeah, I do think there's something there. I haven't quite worked it all out yet, but I think there's something there. So thank you.

- Well, let's leave here thanking Professor Chavez.

- Thank you.

Biography: Karma R. Chávez

Karma R. Chávez is the Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and Department Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. She is co-editor of Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (New York University Press, 2021); Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation (University of Illinois Press, 2020); Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method (Penn State Press, 2016) and Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies (SUNY Press, 2012); and author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (University of Illinois Press, 2013); Palestine on the Air (University of Illinois Press, 2019); and The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (University of Washington Press, 2021).

Biography: Jason Moran

Pianist and composer Jason Moran has established himself as a risk taker and trendsetter for new directions in jazz. Since 2000, Moran and the other members of his trio The Bandwagon have dazzled audiences at venues worldwide. Moran has also composed for Alonzo King LINES Ballet; conceived a jazz and skateboarding collaboration; written the film score for Selma; and paid homage to two legendary pianists in his Blue Note album All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller and his multimedia program In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall 1959. Moran is a faculty member at the New England Conservatory, the Kennedy Center’s artistic director for jazz and a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship (“Genius Grant”).

At Amherst, Moran will present James Reese Europe and the Harlem Hellfighters: The Absence of Ruin. Moran’s multidisciplinary program features his Bandwagon bandmates—bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits—plus a seven-piece horn section, contributions from artist/writer/filmmaker John Akomfrah and visual materials from acclaimed cinematographer Bradford Young. It’s Moran’s response to Orlando Patterson’s concept of the “absence of ruin”—a musical monument to a vanishing African American history.

Transcript: The Black Feminist Cosmos

- Good evening. Thanks for joining us tonight. My name's Darryl Harper, and I'm the Director of the Center for Humanistic Inquiry and one of the partners helping to plan the Presidential Scholar series. This is our final event in this year's presidential colloquium on race and racism. And I'm really honored to introduce our speaker, our guest tonight, visiting presidential scholar, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. In residence here for the week, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein has been meeting with students, faculty, and staff, broadening and enriching our community conversation about physics, science more broadly, and the cultures in which scientific work unfolds. I imagine that many of you attended her astrophysics lecture earlier today, and I hope that many of you will have the chance to participate in one or more of the upcoming events programmed for her week on campus, including class visits, opportunities for informal coffees and lunches. As your questions are an important part of tonight's event, I encourage you to use the cards and pencils placed in the book holders in the pews, and write your questions for Dr. Prescod-Weinstein as the evening progresses. They'll be collected and brought up to the stage as we enter the Q and A portion of the event. And let me also note that this evening's talk is being recorded, and it'll be posted online. And now to welcome our guest, assistant professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in women's and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein is a researcher in theoretical physics with a focus on cosmology, neutron stars and dark matter. She's also a researcher in black feminist, science, technology and society studies. Nature Magazine recognized her as one of 10 people worldwide who shaped science in 2020. Essence Magazine has recognized her as one of 15 black women who are paving the way in STEM and breaking barriers. A leading physicist of her generation, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein is one of fewer than 100 black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos vibrant, buoyantly nontraditional, and grounded in black feminist traditions. Her widely acclaimed first book, "The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred" published in 2021 articulates scientific questions about dark matter and space time while also interrogating the discriminatory sociocultural systems that currently support and at times still define scientific practice. "The Disordered Cosmos" was knee best book of the year by Publishers Weekly, Smithsonian Magazine and Kirkus, and it has been a finalist for many awards, including the 2022 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Award. In addition to her work as a researcher and teacher, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein is a columnist for New Scientist, and Physics World, and a co-founder of Particles for Justice. She received the 2017 LGBT Plus Physicist Acknowledgement of Excellence Award for her contributions to improving conditions for marginalized people in physics, and was also the recipient of the 2021 American Physical Society Award. She was co-organizer of the 2020 Strike for Black Lives, an online campaign for researchers around the world demanding that academic and STEM institutions confront racism, science, and anti-black racism throughout society. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein's conversation partner tonight will be professor Sheila Jaswal, associate professor of chemistry, member of the Biophysics and Biochemistry Program, and co-founder in collaboration with Amherst students of the Being Human in STEM initiative. H-STEM is a model for inclusive practices in STEM education, that strives to foster a more inclusive, supportive collaborative framework in the science classroom, lab and beyond. Since its founding at Amherst in 2016, H-STEM has been adopted at colleges and universities across the country. Please join me in welcoming Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and Sheila Jaswal for a conversation on the black feminist cosmos.

- Hi, Chanda.

- Hello.

- Chanda was telling me that she didn't even tell her how to use the microphone.

- I didn't say that. Wow, we're starting with the lies already.

- There we go. So actually, it's really exciting to have you here visiting Amherst because one of the first resources that my students and I found, in that begin beginning semester of Being Human in STEM was your piece in Medium from January, 2016, "Intersectionality as a Blueprint for Postcolonial Scientific Community Building". So that really gave us a lot to start with. And I've been following and learning from your work since then. And I'm really excited to be here because about a month ago, my dad, who's a theoretical physicist and immigrant from India and activist in Lincoln, Nebraska, emailed me a book review from Physics Today and said, "You should read this book." And I said, "Dad, I have this book." So, it was really fun to hear about your research on axiom particles today. And I am definitely persuaded that there should be funding for cosmic probes of dark matter. So let me know where to sign up to sign the petition. So, what I really loved in reading your book was how beautifully the science and your love of the science are woven together. And you also unflinchingly expose how racism is woven into not just the history of science, but how we practice science today. And therefore, it is woven into the fabric of not just your journey as a queer black gender woman in physics, and my journey as a queer biracial woman in chemistry, but in all of our journeys, including those who have never experienced a microaggression or an entire STEM education without once being taught by someone with their skin color. So, identifying an unraveling racism from the fabrics of our discipline is not just the work of you with your awakening catalyzed by the Mauna Kea Telescope conflict, or me with my awakening catalyzed by the students of the student protest Amherst Uprising, but it's really the work of every single last one of us. So, I would like to ask you, since you've been involved in this kind of work since 2014, in what ways have you witnessed our STEM communities coming to that realization that racism and science is the responsibility of all of us, and that addressing it is as urgent as doing the science itself.

- Oh, this is a big question. So I would say... So I started thinking about these issues and working on them when I first got involved in the National Society of Black Physicists in 2003, 2004. And so, I will generally say that my feeling about this is a feeling of long and deep frustration. Just to pick one thing, we've known since around 2006, 2007, that the number of black students in the United States who were earning bachelor's degrees in physics was going down. So we've known for a long time at this point. And members of the National Society of Black Physicists started sounding the alarm about this as soon as the numbers became clear. For a long time, people just completely ignored it. The American Physical Society ignored it. And part of what people were ignoring is the numbers were dropping because Historically Black Colleges and Universities were closing their physics departments and predominantly white institutions like Amherst, like the University of New Hampshire were not picking up the slack. There was no interest in picking up the slack. It took really another decade and a lot of fighting and organizing to get the American Physical Society to create the TEAM-UP task force that eventually put together a report saying, okay, the numbers are dropping for African-American students. And that's how they framed it. I would have said black. They said African American. What should we do about it? And so they put together a report about the drop, but that was really like 10 years. It was about that time scale. And really, it was just to get people to pay attention to this one small piece, which is just the number of people who are earning bachelor's degrees. On some level, yes, that involves if you read the TEAM-UP report, which I highly recommend, they're talking about conditions and all of these other questions, but that's calling on people to rethink the conditions. We haven't even actually reached the point where those changes are happening. It's just a report recommending the changes. So, my general feeling about it is this stuff is going way too slow, and I'm trying not to cuss.

- Please do. Well, maybe sort of to that point, that many in STEM who haven't had to live with the daily consequences of racism are fearful about saying the wrong thing, don't feel like they know enough to really weight into these conversations, and they haven't studied and read as you have, black studies, feminist studies, history of science, not to mention with keeping up on all these current ideas on Twitter. So, that's fear that people have. And on the other hand, we simply can't wait. As you say, this urgency is there and should have been there all the way along. So we can't wait until everybody feels ready and like they know the right things to say. And for myself, I'm reading, I'm learning, I'm having conversations. I'm always acknowledging that I'm not an expert, and I'm trying to embrace mistakes and learning from them. But I wonder if you could speak to how you make room for that, the fact that we're constantly learning, that we are never done, but yeah, we still have the responsibility to speak up when we can and take action.

- Yeah, so, I've been reflecting on this a lot, having made the transition to being faculty relatively recently. And that's an interesting sort of psychological experience because you go from being in this position where people kind of universally understand you as being relatively disempowered in academic spaces, to people imagining you as being incredibly empowered in academic spaces, to levels that are just completely unreasonable, particularly for a woman of color who is still an assistant professor. Although my impression is is that once you hit associate, some of those things don't go away, right? And so, there's a level of now grappling with people imagining me having power that I don't have. And at the same time, I actually do have some forms of power that I didn't have before, and feeling the need to pay attention to that persistently. So I think that that's part of it is consistently paying attention to what are the power dynamics in the room, and how is my relationship with that shifting as time goes on? As someone who was a student protestor, see, I was going to say is a student protestor, that's still very much who I am in my heart, right? When we were talking yesterday about the, I don't know how it's described the takeover of, the Amherst Uprising, the Amherst Uprising. I was asking questions about like the tactical decisions that had been made, like why was it in the library? Why was it in at the president's office? Which is what we did when I was an undergraduate at Harvard. One of the reasons that I ask that question is because I have to be aware that as time goes on, younger folks are rethinking tactics and making different tactical decisions than the ones that we made when we were students. And the task before me is to understand why those tactical choices are changing, and to learn from it and to figure out how in the position that I now hold with someone who holds some form of professor title, that that can make me better at what I do. So part of it, a piece of that really has to be being ready to ask why are the students doing this rather than reacting through the lens of I've done this and I know how it's done.

- Thank you. So, along the lines of that constant changing and taking stands and then maybe reevaluating, and it sounds like you're reevaluating your positionality as am I as are we all as we're moving through, but can you give us an example of when you may have taken a stand or made a mistake or a misstep and how you learned from that and how that has shifted, how you go forward?

- I have to think about this for a second. So I think like probably the missteps that I go over the most are the ones where I chose silence because I thought I had to, or I felt like I really needed to. And generally speaking, it's usually my own defense. I don't have as much difficulty defending other people, but there have been times when I have chosen silence and it stayed with me in ways that were deeply unhealthy. And I think one of the challenges that we are always facing, particularly those of us who experience marginalization or outsider status and decentering, is figuring out what will help us wake up with ourselves in the morning, go to bed with ourselves at night, and feel like we are who we really feel we are on the inside, on the outside. And so I think that the times when I chose silence, I was not being myself, and I had to live with the consequences. And so I think what I would say like generally is a rubric there, sometimes for people that is the right option, it's important to know what the right option for you is, and to also be generous and patient with yourself. I think my spouse who's sitting in the front, I think at the top of his list of complaints about me is that I am not patient with myself.

- Yes. So, yes, I know that about you now, no. So, this quote that I pulled out, "With this book, I hope to map out for myself and for others and understand that creating room for black children to freely love particle physics and cosmology," means radically changing both society and the role of physicists in it. So this really struck me because I feel like so many of the efforts to diversify science, that a lot of us well-meaning scientists think are going to solve the diversity problem is just get more kids excited about science and make opportunities for students to experience hands on science. And your book really shows that you were someone who already had the excitement and the commitment to science. And so if we think that, oh, we just need to get kids to see science like I do, and then they're going to love it like I do and they're going to excel like I do, that's not enough. And so, I feel like your book really helps blow up that myth that diversifying science is just about getting more children in marginalized communities excited, and we need to radically change ourselves and our disciplines and society. So my question is, what change can you envision that would make it possible for black students in science to thrive instead of survive?

- Yeah. So let's start with this idea of outreach, right? And so, since you mentioned, I keep up with things on Twitter, right? So a lot of people probably saw the recent Saturday Night Live sketch about the Amazon shopping experience with new technology and black people reacting to the technology. So, I guess it's Saturday Night Live, so you're supposed to find it funny. And I didn't like laugh once during that sketch for a variety of reasons. One, I think like the feeling of being threatened with violence, just like I'm not there yet with the ha ha about that. But there was also something that really bugged me about it, which is that they have a moment where all of these, like techno things are being said to a black woman, and she's just kind of reacting to it, like sure, whatever you're saying. And there are a couple of different ways of reading this, but the way that I read it first was the way that I imagined that certain white audiences were going to see it, which is like, she doesn't understand that techno bubble, she doesn't care about the techno bubble. She's concerned about how maybe it's going to harm her, but she doesn't understand what's being said, and she don't care. So, I posted about this on Twitter, and people were very upset with me about it because people were like, how dare you read that interpretation into it? And I was like, I was literally at a meeting last week where a black woman got up in front of a room of mostly white people and said that black people and black children in particular are not interested in space. And it made me realize that people outside of STEM are not aware of how pervasive it is in STEM, these narratives, that the real problem, big air quotes, is that we are just not interested. When there's a plethora of data to support our strong interest in space, going back to the January, 1967 issue of Essence Magazine with Nichelle Nichols on the cover, and inside the magazine, they hailed her as the first Negro astronaut. So, Nichelle Nichols for the young folks, she was Uhura in "Star Trek: The Original Series", and they called it a triumph of modern television over modern day NASA. They were real clear about our interest, right? Going back to 1967. So, I think the beginning of this question about thriving is reconfiguring the public narrative to match reality, which is to stop framing black people being interested in science as unusual, or like literally out of this world, right? And to start talking about how we are part of a long tradition of science. I think that this is a really key piece. As long as we are constructed as outsiders in science, we will feel like outsiders in science. And so part of it is constructing us through the lens of what the actual truth is, which is that we, I come from a long black tradition of science, and nobody ever said that to me, I had to come to that myself, and no black student should have to come to that themselves. So if you're a black student in science in the room, you're part of a long black tradition. And if anybody tells you otherwise, they're full of shit. Yes. So, that narrative... And the way that you said people don't want to hear your view of things like that Saturday Night Live sketch. And I think that's part of the whole challenge of reimagining STEM space and a societal space is that it's really hard to have voices like yours be welcomed when they're saying really hard things. And so, that's something that I really appreciate about you that you're always speaking up and speaking your mind.

- And getting myself into trouble.

- And getting yourself into trouble. I think, I wonder if part of this, you know, I come from a lineage of folks who went to college, both my parents were college professors. So I very much was steeped in what is it like to navigate this kind of environment. And as I mentioned, my dad was a theoretical physicist. So you could say that I came in with a lot of cultural capital to navigate the spaces and navigate these transitions that I continue to go through. It seems like you come from a long line of activists, organizers. Your mom co-founded the Black Women for Wages for Housework in the early 1970s, working for things just now are becoming kind of modern day asks or demands reparations. And so, how do you think having that as part of your lineage has helped you to become the person that you are today in science?

- Yeah, so the interesting thing about that is that I think I came in with cultural capital, and I wasn't aware of it as cultural capital. And I have many times wished that I had the kind that you had because in the academy, that works for you in ways that I had to learn to manipulate mine into a kind of capital. So I come from a family of K through 12 teachers on my mother's side, and on both sides of my family, I come from a family of organizers. So my grandmother was actually the founder of the Wages for Housework campaign. And that's how my parents met actually, is through doing that organizing work. It's also the case that my grandfather wrote several books, and is now actually the object of study in the academy. And he was certainly not popular in that way when I was a kid. And so I didn't have... I mean, he was like... The funny thing is at some point, someone said, well, like you grew up with like a famous grandfather. So like, didn't you grow up with money? And I was like, what part of Marxism do you not understand? Like, this is not how that works. I think it ended up working for me because when I started looking for vocabulary to describe the things that I was experiencing, that it was easier for me to find a place to start. And I think that just coming back to this question of thriving as well, one of the hardest things that we go through is not knowing how to describe what is happening to us, and therefore mis-describing it to ourselves. So I had a lot experiences as an undergraduate that I was internalizing a lot of like very ugly messages that I was getting, because I didn't know how to think about the structural differences, like the incredible wealth I was surrounded by at Harvard. I didn't have a vocabulary for what those differences meant, but I think that when I went looking for one as I matured and started to realize that I needed to situate this in structural context, it was easier for me to find that because of the narratives that I had learned through my family. And I think the other thing is that the hint, the idea that there was a structural context was very embedded. I was trained from basically age zero to look for what is structurally at work in the room. And it took me a minute to figure out that I had to apply that skill in physics. And I think it took me a minute to accept that I had to, 'cause I didn't want to. I think one of the things that I was attracted to physics for was because I thought this is going to be me getting to not think about the things that are broken in the world, and I didn't want it, right? And realizing that there was the only way out was through, that was a tough recognition and it was hard emotionally.

- Yeah, I think I really appreciate how you talk about the ability to indulge the curiosity and the imagination that we think we're going into when we choose the scientific problem that fascinates us, which I'm sure you just didn't run into protein folding early enough to realize how fascinating that is as a research question.

- I actually never ran into protein folding. So, someone messed up

- Oh my God. Okay. Let's, beers after!

- Someone blew in.

- So, I guess that tension between first, maybe it's part of our self care when we can just focus on the protein folding and read the articles. I got to go to a student journal club today that was like a super treat for me. But that tension is always there between wanting to just indulge and focus on the science, which is what the messages that we're getting. That's what you need to do, until 10. And then you can start thinking about these other things. So, yeah, and it sounds like from your book, that staying connected to that curiosity, that passion, that love is kind of what's driven you, but then also you were driven to write this book to give yourself the lessons and the map, and hopefully that other students will take from this to make sense of it. So I don't know really what the question is there, but the connection to curiosity and the fact that you can't just indulge that, like if you held other identities.

- I think a lot of the way that I think about the work that I'm doing with myself and positioning myself is shaped by Kiese Laymon, the brilliant novelist and memoirist and essayist and thinker, who talks a lot about... You see his social media posts. And one of the things he loves to talk about is writing and revising. And so I think a lot of times I'm writing and revising myself. And that was part of what I was doing with the book. And that's one of the reasons that I continue to write in the ways that I do. And it's also why whenever someone comes to me with a problem, somewhere in there, I'm probably going to tell them to write it down and write about it. I really think that writing yourself and writing to figure out what you think is a really important piece of it. As a theoretical physicist, I'm curious about how things work and I'm curious, I mean, I'm curious structurally. I'm a cosmologist. So I'm curious about the way that structure forms in the universe. I'm not sure the questions I'm asking are actually different. It's just applying the same question of what are these structures in different environments? In each setting I'm going in and asking, how does power work in the setting? And sometimes that question is a mechanical question. And sometimes that question is a people question. It's also the case that I see problems and my brain just tries to solve them, which can be totally like maddening if it's like, I don't know something on my computer isn't doing what it's supposed to do, that like I will screw up my schedule that afternoon, like trying to work it out, right? It may be a personality defect that has turned me into a physicist, right? So I think that that's the other thing is seeing problems and making a decision about what problems to apply myself to. And that can be a difficult question. At the end of the day, I realized that I could not stay in physics. And this was a realization I had in graduate school. I could not stay in physics if I did not create room for myself, and I could not stay with myself if I was the only person I created room for. So, it couldn't just be being out for me. I had to be out there for my community in some way, because that is what my values told me to do. There's a difficult balance there because I think that those of us... From my point of view, this is a community value that I grew up with a black community value that I grew up with. Black women in particular, I think, feel undue pressure to carry the whole community forward, and to be like the moral sign post at every stage, which is like deeply unfair. Like sometimes you just like want to eat your dinner and like watch "Abbott Elementary" and like go to bed. But it is a community value. And so we have to find ways to strike a balance between getting the work done for ourselves and getting the work done for others, and be aware that that's a constant negotiation. And that our community should be called to participate proactively and positively and supportively in that negotiation, which is sometimes telling you to rest, and then sometimes telling you, this is the time when you have to lift up your voice.

- So, in terms of community, a lot of the programs that are happening to try to encourage more students to persist in STEM are these bridge programs and cohort programs and mentoring programs. And I wonder how those fit in with the idea that we're not just trying to push more through a pipeline that's broken. We need to fix the pipeline. We need to think about the whole ecosystem. And is there a way that this cohort community thinking can help us do that?

- The thing that first comes to mind is my friend Corey Walch who's a Northern Cheyenne thinker and biologist, and he runs a program for people from underrepresented backgrounds at Iowa State University, specifically focused on people in STEM. And one of the things that I learned to say out loud from Corey was that we need to get away from the deficiency framework, where we are fixing students and telling students that they have deficiencies that need to be repaired, rather than thinking about what are the strengths that the students bring to the table, right? And so for example, the student in front of me seems to know a lot about organizing. How is that a form of capital that can serve her in the physics community, in the physics classroom? To see that as a strength that I'm bringing into the room as opposed to being like, well, she didn't actually take a real AP physics course, so, she's kind of behind, which was like how I experienced it at Harvard. So, I think regardless of what you call your program, how your program is structured, it has to come from a place of, we are creating space for you to do science. That should be the goal. And I think about this like before I wrote the book, I was talking to my agent, I got into some low residency MFA programs, masters of fine arts for writing. And I was talking to my agent about it. And I was like, should I do this? And she was like, you should only do an MFA, particularly because they involve going into debt a lot of the time, if it will buy you time to write. And a low residency program's not going to buy you time. So it's probably not worth your time. Okay. There are the reasons people might do a low residency MFA. I don't want anyone to feel bad if they've made a different decision, but that was the piece of advice that Jessica gave to me. And I think it's a useful thing to think about that all of these programs, your goal should be how do you create room for students to be themselves and be the full scientists that they are? And if that's not what you're thinking about, you're probably doing it wrong. And it should be a community accountable endeavor, which means that it can't, like I can't just go off and start a program and be like the Chanda Prescod-Weinstein school of thought, nobody else gets to make contributions, I have no accountability to anybody else. I have to be in conversation with the community about best practices. I have to be in conversation with the community about what my goals are. And so, I think that that's a piece that's often missing is how do you make room for the students to just do it?

- Yeah, I think about creating the room and also making space for the students to not just come with where they're at, but like how do you create the room and the agency for them to keep growing and growing and pushing up against those boundaries that they're going to keep hitting even once they get through this supportive cohort program, they're going to be. So how do we not just say, well, keep your head down and do it the way that this landscape has been evolved? How do we say you can be part of evolving the landscape, and what do we do to make our landscape more amenable and flexible to the new voices coming in and the new experiences and perspectives?

- So I think a big piece of it is when you're talking about like making room for the students, the other thing is if you think through the lens only of individual programs, you're thinking too small. And this was one of the messages that we wanted to get through when we posted the call for the Strike for Black Lives, is if you are not thinking about whether it's safe for your student to walk down the street near your campus or far from your campus, then you are not thinking big enough, because it's not just a matter of what's their experience in the physics classroom. When you're talking about creating the room for them to be able to do their work, to think, to dream, to just sit under a night sky and wonder about it, then that requires thinking about what are all of the conditions that are shaping their experience? Do they have enough to eat? What is the cost of their textbooks? Are they being treated differently? So, the example I gave at dinner yesterday was being forced to do work study when Harvard could quite reasonably afford to just put that cash in my pocket, right? Those are the kinds of things that we need to be thinking about. And it has to go beyond the program. And it also sometimes does involve sitting down your student and saying like, look, you are going to face some shit. Be honest about it, but that has to be paired with I'm here. I'm fighting with you and I will continue fighting with you, and I will fight for you. It cannot be a pep talk where you send the student into the battlefield by themselves. You're supposed to be a shield on some level, and not you by yourself, you the community, right? We are supposed to be linking arms together to work together to make that happen. And I think that that's the piece that gets missed a lot. There's too much individualism. And I will basically pretty much any question that you ask me the answer, this is all very long-winded ways of saying solidarity is very key.

- Yeah, so I have a question about that too. So, I was really touched by how you write the letter to your mother at the end of the book. And you say, "As I grow to be more and more like you to understand the contours and nuances of your organizing decisions and strategies, I understand that inclusion isn't liberation work, and that liberation work is often lonely, and even without the movement, sometimes unpopular. I'm also becoming aware of important questions. What am I organizing for? Who am I organizing for? Who do want to organize with? What do I want us to achieve?" So I have a couple questions. The first is, can you expand on the distinction between inclusion and liberation work?

- So, the way that I think about this is through the lens of... I was actually, this is great, 'cause I was formulating some thoughts about this earlier today. It's generally speaking the thing that black folks are going to root for black people doing things that white folks told them not to do, right? So, Issa Rae famously said a few years ago, "I'm rooting for everybody black," right? That's a community ethos. And we're going to root for someone like folks rooted for Colin Powell, even though Colin Powell was involved in some real questionable stuff. But people were like, well, that's a black dude doing things that black folks were told not to do, so we celebrate that. I think that we have to start interrogating that a little bit. The Colin Powell example comes up because I think that that's a great example. Sometimes there are things that white folks told black folks not to do, that nobody should be doing, right? And so, actually you don't want to be included in that mess. Like Colin Powell got himself included in that whole Iraq situation and that was a mess and he should not have, right? So I think sometimes it has to be, I'm asking, what are we trying to get included into? Maybe the whole thing is a mess that we want nothing to do with. And so let's talk about what it would mean to rebuild and build something better. So, at dinner last night, we were talking about ending apartheid in South Africa, and it was super cool to hear some of the stories of the faculty like Jacqu and even the president who were involved in anti-apartheid protests in the '80s. When we look at what happened in South Africa in subsequent years, technically, the people in power now are black, they're included in the leadership structure. But the power dynamics of the society are such that white people still have extraordinary amounts of undue power. And so the logic of apartheid lives on even under black leadership. So, inclusion doesn't help us address the power dynamics. And so I think what I want to encourage everyone to do is to start thinking not so much about how can I make the room look different in terms of the population, but is this even the room that we should be in? And how can looking at power dynamics help us rethink that decision?

- So I'm aware of the time passing here, and I know you all have these great cards to put questions on. And so, while I ask my next question, if folks could pass those on, I don't know if Victoria is collecting them or, but yeah. Would be happy to take some questions from you all. So, the follow up question is about your commitment to keep asking these questions about what are you organizing for, who are you organizing? Who do you want to organize with? What do you want to achieve? So what is your process? And it sounds like some of that is just the continually writing and revising for asking those critical questions. And how have you seen your thinking shift through adopting that practice?

- So you were asking way earlier about mistakes that we've made. So one of the things that I think about, and at least this one's like a little bit funny to me. I was involved in the Harvard Living Wage Campaign when I was an undergrad. And so we were fighting specifically for janitors and dining workers to be paid what was at the time, below $15 an hour. Our aspirations were not high enough in the end, I think. And I showed up at my first Living Wage campaign meeting, and I came from this organizing family. I spent my childhood on picket lines and at protests, I went to my first protest when I was two months old. I was in a occupation of a church by mostly prostitutes in London. You can actually find a photo of that on the British Library website. I went in there and I was just like I know about organizing. And I immediately just started telling them that like, they were doing things wrong, and telling them like what they should do differently. And I like, look back on that. And I'm like, oh, 17 year old Chanda, like that's very cute. And you're lucky Ben Macin still speaks to you. So, I'm looking back on that and I have like patience and amusement, but I'm also thinking about what was the mistake that I was continuously making, which was there were ways in which it was valuable for me to both show humility. And I had to break out of some fixed ideas I had about what organizing and what good organizing looked like. I will say though, I was vindicated. I told them that we needed to have a sit-in and it took almost two years to come around to that. But then we made national news and lit up the National Labor Movement when we did it. Right?

- Yeah.

- So the key piece was like maybe my intuition about what tactics we had to use was right. But I had to learn about getting people on board and working in community, because I might have the right idea, but if I don't have a community to do that with me, then ain't shit happening, right? So, I think that's an example of like, even thinking about that and using that also as a reminder, that there are things I have to learn from young folks who have come up as organizers, which was not the case with people my age at that moment in time, that most people had not, and that we are now dealing with a very different generation. And so I think a big part of that is paying attention and asking questions, always asking questions, whether you're doing science or organizing.

- That's such good advice, and these are such good questions.

- This is like a tough job. I'm so glad I just have to answer that.

- Oh. I was going to hand you half the pile. Okay, so here's what-

- No, I can take.

- Can you? Okay. Yes. Okay. Talk amongst yourself.

- I'm not a total jerk.

- Think pair share please. Oh, gosh.

- Okay. Here's one. Should I say who asked these questions or?

- I think if they put their name there, they're proud of their question.

- Okay.

- Be proud.

- Okay, so this one came from Julio Morales, who said, how have you walked the line of being an academic and not committing career suicide for being as outspoken as you are? Much love. So, there are ways in which I did, right? So, I should just be forthcoming. So I write a lot in the book about the fight over the 30 Meter Telescope of Mauna Kea. I'm not going to summarize that here, 'cause it will just end with me going on a long rant, but need to say it involves native Hawaiians objecting to use of their land in ways that they did not consent to. It took me longer to get a faculty position. And when I did, I got a faculty position in a department where nobody does optical astronomy. I don't think that that is an accident. I think I had to go somewhere where people were not invested. And that may have affect the ranking of the institution I ended up at. I think that that's highly likely. I really like my department. So that's not to say anything bad about the University of New Hampshire, but I do think that there were options that were foreclosed. And there are parts of me that feel like angry and resentful about that. But also, I have like zero regrets about what I did because I know who I am, and I did what I needed to do as a Bajan woman, as a person from a community of one of the islands, I stood with other island people, and I didn't step on other island people just so I could have something that I wanted.

- So, when you notice the power dynamics and structures in the room, what are the tactics that you use to disrupt them or make them visible? From Kendall.

- It really depends on the room. So it depends on what the topic at hand is. So if you know, I'm at a particle physics conference, it may be that I just keep doing what I'm doing, which is focusing on doing particle physics. Probably also, I will tell somebody about it. I will write about it. It will make its way into my writing. So I will say like if I haven't said it in the room, you're going to hear about it later. Someone was asking me earlier today about how I kind of handle all of the things that I see. And one of the things that I said is that I have a long memory, I remember. And I think the example that we were discussing actually is a time that I got into an argument with the curators of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum about categorizing Caroline Herschel as an assistant, rather than calling her an astronomer. Yeah, I remembered that 10 years later, right? It helps that they put themselves on record in writing. So you can just like go and look at the stupid emails that they sent. And frankly, I don't think that they were good emails, right? So I think the big thing is that it comes out some way, and sometimes it's my writing.

- So maybe on the other end of that, how do you not scare away people you're encouraging to get involved?

- I mean, maybe sometimes I am, but I'm not going to lie to folks, right? The thing that I can say to people is that this belongs to all of us. The work that I do, these questions of dark matter, being curious about dark matter, being curious about quirks, that belongs to all of us. It doesn't belong to a small group of white men who are able bodied and wear their hair and their khakis in a certain way, right? It belongs to all of us. So that's the thing that I can say. The thing that I can't say is that don't worry about it, because we need to worry about it, there's no way around that.

- Yeah, I almost thought you were going the other way to say this belongs to all of us, this work, this fight, this speaking up, this educating ourselves, just finding ways to be solidarity of this sacrificing like you did to give up on potential future career possibility for what you believed in.

- I will accept that addendum. Yes, for sure.

- So, some questions about as educators. So what is the biggest responsibility for science educators today and kind of along with that, what are your thoughts on professors that do not include intersectionality in their STEM teachings?

- So, I had to think about this for a second. 'Cause one of the comments that I made at dinner yesterday was that often people just want to talk about intersectionality, and I usually use it as a vehicle to talk about whatever thing that I want to talk about. And so, the speech that you were talking about at the beginning that you first read, that was the speech I was telling the story about at dinner last night, where I said, I was asked to talk about intersectionality, but what the community needed to hear was about colonialism. So, I gave a speech that pulled colonialism and intersectionality together. And for me it was just a vehicle. I think more broadly, maybe the question isn't about intersectionality, but is about what work that person is doing in shaping what that space is like for everybody in the room and making sure that everybody has the space, time to do their work, right? So just going back to what I was saying earlier, that everybody has the space, time to do their work. That can come out in a lot of different ways, and it doesn't necessarily mean I am okay and now this is the hour where we talk about racism. Sometimes it's making sure that you use pedagogical practices that minimize students being distracted by things that shouldn't be happening to them. So I think it's valuable for people who are seeking out the building of those spaces to be expansive, and how they understand what can be involved, which is it's not sometimes they hit you over the head. This is inclusion. My syllabus has all of these things in it. And sometimes, it's thinking about the ways that I remember black women students in particular, myself included feeling very anxious about asking questions in the classroom. And so, one of the things that I emphasize really heavily is the importance and significance of asking questions and asking any question that you have, and making really clear with students from day one, that they will score zero and maybe even get negative points from me by making it difficult for people to ask questions. On the face of it, that doesn't seem like it has anything to do with gender or race or disability or anything like that. But I'm also very aware that it changes the culture in the classroom so that people feel more entitled to the education that somebody is surely paying for them to get. And so I think that that can be one of the ways to do it. And so the thing that I would say is to encourage your professors. I think that the question is partly like what can students do to encourage professors to think about the cultural practices in the classroom that make it feel more hostile for you if you're feeling like the classroom is a hostile place for you? I want to make one comment about this, which is for the students who don't feel like they fit under the marginalized umbrella, please don't let the marginalized students be the face of this by themselves. And so, just to come back to how solidarity is the answer, what I would love to see is groups, multiracial, multi-gendered, multi status in a variety of ways, groups to come together, and then the students who have the most social capital being the ones to come forward and say, I have decided that I will put my name to this so that other people don't have to put their name to this, and to be willing to put yourselves on the line because it will simply cost you less overall. And that's one of the ways that you can use the power that you have and redistribute the power that you have. And I'm not saying speak for people. I'm saying that sometimes you're the face when other people have told you what to say, or you've decided as a group what to say.

- So, here's a question that asks about the statistics for queer students in STEM, and maybe the experience, I guess. We can both speak to that, but you go.

- Yeah, so this is a good week to be asking about it because just yesterday, Physics Magazine put out a group of articles and op-eds and a podcast which I was actually a guest on, talking about the LGBT plus experience in physics, and building on the LGBT Climate Report, and the LGBT Plus Physics Climate Report that came out a few years ago. I'm very lucky to be colleagues at the University of New Hampshire with Elena Long, who is an amazing nuclear experimentalist, just a wonderful person, a wonderful friend. She's one of the co-authors, she's also a barrier-breaking trans woman in physics. And Ellie and I talked about that climate survey a lot when she was putting it together with the group and doing the writeup. One of the complicated issues for LGBT statistics in particular is that it's hard to do statistics, because this is an identity that people come into at a variety of points in their lives. Their understanding of it changes with time, and their willingness to come out even in an anonymous survey and say here I am, also shifts with time. So when I talk to Ellie about it, I remember Ellie very distinctly saying to me, "I don't know if we can use the word underrepresented because we don't know." And that tells us something about paying attention to the specificity. Marginalization is like a good catch-all word, but then we need to pay attention to the specificities of anti-blackness, of queer phobia, of black queer phobia. We need to talk about the fact that marginalization isn't always just the numbers game, but sometimes it's a... And very often it's also a power game, and sometimes it's not a number game.

- Do you have any others in your pile that you want to draw on as we're drawing to a close? I know you've had a really long day, so you could also make up a question you wish you would've been asked.

- So, there's a question here from Jennifer Enus, are there particular points in the educational pathway that are especially damaging to potential scientists with marginalized identities? And I will say just damage happens all along the way, unfortunately, to a lot of people. I want to say importantly that's not a guarantee. There are some people who have positive experiences, and I'm always excited when I hear about that, right? Like that's not bad news. That's good news. That's really good news. I want more of that for more people. I think that maybe the comment I will add onto this, which isn't quite the question that I was asked is that so for example we return to this question about the number of black students who are earning bachelor's degrees in physics in the United States, a danger I see in the discourse, in the conversations that have arisen, since people have become more aware and concerned and conscious about that, is thinking that the question of undergraduate education is a self-contained box, where you can just think about what happens to the undergrads, and you don't need to think about what happens to the graduate students and the postdocs and the faculty. But if you treat undergraduate education as a self-contained box, you get black students who are maybe only being educated by non-black faculty. So, you need part of that conversation about the experience undergrads are having is to ask, how are we going to get those black professors into the room, at the same time, not pressuring black students and other students to feel like they have to become academics, but we have swung so much in the direction of, I want students to have the opportunity to make money in industry and all of these other things, and to make sure that they have options outside of academia, that people aren't realizing that the professorate looks about the same and is not changing. And that means that those black students are still not being educated by black professors. And I think black students are entitled to black professors. I think everyone should have the experience of having a black professor if you're a black student. So, I will say that I think that part of the damage is when we start to think that we can contain solutions, and not think about the way that these problems are related to each other and have to be co-solved.

- Solving multiple equations, multiple times.

- It is almost like a non-linear coupled set of differential equations.

- So beautiful. All right. So, I think we will thank Chanda, and then I believe you're going to sign some books for those of us who are lucky enough to win them in the raffle and/or bought our own. And if you didn't, she'll be here the rest of the week. Please go out and buy them now. So, let's thank Chanda. Thank you.

Biography of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is also a columnist for New Scientist and Physics World. Her research in theoretical physics focuses on cosmology, neutron stars, and dark matter. She also does research in Black feminist science, technology, and society studies. Nature recognized her as one of 10 people who shaped science in 2020, and Essence magazine has recognized her as one of “15 Black Women Who Are Paving the Way in STEM and Breaking Barriers.” A cofounder of Particles for Justice, she received the 2017 LGBT+ Physicists Acknowledgement of Excellence Award for her contributions to improving conditions for marginalized people in physics and the 2021 American Physical Society Edward A. Bouchet Award for her contributions to particle cosmology. Originally from East L.A., she divides her time between the New Hampshire Seacoast and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, is now available from Bold Type Books.

Biography of Kwame Anthony Appiah

How do our identities shape what we value—in ourselves, and others? How does what we legislate and create reflect our ideals as a society? A renowned ethicist and professor of philosophy and law at NYU, Kwame Anthony Appiah is known for his innovative work in the field of cultural differences and political philosophy. Raised in Ghana and educated at the University of Cambridge, Kwame has witnessed a broad spectrum of the social, economic, and political forces that shape ethics in this age of international exchange. What do we tell ourselves about who we are—and who others are? How can we shed harmful patterns of identity politics and groupthink, to access growth that’s good for everyone?

His new and acclaimed book, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, explores the nature and history of our identities (including gender, religion, race, and nationality) and how each defines us. Much like in his weekly column for The New York Times Magazine, “The Ethicist,” Kwame’s talks are brilliant and informed, and offer much-needed guidance on how to bridge political divides. He takes an in-depth approach to exploring our identities and what they mean in a contemporary context: and how we can challenge our inherited assumptions and adapt to changing values through progressive, open dialogue.

Transcript of Held in the Balance: The Trask 250

- Good evening, I'm Elizabeth Herbin-Triant, I'm a faculty member in Black studies and history, and I wanted to welcome you all, thank you so much for coming. I'm delighted to be introducing Nicka Smith tonight. Nicka is a professional photographer, speaker, host, consultant and documentarian, with more than 20 years of experience as a genealogist. She has extensive experience in African ancestor genealogy and reverse genealogy, and is an expert in genealogical research in the Northeastern Louisiana area and in researching enslaved communities. Nicka has diverse and very varied experience in media with a background in audio, video and written communications. She's appeared on the Today Show, CNN, MSNBC, and on the series, Who Do You Think You Are? And she's been interviewed by the Oakland Tribune, The Undefeated, National Geographic, and Time. She's the host of BlackGenPro LIVE. I'm sorry, BlackProGen LIVE, an innovative web show with more than 125 episodes focused on people of color genealogy and family history. Today's talk is a culmination of nearly a decade of work for Nicka, including extensive research in the Amherst College Archives. And speaking of the Amherst College Archives, I'd like to encourage students to attend an open house in the archives on Wednesday afternoon from four to 5:30 with Nicka, you'll have the opportunity to view many of the documents that she'll reference in today's presentation. This will be a low key drop in opportunity for students to follow up with Nicka. Nicka, we're so grateful to you for joining us to share your extraordinary research, thank you so much for coming to Amherst College. Please join me in welcoming Nicka Smith.

- All right, let me turn this thing on. Hello.

- [Audience] Hi.

- Hey, I don't do quiet crowds, okay? This is not stuffy, don't say anything to me. No, no, no, no, no, I don't do that, okay? Especially not with the subject matter, this is a big, big deal. You are sitting in a very historic moment and I really want you all to realize this. I've called several people that I know that are in this space, and we believe I'm probably one of the first descendants of an enslaved community tied to a college or university to come and present their research on this level. So , thank you for indulging me for today before I get started, I want to start with a story. 20 years ago this year I was sitting in a seat just like you. Now I may not look like I'm 22 anymore, but, or maybe I do, but I was sitting in a college, on the college campus and I was in a classroom with theater seating, I was in a history of Africa class, the irony, right? Sitting in the history of Africa class, I was on a college campus where I was one of very few Black students, and this was in the Bay area. I was literally a mile plus from Stanford University. And I left my cell phone in my room that night. You know, we had cell phones then, and you know, the internet had just come out when I started college. That sounds crazy to you, but it really did. I didn't get my first email address until I was in college. I know we'll talk about that later. But either way, I left my phone in my room and I walked back to my room and I had missed a bunch of calls and I didn't know what was going on, and my sister picked up and she said, I'm going to mom's house. And I was like, okay and she said, I'm going to go check on her, see what's going on. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And she said, they didn't tell you dad died. And it was a month before I graduated from college. And I share that story because this is my father's side of the family. So in order to have his voice reflected here with me, you're going to see videos of my dad when he was in his early twenties that he left behind for me. And I really want to implore you, you know, you've got iCloud, I don't know what Android users have 'cause I don't use that. But you've got your iCloud, you've got all these different things. Make sure you back your memories up, make sure there's a place for you to put them because I would not have videos to show my son had my father not archived his life. And really just mundane things, you'll see him doing or smiling. But I really want to just dedicate this to my father. 'Cause he didn't even know a lot of the names that you're going to hear tonight. And there's a lot of reasons for why that is. You're going to go through a lot of emotions, hearing this information. Some of it you're going to want to punch someone in the jaw and that's okay, other parts of it, you're going to be excited, you're going to be happy, it's going to be new information, but I really want all of you to know that when I was sitting in your chairs, I didn't know that I would be here doing this right now. There wasn't a genealogy field like it is right now. So there may be things that you have ideas about, and you're not really sure how you're going to execute them, or you don't really feel like you have the support, but if I could be here doing this, having this hobby and no one would even really consider it a job now, just what the world is going to look like for you in 20 years. Okay, so if you don't take anything else from what I said, take that. All right, so let's get started. How in the world did I get to this information, okay? And that's a lot. We're going to start with the 1900 census. If you've never seen a census, well, you did one last year, right? They asked you a bunch of questions, now, before we would self-report information, meaning they send you the form and you fill it out and all that kind of stuff. Someone would go door to door to your house and ask you questions, and they'd go in order. And if you lived in a major metropolitan area, they'd write down the street number and they'd write down the street and all kinds of stuff. And so when I first started research on my father's side of the family, I only knew back to my great grandparents. That was it, and the thing is these great grandparents raised my father, and not only my father, but they also raised my aunt and they raised my aunt and my father's three first cousins. And that was the story, right? They lived in this big family house on the south side of Chicago, but I knew my grandfather was from New Orleans. And so using census information, found him on the various years and then when I got back to his father, I found him in a household with people I had never heard of. Let's see, maybe I walked away too far, maybe not, all right. So there's my great-grandfather name is James Benjamin Soul. And he was born in July of 1887, okay. Now for genealogists, if you're finding a grandchild in the home of grandparents, this list is like a lucky thing, right? Because you get to skip some generations, right? Like, yay, I get to give back two generations. But for me, this was not lucky because how are these people connected? He's in his household with people with the last name Reader. Where does Reader fit in with Soul? Could it be his mom? I'm not sure, and then there's another child in the household, Eleanor Spears, who is that? Is that his sister? Or is it his first cousin? I had all these questions. I said, okay, well, this is great, but how can I find his mother? I had no idea how to find his mother or his father. Now here's the interesting thing, I literally had to guess when it came to his dad, because when I went on to additional records like his draft card, instead of listing just a place of birth, meaning a state, it listed an exact city or town. And in this instance it says Vidalia, Louisiana. And that is not New Orleans. That's further north it's on the Mississippi Delta. In fact, today, I just learned that Bill and Melinda Gates through several entities own more than 20,000 acres of farmland in that parish today. You know, I was researching to see where it was because I wanted to see if it was on the land where my folks were, I wanted to see that wasn't able to confirm that, but yes, 20,000 acres of farmland, if you are interested in looking in that there was a whole story and piece done on in the New Orleans Times, Picayune about the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, having thousands of acres of land in the heartland in the Louisiana, Mississippi I'll call all across the country. So I had Vidalia, I knew this was honey 'cause that's what we called him. That was his nickname was honey, I knew that because Theresa was my great-grandmother, I knew 4902 south Michigan because in my family, my parents don't say great grandma's house or grandpa's house. They use the address to tell us where you're at. 6131 South Ray seed. I got a cousin who is sitting here in the front row. She can say it that's uncle King's house, she knows. Cause we don't use people's names we use the address. So I tried to find him and other records, but the problem is he was born during a time span. We don't have a lot genealogically speaking for children. The 1890 census was partially burned and then the census bureau burned the rest of it. So we don't have that to you, so the first census I had for him was the one in 1900 that I just showed you. So how could I find his parents? Now, the question is, well, I mean, don't you have other relatives, didn't you say that your father was raised with his first cousins and yeah, that's true, he was. And ironically, one of my father's first cousins is what people call a human computer. She can rattle off what she had for breakfast on March 1st, 1978, I'm not joking, what she was wearing, what she did that day, she remembered all those things. And she told me, she said, well, I don't remember Honey's mother's name. But I do remember we have a cousin that lives in Oakland. And at the time she was telling me this story I was living in the Bay area, I was living in Oakland and she said, yeah, you know, because me and your dad, we went with Honey on a train to Oakland when we were kids. And I'm like, my dad never told me he left Chicago because after my family left New Orleans, they moved to Chicago, which is where he's doc. This is Honey's draft card in Chicago and I said, you guys went to Oakland and she said, yeah, because aunt Nora lived there, remember the girl on the census with him, that was a sister. Okay, and she said, yeah, aunt Nora lived in Oakland and their mother was dying, she was dying. Okay, but she's not in Louisiana. So then how does she get to California? Well, they had taken her from there and brought her to California. What's her name? I don't remember her name, but I bet you aunt Nora's house is still there. Here's the address, she gave me the address to aunt Nora's house and told me they probably still owned it. And that if I called our cousin who was named Morrie Turner, he could probably tell me Honey's mother's name, which would be my great, great grandmother. So, you know, what do you do when we had still had phone books? Have you guys ever seen a phone book? Okay. You may or may not have that's all right, right. We got to get that in the archive. We got to get that in an archive, that sounds so crazy. So she said tracked out Maury. See if you can find Maury, Maury can tell you something he's a famous cartoonist. So this explains why when I had to do a project in second grade called maize is corn and I didn't know what I was going to do on that poster board, but my dad said, we're going to draw Thanksgiving and you're going to color it in and I thought he was absolutely nuts until my father drew a Thanksgiving scene and I colored it in. My niece is an incredible makeup artist. We have so many people that can draw my family, I'm like, this is a thing. So when the phone book went online, the virtual one and I found Maury and I called him and I'm thinking I'm cold calling this guy. Like he's probably going to think I'm a telemarketer or something. At the time I was not married. And my maiden name popped up on the caller ID. And he said, Hey, and I'm like, hi, I'm your cousin, you're on of uncle shug's people. Sugar. Honey. Same person. So I said, yeah, I said, I'm calling you because my cousin gave me information and I should call you and he says, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Turns out he really was a famous cartoonist. In fact, he had the first syndicated minority cartoon strip in the country called Wee Pals. They even did a television show off of it, called Kid Power. We forged a relationship, me and good old Morrie Turner for many years before he passed away in 2014. And his death was so important that he got a New York times obituary, not everybody gets those. And so we kept talking and he was honored by the state of California for this and for that, this man drew his comic strip all the way up until he died. And I said, here's my question, who is their mother? He said, I don't know her name and I'm thinking, oh my gosh is everyone that I asked this question going to say that? He said, but let me tell you what you can do. Go to Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland. And this was a cemetery I passed by every single day. I went to work in downtown Oakland and he said, go find my mother, go find my father and her headstone is right next to theirs. So I walked out to the cemetery. Now, you know, I didn't know where in the world I was going. And I was hoping and praying that the people, the grounds folks would stay around so that if I went to the wrong spot, they could be like, no baby, go over here, right. Just like I was trying to find this building the day I was like, Ooh, am I going to the right place? I'm so glad I used Google maps and did the street view. So I know what the building looks like, but you don't have that for cemeteries, so there was a grounds person. He took me right over there. And well, what do, what does she say about her mother? Do you remember anything about.

- Well, I'm in, I know I went to what? Imagine we went to message and I remember the place. I remember the house, I remember the house being separated from the kitchen and is a separate building. In between that and the house, there were animals like cows and a whole bunch of stuff, roaming free. I wasn't afraid of all those things. And then when she got much older and we went to Mississippi and got her and brought her Bergen and she was, constantly walking away the house, please bring her back.

- So he shared many stories like that with me. And I found out her name was Easter Williams. And it had been sitting in a cemetery for all the time that I had been looking for. So sometimes the information is literally right up underneath your nose, but we think it's going to come in this big fireworks display. Drake is going to come out and perform. You're going to get flowers from Beyonce or maybe that nice necklace she's wearing in that Tiffany and Company commercial on Hulu, that I've seen 175 times watching The Wonder Years. Is it just me? I don't understand, it's weird. Either way. I finally got her name. Her name was Easter Williams, and this is when this story goes off the rails and just really kind of changed.

- [Woman] It's very important to me because of the fact that we have such a long line of lineage with our family. And a lot of us never, you know, we weren't able to really learn because some of the older people just never talked, but my father Clinton Palmer, he was the one that was able he did tell me a lot of information and I just want to pass it on. So our family would know just how important we were to society back then and how important we are now and how rich we are with so many resources that we don't even know that we have.

- So how do we go from New Orleans to Vidalia Concordia parish? And then when Maury starts talking to me, he mentioned Mississippi. Now where Honey was from, was along in the Mississippi Delta, okay? Literally right along the river and right across from that area, it was Natchez, Mississippi. And when Maury and aunt Nora, when they went to go and get Easter when she was senile and walking around and just, you know, just not having her bearings about herself, she was living in Natchez. So that gave me even more of a clue as to where to look, so at that point, I said, all right, Honey's not old enough to have been on the 1880 census, but now that I know that Easter is his mother, and I know that Letty who was on that census was her mother, maybe I can find them in that same parish. You know, Louisiana's contrary, we say parish, not county, right? So what if I look for them in 1880? And that's exactly what I did. Now, you noticed, you got to read cursive, sorry guys, they weren't printing back then. I hate to break it to you, but the only way you get better reading the cursive is to keep reading the cursive because, well, you need to keep reading the cursive to read the cards. So I found Letty and I found her mother and I knew it was them because look at who is next to them, Smith Reader, who was on the 1900 census, so I knew these were the right people, but they had the last name Fountain. Now, the reason why this is crazy and you're like, well, why are all these star names involved? We're dealing with women, okay? Every time we get married, we have to change our name, right? And if you have children and you're married multiple times that, hey, that's what happens. The other thing you need to understand about enslavement and slavery for the enslaved was matriarchal. The disposition of a mother determined what happened with their child. So sometimes when you're trying to find enslaved people, you cannot find them because you're looking for them and under their father's surname, but the surname that they took was their mothers. Okay, so at this point again, I knew Easter had died in California. So her birth certificate told me they went under fountain at one point and it pointed me back to Mississippi. So I tried to find them on the 1870 census. You see I'm going back every 10 years because the census is every 10 years. But I wasn't having very much luck trying to find them in Concordia parish, so of course, it's, you know, when you start doing genealogy, you're going to learn who your trouble lines are in your family, it just going to keep giving you trouble over and over and over and over again, eventually you get a break, but they just, you know, I think sometimes they're in the wherever they are, they're sitting there giggling, laughing at us. Oh, look at her, isn't that cute? She's trying that again, either way. The other thing that emerged is that Easter had three sets of children, which further complicates the last name scenario, right? So we have aunt Nora, Nora lived to be almost a hundred years old, thankfully. And she was the keeper of all these pictures. Thank God nor kept all the pictures, our side had none. So I'm Nora that's where Maury, who you heard from comes from, right? Then it's my line that comes from honey, James Benjamin Sewell and then there were more kids from last relationship or actual marriage, she was the widow of a man named Samuel Williams. Now, the reason why I'm showing you this tree is not because I love my use of color on it, but it's because everyone that's in green is DNA tested. Now, why does this make a difference? Well, here's the thing. Most people think that DNA testing is just about getting a little pie chart, right? Oh, that's cute, but 25%, so-and-so 35%. So-and-so yes, that's great. But the power of DNA testing is actually in the DNA matching where I can literally identify relationships between two different people based on the amount of DNA, the two people share, that's what genealogists are doing now. Right? And you all might see it on TikTok with somebody who's saying they met their brother for the first time and they didn't know they had a brother. Why are you all acting like you're not on TikTok, right. You know, the of video, I did an ancestry DNA test. And then the next piece, and I found out I had a brother and then he's waiting in the chair and my brother and I are going to meet today and they get up and they hug, right? All of that is because of the DNA matching technology. She's laughing because it's true, there's so many of those videos out. Either way, the reason why I'm showing you this is because of these three relationships, right? All of us that are in green, we all share DNA as relations, but where this really helps you genealogically is because we're not dealing with two sides of our family that we share the same DNA on. We're only dealing with one because Easter is the common denominator amongst all these people. So what does that mean? That means that if our document trail runs cold and we don't know what to do, we could potentially turn to our DNA matches to see if there are patterns in things that are showing up that will give us the roadmap as to where to go next. Now, from this incident, what started to pop up, right? This is a map, and here's the area we're talking about. This is literally the Mississippi river, all the way down. And I found my people in 1880, I knew that that was them. But what started to pop up was the fact that there was a couple of individuals in a household that looked like they could be Letty Easter, but I wasn't sure they were them because they weren't in the same place. How would I know it was the right people? Remember they could be under a different surname. All kinds of stuff is going on at this time, the country. What's happening during 1870-1880? Come on, who said that? Thank you, wave cap. I don't even know your name with the t-shirt on. Yes, reconstruction, the country is restabilizing itself. We have just ended the civil war, the country, literally people were starving. They needed food, they needed shelter, they did all these things. So that meant that you may not necessarily stay in the same place you were living in that you were enslaved in. You could move around, right? Because you didn't have to get permission from anybody, who going to check you? Nobody's going to check you because you're free. So could it have been there? I don't know, but what happened is that a third location started to pop up and it wasn't because I found them on a census, it was because we had DNA matches there. How does that happen? Because I know Concordia parish based on the documents. And then there's a possible place in 1870 in this town called Woodville in Mississippi, I know my folks at one point lived in Natchez was just north of that, and then we have DNA matches down in a place called Venturous. And it's all on this side of the family. How do you have people who are genetically connected to each other from three different areas and nobody can figure it out? Slavery, that's how you have it. Just like how you can get back to Cameroon and Ghana and all those places through your DNA, you can also retrace the slave trade through DNA. So let's have a conversation about researching the enslaved. There is no central repository to get this information. And this is probably going to be the biggest let down, you are going to have this entire presentation. There is no slavery.com where I just go in, stop laughing at me, where you just go in and type in Nazir Jones, search. There could have been a slave named Naz, we don't know, I haven't found them yet, but either way, there is no central place to go. You have to pull from a number of different resources in order for you to get access to the information that documents enslaved people. Letty was born around the 1830s, Easter in the 1850s, slavery was officially abolished except in the instance of punishment for a crime in 1865. So if you go earlier than the 1870 census, we're dealing with the early seeds of reconstruction and we're also dealing with slavery era document, then there's a lack of access, what do I mean by that? Are the records digitized? Has the municipality made it a priority to digitize these records and make them available to people? Not only that, are they searchable? Can you go in and type a name and to find it? Or do you have to manually search? Have you all ever heard of microfilm? Okay, I'm not even talking to the old people. All you post 99, 2000 born people . Have you ever heard of microfilm? Oh, okay, you see phonebook, microfilm, open ? Got it, we're pulling out all the old tech. Maybe I might, I could bring a 45, Jean has some 45s. If you've never seen a record, have you guys seen records? Okay, good, okay. All right, so with microfilm, it was a great way to preserve records, you photograph them, they'd be on a roll, and in order for people to have access to them, they'd have to pull out this drawer, get the roll, load it on the machine, you get an army, start cranking it, you got to go through all the images and then when we got real high tech, we put that machine on a computer, that was all. That was real high tech. But imagine how tedious that is. If you have to bounce from one location to the next, if you can't literally create some sort of a spreadsheet with all these names on one image, think about it. There were 4 million enslaved people in this country before slavery ended. Think about if you had to track all of them in that fashion. That's the world we're living in right now, but thankfully, some efforts are being made to make it easier to look through this information, but it hasn't always been that way. Now who's heard of 1619? That should be all you all, if not, we got to add that too. Okay, now I love that project, love it. Nicole Hannah Jones, great, love her hair too. But the issue with 1619 is that it takes you a number of generations for you to even trace back that far for just me and my family, that's to my 13th great-grandparents and I'm older than you all, I can be your mama, I could. But that means the 15th great grandparents. And I'm telling you I'm just to, in this presentation, my great, great. So while there are individuals who can trace the 1619, the vast majority of us, that's a bit, there's a very high likelihood, we will never get there, okay? So let's go back to 1880, because this is where my stand still was, I knew these were my people, I knew it, I knew it, but I couldn't be sure that those folks across the river were them, so I said, you know what? Since I like to do unorthodox things and go in the opposite direction that people tell me to go in, what if I started looking at the people living around them? What if they are the clue to finding my folks in 1870 and before. See in genealogy, there is this thought process that look for the nearest white person, 'cause they're going to, you know, they're going to be consistent, they're going to be documented on every census, right? And that's not always the case, right? And this scenario, do you see anybody with a W on this page? B B B B B B, Moo moo moo for mulatto. No. The other thing that I noticed was that there were some Fountains, or people with the surname Fountain, living near them. Were they related? What did I have to lose? Right, why not check them out? So at that point I did find two of those same Fountains. They were living in the same place, 10 years earlier, right, where I was hoping to find my people, I found them. So I said, okay, well, let me see if I can try and find them on something else. Now here's where, whoops, let me go back. I'm over here, just skipping stuff. Here's where my suggestion is for anyone watching tracing enslaved people. Do not go to the nearest white person on the census. That sounds crazy, but that is literally the practice. Don't do that, why? Because a lot of times enslaved communities are preserved in these records. People's neighbors were enslaved with them in community. And when you chase down the nearest white person with a high number or high value of real estate on the record, how do you know that your folks didn't move to that area soon after slavery? How can you make an assumption that that nearest white person was their slave holder? You don't know that, but it's less of a likelihood that the Black folks living around them had moved or that they weren't in community together, right? You guys know about the great migration, okay. People leaving the deep south, going to areas like Chicago, San Francisco, New York, right? And people going together in large groups, you have to think about it from that perspective. So with that said, I have three things that I use primarily when I'm researching enslaved people. And I almost never strike out trying to find them enslaved by using them, one of them is the Freedman's Bureau. If you have never heard of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, I suggest you search it out. And if you end up on Ancestry, you might see a video with the person that looks very much like me on that page, telling you about the Freedman's Bureau. And it was established by Congress, 1865. It is one of the largest scale social service programs. And it primarily documents people who were formerly enslaved in several deep south states, probably about 15, why? Those records say former owner, it just says it. You're not going on a wild goose chase, trying to find who the individual is, okay. There's also things in there called labor contracts, which I'm going to show you that in a second. Civil war pensions, ever heard of the movie Glory? Really nice looking man named Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, right, right? Okay. More than 200,000 Black men fought in the civil war. And as a result of their service, they received pensions from the military. Now, why are those good? Because when they were enlisting, they could potentially name their slave holder. So you're again, you're not chasing down, Oh, let me look at this census, please give me a sign, no, it says it right there, in fact, for some of the 250, the slave holders are the witnesses in the file and they say, I owned the soldier. Plain as day. Wills and probates. Why would I look at wills and probate? I love the eyes going up cause lets me know you're thinking. Slaves were property and if I wanted to bequeath Nazir Jones to Nazir Jones, I could say in my will, I leave to my son Nazir Jones, my Negro man Naz. And if I don't say what I want to go out in my will, it will be included in the inventory of my estate, along with my house and my carriage. And my feather beds, will be a Negro man named Naz. And based on the dollar value, if they didn't put an age for him, I could figure out approximately how old he was based on looking at valuations of enslaved people during their lives. So let's take a look at a labor contract, woo. And when I tell you all, if you're gett in the Freedmen's Bureau, this is some good research right here, okay. It's real good. I found an 1867 labor contract in Concordia parish, Louisiana, and the land owner was a man named A.T Welch, right up there at the top. Goodness, this thing keeps skipping around. Now notice those names on the labor contract. Don't you love the name, Patience Fountain? Like does patience come out of the fountain or do you wish for patience when you throw a penny in the fountain? I haven't quite figured that one out yet, but we find Patience Fountain, we find Henderson Fountain. They were living next to my people in 1880. I found them at 1870, along with two other individuals who appear to be their parents named Delpha Fountain and Isaac Fountain. Now you probably are wondering why are you chasing down this family that you don't know is connected to your community? Maybe if I chase them down because they're more consistent than mine, I might find my people. So let's talk about what happens once you actually go through these records, because here's the thing, this ain't for everybody. You have to have a certain amount of emotional intelligence researching the enslaved. There are going to be things that you were going to read and see that are going to infuriate you. There may be days that you might not even touch the research because you are so emotionally damaged by what you just came across. There are other days where you might cuss the people. Sometimes I do that because they couldn't. You have to learn how to compartmentalize your emotions around this to get to your people or whoever you are researching. You have to turn off your emotions and think like a capitalist. How would I do business? What would I pay? What would be the paper trail that's left behind? That would document my transaction. See, it's easy, she's got a laptop it looks just like mine. How do we know the difference between them? Hers has got stars on it? Mine doesn't. She could decide to charge an extra $10 for her stars? How would I know? Found the receipt from Apple. That's how people were documented. Literally.

- You know, like Jackie said, I'm sorry. Like Jackie said, you know, we have to beat their voice because they can't, and it's still so sad that so much information. I have so many brick walls because of slavery. You know, it's so heart wrenching when you can't even find your people. It took me 30 years to find out who even owned the other side of my family. It's horrible what they did to our history really.

- Go back to what I said about access. There are people who can go online and type in one name and go back seven and eight and nine generations without even trying, and yet we wait for access to improve or get better or even if it is digitized, how are the archives processing it so that I know the names of my people are in those documents? Think of how dependent we are on search engines and keywording. If something is just scanned and it literally says Macbook Pro with stars on it, how do I know it belongs to her? How do I know that she's even associated with it? So there's something to be said for just digitizing and putting it online, but how is that any different from making my computer a microfilm reader? How do we innovate to solve for this problem? You guys might have the information sitting right here in this room. I think you're a lot smarter than I am. There might be an engineer sitting in here right now who can figure out how to make this better. If Google has an algorithm that can run a movie through its system in a minute and tell me how many times a woman speaks in a movie, why don't we have this process more available and accessible? If my airpods know when I take them out of my ears and it knows when I put it back up to reconnect, why do we still have this problem? If my Apple watch knows when I'm walking real fast through the airport that I'm exercising. If you try to use a coupon code for a headband wig and it knows you already used it, right? I love headband wigs by the way, the best technology during a pandemic. But we can do better. So this is where you pivot because in order to research formerly enslaved people, you have to research the slaveholding family. Remember what I just told you about compartmentalizing your emotions? You have to disconnect yourself, you have to literally walk back in that house or into that cotton field for you to find your folks. And this is why certain people can't do this. So I have to get in bed with these people who did this to my family. And that's the only way I can find them. Now on that labor contract was a man named A.T Welch. His name was Augustus Trask Welsh. And while he's on the labor contract as the landowner, right, what labor contracts do is they have a land owner and they have the employees who are working for them. And a lot of times that land owner, the employees, were slave holder and the formerly enslaved. That's why they are a huge clue. So I knew that if I looked up A.T. Welch and looked at his family history and tracked his family, that I could potentially find these individuals that I've been looking for and my people within their enslaved community. Here's the problem. A.T. Welch was in the Freedmen's Bureau. So that meant that he didn't die before the war. And that meant that he didn't have a probate or will, for me to look at that listed the enslaved on there. And the other problem with that is not only did he not have one, but all these people, whoops, let me go back, Oh Lord, okay. I'll appreciate that computer. There we go, all right A.T. The problem is that he died after the war. So that meant I had no probate for him. And that meant that I also didn't have a probate for anyone that was in his generation of the family. Seems like this thing died, maybe it did. Thank you, alright. Because A.T passed away after the war, I had to go out to his first cousins. Why am I looking at his family? Just like the enslaved children were passed down through their, you know, their disposition was based on their mother. If their mother was free, a child was free. If a mother was enslaved, the child was enslaved. This meant, it means the same thing on the slave holding family side, enslaved people were passed down through families. So just as we have Israel Trask being a trustee of this university or school, college, right. He doesn't operate in a silo on his own. It's not just Israel. It's his family. Okay, and there are a bunch of people who were associated with them. Thank you. Look at you, magical helper. Alright, let me turn this on. Okay, I might be up. That's all right, it's okay, hold on. Yeah, no, that's okay. All right, I might have to stand here. That's okay, yeah, I don't think it's connecting. Yeah, it's not. There we go. All right, okay, that's what I'm saying. Cause this is the part you all need to really pay attention to. So I could not use any of these other people in his family because they all died after the war. So some would think that's it party's over, right? You all these people in his generation died before the war, right? So, or after the war, so you can't do anything, not when you have a whole generation and another one above it, of people who died before the war. And if you were researching edslaved people and you find an unmarried uncle, ding, ding, ding, go to the unmarried uncle for records, why? Because he had no children, he had no next of kin. And he had to leave their property to somebody, which could include a niece and a nephew. Oh, it's Augustus Trask Welch, the nephew of James Trask. And it isn't James Trask the brother of Israel, Elliot Trask, and then also the brother of Augustus Trask and the brother of Sarah Trask and Emily Trask, this is one family. And what happens when you go up to this generation with the blue circles, these people were born in Massachusetts. This ain't Tara, this is Brimfield, Springfield, Amherst. Town records going back to almost Jesus in terms of the birth dates of the people. So it wasn't all one, could this be the wrong family? No, not when the town's been recording birth since 1000. So at this point, I say, wait a minute, these people are on the Mississippi Delta. How in the world did they get from Massachusetts down to Mississippi and Louisiana? Oh boy, you all ain't ready for this next part. How'd they get there, how they get there? Come on now? She right, they didn't walk. Maybe now we're talking about the enslaved, look, her face. You should see her face, you all, she's like this. They walked , they did. Now James Lawrence Trask died in August of 1855. On his estate inventory, were more than 250 enslaved people. You are looking at his estate inventory. These dollar values next to people's names are not what they got in his estate. That's the value of these enslaved people. So whose names do we find? Whoops, come on you, right? 'Cause it could be John and Sally, right? Somebody could say, how do you know it's the right people? How many households do you know with an Isaac and Delpha and Nathan and Amos and the Patience and the Henderson all in one household. And then note also on this inventory, not only do they put them in family groups, but they totaled the family groups so that if they had to sell off property because the estate was insolvent, they had $3,400 right here. Let me just get rid of that and then that way we could pay that bill. So what happened? Put them side by side, look like the same names to me don't it? Right. Now, here's the thing. James Trask didn't die in Concordia parish. He died in Wilkinson county, Mississippi just across the river where we had DNA matches. Remember that nice map and how I wasn't sure if these were my people or not? So I said, okay, let me look at this same inventory and see if I can find Letty on it. Easter was born around this time, she might not be on it, but I know Letty is. I'll go to the next page. Hmm, I see a man named Old Randall worth how much? A grown man worth a dollar. Why? Because he was of no financial benefit to these individuals at this time. So because we are going to respect him because he's old, we'll put them on the inventory and make them worth the dollar. The most important information for me was that there was a woman named Letty on this census 'cause I didn't have her name when I started with that census in 1900. Actually I did have her name, but I didn't even know how she was really connected to me. I didn't know her daughter's name, I knew her, I knew her grandson's name. So using this information, I could consider that these were my people and that they were not living in Concordia parish, they were in Wilkinson county because that's where they were enslaved. Now, how do we get here again? Just compare the names. There's a 17 year old boy in that household, he was worth $1,250. But the nanny he was named after was worth a dollar. There's 15 years between these documents. So here's where the story gets even more hard to listen to. The same month, the James Trask died, earlier in that month, he gave an entire plantation and enslaved people to his niece, Charlotte Pinch Ventress. That same month that he passed away, he gave a plantation and the slave people to that same niece and a nephew name, Augustus Trask Welch. And they divided the enslaved people between the two of them, 50/50 interest. One year after James Trask's death, Charlotte and Augusta said, well, you know, I want my property. So I want to do stuff with it, so let me quit claim certain slaves over to you. And then you quit claim others to me so we can separate it. And they quick claimed an infant child away from her mother. The infant child that they quit claimed away was Easter, she went to A.T. Welch and that's why my family, again, he was living in Concordia parish, this is all one network, You all one letting went to Charlotte. You all. When find them in 1870, they've been reunited because they were separated by slavery. This document is what starts the trail of grandparents raising children on this side of my family. When people tell you that the remnants of slavery do not exist today, let me take you back here because don't you remember me telling you when I started this, that my father was raised by his grandparents and then you saw my great grandfather raised by his grandparents, the seeds of it are here at 1856.

- What does this mean for us? Identity. And I think that we, as a people have been in a constant flux wondering who we are, who do we descend from? And if you're constantly told that you are the butler, the maid, the cleaner, I heard some great things about some of the family members who are achieving different things. But I can't say that everybody in the family's achieving, everybody is going for that. And some of them were stuck in the rough because they still don't know who they are, they're searching, they're crying out for help. They need somebody to guide them and that's why I love the history, the information, being able to dig it up and being able to show them, listen, no, no, you're, you're not a nobody. We have documented points showing these connections to it, you know, and that's what's so beautiful about this experience.

- So let's talk about the operation because there is no way I would get up in front of you, not with the information that I have on these individuals. And people saying that you can't quantify this and qualify it with the names and individuals and not bless you all the next generation with knowing how to find it in calling their names out. I would never squander that opportunity. So let's talk about it. Here's your boy Isreal. Take a good look at him with his little feather in his hair. And yes, I do call him by his first name 'cause I can. Who going to check me, right? The brothers who were involved with this operation primarily were Israel Elliot Trask, who was a trustee of Amherst College. We can not truly quantify his influence on this college because we know he gave a certain amount of money, but we know he also helped secure the charter. Would we be sitting in this building right now, without that. Okay, it was him. It was James who you saw his inventory of his estate, along with their other two brothers, William Porter Trask and Augustus Trask along with them were the nephew and the niece, Charlotte Pinchon Ventress from that transaction where they quit claimed the baby away from her mother on Christmas day of 1856 and A.T. Welsch who was on that labor contract. Intermarried families are the Carters, the Poindexters of course, including George Poindexter, who was the governor of Mississippi. And the Ventresses. The father of Old Miss, you know, an Oxford, go rebels, he was married to Charlotte. So this enslaved population is tied to two schools to one in the north and one in the south. So here's a rough timeline of what we're talking about Israel and his brothers. Well, you know, Israel, he got advice from someone named Alexander Hamilton to go down to Louisiana and Mississippi and practice law. And oh yeah, by plantation too, right? You can make some money, so he leaves the north and goes down and then James follows and then so did the other two brothers. And initially they were in two completely separate operations. And then they joined forces and that's when the real money started rolling in. And eventually Israel said, you know what? Hey, I'm going to let you have that, but I'm going to keep loaning you money. Well, you know, he had been splitting his time between Springfield and Woodville, not Springfield, Mississippi, I don't even think there is one. I'm talking to Springfield here. His wife and his family lived here and he would go down and send letters back. Where are the letters? Here. Writing about the conditions of the plantation. Oh, James and he's reckless with his money and all this other stuff, right? What's the newspaper say about Israel. This is a clipping from 1960, you guys ever heard of next tale? You know what NextTel is? You heard a Sprint, right? Okay, you ever heard of Dayton, Hudson? You know what that is? That's Target. There's a reason why I'm bringing that up because slaveholders are very, they it's easy for them to be rebranded. Historically, when we write about them in the archive, we say things like he acquired a plantation in Mississippi and accumulated so much wealth that he soon was able to retire really? In a state with a whole slavery, He acquired so much. Well, how did he do that? Right, he didn't do it by himself. Oh, wait, no, ah, you can go back into the archives. This is a Springfield union, this is the newspaper right here, is that in the south? Nope, here the north they're going on and on about him establishing the law practice. First law practice of an American in New Orleans, but they are forgetting all these enslaved people my favorite part of the story is when they talk about his house, the Alexander House, which is currently on the market and started all of it more than $800,000, I know you have enough money to buy that, right, and you do, and who's going to buy it whenever they talk about the house. They don't talk about how he brought in slave people up from Mississippi to work in his house and open view, and then had to free them because slavery was not legal in Massachusetts. Yeah, so consider how we're rebranding our historical spaces as much as I'm all for tearing down of the monuments, what is going to happen in 20 or 30 years? When people forget there was even a monument there, are they going to say that Michael Jackson came and danced on it with no proof? We don't know, but when we rebrand people into these sort of deities and whatnot and not consider the sum total of who they were and what they were involved with people forget that sprint bought next to, or that Dayton Hudson is actually target. It's the same thing, so here's how this masquerades and the documents, when Israel died here in 1835, you can pull this probate and the long with, you know, him and Downing a couple pews at that first church of Springfield down in the courthouse, you go right over there and building is super old. Okay, there's a second page that says that his brother owes him $140,000 in 1836. If you adjust that for inflation, that's more than $3 million today that his brother owed him. Does it qualify what the debt is for? It just says this James got a bond, when Israel, if you don't read between the lines and go and research this, you don't even know it's for plantation operations. You have no clue, you have to dig further. Now, why would they go down to Mississippi and Louisiana? Well, because there was a surplus of enslaved laborers in the upper south. And as the Western part of the country starts to develop, right? When we go in and do that whole manifest destiny thing, you know, cause there's nobody on the land, right. There's no one living there, you know, forget the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Cherokee, the Creek, right. Tunica, all the nations, right? 'Cause there's no one living there. So, you know, let's do a halfway treaty and get them off their land. Ooh, I could come back and talk about that. It's the other side of my family, but either way you have these areas opening up and there's a surplus of labor in the upper south states like Virginia and the Carolinas and these plantations, these massive spaces have thousands of acres and they don't have anyone to work them. So what you start seeing is literal shifts of the out migration of enslaved people going from places like Virginia and the Carolinas they're leaving there. And they're going to other spots like Mississippi and Louisiana, because they needed the workforce. Boom, I'm going to share this for a second because I feel like we need a little truth in here. I can't find my cursor, there we go.

- I know you're asking today. How long would it take is asking how long we prepping this blind, man, I come to say to you this afternoon, I have a difficult for moment. I have a frustrating the hour, it will not be long because the truth will rise again. Not long because no lie can live forever. waiting for future behind the dam are known standards. God, within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

- Here's how I'm going to get my justice.

- You know, they would mention about the sharecropping and how like Papa, no, I was told, never paid his debt. It was never enough, you know, just like we've seen in the PHIMS they didn't talk too much about sleep. They were always talking about making a better life. And I'd like to even credit that maybe to being a part of the grains plantation, they were paying attention. I mean, and that spilled over and they wanted to be landowners and education was big with the grain, with what our ancestors education, politics, civil rights, you know? So my, my folks followed that pattern and I followed along. I'm still there, but they didn't talk a lot. I think it was because of the pain and there was even one cousin when she saw a cotton field, she would, as she approached that kind of feel most of the time it was on highway 61 living, you probably can identify with that. There was big, huge on both sides, just plantations cotton fields and it was like, let me know when we pass it, she would close her eyes. This would happen every time it was so painful until she passed that cotton field, that's just how painful. So it wasn't a lot that I could actually say that I heard them talk about.

- Kind of always known that we were just sending a slave slaveholder. But what I didn't know was that he was my grandmother's father. After the secret, as you want to say was out, she still never spoke about it, never a word.

- This operation was more than $24 million today, okay. That's a lot of money, you have $24 million. I knew she does, she's not telling the truth. It was massive, all of these states were included in this because what started to happen is as they made more money, they needed more money. So after Israel died, that debt passed onto his heirs, which included his children and his wife. And they still lived in Massachusetts, in New York. And they kept loaning money to James, even as they married into abolitionists families like the Tappin's you ever heard of Amistad anti-slavery societies and whatnot. Yeah, one of their daughters married into that family and was loaning money to her uncle to finance a plantation and collecting interest off of it in this little cute virtue signaling or back in the day. Right, it's like that. Right, where did I find all the documents, ancestry, family search, the Mississippi state archives. This a little place called Amherst college. I don't know where that is and Harvard Israel's papers had been divided between two colleges. So some of them were at Harvard, the business documents were at Harvard, but the letters were here. This is one of the enslaved elders of the trash 250. And by the time he died, this was the number of slave holders he had. This is what I can trace, notice the double sets of brothers, really three sets of brothers. Remember what I said about slavery being familial. These were partnerships that brothers would start and then they would pass them down to their children. Now let's talk about how the enslaved were monetized. In my opinion, they were monetized three different ways. Their literal physical labor generated profit. The air out of their lungs was made profitable. And you're sitting here saying, what do you mean the air out of their lungs? They were mortgaged against their personhood was mortgaged against. And not only could it be mortgaged against, but five different people could have title to my physical labor and my vital labor. So that means that if somebody defaults on a, on a loan, that's been secured against my vital labor or the air out of my lungs. We see these cases where it is laptop versus NAS versus Mike Kelly. Why are there three different parties in this case? Because all three of them had titled to that bile labor, then they've can even monetize their Viro, their photo labor, meaning their children. Oh yes. Their children. So what does this look like over time? Well, when you talk about the physical labor, you are literally looking at a list where they were counting, how many bales of cotton they produce in a single year and the weights on those CA on those cotton bales, 18 27, 600 bales of cotton, 400 bales at 18 28, 900 bales of cotton. Can you even imagine what in the world that looks like six to 700 in the year, 1832, but let me, let me make this even more real for you. 1835, they produce 725 bales of cotton. In that same letter, they say the cotton was going for 14 cents per pound. If you think about how many pounds of bale ways do the math in 1835, that was $48,000 today. That's over a million for that one year one. This was a 58 year operation. Any math majors in here, econ, it's my friend in the front. So excited. Cause I'm not good at math. She's better than me. What the lists let's take it from the perspective of a man named Sago Palmer, who was my fifth great grandfather. By the time he was 60 years old, he had a value of $550. Why? Because he was over the age of 40 and he was not worth that much because your value started to decline at that point in your late teens, your value started to go up and then after you turn 40, your value starts to go down. You'll also notice on this list, are people with trades and note that Randall who was worth a dollar on that inventory was worth $700 in 1838 because he was a carpenter. How else does this look? Well, let's talk about the number of times the traffic's mortgage against their enslaved. From the perspective of Sehgal Palmer, there was a $3,300 mortgage taken out in 1807 now because they don't have specific values for enslaved people on that mortgage. Let's go ahead and just average that out amongst all the people that were part of that transaction. So that meant it was about $90 a person then, and then the next mortgage was $80,000 because Israel wanted to buy this plantation on the German coast. That just so happens. That six months afterwards was a part of Louisiana slavery bowl. And my bull Ana came swinging in the blog, love her, talking about how they burnt his house down, right, as a part of the slave revolt. But in order for him to buy that property, he had to mortgage against the enslaved people in Adams county and in Wilkinson county for a total of $80,000, which was more than a million dollars today. And then in 1818, they mortgaged against Sega. Again, not only just once, but there was also a half interest in his life conveyed. And then again in 1822, we get two more transactions. Oh, let's keep going, Nico. There's more $170,000 in 1831 was the mortgage against the enslaved. And then again, two more mortgages in 1839, Israel died in 1835. So who was providing this money? His family living here and in New York, slavery was American. This isn't a Southern thing. This isn't a Northern thing. Slavery was American. How do you think the system perpetuated itself? And was it successful as it was, if it was just codified to one part of the country, how do you think Dr. Betsy even has a field of study about LOL in the context I'll mills there, if that wasn't the engine that was also financing this massive operation. So when southerners start telling you that you think you bet, and then we act because you live in the north, say, well, slavery was here to at least be acknowledged. You all don't right. Oh, we still got another look, one man mortgage seven, eight times. By the time he dies, what happens when those debts aren't paid? The people living up here then come and claim title separate you from your family. Even though they live in a state that does not, slavery is not legal in it. Let's talk about a zero labor cycle. Palmer had five children with his wife for Tema, okay. From there they have 23 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren that are all born before 1865. Why does this matter? This one, man added more than 46 people to this enslaved population. That's money because that means that the trash and the ventures is, do not have to go out and buy more enslaved people because their populations are generating them. Naturally. Every part of their lives was monetized. And I didn't just include this image for nothing. When it says, and there increase that's literal language from those mortgages, they themselves are mortgage and their increased meaning they're kids, their future children that aren't even walking around yet. And if they were slaves for life cycle Palmer is one of the few of the tracks. Two 50. We actually hear from in Israel's letters where he's actually quoted despite all of the money that they generated for this operation. You barely get their voices. Now, what do they say? This is Israel writing to his wife and his children here at what is the Alexander House now. And my personal favorite part of this is when Israel claimed he walked out in the cotton field and help them pick two for two hours, real sick. He walked out in the field and pick cotton for two hours with the Negroes. That's what he said, right? Virtue signaling in 1827. But he says, I walked out into the cotton field yesterday and help the Negroes pick cotton two hours. The Negro say they want to see massive William and ed all say, go said, when you fetch them, like, well, you don't get your kids. When are you going to bring them back? I said, perhaps by and bought, oh, massive buy. And by me be dead. Never see him. Now here's the irony, single outlet, Israel by 20 years. So he didn't bring them back. All right. So close out. I want to give honor to the elders. This is a list of enslaved people that were part of the Louisiana slave revolt. There were executed by the state for their role note. Their birthplaces Does not say America and note that they were born before 1800. See, there's this whole thought process that you can't trace black people back this far. I don't have a master's. I don't have a PhD, but I did it. And so can you Now there's also documents that tell us that Israel went to Charleston, South Carolina, not point comfort or Fort Monroe in Virginia and bought 12 African slaves. This is an 1805, but they didn't take the transaction to be documented until 1812. It also is not even index to Israel. It's index in his father-in-law and his and his brother-in-law's name. Again, going back to families. If I didn't know who those people were, I wouldn't have even have found this notation about 12 Africans and the pivot here. Again, notice it doesn't say Negroes. If it said Negroes, these would mean that these people who were enslaved were already stateside. The fact that they called them, Africans says they came straight off the boat. Okay? So we're going to honor the elders of the trash two 50. These are all individuals who were born before 1700 and many of them, their children lived long enough to be on a census where they noted where they were born. And they said Africa and several of us descend from several of them. So this is not just one branch of the family. It could be two and three, like Randall. That was worth a dollar and Esther, their descendants go by Talavera and Joshua Boyer and McCaya and Jenny and bill Chan and Clarissa. And why it calls it his wife, Julia and his wife, Hannah and Mussa, and Katie Dunbar, Jefferson Hawkins and Sada, Joe Mohs, Hannah Holoman, Linda Nancy, old Charles and Betty, Peter Paul Weller, Tom you're a book you ever heard of Yoruba? Anybody here know anybody's from Nigeria, these names aren't a coincidence shot. Do you notice the number of African names that are here?

- Oh, Nellie was the, she was my father's oldest sister and she was, she took over the cook position from my grandmother, Evelyn Bolden Palmer. And when it burned, she saved all of the silver and all of the stuff. So veterans also left her some land up there in Natchez. Hmm.

- Wonder why wonder why. All right. So let's talk about the future of this. What does all this mean in the grand scheme of things? As of last week, I have found more than 2,500 genealogical documents documenting this group of enslaved people. That includes more than 300 obituaries, more than 200 death certificates, more than 170 marriage licenses, 50 plus transactions, including 24 mortgages against their lives. Along with 11 slave lists, there are more than 6,300 individuals that I have traced to this enslaved slave population of people, more than 370 of them through DNA. Meaning you spend the tube. I spit in the tube. I look at who we have in common in terms of DNA matches. And if I see trash two 50 descendants, even if you don't have a D you don't even have a family tree, I can tell you how you connect. That's how advanced the technology is now and where the access is, but it can always be better. The majority of us are living in new Orleans Baton Rouge, and it will in Woodville, Mississippi. Some of those who are connected to us are very well known blues musician named buddy guy. In fact, he just had a documentary come out about him on PBS this year. And if you watch the first part, his mother is a towel over. That was the clue. And they lived in Louisiana pulled it up five minutes. I found it also, Dr. Corey, a bear who is a chief science editor at the black news channel. He is also part of this and he cut his teeth during hurricane Katrina.

- They're, they're bringing us to this point. They're opening our eyes. They're able to the whisper, those things that are on our beds at night to make us think about things that maybe we've long forgotten or even didn't know.

- A lot of financial gang was made up of back of slavery. The wealth of America was built up literally after blood, sweat, and tears. And what I want people to learn is to not be ashamed of our past. You know, the thing is the white washing of our history, as the saying the information that has been lost to me, that is the same.

- So I leave you with this. You've received a lot of information about slavery today, and you probably did not even know that there was any connection to the college that you were going to. And a group of enslaved people that never imagined that I would get here and say their names. And you could say to people who weren't here, they existed in that. The number of.

- The number of our kids upstairs here, I'm sorry.

- They thought they were forgotten. They really did, but they're not every single one of you here has a charge and a call to share what you learned tonight. And not just from the vantage point of the school that you will graduate from because I'm believing all of you will, but think about how you and what you were interested in can use this information and use what I have shared to make it so that it's not as hard for other people to get to what I got to. And it may be something really small. It doesn't have to be anything big because as I was sitting in my house, working on this for hours, not paying attention and not really caring, if anybody would even know about it, I had no idea that I will be standing before you sharing it. No clue. It didn't matter because I just wanted to get to my people. I just wanted to know their names. I wanted to see if I could get back to Africa. I wanted to see if I could have that roots experience that everyone has, because we don't have a ship manifest with names of our ancestors, our immigrant ancestors. We don't have an Ellis island. We have to create one for every single group of enslaved people. So think about how you, everyone here, everyone listening, how you can make decisions and, and choices with the information that you got here today to make it so that when it's 20 years later and you're standing in front of a group of students, things are different questions. You can ask me anything. Go ahead, NAS first.

- Thank you so much for doing this work as an. I asked if you have any advice or connections, especially when my trajectory is so different from my family, because everything this country and, you know, especially with.

- You know, if you have any advice on what I can make sure that can.

- Right? Right. So the question asked was how, how can they preserve their family history? Considering that there are a number of different things that have happened in their family that prohibit them from getting information like people dying, no one recording it, but they mentioned they had a grandmother still living interview, her ask very basic questions. In fact, you may even want to dedicate a time when you talk to her where you just, maybe it's once a month. There's, you know, whenever did you ask about family history? Sometimes what I feel works best with older people. Even if you buy them, if you buy like this really nice spiral, like a little a journal. So when she starts to think about things and she may not call you or talk to you that day, she can write it down. So she doesn't forget what it is. And the other thing is you may want to start to work on this while she's still alive so that when you look through documents and you're not sure if it's the right people, you can ask her, do you remember this person living nearby? Or did you remember them mentioning individuals? And, and really, even if you don't have a tree, just write it down, type it out, do whatever you need to do to preserve it. Because as each generation dies and passes away, we lose information. When I got to Maury, Maury did not remember Easter's name, but if I go back to an interview, he did 15 years earlier, he did. That's how quickly people lose information. And he was well, and with his faculties and everything, but he couldn't recall her name. So get to grandma and then potentially start fanning out to other family members who were older, who may be cousins. They may have pictures, they may have documents. They may have all kinds of stuff. And it may take you doing the research to find those people, because those living in your family today may not remember those individuals. And you may get lucky if somebody might've started the tree on ancestry already. And then that way, you know, if you run into me, right, the equivalent of me that will help you to any other questions.

- So, one last question, and then I oldest mentioned most of the students during my classes. So if you're going to come to class tomorrow, I'll ask you all today. You know, if this has been a weighty talk, great. So bring your five kids tomorrow and we'll be able to talk for, you know, live on.

- could definitely very much like a fugitive coffee, like moving forward. So I thank you that commanded for like all the work you've done. One thing you touched on that idea of just like how, like conceptually being in black study, I feel like a lot of the content that I have to research ought to be very personal and very dramatic, and me being a much more emotionally sensitive person. How do you do a self-care how you breath to take care of yourself after going through so much heavy contact.

- Right? That's a great question. How do you practice self care with this? Have a buddy or a friend that is in it, or has an interest in it that you can talk to about this? That's very key. I don't, I don't get here without the support of other folks who are doing research or who are in similar spaces. And you'd have to know when to push yourself away, you know, because you don't want it to be where you're, you know, that you're not in the right space. And sometimes when you sit down at the computer or you sit down and set of documents and you know, your Headspace is not right, and you won't be able to, to, to be as effective that day. So maybe that's a day where you do something where it's an easy win, right? Like you just, Hey, let me get something that I know I can find information for. Especially if you're working on a research project and try to work on your dissertation, find something where it's like, I know there's a ton of literature out there. I know I'm going to find something. Maybe let's not pier it into something that's really challenging today. And that's something that I suggest to genealogists too. I'm like if the new record collection just came out and it's really fun and easy, go do that for a couple days in between do a research on the enslaved because you don't want to traumatize yourself like that. And you really have to become very emotionally intelligent in order for you to, to just deal with the heaviness of being in this all the time. It's not easy. So for me, what I do is sometimes I work on what I call the easy part is let me go find some obituaries, because that means I'm going to have to add another hundred people, because we are just that prolific in terms of procreating and grading kids. And then there are other days where I want to track down those 12 slave people. Can I find that transaction? And that's not sometimes an easy answer. That's not something I can get to really quickly, you know? So that, that day I have to exercise a lot of patience. And then, you know, some days I just cuss at them. I do some days I do, I get mad. I'm like, see Israel, why don't you? This is you guys have the book. You guys have the 300 folders at the state archives, where is this transaction? And then I get the bright idea to try to order all the folders on microfilm so I can digitize and look at them at my house. So then that way I don't have to go there. And it knows cause Ann has been there, but you got to take your time, you know? And, and, and, and you got to have easy wins and you got to have somebody to help you process it. And sometimes it, there are things that you won't get over, but there's a reason why you are getting over it. And you got to really dig into why that is. And sometimes the answer's easy sometimes it's because that's helping you help another person get through what they are discovering, or it could be. You're supposed to learn something from that and pass that on in some way. And you haven't figured that out yet.

- Great. Well, let me thank you. On behalf of Amherst college, we need this information. So thank you for all of your work. And I'm really glad that we'll have the candidate talk further tomorrow and anyone not in my class, remember that our open house Wednesday night.

Transcript of Harriet Washington Keynote Address

- Good evening, everyone. This is the first time I've introduced an event in Johnson Chapel since March 2020. It's wonderful to be back in here, and I'm really honored that this is the event that comes first in what I hope will be a lot more. I'm honored to introduce special guests, who many of you have already met in a class or at a meeting. She is Harriet Washington writer and bioethicist. Harriet works at the intersection of medical ethics, history, and race. Exploring the history of science always through the lens of the ethics of scientific practices. And in her books, as many of you know, she offers comprehensive social histories that expose crucially important and formerly hidden parts of our history. I was just able to finish Carte Blanche today and really enjoyed just a short conversation with Harriet about what's exposed. Harriet Washington is well-known for her book, Medical Apartheid, the dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans from colonial times to the present. Medical Apartheid won the 2007 National Book Critics Award for nonfiction. It won many other honors. She's also the author of Deadly Monopolies, the shocking corporate takeover of life itself. Of a terrible thing to waste. A Terrible Thing to Waste, excuse me. Environmental racism and its assault on the American mind. And this year is Carte Blanche, the erosion of informed consent in medical research. Harriet is a writing fellow in bioethics at Harvard Medical School. She's a fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine. She's been a research fellow in medical ethics at Harvard Medical School. A visiting fellow at Harvard's T.H.Chan School of Public Health. A visiting scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. She's held fellowships at Stanford. She teaches Bioethics at Columbia university, where she delivered the 2020 commencement speech to Columbia's school of public health graduates. And she also won Columbia's 2020 Mailman School of Public Health, Public Health Leadership Award. Harriet Washington is on campus this week as our inaugural presidential scholar in residence. I know she's met with students, faculty and staff all week. She's visited classes in a range of different disciplines. I also know directly from her how much she's enjoyed our students. She's talked with the bioethics society on campus, and with participants in our Being Human in STEM program. She's generously made herself available and we are all extremely grateful to you, Harriet. Thank you. Tonight's conversation is part of the colloquium on race and racism. It's going to be moderated by Katrina Karkazis, professor of sexuality women's and gender studies at the college, and the senior visiting fellow with the global health justice partnership at Yale. Katrina's not only moderator but a participant in tonight's conversation, and I'm really excited to hear the two of them converse. Professor Karkazis is a cultural anthropologist and herself, also a bioethicist. She works at the intersection of science and technology studies, theories of gender and race, social studies of medicine. She is the author of Fixing Sex. For some reason in the cold, I'm unable to separate my pages. Intersects medical authority and lived experience. And she's co-author with Rebecca Jordan-Young of 2019's Testosterone, an unauthorized biography. Quite a book. Katrina has served as an expert witness on gender discrimination in sport at the court of arbitration for sport. She's been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Science Foundation. And at Amherst she's now teaching courses in feminist science and technology studies, medical anthropology, the body and embodiment. Please join me in welcoming Harriet Washington, our inaugural presidential scholar and Katrina Karkazis.

- Is this on? You can hear me? Lovely. Harriet, I have spent the week reading you, listening to you, thinking with you, and I'm just thrilled to be in conversation once again. I think we were talking maybe two or three years ago. It was pouring rain in the middle of Manhattan. No one wanted to leave, in part because the conversation was lovely, but also it was pouring outside.

- Exactly. You've had a long week and I've been able to listen to some of the talks, but I was trying to write and think through questions and think with you across a really incredible body of work, just impressive around the kinds of topics that you tackle. But always thinking about the way in which the long legacy of chattel slavery persists into this moment in terms of the health of Black Americans. And I wanted to start really with such a profound book, Medical Apartheid. If you've not read it, or if you haven't taught it, I encourage you to dive in because my students have loved this book and enjoy it. And in that book, you chronicle what you call the hidden history of medical experimentation on African-Americans and the long week, if you will, of 18th century scientific racism that lingers to the present day. And I think in tracing that history, which you do so meticulously across such a long period of time using so many examples. You've pushed us to see politically. To see across time the unfinished business of tackling race science. And it makes me think of something that poet Claudia Rankine wrote in her book Citizenship. She said, "the past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow." And I was wondering if you could talk more about the resonances of that history that you write about that you see in contemporary society today.

- Certainly. And thank you for the kind words about my work. That's precisely what I try to do. You know, the history that I detail in the 19th century, where the best scientists in the world convene to describe African-Americans in a way that resonates to the centuries. We're still held captive by their descriptions. And for the first time you had the opinions of people in power cloaked in scientific data to give them the semblance of being scientifically But the truth was they were nothing more than the embodiment of myth. And yet we're still trapped by that. I look at Coronavirus 19 in our attempts to address it. And when it comes to the racial disproportion, a lot of the things that we focus on are direct products of that 19th century belief about African-Americans. That we contribute to our own diseases. That we're not intelligent enough to ask for our own best medical interests. What else was that when we heard about failing to social distance or African-Americans drinking and using alcohol as a risk factor an unproven risk factor. So these things still are with us and Claudia Rankine is exactly right. It's a life sentence, unless we elect to end it.

- Mhm. Keeping along with that idea, I think I'm interested in what you've called the unfortunate habits of thought. That there might be something unique to Black biologies. And I think we saw that with COVID-19. I think we still see it with examples of drugs, like BiDil, right? That there's something that, I mean, I completely see this because we talk about it in my classes. There's even 19th century, 18th century notions of people of different racialized groups being different species, and being connected to different animals. And I'm wondering if you can speak a bit more about the way in which some of this racialized biology. I know you've just addressed it in terms of, you know more broadly, but if there might be an example or something in particular that's on your mind as a specific aspect of biology or the way that that's continuing right now?

- There's so many examples. You're right. But let's talk about intelligence. We're talking about biological dimorphism. The idea that Black people and white people are biologically different and that accounts for their different healthcare and health status. So if you look at intelligence we've long, even the Roman physician Galen said that, "African men had oversized genitalia and undersized brains." The 19th century doctors expanded on that saying that African Americans were a different species than white. Indeed, as you suggest. And that they were unintelligent and they transmitted that intelligence from generation to generation. Today, we have very prominent scientists, like James Watson, echoing the exact same sentent. That African-Americans are genetically less intelligent and will always be, so interventions won't work. So, these statements actually hamper attempts to address any IQ gap or intelligence gap between Blacks and whites by invoking futility.

- Yeah, it makes me think too, like, of some of this recent work that's been happening in neuroscience. Based on this idea of neuroplasticity, where there's a way in which the focus once again is on a racialized biology so that there are ways in which poverty, for example, will affect the brains of Black children. And that in turn hinders their ability, I'm sure IQ is tied into this, but sort of their ability to perform academically. And on the one hand, you know, it's a benevolent gesture in the sense that someone is trying to connect social circumstances to a particular kind of harm, but it does it via biology to suggest that there's a particular kind of damage that's happening in these communities. And that it's a really bio-social deterministic way of thinking that seems, I think in their minds, to be separate from earlier science. It's sort of not that earlier kind of race science, but I actually think it recapitulates some of the same problems of that earlier science.

- I don't try to figure out who's benevolent and not benevolent.

- Mhm. I don't pretend to understand how people think. I don't even know what motivates me all the time. Right?

- Mhm. So instead I look at the foreseeable results of people's claims. The people you're talking about are confusing race and socioeconomics. Poverty is not limited to any ethnic group. But even if they were not, it would be illogical because the fact is there are many things that contribute. The real question is what contributes most heavily and what is worthy of pursuing a remedy based on it? It doesn't make sense to determine that something is one half of 1 percent of the cause and then devote all your resources to exploring the putative genetics of that. In fact environmental racism, COVID-19 gave me an opportunity in March of 2020. When people were talking about different bodily differences, genetic differences between Black and white people to explain why Black people were disproportionately sickening and dying. I thought, why are you worrying about genetic anomalies that may or may not be implicated in a small number of people? When we have very dramatic example of environmental racism. Toxicity is affecting people of color dramatically and causing dramatic increases in risk factors. And yet we're not really looking at that. I wrote an article for Nature magazine in which I posited that. And the most frequent response I got was from people who said, "Well, you're saying that it's race driving environmental toxicity, but isn't it socio-economics?" And I pointed out that, no, it actually is race. That even middle-class affluent African-Americans have more exposure than profoundly poor whites.

- Mhm. So all these mythologies start with bad science and bad assumptions from the 19th century.

- Mhm. And it seems to me what I'm hearing you say too, over and over is that it's a myopia to keep returning to biology, right? As though we can isolate these social determinants, just find that part that is attributable to biology. But the problem is it's only ever responsible for a very, very small amount.

- If any.

- If any, and yet the funding goes into that. In the meantime, the social economic and other factors are very often bracketed off, as if they could be bracketed off.

- Exactly. You said it, summarized it exactly.

- Yeah. Something else that I was thinking about, and you had mentioned COVID and I had some questions about COVID. Maybe one of the places that I'd like to start with that is, I believe you wrote somewhere where talking about the connections between the protests after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and also, you know, some of the, what was happening around COVID as well, and kind of a convergence around those protests and COVID. And I'm wondering what connections you see between what happened that summer?

- I was talking about that with a class this morning, and it's a very important connection. I think we all sense there's something there, right? This escalation in violence is concomitant with the rise in Coronavirus 19, and we all sense that there's some kind of connection where it's not exactly clear. And some Canadian scientists have gone a long way to providing that clarity, in my opinion. What they have done is, they have a theory that Stranger Infection, infection suffered by strangers to us. We overreacted or react differently. We react differently because we don't have any physical way of determining who's infected, and non-infected. You can look at somebody and maybe if they have pimples or pustules, you could kind of surmise that they might be infected. But we also react that way to people with different skin color, or even people with a different diet. And so we have these very poor cues that trigger us into overreacting to infectious disease. And why do we do that with strangers and not do it with domestic disease? Because being infected by a disease that you have no immunological knowledge of or experience with is especially deadly. Just ask all the European soldiers who died in West Africa, and what they came to call the white man's grave. Of diseases that Europeans had no experience with, had no defense against. For an African exposed to the disease they might get sick for a few weeks and recover, but the European soldier would die. In this country, Native Americans succumb en masse to syphilis strains that they had not encountered before. Influenza, things like that. So stranger violence makes us overreact and we overreact very inaccurately based on things like diet, what kind of pets people keep, but mostly their appearance. And that's exactly what we saw happen in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic here. Remember the point where a hundred Asians a day were being assaulted, physically assaulted. Serious assaults. An entire Asian family was attacked in a supermarket and slashed by an assailant, who put them in the hospital. Every single day Asian people going about their business were being. Oh, I'm sorry. Asian people, Asian Americans, people who even looked Asian were being accosted. Yelled at. Told they were Chinese said, "Don't bring your Coronavirus here." And then finally they began to be assaulted. In New York City, I saw a transition to include African-Americans. When African-American men wore a mask, they were thrown out of stores by security guards, and police said, "You're wearing a mask. You could be a criminal." Disingenuous I know, but that's what they did. But African-Americans in New York City who did not wear masks, were accosted by the police. Given summons. Even arrested. And at the same day, the very same day you had police going through affluent parts of Manhattan, handing out masks to white people with a polite request to put them on. So the ethnic violence was spreading. And I think this theory does account for our overreaction to stranger violence. Unlike some animals, you know, like tadpoles, Caribbean spinal lobsters, they can identify an infected person and avoid them. But we can't do that by looking. We need a laboratory. If we don't have that, we can't tell who's infected and who isn't. So we overreact and American citizens who look Asian to them or have an Asian descent are called Chinese and are assaulted. You know, very stupid, you know, but it's something that happens. So I think this theory goes a long way to explaining the explosion of violence that we're seeing. And I just want to know that, of course it wasn't confined to Asians. I remember the first step that really chilled me cause it was near me. A Black woman in Brooklyn was killed in an emergency department by another patient who said, "she wasn't practicing social distancing. For all I knew she had the coronavirus and would have killed me." So she killed her. So I think that's a connection and we definitely need to examine how we can turn that insight into real solutions.

- I really appreciate that. I remember actually talking to some Black male friends of mine who purposely were choosing masks that had smiley faces and other things because that what you were supposed to do to protect yourself is actually that which endangered them because of how they were perceived, which is an incredibly important piece. Thank you for mentioning that. I was thinking as well about COVID because the way that it's been talked about a lot is it's an epidemic of comorbidities, right? So that people are ostensibly having underlying conditions, and then there's some exposure and that in turn, you know, puts them at risk. And before thinking about that, I was really thinking about how it is that we come to understand and study health inequities, and some of the double binds that that puts us in when it's really about health disparities, about racialized groups. And part of what I was thinking is that, analyzing how structural racism systematically generates health inequities requires a particular kind of scientific theory or hypothesis or data, but when it comes to racialized health inequities, any attempt to analyze any of this actually requires that we engage with the profound challenges of conceptualizing race, right? And operationalizing race and analyzing the very data, which are racialized categories. And I'm just wondering within the U.S. and the histories of, you know, sort of the contested production of racialized data. You've already mentioned some of it already in our conversation. That extends back to, you know, a slave Republic and the racialized science that race science and racist science that you've talked about. That both the non-use and the problematic use of data on racialized groups. And if you have thoughts about how we can use an anti-racist science for health equity? That employs data on racialized groups, like what, how is that done?

- Again, data are weaponized and that weaponization includes mishandling data, misanalysis, using that incorrectly, collecting incorrectly and not controlling for bias are always going to operate in the direction of enforcing some kind of racial stigma or problem. And that's what happens so often. The data can be copious and look convincing on the surface, but often on the way they've been collected or they're categorized means that the bias is going to be reinforced.

- Mhm. And reifying particular racial categories, which can be.

- Exactly. You mentioned BiDil earlier. A very good example of that.

- Mhm. One of the things I wanted to talk about, because I think it's a really wonderful example of the way that you're writing and your engagement actually has brought about really profound changes. In Medical Apartheid, you do a really long discussion of the gynecologist, J. Marion Sims, and the way that his surgical techniques on enslaved Black women that were done excruciatingly repeatedly without anesthesia had sort of, you know. He'd been propelled to this place of a heroic doctor, one to be admired. But one of the things that you talk about is that actually he had contemporary critics in his time and that there were physicians that were both white and Black, who attacked his methods as barbaric. And I wonder, should we pause and have you talk about that? I really want to also have you talk about the statue, but maybe we should pause.

- I can briefly talk about that.

- Yeah.

- You know. What's often said is that James Marion Sims was the father of American gynecology. He was a medical hero and only recently have loud mouth firebrands, like Harriet Washington, began criticizing him. Okay. That's not true. He was criticized in his own time. His white male contemporaries, and the fellow surgeons criticized him. They did not understand why he was giving morphine to the enslaved women, after the surgeries. He didn't give it to them to dull the pain. He gave it to them afterwards. One historian theorized, he did that to make the women more compliant, you know, and to prevent them from protesting too much. That was one theory. But the other thing was he was criticized by other doctors who said what he did was wrong. Most doctors agreed that he should work on enslaved women. They worked on enslaved women, but a few doctors said, "No, it's wrong." One of them was Daniel Hale Williams, a Black surgeon who complained about Sims. But Montague Cobb, a graduate of Amherst by the way, and a very esteemed and brilliant doctor and physiologist He supported Sims. He said, you know, the end justifies the means basically. So there was a very unlively debate about whether Sims was right or wrong in his own time that is ignored by his critics.

- So taking that into account and the fact that there were, you know, people going back historically to his own moment and then there are people such as yourself that are writing this history for newer generations. My sense is that your writings about this were really critical to the statue of J Marion Sims coming down in New York City. And I'm wondering if you can talk about that in terms of whether or not you were involved, but also the importance of that statue coming down.

- Sure. Sure. And that's true. When Medical Apartheid was published, I gave a lecture at the New York Academy of Medicine. The statue is directly across the street from the academy. When I finished my lecture and mentioned Sims, a medical student in the audience jumped up and said, "We have to tear that statue down!" And I said, "If you do don't use my name because I'm already in enough trouble." But it took 10 years. But the women who lived in the area, mostly Black and Hispanic women now and medical students joined together and petitioned the city. Petitioned the parks department. Petitioned everyone trying to get the statue taken down. And they vandalized the statue. At one point, they had like this big white roll that I thought was a diploma put in his hand. And the medical students said, "No, that's a joint." So eventually the statue was taken down in February of 2018. I was so happy to see it taken down. What's interesting is many people were angry about it taken down. And I kept hearing things like, "You're trying to change history." And I said, "Yes, trying to correct it." But the thing is, statues are not historical documents. If you want to learn history, open a book. Don't go to a statue. The statues often are erected not for historical knowledge, but to lionize people and to remind people living in the area, who was in control. That's why Confederate statues are raised and that's why James Marion Sims statue was erected. And I was very happy to see it banned from Central Park.

- I wanted to, I had the fortune of hearing you on Monday talk a bit about this idea of vaccine hesitancy in more generally, but really in the Black community and some of the misconstruing that's happened in the media and in other arenas around that. And B, I want to use that as a beginning to actually ask you a question after that, but can you start with some of your observations about how this has been framed regarding vaccine use in the Black community? I guess the clinical trials, as well as adoption.

- Sure. The 19th century doctors said, as I've mentioned, that African-Americans would not even act intelligently in their own interests and that's why they were sick. And historically, people who have not bothered to learn all of the history and who don't understand that there have been 400 years of medical abuse will always invoke the Tuskegee study to explain this. Okay. So when it came to try this with the COVID vaccine, what I read every day in medical journals and newspapers was that African-Americans were refusing to join the clinical trials. I'm sure you read it too. Every single day. By the end the recounts got kind of nasty. They're saying things like, "If we don't end up with a vaccine, it will be the fault of African-Americans. You know, who don't join clinical trials." When the trials ended, and we were fortunate enough to have two mRNA vaccines that work really well and were safe. I contacted Johns Hopkins and talked to on regional data for the clinical trials. And what did I see? 10 percent of the people in both Moderna and Pfizer BioNTech studies were African-American. 10 percent. African-Americans were 12.3 percent of the population. That means that they were extremely well-represented. They had a very good showing. They were not avoiding the clinical trials, even though we were told every single day that they were. Okay, I found that disturbing. Next, what we read was that now we have a vaccine, but African-Americans are avoiding it. They're avoiding it because of Tuskegee. First of all, the evidence offered was that African-Americans had lower rates of being vaccinated, which is true. That does not mean that they're refusing the vaccine. That means they're not getting the vaccine. We have an established why, and the reason why I think had much less to do with rejecting the vaccine, and more to do with poor policies. One of the policies we adopted was that 85 year olds should be prioritized. Elderly. They're more vulnerable. That makes sense, right? We need to protect our elderly, But what does it mean to prioritize 85 year olds? In this country, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, African Americans are young populations. If you look at 90 year olds in the U.S. you will find twice the rate of 90 year olds in the white population as the Black population. When we prioritize the elderly, we were effectively limiting access of people of color to the vaccine. Wasn't our intention, but that's what we did. Moreover, how do people access appointments to the vaccine via the internet? In many areas, there isn't a reliable internet access. Many people of color don't have access. And many people of color did not have the luxury of working from home. They had to work at jobs where they had to be there all day long. If they indeed had access, they had to wait until their quote unquote, spare time to go online. I got an appointment by going online several times a day, at least an hour each time. I finally got an appointment at a place 250 miles away from me. And luckily at the last minute I got a local appointment, but most people of color can't do that. Most people can't do that. And so these policies are what really separating people At the same time, we're blaming them as if their rejecting the vaccine is really the problem. It's not. It's inequitable access to the healthcare system.

- Mhm. You know, you made me think of something else. So there's kind of this narrative, I think, happening around vaccine hesitancy that is sort of making caricatures of different populations. I don't think there's one voice that's vaccine hesitant. And, one of those is actually a vaccine hesitant Black population that either because of Tuskegee, or you know, harm from. I mean, it's usually nebulous. It's never very well connected because no one actually talks to anyone. They theorize that maybe they have some knowledge of Tuskegee and that's why. And I was thinking about this because I recently came across two men who were not interested in being vaccinated, but it's not any of the narratives that you typically hear in the media. And I was thinking about it because, I don't know if anyone has seen this, but years ago, Anna Deavere Smith did a play called Let Me Down Easy, where she interviewed people about the healthcare system. And one of the people that she interviewed in that play was a white doctor that was at Charity hospital in New Orleans. And when the flooding from Katrina started to happen. She was a white doctor. The vast majority of the caregivers in that hospital were Black. And she kept saying, "They're going to come and get us." And the Black patients and the Black healthcare workers said, "No, they won't." And as the days go on, there's no food, there's no electricity, they're rationing the vents. And this continues. And she holds out hope. And finally, what she realizes that people around are getting rescued that are at the wealthier hospitals, the white hospitals, but not there. And in her mind, what she said is this is the first time that I really understood what it meant to have your country not be there for you. And it's a long preamble to, to ask what I want to ask. But what I was interested in is that for the people that I had spoken to. There's not a sense that this system is trustworthy, and so to all of the sudden have a country that has not prioritized your health. And in fact has made it very difficult for you to access healthcare, or to get other kinds of things that you need. It's kind of unfathomable and unbelievable that the country at this point would be caring and would want to, you know, and just expect, yes, we want you to be healthy. We want you to have the vaccine, and so come in. But I think I was hearing you say earlier in the week, that's very hard to do when the whole system itself has not been trustworthy. And so why should they, you know, in that way, trust it. When all of the policies of the land have very often worked against them. And I'm just wondering, if that's something that you've come across or you've seen that narrative, or something you could speak to, or maybe it's just the wrong place to be pointing.

- I say this every day, we focus on the reticent and the distrust of African-Americans. But the real problem is that we have an untrustworthy healthcare system. Fix the system. People will flock to it. So we need to focus on both, not just African-American behavior, as if that's a pathology driving. It's not. It's the untrustworthy healthcare system. I want to back up to, and say something about Tuskegee. As I suggested before, it's a lazy, you know, nonintellectual tend to explain behavior. And fortunately, Thomas Loveisck, a professor at Johns Hopkins has written an entire series of articles explaining why Tuskegee syphilis study is not the reason African Americans avoid healthcare and distrust the system. He has pointed out among other things. In one subject study, he pointed out that people who have never heard of Tuskegee are more afraid of medical research than people who have. It is four centuries of abuse in the healthcare system, not one single study that causes people to react. And you know, it's important because if you blame Tuskegee or African-Americans reacting to Tuskegee, what are you saying? You're saying that Black people are overreacting to a single study. That's not what's happening. Black people are appropriately reacting to four years of abuse and falses. Being lied to. So what you said is exactly right, the untrustworthiness of the healthcare system. It's what has brought us to this past. I'm wondering if that makes me think about your latest book on informed consent. And I think those of us that sort of dwell in the land of bioethics, you know, have an understanding from some empirical work that it's a deeply flawed process, whether it's in the clinic or for research. But what you said, I just want to grab your words. That there's another type of erosion of consent that's been lurking. And I'm wondering if you can talk about the kind of egregious violations of consent that you talked about in your latest book, Carte Blanche.

- Most Americans think that they can't be involved in medical research without their consent, right? You have to be able to say yes or no. And generally that has been the truth until 1996. All that changed in September, 1996, when the law was changed. Two addendums were added to the code of federal regulations. One said, if you're a trauma victim, you can be used in research without asking you, without even telling you, without telling anyone in your family. The other is a waiver that said for certain types of research, we no longer need people's permission. One type was generally, using people's data and you could almost see the rationale there. But the other was using research that didn't have more than what they called minimal risk. But their idea of minimal risk does not coincide with my idea of minimal risk. Their idea of minimal risk includes giving ketamine, a very potent anesthetic to people on the street by EMTs who decided they're too agitated and need calming down. 40 percent of being given ketamine that way, wake up the next day in the hospital on a ventilator, and next to them is a form saying, "You've been enrolled in a medical study. Research study. If you don't want to be in it, no problem. You can opt out, just sign the form." Opt out of what? They already have the ketamine. They're already in the hospital on a ventilator. Their objection is not to being infused without their permission. They had to go on a ventilator with nobody asking their permission. These kinds of things have burgeoned now. By my count, at least 900,000 people have been used in research without their consent. That includes soldiers, who were forced to take experimental Anthrax vaccines and people being given ketamine. And it's a huge problem because every day there's new evidence or new studies being used without getting people's consent. And that's unacceptable.

- How are we doing on time? Anybody want to give me a signal?

- Anybody have the time? I have more questions as always, but I want to, what do you think? Maybe one more. Yeah? Okay. I want to ask a big, hard one, but it's one, I think about a lot. So you may not have an answer.

- We'll see.

- Yeah. I was thinking a lot about this during COVID, and white acceptance of Black and brown death is not new, and.

- I'm not sure. I'm sorry, repeat that please.

- White acceptance of Black and brown death is an old thing, in other words, right? It's longstanding acceptance. In the insistent neglect and violence that renders premature death as normative. And I think it risks ongoing indefinite rationalization in some of the ways that you've really, you know, you've detailed tonight in a really lovely way by putting the problem inside individual biologies or lack of trust or other things rather than locating it in systems and histories. And I'm just wondering, how does Black and brown death become as intolerable as white death?

- I think you would have to ask that question of the people who are tolerating Black death. It's a lack of humanity clearly, but the cost of it and the the solution probably varied because we have a spectrum here. We have a spectrum of people who. I'm thinking of something that happened in the 1970s. My father was a military advisor. He was sent to Vietnam in the 1950s, and he and all the other military advisers unanimously said, "We don't need to be in Vietnam, unwinnable war." They continued the war anyway, as you know. He was sent back in 1970, and at this point he was really angry and bitter. This war should have been over 20 years ago. And as a military advisor, he could not carry a weapon, but he could be shot at, right? So it was a really hard time for our family. And I was very upset. My sisters and my brothers were really upset, and my mother would try to comfort us. And one of the things that she often said was, "You have to remember life is very cheap over there, but we're not like that." I think that this utterance about life being cheap, this, you know, vocalization of the lesser quality or value of other people's lives is something people do very often without really admitting it to themselves. And I think we're looking at that here.

- So we're going to open it up. I think anyone is able to ask questions if you have them and I very much hope that you do. There's a mic here. And I think we'll also be fielding some from people online. So please don't be shy.

- Go for it.

- From Richard.

- I appreciate it. Okay. So this is from Richard. "An understanding of race," and this is in quotes, "in medicine" and how the resultant disparities exist does not lead to tangible reductions. How can payment by CMS or commercial insurance plans leverage money to decrease disparities?

- I'm not sure how to answer the question.

- I'm actually not quite sure either, and unfortunately we don't have him here to help us with this.

- Could we possibly have the mic brought to people, who want to ask a question?

- Yeah.

- They might be more comfortable.

- It's like class, I just call on people.

- Okay. You guys can hear me fine?

- Yes.

- A lot of, a lot of the antidotes you listed were also in reference to Johns Hopkins, but after, I took an HDM class over the end of January, and I also know that the institution itself, Johns Hopkins isn't well, it isn't excused from all it's done as well. Do you happen to see any irony? And I guess what they've done in the past and what they've done now?

- I did work when I was at Hopkins, but in terms of the institution itself. Quite frankly, Johns Hopkins fits very neatly

- Mhm.

- They don't really stand out as especially good or bad. We know about episodic abuses. We know about Henrietta Lacks. What people don't know about was that the only documented Burke in this country was people affiliated with Johns Hopkins. A Burke is when you kill somebody to sell their body to the medical school for dissection. The only documented one happened involving Johns Hopkins, but. And then of course the marginalization of medical genius. Something that happens all over the country, and very famously it happened at Johns Hopkins, when Vivian Thomas, you know, who mastered a particularly difficult pediatric surgery was paid as a common laborer and had his work appropriated by surgeons. So, but these things happen at all medical schools in the country. I think it's sometimes a mistake to vilify a particular institution when it's doing things that everybody almost had done. We're looking at American failures from American institutions. And I just rarely see the benefit in singling an institution out unless that institution is either defending its venal actions or refusing to acknowledge them. And that's not the case with Hopkins, they've pretty much owned up to what they had done as far as I can see. Great question.

- Hello.

- Hi.

- I have more of a personal question. My own father has like neglected to get the Corona virus vaccine, and a lot of what you were talking about, this kind of like fear of the medical institutions and also just kind of with the whole masks. He's a laborer, so he's mandated to wear two masks. And we live in New York. So a lot of these pressures start to amount to this resentment to get the vaccine. So I just wanted to know how I could, as a daughter, be impartial and say, you know, "Please get the vaccine. I really want you to be safe." But also come with evidence and not make him feel judged for not having it himself?

- Well, I think. That's a very good question. I think a lot of people probably have the same question, so I'm glad that you asked it. I think one of the most important things you can do for family members and friends is to ally yourself with a part of them that is entertaining fears because those fears are justified, you know, they may not be factual. I don't think people have anything to fear from these vaccines, but I don't blame them for having the fears. It's a logical fear. It's based on history. It's based on known facts. So I think it's really important to let them know that you agree with him. The system is not trustworthy. Certainly researchers are capable of developing a vaccine that could be harmful. We know that unfortunately. Our government has done that. We've disseminated vaccines and treatments that we have known are harmful. That can happen. So let them know that you're not judging them in that sense, and that you actually agree with their fears, but then speak to them about the reality of the present situation. There are factual ways to do that, and there are cynical ways to do that, and I've used them both. I mean, the factual ways are just pointing out. The truth is with this type of vaccine when problems have emerged in the past with vaccines, and they have, but typically they emerge before now. We would've known by now if the, you know, if there were problems. The fact that so many people have taken them, and there have been so few adverse effects is a very powerful argument. And I'd probably amass a little bit of data, and show him that look, you know, it's not hurting people. It's not killing people. It's the best thing you can do. Now, the most cynical thing I have said in the past, don't judge me, is in talking to family members who are dead set against getting the vaccine, you know, and the arguments were the same kind of arguments. Look what they've done in the past. Look what they've, you know, done this to Black people. Done that to Black people. I'm like, yeah, I know something about that. I agree with you, you know. But! But, in the end I said, Look vaccine. At that point, I had this discussion. There were still people who were having a hard time getting appointments, you know, and vying to get it. And there had been an event in New York City where they decided that part of the city was filled with Black and Hispanic people who were not getting the vaccine and who wanted it, So they designated a special site for vaccination. Guess who showed up at eight o'clock the next morning? Rich people from the suburbs, and from upper east side. I showed him, I said, listen, "White people are knocking each other out of the way to get this vaccine." I think it's safe.

- It's true.

- It's the last resort, but it works.

- Yeah. Atlanta as well. It happened all over the place. Oakland, same thing. Yeah. Hi!

- I'm curious if you could talk a little bit, I know for pre-medical students here at Amherst college they have to take, four chemistry courses, two physics classes, a stats class, all of these classes and what we call like maybe hard science and there's no requirement to take, for example, like a feminist science studies class or something about bioethics and or race and medicine. I'm curious if you could talk about kind of how even what we expect out of our doctors as part of the problem, and if how to make changes concretely from that?

- Very good point. Very interesting one too. The talk around affirmative action. Often devolves around test scores, and it's almost laughable. The people who are protesting affirmative action who by the way the lawsuits are being brought not by groups of white students who feel that they've been slighted. They're being brought by Edward Blum. He started several across the country, 65 year old man who is , He wants to end affirmative action and he's instigated a number of lawsuits against it, but he will pretend to be advocating on behalf of Asian American students say for example. Okay. The argument devolves around test scores. You've got a group of students who are whites, who are Asians and their test scores are in the 99 plus percentile. And what are you doing? You're admitting Black people whose test scores are only in the 99th percentile. The differences are so small as to be negligible, but more to the point there's no evidence, in fact, few studies. No evidence showing that having a high MCAT score makes you a good clinician. The things that are being tested do indeed, don't test things that measure your prowess in medicine. There isn't a connection between being a good clinician and many of the things that are being argued with. There's no connection between having an A in a lot of these courses. I talked to doctors who told me the last time I used this particular course was when I was in graduate school. They don't use it. So these are essentially badges of achievement that are used to keep people out. They're not used to judge who is the best future clinician. They're used to narrow the field, so to speak. And many African-Americans. I mean, obviously African-Americans perform extremely well there too, and Hispanic Americans and Native Americans. But when there are very small differences, they've often fit, They often are in favor of whites because white people are more likely to go to the educational institutions where they have that kind of support. A private school, school like this one, or and a school where there's a lot of support who can afford to take thousand dollar MCAT preparation courses, things like that. So the short answer is we're not testing the things that judge, "Would you make a good doctor?" We're not always testing things that make you a good scientist sometimes. And knowing ethics is essential to medical practice. I think it should be, it's right up there. It's probably more important than physics for most physicians and certainly right up there with biochemistry. So we need to rethink some of the credentialing that we do. Great question.

- I'd like to co-sign that quickly because I spent 15 years teaching clinical ethics and research ethics. And I feel very, very strongly that medical school and graduate school is too late. And this is the moment. And so while I have my plug, I decided just about a week ago that in the coming year I'm going to offer a bioethics class because I think this is when we need to bring that kind of thinking in. And what I saw which is not the fault of the students is that the push to get the science is leaving out the social sciences and humanities leaves out the part that medicine is about actually working with humans, right? Not bodies. And that piece is so critical, but if you don't understand yet how to think about race or gender in more complicated ways, and in non-essentializing ways, I think this ends up creating a lot of the problems that Harriet ends up writing about. So to make her writing life easier, I think we should bring that in. But it's imperative that it happen earlier because it's not happening in medical school. By the time I was there, they kept cutting back the hours for ethics to the point where it was very, very minimal and it wasn't taken as seriously. So thank you for that. I didn't see where you went, but thank you for that observation. Yeah. Anyone else? Yeah. Jordan, right? Yeah.

- Hi. I know that there has been a long standing belief that Black people can take more pain or don't feel pain as much as white people. And there's even been attempts to find evidence to support that. And I was wondering, what do you have to say about the effects of that now?

- Sure. Very pertinent question. The 19th century physicians and scientists. Again, we have them to thank for that because one of the tenants that they promulgated was that African-Americans have profoundly primitive neurological systems that don't allow them to feel pain or feel anxiety for that matter. And that belief has persisted for 400 years. If anything, it's gotten stronger and periodically there are studies done to both prove and quantify it. The most recent was 2016 University of Virginia. They found that half of all respondents, medical students and practicing physicians believe that African-Americans do not feel pain the way whites do. They also thought that African-Americans required more radiation than do whites. A lot of beliefs that sound laughable and crude, and I recognize them all as straight out of that 19th century belief promulgated by doctors. So we're still dealing with that. What does it mean when you have doctors practicing who don't believe that Black people don't feel pain? Well, for one thing, what they do is when a Black person appears claiming to be in pain, they're dismissed as drug seeking. So, you know, the assumption is you're just here looking for drugs. Even if you have a disease like sickle cell disease, which is known to be exquisitely painful. Even if it's well-documented, it doesn't matter. You're still going to be turned away. That has a lot of results, you know, that are really poor but it also has a poor result in terms of the way African-Americans are perceived. When you have physicians, assuming that large classes of African-Americans are seeking drugs, that causes them to lack empathy for them. They don't see them as patients who are, you know, worthy of having their health and welfare maximized. They see them as drug addicts. And so it's a huge problem. It's only getting worse with the opioid epidemic because. The cover story in Wired this month, seek it out. It's written by Mya, a friend of mine. And she talks about how the algorithms meant to curb the opioid epidemic are actually quite cruel because they're separating people from drugs that they need, and hoping to categorize these large classes of people like African-Americans as people who are drug seeking. So thank you a very important point. I also have to say, I worry about the things that we're not tracking. We are tracking pain, but a lot of other beliefs I see. I see them in hospitals. I see them being, you know, accepted blindly, and we need to start tracking some of those too. And hopefully crafting solutions.

- I might add one quick thing which was, and maybe you remember this better than I do Harriet. But it was only within the last, definitely within the last five years that there was an empirical study at a teaching hospital in North Carolina, that was a survey about racialized beliefs. And one that I remember was Black people have thicker skin, right. And so, because they have thicker skin, they have a greater resistance to pain, and there were a series of racialized beliefs, and it was.

- There's actually been a lot of those studies.

- Yeah. And there are significant numbers of both medical students and teaching clinicians who subscribed to some of those beliefs, like maybe a quarter, depending upon what it was.

- It's not. It's become a tacit part of medical education. By that I mean you won't find it in a textbook, but it's something that people learn not only from professors who say it, but that's what they've learned when they go on the clinical floors. You go on the clinical floor as a new resident, and what do you see? You see Black people coming in complaining of being in excruciating pain and being dismissed as drug seeking. You know you're told, "Oh, those kinds of patients. they're looking for drugs." You know, you internalize that as part of your training. And so, yeah, it's very common.

- So maybe we'll do one. Oh, sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't see you over there. Yeah, go ahead.

- Yeah. I just had a short follow-up question to your response to Jordan's question, actually. You mentioned at the end of your response there that you think there are a lot of harmful myths outside of this pain one specifically that you were talking about that you think are propagated in medical institutions that we aren't tracking and we aren't talking about. Can you talk some more about what those are?

- Sure, quite a few. Hardly know where to start, but there are diseases that are considered Black diseases. In the past there were things like pellagra, which we now know to be a nutritional deficiency disease that anybody can get. But in the 19th century and earlier we thought it was a Black disease. So Black diseases are one. One good example is Sickle cell disease. Is that a Black disease?

- No.

- No. But is it often described as a Black disease? Do people act like its a Black disease? Do clinicians assume it's a Black disease, in other words if you and say you have sickle cell disease, will there be an assumption that you are Black or have Black organs? Yes. And are Black people with Thalassemia or beta blood deficiencies consistently being misdiagnosed with Sickle cell? Yes. So misdiagnoses because of the belief in Black diseases, and also the link between behavior and disease. Blaming people for their own disorders. That's something that's very, very common and it's very unexamined. So there's fertile ground out there for people who are interested in these questions. We really need people to look into them.

- Maybe I'll ask one more. That came from some where. The inter webs out there. It's a big question, but I think it's an important one. It's from Regina. She said, "You mentioned needing to make the healthcare system more trustworthy. How do we do that?"

- Oh, $64,000 she on that answer. That is a big question. Right? Okay. Many things we can do to make it more trustworthy, but the big change in attitude that I think we need is to begin addressing healthcare disparities as failures of quality of care. We need to stop looking at them as things that we want to do to be moral and to be good to people and kind to people. Look at them as failures to meet our mission of giving everybody the best possible care. Of advancing wellness, as much as we can. And concomitant with that, I think we need to change the way we train people. People always talk about training and education when we hear a big abuse, right? But training and education only take you so far. We need more accountability. We need more policies that are based on quantified research, so that people know exactly what's expected of them in different situations. And when people fail to meet these standards and benchmarks, we need to have punitive responses. We need to not only reward people for doing the right thing. We need to start punishing people and institutions for failing to make benchmarks. If we're talking about quality control, quality control in the hospital. People accept the hospital will be punished. Fined, otherwise stigmatized for not making benchmarks. We need to do the same thing when it comes to racially disparate care. Maybe you shouldn't be able to finish your residency. Maybe you shouldn't be able to get a promotion. Maybe the hospital should not be allowed to get federal funds. We need to Institute penalties. Meaningful consequences for failure to make them, but it should be proceeded and predicated on having quality benchmarks that are very clearly spelled out. Exactly what people should and should not be doing. I think that will get us a long way toward where we want to go.

- Alright. I think we are. Yes. I'm getting the signal. Harriet, it's been an absolute pleasure. On behalf of everyone, thank you for tonight, but also thank you for what was an extraordinary week with us at the college.

- Yes it was. Thank you.

- Very grateful. Yeah.

Biography of Harriet A. Washington

Harriet A. Washington—a prolific science writer, editor, and ethicist—was brought to campus as the inaugural Presidential Scholar during the week of September 27 - October 1, 2021. Washington is the author of the seminal Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Oakland Award, and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award. Her other books include A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind and Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Informed Consent in Medical Research.

Washington has written widely for popular publications and has been published in referenced books and journals such as Nature, JAMA, The American Journal of Public Health, The New England Journal of Medicine, the Harvard Public Health Review, Isis, and The Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. She has been Editor of the Harvard Journal of Minority Public Health, a guest Editor of the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, and served as a reviewer for the Journal of the American Association of Bioethics and the Humanities.

Transcript of conversation between Khary Polk and Walter Johnson

- Good evening, everyone. Thank you very much for joining. I'm really excited about tonight's guest and also our moderator. Just a couple of notes to begin, the event will be recorded and will be available on our website for those who are unable to make it tonight and the other note is that our moderator, Professor Khary Polk, will ask some questions and then also turn to your questions. So you could submit a question to the moderator at any point you wish. It's a great pleasure to welcome Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Professor Johnson grew up in Columbia, Missouri, and I'm very proud to say that he is a history major and graduate of Amherst College, class of 1988. After finishing at Amherst, Walter spent a year at the University of Cambridge before earning a PhD in history at Princeton. Professor Johnson's work has long focused on slavery and capitalism in American history, particularly in the 19th century. His earlier books, "Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market" was published in 1999 and "River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Mississippi Valley's Cotton Kingdom" published in 2013. These two books have been recognized with numerous prizes and awards, including the SHEAR Book Prize from the Society of Historians of Early American, the Early American Republic. The Francis B. Simkins Award from the Southern Historical Association the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association and the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians. I may be missing some of the prizes. Published just last spring, Walter Johnson's most recent book is entitled "The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States" and as many of you who will have read the book know, it traces the interwoven histories of racism, resistance and solidarity in and around St. Louis and tells a much larger story about the history of the country as a whole. It is currently a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction and the LA times 2020 Book Prize for history among others I'm sure. Walter Johnson is the recipient of numerous recognitions and fellowships including a Guggenheim fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship an ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship and he is the founding member of the Commonwealth Project at Harvard, a project I find fascinating and about which I hope he will speak tonight. It's an initiative that models an innovative way for universities to engage with communities and I hope to hear more about it from him directly. Our moderator tonight is associate professor of black studies and sexuality women's and gender studies, Khary Polk. Professor Polk, as many of you know, is a cultural historian of the African American diaspora. He's a specialist in LGBTQ studies and a scholar of race, gender and sexuality in the US military. He received his PhD in American studies from New York University where he knew Walter Johnson, and at Amherst, Khary teaches courses in black sexuality, military history, black European studies and critical theory as well as queer theory. His book "Contagions of Empire" was published recently and to acclaim and I'm delighted that he's agreed to moderate this session. Finally, Professor Johnson has agreed to meet with Amherst students next Monday at 3:45 pm and you can sign up on the President's Colloquium on Race and Racism or you can watch the Daily Mammoth and sign up in that way. I appreciate his generosity and I'm delighted to introduce Professor Walter Johnson.

- Thank you very much for that introduction. It's nice to be back at Amherst so to speak and to have a chance to talk with Khary. I am going to go ahead and just read some of the beginning of the book and then I'll be happy to hear what Khary has and take any questions. The architectural history of a once great city lies packed into crates in a warehouse near Cahokia, Illinois. Molded cement pediments, stained and structural glass, ornamental cast iron, wrought iron and mild steel, stone columns, friezes, reliefs and figural sculptures, doors, window frames and full wooden staircases, remnants of banks and breweries, churches and courthouses, dairies, department stores and steel mills. All of the row houses that lined one side of a downtown square, the red brick gothic classicism of the Little Sisters Of The Poor and the Beaux-Arts Lindell department store. The Ralston Checkerboard Company's grain elevator and the fortress-like First District police station. The 19th century skyscrapers that once lined Real Estate Row, the city of St. Louis torn down, pieced out into elements, cataloged and packed into crates. The archeological remainder of a city that once harbored the ambition of being among the world's greatest, carefully curated by a visionary demo man. Across the Mississippi river, back in the city of St. Louis itself, the pieces of the past lie jumbled together and scattered around the foundation of the city's 30,000 vacant houses, their windows boarded up and roofs collapse upon themselves. Many of these houses have been repossessed by the city and delegated to the St. Louis Land Clearance Redevelopment Authority for resale. Some can be bought for as little as a single dollar. Thousands of poorly maintained parcels of property on the city's north side have been bought up by neighbors or speculators. The population of the city today is just over 300,000, roughly the same number as in 1870 and around 1/3 of the total in 1950. The city has been left behind by its population. Middle-class whites and some blacks have moved to the suburbs. Meanwhile, meanwhile, the neighborhoods of poor blacks and some whites have been torn down around them. It is a truism that the struggles of American cities in the second half of the 20th century were due to white flight and there is no doubt that St. Louis whites moved out of the city in droves in the years following the Second World War but the story of the human geography of St. Louis is as much a story of black removal, the serial destruction of black neighborhoods and the transfer of their population according to the reigning model of profit and policing at any given moment, as of white flight. Of the city's abandoned houses, it is perhaps fair to say that they are worth more dead than alive. The deep burgundy bricks, so smooth that they almost seem glazed, sell for 50 cents a piece today in cities like new Orleans and Houston. For many years, there was little regulation of the demolition business and row houses and brownstones containing anywhere between 20,000 and 40,000 bricks were easy money for anyone with a pry bar and a pickup. Even today, when demolition companies must be licensed and tear downs authorized, there are rogue demo men, brick rustlers, who break into abandoned houses to steal the copper wiring, the iron plumbing and the led counterweights out of the window frames. Some will set an old house on fire, knowing that the water from the firemen's hoses will soften the mortar, making the bricks easier to salvage and scrape clean for sale. So many of the houses in North St. Louis have been torn down that some of the neighborhoods look like rural farmsteads. Clusters of houses here and there, surrounded by open space. St. Louis today has the highest murder rate in the nation and the highest rate of police shootings in the nation. There is an 18 year difference in life expectancy between a child born to a family living in the almost completely black JeffVanderLou neighborhood in North St. Louis than a child born to a family living in the majority white suburb of Clayton, which sits less than 10 miles to the west. Indeed, significant differences in virtually any marker of social wellbeing in the city of St. Louis, rates of adult diabetes or childhoods asthma, levels of lead in the bloodstream, internet access can be charted down a single line, Delmar Avenue, which bisects the city between north and south, between black and white. Just over the city line, St. Louis County boasts three of the 25 wealthiest suburbs in the United States, Town and Country, Ladue and Frontenac. Back in the city, standing on streets that depending on the block contend to lead the nation in the density of accidents involving pedestrians, gun murders and payday loan stores, it is hard not to wonder what happened here. From the Lewis and Clark Expedition to the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014 and the launching of Black Lives Matter, many of the events that we consider central to the history of the United States occurred in St. Louis. Much of this history is so well known that it's Midwestern origins have apparently seemed to historians to be beside the point. The Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scott case and the western Indian Wars. The East St. Louis Massacre in 1917, the Supreme Court decisions in the landmark civil rights cases, Shelley v. Kraemer, Jones v. Mayer, housing rights cases, Gaines versus Canada, education and McDonnell Douglas v. Green, employment, and the symbiosis of urban redevelopment by bulldozer, the sequestration of poor black people in housing projects. Pruitt-Igoe was the nation's most notorious and in the white flight suburbanization in the post-war period. The 1960s synthesis of anti-communism, COINTELPRO and white nationalism in the Nixonian new right and the militarization of policing, all of these events and many others that are treated in this book, are aspects of the history of the United States that cannot truly be understood apart from their St. Louis roots. Looking behind the curve of received history, one finds the often forgotten radical history of St. Louis. The history of the city turns out to be less a matter of timeless Midwestern conservatism than of reaction to the consequential efforts of conquered, stigmatized, poor and radical people to transform their lives and their society and to the image of a fuller humanity. The first general emancipation of the Civil War occurred in St. Louis, where Joseph Wedemeyer, confident and publisher, confidant and publisher of Karl Marx was in charge of organizing the city's defense. The first general strike in the history of the United States, which briefly united white and black workers in what historians have termed the St. Louis Commune, occurred in the city in 1877. Through the 1930s and well into the Second World War, St. Louis was one of the most radical cities in the United States and the communist party in St. Louis was an important site of radical interracial organizing. Indeed through both the period of the civil rights movement and after the black freedom struggle in St. Louis was distinguished by its focus on economic issues, jobs, housing and a just social wage. From the successful strike at Funsten Nut and the sit-ins at city hall in 1933 to one of the nation's first rent strikes in Pruitt-Igoe in 1969, black women from St. Louis have been at the leading edge of the radical history of the United States Seen the light of this history, there is nothing uncanny about the fact that the uprising that touched off the most recent wave of black radical organizing, the Michael Brown moment in American history, happened in St. Louis. Historians have traditionally treated St. Louis as a representative city, a city that is at once east and west, north and south, the place where various regional histories of the United States come together, the gateway to the West, the American confluence, a northern city with a southern exposure and so on. This book makes a more pointed claim that St. Louis has been the crucible of American history, that much of American history has unfolded from the juncture of empire and anti-blackness in the city of St. Louis. St. Louis rose as the morning star of US imperialism. It was from St. Louis, itself a city built on stolen land, that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark departed on the journey to survey the commercial potential of the vast Louisiana Purchase territory, the homeland of dozens of nations that had not been party to the bargain. It was from there that Clark later supervised the forcible relocation, the ethnic cleansing of the tribes of the Upper Midwest. And it was from St. Louis that the genocidal Indian Wars of the last half of the 19th century were staged and supervised. For most of the period before the Civil War, the US Army's Department of the West was headquartered at Jefferson Barracks. For a time after, the entire Department of War was relocated to St. Louis. By 1870, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in the United States and there was talk of moving the nation's capitol to the world-making confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Although the US military footprint in St. Louis lightened over the course of the 20th century, military contracting remained integral to the economy of both city and county through most of the century. It is not possible to tell the story of St. Louis without including the US Cartridge Company, McDonnell Douglas, Monsanto and Mallinckrodt. Behind the story of the rise and demise of the city of St. Louis is a much more complicated history, of continental and even global distributions of violence. The imperium of St. Louis and thus of the United States was centrally framed by the history of genocide, removal and the expropriation and control of land, all justified in the name of white supremacy. In his 1920 essay, "The Souls of White Folk" written in the years following his visit to East St. Louis in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 massacre, W.E.B. Du Bois provided the outline that I have followed in this book. Racism, he argued, was as old as humanity. Ever have men striven to conceive of their victims as different from the victors, endlessly different in soul and blood, strength and cunning, race and lineage. And the exploitation of one group by another was quote, quite as old as the world, but their combination in the conquest of the Americas and the slave trade was something new, something unprecedented, something world making. The imperial width of the thing, the heaven-defying audacity marks its modern newness. Using a term I draw from the work of the political philosopher and social theorist, Cedric Robinson, I present the history that follows all the way from the slave trade and the Indian Wars down to the murder of Michael Brown and the uprising in Ferguson as part of the history of racial capitalism. The intertwined history of white supremacist ideology and practices of empire, extraction and exploitation, dynamic, unstable ever-changing and world making. At the bottom, the history of racial capitalism has been one in which white supremacy justified the terms of the imperial dispossession and capitalist exploitation. Thus has it been possible to expropriate Native American lands on the ground that they were empty, terra nullius, thus has it been possible to justify slavery in a republic founded under the rubric of equality. Thus has it been possible to maintain a distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor and importantly, thus has it been possible to make poor and working class white people believe that their interests lie in making common cause with their political leaders and economic betters. Common cause in whiteness, the idea that they might eventually share in the spoils and the understanding that the discomfort and anxiety of their own precarious lives were due to, are due to those below them, rather than those above them. As the historian, Robin D.G. Kelley suggests, guns and tanks and tear gas are sufficient to control the black people or for that matter, the Indians and the immigrants, white supremacy is necessary to control the whites. An important strand of the argument in this book traces the promises made to poor and working class white people, some kept, some broken, in order to keep them committed to the social order. That is to history in the service of empire and capital, to war in the name of white homesteads, to low wages subsidized by segregation and to social isolation and cultural monotony understood as suburban exclusivity. Beyond even the function of white supremacy in underwriting expropriation and exploitation however, the notion of racism and capitalism as organically related, but not identical, helps us understand the excessive pleasures of white supremacy. The joyful mob in East St. Louis in 1917. It was like Mardi Gras, one observer remembered. The dumb grins on the faces of the lynch mobs, mugging for the camera in front of the mutilated body of a lynched man. The rage of the 5,000 St. Louis whites who rioted after some black kids jumped into the pool on the first day of summer season in Fairground Park in 1949. The masculine fellowship of the St. Louis police in the 1960s as they traded stories about beating up Sonny Liston, the one-time heavyweight champion of the world and all of the torture and violation by which white people have historically drawn pleasure from the suffering of blacks. On the other hand, analysis through the lens of racial capitalism helps us understand that the disciplinary tools and predatory takings originally justified by imperial and racial entitlement come eventually to be deployed against the working class as a whole. The insistent generalization of the tools of empire and anti-blackness, was as Achille Mbembe calls, the paradoxical negrofication of the white world. Tracing the United States' centuries long history of imperial dispossession and relating it to the foreclosure crisis of our own times, the legal historian and theorist, K-Sue Park, suggests that the forms of military, social and financial control pioneered in empire and slavery and justified by racialization were eventually adapted and absorbed in race-neutral form into general practice. Labor cannot emancipate itself in white skin where in the black it is branded, Karl Marx wrote in Capital. Beneath their skin privilege, poor and working class whites have often found, although not always recognized, that the very tools the wealthy rely upon to ensure class rule, the police, the prison, the reduction of the social wage and the derogation of public education come eventually to foreshorten the dreams of everyone, not just the radicalized, the marginalized and the imperialised. In the fall of 1966, following the previous year's fury in the black neighborhoods of St. Louis over the police murder of Melvin Cravens, a 17 year old black boy shot to death while handcuffed in a police station, the black activists, Macler Shepard and Ivory Perry, organized a march in solidarity with south side whites, mourning the death of Timothy Walsh, a young man shot in the back while in police custody. The license to kill, they were saying, has been issued in our neighborhood but it can be carried into yours. The cover of whiteness, it turns out, offers incomplete protection from the violence unleashed in its name. This book traces the history of empire and racial capitalism through a series of stages beginning with the fur trade in the early 19th century and following all the way down to payday lending, tax abatement, for-profit policing and mass incarceration in our own times. These stages should not be understood as pure forms, nor as having unfolded according to a strict sequential historical logic. They are improvised solutions to imperial problems and commercial imperatives that have been mixed up with one another and with other ideas about identity and economy, but they each have characteristics, spatial and environmental aspects and the stages of empire and racial capitalism were repeatedly interrupted, confronted and occasionally even overthrown by the people whom they so insistently dispossessed, ravaged and repurposed in the service of empire, whiteness and wealth. And yet, beneath all the change and insistent racial capitalists cleansing, forced migrations and racial removal, reservations and segregated neighborhoods, genocidal wars, police violence and mass incarceration is evidence in the city at the heart of American history. Viewed from St. Louis, the history of capitalism in the United States seems to have as much to do with eviction and extraction as with exploitation and production. History in St. Louis unfolded at the juncture of racism and real estate, of the violent management of population and the speculative valuation of property. The first to be forced out were Native Americans who were pushed west and killed off by settlers and the US military, but in St. Louis, the practices of removal and containment that developed out of the history of empire in the West were generalized into mechanisms for the dispossession and management of black people within the city limits and because removal is fundamentally about controlling the future, about determining what sorts of people will be allowed to live in what sorts of places, it is always concerned with the control of gender, sexuality and reproduction. Often women and children were singled out for particular sanction and targeted violence. From the time of the Missouri Compromise to the decision in the Dred Scott Case, whites in St. Louis used Indian removal as much as slavery as a model for dealing with their black neighbors and from that time on, black St. Louisans have been repeatedly driven out from East St. Louis in 1917, from the Riverfront, Deep Morgan, Chestnut Valley and Mill Creek Valley in the middle years of the century, from Pruitt-Igoe in 1972 and from whatever neighborhoods were wanted for quote, economic development, down to the present day. To be sure, eviction like extraction and even exploitation has meant different things at various historical moments and yet the continuity between St. Louis's role as the gateway to empire and the 21st century project of enclosing black communities in the hope of a final round of extraction only underscores the point that in St. Louis, empire, slavery and segregation have been distinct aspects of a single common history. The red thread that runs through this entire book is the historical relationship between imperialism and anti-violence. In the aftermath of the murder of Michael Brown on August the ninth, 2014, and the uprising that followed, the term structural racism gained renewed currency as a way to understand the depth of the history that was exploding into plain view across the nation. Part of the work of this book is to try to lend meaning to that phrase, to take us beyond using it to mean simply really bad or really persistent racism and begin to understand the ways in which racism has been built into the material fabric of everyday life in the United States of America, into our roads and neighborhoods and schools and universities. The point of identifying racism as structural is not just to say it is really bad or still less to say that it is so bad that we can't really do anything about it anyway and so we should just go on doing whatever it is that we were doing before. The point is to search out the material history of white supremacy and the alibis in which it has been cloaked in order to understand something about structural racism that isn't otherwise visible, the way that the racial character of our everyday lives has become inexorable, even as its origins have been insistently obscure. Any program intending to address economic inequality in our society, whether revolutionary or reformist that fails to grapple with the racialized character of our material lives will likely intensify rather than ameliorate the inequality. For the sake of example, one might point to the various sorts of racism evident in the social post-mortem that followed the uprising in Ferguson in the fall of 2014. Most telling for many was the discovery of persistent attitudinal racism of white people, of the white police and court clerks in Ferguson who were shown to have a particular fondness for hackneyed racial humor. That attitudinal racism shaded imperceptibly into the institutional racism of the police department as a whole, manifested in their disproportionate targeting of black motorists and street-level harassment of black pedestrians, shoddy record keeping and routinely ignored training protocols and the systematic levy through excessive tickets and exorbitant fines whereby the subsistence of the government of Ferguson was extracted from its mostly black population by an almost entirely white police force. All of this was amply documented in the US Department of Justice's report on the Ferguson Police Department. What the report passed over, however, was the structural aspect of the racism. Why was the police department revenue farming poor black motorists when there was a Fortune 500 company doing $25 billion of business a year headquartered within the Ferguson city limits, just a quarter mile to the couth of the spot where Officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown? And how could that seem so natural that the corporate headquarters of Emerson Electric on West Florissant Avenue, right there where the demonstrators first sat down in the street and the militarized police rioted through the month of August. Why is it that that would go almost unremarked in the thousands of pages and millions of words written in the aftermath of the uprising? The 12 shots fired by Officer Wilson on Canfield Drive ended the life of an 18 year old child and touched off a new period in the history of the United States, the era of Black Lives Matter. This book explores the 200 year history of removal, racism and resistance that flowed through those two minutes of history on August the ninth, 2014. I began writing this book in the month after that event. In the days after the shooting, activists in St. Louis took to the streets of Ferguson demanding that officer Wilson, whose name was initially withheld, be held accountable. Police in St. Louis County and then the Missouri Highway Patrol and eventually the Missouri National Guard responded on a scale and with a ferocity that many observers found wildly disproportionate. Armored personnel carriers patrolled the streets of Ferguson. Police armed with automatic weapons occupied the city. Peaceful protestors were repeatedly dispersed with tear gas, a chemical weapon banned under the Geneva Convention. By the end of November, when the now notorious prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, announced his decision not to bring charges against Officer Wilson, the protests exploded into violence and Ferguson had become a byword for both police violence and the origins of what would come to be called the Black Lives Matter movement. Having grown up just two hours to the west, I had been to St. Louis countless times to visit family, to go to the universities or the museums, even to do historical research for other books that I have written. I came to this book less as a professional historian than as a citizen taking the measure of a history that I had lived through but not yet fully understood. This is a history that I have resisted but also a history from which I have benefited as a white man and a Missourian. I offer the result, not in the spirit of the academics to common conceit that injustice is everywhere but in their own biographical backyards, but rather in the hope that we may all seek to do better, to walk humbly, to act justly, to love mercy. That's all I got.

- Thank you so much, Walter. It's, first off I should say, welcome back and as one of your former students from the September 11th cohort of American studies at NYU, it really is a pleasure to moderate this conversation with the Amherst community.

- I remember.

- Different times. Walter, I'm taken by your use of the term racial capitalism as a framework for linking histories of genocide, removal and the expropriation and control of land, all justified in the name of white supremacy. I was hoping you might discuss why this term at this historical moment is so useful for unpacking the social history of St. Louis, for instance, how does racial capitalism help us understand both the history and the lived present of a city like Ferguson, understood as a sundown community in the 1960s, where blacks came to work during the day, often in white homes, with the understanding they'd be out by sunset, to us understanding now as a space of radical possibility where the movement of Black Lives was launched after the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014?

- Yeah, that's terrific. I think that partly my use of the term racial capitalism has to do with my own intellectual genealogy and that is as someone who really has learned a lot from the black radical tradition from the work of people like Du Bois, like Eric Williams, like Cedric Robinson, like Walter Rodney, like C.L.R. James, like Angela Davis, on and on, Ruth Wilson Gilmore. So that's my intellectual inheritance and that's why I use the term racial capitalism as my base term. One might equally use the term empire or settler colonialism and I think that they signal different centers of gravity in the analysis and really what I'm trying to do is to use those terms in sequence with one another, in symbiosis with one another to try to understand the ways that imperialism and the violence of imperialism and the extraction of imperialism are related to what we generally think of as African American history in the United States and to understand that as having a particular shape in the Midwest. That involves then thinking both about the ways that, in thinking about racial formation in a moderately complicated way. So to think about, for instance, the way that in the history of the South, Native Americans are removed from the land from Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana and that land is then filled in with African-Americans, Africans and African Americans. The relationship of the ruling class in the South to Native Americans is genocidal, it's exterminationist. They want to get rid of native people. Their relationship to African Americans is, it doesn't make sense to compare it morally or practically. It's an abomination, it's a moral abomination, but it is a moral abomination that turns on reproduction, right? The slaveholding regime is pronatalist and so there's a lot more effort to sexually control people and reproduction. One of the things and one of the basic points I'm trying to make at the beginning of the book to relate settler colonialism to racial capitalism in St. Louis is to note the extent to which Western anti-blackness was removalist. It took a similar to form to anti-Indian violence and then to try to think about that and explain why and then to try to relate it to, ultimately to class dynamics within the white population. I try to, you know, the book then catalogs that kind of relationship or analyzes that kind of relationship through a series of moments, the last one being our own moment or the Ferguson moment. And what I try to argue in that part of the book is that the population of Ferguson, which is in North County is what, you know, it's in the northern part of St. Louis County, is first of all, in some ways the descendant population of a number of removals from East St. Louis to Mill Creek Valley to Pruitt-Igoe to Ferguson. But secondly, to be very, very specific about the sorts of extraction that are occurring now no longer really in St. Louis are the, you know, the majority of poor and working class black people being exploited in factories. And in fact, I argue that the population of Ferguson today, because so much of the industry and production has been moved out of the city and in, you know, out to the county, but also out of the country, the population, the black population of Ferguson is in some ways economically surplus from the standpoint of production and so what's happening is that different forms of extraction are being, different extractions are being levied on them, whether that's payday loans or the for-profit policing that we saw in Ferguson or whether that is the political economy of mass incarceration whereby African-Americans, disproportionally poor, disproportionately poor and working class in urban areas are incarcerated and then in many cases, in many States and Missouri is emblematic of this, are held in predominantly white rural areas where they become a source of effectively inflowing revenue for communities, whether that's construction revenue in the building of penitentiaries. I think that every single prison in Missouri, there may be, I can't remember the number but, you know, around 31, every single prison in Missouri has been rebuilt since the early 80s with one exception, I think. And then in provisioning and guarding and so there's this sort of an economic flow I suggest from places like Ferguson to rural Missouri. There's a very complicated argument at the end of the book about the way that the politics of tax abatement work and mobilize the presence of black people in space as a mechanism to produce corporate welfare and that's really where the argument from Emerson, about Emerson Electric comes from.

- Thank you. And I also would like to remind attendees to please submit your questions. And we still have time to, to field these questions. I wanted to circle back to a moment in your book where you write that quote, beyond even that function of white supremacy and underwriting expropriation and exploitation, the notion of racism and capitalism as organically related, but not identical, helps us understand the excessive pleasures of white supremacy. Now I'm really taken by your use of the phrase, excessive pleasures of white supremacy, as it may speak to one of the payoffs, if you will, of white complicity to the ruling supremacist order. But I'm curious if you can speak to first, how does one historicize a feeling like pleasure, excessive pleasure in this sense? And second, as a historian and as a white man, whether this feeling of excessive pleasure may help us better understand what we all witnessed on January 6th, 2021 during the capital riot that left five people dead?

- Hmm. Yeah, let me go first all the way back to the beginning of the question and try to explain by what I mean by organically related but not identical. There's a kind of a, I don't even think it's a, I think it's actually a fairly mainstream debate among people on the left at this point about how to characterize the relationship between white supremacy and capitalism. On the one hand, I think that there are a number of people, I think the 1619 Project would be emblematic of this, they want to see the history of the United States as a long and fairly uninterrupted history of white supremacy. On the other hand, there are a group of people who identify themselves as socialists or Marxists who insist that at bottom, relationships of racial, racial inequality are at bottom class relationships, that they are at bottom economic relationships and so on the one hand you have, you know, the kids term this, right, the debate between race reductionists and class reductionists. And this is really the, this is the same sort of debate that Cedric Robinson was confronting when he wrote "Black Marxism". He was trying to resolve an argument in his mind between overly-orthodox Marxists and between black nationalists and to describe the ways that white supremacy, that racism and capitalism are intertwined, inextricably intertwined, but I think also finally different. And finally, not identical. Not finally different but not identical. And so what, what I mean when I talk about the excessive pleasures particularly in relationship to the riot around the Fairground Park swimming pool is that it is hard to see what exactly the economic stake is in keeping six black kids from jumping in the Fairground Park swimming pool on a hot summer afternoon, right? So it's not, this is not as obvious in some ways as the intense violence that goes into protecting the suburbs as white enclaves in St. Louis. I would argue that there's also a degree of sadism in that but one could look at that and say, well, look, this is simply really at bottom, this is about class politics. This is about people trying to defend their property. But 5,000 people turning out to attack six kids who jumped in a pool and running riot all night? That seems to me to be a different kind of phenomenon, one that has lifted out of any sort of identifiable economic frame and become something else, right? A form of pleasure, just like in East St. Louis, when the newspaper goes into East St. Louis the night after the massacre and the reporter writes, it felt like Mardi Gras, right? Right, well, you know, he's saying that this was like a holiday. And so it's that that I think it's important to capture and it's important to capture not because I believe that we can understand the entire history of the United States as a history of racial sadism and we don't need to think about political economy. That's not what I believe but I think that it's important to think about the meaning of these moments of excess and so that's I guess what I mean by excess is the excess, I mean, I think that the, the entire society, the entire social order is morally excessive. And so I don't think when I say excess, I'm trying to say, well, up to this point it's moral and then this is excessive. I think I'm actually trying to say there's an excess in the history that goes beyond the limits of explanation as, the class interest of white people. I think I'm trying to identify that. Now I do think that, I think that the the joyous character of the attack on the Capitol would be the beginning to think about that, the place to begin to think about that. The kind of antic comic character of the costumes, the strange pleasure that people obviously got from being there and I do think that that is a part of our politics and I think that it is, you know, if I were really to, I mean, this is a little bit off the cuff but it seems to me that that is energy that is kind of playful, uncontrolled energy that in another situation could be, and must be really if we are to survive, transformed into a much more loving, pro-social form of commonality. And right now, all of that pleasure, that humor, that play is aligned in that moment, at least, with white supremacy and a kind of, you know, fascism really, I think in certainly in relationship to non-white people and to queer people, to trans people, to women, to everybody but the, you know, the very central characters.

- Thank you. Let's see. One other question is, what one class from your time at Amherst most influenced your subsequent academic career?

- I had a lot of great classes at Amherst. It took me a while to be worthy of those classes. I think, you know, so I think I should probably just name a whole bunch of folks, Jan Dizard, Robert Gross, Benjamin DeMott, but I think that the class that we were talking about before that really changed my life was taught by Margaret Hunt and it was a class on cultural history of early modern Europe and it was in that class that I read the great British Marxist historian, Christopher Hill, the great, maybe not quite a Marxist, but leftist historian, E.P. Thompson, Natalie Davis, Robert Darnton and these were histories of ordinary people. I mean, in the case of Christopher Hill, these were histories of people, you know, who were so Protestant, they were so Protestant that they believed that they didn't have anything to learn from the priest at all, that godliness rested right in their heart and just in order to prove that godliness rested right in their heart, they would go to church naked and stand in front of the minister and curse to prove their godliness and so for me, being a kind of a misdirected person with a lot of, to be honest with you, with a lot of rage, that helped me actually begin to channel that and think about that politically or to read, you know, to read Robert Darnton about the way that working people in a factory would would take turns having somebody stop, not even a factory, in a shop, I mean, which is the point of the book, but in a shop would have somebody stop working and sit and read political texts while they worked. So for me, that kind of focus on the substantive material everyday lives of humble people that really, really spoke to me and that's really what, what made me think that history was a place that I could take some of the, some of the things I cared about and locate them.

- Thank you. Can you tell us about the Commonwealth Project?

- Yeah, the Commonwealth Project is, I would love to talk about that. So that's something that sits right next to my academic work in St. Louis but emerges out of a set of collaborations with activists and artists in St. Louis. And it's all framed around a beautiful long-term dream, which is to, to set up a, a community-based arts collective on the North side of St. Louis. And at some point we got a little bit ahead of ourselves and at some point we actually had identified a building and kinda got permission to use this building that was a 1938 Arts Deco police station to turn it into an arts collective. It became clear as we began to do that, that we needed to build a little bit more capacity, which is to say, raise money and as a way to do that then I set up a set of internship programs with different organizations in St. Louis, one called the Equal Housing Opportunity Council, the Griot Museum, this year we're gonna work with an organization called Action St. Louis. And I think that as I've done that, I've learned something that for me has been, it's actually been life-changing for me because the work that the students have done has been beautiful. The students have done amazing work, particularly in Centerville, Illinois, which is a community South of East St. Louis, according to median family income, Centerville, Illinois, is the poorest community in the United States, largely elderly, almost entirely black and they have a terrible, terrible storm water sewer problem where both the sewer infrastructure and the storm water infrastructure have decayed to the point that when it rains in Centerville, which is low lying and flat, the streets flood with sewage. And that happens, it can happen five to six times a year and people's houses, people are literally stuck in their houses with two to three feet of sewer water around. So, in cooperation with the Equal Housing Opportunity Council in St. Louis, the Harvard students have gone out there and they've done everything from try to organize community meetings around public health, to do wastewater sampling, this summer the students worked on doing some oral histories and setting up a, a website to try and get out the news about Centerville and the news has got out. There was a story, the story in the Guardian, you know, maybe a month ago. And so we, you know, when we see a story in the Guardian about this, that to me and the students who've worked on this and then particularly the people in St. Louis, that's a combination of two or three years of work. But what I was trying to say is that as I've worked with the students, I learned something new and that was about what I've come to learn, James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs in Detroit called dialectical humanism, and it's about the notion that as you try to make the world more humane, as you try to transform the world in the image of a higher degree, a higher order of human rights, order of human rights where people have housing and clean water and education and healthcare and a decent social wage and a degree of public dignity, as you try to transform that, the society in that image, you discover new ways of being human yourself, right? You discover a deeper form of humanity in yourself. And I learned that from the students because the students who have gone to St. Louis have loved and supported one another in such extraordinary ways that they helped me, you know, re-imagine this project that I was doing with the Harvard students, not simply as a means to an end of let's get this community, you know, let's get this arts collective done and that's still what I wanna do, I'm still working on that, but really as something in and of itself and the spirit that they go in and this is hard for students to learn, hard for Harvard students to learn is not here's everything I know and now I'm gonna fix your problems. The spirit that in which it's necessary for them to go in order for them to be successful is a spirit of humility, to go and say, you know, how can you tell me about your world in a way that's gonna enable me to help? And, you know, I know we're right at the end of time here, but I think some, I was on a call the other day and somebody said something that I think is profound that stuck with me, so the work only advances at the speed of trust, right? That you need to go and come in a spirit of humility, in a spirit of service and solidarity and that once people trust you, then, which, you know, people in St. Louis and North St. Louis or in a place like Centerville have a lot of reason not to trust people from, you know, the outside and yet that's really the lesson that I've learned.

- Excellent and I think there's time maybe for one more question and considering modes of expropriation and extraction, this question wonders what role has militarism or specifically the military recruitment pipeline played in the recruitment of soldiers in predominantly black neighborhoods in St. Louis?

- That's a great question. I mean, you know, it goes back in a way to something that I try to argue about the Civil War which is that Benson Barracks, which were in North St. Louis in a place called Fairground Park where actually where the swimming pool riot took place in 1949 was the place where the United States Colored Troops started to first enlist black soldiers during the Civil War and that has to do with the comparative speed of the Mississippi Valley campaign which was producing then both emacipations and refugees who came up the Mississippi River to St. Louis and so that I argue, first of all, is part of the radical history of St. Louis but also it's part of the very and I know this is, Khary, you know, much closer to the sorts of things that you work on, is part of the very, very complicated history of the relationship of the African-American freedom story to US militarism and imperialism. St. Louis is the place where the Buffalo soldiers were enlisted into the army. It was the place, Jefferson Barracks was the place where all mounted units in the United States Army began. And so it was a place where I suggest that black freedom in the aftermath of the Civil War was framed by empire, where these black soldiers, who were in many ways the greatest symbol of black liberation in the aftermath of the Civil War, were put to work as agents of empire. And so there's a terrible, I think, you know, a terrible irony in that, that I think that American historians by and large just have not really dealt with. Du Bois talks about it in "Black Reconstruction", Du Bois says of the way that the US Colored Troops made an impression upon the ruling, you know, class in the United States, on the Republican Party, on Abraham Lincoln. He said, effectively he says, look, we gave you, we gave you the greatest orator of the 19th century, Frederick Douglas, and you only started to treat us as equals when we killed white people, right? And so he's talking about that irony. So there is something I think tragic about that moment then, you know, just the other night I did an event with the, you know, with the extraordinary, with my extraordinary soon to be tragically former colleague, Cornel West, and he reminded me that it was black soldiers who had been deployed by the United States in the Philippines as part of the imperial army who trained black people in East St. Louis in self-defense, so that in 1917, one of the many things that happened in 1917 in East St. Louis, is that when these white moms came into the black neighborhoods, there were armed African-Americans trained who shot back. And so Cornel West, you know, helped me kind of close that dialectic. I do think, and this, I don't have a good quantitative answer. I had a hard time figuring out quantitatively what enlistment rates are. I tried and I just couldn't quite crack the case, which is not to say that somebody with a better imagination or more tools could, I think probably somebody could. I tried to figure out about the enlistment into the military from various St. Louis ZIP codes. It is, I think probably, and this is discouraging, it's probably easier to figure out about the incarceration rate in those ZIP codes. But I do think that I think it is to this day true that in many neighborhoods in St. Louis, as in the United States generally, the easiest, you know, the most present choices are between the military and the prison. I think that that's, that characterizes, you know, it's schematic but I think it is fair to say that that characterizes a lot of black and and also poor white life in the United States today.

- I agree. So thank you so much, Walter, for this incredibly rich conversation and thanks to all who are joining us tonight and especially those of us who submitted questions. Before we go, I did want to make a plug for another conversation happening on Wednesday, March 24th at 7:00 pm, Eastern time, we'll have a conversation with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Ibram X. Kendi moderated by Amherst trustee and 1982 Amherst graduate, Kimberlyn Leary, and you can find more details and information at the President's Colloquium on Race and Racism page on our website. Thanks again, Walter, and everyone who turned in and have a fantastic night.

Transcript of Imani Perry in Conversation with Anthony Jack ’07

- Good evening everyone. I want to welcome you to this event about which we are all very excited. This is the first in a series of colloquia in which we have invited distinguished scholars two distinguished scholars for each colloquium to have a conversation with one another about race, racism and democracy in the United States in the general sense, and actually to talk about whatever they wish. Those of you who've attended and I'm delighted that so many of you have, please feel free to put questions in the chat at any point during this colloquium. And we have someone behind the scenes who will collect those and make sure Tony has them for the question and answer period. And thanks to those of you behind the scenes for making this possible. I'm delighted to introduce first Imani Perry. Professor Perry is a scholar of law, literary and cultural studies at Princeton University. Her work as so many of you know focuses on the history of black thought, art, music and imagination, highlighting what an enormous contribution and resource that legacy is. She's the Hughes-Rogers professor of African-American studies at Princeton, where she also teaches in the program in law and public affairs, gender and sexuality studies and jazz studies. All of her work and teaching are profoundly interdisciplinary. She's the author of a number of critically acclaimed and award-winning books, including "Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry" "May We Forever Stand" a history of the Black national anthem and her latest book, which is slightly different in style from the others and a gorgeous read, "Breathe: A Letter to My Sons." Her earlier books, "Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation" and "More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States" contend with the intersections of sexism, racism, homophobia, highlighting the ways in which racial inequality and systemic racism persist, despite some formal declarations to the contrary. Imani Perry earned a PhD in American Studies from Harvard University, a JD from Harvard law school and the LLM from Georgetown University law center and got her BA at Yale College in literature and American studies. When it comes to thinking about those titles and achievements, I recommend highly that everyone who hasn't read "Breathe" to see what Imani Perry recommends to her sons about the relationship between prestige and who we are as people beyond those titles. Thank you, Professor Perry, for agreeing to be with us tonight. And our moderator tonight is none other than Amherst's Tony Jack. Professor Anthony Jack is an assistant professor at the Harvard graduate school of education as so many of you know, he's also the Shutzer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for advanced study and a faculty fellow at Harvard's Pforzheimer House. Tony is a sociologist whose research has had an extraordinary impact on higher education showing the many ways in which lower income undergraduates, particularly those who enter college from public distressed high schools continue to be underserved once in our colleges, elite and non elite. The impact has been amazing for this point in anyone's academic career. And we're all better for Tony Jack's work. His award-winning scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and his work has been featured in national media many, many times. He is the author of the "The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students." He earned his PhD in sociology from Harvard and his BA from Amherst college. Tony, welcome back. And thank you both for being here.

- Thank you.

- Oh, thank you.

- It's always a pleasure to come home in any format in any kind of way. And Imani, it's such an honor to welcome you to Amherst. It really is. I mean this is like a dream, like this is like, everytime I get to do something like this, I like big smiles all the way around. So, thank you for this.

- Oh, well thank you. That's really wonderful. I hold and I kind of told Biddy this, I hold Amherst in the highest regard. It is an extraordinary institution. So it's always a joy to be in conversation with Amherst folks, unfortunately not in person, but we do what we can virtually. [Laughs]

- But again, thank you, Biddy. I want to thank you and Norm for convening this series and inviting me to be a part of it, let alone to bring me in conversation with the Imani today. I just am, like I said, I'm over the moon because I'm straight fan girling in a very real way, 'cause I had a chance to return to, for this conversation, Imani, your work, and realizing the impact that it had, not only as me as a scholar, me as a person, but also someone who has, who followed in your footsteps a little bit in Cambridge and at Harvard and navigating this space, which is at once a glorious and tremendous honor, but also not the easiest thing to do. Position, propositionality and so I really appreciate this conversation and I want to make sure we have time for the community's questions. I have some that really, three questions that really stuck to me as I was returning to (holds up. Books) and I actually, like when I say I went through these like "Breathe" and the "Vexy Thing," I mean, these are the two books I'm drawing questions from tonight so that we can have a conversation, yes, on race and racism, but also on how it impacts different systems of inequality and power in the United States. And I also have two questions from, one from an Amherst alumn, Will Pruitt, who is a doctoral student PhD candidate here at Harvard University, and Diana Tiburcio who is a junior at Amherst college who worked with me this summer. So I want to make sure that I want to get to their questions as well. 'Cause they were really, I was like, who do I want to help me craft the question? And I was like, I sent over the gchat. I mean, not the gchat, but the WhatsApp. And then I emailed Diana and she was like, you're talking to Imani, like, can I ask a question? I was like, yes. And so I want to make sure I get to those. The first question I want to start with grief because especially in this moment, when we're talking about again race and racism, from statements that we've heard with Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and countless others, that could have been my child. And then others of us who have spoken, who have had positions to speak on it, that could have been me, to knowing as you write of your own children, an experience that was haunting, when you write, "I can not clip your wings as though cowering in respectful tribute to the beauty we have lost. No, I want your wingspans wide to honor the departed ancestral and immediate be. Living defined by terror is it destructive of the spirit?" Those words were haunting and yet beautiful and signified too many moments in America's present and America's past. And I wanted to see if you could use this moment to reflect on that passage of both your words and also the passage of time that had been littered with too many of these moments.

- Right, thank you. And thank you both for your work and for this conversation. And for that question. I take very seriously what it means to live a life not in, not denying the reality of racial terror, but not defined by it. That that seems to me to be the something indispensable to the struggle for liberation. And as such, I have to let me, I'll say this as a comment, I grew very frustrated with all of the conversations on media about the quote unquote "talk" that Black parents have with Black, the talk especially with boys, but really Black children, period. The "talk" to...that was, that is described as a protection against the prospect of police violence. And I grew frustrated with it for several reasons. One because the moral responsibility does not lie with Black children to prevent themselves from being killed or Black people to prevent themselves from experiencing summary injustice in the street, right? The responsibility lies with those who would do the killing or the society that fails. And so I didn't want to talk about the talk because I thought the conversation that we have needs to be about the injustice. And I also did not want to raise children to have a third person consciousness, to see themselves always from the outside in, I wanted them to feel. And I want them to feel from the inside out to have a sense of possibility to have a sense of the truth of their being, irrespective of how the society might see them or treat them. And so to do that requires though some acknowledgement, some letting go like to allow their wingspans to be wide means that you have to live with certain kinds of, it's not just fear, but you have to like, let them do things that you want to hold them close, because they know that the world is a dangerous, terrifying place, right. But I also know that it's a choice that my grandmother made it's a choice that my mother made. It's a choice that all of these people before had to make for the possibilities right along the generations to be actualized. So, that's, I guess that's sort of where that passage was, sort of where I was emotionally and intellectually with that passage. Does that get to what your asking?

- Yeah, I mean head on because we always, people almost assume that it's only one talk that we hear. That is an everyday thing, Depending on what store you go in, you get a different message, depending on what city, are you on it that's it's not a one-time thing. It's an everyday reality. And you learn to not fear the sun, like Icarus, you fear the sky in general, right. And that because the talks weigh on you to the point, you're saying I'm just wanting to stay on the ground. And it makes me think about "Whistling Vivaldi", right? When Claude wrote Whistling Vivaldi, I, my first thought was, I'm not necessarily afraid of individuals who will be able to know that I'm Whistling Vivaldi as compared to something else. In this day and age it's, there's something in the air that I, that you learn to fear...that fear becomes like this ubiquitous thing, like it's ever present. It's not something that I'm trying to decipher. Why should I make someone else feel good by whistling a particular tune when sometimes I'm more afraid of what those people do at the polls than what they do individually. Right, and so thinking about all of that, and, that passage really, really stuck out to me, because it is about the fear of possibility on both the side of privilege and the side of pain. The second question I had, and it flows directly into your point about let's talk about systems and how rooted they are, how race and races are rooted into the very core of the systems. I want to talk about George Washington's teeth. I think you can remember. I'll read what you wrote about it in "Breathe". But it also speaks, I think, to some what, to the state of politics and denial today. In "Breathe" you asked about, like, you talk about the myth of George Washington having wooden teeth and you write that they actually were not wooden teeth to but they were actually real ones. But you say, Did they pull them off cadavers, like entitled grave robbers? Or was it a form of torture? One of the many rituals of slavery. And in this time, right now, when we are still dealing with and grappling with some, and some of us grappling with the experiences of those rituals of slavery that engenders what you call that epigenetic terror, the threat of losing one wholeness in the face of violence, how do we deal in this moment with the willful denial of racism being... racism being intimately connected with capitalism, racism being rooted into some of our most historic institutions without, but then also yet facing executive orders that say you can't use certain words or talk about oppression, especially if it's going to say that a white person is in a position that isn't framed in a glorious light.

- I mean, I think the answer to the question is that we become kind of epistemic freedom fighters, right? Knowledge is actually a site of contestation, right. So one of my least favorite phrases in response to when you tell a story, like, George Washington had black people's teeth in his mouth is well, he was a man of his time. Okay. But so it was John Brown, right. So my response is we just tell the story true, right. We just tell the truth, right. It's not. And the fact is that all nations rely upon these myths. They become part of national identity formation, and we can see the pernicious effect of so many of the myths of this nation. And so I think we have to decide to tell true stories because we know the violence that myths do over and over again. And that doesn't, I think the reason to me that it has become so plain is I have decided that nobody has clean hands, right. And decided and said that, I think that that's what's true. Particularly those of us who are in positions of relative privilege. So when people say some things to me about Princeton, I'd say that's true, right? Like I don't have an aversion to acknowledging. So then I say, but then what is my role, right, as a person who is in this institution, that is part of the inequality of the society. That is an institution that is part implicated in the reproduction of inequality. And this is what is my role to try to upend some of that, what is my role as someone who has a relatively high degree of access, who has people who can write books and those people, what is my role to try to tell the truth in a way that is meaningful for people to imagine a better society and a better world. That is what, so if I feel like if we get away from some of the anxieties about our precious figures and just try to grapple, honestly, with our history, understanding that this is what we have to grapple with, right. We don't have something else. This is what we have. This is what we have inherited that we're in a better place. Now that the latter part of your question about people who like want to erase any reference to race or racism from the history of the nation. I mean, that's, I really do think that that is a meaningful fight. It tells you why scholarship, why study are so important, because it does change the way you understand the world, right? And you can't, and when you are afraid of studying it, when you are afraid of having your core ideas challenged, that should be a cause for alarm from across any perspective, right. That should always be a cause for alarm. If they're meaningful enough ideas, you should be open to their contestation. You can have a debate over this, over their substance. So I mean, it is what it is. I also, at the same time, and I said this in talking to some students earlier, I am of the school of thought, that Toni Cade Bambara school of thought, that the job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible in the sense that I want to convince people of the sweetness and beauty of a truly humane society and world. That's part of what I think the work is about for me, it's central, right? So it is in a sense, like, I want to present a vision of what we could be, that feels potentially much more hopeful than what is now. So.

- Yeah, I wonder, like, did we even need an executive order when there have been studies that looked at how history is taught across different States, where even in a 300 page textbooks, slavery has given a half a page. And as if it was, literally just about farming or just about something, it was like, never about oppression, never about anything. And it was just very interesting when you talk about those myths, right. We talk about the way in which we try to create gods of men in many ways, when we think about the American founding that we get lost at it. And so the question is, how can we, 'cause we see the backlash. I mean, that executive order was as part of the response to 1619, right? How do you begin to, how do we really truly begin to have that kind of conversation?

- Yeah, I mean, I think it's happening all the time. We have to understand that we will lose frequently in the battles, right? This is a long-term conversation, like one of the projects, and it's not been announced yet, so I'm probably not supposed to say it, but I'm going to say it. But one of my next projects is actually a series of kind of histories for middle grade students that are an attempt to respond to those gaps that are not, and this is really important to me. They, there is really important work that is being done about anti-racism, but there is not enough work about Black life. And to understand why anti-racism is so important one must understand the truth of Black life in history. That you can't, it's almost like if you don't have a full picture of a people, it is nearly impossible to understand how important it is to transform the society, right? Like it's the beauty of human beings, their complexity, irrespective of their identity, like what lies behind the stereotypes has to be shared for us to even get to the point of wanting to change the society, or to envision it. So, I think it's in the work. I mean, I think, I don't think the problem is like, the work has been done. It's always been done. It's ongoing, it frequently gets marginalized or diminished. We've had this period recently where there's kind of this uptick of recognition that this is important that will recede, right. This moment will not be sustained forever, but the work will continue. And so it's like, you sort of, you do the work as the attention ebbs and flows. And you do the work even when folks don't really want to publish it or hear it, or like there's no, for example, my son took African American history last year at a phenomenal high school. There was no textbook. There's no in print textbook for high school African-American history. How could that be, right? That's because there's, it's not for a dearth of scholars, right. That's a decision that has to be made at the level of the publishing industry. That's a demand though that has to be made, right? That's something we have to talk about. We're starting to talk about those things in a way that's becoming more visible, but it's going to be a long journey.

- This is my last question. Before I get to the one submitted by Will Pruitt and Diana Tiburcio is, and it also plays in touch again with the founding myths. And we all talk about the founding fathers and I love your work on gender and feminism because it forces us to you talk about liberation feminists, which you invite us to conceive of feminism, not primarily as a set of positions or doctrines, but as a critical practice of understanding and working against gender forms of domination and I guess the way gender becomes a tool of domination and exploitation. And in a lot of the conversation on race, on capitalism, women are often left out. Gender is often left out of that conversation, leaving our understanding of domination and power and privilege weakened and our fatigue for any kind of system that we've put in place in response to it incomplete. And I was very interested in how you think, especially when you think about quote unquote, "the market," how do we separate, how we begin, especially in this, we had comments about like how we don't have supply and demand type of system. Is there a way to separate feminism from the market and the way that you envisioned it to again, invite us to that conversation of understanding more critical practice of gender norms and the like and how do we build out that kind of agenda to be at, not to be inclusive, because that means almost as if we have something and then we're bringing something in, but rather to actually build it in from the beginning and let it serve as a foundation for critical understanding of society.

- Thank you, that is a really powerful question because part of what I describe liberation feminism as is I understand feminism, for me, as most and I talk about all of these previous generations of feminist thinkers that shaped my work really profoundly, particularly feminist of the '70s and '80s, many of whom are disregarded for how complex they were thinking about gendered forms of domination, right. And lots of axes, right? Like, and I think it's like almost everything. It, official stories, oftentimes sweep whole communities of thought under the rug. And then people think that they're coming up with something totally new even though these issues have been brought before. I think of feminism as a reading practice, right. And a read...by that I mean is we look at the world and we analyze who's being excluded from this conversation, who is being, who is the disfavored amongst the disfavored. How do structures of domination layer on top of each other, Patricia Hill Collins wrote beautifully about matrices of domination, right? So you could be on one axis relatively privileged and on another oppressed, or you could be implicated in the oppression of others even as an oppressed person. And so for me the vision is to get to right relation, right. To get to ethical relations with one another. And to do so you have to be willing to read through the layers of domination, which often requires difficult reckoning with oneself I think, and also requires pushing against like two dimensional descriptions of gendering. So one of the things that I write about is sort of global markets like the circulation of various goods, whether they're handbags or artificial, like, or counterfeit handbags or human hair that is harvested from temples in India, and then processed in Asia and then sold to Black women in the United States with the sort of, with packaging that is about sort of fantasies of colonial domination. Like there are these cycles, these market cycles. And if you read through them all, and I very clear...nobody in these cycles, except for those who are raking in lots of dough are subject of criticism to me. But I want to understand how in all of these sites, there are forms of gender domination about beauty, about labor, that are happening, right. And that we have to learn to read beyond our particular experience at being gendered to see the structures that are layered on top of each other. And I think that that's important just to get to the position of taking a position on various issues. Like, so when you do the one decides, we decide, what do I think about this or that I want to, I want us to be in the habit of thinking, well, how does this affect all different kinds of parties? Like it's part of, for me, I just give one more example. So when I teach sexual harassment law, the history of it. I teach sort of the official history, but then I also ask this, ask my students, why do you think it is all of these major cases that started the discussion around sexual harassment law all came from Black women? Usually working class Black woman, right. And that has to do with layers of domination who is seen as having a recourse. And then we move from that to talking about the experience of harassment, of undocumented women who really have no recourse, because the second you report it, then you become vulnerable. Like, so you can talk about here's what is deemed criminal behavior, but here is actually how it operates and who is not protected by the category, by virtue of other categorizations. And so that's sort of what I'm trying to get to, like how I think about markets in the midst and identities in the midst of what we say is sort of a cat... a form of gender domination, but it impacts people distinctly.

- Yeah, no, I mean, when I was at Amherst, I actually was a women's and gender studies major and it opened my... I'll never forget when reading [Indistinct] and in the responses, right. By doing gender and all the responses that came happened in [indistinct] Patricio calls his response to, and it is very interesting to think about these different systems. The next two questions put us, in a forward-thinking way, as we've been moving, especially as it deals with politics and the Academy today. And so Will Pruitt, who writes on race politics and the boundaries of America imaginings, as how should, especially in this moment, how should progressives and leftists maintain pressure on the political system, and a Biden Harris administration specifically, to pursue policies that are central to expanding the conversation about different forms of inequality that we have been ignoring, or at least not paying attention to in the same way for awhile.

- So I have a somewhat probably unpopular perspective on this, in this era which is, I think we have to de-center presidential politics from left disorganizing. By that I mean, there are, you can, you take positions on particular policy matters, but the way in which presidential elections take up so much space to the detriment of local questions, where there is often much more ability to bring pressure and transform governance models, and also the way in which then you become sort of caught in a relationship of being beholden to. Like, so you ask for something and then you say, well, this is the consequence. And then it happens or it doesn't happen. And then, so it becomes a sort of overwhelming frame. So I often, my model is often thinking about how Snick functioned in Mississippi, but throughout the South. And that like people would try, and it also happened within organizing in Birmingham, right. People would say, "hey, can you like chill out 'cause this, we're in the midst of a presidential campaign." And they were like, they're going to do what they're going to do, right. We're involved in our organizing. And I do think there's a certain degree of that that has to happen such that one, people organizers aren't so moved about by presidential elections. Not that they're not important. You vote and then that's the thing. And then you go back to the day to day work that you do, like in various moments, I've been asked to endorse presidential candidates. I don't do that because of my politics, but also because I'm a scholar and I'm not a representative of politicians. Like I think that understandably this has become a huge subject of concern, obviously with the current administration in particular. But I think we have to, you put, you take positions, but then you have to think about the structure of the society as a whole and how the transformation doesn't really come from presidents by and large. It just doesn't. It's more likely to come through courts or through Congress than it is through pres... or than it is through presidents, frankly.

- Yeah, and this is my last question for this. So for those in the audience, please submit your questions so that we can continue this conversation. And this was from Diana Tiburcio who was again, a junior at the college and who worked as my RA this summer, she asked, How do you think the digital age has impacted and influenced social justice efforts? And where do you see it going in the next 10 years?

- Oh, such a good question. I sort of feel like she should answer the question more than I should given that she's Generation Z, but I will say it's a double-edged sword. So on the one hand, I think that there's a lot about the digital landscape and in particular, the kind of the simulacra, the way in which we're cyborgs and that this sort of screen space becomes extensions of ourselves, of our self, but also extensions of ourselves that can very easily be detached from sort of on the ground organizing or actual sort of deep interaction, even by virtue of the structure. Like, so people say something and then somebody else criticizes. And then the position is a defensive one almost automatically. It's not a discussion almost ever, right. Not a space where you can engage in a transformation because that's a representation of yourself. Like that is you and it circulates beyond your control. So you say something and you might regret it. And then it may have a thousand views or 10,000 people who've seen it. And now you're in a position of feeling vulnerable. And then you dig in. And so there's not a lot of, so there's certain kinds of transformations that are very hard to affect on digital platforms because of this, I think. But it also has allowed people to network in ways, especially young people who are in the most vulnerable positions, they can find community with other people with like interests and concerns. And I think that is extraordinary. So I think the question is how do we attach the possibility of the digital landscape with the necessity of analog connection in order to really do deep transformation? The other piece that's hard is these are public spaces are owned by corporations that do manage our conversations. They manage what we see, right. They, it is just true. They are, they, there is a lot of, it took so long for so many of these platforms to control a lot of the most disgusting homophobic, transphobic, racist, misogynistic stuff, because they make money off of that because lots of people like to get on there because they can say those things. It feels cathartic. So now they, some of them are starting to do it. They, it was not, they're not real public spaces and they are driven by profit. That's what they're supposed to be. That's what supposed to be their logic 'cause that, and so we have to also be, have a not, we have to have them like, okay, wait, I can use the space, but we can't be too attached to them because it is not an objective neutral space. It's not a public sphere really. So yeah, we have to have a kind of skepticism, even if we use it a lot. And I'm someone who's on social media, like multiple social media platforms. But so I don't mean like get off of them, but I just mean, understand what they are.

- Yeah. I clapped today because I got to follow back. So it made my day even better. So I just want to put it out there. [Anthony and Imani laughing] But I want to turn to some questions from the audience. There are two at the top of my list. One is inspired, is connected to the question that, and your response to Will's point about centering and centering of presidents in movements, and then the other is about the K-12 curriculum more generally, I'll start with the politics one. And then, so we can branch out to the K-12 education talk. [indistinct] asks a question regarding presidential influence and power on social change. What would be your perspective on, for example, FDR, social security, LBJ, Medicare, and thinking, and how does that, I think the question is how does that then fit in with the centering or not centering of presidents with respect to leftist or progressive agendas at the time and once they're in office.

- Okay, so that, it's a complicated question to answer because they're all of these variables right at each moment. So one is, yes there's exercise of presidential power, but it also required Congress and there's also movement. And the social movement is functioning in two ways, right? So one, the social movement is bringing pressure to bear on the executive and the congressional branch, but it's also challenging them. There's a feat... so for example, you can't, you, it's hard to read the New Deal without also thinking about the red scare. So when there is this proposal, this is the sort of the beginnings of the seeds of the cold war. There's a lot of leftist movements in the United States. They are making propositions about a different way that society ought to be organized. And there is a concern, from the mainstream of American politics about, yeah, how do we respond to the suffering of Americans, but also not wanting it to destabilize the structure that exists. So you get things in the New Deal, like, the majority like, so for example, my grandmother who was a domestic, she cleaned folks' houses would not have received social security but for the fact that the last family who she worked for, the husband of the family got her a job at the house at the hospital. And that's because domestic laborers were excluded from the social security program in order to appease southerners, southern white politicians at the time. So, and same thing with agricultural laborers. People who worked like, so the jobs that most Black people did were excluded. And so when you tap, so in substance, that history becomes a perfect example. On the one hand movements can bring pressure, but also they are not the same thing as movements because they often sustain aspects of the status quo that are unjust. So that couldn't be like getting the New Deal couldn't be the end of the story for Black protests, even though that is precisely what sort of ushered in the shift of Black people to begin the process of moving away from the Republican party.

- Yeah, I mean, and we've seen this over and over again, like, progressive policies with some kind of with backwards tenants of it, even when you think about the GI bill, think about FHA loans, things that have created the middle-class specifically the white male middle class, because we weren't able to get access to it. And who was by virtue of race or birth or gender or were prohibited from accessing it. So it's very interesting to see the K-12 question came from a number of people. And I'll try to put them together. A question about for those of us who are not in the Academy, how do we contribute to the demand for inclusive publishing of texts? Then also a couple of that, another question asked by Joe Richardson, does an acceptance by boards of ed matter when each elected parent is a stakeholder? And so thinking about the ways in which people have voted on and/or agreed with school systems and the relationship to the system and the publishing of the books they use.

- Yeah, so, one, elected school boards matter. I think that they're important, especially in racially diverse cities. Two, I think the question of sort of how people who are not active, not in academia or not educators, play a role, has a lot to do with the way that we sort of function as I talk about this in "Vexy" sort of we curate what comes into view and it's, one side of the, one of the little saving graces of the pandemic is that all kinds of incredible work has come into view and we can access sort of thinkers and ideas. So for example, Jason Reynolds, who has so many events on Instagram, who writes young adult literature, but you can see a whole and who co-wrote the youth, the young adult version of "Stamped" Ibram Kendi's book, but you can see like both the backlash against him, but also a whole sort of different world of ideas that can be opened up to children through his work. So, sharing that work, like being, engaging it, giving it to young people in your life, reading it yourself as an adult. My mother, who is an education scholar, has talked a lot and I think this is really important, is getting the right balance between advocacy and self activity also, so there is advocacy from the that you engage in for the institutions, the school boards, the schools, the government, and then there's also the prospect of self activity. Communities can do a lot to provide alternative narratives sources for the community. So Kim Parker, who is an, you may know her, is an educator in Boston, has reading clubs for Black boys. And that, you know, and they get, oftentimes books are donated. Like there are ways to build communities of knowledge that don't require the mediation of the institution. It's hard to change a school system, but you can do a lot with the community. And if community is more and more empowered, they can collectively change a school system much more readily than we can as individuals.

- Actually, it's, this is a question from David Moore, and I think it speaks to where you just left off is, can we talk more concretely about the work beyond writing books and teaching elite students? I can tell you the question one or two ways. I was thinking more about the role of an engaged scholar is the way I initially read the question, like, what is like, how do we go beyond either our books or our teaching or rather, or it can be taken in another way, the public intellectual, or I don't know how, I'm a little bit lost about how to read the question, but the question was saying, can you talk more completely about your work beyond writing books and teaching elite students?

- Okay, well, I will begin by saying this. I am not an organizer and I have never deemed myself an organizer and I would not because I value it far too much to attribute what I do when I, whether it's school groups in Philadelphia or my mentees to the same kind of work, right. Part of what my writing is doing is providing resources for organizers. People who, but you can't, and I'll say it this way, you cannot identify a major social transformation in the history of this nation that did not depend centrally on intellectual work. And the only reason we don't understand that is because the histories are told poorly. So for me, like, sort of, for example, in my book, May We Forever Stand A History of the Black National Anthem, part of the reason that was important for me to write is, people tell this story like there are these people who just have this emotional surge to sort of become free. Not that there are generations of people building bodies of knowledge for Black school children. Not that there are Black intellectuals who are directly involved in crafting curriculum, they may not be in the classroom, but their crafting curriculum, not the Black newspapers covered international news. Not that they became vehicles for the publication of sort of every major Black writer that you can think of in the first half of the 20th century published in newspapers and magazines, not just books. So we think, we tend to talk and think as the intellectual work is somehow outside, that it is always central to struggle. You can't find an example where what, whether you're talking about the Black Panther party, which is an intensely intellectual organization, or you're talking about Snick, we're talking about the NAACP that all have required intellectual work. So the premise of the question as though that is somehow outside the struggle, I don't think is, and I understand why, because there's, these questions come up all the time because we're the way we're taught is though these are different. Now that said, I will say this to be a Black public intellectual now, or to be a respected sort of Black academic in this era is, does not require any form of accountability to Black communities even if the person is speaking on issues related to race and that engenders some deep skepticism, oftentimes from Black communities, because people say, well, how are you speaking for us and not accountable to us. And that's a fair critique. And I think it's a fair critique at the level of particularly the level of punditry. Like what does it mean to speak and you don't have any organic relationship. So I don't, so I could rehearse a series of relationships, but I feel like in some ways that that's also disingenuous because I do work at an extremely elite university and I live a life that is very distinct in terms of socioeconomic status from the majority of Black folks in this country. Although, you miss two paychecks. I mean, given the way being middle-class works for Black people, that that kind of begins to de-stabilize. But I will say that I do think that intellectual work matters. I think organizing work matters. I think the meaningful part is when you bring those pieces together. Substance.

- I really appreciate that because I was thinking about the work of Jarvis Givens, who is my colleague at the Ed School and his book, "Fugitive Pedagogy" which is coming out next semester with HUP [indistinct]. [indistinct] in the art of Black teaching. These were intentional ways of spreading knowledge, even while being policed by school boards and white teachers. And that you have to teach just one 10th of the curriculum, but you, again, the fugitive pedagogy, were willing to go above and beyond, even at the risk of your own life and how knowledge is itself, a very political enterprise. And I appreciate your comments about the state of public intellectualism because in many ways, Black Studies, African Studies, Latinx Studies, Asian Studies, have always been more public facing in their scholarship and in their orientation than other quote unquote traditional departments. And so there's always that level of engagement, but you're right there's like now a push where you don't have to even have any kind of credential or stamp, or you have a platform by virtual of just being on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok. And as a young scholar myself, I, people always ask me like, oh, like, how did you become a public intellectual? I was like, I'm very clear. I'm an academic who engages the public. I will always air on the side of commenting only on things that are like one degree of separation from my wheelhouse, like the things that fit within the study, what I studied as a sociologist, because I think it becomes too easy to just comment on everything. And then when news agencies find their coherent, eloquent speaking, Black person, you will forever be the person who they call just to almost like be a parent at times. And then you can easily lose... like it becomes, things become off the rail a little bit. And so I appreciate the discussion about being in this position, because even though, yeah, I have a whole bunch of titles that say Amherst and Harvard and degrees and stuff like that, I will forever be that first-gen, broke person who came to Amherst with like $10. That's just whatever my understanding and how we also don't, we view titles as one thing, but don't actually then begin to investigate the social trajectory of the person. Not saying that gives them any more or less credence, but the way in which we just began to present or depict people based upon what you see, you lose that. And then I love you bringing in the fact that white wealth and black wealth is totally different, especially in the context of the pandemic. When some of us are more likely taking care of families as compared to who lost jobs, who didn't who works in, who are more often be frontline workers and who's not, when we think about Latino, LatinX families who are, and native families, Black families who are disproportionately affected by something that's hurting us all. Like these are very, very real things that the Academy does not protect you, is not, there's no, there's like, there's no perfect shield. I think we have, and so I really appreciate that. And I think we have time for one, maybe two questions that we can be quick with it. I love this one. And especially given that we have a lot of students on the call today, thinking of generations of activism, how are today's younger activists different from the past?

- It's so hard to answer that question in the present. I mean that the valuation will be in the hindsight I think. What I have noticed is that there are many young activists who are in line with what I think the very best of the traditions of organizing are. And by that, I mean, so when I think about, and I've referenced Snick all the time, because for me that's the standard. But when I think about an organization that internally is contending with questions around the politics of gender, are contending with questions around sexuality are contending with questions around sort of internationalism and capitalism, right? One of the things that this young people who say, I don't, I refuse to wait on, to set these issues aside while I'm dealing with this particular thing. I think that is going to be the hallmark of this generation. That such a large group of young organizers are refusing to say, okay, well, we'll deal with that later. No, we're going to deal with it all right now. And so that all of us can be recognized in this moment, I think is very powerful. I don't know, I can't say though, that that's like across the board because there's a wide range. Like there always is. But that's the young people who are in my world. I really admire that about them.

- I want to end the night with a question from Marlin Cave and one, because it invites us to connect past, present and future and how I'm reading the question and it reads, are there Black intellectuals the past that have, or continue to impact change today?

- Oh yeah, so many.

- Yeah, that's all [Laughs] in with that kind of in that forever imprint and how we move forward, who comes to mind?

- Yeah, I mean, there's so many people and I think that's why we return to them, whether it's, DeBois or Baldwin or Lorraine Hansberry or Ida B. Wells, I mean, we there is such a font. Ella Baker. We keep, we go back because they still have things to speak to us in the moment. I just want to briefly go back to something that you said, Tony, because this was so important and part of why your work is so important. That the public intellectual moniker, like means more than one thing. For some people, it means television media, for some people, it means being in service to the public in multiple ways, some of which might bring you to those sorts of public venues, but most of which is not visible. And I think that that's a really important distinction because punditry is a lot about that piece of it is just one dimension and what you described and what you described also is shaped by your relationship. If you have a relationship to a wide array of communities, it affects the work that you do that is public facing, but may not be publicly visible. And I think, so thank you for doing that work. And also for adding that dimension to the conversation.

- I appreciate that. And before we turn it back to Biddy, I just want to say, thank you for this conversation, for enriching a community that I, to this day, still call home. And I really, really, really appreciated this conversation in allowing both students and alumni's voices to be part of it, even in this format that we find ourselves, it still reminds me of the best days of Amherst. And so I really appreciate it, the time, and the wide ranging conversation and the ability to, again, really dig deep into these works and relate them to present day parallels and possibilities. And so I just want to say thank you.

- Thank you. Such a joy.

- I want to thank both of you. Thank you so much for spending time with us investing the time and giving us so much to think about with your questions and responses. I want to thank everybody who attended everyone who worked on the event, especially Norm Jones who's the co-organizer with me of these colloquia. There will be several starting in January. Well really, sorry, in February, with the new semester and going through the spring and we'll send ample word of the speakers and the times and dates. Let's just end by thanking Tony Jack and Imani Perry again and again. And I hope you all stay well and I'll see you at the next colloquium if not before. Goodnight.