(theme music playing) LISSA: Good evening, everyone and welcome to P&P Live!

I'm Lissa Muscatine co-owner of Politics and Prose along with my husband and co-owner Brad Graham.

And on behalf of our fabulous staff, we welcome all of you to tonight's event.

We are so excited and delighted to have two extraordinary, wonderful writers with us tonight, Claudia Rankine and Sarah Blake.

They'll be discussing Claudia's new book, it's called, "Just Us": An American Conversation".

Claudia Rankine is an award-winning poet, playwright and essayist.

She's a professor of poetry at Yale University, a winner of both the Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as a Genius Award and one of the most provocative and evocative writers in our country today.

She uses poetry, essays, photos, and visual imagery written text and documents to, as she says, "Provoked dialogue to navigate race and loneliness and what it means to live in the world."

"Just Us" is a truly beautiful book and remarkable book, beginning with this incredible cover.

When you pick it up, you'll note the weight of it.

And I think that is a metaphor for the message inside.

We're so delighted to have you here and I hope the audience can join me in welcoming you to "Politics and Prose Live".

SARAH: Thank you Lissa.

CLAUDIA: No, it's a real honor.

Thank you so much for joining me.

SARAH: It's really impossible to capture just how wide and deep and mighty this this book is while it directs its attention onto the culture of whiteness and white privilege while it is both meditative and interrogative, conveyed in the language of public intimacy that I think of is only yours, Claudia.

Nonetheless, this book roams, it reaches, it wonders, it wanders.

It catalogs like conversation.

It loses its bounds.

It begins, "What if what I want from you is new.

Newly made.

A new sentence in response to all my questions."

And it ends, "Tell me something.

One thing.

The thing.

Tell me that thing."

In between that initial call and final response, you take us on the seats in planes, and to your daughter's school gymnasium, a marriage counselor's office, through a facsimile of Jefferson's notes on the state of Virginia, which you've redacted, to notes on the state of whiteness.

Around dinner tables, into the audience.

At Jackie Sibblies Drury's play "Fairview".

Through images and text, graphs, sources considering blondness, white male privilege, the racial wealth gap, racism in schools, police brutality, white memory, or the lack thereof.

And always you are asking, who am I?

And who are you?

And what are we talking about?

Or not talking about?

In these spaces we share.

Thus.

There's so many entry points into this book, um, Claudia, but I'm wondering if maybe we should, maybe if you could just read a little just to, to start to start us off and we're thinking maybe of reading "Tall", would that, is that, that works?

That's uh, um, in the middle of the book.

CLAUDIA: Yes, thank you, Sarah, for that intro.

I wanted to, to, to just say that the image on the front of the book, uh, is by Nona Faustine, photographer.

And that black cloud that hangs in the mall is what drove me to this image and the use on the cover.

So I want to thank Nona, wherever she is.

"Tall: On my way to retrieve my coat I'm paused in the hallway in someone else's house when a man approaches to tell me he thinks his greatest privilege is his height.

There's a politics around who is tallest, and right now he's passively blocking passage, so yes.

But greatest, no.

Predictably, I say, I think your whiteness is your greatest privilege.

To this, he pivots and reports that, unlike other whites who have confessed to him they're scared of blacks, he is comfortable around black people because he played basketball.

He doesn't say with black men because that's implied.

For no good reason, except perhaps inside the inane logic of if you like something so much, you might as well marry it, I ask him, 'Are you married to a black woman?'

'What?'

He says, 'No, she's Jewish.'

After a pause, he adds, 'She's white.'

I don't ask him about his closest friends, his colleagues, his neighbors, his wife's friends, his institutions, our institutions, structural racism, weaponized racism, ignorant racism, internalized racism, unconscious bias, I just decide, since nothing keeps happening, no new social interaction, no new utterances from me or him, both of us in default fantasies, I just decide to stop tilting my head to look up.

I have again reached the end of waiting.

"What is it?"

the theorist Saidiya Hartman said?

And I quote, "Educating white people about racism has failed."

Or, was it that, and I quote "hallways are liminal zones where we shouldn't fail to see what's possible."

Either way, and still, all the way home, the tall man's image stands before me, ineluctable.

And then the Hartman quote I am searching for arrives: "One of the things I think is true, which is a way of thinking about the afterlife of slavery in regard to how we inhabit historical time, is the sense of temporal entanglement, where the past, the present and the future, are not discrete and cut off from one another, but rather that we live the simultaneity of that entanglement.

This is almost common sense for black folk.

How does one narrate that?"

Her question is the hoop that encircles.

SARAH: Thank you.

I kept returning again and again to this, to Saidiya Hartman's question, as I was thinking about how to, you know, begin a conversation on the book, this "How do you narrate that?"

And I just, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about, um, what's, what is what's going on in this, in this hallway?

What is it that, um, how does the book enact in some ways, um, a way out of this hallway and, and, uh, how did it, as you were sort of growing it, figuring out how you were going to, um, have it structure, try and blow a wall through that, that, that hallway where the two are stuck in their individual fantasies, their "default fantasies", as you say, maybe just a little bit about how this, how you conceived of moving from here of answering Hartman's question.

CLAUDIA: How do you narrate that?

Well, this encounter in the hallway, I included it in the book because it makes me laugh.

It's really, I remember the man saying to me, um, you know, being tall as my, my greatest asset in a sense, and, and I've read articles about how tall people, um, are paid more and are in more positions of leadership, but I always thought, you know, aren't they leaving out the word white?

And so when he knew, you know, neglected to say that, I thought that was interesting.

But to get to your question, how do, how do you narrate that erasure, that leaving out?

Um, how do you bring forward constantly the whole picture, which includes the erasure of the centralizing of whiteness.

That really was the project in terms of pushing these conversations to their crisis.

And, um, the idea that he should marry blackness, if he's concerned about blackness comes from Peewee Herman, like if you love something, why aren't you marry it?

Um, so it's not, it's not a question.

It's not a scholarly, um, idea.

It's it was a cultural idea.

And I wanted to, I wanted to include in this book, the high, the low, the sideways and the frontal in terms of thinking about these questions, and this was not the first piece I wrote.

The first piece of I wrote was the "New York Times" piece that had to do with, um, addressing white men on airplanes.

But certainly white men hold the power.

Um, and so they were of, uh, of, of special interest to me in the exploration of, of "Just Us".

SARAH: And I think that just like pushing on that a little bit, the piece that you're referring to the, um, that was in the "New York Times", which comes early in the book, is also quite a long piece about the kind of origin of thinking about whiteness about, um, you were teaching your students about through lines, you know, and realizing that they often had a completely different history from the one that was, that is, you know, in your head and, and wanting to sort of really think about whiteness and in all of its phases.

And meanwhile, you're constantly in these liminal spaces, which, you know, you again in the hallway and wanting to ask finally, wanting to break out of, out of that space.

And I I'm, I'm just wondering if, um, the way in which the book grew into these, um, like in and of itself, the structures are these conversations, but then, um, the fact that you have these, um, fast, like, I don't know if people can see, but so on the right hand side, Claudia has her, um, her thinking and her the sort of, uh, what she had the narrative and on the left hand side, often it will be, um, there will be fact check and there'll be this, this voice that says maybe, or yes or no, and then notes and sources.

And I guess I'm, I'm thinking about the fact that I'm breaking into whiteness in order to show whiteness his face.

Like I was just so, um, I mean just so inspired by the way, in which the book is constantly both in the high and the low tone that you're talking about.

I mean, at one point you're often you're calling for a taxi in the middle of a conversation.

Like, you know, there's much laughter and we can talk about the laughter later, but just how did you come upon this sort of understanding of how the book had to always be, you know, asking of itself, is this it, is this it like, how has that a question to whiteness about whiteness or to what you're doing?

CLAUDIA: Well, uh, you know, when I first decided to teach the course at Yale, um, on whiteness, I went to a bookstore.

I remember this, I was in LA, I went to the bookstore and I, I said to the person who was a man, um, probably in his late twenties, maybe early thirties, I said, "Can you direct me to the books on whiteness?"

And he said, "What is that?"

And I said, "You know, books where whiteness is, um, being interrogated, there's a line of inquiry around whiteness".

He said, "I don't think that exists."

Um, and so that's how that, you know, that, that sense that, um, all work in the subject was about bringing forward something that white people didn't think existed.

And there had been, um, um, many people who had written about whiteness, Baldwin, Toni Morrison, um, Nell Painter.

So, many people there had been whiteness studies in the 80s.

So there, there actually is, um, a tradition of it.

Uh, but that in the sort of cultural, um, landscape, it, it still was not a thing.

And so how do you kind of normalize that was the question, you know, five, six years ago for me.

And, um, when I wrote the piece for "The Times", it was the first piece and it was the piece that, because it was being written for a newspaper, would have to be fact checked.

And so the fact checking part of it was, came out of the structure of this initial pieces, destination.

It was going into a newspaper, but then once I did that first piece, and this is before I even thought I would work on the book, once I did that piece, I became more and more interested in what are the other ways you fact check a thing, you know, do you, and in, in my case, I, I, I employed.

I don't know if you call it employment, but I asked a, shrink a psychiatrist.

Um, if she would, uh, read the pieces with me alongside me and, and tell me, or discuss with me why I might say the things I say and feel and, and do the things I do in these conversations and what, and she's a white woman, what was her reading of my interlocutors responses?

And so that, that was the second thing, the fact checking the psychiatrist.

And then I began to think about how images, um, are actually positioning in our thinking, what we see present positions, what we think.

And so it built in that way.

And once I did one, the next time I had a conversation I was interested in, I applied the same structural points to that conversation.

So the psychiatrist, the fact checking and whatever kind of imagestic, uh, references I thought could be in dialogue with the essay themselves, which, which is a recounting of the conversation I had.

SARAH: Yeah.

And I think this is what's so amazing about this book because the, the effect then, and it's interesting what you say about, you know, journalism being a kind of initiating, um, mechanism, is it it's, it feels so minute to minute, like you are in a situation and either on one side of the page or the other, or in the text itself, there's this constant interrogative, like, is this happening?

Is it, how is this?

Where am I?

I mean, so there's, there is actually no stasis in here.

There isn't a place for whiteness to just be monolithic.

It's, it's, there's like, it's, um, who's in the room, how they're in the room and the, and that is the habit of the book, which is just, um, I mean, the, and the more, the, the sort of further you get in it, you realize how you are, or I felt as I was, as I was reading, I am being, um, shown how to actually do the kind of thinking that you do ask of white people to be, you know, like what if you were the, again, the, what if, which is your initial question?

What if white people walked into rooms and thought about the facts?

So for example, in the piece called "Daughter", and thought, why aren't there any black teachers in here?

Why are there so many white teachers, what if white people thought about race, racism, as, you know, as integrally, as much as Saidiya Hartman is, you know, that entanglement, what if white people were entangled in the same way?

And I think this is what, why I keep I'm so interested in the structure and the way that the book grew, because that makes it, it breaks us out of a hall, it breaks, we have to constantly be asking and, and, and thinking.

I mean, and you know, you, you quote Homi Bhabha, um, it's sort of later.

And I was thinking about this, too.

He says, he's talking to Toni Morrison and he says, "Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection.

It is a painful remembering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present."

I feel like this is, again, you know, this notion of remembering what you're describing is in play here, you know, too.

And, and, uh, speaking of apartments.

CLAUDIA: I think, you know, as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking about, um, well, I'm, I, this is silly, but I was thinking about an entanglement with August that it's, it's a reference, um.

(laughing) SARAH: Ok. CLAUDIA: But this, but this, this notion of entanglement and, um, remembering being one thing.

And I think for, for black people, maybe I should say for this black person to be in the presence of the world, really, the world is a remembering of, of all of the trauma that has arrived me at any one moment.

And so I think white people have the gift of being in the moment without understanding how the moment was formed and in a way that, that, um, mindlessness in a way is, is what it is to be white.

Whereas, um, for, for blacks specifically, and I know other people of color being in the moment is all, brings with it, an awareness of how that moment was formed.

And, and, you know, we've had a lot of, um, videos, for example, where black people are trying to get into their home and some white person is like "prove to me you belong here, show me your key, show me, you know, an envelope with your address on it" as if you were at the DMV or you know show me, show me the license plate that shows that this is your car.

And for them, there's that sense that the space is theirs and that their presence is held by the space and that our presence must be justified in order to continue on inside that space.

And so I think, I think that kind of constant entanglement with the history is both something that blacks carry with them and something that whites force upon them with these questions and with, by tailing them in, in, in grocery stores and by racially profiling them in, um, in the world.

So I, you know, that relationship, like how do you get white people to understand that whatever history I bring you actually bring too, and, and that the ability not to have to think about it is the problem.

SARAH: Yeah.

CLAUDIA: Is actually the problem.

SARAH: Yeah.

CLAUDIA: That allows you to act out and behave in the ways that you act out and behave.

Um, so yeah, so those, that to me was the sort of, um, dance between the entanglement and the, the remembering.

SARAH: When I think it's the, you know, the going back to the, um, Hartman is referring to Patterson's phrase the "afterlife of slavery" in in this quote, and that's very much what you're describing, you know, the afterlife of slavery for, you know, the, is the entanglement for the, for a black person, for a white person, is the ability to, in fact, not be entangled.

And, and I want to, I, I'm thinking a lot about, um, this, and then what the role conversation has in, in, you know, sort of kicking us free, but just something that you said, this is in the middle of, um, the piece that is called "A Social Contract", and you write "moments like these," this, this kind of, um, this moment where the silence between a black and a white person and where something is not said.

"Moments like these, make me understand that the non-comprehension of what is known on the part of whiteness is an active investment in not wanting to know if that involves taking into account the lives of people of color."

The sense of this sort of active, not knowing that, that it's an, it's a choice.

It's an, it's an, it's a, it's something that is, um, not, not just sort of happenstance.

So, I mean, that's what you're saying.

I mean, let's, let's think about, um, this again, that the ways in which, uh, how to sort of show the face of the afterlife of slavery, how it's enacted, as you're saying in the world, you know, the difference for a white person and a black person in a room.

And, um, I wanted to just really think about the fact that the book is sub, the is subtitled is "An American Conversation", and, um, the book moves through, uh, you know, rooms of conversation.

Basically, if you think of each of these pieces as stanzas or rooms, um, and the conversations are rendered, they're analyzed, they're responded to.

And so it's very much the book's currency.

I really want to think about the radical nature of that, of the idea of conversation and what a conversation does and what, how it is that it's, it's operating.

But, um, should we maybe read, do you want to read a little from "Social Contract"?

CLAUDIA: Sure, sure, sure.

SARAH: And then we can sort of kick it open in terms of what's, what's happening there.

CLAUDIA: Okay.

So, um, so the, this, the scene of this is there's a dinner party.

Um, there is somebody who is writing a book on, um, on the presidency.

And I, he makes the argument that those people who supported our current president supported him for economic reasons.

And I made the claim that, well, no, he ran on racism.

He ran on exclusionary, um, policies, like building a wall, um, immigration issues, et cetera.

And, um, and so I want to give people who voted for him, the benefit of the doubt that they actually heard what he said and voted for him based on those things.

And, and that does not go well in, uh, around a table full of white people.

Um, there's also an Asian person.

And, um, and so, um, things get a little bit, uh, strained, "But all the structures and all the diversity planning put in place to alter those states, those structures, and all the desire of whites to assimilate blacks in their day to day lives, come with the continued outrage, outrage, all the perceived outrage at me, the guests who brings all of herself to dinner.

All of it, her body, her history, her fears, her furious fears, her expectations is in the end so personal.

The mutual anxieties and angers blow invisible in the room.

A wind of blustery turbulent, and squally overcast find a discomfort level.

I pushed my brownie around my plate.

I am middle-aged and overweight.

I shouldn't eat this.

I shouldn't eat anything.

Nothing.

Moments like these make me understand that the non-comprehension of what is known on the part of whiteness is an active investment in not wanting to know.

If it involves taking into account the lives of people of color and the perceived tiresome insistence on presenting one's knowledge on the part of blackness might be a fruitless and childish exercise.

Do I believe either of these positions enough to change my ways?

Might as well stop weather from coming.

Had the woman who admired the dessert tray in an attempt to redirect the conversation said to me, "Here's your coat.

What's your hurry?"

Now, that would have made me smile.

The corners of my mouth would have lifted and raised my cheeks to form crow's feet around my eyes.

I would have smiled with my eyes in admiration of her directness, 'Get out' rather than serving up redirection and false civility."

So what I didn't say obviously was when the conversation got heated, a woman sitting across from me pointed to the dessert tray and said, "Oh my God, that is so beautiful."

And I then turned to her and say, "Am I being silenced?"

And that was as if I had led off a bomb inside the room.

So, you know, this, this thing of, within the company of white people, you can only say so much.

And then if it gets to a point where you make them uncomfortable, you have to be silent.

And if you're not silent, then you're an angry black woman who, and this is the fact, has never been invited back to that home again, and perhaps would not go, were I, but, but certainly the fact of the matter is due to that moment in the conversation, I have never been asked back.

SARAH: So is, is that an American conversation?

CLAUDIA: I believe so.

I believe it's American conversation.

You know, how many people do we know who don't have integrated lives?

You know, we're talking about how do people, and this, these are people all around the spectrum from Asians to blacks, to who, who do not have in their homes.

People who are not the same color as they are, um, you know, race is a constructed thing, it's, but it's real.

If the construction has made it real.

And so people have managed to maintain the lines of segregation that white supremacy put in place in the first place, you know?

And, and so you have liberal white America who claim they want equity, who claim they, um, they want so much for all of us, and yet you could go to their house 365 days in the year and enter a segregated environment.

So what, you know, what is that?

SARAH: Well, this is, and you know, um, we were talking earlier, you and I that's, uh, the Orlando Patterson's, um, phrase where he talks about segregation is the last expression of slavery.

And again, thinking about the ways in which the afterlife of slavery are, um, activated reactivated all the time.

And I was thinking about how is it then that conversation?

So this isn't, this is in some sense, a failed conversation, had the woman actually said something actually had, if you had, you had a conversation, maybe not, but this is one that is sort of standing in the book is the kind of the American conversation where silence is actually silencing that it's speaking.

It is speaking the history.

It is totally, but how is it that conversation, the way that you're conceiving of it and thinking again about the structure of the book, which is working as a conversation with itself all the time.

There's nothing, there's no rest anywhere in this book.

Um, both structurally and, and it's, um, enterprise, how is it that conversation is and, um, maybe a way or an error of process and towards it's actually radical about that is integration.

That is in fact, speaking to this notion of just what you're saying, all of us at our separate tables, in our separate rooms, with our separate words, what does conversation, why, why and American conflict, what is it and how is it?

CLAUDIA: Well, because to me, the conversation is the thing that has disallowed has been disallowed in a way, um, by silencing, um, black women by saying, you know, if you're going to talk about your life, your sorrows, you're mourning, you're angry.

And that just does not work here.

You know, how many white men has said to me, "You know, Claudia, what I like about you is you don't get angry.

We can talk to you because you know, you're not accus... Yeah.

You, you know, you're, you're, you have a good sense of humor."

Um, and, and so I do, but, um, but I, you know, that that little move of you can't be pissed off at this culture, this structure.

And if you show that you're pissed off, it means that I'm going to have to do something different and I'm really not prepared to do anything different.

So you're, you cannot put me in a situation where I feel uncomfortable about what's going on.

And that, you know, that has been the, um, the road to exceptional blackness in a way, because you get, you bring in certain black people, as long as they don't distress you and, and you claim you can work with them.

And in the meantime, there are people out there being shot in the back seven times whose knee is, you know, some, the police has given carte blanche, to basically kill people.

And the appetite for black death in the American gestalt is fine.

Like we're supposed to just take it.

And, and by us, I mean, black people, because white people don't even remember that so and so died or so and so died.

I mean, I'm hoping that this is a moment where that has shifted.

We have seen, um, suburban moms and in Portland and in other places coming out, um, with Black Lives Matter, we have seen, um, organizations, grassroots organizations like showing up for racial justice, doing the work of preparing people to have the conversations and to show up in moments of protests.

Um, I think that the, the Woman's March on Washington, um, after the inauguration, that was a key moment for white women in this country to understand their own power, to understand that they have given over their lives to white, patriarchy and, and white supremacy, basically.

And you know, what, what has that brought us to this moment on the edge of fascism with a Senate run by Mitch McConnell and others who refused, refused in the face of more and more and more evidence to impeach the most incapable, vicious, fascist president we have ever had seen in my lifetime, which is not to say that, um, it's been all good, but I mean, this is beyond the pale.

A little bit so, yes.

SARAH: Oh yeah.

CLAUDIA: Oh yeah.

So anyway, the conversations are until we are able to, to get there, people are willing to live with stuff they shouldn't live with.

SARAH: Right.

CLAUDIA: You know, that was the Me Too movement.

The Me Too movement said "Hey, we've been holding this stuff silent inside of us and remaining as individuals when we should come and be and move as a group against this oppressive situation.

And until those women started to talk to each other, you know, the first articles that came out were written by other women.

Um, so, and I, and I think we can, we can, you know, something like 96, I think percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton.

That was not enough.

Even if the election was stolen, it was not enough because white women, 47% said, they, that's not enough.

What is, what is going on with your people, Sarah?

You need to talk to them.

You know, you have this guy who comes and says, "I'm going to build a wall and, and you have 53% of white women."

SARAH: Saying, "yeah, I'll take that."

CLAUDIA: 46% of white women saying, "yeah," that, that that's crazy.

SARAH: So this, I mean, we should, we should kick open the door here.

Cause I know there are going to be lots of questions, but I want to maybe hold above us all.

Cause one of the things that is circling around, what you're saying is that is, is this notion of "us" who is the us now?

Um, how has the conversation, you know, opening the us?

Is it, you know, do we, the "Just Us" and, and, um, I'd love maybe just, if you could just give a little, teeny little, um, thing about, you know, the, the epigraph that comes from Richard Pryor, because it's, again thinking about the shifting nature of us and what it would mean to have, um, to think about us as all of us, all of it, you know, but every woman, every black woman, every white woman, all the everybody in the room, what would it mean to actually be conceiving like that?

But just before we kick into the question and answers.

CLAUDIA: Well, the title "Just Us" was the title before I found the Richard Pryor.

I was talking to, um, uh, a friend, Alexandra Bell, the artist who does a lot of counter narratives.

And she said to me, did "Just Us" come from the Richard Pryor?

And I said, no, "Just Us" came because I'm really talking about me and you, just us, as one at a time.

And, um, but then she sent me to the Richard Pryor and when I went to the Richard Pryor, it was about, it was a joke, um, where that he actually took from another comedian.

But in any case, Pryor was going in for tax evasion, um, stuff, it with the justice system.

And he says, I went down to the court house and I realized it was "Just Us".

And I love that the moveability and the porousness of "Just Us" in his, in his joke.

Um, but the, the question of this book, the conversation of this book is can we form a "we" actually, that, that doesn't lose its individualness, in terms of one, uh, one of us, you and me and everyone else as ourselves and also collectively Americans invested in some form of equity across the board.

Is that possible in this culture or is, is the idea of equity, um, a fantasy when it comes to what American politics means and how it, it, it means to be as the future moves forward.

I mean, when we look at a ticket like Biden and Harris, are we looking at, are we wanting a quieting down of the tweet atmosphere?

You know, the Twitter atmosphere of, of racism and negativity and nationalism and white supremacy that Trump has brought forward, or are we really asking for a new way of thinking about we, America, we, American citizens?

Is that what Biden and Harris can bring forward for us?

Is that what we want from them?

Do we want a return to a silencing or do we want to have new conversations?

SARAH: Do we want all of it?

CLAUDIA: All of it.

SARAH: Do we?

CLAUDIA: Yeah, exactly.

SARAH: Okay.

Yay.

I'm gonna, um, okay.

I'm just going to read starting from the first one here.

Um, Claudia, would you talk about how this book sits next to "Citizen"?

CLAUDIA: Sure.

I mean, "Citizen" was a book that was collected, um, um, incidents from people to show what that looked like.

And, you know, it started the, the catalyst for um, "Citizen" was really the, the, the, the, the question, how did this happen?

How did we get, um, Katrina?

How did we get to having dead bodies in the street?

Like Michael Brown, lying for hours uncovered?

And the, the, the reason is that every day, white people were doing these smaller infractions that were in line with the abandonment of entire communities during Katrina or the killing of black people on the street.

It didn't seem that way because it wasn't a gun.

It wasn't the abandonment.

But it was, it was a comment like, um, you know, "You only got this job because you're black" or "Your child," um, "took my child's seat, um, because of affirmative action."

You know, these little comments that white people throw out like, "Oh, we all know that don't we?"

as if they themselves, haven't been hoarding all of the resources up until now, these things wouldn't have been, um, necessary as, as policy, if it weren't for a hoarding of resources prior to those moments.

So, you know, I just wanted "Citizen" to, to enact the connection between the larger infractions and the daily infractions.

"Just Us" is a book that in a way takes for granted that we have been living in a world where white supremacy is the foundational structure that we live on.

So, can we have conversations, um, including myself?

Can I also have a conversation where I am bringing forward the history and bringing forward the information that supports the claims that I am making the position from, which I think I am, um, moving.

When I ask you a question, um, you know, when I say "Sarah, speak to your people," I'm saying it from the position of knowing that black women never, ever would have voted as a mass for someone like Donald Trump.

And we have the numbers to prove it.

So, um, so I, I wanted the book to enact that, but also question where we are when we are making the claims that we make.

What is going on in our heads, both emotionally and factually.

And how do you create a structure that shows all of that at one time?

So that's, that's the difference between the two, the two for me.

SARAH: That kaleidoscope is very much what we were talking about.

The new structure for this.

What if I could do something new?

Um, here is a question, uh, is all space for black folks, e.g.

me, liminal in a country where space is normed white and the white historical memory is nonexistent?

CLAUDIA: You know, I think the it's not, it's, it's, it's all, it's all space and no space.

Because in many ways, when we talk about black people, we're not actually talking about individual blacks.

We're talking, you know, I can have a very, um, my home, I can have joy.

I can have fun with my family.

But I am well aware of the structures that have allowed me to get where I am and have limited where I have been able to go.

And though, in that way, the space is constantly, um, readable, but can I also have a space that I own, that is me, that is black joy?

That is, yes, I can also have that.

So I don't think, um, but that's, that's me, Claudia versus me, a black woman, the two things are, are entangled.

And yet, um, it doesn't mean I have absolutely no agency.

And I think, I think sometimes, um, that becomes the difficulty.

How do you, how do you talk about, um, black agency and black joy and black living inside a country where we were not meant to survive?

You know, we were not meant to be, and, and each step towards our, our, our autonomy is a bad word, but our fullness has been a fight, has been, you know, a, literally a battle, not a fight, but a battle to, to own that, you know, it's, it's, it's, and, and the battle continues.

SARAH: Have you noticed a shift in conversations with white people since George Floyd's murder?

If so, does it seem that they are genuinely open to hearing you, or just more aware that they should be?

CLAUDIA: I don't think, I mean, I, I have had some very disappointing conversations since the murder of George Floyd, but not around George Floyd.

I've had them around like Amy Cooper, which is really interesting, you know, George Floyd and Amy Cooper in my mind are very married.

The two things happened within 24 hours of each other.

So, on the one hand I have white people saying, "Oh, it's terrible.

That George Floyd was, um, killed."

And they said, "But didn't, they go a little too far in firing Amy Cooper for calling the police on a black man, isn't that a little too much?"

And that inability to see how the two moments are connected is always rather disappointing.

Let's put it that way.

SARAH: Um, let's see.

Um, in your book, you speak a lot about the desire for a new world or a better existing world, especially in the "Daughter" chapter.

And you touch on this throughout your book, this desire for better actions from white people for more and new conversations, and you meet these desires occasionally with reality and the knowledge that it may not come.

Like the Hartman quote of teaching racism to white people failing.

How do you grapple with these opposing desires/ knowledges as a writer, as a person wanting more from a world that continually fails them?

CLAUDIA: Well, I think, I think we can't, we can't not want more.

You know, you can't be, this is a difference I think, um, between white people and black people.

White people believe they could live their lives the way they have it, and that it would be okay because the brunt of the toxicity is, is coming at in my direction.

But it's still toxic.

Um, but, but I believe that for as long as we are alive, we have to be striving forward.

I mean, I might understand that the Electoral College is not going to disband itself with, but I think it might, um, you know, down the road, but, and I might understand why I think it would be a good idea for that to happen.

Um, but I also understand that might not happen tomorrow.

So it doesn't mean I'm not going to ask for that because it's been used to justify, um, and, and, and discount the popular vote, for example.

So I know all of that as, as in my head and I will ask for something, I also know it might not happen, but because I am a little bit aspirational, I will continue in, in the fight for certain things.

And, and that I think is what it means to be alive.

I mean, if, if in a way I feel like I need to honor all the black people, historically, who have seen beyond their present situation.

You know, the Frederick Douglasses, the, the, um, the Du Boises, the all of the Baldwin who have been able to stand in the middle of a thing and say, this thing cannot be forever, and I'm willing to do and say and write and, and be accused of being bourgeois or X thing, or Y thing or apologist or whatever in service of a possible future, a possible newness.

SARAH: Okay.

Um, I think we have time for one last question.

Um, and whiteness has the luxury of not wanting to know or having done understand what came before.

Courageous conversations are uncomfortable but necessary in order to learn constructively.

My question: what do we truly need to do in order to stop looking at blackness or people of color like they are commodities that, that other, or that "thing", quote unquote, that's uncomfortable and guilt written?

CLAUDIA: I hate what do I need to do questions because I don't know, you know, I don't know.

I don't know.

Um, I think asking a question is in a way, always the first step towards knowing something.

Um, um, so I think whoever asked that question has a sense that perhaps, um, well, I, you know, but this is, this would be my attempt to answer that question.

I think that, um, for a long time, people were able to talk about racism without talking about whiteness.

SARAH: Right.

CLAUDIA: And they manage, even though there is no racism without structural whiteness in place.

And even though the subjugation of black people had to do with maintaining white supremacist thinking, somehow those discussions managed to happen without ever saying the word "white people."

Or bringing up the group of white people who were involved in that.

So I think if we can begin to look at the source of the investment and the, and the, um, you know, I'm out of that, that's not about me.

SARAH: Right.

CLAUDIA: That's, that's about what is this country invested in?

I mean, look, look at, um, Thomas Jefferson, you know, he's like, I loved, I heard a guy the other day say that the monument we should keep is Monticello.

Because it has both the slave quarters and the grand house.

You know, somebody offered to free Jefferson's slaves and, you know, Jefferson said, I can't accept because I actually need them.

SARAH: Oh, by the way... CLAUDIA: Oh by the way, my house is built on top of their house.

So, thank you but no.

So I think we need to start having that conversation.

SARAH: I think that, you know, just to, to end, I mean, what you're saying reminds me of, um, the thing that Baldwin said in 1985, when he was talking about, you know, instead of thinking of it being the negro problem, what if you change it to the white problem?

Change the word on the page and you change the page, this, this is what you're, um, what you're pointing to there.

So that is that's all the time we have for, um, questions.

And, um, I think, uh, maybe Lissa comes up?

Oh yes.

CLAUDIA: Thank you Sarah, thank you, it's so great to talk to you at night, instead of morning.

LISSA: Oh, I just want to thank both of you for an incredible, wonderful, rich, thoughtful conversation.

Um, it's such a pleasure to listen to the, to the two of you talk about, you know, something that's hard.

Um, so we thank you both.

And Claudia, we especially thank you for your book.

We will make sure to get it into as many reader's hands as we possibly can.

Um, it is, as Sarah has been saying just, uh, uh, tremendous, tremendous, uh, uh, work for people to cogitate over and mull over and absorb and think about, and hopefully, um, be inspired to think very differently about the way they go about the world and the way they inhabit the world.

So, we thank you for that.

Um, we thank you, Sarah, for always being so great to our bookstore.

We love you as you know, um, and all of you who are watching, thank you for joining us.

This is a, you know, this is the kind of event that we pride ourselves on, and that we're so proud to be able to bring to our community and to the broader community on now on Zoom, wherever you all are.

Uh, please keep joining us for these events.

Thank you both.

I hope you, uh, both stay safe and well, and all of you, um watching, we want you to stay safe and stay well and stay well read, of course.

Um, and we will see you next time, thank you.

ANNOUNCER: Books by tonight's authors are available at Politics and Prose bookstore locations or online at politics-prose.com (music playing through credits)