Latest Breaking News On - Taft school - Page 1 : vimarsana.com

Transcripts For CSPAN3 Author Discussion On Race Identity In America 20221106

deference. an agency enjoys, when it interprets its own organic statute, for example, how much deference epa enjoys when it the clean air act at the state levels. that same level of deference has under serious and sustained attack for a long time and and and successful attack and in a lot of states agencies simply do not enjoy deference when they interpret their own organic statutes. and i think that's really really deeply unfortunate and think there is something about the political economy of state of states or state governments as opposed to the federal government that really me less optimistic about about state regulatory apparatuses. and maybe i'll just kind of leave it at that for and chris, when i think about some of the greatest changes in the criminal legal system and criminal procedure much of it has started at the state level. and when the us court decided that people with intellectual disability could no longer be subject to capital punishment, they surveyed states and there was a national trend. when the us supreme court said that no longer can we subject under the age of 18 to the death penalty. they surveyed the state. do we have some sort of movement going on in state courts to limit what scientifically describe as junk science. well, i mean, just to zoom out a little bit when, you talk about federalism and the work of state courts, high courts and state constitutions. you know what much of my job at the innocence project is strategically engaging is an effort to change the law around the leading contributing factors are convictions so eyewitness misidentification, junk science, false confessions, all of these kind of core things that have been used to wrongfully make people. and so i a lot of our amicus practice in the supreme court and five years ago, seven years ago, i would once in a while support a petition to supreme court because i thought maybe on sixth amendment issues. there are a couple you find five votes for an issue that really cared about and for the last five years, anytime people have come to me for you know we want to support this case or that case, you know, and these are innocent people by and large. right. you know, very plainly on the, you know, great facts, perfect facts and used to be good facts make good law. and then the reverse was true. but now, you know, i say is like, show me where you have five votes for this. i don't care how innocent your client is, you know, i mean, show where you got five votes, you know, and they will now take these really bad facts or great facts depending on what side on and not take a position that matters, but will deliberately gut it and say it doesn't matter. right. if you look at the indecision, innocence matter. right? only process, only a fair trial. and then you look at what the the interpretation of due process in federal courts, and that's where innocent people go to die because of so much deference is given to state courts by the federal and by federal judiciary. as a result, supreme court precedent. so now all of the reform work that i focus on when i'm thinking ahead and designing litigation, state high courts. yeah. and how important every election is is massive right so you know you have a case, you know, or an issue that you really care about, right? so we're talking about trying to get better and the use of scientific. suddenly we have a new governor. we can pass a law like we have in texas where the junk science right which i write lot about in the book where it's the first law in the country where there's a path back into court for people who can demonstrate that the so-called science that was used at trial has been discredited by the progress it's known now. it's state by state incremental change and further balkanization of the way that we treat people that are subjected to the criminal legal and sadly, i believe that you're right. these require national solutions. but i don't think politically possible anymore. you i mean, and so much of the litigation i do is in the deep, too. so then you're screwed in state court and you're screwed federal court, right? so really it's what do we care about? and the legal system seems to put the highest priority finality. so a case was adjudicated in the state court regardless of what sort of new evidence comes forward subsequently in post-conviction that the court wants to rely. on what the initial trial court found, which was a conviction. exactly. i mean, i devote a chapter on, you know, denying innocence in the age of and the principle of finality in the age of innocence. and really that has been the paramount legal consideration by our courts for a long time as the jury verdict in and that's it. you know, you're entitled to a fair trial and no more. and this is why the innocence project and other similar organizations have been so disruptive and such a threat to the status quo, because that undermines the legitimacy of our entire criminal legal system when you're convicting innocent people because most used to be anyway people republicans democrats would agree that you shouldn't incarcerate innocent people shouldn't put innocent people to death. i'm not sure that you can really say that anymore. each you in many ways is is relying on the existing structure. and chris, even though you don't have faith and the rules of evidence in criminal procedure, you're you're still filing post-conviction briefs, you're still using the existing tools. and really, our discussion is about how is. it that we can maybe return to have faith again in our legal institutions and our regulatory systems and each of offers prescriptions about suggestions in your book and and i want to give some hopefulness right to our despite fact that we have a decision like dobbs on abortion. the fact that we have a decision like sean versus martinez and jones which chris mentioned that limits the type of new evidence that a criminal defendant can bring into court after having litigated issues in state court. so if you can talk, about some of the intervention, some of the prescriptions in your book that can allow us to have faith in this system systems. sure. okay. so as i said in my in my first set of remarks, what a lot of the book attempts to find a way to do to harmonize these ideas of expertise and democracy. and so the obvious question, well, how do you do that? how did you then in this context and so i think in the regulatory context are a couple of ways. number one, start with maybe with the most obvious one, success has of buddies. and so i think if you can manage to create successful regulatory programs, then you will find that those programs and the agencies that that promote end up getting more end up becoming more legitimate. now, that's an obvious one. we'll just do a better job and you know, you'll more support. so you have to think go beyond that. i mean, how do you actually make that happen? and i think one of the ways you make that happen is, you know, you pull some levers kind of at the institutional design level to try to incentivize these these good results that will then lead more to more democratically intimacy. so in the book, i talk about trying to don't attempt presidential control over bureaucratic output kind of leaving job more to oversimplify to leave the job more to the actual experts rather than to the politicians in the white house or even to politicians at the agency headquarters building. i also argue that courts should play a role here by calibrating their judicial review of agency based on the extent to which the agency has used procedures that may well incent, that may well promote expertise. right. so if the agency of falls down on using the right procedures to promote to use expertise, then maybe the judicial review should be a little more skeptical, more stringent, and the reverse be true of the agency does something else. i also argue that there need to be reforms with regard to the use of information in administrative agencies or information should be a lot freer. in other words and not subject to the political pencil. that is to say to political. so some of you may remember i've never remember 14 years ago, james hansen, famous climate scientist at columbia, went to capitol hill and said, i disavow the testimony that is now being entered in the record because that testimony, in fact, cooked by my bosses at epa orbit, nasa's wherever he happened to be. so i think there really need to be reforms with regard to information, how information is created and how it's disseminated. and then finally and this is maybe the best. well, second to last, agencies have to have their their staffing up. we are operating under a very, very thin civil service or with a very thin civil service. and there absolutely needs to be reformed. we need more bureaucrats and we need fewer contractors and outsourced jobs. finally, and this really is kind of the big one, you know, need to change the process by which agencies interact with the public the way the system runs. and this is, again, a big oversimplification but the way the process runs now is. agencies make some decisions about what they want to do. they embark on a technically very complex rulemaking. and at that point they ask the public, do you have anything interesting add here? and of course, most members of the public don't because these are really issues. however, if the agency had sought out public input at earlier stages, maybe stages that are more politically fraught in terms of kind of making decision ins about which initiatives we should prioritize here. so i think i use the faa. i'm not sure i even gave you the example that i was talking that i had in mind. so how this how about the faa going to the public saying the following things? we have time and space for one big rulemaking this year about passenger rights. let's have a citizen jury convene and let's talk about whether you'd a rulemaking on tarmac versus a rulemaking on for baggage loss. now that's a very simple example but if can involve the public in making sorts of politically fraught decisions politically, fraught because they involve value choices, then basically the is in fact able to participate in the process by which the agency makes its decision. as opposed to what? well, as opposed to starting a process kind of getting into the technical weeds and only then asking public if they have anything interesting to add which of course they likely want. and then, you know, the public walks away of feeling what that really wasn't much a process. and everyone sort of walks away dissatisfied. so i think if you can do these sorts of things, these sorts, these sorts of reforms, maybe you have a way of of squaring that circle that definitely would increase. and even the credibility of some of these agencies will or. chris yeah sure. so just quickly highlight three things which are several solutions we should be looking to, but i'm highlighting these three in particular because they with each other in a way to show how we can actually get to sustainable change. so one, the history has shown that social have been the leading sort of driver of constitutional change. so we look at abolitionist movement, right that long preexisted the point when we got to the 13th amendment that outlawed slavery immediately and universally right the movements for suffrage whether it's black suffrage or women's suffrage that was very much part of a movement. right? women in several states were trying to the right to vote, but they were. and it actually continued push at the national level to get the 19th amendment secured. the movement for temperance. we ended up getting the prohibition amendment, the 18th amendment ill fated ill probably not the best example things but it did have a really long sustainable temperance movement was driving it and sort of led to like you're sort of like scorecards that they sort of movement behind it. the institutions that were working with it led to the score cards that we kind of of today that members of congress are checked against in terms of advocacy organizations. so social movements and obviously we to the civil rights era. and then you have like robust social movements on on looking to change on several dimensions. so social movements and then relatedly civil society and the engagement, these sort of organizations. right. and so i mentioned the idea of the scorecard that was sort of developed around the temperance movement and the amendment, but you can think of all the great organizations that engaged with society and and led these sort of movements the naacp comes to mind sort of first and foremost in terms of the civil rights right with their district in to what they were doing in terms of strategic litigation and trying to find these test cases throughout the country that they could bring these amazing cases to challenge the status quo. was they i mean, they were also lobbying they had a district who might as well have been living on capitol hill. right. testifying for the range constitutional change, formal or sub constitutional are the informal ways to try to push this forward. so then you have social movements, you have the engagement, civil society and then really is the academy honestly is a role for academics in this. right. we're not going to have these unless we have general ideas being generated in the academy. people who have the time, the privilege, honor and i argue the duty to think about what is ailing our democ and how we can sort of turn these big ideas or like one, come up with the big ideas what it could look like in our current constitutional sort of framework or we need to get out of our current constitutional framework into what that might look like in practice. so the implementation of these things and one person who comes to mind for me is murray. and we would not talking about the equal rights amendment if it weren't for pauli murray. she's talked the idea she wrote a seminal law review article called describing crow. right. so playing on the idea of jim crow, which was denying the rights to black americans throughout the country but particularly in the south, this idea of crow, which also existed where women were not thought of anything but extend of their husbands and sort of male family. right. and she used this to help not only sort of propel ruth bader strategic litigation to use the 14th amendment for constitutional change to protect such sex discrimination against sex discrimination, but also push for the equal rights amendment, which we're still talking about today, something that is being debated at the d.c. circuit right now. right. so these ideas are interrelated social movements, engagement by civil society, and then the academy. and i think that that is one idea or one sort of a panoply of ideas that can help us get out of the malaise we're in now. thank you for. uplifting pauli murray, who is getting renewed attention. i think there is a great profile in the new yorker on within the last few years. that's probably with an eye if anyone's interested chris you know i always struggle for optimism in these types of talks that give something. yeah. one of the things though that i think becoming much more part of mainstream thought. that the criminal legal system is and needs reform and that's become know for different reasons. you know on the right it's of a financial matter. it doesn't make financial sense. and on the left, you know, i think you know, these the arguments are i'm going to assume that you do the mass incarceration is a bad thing. right. we have you know 2.3 million people in this country in various forms of incarceration at any given time. by far the greatest in the world. and yet we're not a particularly safe. so locking up all these people is not working. plainly, the one of the things that i was heartened before the actual result of the 2016 election was that hillary clinton was forced apologize for her husband. criminal justice policies, which have led to a lot of what we've been talking about today. and so a lot of this goes down to the antiterrorism and effective death penalty act called adverse. this was passed during the clinton years. what it effectively did was sort of relief in or the ability to get federal courts to review state court convictions. the overwhelming majority of crimes and particularly violent crimes are prosecuted in state court. that's also where overwhelming majority of wrongful convictions occur. many of those would have and could have been corrected by federal judges who have lifetime tenure, and they're more arm's length from the facts of those cases. and what the apa did was give all this power to the supreme court to define this statute and what is now today the law is that you can point to something that is clearly established supreme court precedent that was violated in your client's case, you can't get into federal court at all. and the way that that's been interpreted, it's been so restrictive now we talked about this other opinion that that you can't bring in new evidence in federal court to demonstrate your innocence of the way the supreme court is interpreting this law. so i think in light of this and i went back to where were talking about the importance of elections. so if we have a and 2024 a blue wave crests and then there may be political momentum to doing away with that bar and epa is really the thing prevents so much injustice from being corrected at the federal level and the politics and i a chapter to this in my book if you're trying to overturn a conviction you have to bring in new evidence and you have to present that evidence in front of the same judge and the same prosecute her who wrongfully convicted you in the first place. right. so the confirmation bias on the, you know, whether or not this new evidence would altered the outcome is and in wait and it all the more difficult to get it overturned state court and because of epa. it's almost impossible to it overturned in federal court and these are really good factual cases. so my comes from maybe a political will depending on the tide that will at least amend if not abolish at who. and i think it's also laypeople are becoming increasingly more aware of all the injustice that exist, the criminal legal system. and it's through uplifting stories like those of your clients when i think about, you know, the of serial and podcasts and the shift that we see in sort of true crime depictions on television, it's not just sort of law and order special victims unit as dominant sort of narrative of what a criminal legal system looks like and the fact that you can have that are wrongfully convicted, the fact that you have people may have engaged in criminal conduct, but we don't write them off. and people are worth more than the worst thing that they've ever done. and and those kind of shifting, i think, are critically important as people are thinking about what judges elect, what local prosecutors to elect. and i think that dovetails well with bill and wilfred's work about public engagement sharing expertise among people that can actively then participate in in our legal systems and regulatory systems. so later afternoon, i'm somewhat biased here in addition to teaching evidence and crim pro, i'll teach a class in abolition in the spring and at 5 p.m. in this room we'll have a discussion on. abolition from thinkers and activists and it calls for as a theoretical framework calls for a different social and economic order in which police prisons no longer exist. so in many ways, abolition seeks dismantle existing legal and regulatory power structures, advance economic and racial inequality. and how do some of the inner some of the writings your book square with an abolitionist approach to social change. i'm happy to it's a little bit more difficult to think constitutional law and the way that the think about their movement because you know we're guided by a constitution it's not easy to just overthrow an entire regime although that's how we our original constitution. right. it's michael klarman who wrote a book calling it the framers coup. but so, you know in constitutional law we're at least stuck that we have this existing old texts that people really kind of have idolatry. so at a certain point they venerated the point where like there's no problems here. and so we think so one of the things we need to do is sort of reframe that debate, right? the idea that this document is like sent down on stone tablet. it's this veneration has gotten to a point where it's helped get us stuck at this point where we won't want to change it because we think these people are too wise who did it or they might be repercussions if we open the door to amending the constitution and i think we need to sort of as people think about this to change that, say that maybe it is worth it maybe looking in light of history which is what my book tries to present it is a we're starting to see these things that tell us it's time for constituted all change so there's that but i do want to just reiterate the importance of social movements because abolitionism for the criminal system. i was going to say criminal justice but it sort of beat my tongue a little bit for that system is very much in with the idea of social movements taking the lead on these things. right it does require broad participation from everyday people, people like you and me, people in here see the injustice and act upon it to pressure political leaders to try to engage broadly, to make sure that we get the solutions that are we deserve today. so i won't belabor point, because i think that they'll talk more about that at the of the event tonight. but i do think both social movements and of changing the way we think about the constitution as a sacred text is important to that sort of approach. it, you know, i you know, i wrote a book in oh five about the drug wars, satirical book, you know, i mean, and and at that time, i would not have believed that you could walk right out front here and blow up the big fatty and walk around outside and nobody's going to bother you, right? i mean, that's that's incredible. you know, i mean, and and that's really like was in arraignments. i just took a bunch of people from the innocence project to arraignments to watch the other and i was struck by how much it changed. i was at the bronx defenders, you know, i mean, it to be like tens and 20, 30, 40 wrongful arrests every day. nonsense charges, you know, you saw bail reform. there were no marijuana arrests. it was really remarkable and it was totally, you know, falsified my hypothesis to everybody who had was thing. i was like, wow, this seems not as grossly just as it usually is. the and so you know when i first heard about abolitionism you know i mean as you know i think i probably had the same response that a lot of us have. you know, as i ask, what are we going do with all the rapists and murderers, right. you know, i mean, and kind of thinking, you know, i mean, and so even as you know, consider myself kind of left of ho chi minh still is like grappling with like know that concept. but increasingly i find it having a you know if you really at the legitimacy of the criminal legal system you talk about the constitution they had all of these they built into the constitution slavery. right. you know, i mean, it's just like so that's not a legitimate document. right. know, i mean, plainly and so, you know, if you think about who were being cast waiting and why and what force, then abolition makes a lot of a lot of sense, you know, and i've represented really thousands of people in my career, thousands. and i would say of those thousands people very, very serious cases. right. and tiny handful, three or four, where i would say this person probably should be segregated from society. right. that this person is very likely to re-offend and really is antisocial in a way that really can't be contained. so that's based on a lot of training experience, you know, mean that. so i think it's a important conversation and. i think it's really important to push reform in this. so if you dismantle the drug war, you know how much reduce capacity you would have in the criminal legal system. right. and if you stop poverty, right so there are many ways, you know, i think that people like me and the meet and then we have a much, much smaller footprint, you know, i mean and that's really what's important. i think from my perspective, the carceral would have a smaller footprint. yes mm hmm. yeah. so just think, i think relatively briefly, you know, it's easy, i guess as a first cut. as a first cut answer to question, to say, well, that just doesn't apply to the regulatory system. and in some ways that's right because, i mean, if you want a regulatory, then you're going to have a regulatory system and it does it means you're not going to abolish it. but i think it's a matter of degree. and what i would suggest is maybe thinking about the abolition frame in terms of the regulatory system, maybe we can think about it in terms of returning to a regulatory system. maybe maybe we once had that maybe was, you know, closer to ideal than what we have now. and that doesn't abolishing it by means maybe it means restoring it in some ways. we used to have a regulatory system that actually worked pretty well and that americans had a great deal of confidence. and in 1964, i think was 78% of americans polled said they had either some or a great deal of trust in the federal government to do the right thing least most of the time. obviously not the case today. and so it wouldn't take you know, it wouldn't be a london skills revolution, but it would certainly be to scales of a pretty large scale of a lot of happened over the last several decades to get to i think you know would, be in a, you know, the kind of place that in the criminal system, abolitionists aspired to to so. but but i but i wouldn't call it abolition. yeah. thank and that concludes our panel for please join me in thanking wilfred william and chris. let's introduce the panel. kendra james is an executive producer at crooked media and was a founding editor at shonda lancome, where she wrote and edited work for two years, she has been heard and seen on npr and podcast including -- sesh love. it or leave it. yo, is this racist? this is love. star trek the pod directive and more. and her writing has been published in elle marie claire town and country women's health and others and her book admissions is out now. danica roem is part of the historic group of elected officials flipped republican seats in the 2017 election. she's the first out and seeded transgender state legislator in american history. prior to her political prior to her political career, she was a journalist and now serves as a frequent guest on national media. she and her work have been featured in the usa today people. gq, the new york times, elle and others, and she was the subject of the glad award winning documentary, this is how we win. her book, burn the page is out now. so i thought we would just start like as most many stories do from the beginning in your lives and maybe in each of you can talk about your kind of early childhood and what were your most indelible memories and maybe what how you tapped into some of that for in writing the book. kendra, you want to start? oh, boy. sure. early childhood. so i grew up in maplewood, new jersey, which if you're from brooklyn, you might know it as the place that your friends are escaping to. it's a small town, kind of like 30 minutes outside of the city. i grew up in a single income home. my my mom was a very traditional stay at home mom. she did not have a job until i was, like 25, 26. and that was when my parents got divorced and my dad was a wall street banker. and so basically, i my book admissions is about the three years that i spent at the task school, which is a boarding school in connecticut. and i was raised essentially knowing that i was going to go there because my dad had graduated from the school in 1974. and it was basically i had been going up to the campus since i was two because he was really involved in alumni affairs and he was on the school board for a while. and he had a really positive relationship with it. so i have a lot of memories of just like spending time on this, this campus that was essentially a i usually refer to it as a club for teenagers. it's several many hundreds of acres rolling green hills, two ice rinks, just like a really kind of like luxurious place to be educated and to and to spend time in. or that is how it appears on the outside. so i really grew up like knowing that i was going to go there but was not like fully prepared because of the way i had grown up in this like very upper middle class town. and with parents who themselves were pretty privileged, i was not really prepared for kind of the the stark contrasts in terms of like socioeconomic stuff and also the way race would play out on that campus because i grew up pretty sheltered. i grew up with sort of a lot of respectability politics, like ingrained me by both of my parents. and so, yeah, i just i wasn't per prepared for it. so that's kind of a quick background on, on my childhood. all right. so my name is danica roem. i am grateful. representative for the city of manassas park in the western pennsylvania county, portions of haymarket. gainesville in my lifelong home, manassas, in the 13th district of virginia, house delegates elected 2017 reelected, 2019 2021, running for state senate next year. and i, like i said, because it's lifelong manassas i'm born and raised prince william hospital, september 30th, 1984. cheryl sadly wrote and long story short with it, is my childhood is a series of overcoming a lot of traumatic events and other things and at the same time having, you know, the best italian food on sunday nights of my mom's cooking. and if you know anything about italian family argument is communication and i like to make that point pretty clear in my book as well and. you know, the thing is, in my case, my upbringing in any way, even though the way that you would stand is like, hey, look, you live out in the woods and in the burbs, right? you know, like this, you know, this, you know, in a white middle class family. but you know what's going to stand out so much? it's like, well, you know, my dad killed himself when i was three years old. so in my earliest childhood memories is running next door after you got himself on fire. then i. my grandmother died by the time i was seven over and she had parkinson's and we had lived with her right after he had died. so to immediate family. so i lived with you die by the time i was in second grade and know so the the core nexus is my family, my mother, my sister and me for y'all from here, my mother's the bronx specifically from morris park and again, italian catholic woman who was born with a chip on his shoulder. so that definitely ingrained in the funny thing is like so i'm virginia to my core. i mean, you know, my manassas battlefield fleece that i wear fleece better than my governor, by the way, just for the record. yeah, but, but one of my students, they go into the city, my mother's voice starts coming out so, so aggressively, like she that this otherwise just sort of completely boring mid-atlantic accent every other day second she's on the phone with some from new york. oh, my god, donna, how you doing? oh, my god. did she just hear enrico's close over in the bronx. can't even believe it. we're going to get a good pastry now, right? that. so that's part of my upbringing only in the south and i spent 13 years in catholic school. i spent four years public school over at loch lomond groceries, and then from fourth grade all the way until i graduated in parliamentary university in 2006 and college, those last four were by choice. those middle nine absolutely were not. and the thing about being a closet case in a catholic school is it's already pretty suffocating environment that just makes it worse. and i was looking for outlets and i was scared to death of anyone finding out who i was and at the same time, when you will have that fear, you want, be associated with other things, and so you start overcompensating in some ways, right? and at the same time wanted people to think i was the middle person i was, you know, whatever other identity i was the funny person. i never wanted to be perceived as the gay guy, which is how i was basically referred to for most of my childhood with a series slurs. that's for the perception of being gay, let alone the actual reality of being trans. and as i would find out in my upbringing, when i was just basically trying to figure out how to talk to the world at large, i would use sexuality as a stepping stone to get to a gender identity, which i wrote about a lot in from the page about how i would come out as bi first. i'm so sorry to everybody person, by the way, because they always are like, are you actually or not? it's used by two gay to two trans and you know keeping my social rotation. gender identity are different things, but it was just an easier way for me to start like tiptoeing, just talking to people. for the first time. i told anyone i was 17 years old and once it got into college and i was 343 miles away from home, that's when i first start telling the women in my life. and really, because wanted them to feel safe around me, i want them to know it was going to be okay to talk to me just like they would do any of the other girlfriends and then, you know, like we would get dressed up and go club and go dancing or go into like, you know, gothic shows and stuff like a band called jen tortures. i'll see you after the show. and you go to these shows where it's just like, it doesn't matter your gender, they are everyone's wearing makeup anyway and all black. so hey you know fit in and that was kind of my tiptoeing out. i had some pretty bad events that happened in between that i wrote about in the book, but eventually i always described general for is kind of like having a hand. it closes around your throat slowly over time, to the point where you can't breathe anymore and you got to do something about it. that moment happened for me when i was eight. i knew, right, tom? i was ten years old, that i was trans, but i never even thought it. so at 28, i finally started seeing a psychologist. i came out to my mom, my sister, my 30th birthday, and just to put a wrap around this one, mama said that night, well, i'm just concerned. how are you going to actually find someone? and i said, well, i got a date next week actually at this with a temptation concert in baltimore with this trans guy who's from finland, originally lives in maryland now. and so that was october 7th, 2014, when we had our first date. and then september 9th, 2022, we went back to baltimore to go see apocalyptic art because finished tell metal girls and of that person who my mom was concerned about, whether i would ever find out just proposed to me so yeah hey. we have breaking news on the panel to that. that's very good. excellent. so chen, julie wong has now has joined us and i want to we just opened up. i just asked i introduced everybody bio and then just wanted a little bit more kind of talk about their earliest childhood memories. i know you have many, many, many of them in your book, but in sort of what were the most some of the indelible ones and that you wanted to sort of just, you know, clue people into is where you came from literally and figuratively. absolutely. i apologize for being late. i used to live five minute walk from here, but today i had the fortune of commuting from new jersey. so, yeah, i mean, my my story when you said, danika, the fear of being found out, being terrified of that that although we have very different experience is i relate to that so deeply that hits at the very core of me so i went from being a pretty privileged, spoiled kid, north china, to getting on a plane, getting off that plane at jfk airport and realizing that i was half a world away from everybody i ever knew. it was just me and my two parents and we were what was called undocumented. and i never been aware of documents before. i never knew that that was an issue anywhere in the world. and all of a sudden because of that change we did not have enough money for food. we shared a home with six, seven other immigrant families. every time i saw a cop, a firefighter, a sanitation worker, anybody in uniform, i would turn and run the other way. and so this this fear of being found out became the defining sense of me. and with secrets come this implicit shame of you should hide who you are. there's something inherently wrong with you. and like danica, i chose to overcompensate by achieving. i thought that i could weave an american dream where i would earn my worth in america and prove that i was thoroughly american, that i was i belonged here and i deserved all the documents that i had so longed for. and was not. until you achieve your your dreams that you realize that there were some fallacies in there. i'm sure we'll talk about that a little. can joe just want to ask you so you mentioned to the first black legacy student at taft school, and you start there in three. is that so? did you feel a responsibility to your family and or other students of color to excel not in terms of like that like being the first because i when i got there like being the first so i was the first black american legacy, i should say. there was another person the school started accepting black students in like 1953, and the first black student who attended was actually from bermuda. and so then he sent his granddaughter there in the eighties. so she was actually the first black legacy to graduate. and then i was the first black american one. and i make that distinction because taft was actually the first place where i really learned that there was sort of that distinction within the diaspora of black american versus like black from anywhere else, like literally anywhere in the world. i remember i had a friend who was on haitian or haitian-american, and someone referred her her as african-american. at one point she was like, i am absolutely not. which comes like with that statement also like comes some things that you have to unpack, but it is an important distinction to make because the experiences are really different. but in terms of pressure to excel, i didn't really know that i was the first black american legacy to who had the potential to graduate until it was announced during an all school like an all school assembly. um, about black history at taft. and that was like kind of when i realized like, oh, okay, this like a thing. and there were also a bunch of other kids there who were freshmen when i was a senior who were also legacy students at the time. and we were all friends just because all the black kids at the school friends. so in terms of excelling like i did feel pressured to do well outside of that that fact just because like i knew that i was there i was at the school. a lot of my friends from maplewood where i had gone to public school through the ninth grade, i had a lot of friends who would leave between like eighth and ninth grade and they would go to other schools like they would go to my care. montclair kimberly or like kent place, other schools in new jersey. and the idea of having to then like go away to that privileged school and then come back like that was sort of like an embarrassing thing that might happen. so like that where a lot of the pressure came from, it was like, you don't want to you don't want to come back. you don't want to have that associated with you. and it again came up for me when i was applying for college as well. it was of the main reasons i did not want to to rutgers. rutgers grad school. it one of my favorite actors, avery brooks, is on faculty there. it's a great place, but i like was really like conscious of the fact that i did not like to go to college with the people that i had like quote unquote, escape kept going to public school because a lot of my friends from columbia, my public school winter records because it was cheap and it was a good school and. so yeah there was that pressure of like wanting to do better than what you had left behind and and one of the jean of the story tell, a story about a roommate that you had there who who made racist comment to you. but basically, he she said that she didn't like that you had to get up early to your hair and complained about the, quote. gross, unquote, smell in the room from your hair products. and then you sort of devised was sort of a prank that meant to be not vengeful. but in and where you were going to put a hex on her and set up the witchcraft symbols in the room. yes, i was very revenge motivated and how did that experience affect how you would see your other white classmates after that? was it did it change that in many ways, yeah. there was like so like i said, the this maybe i didn't take it, but the school was it was very segregated socially white students pretty much like you only hung out with white students. black students hung out with black latin students. and then everyone just kind of assumed like we had a black table in the in the dining hall. but then there was also like an asian table and by asian table, like it was just assumed that everyone was chinese essentially when in reality was like there were kids from hong kong, there were kids from china, japan, korea. i had a lot of very good korean friends. like it was just like it was a whole mixture, but the school was just so segregated. and when i got there i was not i wasn't aware of that. and back in maplewood, like one of the big things that's always touted by the realtor is it's like it's so diverse. you, like everyone is friends with everyone. and for me that was really true. my group was very, very diverse. and so i got attached and i really thought i was going to do the same thing and that was not the case for me. and so, yeah, it was my, my friends, two of my black friends were the ones who told me when my roommate said that me they were the ones who said like, that's racism. because for me, racism was very much like a water hose. it's a slur it's like a very big event incident that happens because we didn't have language like microaggression back then to describe those sort of smaller incidents are so yeah it really after that it really did change sort of my perception of like who i am going to be friends with in this environment. and i really did start like that was the moment i stopped really trying to be friends, the white kids at that point. and there were a few who would like come into the group because we were very we would take in misfits like that because we were at the school essentially misfits. but it was it was very much it was not an effort that i was making on my part on outreach, because it very much felt like it wasn't possible. no. danica, i wanted to ask you so you mentioned that you don't know that danica was in a you call it thrash metal or we just call a heavy metal, what we call oppression, melodic death metal. okay. okay, good some people in the room respect the differences. so, you know the big question is, do you go from being as you write about you're a thrash metal boat vocalist working also as a food delivery driver. at one point, right to. a legislator who beat a 13 term incumbent. i think it's really funny that of the parts of my like career biography, we went over it, we just talked about metal band for 12 years. we talked about food delivery driver and my 92 dodge and. we completely missed the ten years i was a newspaper reporter. well, no, we'll get that. but the reason i beat that, though, is that was my chief qualification for office. the 2500 news stories i heard about covering western prince william county, my home area, and i was working for for a two full time jobs for four or five years. at one point where i was working for the hotline in dc covering campaigns at six something in the morning until mid afternoon, and then i would hightail it out to haymarket and go cover, you know, maybe a battlefield girls volleyball game or maybe i would go all the way down to gerry, virginia, to go cover an electric chair execution in person. there's a fun little way to spend your evening. i saw that. and you know, for all of the things that i you know, that i did, all the different identities that i acquired kind of along the way, it's kind of in the personal loyalty type where you see it's like it's not that you can't focus on. one thing is that there's a lot really cool things you want to do and you kind of want to try a whole lot of different stuff, which also means you have the in ability to be really good at particular one of those, but maybe you could be like, you know, above average. and that's kind of where i was shooting for in a lot of ways. but the way the reason i, you know, went from all of that was when i came out, when i turned 30 and i and then we changed my byline in the paper. the next year i stopped being afraid. what other people were going to think of me. i stopped being afraid and stopped giving a -- what other people were going to do to judge me. i stopped caring about my god. what if they find out and trans yeah i am? and then it was just like and now what? and when you just start confronting people with it, then suddenly all the things in life that you thought were impossible don't to be. i always thought it was from the first day i went into therapy. november 21st, 2012, i thought that my worlds were going to have to exist and two different things. they were not going to be able to link like this. i was not going to have a bean diary. i was just going be like this where i could do metal things here and journalism here. because if you come here, this is going give you a negative reaction here. you're not going to get hired here. and by the way, the not getting hired part completely true. coming out as trans is, probably one of the top ways to kill your career prospects in a lot of ways until you get elected. then you have a lot of people who are very interested in you. suddenly, a side note, you shouldn't have to get elected, to have health care. and it's like me too. and i was unemployed for two and a half years before i liked it. that's a different that's a different story where i was kind of tied in together, though, is that i had used metal really not just as a, you know, escape or whatever, but was also an audio rebellion for me. there was a way to kind of, you know, really also see the world in a bit. my band would go to you know, northern ireland. we would go to glasgow, edinburgh and aberdeen over in scotland. i loved traveling. we go, you know, just all over and even on when you're dylan broke doing it, i always thought, you know, you don't get to take to the grave with you guys take experiences so you know might as well go you know them up but at the same time i started getting really bad in that i mean 25, $30,000 credit card debt and i started working two full time jobs again or two part time jobs again. this time after i came out for one job, 30 hours a week for $15 an hours in newspaper editor, side job, $5 an hour plus tip as a weekend asking bob house delivery driver which i wrote about you know actually very very early in my book and burn the page and i lost money at that job because of car repairs. and i was 32 years old, uninsured and, you know, just driving a car that had been would functionally be dead in months. and that's when i the phone call saying, hey, have you considered for office you'd be really good a day after i got an email, they didn't respond to saying the same thing. and when i ran for office in 2017. i was uninsured, driving at $324 a piece of -- as transgender metal head reporter do any step mom vegetarian, you know, central casting? and when i decide to run, i said, well, politics and elected government shouldn't just be the sole domain of the rich and powerful. it's for us, too. and it's our time to run it. and what we we do now, great, great. chin so you came you came to new york in 1994 and you were seven, right? and you're both your parents had been professors in china. so in his undocumented immigrants, their jobs were much different. others, and they worked to survive live. did they talk about how they felt about not being considered professionals here in any way and comparing their lives? or were they just have to said have a family and we have to do what we have to do. it was a little bit of both. i think my parents kind of try to keep out of some of the emotional and psychological hardship that they themselves dealt with. it's very different coming to a new as a child, you kind of the of childhood is that you kind of accept everything as it comes and you think it's just temporary and you don't think about long term what should be. and for my parents, it was a very different experience. my father was an english professor. my mother a math professor on the forefront of developing computer technology. my very first memories of her were were for sitting in front of a computer that was the size of this room in china typing in on a black screen and. when we got here, she worked at a sweatshop on division street in chinatown. she made $0.03 per article of clothing, attaching the label to the back of shirts and dresses. and i sat next to her and i snipped off the loose thread off every piece of clothing for $0.01. and she told me to pretend it was a game that i was playing hide and seek with the thread i was snipping off and the way described the sweatshop room in the book is very much through my childhood lines of i'm just is my task of finding every single thread and if there is no thread that i can find, i'm going to rip one loose and cut it off because that's my job. later on i would see my mother work much, much harder job. so even she would stand in ice water 14 hours at a time, processing sushi in a plant. she very rarely let slip what was going on deep down inside. but there were times when i would see her spit in the mug of a boss you had to bring tea to, and she would say things like, i was an academic. i was a professor, i was develop up in computer science and here i am fetching tea for someone who sees me as subhuman and thinks they can exploit me because by virtue of documents and that that that fate is still going on today, it's not you know, it was in the nineties, but to this day, there are people who come here ready to contribute to country, to contribute all of their talents, training and really stuck in places where they are being exploited and. we've about in the book about you said you didn't want send your kids to taft do you still feel that way and and if what have to change there and maybe it's not just taft but in prep schools in general diverse students. yeah i i was on the so i live los angeles now and i was just on the east coast two weeks ago doing a tour of various schools, basically like from massachusetts down to new york. and i would send it's twofold. it's like i would send my kid to an independent school actually live in l.a., like down the street from one but i often because my college hosts all their interview stuff there so i'm there a lot and i quite like it. i just very firmly believe that i to be within 50 to 20 minutes of my child's school so that i can be there, like should, should something go down the a lot of my pop culture references have not been flying with the children that i've been speaking to just because they're not getting them but the one that actually has really stuck with them was there's this the they did the reboot of the fresh prince of bel air on on peacock and. there is a scene in it that i watched. luckily after i had finished the book and because it would have just triggered me so badly otherwise it's a scene where a white kid puts drugs into will's backpack because he's trying get him expelled from bel air academy, which is his independent school that he goes and so well gets pulled into the head of school's office and there's like a whole like thing. and he's going to be expelled until like his aunt and uncle, uncle phil and aunt viv come down the mountain from their mansion and are like in the office, is immediately asking questions like making demands. they're like, we are paying tuition here? like you have to have some sort of interaction with us in terms when it comes to punishing the child who is in our who who is it's not his looking for who is in our care and the thing with boarding schools is that they use this phrase called in loco, which means in place, place of the parent and so you are basically saying when you send your kids to a boarding school, we trust, to make decisions as we the parents would. but i think when you are a black parent in america, there is a very specific way of like parenting and things that you have to deal that you that you can't necessarily trust a white person to be making the same decisions that you as a black parent would make or think of the same things or no like sort of how to deal with specific. and so for that's kind of why boarding school is just like not in the picture right now. it's also because specifically taft it's actually not just because of the experiences that i had there because in some ways i am very thankful for the education that i got there. it's also because, quite frankly at the schools founded in 1890, they're in a head of school search right now, 1890, it's 2022. there have only been five heads of school. since 1890. so there have been five white men who have run that school since 1890. and so they're all like have they're all educators. so they all have the best interests of the kids at heart. but when you saw the current head of school was my head of school and he graduated from in 1978, went to college and then immediately came back to taft and has been there ever since. so the only place that he has really interacted with people of color in his lifetime has been at taft. so when you think about that, it's like when that is the the administration in place and when that like the type of people they're it's really hard to then bring change into school because they have no other life experience. and so for taft specifically, that's kind of why that's that's where my thoughts immediately go. but school in general, i would certainly consider just because i also think that when you're the parent of any of any child of color in america or any child who is going to fit into a marginalized us space in america, you're kind of looking there's, there's public school obviously. and then there's independent school or private any of private school. and it's like with public school, it's like the devil, you know versus the devil you don't know either way, you're going to be facing as a parent color some sort of racism. it just kind of depends which races and you feel you want to deal with it. yeah, yeah. but danika, you read about book, you hired an opposition researcher to do look into dig up anything they might throw at you in your first two campaigns. right? both of them. yeah, both of them. and i just would like to read one line that was very funny from your book where you say, quote, there's nothing like watching a television ad portraying me as a conceited --. i knew i was an absolute lie. i am not conceited. i just thought of some of the humor in the book. but what what what kinds of i mean and then in your some of your chapter kind of beginnings, they also the actual up research that they found. and you said there was some that was accurate, some that was way off base. is that anything so? nothing surprised you, i guess so. if you listen to the audiobook, which i also narrated, you'll you'll get the right diction for how i, i said i am not conceited and smart. and another one of the headlines that i really like. they actually was there was the chapter where two weeks before my first election, 2017, there there is a washington post headline that says rome or it was it was marshall ad accuses rome of lewd behave here an old video of her bad and the then executive of the republican party of virginia john finley says that in this video is clearly implied direct performed group oral sex and i wrote well whoa whoa time out hold on implied. was that was pretty direct john sack in it was the equivalent of a spit take on snl or the daily show and quite frankly and this is really kind like one of the things i really wanted to get at with especially doing a lot of the opposition research and everything and including all that after 2016, where it was not unacceptable for a majority of voters, according to the electoral college, to vote for someone who bragged about sexually assaulting women openly about it as locker room, talk to, call whatever they wanted. i thought, what the hell in my background is anything even close to what this guy has done and he's gotten elected president united states for it. and then he put brett kavanaugh on the supreme court, by the way so is making someone laugh with a pg 13 joke in a comedy video from 2012 going to be my downfall? well, apparently not. so, you know, i looked at that. i the first part, you know, where they were you know hit me on tv ad for it and i think how well i wanted to do here they really get part in the book is i even thought about having a section my website called the dirt where i would just put my stuff out there and then i would compare all the other terrible things, you know, whether my now predecessor had and there's an actual headline you can find if you look it up that says that is the cbs news headline of where i was. marshall says that are marshall says that disabled children are god's punishment for abortion. that's who was up against. he was like the 13 times over 26 years since i was seven years old. he was the self-described chief homophobe of virginia who authored the state's constitutional amendment against marriage equality. offered, you know, bathroom bill and all the other sort of stuff. my gut, my current governor is now trying to do, by the way, it's not going to go over well for i'm going to sue all other things. i looked at that. i was like, well then, yeah, i don't come from central casting. yes, i have lived very funny life in some regards where you front metal bands for 12 years and we were a drinking band our big song for drunk on arrival there's stories behind that. i mean i had cops break up our one show two times. i was out in a farm in knoxville and at the second time where they cut, they told us to cut the power and everything. i then had the crowd do all sort clapping together like, and we did an a cappella version of drunk on arrival that was kind of fun, but i wanted to tell those stories to encourage people in the that the central premise of this book, the central, you know, like the thesis was own your narrative. i spent decades of my life allowing the fear of what other people thought about me, control the narrative i would put out there. but, you know, it's funny when you own your own narrative, when you actually start telling your own stories and you start living your own truth as we say in lgbtq world, you're authentic sense of self. you know what happens that point suddenly. not only are you not afraid of all the other sort of things, whatever, but the opposition research that's out there, what are they going? do you want something you've already talked about? hits. you want something you've already put out there? you know, for the republican redskins against me next year, here's 320 pages of opposition research. have fun. but like what are going to hit me when i've already said? yeah. here are all my foibles. my warts, flaws, everything else. and i'm still standing. i've been elected over life of earned election three times. now we've passed 32 of my bills into law, including ten to feed hungry kids. and the reason that i keep coming back and you know, i keep earning election is because my constituents, like the job that i'm doing, i show up in front of them authentically myself, i speak to them authentic actually myself. a funny thing is in northern virginia, you got a lot of new york transplants. and so soon as i go in front of like a town hall and heritage home, which is like a 55, an older community and i know like have to cross from new york. i just let my mother's voice over and i start really condescending really quickly toward common enemy. so it's like, can you believe mail in driver's, you know, just like this sort of thing. but what i also find is that you can be radically different from people around and still find common ground is when you're yourself because you know my voters will tell you very often the anchor i have no idea what it's like being trans, nor do i even probably care. the metal thing that's just weird. i don't get it, but i do get that. you get stuck in your commute too. i do get that. you're the only person in town who actually has a plan to fix my -- commute. go do something. it will you. and the way part that's under construction now. so long and short of it. you know what? i'm really trying to stress and burn the page. is that real importance of unabashedly being yourself? no matter who you're up against? because what are you going to? what's what is in your story that's worse than the now former president united states, who is now a viable contender again for a nomination for a third election cycle in a row? what is worse? well, then go be yourself. if running for office is your plan, go it. but otherwise, if it's just getting around, being employed, having you family or just being yourself in day to day, well, go do it because this is your to. chin you would said and this is it probably will be somewhat but mirrors may be or maybe not but kendra was talking about you said that you could not have felt more out of place at yale law. what what were those some of the experiences that made you feel that way? you know, the end to the american dream is so often you come here, poor immigrant and you make it to the ivy league. that's the happy ending. and the truth is, my years that swarthmore and you were absolutely the most miserable of my life. i would have happily traded those days for going back to the sweatshop with my mother. i felt so out of place, so ostracized, so incredibly ashamed of my background. my first day at swarthmore, i came upon a few white girls just hanging out in the cafeteria and they were talking and i wanted to fit in. they were talking about writing. so i sat down and i was like, huh? i never learned to ride a bike. and they were like, we're talking about horses. and i was like, oh, think about riding horses and think people did that. and i'm like, oh, that's funny. i don't know how to ride those either. and they just stare at me and then i start listing things. i didn't know how to do because i wanted to. i thought, like, vulnerability, you know being me would pull in. so i was like, i don't know how to swim, you know, i still know how to drive. and they just look at me, they're like, do you not have a childhood or something? like what? this look of disgust. and they just walked. and from day on i knew there was something wrong with me that did not in, in this world and i had always loved to read and write my father was an english lit professor. he grew up in a dissident and his most cherished memories were pulling out. his eldest brother's band books from america and from england, from the floorboards his eldest brother had been persecuted and thrown in prison and when he missed his brother most, he would pull those out and read them by candlelight. dickens. twain. if scott fitzgerald and he would dream of this place where there was equality and justice and you couldn't make your own way. and that was the story of america that he had told me. and so i thought if i spoke english perfectly, not to give suspicions of the fact that i might be undocumented, not, you know, fall into the stereotype. asians can't speak english. if i could just speak english perfectly. if i could write perfectly, then i would be accepted and first time this happened was in the fifth grade, i worked my -- off on a on an essay and i was like, i finally made it been in america for three years. i can write as good as a white person. hopefully better and it was the first white male teacher i had. he called me up to the front of the classroom and he says, i don't think you wrote this. and i'm like, who could write it? my parents are working all the time. there is no one else i know who speaks english could possibly have written this. and he was, like this, is not the kind of writing we see in those chinatown school. and i would love say that that stopped. i would love to say that but it happened over and over and over again and through my schooling, i just learned that was something inside me that did not match the outside of me. so every time before i handed in something, i would go in and just put in misspellings. i would just change the grammar so it was wrong. and i thought once i got to swarthmore, once i got to yale, once i proved myself, that would be gone. well, six years after i graduated from yale law school, i'd been a lawyer for six years. i by then i became a citizen in 2016. unfortunate year. but i felt very grateful. 22 years after i first landed here. so by that time, i a citizen, i was a lawyer. i've been arguing court for for years. my supervisor calls me and who's this office and this was a supervisor that had seen me stand up in court, had seen me counsel clients, had seen me develop case strategy from the ground up. he calls me into his office. and the minute i look at him, i know coming because i've seen it a million times before. and he says this brief is remarkably well written. who did you copy from? and i had some very, very choice words for him that i will not repeat. i quit that job a few months later and that was when i had it. i have played your game for far too long. i'm going to be me. i'm not to make myself smaller because it fits in your vision of me. i'm not going to make myself smaller to fit in that box that i was trapped in before i could understand what was happening. and that is the reality of what so many children grow up with here of unfortunate you don't fit in to whatever you think the mainstream might be that they learn to shrink and they stay shrunken because they think there's something wrong them when the only thing wrong with them is their excellence. and so if i was going to go out there and tell my to tell their truth and share their story with the court, i had to do that myself. and that was first day of the rest of my life. and then. i okay, i've i've got to sort of come back to sort the since you're all memoirists and how you you can just go kind of down the line here when you when you were writing were there things that you were surprised you remembered too you had more detail. you wanted be there were things that you wished knew and you had to be. you called on a or family member name to sort of fill the blanks. that because i just want a little bit about since this is a book festival your process. yeah i'll go really quickly i was i was very lucky actually because i was an obsessive compulsive child and i saved literally. so i when i sat down to write this, i had a wealth of information. not only did i have a livejournal that like i would sometimes i sometimes updated my livejournal like five times a day, like between classes documenting, things that were like happening in classes with my friends. i also before i could find a program, i coded a program myself, automatically saved all of my messages. so i have every message i ever had from high school. so when it came to like recreating the voices of my friends or things that happened in the classroom i just had everything i, my, my mom just sold her house, actually, and she gave me a folder of like all of this other stuff from high school, some of which i had. like it had my first college list ever, that physical piece of paper that my college counselor printed it and handed it to me, i had another copy back in california, but then it had all these like sort of teacher reports as well, and some of that. stuff i actually wish i had had while i was writing the book because it really illuminated for me another of the way that a lot of, again, the white teachers saw my relationships, my other with my black friends and with other students of color on campus there was a lot of complaint. i hung out too much with younger kids and what that said to me was that they were not asking the sort of lack of choice that had, but also the very important, i think, role of when you are an older student of color on campuses hanging out with the freshmen, hanging out with the sophomores to make sure that they feel comfortable and that they feel welcome. there was also a lot of complaints that, like i said, too much time on the internet or like that i wasn't enough with the other kids in my dorm. and a lot of that too was my mom had actually called the school after sophomore year and made so that me and my best friend also could never live together and so we like i was living alone in these dorms with just like a lot of other white kids. and so, no, i wasn't socializing with them. i was socializing with my friends on livejournal and like online stuff. and then also with like the black kids on campus. so that's like one thing that i wish i had had. so i think it would have added definitely another interesting part to the book. so i was blacked out at the first consulate in 2012 after drinking das boot in another liter beer right before my band's uk started and i to fill in some of those blanks because. yeah, they were definitely still gone. and so i called my drummer who was 19 at the time. so he had to be the server one and he told me exactly what happened on the new york city subway when i took him to the wrong airport. and apparently i was high fiving everyone and i was like, oh my god, we're to uk. and this one guy goes, and this the this is months before i started my transition. so i was still presenting as male and the guy, this one guy goes to my drummer, you need to get a hold of your friend and he goes, don't own. and i said in the book i would have thrown me under a bus to misgendering, notwithstanding. but one of the other things i did was i called some of my campaign folks from a 2017 and some of the other folks and i asked for their stories in the trail and really help fill in some of those chapters to. and i would talk to my mom and here's one of the together in a real process. i was falling behind on my deadlines like, you know, like, like bless emily wunderlich and everyone over at viking. they had so much patience with me because once covid happens, my office, we were swamped. we constituent service work that was taking 12, 14 hours a day and then do it again the next day and again next day. you know, it was just i wasn't making the time, right. so i finally had deadline. and once once bah bah, she saved the day and she would call me and basically interview me for like 2 hours at a time. sometimes and because i'm you asked me a question, i'm national storyteller with just like this she would type it like basically everything is tell her send it to me and then i could put that in narrative form on certain things when i would fall behind. on most other occasions, i would get up at 3:00, 4:00 in the morning. he gives her earl gray tea, because that's the thing and that's my drink of choice. i don't do coffee and. i would just type it until i couldn't type anymore. and then i had start my day or something like that and what works for me is not necessarily what's going to work for everyone else here, but i absolutely do recommend to any of you who are who are writing, even if you have everything cataloged in your life and it's amazing. oh, my god. or you don't. despite being a reporter for most of my life, what i would very, very suggest to you is talk to other people you've interact with because they might remember something a little different than you and just start telling to each other. if you get someone really going in the storytelling, you're going to find some really good pieces that just might make your cut. so i focus my book on, ages seven, to 12. those particularly momentous years, my life, but the focus on those years was really because of my chief belief that all of the truth of who we are, all of our strength and wisdom, are locked up in those years. and if we encountered a time when learn to be less ourselves, to hide ourselves from the world, it likely goes back to those years before we were teenagers. before we were adults, we were just bumping the worlds, trying to understand what was happening with our full hearts out for for consumption. and i think that the best thing an adult can do was to go back to that time and reclaim some of that openness and vulnerability. so the problem with focusing on those years, of course, it was a long time ago, but thankfully revered harriet the spy. yeah, i wanted be her. i wrote down everything around me to try to solve the mystery in new york. unfortunately it's boring no mysteries but i knew what i ate in second grade for lunch, you know, and i wanted my book to be an experience where people opened beautiful country and they felt like they were stepping into my body and seeing everything as i saw it. and then that way they could reawaken that childhood part of them, their cells and that childhood heart is still inside that maybe has been silenced for a little bit longer. so i would read the diary trying to understand and this child's there would be like five pages at a time where i would fixate on my classmate and how she ate strawberry shortcake popsicle every day and how that strawberry shortcake popsicle was so annoying because it had perfect pink and red and white dots all over it. and it had 50, probably 50 dots on one side. and i would think, what is this child rambling on about? why is she fixated with the dots? and then i realize, oh, she was hungry, she wanted to know what it taste didn't like and not what it looked like, but what it looked like was the only thing she had access to and so in that experience i was really able to get into this child's mind. but of course i had not been able to revisit these really troubling memories for a long time. so the longer i did that, the more damaged i felt and i went into therapy for her beauty years before i could start to write my book, i needed to understand the depths of the love and longing and fear that she struggles with and buried for so long. and when i really had trouble accessing that voice for years, i did what i found helped me. it was completely by accident. i was really short on time. i was making partner. i was hundred hours a week. my only free time from client calls and emails was the subway. i had very limited reception and one day i looked down on my phone and i'm like, i have so many emails to do. i have this book to write and i can't it i'm just stuck on this

Transcripts For CSPAN3 Author Discussion On Race Identity In America 20221105

thank and that concludes our panel for please join me in thanking wilfred william and chris. let's introduce the panel. kendra james is an executive producer at crooked media and was a founding editor at shonda lancome, where she wrote and edited work for two years, she has been heard and seen on npr and podcast including -- sesh love. it or leave it. yo, is this racist? this is love. star trek the pod directive and more. and her writing has been published in elle marie claire town and country women's health and others and her book admissions is out now. danica roem is part of the historic group of elected officials flipped republican seats in the 2017 election. she's the first out and seeded transgender state legislator in american history. prior to her political prior to her political career, she was a journalist and now serves as a frequent guest on national media. she and her work have been featured in the usa today people. gq, the new york times, elle and others, and she was the subject of the glad award winning documentary, this is how we win. her book, burn the page is out now. so i thought we would just start like as most many stories do from the beginning in your lives and maybe in each of you can talk about your kind of early childhood and what were your most indelible memories and maybe what how you tapped into some of that for in writing the book. kendra, you want to start? oh, boy. sure. early childhood. so i grew up in maplewood, new jersey, which if you're from brooklyn, you might know it as the place that your friends are escaping to. it's a small town, kind of like 30 minutes outside of the city. i grew up in a single income home. my my mom was a very traditional stay at home mom. she did not have a job until i was, like 25, 26. and that was when my parents got divorced and my dad was a wall street banker. and so basically, i my book admissions is about the three years that i spent at the task school, which is a boarding school in connecticut. and i was raised essentially knowing that i was going to go there because my dad had graduated from the school in 1974. and it was basically i had been going up to the campus since i was two because he was really involved in alumni affairs and he was on the school board for a while. and he had a really positive relationship with it. so i have a lot of memories of just like spending time on this, this campus that was essentially a i usually refer to it as a club for teenagers. it's several many hundreds of acres rolling green hills, two ice rinks, just like a really kind of like luxurious place to be educated and to and to spend time in. or that is how it appears on the outside. so i really grew up like knowing that i was going to go there but was not like fully prepared because of the way i had grown up in this like very upper middle class town. and with parents who themselves were pretty privileged, i was not really prepared for kind of the the stark contrasts in terms of like socioeconomic stuff and also the way race would play out on that campus because i grew up pretty sheltered. i grew up with sort of a lot of respectability politics, like ingrained me by both of my parents. and so, yeah, i just i wasn't per prepared for it. so that's kind of a quick background on, on my childhood. all right. so my name is danica roem. i am grateful. representative for the city of manassas park in the western pennsylvania county, portions of haymarket. gainesville in my lifelong home, manassas, in the 13th district of virginia, house delegates elected 2017 reelected, 2019 2021, running for state senate next year. and i, like i said, because it's lifelong manassas i'm born and raised prince william hospital, september 30th, 1984. cheryl sadly wrote and long story short with it, is my childhood is a series of overcoming a lot of traumatic events and other things and at the same time having, you know, the best italian food on sunday nights of my mom's cooking. and if you know anything about italian family argument is communication and i like to make that point pretty clear in my book as well and. you know, the thing is, in my case, my upbringing in any way, even though the way that you would stand is like, hey, look, you live out in the woods and in the burbs, right? you know, like this, you know, this, you know, in a white middle class family. but you know what's going to stand out so much? it's like, well, you know, my dad killed himself when i was three years old. so in my earliest childhood memories is running next door after you got himself on fire. then i. my grandmother died by the time i was seven over and she had parkinson's and we had lived with her right after he had died. so to immediate family. so i lived with you die by the time i was in second grade and know so the the core nexus is my family, my mother, my sister and me for y'all from here, my mother's the bronx specifically from morris park and again, italian catholic woman who was born with a chip on his shoulder. so that definitely ingrained in the funny thing is like so i'm virginia to my core. i mean, you know, my manassas battlefield fleece that i wear fleece better than my governor, by the way, just for the record. yeah, but, but one of my students, they go into the city, my mother's voice starts coming out so, so aggressively, like she that this otherwise just sort of completely boring mid-atlantic accent every other day second she's on the phone with some from new york. oh, my god, donna, how you doing? oh, my god. did she just hear enrico's close over in the bronx. can't even believe it. we're going to get a good pastry now, right? that. so that's part of my upbringing only in the south and i spent 13 years in catholic school. i spent four years public school over at loch lomond groceries, and then from fourth grade all the way until i graduated in parliamentary university in 2006 and college, those last four were by choice. those middle nine absolutely were not. and the thing about being a closet case in a catholic school is it's already pretty suffocating environment that just makes it worse. and i was looking for outlets and i was scared to death of anyone finding out who i was and at the same time, when you will have that fear, you want, be associated with other things, and so you start overcompensating in some ways, right? and at the same time wanted people to think i was the middle person i was, you know, whatever other identity i was the funny person. i never wanted to be perceived as the gay guy, which is how i was basically referred to for most of my childhood with a series slurs. that's for the perception of being gay, let alone the actual reality of being trans. and as i would find out in my upbringing, when i was just basically trying to figure out how to talk to the world at large, i would use sexuality as a stepping stone to get to a gender identity, which i wrote about a lot in from the page about how i would come out as bi first. i'm so sorry to everybody person, by the way, because they always are like, are you actually or not? it's used by two gay to two trans and you know keeping my social rotation. gender identity are different things, but it was just an easier way for me to start like tiptoeing, just talking to people. for the first time. i told anyone i was 17 years old and once it got into college and i was 343 miles away from home, that's when i first start telling the women in my life. and really, because wanted them to feel safe around me, i want them to know it was going to be okay to talk to me just like they would do any of the other girlfriends and then, you know, like we would get dressed up and go club and go dancing or go into like, you know, gothic shows and stuff like a band called jen tortures. i'll see you after the show. and you go to these shows where it's just like, it doesn't matter your gender, they are everyone's wearing makeup anyway and all black. so hey you know fit in and that was kind of my tiptoeing out. i had some pretty bad events that happened in between that i wrote about in the book, but eventually i always described general for is kind of like having a hand. it closes around your throat slowly over time, to the point where you can't breathe anymore and you got to do something about it. that moment happened for me when i was eight. i knew, right, tom? i was ten years old, that i was trans, but i never even thought it. so at 28, i finally started seeing a psychologist. i came out to my mom, my sister, my 30th birthday, and just to put a wrap around this one, mama said that night, well, i'm just concerned. how are you going to actually find someone? and i said, well, i got a date next week actually at this with a temptation concert in baltimore with this trans guy who's from finland, originally lives in maryland now. and so that was october 7th, 2014, when we had our first date. and then september 9th, 2022, we went back to baltimore to go see apocalyptic art because finished tell metal girls and of that person who my mom was concerned about, whether i would ever find out just proposed to me so yeah hey. we have breaking news on the panel to that. that's very good. excellent. so chen, julie wong has now has joined us and i want to we just opened up. i just asked i introduced everybody bio and then just wanted a little bit more kind of talk about their earliest childhood memories. i know you have many, many, many of them in your book, but in sort of what were the most some of the indelible ones and that you wanted to sort of just, you know, clue people into is where you came from literally and figuratively. absolutely. i apologize for being late. i used to live five minute walk from here, but today i had the fortune of commuting from new jersey. so, yeah, i mean, my my story when you said, danika, the fear of being found out, being terrified of that that although we have very different experience is i relate to that so deeply that hits at the very core of me so i went from being a pretty privileged, spoiled kid, north china, to getting on a plane, getting off that plane at jfk airport and realizing that i was half a world away from everybody i ever knew. it was just me and my two parents and we were what was called undocumented. and i never been aware of documents before. i never knew that that was an issue anywhere in the world. and all of a sudden because of that change we did not have enough money for food. we shared a home with six, seven other immigrant families. every time i saw a cop, a firefighter, a sanitation worker, anybody in uniform, i would turn and run the other way. and so this this fear of being found out became the defining sense of me. and with secrets come this implicit shame of you should hide who you are. there's something inherently wrong with you. and like danica, i chose to overcompensate by achieving. i thought that i could weave an american dream where i would earn my worth in america and prove that i was thoroughly american, that i was i belonged here and i deserved all the documents that i had so longed for. and was not. until you achieve your your dreams that you realize that there were some fallacies in there. i'm sure we'll talk about that a little. can joe just want to ask you so you mentioned to the first black legacy student at taft school, and you start there in three. is that so? did you feel a responsibility to your family and or other students of color to excel not in terms of like that like being the first because i when i got there like being the first so i was the first black american legacy, i should say. there was another person the school started accepting black students in like 1953, and the first black student who attended was actually from bermuda. and so then he sent his granddaughter there in the eighties. so she was actually the first black legacy to graduate. and then i was the first black american one. and i make that distinction because taft was actually the first place where i really learned that there was sort of that distinction within the diaspora of black american versus like black from anywhere else, like literally anywhere in the world. i remember i had a friend who was on haitian or haitian-american, and someone referred her her as african-american. at one point she was like, i am absolutely not. which comes like with that statement also like comes some things that you have to unpack, but it is an important distinction to make because the experiences are really different. but in terms of pressure to excel, i didn't really know that i was the first black american legacy to who had the potential to graduate until it was announced during an all school like an all school assembly. um, about black history at taft. and that was like kind of when i realized like, oh, okay, this like a thing. and there were also a bunch of other kids there who were freshmen when i was a senior who were also legacy students at the time. and we were all friends just because all the black kids at the school friends. so in terms of excelling like i did feel pressured to do well outside of that that fact just because like i knew that i was there i was at the school. a lot of my friends from maplewood where i had gone to public school through the ninth grade, i had a lot of friends who would leave between like eighth and ninth grade and they would go to other schools like they would go to my care. montclair kimberly or like kent place, other schools in new jersey. and the idea of having to then like go away to that privileged school and then come back like that was sort of like an embarrassing thing that might happen. so like that where a lot of the pressure came from, it was like, you don't want to you don't want to come back. you don't want to have that associated with you. and it again came up for me when i was applying for college as well. it was of the main reasons i did not want to to rutgers. rutgers grad school. it one of my favorite actors, avery brooks, is on faculty there. it's a great place, but i like was really like conscious of the fact that i did not like to go to college with the people that i had like quote unquote, escape kept going to public school because a lot of my friends from columbia, my public school winter records because it was cheap and it was a good school and. so yeah there was that pressure of like wanting to do better than what you had left behind and and one of the jean of the story tell, a story about a roommate that you had there who who made racist comment to you. but basically, he she said that she didn't like that you had to get up early to your hair and complained about the, quote. gross, unquote, smell in the room from your hair products. and then you sort of devised was sort of a prank that meant to be not vengeful. but in and where you were going to put a hex on her and set up the witchcraft symbols in the room. yes, i was very revenge motivated and how did that experience affect how you would see your other white classmates after that? was it did it change that in many ways, yeah. there was like so like i said, the this maybe i didn't take it, but the school was it was very segregated socially white students pretty much like you only hung out with white students. black students hung out with black latin students. and then everyone just kind of assumed like we had a black table in the in the dining hall. but then there was also like an asian table and by asian table, like it was just assumed that everyone was chinese essentially when in reality was like there were kids from hong kong, there were kids from china, japan, korea. i had a lot of very good korean friends. like it was just like it was a whole mixture, but the school was just so segregated. and when i got there i was not i wasn't aware of that. and back in maplewood, like one of the big things that's always touted by the realtor is it's like it's so diverse. you, like everyone is friends with everyone. and for me that was really true. my group was very, very diverse. and so i got attached and i really thought i was going to do the same thing and that was not the case for me. and so, yeah, it was my, my friends, two of my black friends were the ones who told me when my roommate said that me they were the ones who said like, that's racism. because for me, racism was very much like a water hose. it's a slur it's like a very big event incident that happens because we didn't have language like microaggression back then to describe those sort of smaller incidents are so yeah it really after that it really did change sort of my perception of like who i am going to be friends with in this environment. and i really did start like that was the moment i stopped really trying to be friends, the white kids at that point. and there were a few who would like come into the group because we were very we would take in misfits like that because we were at the school essentially misfits. but it was it was very much it was not an effort that i was making on my part on outreach, because it very much felt like it wasn't possible. no. danica, i wanted to ask you so you mentioned that you don't know that danica was in a you call it thrash metal or we just call a heavy metal, what we call oppression, melodic death metal. okay. okay, good some people in the room respect the differences. so, you know the big question is, do you go from being as you write about you're a thrash metal boat vocalist working also as a food delivery driver. at one point, right to. a legislator who beat a 13 term incumbent. i think it's really funny that of the parts of my like career biography, we went over it, we just talked about metal band for 12 years. we talked about food delivery driver and my 92 dodge and. we completely missed the ten years i was a newspaper reporter. well, no, we'll get that. but the reason i beat that, though, is that was my chief qualification for office. the 2500 news stories i heard about covering western prince william county, my home area, and i was working for for a two full time jobs for four or five years. at one point where i was working for the hotline in dc covering campaigns at six something in the morning until mid afternoon, and then i would hightail it out to haymarket and go cover, you know, maybe a battlefield girls volleyball game or maybe i would go all the way down to gerry, virginia, to go cover an electric chair execution in person. there's a fun little way to spend your evening. i saw that. and you know, for all of the things that i you know, that i did, all the different identities that i acquired kind of along the way, it's kind of in the personal loyalty type where you see it's like it's not that you can't focus on. one thing is that there's a lot really cool things you want to do and you kind of want to try a whole lot of different stuff, which also means you have the in ability to be really good at particular one of those, but maybe you could be like, you know, above average. and that's kind of where i was shooting for in a lot of ways. but the way the reason i, you know, went from all of that was when i came out, when i turned 30 and i and then we changed my byline in the paper. the next year i stopped being afraid. what other people were going to think of me. i stopped being afraid and stopped giving a -- what other people were going to do to judge me. i stopped caring about my god. what if they find out and trans yeah i am? and then it was just like and now what? and when you just start confronting people with it, then suddenly all the things in life that you thought were impossible don't to be. i always thought it was from the first day i went into therapy. november 21st, 2012, i thought that my worlds were going to have to exist and two different things. they were not going to be able to link like this. i was not going to have a bean diary. i was just going be like this where i could do metal things here and journalism here. because if you come here, this is going give you a negative reaction here. you're not going to get hired here. and by the way, the not getting hired part completely true. coming out as trans is, probably one of the top ways to kill your career prospects in a lot of ways until you get elected. then you have a lot of people who are very interested in you. suddenly, a side note, you shouldn't have to get elected, to have health care. and it's like me too. and i was unemployed for two and a half years before i liked it. that's a different that's a different story where i was kind of tied in together, though, is that i had used metal really not just as a, you know, escape or whatever, but was also an audio rebellion for me. there was a way to kind of, you know, really also see the world in a bit. my band would go to you know, northern ireland. we would go to glasgow, edinburgh and aberdeen over in scotland. i loved traveling. we go, you know, just all over and even on when you're dylan broke doing it, i always thought, you know, you don't get to take to the grave with you guys take experiences so you know might as well go you know them up but at the same time i started getting really bad in that i mean 25, $30,000 credit card debt and i started working two full time jobs again or two part time jobs again. this time after i came out for one job, 30 hours a week for $15 an hours in newspaper editor, side job, $5 an hour plus tip as a weekend asking bob house delivery driver which i wrote about you know actually very very early in my book and burn the page and i lost money at that job because of car repairs. and i was 32 years old, uninsured and, you know, just driving a car that had been would functionally be dead in months. and that's when i the phone call saying, hey, have you considered for office you'd be really good a day after i got an email, they didn't respond to saying the same thing. and when i ran for office in 2017. i was uninsured, driving at $324 a piece of -- as transgender metal head reporter do any step mom vegetarian, you know, central casting? and when i decide to run, i said, well, politics and elected government shouldn't just be the sole domain of the rich and powerful. it's for us, too. and it's our time to run it. and what we we do now, great, great. chin so you came you came to new york in 1994 and you were seven, right? and you're both your parents had been professors in china. so in his undocumented immigrants, their jobs were much different. others, and they worked to survive live. did they talk about how they felt about not being considered professionals here in any way and comparing their lives? or were they just have to said have a family and we have to do what we have to do. it was a little bit of both. i think my parents kind of try to keep out of some of the emotional and psychological hardship that they themselves dealt with. it's very different coming to a new as a child, you kind of the of childhood is that you kind of accept everything as it comes and you think it's just temporary and you don't think about long term what should be. and for my parents, it was a very different experience. my father was an english professor. my mother a math professor on the forefront of developing computer technology. my very first memories of her were were for sitting in front of a computer that was the size of this room in china typing in on a black screen and. when we got here, she worked at a sweatshop on division street in chinatown. she made $0.03 per article of clothing, attaching the label to the back of shirts and dresses. and i sat next to her and i snipped off the loose thread off every piece of clothing for $0.01. and she told me to pretend it was a game that i was playing hide and seek with the thread i was snipping off and the way described the sweatshop room in the book is very much through my childhood lines of i'm just is my task of finding every single thread and if there is no thread that i can find, i'm going to rip one loose and cut it off because that's my job. later on i would see my mother work much, much harder job. so even she would stand in ice water 14 hours at a time, processing sushi in a plant. she very rarely let slip what was going on deep down inside. but there were times when i would see her spit in the mug of a boss you had to bring tea to, and she would say things like, i was an academic. i was a professor, i was develop up in computer science and here i am fetching tea for someone who sees me as subhuman and thinks they can exploit me because by virtue of documents and that that that fate is still going on today, it's not you know, it was in the nineties, but to this day, there are people who come here ready to contribute to country, to contribute all of their talents, training and really stuck in places where they are being exploited and. we've about in the book about you said you didn't want send your kids to taft do you still feel that way and and if what have to change there and maybe it's not just taft but in prep schools in general diverse students. yeah i i was on the so i live los angeles now and i was just on the east coast two weeks ago doing a tour of various schools, basically like from massachusetts down to new york. and i would send it's twofold. it's like i would send my kid to an independent school actually live in l.a., like down the street from one but i often because my college hosts all their interview stuff there so i'm there a lot and i quite like it. i just very firmly believe that i to be within 50 to 20 minutes of my child's school so that i can be there, like should, should something go down the a lot of my pop culture references have not been flying with the children that i've been speaking to just because they're not getting them but the one that actually has really stuck with them was there's this the they did the reboot of the fresh prince of bel air on on peacock and. there is a scene in it that i watched. luckily after i had finished the book and because it would have just triggered me so badly otherwise it's a scene where a white kid puts drugs into will's backpack because he's trying get him expelled from bel air academy, which is his independent school that he goes and so well gets pulled into the head of school's office and there's like a whole like thing. and he's going to be expelled until like his aunt and uncle, uncle phil and aunt viv come down the mountain from their mansion and are like in the office, is immediately asking questions like making demands. they're like, we are paying tuition here? like you have to have some sort of interaction with us in terms when it comes to punishing the child who is in our who who is it's not his looking for who is in our care and the thing with boarding schools is that they use this phrase called in loco, which means in place, place of the parent and so you are basically saying when you send your kids to a boarding school, we trust, to make decisions as we the parents would. but i think when you are a black parent in america, there is a very specific way of like parenting and things that you have to deal that you that you can't necessarily trust a white person to be making the same decisions that you as a black parent would make or think of the same things or no like sort of how to deal with specific. and so for that's kind of why boarding school is just like not in the picture right now. it's also because specifically taft it's actually not just because of the experiences that i had there because in some ways i am very thankful for the education that i got there. it's also because, quite frankly at the schools founded in 1890, they're in a head of school search right now, 1890, it's 2022. there have only been five heads of school. since 1890. so there have been five white men who have run that school since 1890. and so they're all like have they're all educators. so they all have the best interests of the kids at heart. but when you saw the current head of school was my head of school and he graduated from in 1978, went to college and then immediately came back to taft and has been there ever since. so the only place that he has really interacted with people of color in his lifetime has been at taft. so when you think about that, it's like when that is the the administration in place and when that like the type of people they're it's really hard to then bring change into school because they have no other life experience. and so for taft specifically, that's kind of why that's that's where my thoughts immediately go. but school in general, i would certainly consider just because i also think that when you're the parent of any of any child of color in america or any child who is going to fit into a marginalized us space in america, you're kind of looking there's, there's public school obviously. and then there's independent school or private any of private school. and it's like with public school, it's like the devil, you know versus the devil you don't know either way, you're going to be facing as a parent color some sort of racism. it just kind of depends which races and you feel you want to deal with it. yeah, yeah. but danika, you read about book, you hired an opposition researcher to do look into dig up anything they might throw at you in your first two campaigns. right? both of them. yeah, both of them. and i just would like to read one line that was very funny from your book where you say, quote, there's nothing like watching a television ad portraying me as a conceited --. i knew i was an absolute lie. i am not conceited. i just thought of some of the humor in the book. but what what what kinds of i mean and then in your some of your chapter kind of beginnings, they also the actual up research that they found. and you said there was some that was accurate, some that was way off base. is that anything so? nothing surprised you, i guess so. if you listen to the audiobook, which i also narrated, you'll you'll get the right diction for how i, i said i am not conceited and smart. and another one of the headlines that i really like. they actually was there was the chapter where two weeks before my first election, 2017, there there is a washington post headline that says rome or it was it was marshall ad accuses rome of lewd behave here an old video of her bad and the then executive of the republican party of virginia john finley says that in this video is clearly implied direct performed group oral sex and i wrote well whoa whoa time out hold on implied. was that was pretty direct john sack in it was the equivalent of a spit take on snl or the daily show and quite frankly and this is really kind like one of the things i really wanted to get at with especially doing a lot of the opposition research and everything and including all that after 2016, where it was not unacceptable for a majority of voters, according to the electoral college, to vote for someone who bragged about sexually assaulting women openly about it as locker room, talk to, call whatever they wanted. i thought, what the hell in my background is anything even close to what this guy has done and he's gotten elected president united states for it. and then he put brett kavanaugh on the supreme court, by the way so is making someone laugh with a pg 13 joke in a comedy video from 2012 going to be my downfall? well, apparently not. so, you know, i looked at that. i the first part, you know, where they were you know hit me on tv ad for it and i think how well i wanted to do here they really get part in the book is i even thought about having a section my website called the dirt where i would just put my stuff out there and then i would compare all the other terrible things, you know, whether my now predecessor had and there's an actual headline you can find if you look it up that says that is the cbs news headline of where i was. marshall says that are marshall says that disabled children are god's punishment for abortion. that's who was up against. he was like the 13 times over 26 years since i was seven years old. he was the self-described chief homophobe of virginia who authored the state's constitutional amendment against marriage equality. offered, you know, bathroom bill and all the other sort of stuff. my gut, my current governor is now trying to do, by the way, it's not going to go over well for i'm going to sue all other things. i looked at that. i was like, well then, yeah, i don't come from central casting. yes, i have lived very funny life in some regards where you front metal bands for 12 years and we were a drinking band our big song for drunk on arrival there's stories behind that. i mean i had cops break up our one show two times. i was out in a farm in knoxville and at the second time where they cut, they told us to cut the power and everything. i then had the crowd do all sort clapping together like, and we did an a cappella version of drunk on arrival that was kind of fun, but i wanted to tell those stories to encourage people in the that the central premise of this book, the central, you know, like the thesis was own your narrative. i spent decades of my life allowing the fear of what other people thought about me, control the narrative i would put out there. but, you know, it's funny when you own your own narrative, when you actually start telling your own stories and you start living your own truth as we say in lgbtq world, you're authentic sense of self. you know what happens that point suddenly. not only are you not afraid of all the other sort of things, whatever, but the opposition research that's out there, what are they going? do you want something you've already talked about? hits. you want something you've already put out there? you know, for the republican redskins against me next year, here's 320 pages of opposition research. have fun. but like what are going to hit me when i've already said? yeah. here are all my foibles. my warts, flaws, everything else. and i'm still standing. i've been elected over life of earned election three times. now we've passed 32 of my bills into law, including ten to feed hungry kids. and the reason that i keep coming back and you know, i keep earning election is because my constituents, like the job that i'm doing, i show up in front of them authentically myself, i speak to them authentic actually myself. a funny thing is in northern virginia, you got a lot of new york transplants. and so soon as i go in front of like a town hall and heritage home, which is like a 55, an older community and i know like have to cross from new york. i just let my mother's voice over and i start really condescending really quickly toward common enemy. so it's like, can you believe mail in driver's, you know, just like this sort of thing. but what i also find is that you can be radically different from people around and still find common ground is when you're yourself because you know my voters will tell you very often the anchor i have no idea what it's like being trans, nor do i even probably care. the metal thing that's just weird. i don't get it, but i do get that. you get stuck in your commute too. i do get that. you're the only person in town who actually has a plan to fix my -- commute. go do something. it will you. and the way part that's under construction now. so long and short of it. you know what? i'm really trying to stress and burn the page. is that real importance of unabashedly being yourself? no matter who you're up against? because what are you going to? what's what is in your story that's worse than the now former president united states, who is now a viable contender again for a nomination for a third election cycle in a row? what is worse? well, then go be yourself. if running for office is your plan, go it. but otherwise, if it's just getting around, being employed, having you family or just being yourself in day to day, well, go do it because this is your to. chin you would said and this is it probably will be somewhat but mirrors may be or maybe not but kendra was talking about you said that you could not have felt more out of place at yale law. what what were those some of the experiences that made you feel that way? you know, the end to the american dream is so often you come here, poor immigrant and you make it to the ivy league. that's the happy ending. and the truth is, my years that swarthmore and you were absolutely the most miserable of my life. i would have happily traded those days for going back to the sweatshop with my mother. i felt so out of place, so ostracized, so incredibly ashamed of my background. my first day at swarthmore, i came upon a few white girls just hanging out in the cafeteria and they were talking and i wanted to fit in. they were talking about writing. so i sat down and i was like, huh? i never learned to ride a bike. and they were like, we're talking about horses. and i was like, oh, think about riding horses and think people did that. and i'm like, oh, that's funny. i don't know how to ride those either. and they just stare at me and then i start listing things. i didn't know how to do because i wanted to. i thought, like, vulnerability, you know being me would pull in. so i was like, i don't know how to swim, you know, i still know how to drive. and they just look at me, they're like, do you not have a childhood or something? like what? this look of disgust. and they just walked. and from day on i knew there was something wrong with me that did not in, in this world and i had always loved to read and write my father was an english lit professor. he grew up in a dissident and his most cherished memories were pulling out. his eldest brother's band books from america and from england, from the floorboards his eldest brother had been persecuted and thrown in prison and when he missed his brother most, he would pull those out and read them by candlelight. dickens. twain. if scott fitzgerald and he would dream of this place where there was equality and justice and you couldn't make your own way. and that was the story of america that he had told me. and so i thought if i spoke english perfectly, not to give suspicions of the fact that i might be undocumented, not, you know, fall into the stereotype. asians can't speak english. if i could just speak english perfectly. if i could write perfectly, then i would be accepted and first time this happened was in the fifth grade, i worked my -- off on a on an essay and i was like, i finally made it been in america for three years. i can write as good as a white person. hopefully better and it was the first white male teacher i had. he called me up to the front of the classroom and he says, i don't think you wrote this. and i'm like, who could write it? my parents are working all the time. there is no one else i know who speaks english could possibly have written this. and he was, like this, is not the kind of writing we see in those chinatown school. and i would love say that that stopped. i would love to say that but it happened over and over and over again and through my schooling, i just learned that was something inside me that did not match the outside of me. so every time before i handed in something, i would go in and just put in misspellings. i would just change the grammar so it was wrong. and i thought once i got to swarthmore, once i got to yale, once i proved myself, that would be gone. well, six years after i graduated from yale law school, i'd been a lawyer for six years. i by then i became a citizen in 2016. unfortunate year. but i felt very grateful. 22 years after i first landed here. so by that time, i a citizen, i was a lawyer. i've been arguing court for for years. my supervisor calls me and who's this office and this was a supervisor that had seen me stand up in court, had seen me counsel clients, had seen me develop case strategy from the ground up. he calls me into his office. and the minute i look at him, i know coming because i've seen it a million times before. and he says this brief is remarkably well written. who did you copy from? and i had some very, very choice words for him that i will not repeat. i quit that job a few months later and that was when i had it. i have played your game for far too long. i'm going to be me. i'm not to make myself smaller because it fits in your vision of me. i'm not going to make myself smaller to fit in that box that i was trapped in before i could understand what was happening. and that is the reality of what so many children grow up with here of unfortunate you don't fit in to whatever you think the mainstream might be that they learn to shrink and they stay shrunken because they think there's something wrong them when the only thing wrong with them is their excellence. and so if i was going to go out there and tell my to tell their truth and share their story with the court, i had to do that myself. and that was first day of the rest of my life. and then. i okay, i've i've got to sort of come back to sort the since you're all memoirists and how you you can just go kind of down the line here when you when you were writing were there things that you were surprised you remembered too you had more detail. you wanted be there were things that you wished knew and you had to be. you called on a or family member name to sort of fill the blanks. that because i just want a little bit about since this is a book festival your process. yeah i'll go really quickly i was i was very lucky actually because i was an obsessive compulsive child and i saved literally. so i when i sat down to write this, i had a wealth of information. not only did i have a livejournal that like i would sometimes i sometimes updated my livejournal like five times a day, like between classes documenting, things that were like happening in classes with my friends. i also before i could find a program, i coded a program myself, automatically saved all of my messages. so i have every message i ever had from high school. so when it came to like recreating the voices of my friends or things that happened in the classroom i just had everything i, my, my mom just sold her house, actually, and she gave me a folder of like all of this other stuff from high school, some of which i had. like it had my first college list ever, that physical piece of paper that my college counselor printed it and handed it to me, i had another copy back in california, but then it had all these like sort of teacher reports as well, and some of that. stuff i actually wish i had had while i was writing the book because it really illuminated for me another of the way that a lot of, again, the white teachers saw my relationships, my other with my black friends and with other students of color on campus there was a lot of complaint. i hung out too much with younger kids and what that said to me was that they were not asking the sort of lack of choice that had, but also the very important, i think, role of when you are an older student of color on campuses hanging out with the freshmen, hanging out with the sophomores to make sure that they feel comfortable and that they feel welcome. there was also a lot of complaints that, like i said, too much time on the internet or like that i wasn't enough with the other kids in my dorm. and a lot of that too was my mom had actually called the school after sophomore year and made so that me and my best friend also could never live together and so we like i was living alone in these dorms with just like a lot of other white kids. and so, no, i wasn't socializing with them. i was socializing with my friends on livejournal and like online stuff. and then also with like the black kids on campus. so that's like one thing that i wish i had had. so i think it would have added definitely another interesting part to the book. so i was blacked out at the first consulate in 2012 after drinking das boot in another liter beer right before my band's uk started and i to fill in some of those blanks because. yeah, they were definitely still gone. and so i called my drummer who was 19 at the time. so he had to be the server one and he told me exactly what happened on the new york city subway when i took him to the wrong airport. and apparently i was high fiving everyone and i was like, oh my god, we're to uk. and this one guy goes, and this the this is months before i started my transition. so i was still presenting as male and the guy, this one guy goes to my drummer, you need to get a hold of your friend and he goes, don't own. and i said in the book i would have thrown me under a bus to misgendering, notwithstanding. but one of the other things i did was i called some of my campaign folks from a 2017 and some of the other folks and i asked for their stories in the trail and really help fill in some of those chapters to. and i would talk to my mom and here's one of the together in a real process. i was falling behind on my deadlines like, you know, like, like bless emily wunderlich and everyone over at viking. they had so much patience with me because once covid happens, my office, we were swamped. we constituent service work that was taking 12, 14 hours a day and then do it again the next day and again next day. you know, it was just i wasn't making the time, right. so i finally had deadline. and once once bah bah, she saved the day and she would call me and basically interview me for like 2 hours at a time. sometimes and because i'm you asked me a question, i'm national storyteller with just like this she would type it like basically everything is tell her send it to me and then i could put that in narrative form on certain things when i would fall behind. on most other occasions, i would get up at 3:00, 4:00 in the morning. he gives her earl gray tea, because that's the thing and that's my drink of choice. i don't do coffee and. i would just type it until i couldn't type anymore. and then i had start my day or something like that and what works for me is not necessarily what's going to work for everyone else here, but i absolutely do recommend to any of you who are who are writing, even if you have everything cataloged in your life and it's amazing. oh, my god. or you don't. despite being a reporter for most of my life, what i would very, very suggest to you is talk to other people you've interact with because they might remember something a little different than you and just start telling to each other. if you get someone really going in the storytelling, you're going to find some really good pieces that just might make your cut. so i focus my book on, ages seven, to 12. those particularly momentous years, my life, but the focus on those years was really because of my chief belief that all of the truth of who we are, all of our strength and wisdom, are locked up in those years. and if we encountered a time when learn to be less ourselves, to hide ourselves from the world, it likely goes back to those years before we were teenagers. before we were adults, we were just bumping the worlds, trying to understand what was happening with our full hearts out for for consumption. and i think that the best thing an adult can do was to go back to that time and reclaim some of that openness and vulnerability. so the problem with focusing on those years, of course, it was a long time ago, but thankfully revered harriet the spy. yeah, i wanted be her. i wrote down everything around me to try to solve the mystery in new york. unfortunately it's boring no mysteries but i knew what i ate in second grade for lunch, you know, and i wanted my book to be an experience where people opened beautiful country and they felt like they were stepping into my body and seeing everything as i saw it. and then that way they could reawaken that childhood part of them, their cells and that childhood heart is still inside that maybe has been silenced for a little bit longer. so i would read the diary trying to understand and this child's there would be like five pages at a time where i would fixate on my classmate and how she ate strawberry shortcake popsicle every day and how that strawberry shortcake popsicle was so annoying because it had perfect pink and red and white dots all over it. and it had 50, probably 50 dots on one side. and i would think, what is this child rambling on about? why is she fixated with the dots? and then i realize, oh, she was hungry, she wanted to know what it taste didn't like and not what it looked like, but what it looked like was the only thing she had access to and so in that experience i was really able to get into this child's mind. but of course i had not been able to revisit these really troubling memories for a long time. so the longer i did that, the more damaged i felt and i went into therapy for her beauty years before i could start to write my book, i needed to understand the depths of the love and longing and fear that she struggles with and buried for so long. and when i really had trouble accessing that voice for years, i did what i found helped me. it was completely by accident. i was really short on time. i was making partner. i was hundred hours a week. my only free time from client calls and emails was the subway. i had very limited reception and one day i looked down on my phone and i'm like, i have so many emails to do. i have this book to write and i can't it i'm just stuck on this train. and then i saw the notes app, so i opened it up and i started writing and i used to commute to and from school every day. and i would read harriet the spy and babysitters club and it was there that i felt an immediate connection to that. i felt like she was sitting next to me kind of just telling me where to go. and from then on it, just the all of the memories poured out of me right, right. chloe cooper jones is a

Transcripts For CSPAN2 Author Discussion On Race Identity In America 20221031

happened over the last several decades to get to i think you know would, be in a, you know, the kind of place that in the criminal system, abolitionists aspired to to so. but but i but i wouldn't call it abolition. yeah. thank and that concludes our panel for please join me in thanking wilfred william and chris. let's introduce the panel. kendra james is an executive producer at crooked media and was a founding editor at shonda lancome, where she wrote and edited work for two years, she has been heard and seen on npr and podcast including -- sesh love. it or leave it. yo, is this racist? this is love. star trek the pod directive and more. and her writing has been published in elle marie claire town and country women's health and others and her book admissions is out now. danica roem is part of the historic group of elected officials flipped republican seats in the 2017 election. she's the first out and seeded transgender state legislator in american history. prior to her political prior to her political career, she was a journalist and now serves as a frequent guest on national media. she and her work have been featured in the usa today people. gq, the new york times, elle and others, and she was the subject of the glad award winning documentary, this is how we win. her book, burn the page is out now. so i thought we would just start like as most many stories do from the beginning in your lives and maybe in each of you can talk about your kind of early childhood and what were your most indelible memories and maybe what how you tapped into some of that for in writing the book. kendra, you want to start? oh, boy. sure. early childhood. so i grew up in maplewood, new jersey, which if you're from brooklyn, you might know it as the place that your friends are escaping to. it's a small town, kind of like 30 minutes outside of the city. i grew up in a single income home. my my mom was a very traditional stay at home mom. she did not have a job until i was, like 25, 26. and that was when my parents got divorced and my dad was a wall street banker. and so basically, i my book admissions is about the three years that i spent at the task school, which is a boarding school in connecticut. and i was raised essentially knowing that i was going to go there because my dad had graduated from the school in 1974. and it was basically i had been going up to the campus since i was two because he was really involved in alumni affairs and he was on the school board for a while. and he had a really positive relationship with it. so i have a lot of memories of just like spending time on this, this campus that was essentially a i usually refer to it as a club for teenagers. it's several many hundreds of acres rolling green hills, two ice rinks, just like a really kind of like luxurious place to be educated and to and to spend time in. or that is how it appears on the outside. so i really grew up like knowing that i was going to go there but was not like fully prepared because of the way i had grown up in this like very upper middle class town. and with parents who themselves were pretty privileged, i was not really prepared for kind of the the stark contrasts in terms of like socioeconomic stuff and also the way race would play out on that campus because i grew up pretty sheltered. i grew up with sort of a lot of respectability politics, like ingrained me by both of my parents. and so, yeah, i just i wasn't per prepared for it. so that's kind of a quick background on, on my childhood. all right. so my name is danica roem. i am grateful. representative for the city of manassas park in the western pennsylvania county, portions of haymarket. gainesville in my lifelong home, manassas, in the 13th district of virginia, house delegates elected 2017 reelected, 2019 2021, running for state senate next year. and i, like i said, because it's lifelong manassas i'm born and raised prince william hospital, september 30th, 1984. cheryl sadly wrote and long story short with it, is my childhood is a series of overcoming a lot of traumatic events and other things and at the same time having, you know, the best italian food on sunday nights of my mom's cooking. and if you know anything about italian family argument is communication and i like to make that point pretty clear in my book as well and. you know, the thing is, in my case, my upbringing in any way, even though the way that you would stand is like, hey, look, you live out in the woods and in the burbs, right? you know, like this, you know, this, you know, in a white middle class family. but you know what's going to stand out so much? it's like, well, you know, my dad killed himself when i was three years old. so in my earliest childhood memories is running next door after you got himself on fire. then i. my grandmother died by the time i was seven over and she had parkinson's and we had lived with her right after he had died. so to immediate family. so i lived with you die by the time i was in second grade and know so the the core nexus is my family, my mother, my sister and me for y'all from here, my mother's the bronx specifically from morris park and again, italian catholic woman who was born with a chip on his shoulder. so that definitely ingrained in the funny thing is like so i'm virginia to my core. i mean, you know, my manassas battlefield fleece that i wear fleece better than my governor, by the way, just for the record. yeah, but, but one of my students, they go into the city, my mother's voice starts coming out so, so aggressively, like she that this otherwise just sort of completely boring mid-atlantic accent every other day second she's on the phone with some from new york. oh, my god, donna, how you doing? oh, my god. did she just hear enrico's close over in the bronx. can't even believe it. we're going to get a good pastry now, right? that. so that's part of my upbringing only in the south and i spent 13 years in catholic school. i spent four years public school over at loch lomond groceries, and then from fourth grade all the way until i graduated in parliamentary university in 2006 and college, those last four were by choice. those middle nine absolutely were not. and the thing about being a closet case in a catholic school is it's already pretty suffocating environment that just makes it worse. and i was looking for outlets and i was scared to death of anyone finding out who i was and at the same time, when you will have that fear, you want, be associated with other things, and so you start overcompensating in some ways, right? and at the same time wanted people to think i was the middle person i was, you know, whatever other identity i was the funny person. i never wanted to be perceived as the gay guy, which is how i was basically referred to for most of my childhood with a series slurs. that's for the perception of being gay, let alone the actual reality of being trans. and as i would find out in my upbringing, when i was just basically trying to figure out how to talk to the world at large, i would use sexuality as a stepping stone to get to a gender identity, which i wrote about a lot in from the page about how i would come out as bi first. i'm so sorry to everybody person, by the way, because they always are like, are you actually or not? it's used by two gay to two trans and you know keeping my social rotation. gender identity are different things, but it was just an easier way for me to start like tiptoeing, just talking to people. for the first time. i told anyone i was 17 years old and once it got into college and i was 343 miles away from home, that's when i first start telling the women in my life. and really, because wanted them to feel safe around me, i want them to know it was going to be okay to talk to me just like they would do any of the other girlfriends and then, you know, like we would get dressed up and go club and go dancing or go into like, you know, gothic shows and stuff like a band called jen tortures. i'll see you after the show. and you go to these shows where it's just like, it doesn't matter your gender, they are everyone's wearing makeup anyway and all black. so hey you know fit in and that was kind of my tiptoeing out. i had some pretty bad events that happened in between that i wrote about in the book, but eventually i always described general for is kind of like having a hand. it closes around your throat slowly over time, to the point where you can't breathe anymore and you got to do something about it. that moment happened for me when i was eight. i knew, right, tom? i was ten years old, that i was trans, but i never even thought it. so at 28, i finally started seeing a psychologist. i came out to my mom, my sister, my 30th birthday, and just to put a wrap around this one, mama said that night, well, i'm just concerned. how are you going to actually find someone? and i said, well, i got a date next week actually at this with a temptation concert in baltimore with this trans guy who's from finland, originally lives in maryland now. and so that was october 7th, 2014, when we had our first date. and then september 9th, 2022, we went back to baltimore to go see apocalyptic art because finished tell metal girls and of that person who my mom was concerned about, whether i would ever find out just proposed to me so yeah hey. we have breaking news on the panel to that. that's very good. excellent. so chen, julie wong has now has joined us and i want to we just opened up. i just asked i introduced everybody bio and then just wanted a little bit more kind of talk about their earliest childhood memories. i know you have many, many, many of them in your book, but in sort of what were the most some of the indelible ones and that you wanted to sort of just, you know, clue people into is where you came from literally and figuratively. absolutely. i apologize for being late. i used to live five minute walk from here, but today i had the fortune of commuting from new jersey. so, yeah, i mean, my my story when you said, danika, the fear of being found out, being terrified of that that although we have very different experience is i relate to that so deeply that hits at the very core of me so i went from being a pretty privileged, spoiled kid, north china, to getting on a plane, getting off that plane at jfk airport and realizing that i was half a world away from everybody i ever knew. it was just me and my two parents and we were what was called undocumented. and i never been aware of documents before. i never knew that that was an issue anywhere in the world. and all of a sudden because of that change we did not have enough money for food. we shared a home with six, seven other immigrant families. every time i saw a cop, a firefighter, a sanitation worker, anybody in uniform, i would turn and run the other way. and so this this fear of being found out became the defining sense of me. and with secrets come this implicit shame of you should hide who you are. there's something inherently wrong with you. and like danica, i chose to overcompensate by achieving. i thought that i could weave an american dream where i would earn my worth in america and prove that i was thoroughly american, that i was i belonged here and i deserved all the documents that i had so longed for. and was not. until you achieve your your dreams that you realize that there were some fallacies in there. i'm sure we'll talk about that a little. can joe just want to ask you so you mentioned to the first black legacy student at taft school, and you start there in three. is that so? did you feel a responsibility to your family and or other students of color to excel not in terms of like that like being the first because i when i got there like being the first so i was the first black american legacy, i should say. there was another person the school started accepting black students in like 1953, and the first black student who attended was actually from bermuda. and so then he sent his granddaughter there in the eighties. so she was actually the first black legacy to graduate. and then i was the first black american one. and i make that distinction because taft was actually the first place where i really learned that there was sort of that distinction within the diaspora of black american versus like black from anywhere else, like literally anywhere in the world. i remember i had a friend who was on haitian or haitian-american, and someone referred her her as african-american. at one point she was like, i am absolutely not. which comes like with that statement also like comes some things that you have to unpack, but it is an important distinction to make because the experiences are really different. but in terms of pressure to excel, i didn't really know that i was the first black american legacy to who had the potential to graduate until it was announced during an all school like an all school assembly. um, about black history at taft. and that was like kind of when i realized like, oh, okay, this like a thing. and there were also a bunch of other kids there who were freshmen when i was a senior who were also legacy students at the time. and we were all friends just because all the black kids at the school friends. so in terms of excelling like i did feel pressured to do well outside of that that fact just because like i knew that i was there i was at the school. a lot of my friends from maplewood where i had gone to public school through the ninth grade, i had a lot of friends who would leave between like eighth and ninth grade and they would go to other schools like they would go to my care. montclair kimberly or like kent place, other schools in new jersey. and the idea of having to then like go away to that privileged school and then come back like that was sort of like an embarrassing thing that might happen. so like that where a lot of the pressure came from, it was like, you don't want to you don't want to come back. you don't want to have that associated with you. and it again came up for me when i was applying for college as well. it was of the main reasons i did not want to to rutgers. rutgers grad school. it one of my favorite actors, avery brooks, is on faculty there. it's a great place, but i like was really like conscious of the fact that i did not like to go to college with the people that i had like quote unquote, escape kept going to public school because a lot of my friends from columbia, my public school winter records because it was cheap and it was a good school and. so yeah there was that pressure of like wanting to do better than what you had left behind and and one of the jean of the story tell, a story about a roommate that you had there who who made racist comment to you. but basically, he she said that she didn't like that you had to get up early to your hair and complained about the, quote. gross, unquote, smell in the room from your hair products. and then you sort of devised was sort of a prank that meant to be not vengeful. but in and where you were going to put a hex on her and set up the witchcraft symbols in the room. yes, i was very revenge motivated and how did that experience affect how you would see your other white classmates after that? was it did it change that in many ways, yeah. there was like so like i said, the this maybe i didn't take it, but the school was it was very segregated socially white students pretty much like you only hung out with white students. black students hung out with black latin students. and then everyone just kind of assumed like we had a black table in the in the dining hall. but then there was also like an asian table and by asian table, like it was just assumed that everyone was chinese essentially when in reality was like there were kids from hong kong, there were kids from china, japan, korea. i had a lot of very good korean friends. like it was just like it was a whole mixture, but the school was just so segregated. and when i got there i was not i wasn't aware of that. and back in maplewood, like one of the big things that's always touted by the realtor is it's like it's so diverse. you, like everyone is friends with everyone. and for me that was really true. my group was very, very diverse. and so i got attached and i really thought i was going to do the same thing and that was not the case for me. and so, yeah, it was my, my friends, two of my black friends were the ones who told me when my roommate said that me they were the ones who said like, that's racism. because for me, racism was very much like a water hose. it's a slur it's like a very big event incident that happens because we didn't have language like microaggression back then to describe those sort of smaller incidents are so yeah it really after that it really did change sort of my perception of like who i am going to be friends with in this environment. and i really did start like that was the moment i stopped really trying to be friends, the white kids at that point. and there were a few who would like come into the group because we were very we would take in misfits like that because we were at the school essentially misfits. but it was it was very much it was not an effort that i was making on my part on outreach, because it very much felt like it wasn't possible. no. danica, i wanted to ask you so you mentioned that you don't know that danica was in a you call it thrash metal or we just call a heavy metal, what we call oppression, melodic death metal. okay. okay, good some people in the room respect the differences. so, you know the big question is, do you go from being as you write about you're a thrash metal boat vocalist working also as a food delivery driver. at one point, right to. a legislator who beat a 13 term incumbent. i think it's really funny that of the parts of my like career biography, we went over it, we just talked about metal band for 12 years. we talked about food delivery driver and my 92 dodge and. we completely missed the ten years i was a newspaper reporter. well, no, we'll get that. but the reason i beat that, though, is that was my chief qualification for office. the 2500 news stories i heard about covering western prince william county, my home area, and i was working for for a two full time jobs for four or five years. at one point where i was working for the hotline in dc covering campaigns at six something in the morning until mid afternoon, and then i would hightail it out to haymarket and go cover, you know, maybe a battlefield girls volleyball game or maybe i would go all the way down to gerry, virginia, to go cover an electric chair execution in person. there's a fun little way to spend your evening. i saw that. and you know, for all of the things that i you know, that i did, all the different identities that i acquired kind of along the way, it's kind of in the personal loyalty type where you see it's like it's not that you can't focus on. one thing is that there's a lot really cool things you want to do and you kind of want to try a whole lot of different stuff, which also means you have the in ability to be really good at particular one of those, but maybe you could be like, you know, above average. and that's kind of where i was shooting for in a lot of ways. but the way the reason i, you know, went from all of that was when i came out, when i turned 30 and i and then we changed my byline in the paper. the next year i stopped being afraid. what other people were going to think of me. i stopped being afraid and stopped giving a -- what other people were going to do to judge me. i stopped caring about my god. what if they find out and trans yeah i am? and then it was just like and now what? and when you just start confronting people with it, then suddenly all the things in life that you thought were impossible don't to be. i always thought it was from the first day i went into therapy. november 21st, 2012, i thought that my worlds were going to have to exist and two different things. they were not going to be able to link like this. i was not going to have a bean diary. i was just going be like this where i could do metal things here and journalism here. because if you come here, this is going give you a negative reaction here. you're not going to get hired here. and by the way, the not getting hired part completely true. coming out as trans is, probably one of the top ways to kill your career prospects in a lot of ways until you get elected. then you have a lot of people who are very interested in you. suddenly, a side note, you shouldn't have to get elected, to have health care. and it's like me too. and i was unemployed for two and a half years before i liked it. that's a different that's a different story where i was kind of tied in together, though, is that i had used metal really not just as a, you know, escape or whatever, but was also an audio rebellion for me. there was a way to kind of, you know, really also see the world in a bit. my band would go to you know, northern ireland. we would go to glasgow, edinburgh and aberdeen over in scotland. i loved traveling. we go, you know, just all over and even on when you're dylan broke doing it, i always thought, you know, you don't get to take to the grave with you guys take experiences so you know might as well go you know them up but at the same time i started getting really bad in that i mean 25, $30,000 credit card debt and i started working two full time jobs again or two part time jobs again. this time after i came out for one job, 30 hours a week for $15 an hours in newspaper editor, side job, $5 an hour plus tip as a weekend asking bob house delivery driver which i wrote about you know actually very very early in my book and burn the page and i lost money at that job because of car repairs. and i was 32 years old, uninsured and, you know, just driving a car that had been would functionally be dead in months. and that's when i the phone call saying, hey, have you considered for office you'd be really good a day after i got an email, they didn't respond to saying the same thing. and when i ran for office in 2017. i was uninsured, driving at $324 a piece of -- as transgender metal head reporter do any step mom vegetarian, you know, central casting? and when i decide to run, i said, well, politics and elected government shouldn't just be the sole domain of the rich and powerful. it's for us, too. and it's our time to run it. and what we we do now, great, great. chin so you came you came to new york in 1994 and you were seven, right? and you're both your parents had been professors in china. so in his undocumented immigrants, their jobs were much different. others, and they worked to survive live. did they talk about how they felt about not being considered professionals here in any way and comparing their lives? or were they just have to said have a family and we have to do what we have to do. it was a little bit of both. i think my parents kind of try to keep out of some of the emotional and psychological hardship that they themselves dealt with. it's very different coming to a new as a child, you kind of the of childhood is that you kind of accept everything as it comes and you think it's just temporary and you don't think about long term what should be. and for my parents, it was a very different experience. my father was an english professor. my mother a math professor on the forefront of developing computer technology. my very first memories of her were were for sitting in front of a computer that was the size of this room in china typing in on a black screen and. when we got here, she worked at a sweatshop on division street in chinatown. she made $0.03 per article of clothing, attaching the label to the back of shirts and dresses. and i sat next to her and i snipped off the loose thread off every piece of clothing for $0.01. and she told me to pretend it was a game that i was playing hide and seek with the thread i was snipping off and the way described the sweatshop room in the book is very much through my childhood lines of i'm just is my task of finding every single thread and if there is no thread that i can find, i'm going to rip one loose and cut it off because that's my job. later on i would see my mother work much, much harder job. so even she would stand in ice water 14 hours at a time, processing sushi in a plant. she very rarely let slip what was going on deep down inside. but there were times when i would see her spit in the mug of a boss you had to bring tea to, and she would say things like, i was an academic. i was a professor, i was develop up in computer science and here i am fetching tea for someone who sees me as subhuman and thinks they can exploit me because by virtue of documents and that that that fate is still going on today, it's not you know, it was in the nineties, but to this day, there are people who come here ready to contribute to country, to contribute all of their talents, training and really stuck in places where they are being exploited and. we've about in the book about you said you didn't want send your kids to taft do you still feel that way and and if what have to change there and maybe it's not just taft but in prep schools in general diverse students. yeah i i was on the so i live los angeles now and i was just on the east coast two weeks ago doing a tour of various schools, basically like from massachusetts down to new york. and i would send it's twofold. it's like i would send my kid to an independent school actually live in l.a., like down the street from one but i often because my college hosts all their interview stuff there so i'm there a lot and i quite like it. i just very firmly believe that i to be within 50 to 20 minutes of my child's school so that i can be there, like should, should something go down the a lot of my pop culture references have not been flying with the children that i've been speaking to just because they're not getting them but the one that actually has really stuck with them was there's this the they did the reboot of the fresh prince of bel air on on peacock and. there is a scene in it that i watched. luckily after i had finished the book and because it would have just triggered me so badly otherwise it's a scene where a white kid puts drugs into will's backpack because he's trying get him expelled from bel air academy, which is his independent school that he goes and so well gets pulled into the head of school's office and there's like a whole like thing. and he's going to be expelled until like his aunt and uncle, uncle phil and aunt viv come down the mountain from their mansion and are like in the office, is immediately asking questions like making demands. they're like, we are paying tuition here? like you have to have some sort of interaction with us in terms when it comes to punishing the child who is in our who who is it's not his looking for who is in our care and the thing with boarding schools is that they use this phrase called in loco, which means in place, place of the parent and so you are basically saying when you send your kids to a boarding school, we trust, to make decisions as we the parents would. but i think when you are a black parent in america, there is a very specific way of like parenting and things that you have to deal that you that you can't necessarily trust a white person to be making the same decisions that you as a black parent would make or think of the same things or no like sort of how to deal with specific. and so for that's kind of why boarding school is just like not in the picture right now. it's also because specifically taft it's actually not just because of the experiences that i had there because in some ways i am very thankful for the education that i got there. it's also because, quite frankly at the schools founded in 1890, they're in a head of school search right now, 1890, it's 2022. there have only been five heads of school. since 1890. so there have been five white men who have run that school since 1890. and so they're all like have they're all educators. so they all have the best interests of the kids at heart. but when you saw the current head of school was my head of school and he graduated from in 1978, went to college and then immediately came back to taft and has been there ever since. so the only place that he has really interacted with people of color in his lifetime has been at taft. so when you think about that, it's like when that is the the administration in place and when that like the type of people they're it's really hard to then bring change into school because they have no other life experience. and so for taft specifically, that's kind of why that's that's where my thoughts immediately go. but school in general, i would certainly consider just because i also think that when you're the parent of any of any child of color in america or any child who is going to fit into a marginalized us space in america, you're kind of looking there's, there's public school obviously. and then there's independent school or private any of private school. and it's like with public school, it's like the devil, you know versus the devil you don't know either way, you're going to be facing as a parent color some sort of racism. it just kind of depends which races and you feel you want to deal with it. yeah, yeah. but danika, you read about book, you hired an opposition researcher to do look into dig up anything they might throw at you in your first two campaigns. right? both of them. yeah, both of them. and i just would like to read one line that was very funny from your book where you say, quote, there's nothing like watching a television ad portraying me as a conceited --. i knew i was an absolute lie. i am not conceited. i just thought of some of the humor in the book. but what what what kinds of i mean and then in your some of your chapter kind of beginnings, they also the actual up research that they found. and you said there was some that was accurate, some that was way off base. is that anything so? nothing surprised you, i guess so. if you listen to the audiobook, which i also narrated, you'll you'll get the right diction for how i, i said i am not conceited and smart. and another one of the headlines that i really like. they actually was there was the chapter where two weeks before my first election, 2017, there there is a washington post headline that says rome or it was it was marshall ad accuses rome of lewd behave here an old video of her bad and the then executive of the republican party of virginia john finley says that in this video is clearly implied direct performed group oral sex and i wrote well whoa whoa time out hold on implied. was that was pretty direct john sack in it was the equivalent of a spit take on snl or the daily show and quite frankly and this is really kind like one of the things i really wanted to get at with especially doing a lot of the opposition research and everything and including all that after 2016, where it was not unacceptable for a majority of voters, according to the electoral college, to vote for someone who bragged about sexually assaulting women openly about it as locker room, talk to, call whatever they wanted. i thought, what the hell in my background is anything even close to what this guy has done and he's gotten elected president united states for it. and then he put brett kavanaugh on the supreme court, by the way so is making someone laugh with a pg 13 joke in a comedy video from 2012 going to be my downfall? well, apparently not. so, you know, i looked at that. i the first part, you know, where they were you know hit me on tv ad for it and i think how well i wanted to do here they really get part in the book is i even thought about having a section my website called the dirt where i would just put my stuff out there and then i would compare all the other terrible things, you know, whether my now predecessor had and there's an actual headline you can find if you look it up that says that is the cbs news headline of where i was. marshall says that are marshall says that disabled children are god's punishment for abortion. that's who was up against. he was like the 13 times over 26 years since i was seven years old. he was the self-described chief homophobe of virginia who authored the state's constitutional amendment against marriage equality. offered, you know, bathroom bill and all the other sort of stuff. my gut, my current governor is now trying to do, by the way, it's not going to go over well for i'm going to sue all other things. i looked at that. i was like, well then, yeah, i don't come from central casting. yes, i have lived very funny life in some regards where you front metal bands for 12 years and we were a drinking band our big song for drunk on arrival there's stories behind that. i mean i had cops break up our one show two times. i was out in a farm in knoxville and at the second time where they cut, they told us to cut the power and everything. i then had the crowd do all sort clapping together like, and we did an a cappella version of drunk on arrival that was kind of fun, but i wanted to tell those stories to encourage people in the that the central premise of this book, the central, you know, like the thesis was own your narrative. i spent decades of my life allowing the fear of what other people thought about me, control the narrative i would put out there. but, you know, it's funny when you own your own narrative, when you actually start telling your own stories and you start living your own truth as we say in lgbtq world, you're authentic sense of self. you know what happens that point suddenly. not only are you not afraid of all the other sort of things, whatever, but the opposition research that's out there, what are they going? do you want something you've already talked about? hits. you want something you've already put out there? you know, for the republican redskins against me next year, here's 320 pages of opposition research. have fun. but like what are going to hit me when i've already said? yeah. here are all my foibles. my warts, flaws, everything else. and i'm still standing. i've been elected over life of earned election three times. now we've passed 32 of my bills into law, including ten to feed hungry kids. and the reason that i keep coming back and you know, i keep earning election is because my constituents, like the job that i'm doing, i show up in front of them authentically myself, i speak to them authentic actually myself. a funny thing is in northern virginia, you got a lot of new york transplants. and so soon as i go in front of like a town hall and heritage home, which is like a 55, an older community and i know like have to cross from new york. i just let my mother's voice over and i start really condescending really quickly toward common enemy. so it's like, can you believe mail in driver's, you know, just like this sort of thing. but what i also find is that you can be radically different from people around and still find common ground is when you're yourself because you know my voters will tell you very often the anchor i have no idea what it's like being trans, nor do i even probably care. the metal thing that's just weird. i don't get it, but i do get that. you get stuck in your commute too. i do get that. you're the only person in town who actually has a plan to fix my -- commute. go do something. it will you. and the way part that's under construction now. so long and short of it. you know what? i'm really trying to stress and burn the page. is that real importance of unabashedly being yourself? no matter who you're up against? because what are you going to? what's what is in your story that's worse than the now former president united states, who is now a viable contender again for a nomination for a third election cycle in a row? what is worse? well, then go be yourself. if running for office is your plan, go it. but otherwise, if it's just getting around, being employed, having you family or just being yourself in day to day, well, go do it because this is your to. chin you would said and this is it probably will be somewhat but mirrors may be or maybe not but kendra was talking about you said that you could not have felt more out of place at yale law. what what were those some of the experiences that made you feel that way? you know, the end to the american dream is so often you come here, poor immigrant and you make it to the ivy league. that's the happy ending. and the truth is, my years that swarthmore and you were absolutely the most miserable of my life. i would have happily traded those days for going back to the sweatshop with my mother. i felt so out of place, so ostracized, so incredibly ashamed of my background. my first day at swarthmore, i came upon a few white girls just hanging out in the cafeteria and they were talking and i wanted to fit in. they were talking about writing. so i sat down and i was like, huh? i never learned to ride a bike. and they were like, we're talking about horses. and i was like, oh, think about riding horses and think people did that. and i'm like, oh, that's funny. i don't know how to ride those either. and they just stare at me and then i start listing things. i didn't know how to do because i wanted to. i thought, like, vulnerability, you know being me would pull in. so i was like, i don't know how to swim, you know, i still know how to drive. and they just look at me, they're like, do you not have a childhood or something? like what? this look of disgust. and they just walked. and from day on i knew there was something wrong with me that did not in, in this world and i had always loved to read and write my father was an english lit professor. he grew up in a dissident and his most cherished memories were pulling out. his eldest brother's band books from america and from england, from the floorboards his eldest brother had been persecuted and thrown in prison and when he missed his brother most, he would pull those out and read them by candlelight. dickens. twain. if scott fitzgerald and he would dream of this place where there was equality and justice and you couldn't make your own way. and that was the story of america that he had told me. and so i thought if i spoke english perfectly, not to give suspicions of the fact that i might be undocumented, not, you know, fall into the stereotype. asians can't speak english. if i could just speak english perfectly. if i could write perfectly, then i would be accepted and first time this happened was in the fifth grade, i worked my -- off on a on an essay and i was like, i finally made it been in america for three years. i can write as good as a white person. hopefully better and it was the first white male teacher i had. he called me up to the front of the classroom and he says, i don't think you wrote this. and i'm like, who could write it? my parents are working all the time. there is no one else i know who speaks english could possibly have written this. and he was, like this, is not the kind of writing we see in those chinatown school. and i would love say that that stopped. i would love to say that but it happened over and over and over again and through my schooling, i just learned that was something inside me that did not match the outside of me. so every time before i handed in something, i would go in and just put in misspellings. i would just change the grammar so it was wrong. and i thought once i got to swarthmore, once i got to yale, once i proved myself, that would be gone. well, six years after i graduated from yale law school, i'd been a lawyer for six years. i by then i became a citizen in 2016. unfortunate year. but i felt very grateful. 22 years after i first landed here. so by that time, i a citizen, i was a lawyer. i've been arguing court for for years. my supervisor calls me and who's this office and this was a supervisor that had seen me stand up in court, had seen me counsel clients, had seen me develop case strategy from the ground up. he calls me into his office. and the minute i look at him, i know coming because i've seen it a million times before. and he says this brief is remarkably well written. who did you copy from? and i had some very, very choice words for him that i will not repeat. i quit that job a few months later and that was when i had it. i have played your game for far too long. i'm going to be me. i'm not to make myself smaller because it fits in your vision of me. i'm not going to make myself smaller to fit in that box that i was trapped in before i could understand what was happening. and that is the reality of what so many children grow up with here of unfortunate you don't fit in to whatever you think the mainstream might be that they learn to shrink and they stay shrunken because they think there's something wrong them when the only thing wrong with them is their excellence. and so if i was going to go out there and tell my to tell their truth and share their story with the court, i had to do that myself. and that was first day of the rest of my life. and then. i okay, i've i've got to sort of come back to sort the since you're all memoirists and how you you can just go kind of down the line here when you when you were writing were there things that you were surprised you remembered too you had more detail. you wanted be there were things that you wished knew and you had to be. you called on a or family member name to sort of fill the blanks. that because i just want a little bit about since this is a book festival your process. yeah i'll go really quickly i was i was very lucky actually because i was an obsessive compulsive child and i saved literally. so i when i sat down to write this, i had a wealth of information. not only did i have a livejournal that like i would sometimes i sometimes updated my livejournal like five times a day, like between classes documenting, things that were like happening in classes with my friends. i also before i could find a program, i coded a program myself, automatically saved all of my messages. so i have every message i ever had from high school. so when it came to like recreating the voices of my friends or things that happened in the classroom i just had everything i, my, my mom just sold her house, actually, and she gave me a folder of like all of this other stuff from high school, some of which i had. like it had my first college list ever, that physical piece of paper that my college counselor printed it and handed it to me, i had another copy back in california, but then it had all these like sort of teacher reports as well, and some of that. stuff i actually wish i had had while i was writing the book because it really illuminated for me another of the way that a lot of, again, the white teachers saw my relationships, my other with my black friends and with other students of color on campus there was a lot of complaint. i hung out too much with younger kids and what that said to me was that they were not asking the sort of lack of choice that had, but also the very important, i think, role of when you are an older student of color on campuses hanging out with the freshmen, hanging out with the sophomores to make sure that they feel comfortable and that they feel welcome. there was also a lot of complaints that, like i said, too much time on the internet or like that i wasn't enough with the other kids in my dorm. and a lot of that too was my mom had actually called the school after sophomore year and made so that me and my best friend also could never live together and so we like i was living alone in these dorms with just like a lot of other white kids. and so, no, i wasn't socializing with them. i was socializing with my friends on livejournal and like online stuff. and then also with like the black kids on campus. so that's like one thing that i wish i had had. so i think it would have added definitely another interesting part to the book. so i was blacked out at the first consulate in 2012 after drinking das boot in another liter beer right before my band's uk started and i to fill in some of those blanks because. yeah, they were definitely still gone. and so i called my drummer who was 19 at the time. so he had to be the server one and he told me exactly what happened on the new york city subway when i took him to the wrong airport. and apparently i was high fiving everyone and i was like, oh my god, we're to uk. and this one guy goes, and this the this is months before i started my transition. so i was still presenting as male and the guy, this one guy goes to my drummer, you need to get a hold of your friend and he goes, don't own. and i said in the book i would have thrown me under a bus to misgendering, notwithstanding. but one of the other things i did was i called some of my campaign folks from a 2017 and some of the other folks and i asked for their stories in the trail and really help fill in some of those chapters to. and i would talk to my mom and here's one of the together in a real process. i was falling behind on my deadlines like, you know, like, like bless emily wunderlich and everyone over at viking. they had so much patience with me because once covid happens, my office, we were swamped. we constituent service work that was taking 12, 14 hours a day and then do it again the next day and again next day. you know, it was just i wasn't making the time, right. so i finally had deadline. and once once bah bah, she saved the day and she would call me and basically interview me for like 2 hours at a time. sometimes and because i'm you asked me a question, i'm national storyteller with just like this she would type it like basically everything is tell her send it to me and then i could put that in narrative form on certain things when i would fall behind. on most other occasions, i would get up at 3:00, 4:00 in the morning. he gives her earl gray tea, because that's the thing and that's my drink of choice. i don't do coffee and. i would just type it until i couldn't type anymore. and then i had start my day or something like that and what works for me is not necessarily what's going to work for everyone else here, but i absolutely do recommend to any of you who are who are writing, even if you have everything cataloged in your life and it's amazing. oh, my god. or you don't. despite being a reporter for most of my life, what i would very, very suggest to you is talk to other people you've interact with because they might remember something a little different than you and just start telling to each other. if you get someone really going in the storytelling, you're going to find some really good pieces that just might make your cut. so i focus my book on, ages seven, to 12. those particularly momentous years, my life, but the focus on those years was really because of my chief belief that all of the truth of who we are, all of our strength and wisdom, are locked up in those years. and if we encountered a time when learn to be less ourselves, to hide ourselves from the world, it likely goes back to those years before we were teenagers. before we were adults, we were just bumping the worlds, trying to understand what was happening with our full hearts out for for consumption. and i think that the best thing an adult can do was to go back to that time and reclaim some of that openness and vulnerability. so the problem with focusing on those years, of course, it was a long time ago, but thankfully revered harriet the spy. yeah, i wanted be her. i wrote down everything around me to try to solve the mystery in new york. unfortunately it's boring no mysteries but i knew what i ate in second grade for lunch, you know, and i wanted my book to be an experience where people opened beautiful country and they felt like they were stepping into my body and seeing everything as i saw it. and then that way they could reawaken that childhood part of them, their cells and that childhood heart is still inside that maybe has been silenced for a little bit longer. so i would read the diary trying to understand and this child's there would be like five pages at a time where i would fixate on my classmate and how she ate strawberry shortcake popsicle every day and how that strawberry shortcake popsicle was so annoying because it had perfect pink and red and white dots all over it. and it had 50, probably 50 dots on one side. and i would think, what is this child rambling on about? why is she fixated with the dots? and then i realize, oh, she was hungry, she wanted to know what it taste didn't like and not what it looked like, but what it looked like was the only thing she had access to and so in that experience i was really able to get into this child's mind. but of course i had not been able to revisit these really troubling memories for a long time. so the longer i did that, the more damaged i felt and i went into therapy for her beauty years before i could start to write my book, i needed to understand the depths of the love and longing and fear that she struggles with and buried for so long. and when i really had trouble accessing that voice for years, i did what i found helped me. it was completely by accident. i was really short on time. i was making partner. i was hundred hours a week. my only free time from client calls and emails was the subway. i had very limited reception and one day i looked down on my phone and i'm like, i have so many emails to do. i have this book to write and i can't it i'm just stuck on this train. and then i saw the notes app, so i opened it up and i started writing and i used to commute to and from school every day. and i would read harriet the spy and babysitters club and it was there that i felt an immediate connection to that. i felt like she was sitting next to me kind of just telling me where to go. and from then on it, just the all of the memie

Transcripts For CSPAN2 Author Discussion On Race Identity In America 20221030

lancome, where she wrote and edited work for two years, she has been heard and seen on npr and podcast including -- sesh love. it or leave it. yo, is this racist? this is love. star trek the pod directive and more. and her writing has been published in elle marie claire town and country women's health and others and her book admissions is out now. danica roem is part of the historic group of elected officials flipped republican seats in the 2017 election. she's the first out and seeded transgender state legislator in american history. prior to her political prior to her political career, she was a journalist and now serves as a frequent guest on national media. she and her work have been featured in the usa today people. gq, the new york times, elle and others, and she was the subject of the glad award winning documentary, this is how we win. her book, burn the page is out now. so i thought we would just start like as most many stories do from the beginning in your lives and maybe in each of you can talk about your kind of early childhood and what were your most indelible memories and maybe what how you tapped into some of that for in writing the book. kendra, you want to start? oh, boy. sure. early childhood. so i grew up in maplewood, new jersey, which if you're from brooklyn, you might know it as the place that your friends are escaping to. it's a small town, kind of like 30 minutes outside of the city. i grew up in a single income home. my my mom was a very traditional stay at home mom. she did not have a job until i was, like 25, 26. and that was when my parents got divorced and my dad was a wall street banker. and so basically, i my book admissions is about the three years that i spent at the task school, which is a boarding school in connecticut. and i was raised essentially knowing that i was going to go there because my dad had graduated from the school in 1974. and it was basically i had been going up to the campus since i was two because he was really involved in alumni affairs and he was on the school board for a while. and he had a really positive relationship with it. so i have a lot of memories of just like spending time on this, this campus that was essentially a i usually refer to it as a club for teenagers. it's several many hundreds of acres rolling green hills, two ice rinks, just like a really kind of like luxurious place to be educated and to and to spend time in. or that is how it appears on the outside. so i really grew up like knowing that i was going to go there but was not like fully prepared because of the way i had grown up in this like very upper middle class town. and with parents who themselves were pretty privileged, i was not really prepared for kind of the the stark contrasts in terms of like socioeconomic stuff and also the way race would play out on that campus because i grew up pretty sheltered. i grew up with sort of a lot of respectability politics, like ingrained me by both of my parents. and so, yeah, i just i wasn't per prepared for it. so that's kind of a quick background on, on my childhood. all right. so my name is danica roem. i am grateful. representative for the city of manassas park in the western pennsylvania county, portions of haymarket. gainesville in my lifelong home, manassas, in the 13th district of virginia, house delegates elected 2017 reelected, 2019 2021, running for state senate next year. and i, like i said, because it's lifelong manassas i'm born and raised prince william hospital, september 30th, 1984. cheryl sadly wrote and long story short with it, is my childhood is a series of overcoming a lot of traumatic events and other things and at the same time having, you know, the best italian food on sunday nights of my mom's cooking. and if you know anything about italian family argument is communication and i like to make that point pretty clear in my book as well and. you know, the thing is, in my case, my upbringing in any way, even though the way that you would stand is like, hey, look, you live out in the woods and in the burbs, right? you know, like this, you know, this, you know, in a white middle class family. but you know what's going to stand out so much? it's like, well, you know, my dad killed himself when i was three years old. so in my earliest childhood memories is running next door after you got himself on fire. then i. my grandmother died by the time i was seven over and she had parkinson's and we had lived with her right after he had died. so to immediate family. so i lived with you die by the time i was in second grade and know so the the core nexus is my family, my mother, my sister and me for y'all from here, my mother's the bronx specifically from morris park and again, italian catholic woman who was born with a chip on his shoulder. so that definitely ingrained in the funny thing is like so i'm virginia to my core. i mean, you know, my manassas battlefield fleece that i wear fleece better than my governor, by the way, just for the record. yeah, but, but one of my students, they go into the city, my mother's voice starts coming out so, so aggressively, like she that this otherwise just sort of completely boring mid-atlantic accent every other day second she's on the phone with some from new york. oh, my god, donna, how you doing? oh, my god. did she just hear enrico's close over in the bronx. can't even believe it. we're going to get a good pastry now, right? that. so that's part of my upbringing only in the south and i spent 13 years in catholic school. i spent four years public school over at loch lomond groceries, and then from fourth grade all the way until i graduated in parliamentary university in 2006 and college, those last four were by choice. those middle nine absolutely were not. and the thing about being a closet case in a catholic school is it's already pretty suffocating environment that just makes it worse. and i was looking for outlets and i was scared to death of anyone finding out who i was and at the same time, when you will have that fear, you want, be associated with other things, and so you start overcompensating in some ways, right? and at the same time wanted people to think i was the middle person i was, you know, whatever other identity i was the funny person. i never wanted to be perceived as the gay guy, which is how i was basically referred to for most of my childhood with a series slurs. that's for the perception of being gay, let alone the actual reality of being trans. and as i would find out in my upbringing, when i was just basically trying to figure out how to talk to the world at large, i would use sexuality as a stepping stone to get to a gender identity, which i wrote about a lot in from the page about how i would come out as bi first. i'm so sorry to everybody person, by the way, because they always are like, are you actually or not? it's used by two gay to two trans and you know keeping my social rotation. gender identity are different things, but it was just an easier way for me to start like tiptoeing, just talking to people. for the first time. i told anyone i was 17 years old and once it got into college and i was 343 miles away from home, that's when i first start telling the women in my life. and really, because wanted them to feel safe around me, i want them to know it was going to be okay to talk to me just like they would do any of the other girlfriends and then, you know, like we would get dressed up and go club and go dancing or go into like, you know, gothic shows and stuff like a band called jen tortures. i'll see you after the show. and you go to these shows where it's just like, it doesn't matter your gender, they are everyone's wearing makeup anyway and all black. so hey you know fit in and that was kind of my tiptoeing out. i had some pretty bad events that happened in between that i wrote about in the book, but eventually i always described general for is kind of like having a hand. it closes around your throat slowly over time, to the point where you can't breathe anymore and you got to do something about it. that moment happened for me when i was eight. i knew, right, tom? i was ten years old, that i was trans, but i never even thought it. so at 28, i finally started seeing a psychologist. i came out to my mom, my sister, my 30th birthday, and just to put a wrap around this one, mama said that night, well, i'm just concerned. how are you going to actually find someone? and i said, well, i got a date next week actually at this with a temptation concert in baltimore with this trans guy who's from finland, originally lives in maryland now. and so that was october 7th, 2014, when we had our first date. and then september 9th, 2022, we went back to baltimore to go see apocalyptic art because finished tell metal girls and of that person who my mom was concerned about, whether i would ever find out just proposed to me so yeah hey. we have breaking news on the panel to that. that's very good. excellent. so chen, julie wong has now has joined us and i want to we just opened up. i just asked i introduced everybody bio and then just wanted a little bit more kind of talk about their earliest childhood memories. i know you have many, many, many of them in your book, but in sort of what were the most some of the indelible ones and that you wanted to sort of just, you know, clue people into is where you came from literally and figuratively. absolutely. i apologize for being late. i used to live five minute walk from here, but today i had the fortune of commuting from new jersey. so, yeah, i mean, my my story when you said, danika, the fear of being found out, being terrified of that that although we have very different experience is i relate to that so deeply that hits at the very core of me so i went from being a pretty privileged, spoiled kid, north china, to getting on a plane, getting off that plane at jfk airport and realizing that i was half a world away from everybody i ever knew. it was just me and my two parents and we were what was called undocumented. and i never been aware of documents before. i never knew that that was an issue anywhere in the world. and all of a sudden because of that change we did not have enough money for food. we shared a home with six, seven other immigrant families. every time i saw a cop, a firefighter, a sanitation worker, anybody in uniform, i would turn and run the other way. and so this this fear of being found out became the defining sense of me. and with secrets come this implicit shame of you should hide who you are. there's something inherently wrong with you. and like danica, i chose to overcompensate by achieving. i thought that i could weave an american dream where i would earn my worth in america and prove that i was thoroughly american, that i was i belonged here and i deserved all the documents that i had so longed for. and was not. until you achieve your your dreams that you realize that there were some fallacies in there. i'm sure we'll talk about that a little. can joe just want to ask you so you mentioned to the first black legacy student at taft school, and you start there in three. is that so? did you feel a responsibility to your family and or other students of color to excel not in terms of like that like being the first because i when i got there like being the first so i was the first black american legacy, i should say. there was another person the school started accepting black students in like 1953, and the first black student who attended was actually from bermuda. and so then he sent his granddaughter there in the eighties. so she was actually the first black legacy to graduate. and then i was the first black american one. and i make that distinction because taft was actually the first place where i really learned that there was sort of that distinction within the diaspora of black american versus like black from anywhere else, like literally anywhere in the world. i remember i had a friend who was on haitian or haitian-american, and someone referred her her as african-american. at one point she was like, i am absolutely not. which comes like with that statement also like comes some things that you have to unpack, but it is an important distinction to make because the experiences are really different. but in terms of pressure to excel, i didn't really know that i was the first black american legacy to who had the potential to graduate until it was announced during an all school like an all school assembly. um, about black history at taft. and that was like kind of when i realized like, oh, okay, this like a thing. and there were also a bunch of other kids there who were freshmen when i was a senior who were also legacy students at the time. and we were all friends just because all the black kids at the school friends. so in terms of excelling like i did feel pressured to do well outside of that that fact just because like i knew that i was there i was at the school. a lot of my friends from maplewood where i had gone to public school through the ninth grade, i had a lot of friends who would leave between like eighth and ninth grade and they would go to other schools like they would go to my care. montclair kimberly or like kent place, other schools in new jersey. and the idea of having to then like go away to that privileged school and then come back like that was sort of like an embarrassing thing that might happen. so like that where a lot of the pressure came from, it was like, you don't want to you don't want to come back. you don't want to have that associated with you. and it again came up for me when i was applying for college as well. it was of the main reasons i did not want to to rutgers. rutgers grad school. it one of my favorite actors, avery brooks, is on faculty there. it's a great place, but i like was really like conscious of the fact that i did not like to go to college with the people that i had like quote unquote, escape kept going to public school because a lot of my friends from columbia, my public school winter records because it was cheap and it was a good school and. so yeah there was that pressure of like wanting to do better than what you had left behind and and one of the jean of the story tell, a story about a roommate that you had there who who made racist comment to you. but basically, he she said that she didn't like that you had to get up early to your hair and complained about the, quote. gross, unquote, smell in the room from your hair products. and then you sort of devised was sort of a prank that meant to be not vengeful. but in and where you were going to put a hex on her and set up the witchcraft symbols in the room. yes, i was very revenge motivated and how did that experience affect how you would see your other white classmates after that? was it did it change that in many ways, yeah. there was like so like i said, the this maybe i didn't take it, but the school was it was very segregated socially white students pretty much like you only hung out with white students. black students hung out with black latin students. and then everyone just kind of assumed like we had a black table in the in the dining hall. but then there was also like an asian table and by asian table, like it was just assumed that everyone was chinese essentially when in reality was like there were kids from hong kong, there were kids from china, japan, korea. i had a lot of very good korean friends. like it was just like it was a whole mixture, but the school was just so segregated. and when i got there i was not i wasn't aware of that. and back in maplewood, like one of the big things that's always touted by the realtor is it's like it's so diverse. you, like everyone is friends with everyone. and for me that was really true. my group was very, very diverse. and so i got attached and i really thought i was going to do the same thing and that was not the case for me. and so, yeah, it was my, my friends, two of my black friends were the ones who told me when my roommate said that me they were the ones who said like, that's racism. because for me, racism was very much like a water hose. it's a slur it's like a very big event incident that happens because we didn't have language like microaggression back then to describe those sort of smaller incidents are so yeah it really after that it really did change sort of my perception of like who i am going to be friends with in this environment. and i really did start like that was the moment i stopped really trying to be friends, the white kids at that point. and there were a few who would like come into the group because we were very we would take in misfits like that because we were at the school essentially misfits. but it was it was very much it was not an effort that i was making on my part on outreach, because it very much felt like it wasn't possible. no. danica, i wanted to ask you so you mentioned that you don't know that danica was in a you call it thrash metal or we just call a heavy metal, what we call oppression, melodic death metal. okay. okay, good some people in the room respect the differences. so, you know the big question is, do you go from being as you write about you're a thrash metal boat vocalist working also as a food delivery driver. at one point, right to. a legislator who beat a 13 term incumbent. i think it's really funny that of the parts of my like career biography, we went over it, we just talked about metal band for 12 years. we talked about food delivery driver and my 92 dodge and. we completely missed the ten years i was a newspaper reporter. well, no, we'll get that. but the reason i beat that, though, is that was my chief qualification for office. the 2500 news stories i heard about covering western prince william county, my home area, and i was working for for a two full time jobs for four or five years. at one point where i was working for the hotline in dc covering campaigns at six something in the morning until mid afternoon, and then i would hightail it out to haymarket and go cover, you know, maybe a battlefield girls volleyball game or maybe i would go all the way down to gerry, virginia, to go cover an electric chair execution in person. there's a fun little way to spend your evening. i saw that. and you know, for all of the things that i you know, that i did, all the different identities that i acquired kind of along the way, it's kind of in the personal loyalty type where you see it's like it's not that you can't focus on. one thing is that there's a lot really cool things you want to do and you kind of want to try a whole lot of different stuff, which also means you have the in ability to be really good at particular one of those, but maybe you could be like, you know, above average. and that's kind of where i was shooting for in a lot of ways. but the way the reason i, you know, went from all of that was when i came out, when i turned 30 and i and then we changed my byline in the paper. the next year i stopped being afraid. what other people were going to think of me. i stopped being afraid and stopped giving a -- what other people were going to do to judge me. i stopped caring about my god. what if they find out and trans yeah i am? and then it was just like and now what? and when you just start confronting people with it, then suddenly all the things in life that you thought were impossible don't to be. i always thought it was from the first day i went into therapy. november 21st, 2012, i thought that my worlds were going to have to exist and two different things. they were not going to be able to link like this. i was not going to have a bean diary. i was just going be like this where i could do metal things here and journalism here. because if you come here, this is going give you a negative reaction here. you're not going to get hired here. and by the way, the not getting hired part completely true. coming out as trans is, probably one of the top ways to kill your career prospects in a lot of ways until you get elected. then you have a lot of people who are very interested in you. suddenly, a side note, you shouldn't have to get elected, to have health care. and it's like me too. and i was unemployed for two and a half years before i liked it. that's a different that's a different story where i was kind of tied in together, though, is that i had used metal really not just as a, you know, escape or whatever, but was also an audio rebellion for me. there was a way to kind of, you know, really also see the world in a bit. my band would go to you know, northern ireland. we would go to glasgow, edinburgh and aberdeen over in scotland. i loved traveling. we go, you know, just all over and even on when you're dylan broke doing it, i always thought, you know, you don't get to take to the grave with you guys take experiences so you know might as well go you know them up but at the same time i started getting really bad in that i mean 25, $30,000 credit card debt and i started working two full time jobs again or two part time jobs again. this time after i came out for one job, 30 hours a week for $15 an hours in newspaper editor, side job, $5 an hour plus tip as a weekend asking bob house delivery driver which i wrote about you know actually very very early in my book and burn the page and i lost money at that job because of car repairs. and i was 32 years old, uninsured and, you know, just driving a car that had been would functionally be dead in months. and that's when i the phone call saying, hey, have you considered for office you'd be really good a day after i got an email, they didn't respond to saying the same thing. and when i ran for office in 2017. i was uninsured, driving at $324 a piece of -- as transgender metal head reporter do any step mom vegetarian, you know, central casting? and when i decide to run, i said, well, politics and elected government shouldn't just be the sole domain of the rich and powerful. it's for us, too. and it's our time to run it. and what we we do now, great, great. chin so you came you came to new york in 1994 and you were seven, right? and you're both your parents had been professors in china. so in his undocumented immigrants, their jobs were much different. others, and they worked to survive live. did they talk about how they felt about not being considered professionals here in any way and comparing their lives? or were they just have to said have a family and we have to do what we have to do. it was a little bit of both. i think my parents kind of try to keep out of some of the emotional and psychological hardship that they themselves dealt with. it's very different coming to a new as a child, you kind of the of childhood is that you kind of accept everything as it comes and you think it's just temporary and you don't think about long term what should be. and for my parents, it was a very different experience. my father was an english professor. my mother a math professor on the forefront of developing computer technology. my very first memories of her were were for sitting in front of a computer that was the size of this room in china typing in on a black screen and. when we got here, she worked at a sweatshop on division street in chinatown. she made $0.03 per article of clothing, attaching the label to the back of shirts and dresses. and i sat next to her and i snipped off the loose thread off every piece of clothing for $0.01. and she told me to pretend it was a game that i was playing hide and seek with the thread i was snipping off and the way described the sweatshop room in the book is very much through my childhood lines of i'm just is my task of finding every single thread and if there is no thread that i can find, i'm going to rip one loose and cut it off because that's my job. later on i would see my mother work much, much harder job. so even she would stand in ice water 14 hours at a time, processing sushi in a plant. she very rarely let slip what was going on deep down inside. but there were times when i would see her spit in the mug of a boss you had to bring tea to, and she would say things like, i was an academic. i was a professor, i was develop up in computer science and here i am fetching tea for someone who sees me as subhuman and thinks they can exploit me because by virtue of documents and that that that fate is still going on today, it's not you know, it was in the nineties, but to this day, there are people who come here ready to contribute to country, to contribute all of their talents, training and really stuck in places where they are being exploited and. we've about in the book about you said you didn't want send your kids to taft do you still feel that way and and if what have to change there and maybe it's not just taft but in prep schools in general diverse students. yeah i i was on the so i live los angeles now and i was just on the east coast two weeks ago doing a tour of various schools, basically like from massachusetts down to new york. and i would send it's twofold. it's like i would send my kid to an independent school actually live in l.a., like down the street from one but i often because my college hosts all their interview stuff there so i'm there a lot and i quite like it. i just very firmly believe that i to be within 50 to 20 minutes of my child's school so that i can be there, like should, should something go down the a lot of my pop culture references have not been flying with the children that i've been speaking to just because they're not getting them but the one that actually has really stuck with them was there's this the they did the reboot of the fresh prince of bel air on on peacock and. there is a scene in it that i watched. luckily after i had finished the book and because it would have just triggered me so badly otherwise it's a scene where a white kid puts drugs into will's backpack because he's trying get him expelled from bel air academy, which is his independent school that he goes and so well gets pulled into the head of school's office and there's like a whole like thing. and he's going to be expelled until like his aunt and uncle, uncle phil and aunt viv come down the mountain from their mansion and are like in the office, is immediately asking questions like making demands. they're like, we are paying tuition here? like you have to have some sort of interaction with us in terms when it comes to punishing the child who is in our who who is it's not his looking for who is in our care and the thing with boarding schools is that they use this phrase called in loco, which means in place, place of the parent and so you are basically saying when you send your kids to a boarding school, we trust, to make decisions as we the parents would. but i think when you are a black parent in america, there is a very specific way of like parenting and things that you have to deal that you that you can't necessarily trust a white person to be making the same decisions that you as a black parent would make or think of the same things or no like sort of how to deal with specific. and so for that's kind of why boarding school is just like not in the picture right now. it's also because specifically taft it's actually not just because of the experiences that i had there because in some ways i am very thankful for the education that i got there. it's also because, quite frankly at the schools founded in 1890, they're in a head of school search right now, 1890, it's 2022. there have only been five heads of school. since 1890. so there have been five white men who have run that school since 1890. and so they're all like have they're all educators. so they all have the best interests of the kids at heart. but when you saw the current head of school was my head of school and he graduated from in 1978, went to college and then immediately came back to taft and has been there ever since. so the only place that he has really interacted with people of color in his lifetime has been at taft. so when you think about that, it's like when that is the the administration in place and when that like the type of people they're it's really hard to then bring change into school because they have no other life experience. and so for taft specifically, that's kind of why that's that's where my thoughts immediately go. but school in general, i would certainly consider just because i also think that when you're the parent of any of any child of color in america or any child who is going to fit into a marginalized us space in america, you're kind of looking there's, there's public school obviously. and then there's independent school or private any of private school. and it's like with public school, it's like the devil, you know versus the devil you don't know either way, you're going to be facing as a parent color some sort of racism. it just kind of depends which races and you feel you want to deal with it. yeah, yeah. but danika, you read about book, you hired an opposition researcher to do look into dig up anything they might throw at you in your first two campaigns. right? both of them. yeah, both of them. and i just would like to read one line that was very funny from your book where you say, quote, there's nothing like watching a television ad portraying me as a conceited --. i knew i was an absolute lie. i am not conceited. i just thought of some of the humor in the book. but what what what kinds of i mean and then in your some of your chapter kind of beginnings, they also the actual up research that they found. and you said there was some that was accurate, some that was way off base. is that anything so? nothing surprised you, i guess so. if you listen to the audiobook, which i also narrated, you'll you'll get the right diction for how i, i said i am not conceited and smart. and another one of the headlines that i really like. they actually was there was the chapter where two weeks before my first election, 2017, there there is a washington post headline that says rome or it was it was marshall ad accuses rome of lewd behave here an old video of her bad and the then executive of the republican party of virginia john finley says that in this video is clearly implied direct performed group oral sex and i wrote well whoa whoa time out hold on implied. was that was pretty direct john sack in it was the equivalent of a spit take on snl or the daily show and quite frankly and this is really kind like one of the things i really wanted to get at with especially doing a lot of the opposition research and everything and including all that after 2016, where it was not unacceptable for a majority of voters, according to the electoral college, to vote for someone who bragged about sexually assaulting women openly about it as locker room, talk to, call whatever they wanted. i thought, what the hell in my background is anything even close to what this guy has done and he's gotten elected president united states for it. and then he put brett kavanaugh on the supreme court, by the way so is making someone laugh with a pg 13 joke in a comedy video from 2012 going to be my downfall? well, apparently not. so, you know, i looked at that. i the first part, you know, where they were you know hit me on tv ad for it and i think how well i wanted to do here they really get part in the book is i even thought about having a section my website called the dirt where i would just put my stuff out there and then i would compare all the other terrible things, you know, whether my now predecessor had and there's an actual headline you can find if you look it up that says that is the cbs news headline of where i was. marshall says that are marshall says that disabled children are god's punishment for abortion. that's who was up against. he was like the 13 times over 26 years since i was seven years old. he was the self-described chief homophobe of virginia who authored the state's constitutional amendment against marriage equality. offered, you know, bathroom bill and all the other sort of stuff. my gut, my current governor is now trying to do, by the way, it's not going to go over well for i'm going to sue all other things. i looked at that. i was like, well then, yeah, i don't come from central casting. yes, i have lived very funny life in some regards where you front metal bands for 12 years and we were a drinking band our big song for drunk on arrival there's stories behind that. i mean i had cops break up our one show two times. i was out in a farm in knoxville and at the second time where they cut, they told us to cut the power and everything. i then had the crowd do all sort clapping together like, and we did an a cappella version of drunk on arrival that was kind of fun, but i wanted to tell those stories to encourage people in the that the central premise of this book, the central, you know, like the thesis was own your narrative. i spent decades of my life allowing the fear of what other people thought about me, control the narrative i would put out there. but, you know, it's funny when you own your own narrative, when you actually start telling your own stories and you start living your own truth as we say in lgbtq world, you're authentic sense of self. you know what happens that point suddenly. not only are you not afraid of all the other sort of things, whatever, but the opposition research that's out there, what are they going? do you want something you've already talked about? hits. you want something you've already put out there? you know, for the republican redskins against me next year, here's 320 pages of opposition research. have fun. but like what are going to hit me when i've already said? yeah. here are all my foibles. my warts, flaws, everything else. and i'm still standing. i've been elected over life of earned election three times. now we've passed 32 of my bills into law, including ten to feed hungry kids. and the reason that i keep coming back and you know, i keep earning election is because my constituents, like the job that i'm doing, i show up in front of them authentically myself, i speak to them authentic actually myself. a funny thing is in northern virginia, you got a lot of new york transplants. and so soon as i go in front of like a town hall and heritage home, which is like a 55, an older community and i know like have to cross from new york. i just let my mother's voice over and i start really condescending really quickly toward common enemy. so it's like, can you believe mail in driver's, you know, just like this sort of thing. but what i also find is that you can be radically different from people around and still find common ground is when you're yourself because you know my voters will tell you very often the anchor i have no idea what it's like being trans, nor do i even probably care. the metal thing that's just weird. i don't get it, but i do get that. you get stuck in your commute too. i do get that. you're the only person in town who actually has a plan to fix my -- commute. go do something. it will you. and the way part that's under construction now. so long and short of it. you know what? i'm really trying to stress and burn the page. is that real importance of unabashedly being yourself? no matter who you're up against? because what are you going to? what's what is in your story that's worse than the now former president united states, who is now a viable contender again for a nomination for a third election cycle in a row? what is worse? well, then go be yourself. if running for office is your plan, go it. but otherwise, if it's just getting around, being employed, having you family or just being yourself in day to day, well, go do it because this is your to. chin you would said and this is it probably will be somewhat but mirrors may be or maybe not but kendra was talking about you said that you could not have felt more out of place at yale law. what what were those some of the experiences that made you feel that way? you know, the end to the american dream is so often you come here, poor immigrant and you make it to the ivy league. that's the happy ending. and the truth is, my years that swarthmore and you were absolutely the most miserable of my life. i would have happily traded those days for going back to the sweatshop with my mother. i felt so out of place, so ostracized, so incredibly ashamed of my background. my first day at swarthmore, i came upon a few white girls just hanging out in the cafeteria and they were talking and i wanted to fit in. they were talking about writing. so i sat down and i was like, huh? i never learned to ride a bike. and they were like, we're talking about horses. and i was like, oh, think about riding horses and think people did that. and i'm like, oh, that's funny. i don't know how to ride those either. and they just stare at me and then i start listing things. i didn't know how to do because i wanted to. i thought, like, vulnerability, you know being me would pull in. so i was like, i don't know how to swim, you know, i still know how to drive. and they just look at me, they're like, do you not have a childhood or something? like what? this look of disgust. and they just walked. and from day on i knew there was something wrong with me that did not in, in this world and i had always loved to read and write my father was an english lit professor. he grew up in a dissident and his most cherished memories were pulling out. his eldest brother's band books from america and from england, from the floorboards his eldest brother had been persecuted and thrown in prison and when he missed his brother most, he would pull those out and read them by candlelight. dickens. twain. if scott fitzgerald and he would dream of this place where there was equality and justice and you couldn't make your own way. and that was the story of america that he had told me. and so i thought if i spoke english perfectly, not to give suspicions of the fact that i might be undocumented, not, you know, fall into the stereotype. asians can't speak english. if i could just speak english perfectly. if i could write perfectly, then i would be accepted and first time this happened was in the fifth grade, i worked my -- off on a on an essay and i was like, i finally made it been in america for three years. i can write as good as a white person. hopefully better and it was the first white male teacher i had. he called me up to the front of the classroom and he says, i don't think you wrote this. and i'm like, who could write it? my parents are working all the time. there is no one else i know who speaks english could possibly have written this. and he was, like this, is not the kind of writing we see in those chinatown school. and i would love say that that stopped. i would love to say that but it happened over and over and over again and through my schooling, i just learned that was something inside me that did not match the outside of me. so every time before i handed in something, i would go in and just put in misspellings. i would just change the grammar so it was wrong. and i thought once i got to swarthmore, once i got to yale, once i proved myself, that would be gone. well, six years after i graduated from yale law school, i'd been a lawyer for six years. i by then i became a citizen in 2016. unfortunate year. but i felt very grateful. 22 years after i first landed here. so by that time, i a citizen, i was a lawyer. i've been arguing court for for years. my supervisor calls me and who's this office and this was a supervisor that had seen me stand up in court, had seen me counsel clients, had seen me develop case strategy from the ground up. he calls me into his office. and the minute i look at him, i know coming because i've seen it a million times before. and he says this brief is remarkably well written. who did you copy from? and i had some very, very choice words for him that i will not repeat. i quit that job a few months later and that was when i had it. i have played your game for far too long. i'm going to be me. i'm not to make myself smaller because it fits in your vision of me. i'm not going to make myself smaller to fit in that box that i was trapped in before i could understand what was happening. and that is the reality of what so many children grow up with here of unfortunate you don't fit in to whatever you think the mainstream might be that they learn to shrink and they stay shrunken because they think there's something wrong them when the only thing wrong with them is their excellence. and so if i was going to go out there and tell my to tell their truth and share their story with the court, i had to do that myself. and that was first day of the rest of my life. and then. i okay, i've i've got to sort of come back to sort the since you're all memoirists and how you you can just go kind of down the line here when you when you were writing were there things that you were surprised you remembered too you had more detail. you wanted be there were things that you wished knew and you had to be. you called on a or family member name to sort of fill the blanks. that because i just want a little bit about since this is a book festival your process. yeah i'll go really quickly i was i was very lucky actually because i was an obsessive compulsive child and i saved literally. so i when i sat down to write this, i had a wealth of information. not only did i have a livejournal that like i would sometimes i sometimes updated my livejournal like five times a day, like between classes documenting, things that were like happening in classes with my friends. i also before i could find a program, i coded a program myself, automatically saved all of my messages. so i have every message i ever had from high school. so when it came to like recreating the voices of my friends or things that happened in the classroom i just had everything i, my, my mom just sold her house, actually, and she gave me a folder of like all of this other stuff from high school, some of which i had. like it had my first college list ever, that physical piece of paper that my college counselor printed it and handed it to me, i had another copy back in california, but then it had all these like sort of teacher reports as well, and some of that. stuff i actually wish i had had while i was writing the book because it really illuminated for me another of the way that a lot of, again, the white teachers saw my relationships, my other with my black friends and with other students of color on campus there was a lot of complaint. i hung out too much with younger kids and what that said to me was that they were not asking the sort of lack of choice that had, but also the very important, i think, role of when you are an older student of color on campuses hanging out with the freshmen, hanging out with the sophomores to make sure that they feel comfortable and that they feel welcome. there was also a lot of complaints that, like i said, too much time on the internet or like that i wasn't enough with the other kids in my dorm. and a lot of that too was my mom had actually called the school after sophomore year and made so that me and my best friend also could never live together and so we like i was living alone in these dorms with just like a lot of other white kids. and so, no, i wasn't socializing with them. i was socializing with my friends on livejournal and like online stuff. and then also with like the black kids on campus. so that's like one thing that i wish i had had. so i think it would have added definitely another interesting part to the book. so i was blacked out at the first consulate in 2012 after drinking das boot in another liter beer right before my band's uk started and i to fill in some of those blanks because. yeah, they were definitely still gone. and so i called my drummer who was 19 at the time. so he had to be the server one and he told me exactly what happened on the new york city subway when i took him to the wrong airport. and apparently i was high fiving everyone and i was like, oh my god, we're to uk. and this one guy goes, and this the this is months before i started my transition. so i was still presenting as male and the guy, this one guy goes to my drummer, you need to get a hold of your friend and he goes, don't own. and i said in the book i would have thrown me under a bus to misgendering, notwithstanding. but one of the other things i did was i called some of my campaign folks from a 2017 and some of the other folks and i asked for their stories in the trail and really help fill in some of those chapters to. and i would talk to my mom and here's one of the together in a real process. i was falling behind on my deadlines like, you know, like, like bless emily wunderlich and everyone over at viking. they had so much patience with me because once covid happens, my office, we were swamped. we constituent service work that was taking 12, 14 hours a day and then do it again the next day and again next day. you know, it was just i wasn't making the time, right. so i finally had deadline. and once once bah bah, she saved the day and she would call me and basically interview me for like 2 hours at a time. sometimes and because i'm you asked me a question, i'm national storyteller with just like this she would type it like basically everything is tell her send it to me and then i could put that in narrative form on certain things when i would fall behind. on most other occasions, i would get up at 3:00, 4:00 in the morning. he gives her earl gray tea, because that's the thing and that's my drink of choice. i don't do coffee and. i would just type it until i couldn't type anymore. and then i had start my day or something like that and what works for me is not necessarily what's going to work for everyone else here, but i absolutely do recommend to any of you who are who are writing, even if you have everything cataloged in your life and it's amazing. oh, my god. or you don't. despite being a reporter for most of my life, what i would very, very suggest to you is talk to other people you've interact with because they might remember something a little different than you and just start telling to each other. if you get someone really going in the storytelling, you're going to find some really good pieces that just might make your cut. so i focus my book on, ages seven, to 12. those particularly momentous years, my life, but the focus on those years was really because of my chief belief that all of the truth of who we are, all of our strength and wisdom, are locked up in those years. and if we encountered a time when learn to be less ourselves, to hide ourselves from the world, it likely goes back to those years before we were teenagers. before we were adults, we were just bumping the worlds, trying to understand what was happening with our full hearts out for for consumption. and i think that the best thing an adult can do was to go back to that time and reclaim some of that openness and vulnerability. so the problem with focusing on those years, of course, it was a long time ago, but thankfully revered harriet the spy. yeah, i wanted be her. i wrote down everything around me to try to solve the mystery in new york. unfortunately it's boring no mysteries but i knew what i ate in second grade for lunch, you know, and i wanted my book to be an experience where people opened beautiful country and they felt like they were stepping into my body and seeing everything as i saw it. and then that way they could reawaken that childhood part of them, their cells and that childhood heart is still inside that maybe has been silenced for a little bit longer. so i would read the diary trying to understand and this child's there would be like five pages at a time where i would fixate on my classmate and how she ate strawberry shortcake popsicle every day and how that strawberry shortcake popsicle was so annoying because it had perfect pink and red and white dots all over it. and it had 50, probably 50 dots on one side. and i would think, what is this child rambling on about? why is she fixated with the dots? and then i realize, oh, she was hungry, she wanted to know what it taste didn't like and not what it looked like, but what it looked like was the only thing she had access to and so in that experience i was really able to get into this child's mind. but of course i had not been able to revisit these really troubling memories for a long time. so the longer i did that, the more damaged i felt and i went into therapy for her beauty years before i could start to write my book, i needed to understand the depths of the love and longing and fear that she struggles with and buried for so long. and when i really had trouble accessing that voice for years, i did what i found helped me. it was completely by accident. i was really short on time. i was making partner. i was hundred hours a week. my only free time from client calls and emails was the subway. i had very limited reception and one day i looked down on my phone and i'm like, i have so many emails to do. i have this book to write and i can't it i'm just stuck on this train. and then i saw the notes app, so i opened it up and i started writing and i used to commute to and from school every

Transcripts For CSPAN First Ladies Influence Image 20130921

>> next, first lady's influence taft.focuses on helen later, chinese foreign affairs minister talks about the relationship between america and china. >> helen taft was more ambitious about getting to the white house than her husband, william howard taft, and was willing to get personally involved in politics to get him elected. she overcame a serious illness to directly manage the white house. invited top classical musicians to perform there. helen taft also has one of the most visible legacies of all first ladies. washington d.c.'s famous japanese cherry tree. bring tens of thousands of visitors to washington every year. good evening and welcome to "first ladies." the life of helen taft. her husband served in the white house until 1913. here to speak about her life and legacy is her biographer. the biography of her is "helen taft, our musical first lady. you open the book by making the case that she is the most obscure of 20th century first ladies. why do you think she deserves better than being obscure? >> she did things that were very constructive. the cherry trees, bringing the classical music and musicians to the white house, and, generally, trying to make washington the cultural center of the nation. that was her ambition. it did not work out because of medical reasons. she had an agenda that would have made her rank with eleanor roosevelt or lady johnson in terms of transforming washington if things had gone the other way. >> she had an agenda to get her husband to the white house. >> the story is that she decided when she visited the white house, "hey, i want to do that as well." there are a lot of women who wanted to have their husbands be presidents. sometimes, she is portrayed as a cross between mommy dearest and lady may have, which is not the case. she was a much more constructive influence. >> helen taft has an interesting story. many of you in the audience will be hearing it for the first time tonight. you can be involved in our conversation in a lot of ways. send us a comment on facebook. we already have a robust discussion starting there. you can also send us a tweet, #firstladies. i want to hear this story. how did she get to the white house at age 16? >> her father in cincinnati was friends with rutherford b. hayes and lucy hayes and they went to the white house. she went only once but had not yet made her debut and could not yet participate in social activity, but she was there. president hayes said it was wonderful to have them there. in the past family lore, she was supposed to have said, i will come back. it is not clear that is really what she said, but like many people, i want to marry a man who may become president. >> she came from a political family. >> yes. her father was a friend of benjamin, and involved in politics on her mother's side. she was quite the intellectual. she was reading darwin and had the ability to play the piano, which she studied seriously. i wish there were recordings, and there does not seem to be. in cincinnati, a very culturally rich city in those days. they had seven hills. they thought of themselves as the rome. >> she was from a political family and the matter how much getting to the white house, how did she choose taft as her mate? >> they knew of each other in a small community. it was after he had gone to yell and come back for cincinnati law school that their lives again to intersect and they began to court. she was in her mid-20's, late for marrying in those days, and he was almost 29 by the time he gets married. they started going out to some of the beer halls in cincinnati and gradually fell in love. he was much more smitten with her originally then she was with him. but he proposed, she rejected him, a standard thing in those days. the woman never excepted the proposal right off. they had a rather lengthy courtship i our standards, which sometimes last all weekend. in those days, she made him wait a while, then got married in june 1886. >> where did she go to college? >> she studied a little bit at the university of cincinnati, but almost was self educated. took courses but did not ever get a degree. did not have a degree like her husband did. >> how common was it for women to go to beer halls in those days? >> it was not a thing. with its german community and stuff like that, it was where young people went. young people in the 80's had the same impulses they have today. that is where people went. they did not date quite the way they would later in the 20th century. >> william howard taft was not intending a career in politics when he proposed. >> he wanted to be a lawyer and get to the supreme court. he would later say, like any good politician, he had his bull turned upward when offices were falling in his lap. he definitely wanted to be chief justice of the united states from the time he learned about the law. >> william howard taft made good on his wish. he is the only president who also served in the role of chief justice of the united states. we will learn more after the white house progresses. how instrumental was helen in moving him in that direction as a politician? >> in the initial stages, she had relatively little influence because he becomes a state judge and then he becomes a solicitor general of the united states and is appointed to the court of appeals in ohio. she watched him do that. the big turning point came in early 1900 when president mckinley called him to come to washington and offers him a chance to go and establish a civilian government in the philippines. she says, take it. she says, by all means, this would give my husband a sphere of power and influence he would not have had any other way. that was the decisive moment in their lives when he was in his mid-40's, to moving to being in politics in a new way. >> we have to quote one from each of the test. to give you a sense of how interested the two of them were in politics, you could tell how much this really reflects their overall attitudes, from helen taft, she writes of her husband, mr. taft was all but impervious to any friendly advice -- we have a 1906 quote from william howard taft. he says, -- >> some of that was for public consumption. i think he pursued a political career with more zest than we sometimes realize. what nellie was saying is that he had a way to get people to push them in her direction he wanted to go. i think she is acknowledging he moved her as much as she moved him. >> a reference to his career and he mentions the two that were in the law. in addition, let's take a look at the political positions that william howard taft held over his lifetime. in 1890 21892, he served as ansolicitor general. he was governor general of the philippines. an important part in that country's development and our relationship with it. in 1904 was the secretary of war. they called the secretary of defense today. president from 1909 to 1913. ilater on, his life switched, think i likebecame the chief justice of the united states. of the early positions, secretary of war, which was most helpful? >> i think the governor general of the philippines made him a national figure. inwhen he goes to theodore roosevelt's cabinet, he presents himself to roosevelt as the logical choice in 19 eight. once roosevelt had said, "i will not run." anot run." he looked over the cabinets to see who might be his successor. eleanor might be too old, but there was will taft from ohio, a state that really mattered to republicans in those years, and he became the logic of the situation. >> very briefly, why does the united states have the ability to appoint a governor general of the philippines? >> as the result of the spanish- american war in the treaty of paris in 1898 december, spain aparis in 1898 december, spain ceded the philippines to the united states and they became the possessor and would remain so until 1946. in>> we have been taking you toa historic sites associated with herfirst ladies and their lives. we will be taking you to the william howard taft nationalis just asites in cincinnati. we hope those of you interested inin this series will visit some of the places we are showing you. up next, we will meet the super intendant of the site and he will tell us more about the time spent in the philippines by the taft. >> he got a chance to be the chairman of the philippine commission, and she jumped at the chance to encourage him to take the job. they took the family to the philippines. \she had a chance to travel around the world and also had a chance to introduce her children to this travel. she learned different languages. before she and the children got there, taft -- andmrs. taft liked to have dinners and incorporate aphilippines people. these are programs from the different rank that were there. you a youpeople loved william howard taft and his family. athey treated him just like inequals. mrs. taft invited them toas adinners. whatthey attended a lot of the youcelebrations. she liked to see the band play. you areentertainment was a big part of the things she did over there when in part of the philippines. this is where we keep more valuable artifacts as well as a a anon display.a a aas we come in, we see mrs.in a intaft collected a lot of andphilippines items. this is a storage chest theyare abought over there. youit was one of the items they were able to pick up while arewere able to pick up while youthere. some photographs from ladies in the philippines. ahey took some formal isphotographs here. they wrote inscriptions and gave athem to mrs. taft.a youthis is from december 22, you1983, philippines. those illustrate the admiration youthe philippine people had for herthe taft family, especially mrs. taft, as she worked to make hermrs. taft, as she worked to make them feel integrated in the greater society, make them feel you willequal to the other people, invited them to parties, put on youinvited them to parties, put on andmusicals and those types of things, helped with their athings, helped with their education. they really loved the taft's. awe still get people coming from andthe philippines and still youhave the connection from the taft family and things they did while there. >> joining the onset, a firstyou alady scholar. jane cook, how important was the in time in the philippines to the anddevelopment of helen taft in adevelopment of helen taft in youher role as first lady aechoplex very important to her anddevelopment.her you knowwhen she returned to theyou andunited states, she met ayou and i andmilitary wife in the army youmilitary wife in the army towho had known her in the philippines. she says, you were a clean in philippines. here, you are a nobody. i do not think helen ever thought of herself as a nobody. when in the philippines, she was not a queen. she served her husband very well by doing those things. >> how unusual was it -- in the piece, we heard she treated the philippines equal. we were in their country. today, we would think, why would she not? >> the army drew the color line, which meant, they did not associate with philippines. for them to shake hands with the philippines and dance with them was seen as quite radical. there were elements in the military that were not thrilled with what taft was doing. he would not have been able to do this in the united states at the same time. the philippines count in part for his and during popularity. they wanted us out as soon as possible. >> on twitter, they want to know more about what they thought about the philippine people and their culture when they lived there and how did it shape their view of the population as a whole. >> it was something she, by reaching out to them, she could see the benefit of bringing the cultures together. she was using her executive social skills and management skills, she would go out horseback riding and taft ordered a band for the filipino people. they would go to a big open space and have concerts. this was really something that meant a lot to her. when she wears the filipino formal gown, she is embracing the culture. >> she started in the spring -- what is a -- >> a space where, on sundays, aristocracy would gather with carriages and go around and have it was the social setting for high society in the philippines. she wanted this to be a place in washington to do that. it was very popular for the first couple of times. after the stroke, she could not personally manage it, but it was one of those false starts that characterizes her career. >> those of you watching us along the way know our goal this year is to teach you more, help you learn about each of the americas first ladies. in the series throughout this year, 20th-century ladies. earlier in the year, we did the first ladies beginning with martha washington. our goal goal is to present the biography of them to help you understand more about the president's administration and also about our country and how it changed and how the role of women changed. there is a lot to talk about. we will give you the telephone number so you can join into the conversation. -- we will love having your calls and questions. they have been a hallmark of the program. also, we developed a website for this series. at each week, there is one special item attached to the first lady we do not talk about during the program. today, if you go to the site, you will learn more about a chair she really cherished that she acquired in the philippines. back from the philippines, talk to me about a very important relationship, maybe the most important other than william howard taft with nellie, and that is the relationship with theodore roosevelt. >> will taft and t.r. know each other in the early 1890's. almost in the beginning, there was not still the same rapport between edith and nellie. nellie would say later she did not like edith roosevelt. there was a competition between them through the 1890's. she said, i wish i knew more about what exactly happened, but they struck odds when they started out. you had these two men who were very close, but their intimate families, not so much. there was not a strong underpinning of the male relationship once the two women were in close proximity. it had something to do with cincinnati versus new york, with edith roosevelt coming from an aristocratic family. helen taft wanting to be upwardly mobile. >> we learned that mrs. roosevelt had regular sessions with all the cabinet wise, which required attendance. what was the effect of those on helen taft and her own thinking about how she might approach the job as first ladies? >> they had weekly meetings in the white house library once a week. helen did attend. i think she thought they were too gossipy or the topic of conversation just aboard her and was not something she really enjoyed. she made it known to the press that she would not be continuing them because they had not been successful. that was quite a slam to edith to say that publicly. she could have been more genteel on how she transitioned. >> if you were with somebody who is not your husband, you heard from the white house that you better stop your there was a certain amount of gossiping that helen taft was not as hoity- toity as edith roosevelt. that was another source of tension. helen taft wanted to set a standard. edith wanted a higher moral standard. caller: hello. i wanted to know if you are familiar with the miniseries that aired in 1979. i want to ask mr. gold, if you are familiar -- that was really my first awareness of mrs. taft. was that an accurate depiction of her? i thank you. >> i think it was generally accurate. it had some fictional elements in it. i do not think most historians regard it as something you should take to the bank and be very reliable. it was dramatized for television purposes. it is a useful source, but use it with caution. >> theodore roosevelt asked him to be his secretary of war. how does that affect them? >> taft and nellie both loved to travel. he was on the road constantly. he became a troubleshooter diplomatically for t.r.. when he would go off hunting, he would say he left taft on the lid in washington, but he and mrs. taft traveled a lot, a story that illustrates her ambiguity about this, when she was traveling and verily garish very nearly missed the train and said, "you have got to help me out. i am mrs. william howard taft," no response. "i am traveling with alex roosevelt," instantaneously, they got her baggage and got her on the train. >> it had to be painful given the friction between the two. how common would it have been for senior public officials to see that much of the world? was there a lot of traveling going on in that time? >> at this point, with trains and steamships, yes, it was more common. secretary of war was but he was also called secretary of peace in the newspapers. he was really more of a peacemaker than he was focusing so much on dissent. there is a really great story about his time as secretary of war when helen is given a tapestry and she really wants to keep it. taft says, legally, we need to give it back to the smithsonian. she said, "i am a private citizen." she takes it to roosevelt and wants it that badly. roosevelt says, you are a private it is in. that shows the difference between taft and roosevelt. taft very much wanted to honor the law and roosevelt would push the envelope a little bit. that is a good way to illustrate the difference between them. >> that became a fundamental difference between them and the way they view the presidency. roosevelt said if it was not forbidden, we can do it. taft said it had to be explicitly allowed before we can do it. the two views of the presidency were very different that they had. >> a real study in leadership. on to facebook, holly wants to know how mrs. taft got the nickname, nellie. >> good question. a number of brothers and sisters. it was a family name. her husband refers to her as his dearest nellie. >> did she call him will or mr. taft? >> will. once people knew him well, he was called will. he was not bill or something like that. almost nobody called theodore "teddy" who knew him well. >> hello. what is your question? caller: i love this show so much. i know the president in order. two questions. of the more modern first ladies of the 20th century, who were the more noteworthy after, abigail and dolly, and were any of the first ladies in the 20th century noteworthy, too? my second question is, what was the inspiration for the cherry tree? thank you. >> the first question is easy. eleanor roosevelt by far became a delegate to the united nations so in the post first lady career, she and lady bird johnson, there are others, but those would be two. >> we will show video of it for later on. next is a call from leroy in kentucky. hello. caller: great program. i enjoyed this so much. i was looking forward to it last week. i did not get to watch it. i have got a question for ms. cook. were the taft family christian people, born-again christians? did they know jesus and study the bible? >> what was the religion and how important was it? >> she grew up in an episcopal church. he was a unitarian. at that time, the difference was mostly about the trinity or not the trinity. unitarians did not embrace the trinity. there is a story i read of a minister in the more traditional tradition who went over to the white house and talked to taft and he came away feeling confident in his traditional religious the leaf. it was important to them. they were not evangelical in that tradition. it was definitely something that targeted that. >> taft was to be president of el in 1900 and decided not to do it. he wrote his brother a sentence that if it had come out at the time, he would never have been president. he said he does not believe in the divinity of jesus christ. it never became known. in a campaign of 1980, he was attacked for being unitarian and having been friendly to the catholics in the philippines. t.r. and taft were cautious about how they handled their religious views. >> let me move on to calvin in georgia. i apologize, somerville, alabama. caller: i was going to ask you about the connection taft had with other first ladies that came from ohio, especially lucy hayes. >> we talked a little bit about that earlier. they were very friendly with the hayes family and they did entertain her at the white house. she did spend some time. later on she was there almost every weekend. that was way overdrawn. i think she was only there, according today's diary, once. >> she makes the decision she will not run for reelection and has the opportunity to anoint his successor. how does it become william howard taft? >> it is quite a complex issue, which i will try to nail down in a couple of sentences. he will outlive taft. he is also a corporate lawyer, you wanted. he looked over the republican party, who was the most sympathetic available candidate, and here was will taft from ohio, secretary of war, well known because of the philippines, interested in the position so roosevelt begins to convince himself he and taft agree on more than they in fact agreed on. this kind of courtship where both invest each other with the qualities they want to have. later on, they find out they had somewhat deluded themselves. roosevelt becomes a staunch backer of taft. >> we have many biographers that talk about helen taft's very serious lobbying of theodore roosevelt to select her husband and because of his known attitudes about politics and the desire for the supreme court role, may be it indicated he was a bit more hesitant. "mr. taft was such a poor politician. i urged him to display a little bit more enthusiasm on his own account." she is working both sides. how influential was she? >> think about it. if your wife thinks you can be president, that is a big boost that she has that confidence in you. she did meet with theodore roosevelt on two occasions to talk about this. he wanted to offer taft a position on the supreme court. he wants to remain as your secretary of war. roosevelt did not see the passion in taft. there are other men who want this. you need to be more aggressive. he did some campaigning for congressional candidates in 1906 to prove that he could campaign. >> does she meet personally with theodore roosevelt to make the case? >> taft is out on the road and she does have a luncheon with the president and he says, go by one of the windows and chat for a while. taft and tr both believed that she had misinterpreted what he was trying to say. you need to be more aggressive. he was not threatening to support governor hughes. he did not like charles evans hughes. helen was so sensitive to any variation that she interpreted this warning as a threat that he might support the soon-to-be governor of new york. >> what was the election like? >> they held on to the house and senate. they suffered some losses. basically, taft came out of it as the front-runner. >> how much did he win by? >> in the general election? he beat william jennings bryant 361 -- i forget offhand. it was a pretty decisive victory. it was big enough for all practical purposes. bryant carried the south. taft did very well. >> there are several parts of the story, things did not often break very well for her. one of those was inauguration day. there was a blizzard. it made the ceremony go indoors. we have a video about the inauguration. >> march 4, 1909, mrs. taft got to realize her dream that she became the first first lady to ride back from the capitol to the white house with her husband. these are some of the souvenirs from the inauguration. these are a couple of programs from the inauguration ceremony. a little dance card from the inaugural ball. here is an invitation to the inaugural ball that would have gone out to different folks. it would come along with tickets and the place for you to park. we have quite a few of these things in our collection. this is a bible that was used for swearing in of william howard taft when he was inaugurated in 1909. it was also used when he took the oath of office of chief justice. this is an interesting artifact as it represents the culmination of those two high points in his career. the inauguration was the realization of her biggest dreams. she pushed her husband through a lot of different positions and even though there was a blizzard, a snowstorm, the ceremonies had to be pushed into the capitol building, this was one of the biggest days in her life. >> what are some of the stories you would like to tell the public about inauguration day? >> theodore roosevelt said, i knew it would be a cold day when i went out. she went back to the white house it was the night before that was significant for the roosevelt and taft relationship. tr had invited the tafts to spend the night. it was a very awkward evening. taft, four years later, he said to his friend, you were there for that funeral in 1909 and we do not want to do that again. there was a great deal of tension between the roosevelts and the tafts the day before he was inaugurated. one of our viewers on facebook says, i detect a smug look on her face in that picture. what do we know about her emotions? she made this decision to get into the car. >> "i had a secret elation in doing something that no other woman had done." this was her proudest moment, riding in that car. being by her husband's side. she set a precedent. first ladies who followed her have done that since. she did have a fashion emergency the night before. her hat caught on fire. >> that was the high point of her time as first lady. it was almost all downhill after that. >> she had a very busy two months and we will learn about her approach to the white house. about her transition with edith roosevelt, that contributed to the management of the one family moving out and the other family moving in. the oil and water of these two women. what contributed to the friction between them? >> there was no mechanism for the transition in those days. helen was eager to get started. she talked about changing who the footmen would be at the white house door. edith had a gentleman who was white to greet people. helen wanted african-americans. she wanted to change the furniture. she had changes she wanted to make right away. let's get started. edith, thinking, i will be first lady until march 3, said, not so fast. wait a while. there began to be, you need to take over. the roosevelt people said, wait a minute, what is going on? what about the appointments being made? the friendship began to erode. it started to erode when taft wrote tr a letter saying, you and my brother charlie are responsible for making the president. charles was a newspaper owner and tr was infuriated by that statement. taft writes a thank you note. >> in the parlance of today, edith roosevelt and helen taft were not bff's. >> i have been watching the series from the beginning. i have a question i wanted to ask. i am a little embarrassed to ask. where are they buried? they are not just information on paper and books and old magazines. i would like to know their resting places. >> we will tell you right now. >> arlington national cemetery. she is the first first lady to be buried there. >> the only other is jacqueline kennedy. >> i want to spend a little bit more time understanding the personality and what she brought to the role of the white house. you mentioned earlier that she was very intellectual and that even though she did not go to college, she was self-educated. how important was this in shaping the role of first lady. >> she wanted to make washington the cultural center of the united states. this made people in new york very uneasy. there were some newspaper columns saying, what do you want to do? washington did not have a symphony orchestra, did not have an opera. she wanted to have the city embody american values. that was partly what it was about, making the beautification of the city with the cherry trees. that was all part of her vision of what washington could be. she hit the ground running and she also started going to see congress in visiting the supreme court, advising taft on the cabinet. >> one of the biographers that i read described her as outspoken, abrupt, and determined. >> she could be quite blunt. when she was a young teenager visiting the white house and saw the magic of it and had the idea that she could one day be there, she felt she had the skills to do it. she created these groups in cincinnati and they would have book discussions. she was determined to bring what she had at her skill set and use it to bring people together socially in washington. >> she had been president of the cincinnati symphony. she had run an orchestra, hiring the conductors in the 1890s. she had executive qualities. when taft proposed somebody for the cabinet, she said to him, he is quite impossible, i cannot imagine why you ever suggested him. that was the end of that candidate. >> i have some questions. can you tell us what helen taft's thoughts were on segregation? what did she feel about black men being able to vote and not her being able to vote? >> a very timely question. that is the next thing on my list. some people have suggested that she disdained racism, as evidenced by her time in the philippines. would you agree with that characterization? >> she seemed open. it is hard for me to know precisely what she thought about segregation. through her actions, she brought african-americans in as employees at the white house. that is the best testimony that we have. she also -- >> as servants? >> that is true. she uses the language of the day. she was a woman of her time period. when it comes to suffrage questions for women, she was not sure that america was quite ready for women to vote because they were not politically active. they were not public minded enough. >> using the language of the day, on edith roosevelt, we referenced your scholarship on the fact that edith roosevelt used racist terms about african- americans. we have a lot of helen taft's writings. >> i did not find the same use of words, some of the other unfortunate things that edith roosevelt said. they did not go as far as woodrow wilson in instituting it in the government, but taft hoped to develop the republican party in the south. helen taft was not a crusader for racial justice, but she was not a bigot either. edith roosevelt was further out on the edge. >> they also grew up post-civil war. >> edith and helen were born in the same year, 1861. >> jennifer wants to go back to that overnight stay. was it a preview of today's outgoing president hosting the incoming president for coffee on the day of? >> not so much. if it was an initiative that tr started, it flopped. the tradition of the transition would evolve in the 20th century. we cannot look at tr and taft as any helpful precedent. >> earlier you referenced she was more modern and her approach to things like enjoying alcohol and playing cards. we have a photograph of her at the card table. she smoked, she drank, and she played cards. how much did that connect her with the public at large? >> she played bridge for money and she would win $10 or so. if you put it into today's currency, she was winning about $200 or $300 in purchasing power. if that had come out that she was playing cards, it would have been another political difficulty. >> what would helen like to drink? taft would have said, anything with alcohol in it. >> did edith roosevelt drink alcohol? >> her father was an alcoholic. alcoholism runs through the roosevelt family. fdr and tr were the only two that really escaped the effects of alcoholism entirely. edith roosevelt was not thrilled with the idea of champagne and other things that helen taft liked very much each day. >> colleen is in ohio. what is your question? >> my great uncle used to be the personal secretary of president taft. they became really good friends. >> which was your relative? >> charles was his personal secretary. >> he was the last and most efficient secretary. his papers are at yale. >> we will have more and more connections. thank you for your call. >> can you hear me? i wanted to ask, helen was such a vibrant first lady. i wanted to know what is her transition from being a first lady to being kind of a private figure in terms of being married to a supreme court justice. how did that work for her? >> she had eight years of transition. taft became a professor of constitutional law at yale. on those days, you could get on a train and go to new york, go to the theater, have a nice meal and get back in time for dinner at night. she enjoyed that part of it after the pressures of the white house. of course, they went back to washington and the role of the chief justice was very much less social than had been the president. they also differed over prohibition. chief justice taft wanted it enforced and mrs. taft, not so much. >> he was a very large man. >> 350 pounds. he had neglected his health. he had not been to a dentist in a couple of decades. there were many stories about his weight. >> a lot of jokes were going around at the time. a lot of opportunity for commentary and satire. >> how did mrs. taft feel about his weight? >> this was the source of some marital tension. there was a story of him at a cabinet meeting and they had a bowl of fruit and he picked one off until the bowl was completely empty. he did not find the presidency very enjoyable. >> the white house needed an extra large bathtub to accommodate the president. >> that they had to put it in and it happened on the inauguration is one of those stories -- it was not done in the way they talked about. >> he was a big baby. when he was seven weeks old, his mother could not put nursery gowns on him that had belts. >> but he was a very good dancer, far better than tr. taft was very light on his feet. >> what was her relationship like with the press? >> she seemed to have a good relationship with the press. this is exactly the position i think my husband should have. one of the reporters commented that she would be an intellectual, cultural, all in one package. what a great opportunity for america to have helen in the white house. >> the only time edith was quoted was when there was a performance of "hansel and gretel." helen taft was quite willing to share her opinions on lots of issues with the press. she did not give interviews. she did not speak out on every issue, but if they asked, she got out and about. >> the american public was wildly enthusiastic about the young roosevelt family. what did the public think about the tafts? >> they were older when they came to the white house. robert was already at yale, soon to be at harvard law school. her daughter was at bryn mawr. charles was at the taft school that taft's brother ran in connecticut. >> we promised you more about the cherry blossoms. >> when helen taft became first lady, she had the cherry trees planted around the tidal basin. the tidal basin was a mess. there was a speedway. there was nothing to draw people or to make it a beautiful place for people to gather and enjoy nature. helen taft wanted to change that. one of the first things she did when she became first lady was to ask for trees to be planted. they were requested from nurseries in pennsylvania. the japanese heard about her interest and they decided to give 2000 trees to the united states from the city of tokyo to the city of washington as a gift honoring the american support of japan. they arrived in january of 1910 infested with bugs. president taft made the decision that they would have to be burned. the japanese were very accommodating and understanding and sent 3000 trees, which arrived in 1912. this is the north section of the tidal basin. many of the original trees had been planted. the older ones have gnarly trunks and overarching branches. this is where helen taft would have planted the first cherry blossom tree. the cherry blossom trees would not be here if it were not for helen taft. it was due to her that the trees are here today. >> permanently transforming the capital city. what else do we need to know about this story? tr had been more projapanese figuring there was no way to stop them in asia. so this was i think a gesture by the japanese government to make nice with taft. but it turned out to be one of the great beautify indication moves of the 20th century. and taffed said to his daughter your mother's work with the cherry trees are coming to blossom. >> it was a busy time in american history. here are a couple of important things. much of his presidency seemed to be a debate about tariffs. and the tariff act passed in 1909. the 16th amendment came into being in the taft administration. for those of you who don't know that's what brought us the income tax. two more states were admitted to the union new mexico and arizona. helen taft's role in all of that. how long was it after the inauguration you referenced a few times that she had a stroke? > may 17, they went out to take a cruise on the presidential yacht and one of the cabinet members noticed that there was something wrong with mrs. taft and they realized that she had had some kind of seizure and they turned around and took the residential vessel back. decpwhrf that transformed the presidency in their lives. >> at the time they didn't know what a stroke was. how impaired was she and for how long? > she had some temporary paralysis. >> you couldn't understand her because she lost that arctic cue lation and it took a long time for that to come back and i don't know if she was ever fully the same. but the nerves earlier that morning she had a stroke, her son had surgery. her youngest charles had surgery. adenoid removed and so she was a nervous wreck that particular day. robert taft just did it so bright that they didn't have to worry about him but she sent charlie to prep school she said i'll never see him again go back as a son. seeing her go through this was a trauma for her. the nice thing what the president did was there's stories of him sitting on a couch with helen saying save thee, darling, save thee. let's try to save thee again. he was running a rehab in the white house for his wife. was he able to do his duties as fully as he should have? >> i think he carried forward the duties of the white house. but what is striking to me is the emotional stress that it must have been because any moment he could have had another stroke she feels having in may 19, 1911. but the concentration and the distraction of knowing that your wife is upstairs vocally mpaired and suffering, i think it's an element of the taft presidency that even in the book i wrote about the taft presidency, i don't think i gave it enough importance. >> comes at a critical time in the presidency when they are debating the tariff act and he loses her input to him on the political ramifications as it goes this way or that way. this was a highly stressful time for him and for her. >> he relied on her political advice. >> he really had no other close friends because t.r. had been the other close friend. but none of the brothers were good at giving him advice. no structure in the white house. he had no other friends to confide with. he was the most intimate advisor and in an afternoon she's gone in terms of giving him advice. >> not a politician to boot. >> roosevelt left him in a tough position. he delayed the tariff until it was dumped into taft's lap. so it wasn't a profile in courage for t.r. >> you're on the air? >> hi there. >> you can tell more about the likes and dislikes of theater and music. a cultural change of trying to pgrain everything. some of the luminaries she kind of favored and wanted to bring into the white house, either actors or writers or musicians, i would like to get a better picture. name drop, if you would, please. >> in the first book, our musical first lady, you list the performers she brought to washington. >> charles coburn, later a character actor in the 1950s. he took shakespeare around and had performances of shakespeare on the white house lawn. edith roosevelt did a little bit of that. but these were full blown production of the plays and she had artist like ogof samerov. the kind the fbi juries in the 1960s. and bloomfield biseler, the great female pianists, the who's who of classical music moved through the white house n the last four years. >> did it have cultural or political impact on society? >> i think it was more cultural. i thought she didn't see this as sort of moving the poll numbers. it was what the first lady ought to do bring the finest music to the white house. and i think generally that's what cultural aspects of the white house do. >> if she wanted washington to be the social representative city of the land. and in it, you know, we have records. we have video and audio of and photographs of jackie kennedy's concerts that she had. but we don't have that with owen taft. so we've got the visual tangible cherry trees. but we don't have the -- there's just the technology wasn't developed enough to have the film that we have now with audio to know what those concerts were like in the white house. >> president taft loved to listen to records. they loved to play them at night and he enjoyed going to the musical performances. one wishes we had 30 seconds of helen taft playing the piano would be, i'd certainly listen. >> you referenced a few times, archie button. who is he? >> the president had a military aide in those days. this was archibald willing hamm butt, b-u-t-t. the military aide. he's famous. he wrote his sisters letters. there are three volumes of the letters, one from the roosevelt years, two from the taft years. he was a great gossip. he recorded everything anybody said. some of it may be right, some may be wrong. it's a source the historians used for years. the archie butt, taft and roosevelt. the intimate levels of archie butt. >> the amazing story is how did he die? >> on the titanic. >> great loss for taft. >> it crushed taft. archie started off pro t.r. and moved over to taft. e created an emotional dependence on archie. he was with taft most of the time. so when he went off to europe, he -- he didn't want to be around when taft and roosevelt had their battle. so he went off and made his way back in april of 1912. and supposedly was quite heroic on the titanic making sure he got in at the cost of his own life. despite the illness -- we'll learn more about it in the first video. >> mrs. taft enjoyed being the first lady. she suffered a stroke in 1909 and wasn't able to attend to all of those things. so it was disappointing. in june of 1911, they were able to celebrate the 25th anniversary there. a big party there with the white house open. thousands of guests came in. they had music and they received tons of silver. just embarrassing amounts of silver. some expensive from all types of not just their friends, from corporations, from all types of people. and we have some of that silver here. that they would have been presented. and it was some things very small and they would have little inscriptions on them. this one just says the taft inscription here. to some things that are like we have, very large silver tray. that would have the dates of 1886 to 1911 or just as simple as having a "t" inscribed in them. some of the pieces were large which had the inscription, you can see 1886 to 1911. and william howard taft and hiram taft. in addition to the gifts of silver, many telegrams were sent to the taft family from all over the world. this is the momento that show cases all of those telegrams. they kept those, collected those, and some -- here's some from washington, d.c., buffalo, new york. let's see. here we have -- south orange, ew jersey, pittsburgh. chicago. this one says permit me to join with your friends in the hope of today's great happiness that you and your family will be exceeded by the happiness of your 50th anniversary. so this from chicago was looking forward to 25 more years. this is recognition of all of the people who appreciated the president and mrs. taft by the gifts, the telegrams, and it was just a strengthening affair for mrs. taft as she moved through her years in the white house. > well, this tweet is a nice way to come out of that asking how did helen's stroke impact the marriage of the tafts? we have them celebrating their anniversary. you talked about how much he attended to her personally. what are they going to do? >> i think it's strength and a powerful union they established because he became president as care giver and doted on her and worried about her and was constantly solicitous about her. so they were a very devoted couple to begin with. so i think alas and sadly, they would have passed on it if they could have. but it did bring them closer together. the letters he wrote to her, he wrote to her every day when she was away and these were handwritten, six, seven, eight-page letters. we get to woodrow wilson writing letters for another reason. but here was taft at the end of a very busy day sitting down and writing 2,000 to 3,000 words to his wife. that's devotion. >> she was in massachusetts recovering at a seaside house. >> she couldn't be in washington in the summer without air conditioning in those days. that's why the british made washington the hardship post. but he would dictate some letters and she said please, handwrite them. and so he did that too. >> watching in massachusetts. speaking of massachusetts, what is your question? >> good evening. we live two towns over from the vacation -- >> beverly. >> beverly, mass. what they call the gold coast. my grandmother relived stories of seeing taft in downtown beverly heading over to play golf at my open yeah country club in hamilton and returned for a couple of summers while in the white house. i wanted to say i enjoy your show and pass that information alone. >> we have a photograph of the place she would recuperate in beverly, massachusetts. on her influence, even with her stroke, a comment from the chief usher, ike hoover at the white house observing her in action in washington. he wrote, no uncommon thing to see her take part in political and official conferences, speaker cannon of the house with the president and mrs. taft. she attended the private conferences. she would walk in on private caucuses, unheralded, unannounced. >> it was interesting brought up in 1964, her daughter wrote a letter to "time" magazine said this is much overdrawn, my mother after the stroke couldn't do that anymore. ike hoover has a very well known memoir in the white house. historians regard him with deep skepticism. he didn't like ellen taft. he was not fan of hers. so take it for what it says. >> the view of her own writings and other people's observations on how deeply she was involved and on policy making, tells us what? >> in looking at her memoir, she downplays the role. but it seems to me she had more of an advanced role than a lot of first ladies up to that point. but not nearly as advanced as we are today. she was washington centric in her outlook as first lady. she was not going out and about around the country making stops in different parts of the country. she might have travelled with him had she not had that stroke. that might have been the influence that we're missing on his presidency. >> so in no sense they were co-president? >> no, no. >>ed the last year when the rift becomes great between theodore roosevelt and taft. and he decides that he might be mounting a challenge to him, how did that all play out for the party and for the two men? >> well, there was a disaster for the republican party that still echoes in its sort of dna. to this day. one reason the republicans compose their differences more than the democrats is because there's this ancestral memory of the trauma they went through in 1912. helen was convinced t.r. was going to run from march 4, 1909. it started developing in a more measured way. in 1911, it was clear that roosevelt was pushed hard to be put into the race. she kept saying i know he's going to do it. i know he was going to do it. when he announced, she said i new he was going it. will said, my dear, i think you've been predicting it for so long, you're happy now that your prediction has come rue. he didn't trust theodore roosevelt one minute. >> he split off, was with the bull moose party. his decision to do that brought wood row wilson into the white house. what were the last months of the taft presidency like? >> well, taft took his defeat with unusual grace. he was not a bad loser. he said -- when the press said do you feel disappointed? he said, look, the american people gave me the gift of the presidency for four years. how many men have had that gift given to them? i would be an ingrate and a loser if i said i was angry at this point. he writes to one of his relatives and friends in cincinnati. you know, you have to punt with the vagaries of democracy, the american people have made their decision. i have to live by it. i can't be angry about it. he went out on a wave of goodwill as someone who showed how democracy should operate. so he was disappointed but not imbittered. that's to his credit over the long haul. >> what mattered most to taft was the law and the rule of law and the people had spoken. so he could accept that more easily than some people. >> christine in boise. you're on the air, hi, christine? >> hi. i was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about her three children and what became of their lives and families? >> well, her oldest son robert ran for the senate. was a successful senator. so was his son and then his son, robert, taft's great grandson was governor of ohio. their daughter went on a phd. she married, had children. the youngest son was the mayor of cincinnati. mr. cincinnati was his nickname. they had their own legacy in politics. >> robert taft becomes mr. republican. and helen, the daughter, becomes the dean at brinmar and is an influential educator. charles taft had a career in cincinnati politics. he tried to move up to be governor. didn't work out. he was probably the most liberal between he and robert taft. and helen was pro suffrage at the time that her mother wasn'tment. president taft becomes pro suffrage because it's a way of enforcing prohibition and his view, he didn't like prohibition, but if the american people wanted it, he wanted it in force. >> we have a list of some of the firsts that mrs. taft brought to the role of the first lady. the first to ride with the president in the inaugural parade. the first to attend a supreme court argument. she was the first to attend a political convention, but not of her husband's party. she went to the democratic convention in 1912. >> yes. they met in baltimore which made it a sort of a road trip for her. she went with democratic women. most of society went over to see the baltimore convention. it lived up to the billing unlike the dull routine political conventions of our time that's drained of all significance. the one that nominated wood row wilson had 46 ballots. it had drama. a resolution was included attacking president taft and he withdrew it because he didn't want to embarrass the first lady while she's sitting in the gallery. >> she was the only first lady to attend the opposite political party. >> imagine that happening today, can you? >> no. >> among the firsts -- the first to donate her inaugural gown to the smithsonian and started that practice which is the most popular exhibit. she brought automobiles to the white house. in fact, in a commercial which we don't have time to tell that story, the first first lady to publish her memoirs and the first first lady along with her husband to be buried in arlington cemetery. one of the viewers tweeted to us that they have been flowing along in our book about first ladies. i want to take a second to tell you about it. we're doing this series in partnership with the white house historical association. they have published a book called the first ladies that contains a biography of each one of the first ladies. we're making it available at cost, 12:95 on our website. the one i referenced earlier. there's a way to buy this book. you can read along with it and learn more about each of the first ladies as we work our way through the series. if you're interested, that's a resource available to you. we have a video about the inaugural gowns. let's watch that, next. >> smithsonian has very few pieces that belong to helen taft. but the piece that we do have is the most significant -- one of the most significant pieces in the first ladies' collection. going to open it up for you. helen taft was a woman of firsts. she was a woman of combination. and this to me symbolizes all of that. this is helen taft inaugural gown. she had the dress embroidered in the philippines to wear to the inaugural ball. the nomination was very important to helen taft. she saw it as her husband coming into the white house and herself coming into the white house. it was a very ceremonious occasion for her. she marked this occasion, her entry into the white house and added it as a mark of first ladies on the united states when she became the first first lady to donate her inaugural gown to the smithsonian institution. she happeneded to be the first first lady when the founders were putting the collection together. they met helen taft at a lunch commemorating dolly madison. they asked her if she would be interested in the new collection they were putting together. they were trying to acquire something from every first lady. mrs. taft generously offered to lend and donate her inaugural gown to the election. she's the founding patron of the first ladies' collection and she established a tradition that the first ladies would donate their gown to the collection. every first lady after mrs. taft who had an inaugural gown donated it to the smithsonian institution. >> many of you watching tonight have been through that exhibit over time. well, the tafts leave washington. he has the problem that he can't really practice law because he's appointed so many of the judges so he goes to teach at yale. >> coming back to yale, he tells the yale daily news. >> how did he become the chief justice of the united states? >> he played things very carefully for eight years hoping that the republicans would come back in. he was very disappointed when wilson -- heart broken was the case when wilson was re-elected. he had come to hate wilson. wilson and the democrats were reputiated in 1920 and harding becomes president on new year's eve -- sorry, christmas eve. 1920, taft is in marion, ohio and goes to see the hardings and the hardings say, would you like to be on the supreme court? i'll kbrout on the court. he said i could only be chief justice. harding says chief justice douglas white dies. taft was going to make way for a republican anyway. and taft is appointed chief ustice about july 1, 1921. >> and served for how long? >> he serves until his death in early 1930. >> and chief justice william howard taft was responsible for giving the supreme court its own home. until that time, it met in the capitol building. he understood as president how to get that done. he didn't live to see the court work in the supreme court building. but he's the one that got that under way and gave the court its own place in washington, d.c. brian seenbergen ask, did helen taft -- we know the story -- like being first lady more than taft liked being president. but goes on to say what was her role after he became chief justice? what was her life like then? >> pretty much, very quiet. the wives of the justices did not have a public role. they didn't entertain. it was really cloistered in a way that is not the case today. we have chief justices speaking on all sorts of questions. and taft's view was he issued opinions. promoted the law, he helped to get the supreme court building. but that was about it for society as far as the supreme court was concerned. >> big first lady is what she always wanted to do. she didn't have a big ambition about that other than just to live a quiet life. so i think that's why, you know, you don't see that as much. >> bill in tampa, hi, bill, you're on. >> i was channel surfing and came upon your program. wonderful, congratulationses. i'll be tuning in for all of the episodes. >> thank you. >> and your question. >> we love it. ms. cooke, we love american phoenix, keep that works going, thank you. >> thank you, appreciate it. >> she feels a lucky lady. she suffered two strokes and outlived her husband and lived to the ripe old age of 81. how did she spend those years? >> interacting with children and grandchildren, they continue to go to murray bay. haven't talked about his love for murray bay, canada. they had a cabin and grew into a kind of a taft complex. 4e would have made it the summer white house in canada, but the president by tradition could not leave the continental united states in their time in office. if they had been in murray bay, it would have been much happier. >> the political fallout having a summer home in another country. >> yeah, it was just impossible. but he loved murray bay so much. he k0u8d not wait to get there to get away from the heat of washington. >> she's also -- this is not during the chief justice years but after the white house, she did write an autobiography with a ghost writer. the first ones to be published. >> published in 1914 a couple of years after she left the white house. as a matter of fact, if you're really sbrelsed in her life, we have hyperlinked her autobiography on her website. it's in a public domain now. you can read it if you would like to have more of her details. that's on that website. trying to put lots of resources on there for those of you who are interested. >> more about the philippines than the white house. the white house just about the last 15%. but it was unique even though it was ghost written by a writer from a magazine and her daughter, she didn't think it was dignified to write it herself. >> you brought a letter you found on the internet, as a matter of fact, her and her postwhite house years. why did you find this charming or interesting? >> i enjoy collecting the letters of people. i did all of this. but she's writing about the transition taft had been on the national war labor board in world war i. that was coming to an end. we were moving back to new haven. she talks about, then we can go to the summer to murray bay. >> invited back to the white house by eleanor roosevelt in 1940. >> yes. she feels. that's a quiet tradition that first ladies have. elen invited cleveland back to the white house. when she was first lady, thach got invited. they were married the same year, 1886. there's a little lub of first ladies to share and talk about their experiences and to invite a previous first lady back is a nice quiet tradition. >> died on may 22, 1943. and as we said earlier, is the first and only one of two first ladies buried at arlington cemetery. you can see some video there of arlington national cemetery. the taft -- the taft burial place. also we close out here in our final few seconds, i want to go right back to where we started. we have introduced people to helen taft. why should she be remembered among the pantheon of first ladies. >> the cherry trees, the musicianship she bought, the role of making taft president, the role in the split between t.r. and her husband. she was a consequential first lady in a cultural and political and marital sense. and i think she deserves much more from history than she's received. >> and jane, what would you say? >> i would say definitely all of the firsts that she did as first lady. but also that she made it okay for a woman to have an interest in politics. we can look back and see that she was ahead of her time. and to see the first ladies that came after her, more of them had the natural interest as well. >> for our first lady scholars, thank you for helping us to understand more about one of america's most obscure 20th century first ladies. we hope we told the audience about her life and interested them in learning more. thanks for being with us. >> thank you. >> the wilson's love was reflected in letters. she died of kidney disease after being first lady for less an a year and a half through this personal tranl i did and with america on the path to world war i, president ill wilson met edith and fell in love and got married. edith is best known for looking after president wilson when he suffered a stroke during his second term. join us as we get to know both first ladies in the wilson white house, ellen and edith live monday night at 9:00 p.m. astern on c-span and c-span 3. >> we're offering a special edition of the book first ladies of the united states of america. it has a biography and portrait of each first lady and comments on the role of each first lady through history. t's offered for a discounted price. there is a special section on our website. it chronicles life in the executive mansion. you can find out more at c-span.org/first ladies. >> tonight on c-span the american bar association hosting a discussion on the effect race has on the college admissions process. after that chinese foreign affairs minister on u.s. china relations. then a discussion on relidgens impact on race relations in america. >> the subject of whistle blowers is a very important and sensive subject. we as ig's depend on whistle blowers. we value their information. it's very important they feel comfortable coming forward and saying i have information that you need to have. and my identity i'm concerned about potential repricele, you need to protect my identity. we understand that. the statute requires us to extend protections. in practice what we as ig's will depodown is to advise existle blowers of these protections. to the extent you can give us specific information that is more helpful to us than general information. and sometimes in the course of providing specific information in details, it may be that an enl kated and informed person may be able to guess as today identity of the whistle blower. and you need to be aware of that risk. >> more with agriculture department and the role of inspector general sunday night at 8:00 an c-span's q&a. >> next a discussion about race and the college admissions process specifically a supreme court case involving the university of texas and its afir ma i tive action admissions policy. this is from the bar association meeting in san francisco. t's a little more than an hour the council on race in the pipeline is sponsoring this panel. our chair could not be here was so i'm going to be moderating. i also wanted to take a minute to acknowledge robin who just stepped out of the room. she is the executive director of the council and has been for a number of years and as those of you who work in volunteer organizations know that the work is done and the committees are all run by the executive directors and the staff. and she has been such a contributor to our work over the years that i have known her that i just wanted to thank her. she's back in the room. to thank robin for all of her diligence and dedication because she's really had an impact over the years. thank you robin. i wanted to just lay the ground work a little bit for today's panel and go ahead and introduce our speakers. they are each going to speak for a few minutes and then we'll take questions among ourselves and questions from the audience. the idea for today's panel is a discussion of fisher versus texas. ot from the litigation perspective but to ask a more fundamental question which is given fisher's holding and given the decision that is have been issued by the supreme court and various courts of appeals. how should educational institutions respond and react in a way that fosters diversity in the education pipeline? so with that said, let me introduce today's panel. immediately to my right is our first speaker. i tell everyone to turn things off and then don't do it myself. immediate to to my right is professor garcia. the professor is a professor of law. he was professor of law and director of labor employment law program in san diego where he taught for eight years. he's also held academic appointments at the davet school of law. before beginning his teaching he worked as an attorney for public and private sector labor unions in the los angeles area. perhaps as relevant to today he's incoming president of society of american law teachers. and has been a participant in the fisher litigation through various filings. >> carla pratt who is to his right is the associate dean for academic affairs at the penn state law school. professor pratt teaches and writes in the area race and the law. she served as the new jersey deputy attorney general and engaged in private practice in philadelphia. she teaches or has taught constitutional law, federal indian law, race and american law and professional responsibility. and was recently confirmed as an associate justice of the standing lock sue supreme court. >> professor cantor has an appointment in the education and law school at the university of texas. i think that gives her particular insight into fisher obviously coming from u.t. for eight years she served as the assistant secretary for education -- assistant secretary of education for the civil rights division of the u.s. department of education. and the clinton administration where she oversaw a staff of 850 and was in charge of implemented policy for civil rights in the education arena. prior to service as the enforcer, professor cantor worked as for 14 years at the educational director at the mexican defense and educational fund. in that capacity she participated in countless cases and litigation strategy on any number of civil rights matters particularly those that involve educational funding. english language learners and student policies as well as racially hostile environments. with that said i will introduce professor garcia. >> thank you and thank you for being here. thank you to my co-panelist who i'm sure i will learn a lot from especially in the state of texas. i'm from texas originally so it's interesting to be on this panel. i have to emphasize we're not talking about litigation strategies here but rather appropriate to this panel how we talk about the dialogue that fisher versus texas and the debate around affirmative action has created and how we might try to shape that dialogue. 'm here on behalf of salt, the society of american law teachers. we now almost 40 years old. we are the largest independent organization of law teachers in the country. and we have been involved in race conscious remedies and affirmative action issues for that time. we were am cuss council in the baucus case and in the fisher and now in a case i'll be talking about in a moment, a case next term. so what i am here to talk about then is a little be about where we are post fisher, what fisher versus texas is, what it means. what i think the next frontiers might be in this particular debate. then a little bit about the role that i think salt, the aba and the rest of the civil rights community might plail. and then just close briefly with some ideas about where the dialogue and the debate about affirmative action and of course how that might impact the educational pipeline which is the reason why we're here, we're concerned about the race and eth nick diversity in the educational pipeline. so what is fisher versus the university of texas? i'm not going into a great detail about the case itself ut suffice to say it was the most recent statement by the supreme court on the issue of affirmative action in higher ucation and it concerned the application of abigail fisher to the university of texas which at the time in 2008 as fisher was applying for admission to the university, xas was using a hybrid admissions program, a top 10% program that took from the top 10% of school districts in texas and also used holistic review of the kind that the supreme court approved in university of michigan versus gruder. and so when the supreme court took this case as you can imagine, there was a lot of concern about the sturdyness and the longevity of gruder. d to the relief of many, the gruder president was unchanged -- precedent was unchanged, at least not overruled. and we'll talk about in this panel what exactly the fisher case means for affirmative action in higher education going forward, but the doctrine al outcome of the case was that the diversity in higher education remains a compelling interest. but as the supreme court said, the fifth circuit had given too much deference to how the university of texas was going to apply that standard. so they sent the case back to the lower courts to try to make sure that the remedy that the university of texas had chosen was narrowly taylored for the particular interest, the compelling interest in racial diversity and higher education. so again, in terms of where the doctrine stands, it seems to me, and again i would like to ear from my co-panelists and the rest of the audience in terms of the doctrine, it seems like we are still at least where we were before. there is still no major change the use of affirmative action in higher education. so that really i guess leads to the question of what is the public debate or what is the public perception of this case and what is the importance of the public perception in terms of these -- the pipeline into the higher education? and again, i think it's important to remember that each time there is an affirmative action case before the court, there is a dialogue and a counter dialogue about what that actually means. i think it's important to remember that after gruder, those who opposed affirmative action never really acknowledged that it was really a reaffirmation of the policy. so again, i think for the last nine years or so, they had made it seem like ruder was on shakey found dapings. we kept hearing that affirmative action is time limited. it seemed like a good policy for another 25 years and then it would have to sunset. and then as i said, you had a lot of people arguing that the sun was setting. and i think, again, it's important to even given the difficulties that we might face in terms of the next case and fisher when it does return to the court that the scourt had -- supreme court had the possibility of over ruling gruder and saying diversity was not a compelling interest in higher education and it did not. so the decision, again, seems to reaffirm gruder for now. now again, in terms of information and not just to institutions of higher education but also students who are interested in applying into universities or law schools, it's very important to get the message out that there are no major changes in the way that universities should be addressing what they have been doing -- in other words applying gruder as it existed before. the civil rights community i think also has a role to play in this record. i know that there was a lot of concern about gruder as well as the shelby county case. and so the dialogue on that will also -- is also a role that the civil rights community plays in terms of the dialogue. for our own part, the society of american law teachers, we have even before fisher came out, we had been holding a ba to jd pipeline programs to try and make sure that applicants to law schools and institutions knew the lay of the land in terms of what was possible, in terms of diversity and affirmative action. salt is also very active in also tation issues and is very cognizant of changes in acreditation standard that might impact the diversity of the law school student body. and as i said, we've been involved in amikus with the help of probonn no law firms. later this year salt will be introducing a consumer guide to law schools. so again, trying to get information to students who are choosing law school and hopefully getting information about what currently exists in terms of the possibilities for diversity and affirmative action in law schools. o i'll close just by trying to reaffirm a few things. salt will try to press after fisher and obviously into the next supreme court term. we at salt continue to want to stress that educational institutions have a compelling interest and need in racial and eth nick diversity. and we through our affirmative action and equal opportunity committee continue to try to provide resources to institutions mostly law schools, but as as i said, , ing into prelaw programs until we get more guidance from the supreme court that gruder remains the law of the land. and then as i said at the beginning, we have another case oming up on affirmative action . and salt will be filing a brief in that case as well. but that case is not, as i aid, not a referendum on affirmative action but more on the political system and it heartens back to some old cases about the political structure of the state and how it might negatively impact minorities in terms of getting their legislation through. so that is the next case that will be heard in the supreme court and again i'm sure it's going to be a little bit different than fisher but we also want to mike that you are people know that it's not necessarily going to be another referendum on affirmative action. and then finally our role at salt is just to continue to try to advocate for diversity justice and academic excellence. and again, i think we do that through continuing to remind people about the importance of diversity both in the law schools and also in the pipeline into law schools, universities like the university of texas. so thank you. >> thank you professor garcia. dean pratt. >> thank you for inviting me to speak today and i think professor garcia is the optimist on the panel and i'm a bit of a pessimist on the panel. i agree with him wholeheartedly that fisher does not overrule gruder but i have serious concerns as an academic administrator about fisher's view of gruder as precedent. fisher makes it clear that we can still consider race as long as our consideration of race in the admissions process meets strict scrutiny. and fisher gives us a lot of guidance with respect to what that means. fisher for the first time art lates that diversity for diversity's own sake is not compelling interest. that would be unconstitutional balancing. so the only permissible goal is to achieve the educational benefits that are derived from a diverse student body. so as an administrator i have to art late to the court what those benefits are that are deriveed from having a diverse student body. which means i have to also work with my faculty to discern what benefits are deriveed from racial diversity that couldn't be deriveed from non-racial diversity. so if we considered a race neutral approach to diversity economic status, joge fy, gender and other factors outside of race, perhaps we could achieve those educational benefits that flow from diversity without considering race. and so we have to give consideration as educational institutions i think to what exactly is it that racial diversity adds to our educational process. fisher in my opinion deviates from gruder. i think most scholars understood it to permit deaf rans on both the first and second prong of the scruletny test. fisher makes it clear that while it's appropriate to dive some difficult rans, it's not on the second prong of the test. so fisher says some but not complete deafer answer is allowed. diversity is essential to its mission. because the court is only going to give us some, we need to be ready to justify why we're using race and how the consideration of race in our admissions process is essential to our mission. and because there is not going to be any with respect to the narrow tayloring prong it's whether they could achieve sufficient diversity without using race. school rejecting certain add misprocesses is relevant. that tells me i need to give serious thought to whether we need to try a race neutral alternative before we can justify the consideration of race in admissions. i would argue that because i am in central pennsylvania where we have a very difficult time getting a critical mass of any racial minority group that i probable don't need to try a racial neutral alternative because i haven't achieved it under a race conscious plan. but in texas where aurguably you can achieve some racial diversity in a race neutral fashion, there is going to be an inquiry by the courts in terms of ha is the justification for considering race given you can achieve it through the texas 10% plan or some other race neutral means. i think it's interesting to note too that the schools bear the o fisher burden of proof. we bear the burden of proof and those benefits cannot be achieved at a satisfactory level without the consideration of race. in order for compliance i think administrators are going to have to show they gave serious good faith consideration of workable race neutral alternatives and they decided they were insufficient for x reason. and the court made it clear that consideration of race neutral alternatives alone was insufficient. that you have to show that no workable race neutral alternative would produce the benefits of diversity. connecting it to that first prong of the strict scrutiny test. the court made it clear in fisher that color blindness is the preferred approach. if a non-racial approach could promote diversity about as well and at tolerable expense then the university may not consider race. so i think we do have to ascertain also even if we could utilize race neutral measures what is the cost of doing so. so i don't think the court is going to hold us to the standard of having to conduct many imperical tests or studies on each aspect of our admissions process in order to justify the use of race, but i do think the court's moving forward may require universities to demonstrate that the non-racial approach to university admission was not producing the sufficient levels of diversity or that it would not produce sufficient levels of diversity and why those levels of diversity are essential to the education mission think the bar is higher now than it was then in terms of the homework we had to do behind the scenes of educational administrators. again, it is clear the use of race is permissible, but we might have to change a few practices. we might need to define our educational goals. i will try to get my faculty

Transcripts For WMAR News 20130111

outer loop to 70. megan and charley, over to you. it's purnel friday and you -- purple friday and you will be hard-pressed to fiend anyone not wearing that color. but in denver you have to look harder. we sent jamie costello into enemy territory to find the purple pride in the mile high city. >> reporter: good morning. ravens fans made their trek here. marty spent 25 years in baltimore and lives out here in denver now. exe explains the spags -- he explains the passion between the two cities. >> denver is intense the state capitol is lit up in orange. people are walking around in jerseys broncos are a big deal. >> we are here for you. >> found out when we landed we had the e-mail. >> reporter: is this great. >> i am so excited. >> go ray lewis. >> we got our jerseys. >> and we will represent. >> we will be obnoxious fans and wearing purple. >> reporter: and ravens fans will continue to flock into denver today. and later this afternoon, the ravens will arrive. here in denver, jamie costello, good morning maryland. a group from baltimore is getting ready to head there. and they will be excited with the trip. people from b more around town are out in hanover having breakfast with linda so and donuts and linda, you guys are dancing. >> reporter: weil we are at haney's-- we are at haney's corner deli. they are having a mini pep rally free donuts for anyone who comes in. available until 7. free coffee and you get to do it all with tons of ravens fans over here. they brought out the dj for this event. and this is the dj that does all the events for b more around town. >> i am so excited i couldn't sleep and it's to come work. >> go ravens. >> reporter: are you going to denver. >> no i will be watching on tv because i have to work. >> reporter: yeah but he was nice enough to come out this morning. all the fans are going out to denver most of them. and steven you are one of them. come over. so a group of you guys how many are going out? >> i think it's about 15 of us going out we are expecting 80 at the tailgate tomorrow for the game. >> reporter: so you are leaving this morning from the airport? >> flying out around quarter of 9. >> reporter: predictions for the game. >> it's going to be ravens win. we are heading to new england next week. we will see what happens. >> reporter: very excited. now the fact that it could be let's cross our fingers not that it could be ray lewis' last game that's got to be great you are going to be watching that. >> yeah. definitely it was very exciting time in the stadium last week and it's going to be bet they are week. hopefully we can make it down at the end of the game and make it to the bottom and watch them come off the field. >> reporter: this morning before you leave you want to treat the ravens fans who come out right? you are encouraging anyone every one to come out right? >> anyone and every one to come down and we have donuts and coffee and water and hot chocolate whatever you want come down and check it out. >> reporter: so you have a little chant for us this morning? >> yeah. [ music ] ♪ oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh ♪ oh oh oh oh ♪ oh oh oh oh oh oh ♪ oh oh oh oh oh ♪ >> reporter: come on guys don't you want to join the party again haney's corner deli in hanover until 7 this morning free donuts and coffee for everyone. come on out. >> can't wait to see what happens next. that's haney's corner deli in hanover. if you are going to be sporting number 52 and you won't be alone, ray announced his retirement and sales for the jersey has risen 2,000%. his is the number one selling nfl jersey on the website fanatics.com and the second most popular belongs to the man ray lewis will be trying to sack tomorrow number 18, broncos quarterback peyton manning. that is second and then redskins quarterback robert griffin iii behind him. tonight, we want to remind you we are having a special tribute to ray lewis. downtown baltimore is the place to be. the baltimore marriott water front hotel will have a laser show in front of the hotel facing the inner harbor showing for for -- support for the ravens. image is going to be ray lewis doing his famous dance and it's going to take up at least 15 floors of the building and loop continually. that starts at 5:30 and goes until 9:00 tonight. and here at abc2 we are excited for the ravens playoff run. and we want you to join in on that excitement. we are having a special one hour show destination denver. kelly swoope will be live with fans at della rosa's in white mash and jammy costello is live in -- jamie costello is live in denver and charley will be at the ravens zone and that starts tonight at abc2. 5:36. >> background checks limiting magazine signs and banning assault style weapons could be among the recommendations vice president joe biden delivers to the president on tuesday. now all of this is as a result of biden meeting with the nrayesterday and ongoing task force that could be called the meeting maybe a little less cordial. nra released a stinging statement following the sit- down saying it didn't produce ideas as curbing gun violence but instead hacking the second amendment. mr. biden said the one thing has come out of his immediateings is that consensus that background checks need to be strengthened overall. and adding urgency to the debate another school shooting. this one in taft, california war 16-year-old -- where a 16- year-old walked into the school and shot a classmate. police cred ate teacher and staffer with talking that shooter into putting the weapon down before things got worse. the victim is in critical condition. and we are learning that bullying may have been the motive behind the school shooting in california. and you have this scene in portland oregon a. two men armed with rifle taking to the streets and hoping to raise awareness about gun rights. instead it caused a near panic. when officers showed up, there was not much they could do. the pair had concealed carry permits and were not breaking laws. coming up, we have checked around this morning and both taft school and shooting with the nra meeting with vice- president biden is among the top searches and thevice- president will hand his recommendations to the president on tuesday. some could require congressional action. 5:37. every now and then wild animals need help from the humans and that's the case for this deer who wandered out to a frozen pond. we will tell you how rescuers got the big guy on land. the flu outbreak is getting worse and schools are being forced to close their doors because too many kids are sick. we will have the latest details coming up. what can we do with a brand new year, and a room that needs refreshing? we can work with a new collection of carpet that proves durable can be softer than ever. we can get for less and spread that softness even further. turns out, we can do even more than we thought we could. because this is the year of doing. more saving. more doing. that's the power of the home depot. roll out the new year with free whole home basic carpet installation on three rooms or more. i think that story is sad. it has happy ending but i hate watching it a deer is thrown a life loin when it is stuck in the middle of a frozen lake. he tries to stand up but keeps slipping and member of the colorado packs and wildlife service walks out on the thin ice and tries to shoe the -- shoo the deer and than lassos it by the antlers and pulls it ashore. it runs into the woods. >> this may make you feel better. think about how much worse the story could have been and ask how the guy got the rope off the antlers after the deer was to dry land? where was this? >> colorado. >> 44 and 10 is a good reminder to stay off a lakefront during the course or the bay everything is well above freezing. we haven't seen the cold air aloft so stay off bodies water. 48 today. cloudy and it's well on the mild side. late day showers will develop and it stays mild for tonight. 40 degrees. watch out for the fog after midnight and cloudy skies out there. now the showers will wrap up a little after the 5:00 hour. 7-day forecast 48 goes to 60 on saturday. fog for the overnight maybe into saturday morning. and then look how mild it gets on sunday. 67 degrees. we will talk more weather coming up in bit. lauren cook how are the roads>> reporter: we are following a serious crash in carroll county. two people have been flown to shock trauma one with life- threatening injuries. shut down from old liberty road and it's important for you to avoid the area. you will want to stick with route 32 or route 27 as your alternate. more problems on 95 in downtown baltimore. we are dealing with a crash right along the northbound lanes at dundalk avenue. here's a live look at 395. fortunately no problems getting through the fort mchenry tunnel and harbor tunnel will be clear. that's the abc2 timesaver traffic megan and charley over to you. >> telethons charity conseaters few ways people have been raising money for victims of the super storm sandies. >> and breweries are thinking outside the box. we have details on the sandy beer. >> and a cheaper version of the iphone. rumors seem to good to be true and we are learning they were. good morning maryland continues in just a few moments. on this friday morning a hearing is happening today in texas where planned parenthood will ask for an injunction to receive state funding a judge ruled that texas can cut off funding to the organization's family planning programs. a judge will ask a -- request a hearing to exhume the body of a man poisoned weeks after winning the lottery. family members were suspicious about the man's desk. afghan president karzai is speak at george washington university and is expected to talk about his beliefs the u.s. and nato failed to make afghanistan more secure. karzai is meeting with president obama and secretary of state hillary clinton today. it's unclear whether the man accused of opening fire in a colorado movie theater will be arraigned today. lawyers for james holmes say that he is not ready to enter a plea. a judge ruled yesterday that there is enough evidence to put holmes on trial. half of the world's food goes to waste. that's according to a new study out of britain. it says that food is lost in production with insufficient weighs of getting it there or wasted by consumers completely. many people threw away as much as half of what they buy at the store. today we are expected to learn more from the cdc on growing flu epidemic among children there have been 18 deaths reported so far this season. from coast to coast americans are waging a losing battle against the nasty flu strain. doctors overrun with patients are running low on flu shots and tests as the virus continues to spread. more than 180 million vaccine doses has been distributed worldwide but clinics can't keep up with demand. pharmacists are struggling to fill prescription drugs and schools across the country reports hundreds of children out sick. one school district in oklahoma canceled class after a quarter of the students became ill. >> when it hits you, it knocks you quick. >> one county in new york reports 2300 cases of the flu. last year at this time there, were 5 cases. cdc says the seasonal flu will cost businesses nearly 10 1/2 billion dollars in direct cost for hospitalizations and outpatient visits for adults and that doesn't include sick pay and work delays and overall lost productivity. abc2news.com/flu is your place to go for all flu related questions you might have especially about the shots or remedies or symptoms and what you need to do after contacting your doctor all that can be found at abc2news.com/flu section also you will find a listing of flu shots and clinics to get them. megan. news time 5:48. for many it's payday. and your first paycheck of 2013you might do a double take because it's going to be a bit smaller. it's all thanks to the fiscal cliff deal. the payroll tax holiday on social security tax expired raising rates by 2%. and the payroll tax cut also expired and was not renewed. so what does it mean for you? expect to see about 40 dollars less in each of your paychecks. we have to check on that because some people wonder if it's 40 per paycheck or week. so hang in there we will find out for you. don't get too excited about a cheaper version of the iphone. company says the rumors are not true. an apple executive spoke to a newspaper in shanghai about the buzz of the budget iphone and said that he will "never be in the future of apple's products." earlier reports said the tech giant was work on a cheaper version to combat the slowing sales. here's a unique idea. raising money for super storm sandy victims by selling beer. >> that's a pretty good idea. a handful of breweries on long island created a beer called surge protector. 8 breweries in all are taking part. they donated ingredients to make the indian pale ale and some of the proceeds will go to help one of their own. barrier brewing was wiped out by the storm. the money will be donated to long island cares which provides food to victims. >> the buzz is starting to build and i think people will be psyched when it does come out. >> we are stronger together thanseparate and this is a good demonstration of that. >> they hope to get it in stores by january 22nd and they are distributing kegs for restaurants to serve notice he says the buzz. >> the buzz is growing. >> that's clever but a lot of people do still need help in the area so it's a good way to see them coming together to a do it. >> they do and they will get a break this weekend becauses weather will cooperate towards the outdoor activities. >> sure. we haven't seen a lot of storms across the area so that's good news for the areas including us. but the winter weather is not too far off in the distance. we will talk about that? second. -- about that in a second. notice outside the beltway we are into the middle 30s. 44 in town right now. and we are 3 degrees coarld than we were -- colder than we were this time yesterday morning. it's all about the clouds today and prepare for a cloudy sky and notice to the south that is warm front that's going to deliver the mild air into the region over the weekend. so while 63 right now in atlanta, we are at 36 in baltimore and out to the west, that little game in denver that we have on saturday, it's going to be like 20 degrees. so a -- it's certainly cold towards the west. notice the storm track keeping the warm air towards the east and look at the cold air back up towards the west. 18 degrees. the southeast ridge delivering the heat over the weekend, 48 goes to 60 around saturday and sunday 67 degrees before we start to get to more normal conditions. temperatures back into the 70s. hey lauren. >> reporter: hello. we are following a very serious crash in carroll county. two people have been medivaced and route 97 is now shut down from old frederick road to bars low road it will be closed throughout the morning rush so stick with route 32 or 27 as your alternate. and there are more problems on95. we are dealing with a crash along the northbound lanes at dundalk avenue. much different story for those of you using 83 this morning. and here's what it looks like up in hunt valley. nice and clear at shawan road and will remain that way making are way into the city. looking at the abc2 timesaver traffic drive times. 695 in great shape. no problems on the outer loop from 95 all the way up to 83. that takes you 11 minutes and you are looking at an 11-minute ride as well on the west side to travel that outer loop from 795 down to 95. megan and charley over to you never underestimate the capabilities of a grandma. >> a robber made that mistake when he tried to steal cash from a woman in a grocery store. we will tell you how it went down. this cold season, nasal congestion won't stop me. i made the clear choice. claritin-d. decongestant products on the shelf can take hours to start working. claritin-d starts to work in just 30 minutes. power through nasal congestion fast. get claritin-d at the pharmacy counter. the us that of someone rock your grandmother is not a pleasant thought. >> unless she is the one carrying the gun. earns teen owns a grocery store and one night a man pulled a knife and tried to grab cash and she was not going to have any part of this. she pulled the gun and she took aim. >> i shouldn't say this but i think i was going to shoot the gun but he was running away. so once his back was turned i actually couldn't do it. >> she says she was only -- she only shot the gun twice and hopes to never have to pull it out but showed immediately watch this video. not messing around at all. >> don't mess with grandma. well, we know water bottlesconditioned foods are products you come in contact with on a daily base nice but many contain bpa which can be harmful to infants. we will have tips to avoid buying things containing the chemical. >> a local teacher combines love for art and ravens to benefit her student. how this stroke of a paintbrush is making a huge delivrance. difference. you're watching the station that works for you. now, good morning maryland. when your kid is gets on the bus you want to note driver is obeying the law. thanks to an abc2 news investigation, city leaders are stepping in to try to make sure they

Bristolian's secret to turning 100? Staying active, and lots of Bingo | EastBayRI.com - News, Opinion, Things to Do in the East Bay

Betty (Jones) Grimo officially reached the 100-year plateau on May 29, with all the pomp and circumstance befitting a queen.

School rules eclipse lessons on solar spectacle - Youth Journalism International

JUSTICE: A Father's Account of the Trial of His Daughter's Killer | Vanity Fair

Eagles sign 7 undrafted free agents, including one from Australia