Its an epistolary work. Its a letter, a series of letters to my sons of course its also a letter to the larger world. Both about the reality of the terror and anxiety and worry that comes along with being a parent of black children and particularly black boys in the United States at this moment but its also filled with my desire for them to lead a life of beauty and joy. And excellence and self regard. Much of which i think one defined the lessons for an extraordinary definition we have to draw from. Where did you come up with the idea to write your sons a letter . Actually have written them letters privately for years. But my editor gayatri at beacon press said is this something youd be interested in doing i think a large part because i talk about my children all the time direct post about them in social media. Initially what we both had in mind was something that was probably a bit more lighthearted. When i started to reflect on what it would mean to try to tell a story about both my expectations but also my warnings and the depth of my love and a story for both them and the world became something more sober and i reached into the archives i had in my mind of the works that for me did that and try to have a conversation with the past and the present for their future. It reads as if it flowed out of you. Thats probably not the case but it reads that way. Thank you. Certainly its the book that came out most quickly. It did flow out of me. My previous work was in and foundation for it. I wrote most of it while we were all in japan where i was working. There was a way in which that provided a space of contemplation and retreat that allowed it to flow forth but its also the case is the conversations in the book are the conversations that we have all the time. To craft those conversations to craft that message of course took time but there is something that sort of just flowed forth and to a certain extent some of the Emotional Energy i think of this path which is kind of breathless and beautiful and exciting. Stewarding childrens lives is just like that. Where did you come up with the title . Its so interesting because it has many people guess, there is a reference there to eric garners statement i cant breathe. But theres also a reference to one of the things i was saying is the city i was born in birmingham alabama had the worst air quality in the nation and the euro was born. I was thinking about the prevalence of asthma. An environmental racism. In the way that it makes it very hard to breathe actually. And then i was thinking about the kind of holding ones breath in moments of deep anxiety around the threat of violent moments of racial injustice. And also in part because its connected to my first book which was on hippo. I came abthe extraordinary skill of rapper that goes unnoticed to say all those words requires a management of the breath. I want them to breathe in a sense of taking and what they need to survive and flourish. But also managing the breath. Navigating the difficult moments, which is what it means to get out 16 bars with barely catching a breath. It was a powerful metaphor for me. Fear, fly, fortune, what do they mean . The fear part abi should say that that structure comes both from Richard Wrights native son and abbetween the world and me. There is a modification that i will talk about. The fear part i think in some ways is selfevident. The fear of the ravages of racism. Whether that be the harrowing incident that weve been seeing on video for some several years but throughout American History of the killing of unarmed black people. Often by police officers. Without any process, without just cause for the most minor infractions. Or none at all. Theres that part of the fear but the fear at large. The ways in which inequality can limit your opportunities but also get in your head. Those kinds of fears are without question ever present and part of the task of parenting for me is to attempt to navigate around those fears with the recognition that tomorrow he really isnt promised. So you have to attempt to navigate but you also cannot be completely overwhelmed by the fear over while otherwise you wont live. You have to deal with the reality of tragedy and disaster are possible. And then fly is in some ways an indication of Toni Morrison as opposed to, flight for native son is the moment when the protagonists is running away from the law because hes committed a murder thats prompted by his terror. And being lynched essentially. But i thought about flight in the sense of actually taking flights in life. So sort of an extension of the idea of not being defined by the fear but how to take flight. And thats a direct reference to Toni Morrison the song of solomon. In the idea of flying if you give up the stuff that weighs you down. Its not about inheritance and the way we tend to describe it. As riches. But actually the fortune of a tradition and ancestry of resilience, of incredible beauty, of creativity, even in the face of constraint and so i talk about everything from our ancestors who work the land to Thelonious Monk and his in the repetition of a single composition over and over which really functions as a way of thinking about how i navigate this . We have this set of notes which we could say is a metaphor for life and navigating the terms over and over again. Thats sort of the foundation of the structure. What we know about freeman and esa . This is a hard question to answer because sometimes in some ways the most important part is that they are fully and absolutely human in all of its complexity. I say it that way because so often i think black children in particular arent granted that recognition. I can talk about how they are distinctive. Esau is a brilliant athlete and incredibly sophisticated at Human Understanding understanding human relations. A beautiful writer. I can talk about freeman composes extraordinary music and he is an amazingly gifted artist and they are both really good friends and all of these things but i sometimes have to abbecause these things are true about them but i dont want to sound as though im making them exceptional because i really do believe that all children are really special. And that many children who dont have parents who can draw attention to their gifts are often made to feel as though their children are inadequate. That proportionately falls, not just on black children but black boys in particular. So they are really human as all children are. What they think about the fact that you wrote a letter to them exposing them to the world . Thus far they are okay with it they also understand that might change over time. My sons are 13 and 16. They are in a pretty intense stage of development each of them. I didnt give them veto power of the content of the books i love them to see if there were stories they didnt want to book and details that i hope maybe they let me tell later in life but maybe not. But with respect to the idea of being on book tour and the book getting public attention, thats not particularly interesting to them and i think thats a good thing. I am not, in our intimate domestic life, a public figure. That part of the day to day of our lives really isnt on display. Thats the most important piece, for them, its the relationship. From your book you write that racism is in every step and breath we take. It really is. When you actually start to deconstruct it in a detailed fashion and you see everything from how homes are constructed, how frequently the street cleaning operations take place, who can be where, what opportunities exist, who has bank accounts, who doesnt, who has stock and who doesnt, walking along the street, whose body elicits a clutching of the purse. Who gets followed in a store. Where are their bookstores . In which communities . What do the Schools Look Like . Whats the quality of the air we breathe. Its so pervasive and its part of what makes as uncomfortable as conversations about race are for so many people. We cannot function as a Decent Society without talking about it because we are in the thick of it all the time. Imani perry, on friday we sent out a tweet promoting your appearance here on sunday and in the tweet we put the words our white people irredeemable, asks imani perry at princeton university. You took a little issue with that. I did. I want to read from breathe a letter to my sons what prompted that question. We will put it on the screen as well. We will give you a chance to talk about this a little bit. Here is a confession, recently i have wondered if white people are irredeemable. Again, i have to issue a caveat for the sensitive, no i do not mean individuals, individuals are the precious bulwark against total desperation. In them we find the persistence of possibility. Of course a Single Person can be someone abut a Single Person can be a heaven too were a friend. I worry that way people are irredeemable and it scares me. What would the complete dissembling of the kingdom of identity look like . How would the visser of pulse under a cracked open surface . Would we all shatter . Could we put something together again pee dee i dont know, i am losing some of my ability to dream a world. Given those two paragraphs, sounds like we were rather accurate in asking that question, no . Let me say why the single sentence question is hard for me. Because without the larger context, often sentences like that trigger a defensiveness that becomes impossible to engage. This is sort of the difficulty of social media all the time. Its not unique. I certainly have experienced it even with tweets that i wrote. But that second sentence that is the caveat is important because people here when you say, i wonder if white people irredeemable day here all white people. They hear white people as individuals, as opposed to whiteness as an identity thats clung to. So that when i go on to the second paragraph where and what, what if we took this identity part, those people would not have a different history for body but it would be a different relationship to identity that i think would potentially have, as a consequence, a more humane relationship to each other. When i went into later in the first paragraph when im saying, a person can individual can be heaven, not talking about eminent individuals, individual can be heaven, certainly both someone raised by a white man or as someone who thinks of so many figures like for example john brown or howard zen or bob zeller. I think of some of the most precious people in the world its important to me to not have a formulation that removes them from my sense of the struggle that im engaged in. One more question about breathe before we move on to some of your other books. Mothering black boys in america is a special calling. Yes. Its a sentence that my mother said to me. I think about it in a number of different ways. Of course one is there is of course all the risks so people talk about incessantly in some ways that are difficult i think and maybe not necessarily helpful about the challenges that black boys face in this world. I think about it differently. I think about it all those things are true but i think about the simultaneity of wanting to raise my children who are identified as black boys in a way that doesnt delimit their imaginations, this is that keeps them from thinking they are superior to people because they are relatively privileged. Also that keeps them away from seeking patriarchy or dominance in this society that values those things highly. So that even though those things are more elusive for black men to attain we have a society that values that part of the task is also raising them, for me, to not value that but to value their characters and sensitivity and complexity. And other people around them irrespective of what walk of life they come from. All that is a special calling because a lesson about what it means to be a man across the board oftentimes. In the lessons of what blackness is. Its often times not so good unless you counted both of those things. Its much more loving and gives a greater capacity to be fully human. In the last 19 minutes everything we talked about are these the types of things you teach or in part at princeton . Not really, which is interesting. In some ways this is a departure for me. Its the spirit with which i teach and certainly i teach the work of Toni Morrison and i taught the work of tony right. But i tend to teach much more fact driven and material driven as opposed to the kind of emotional register. I think of teaching at self as a calling. Its important to bring to that a sense of value justice and love to the students even though we are supposed to be somewhat dispassionate. How does one get a phd and jd from harvard at the same time . Unwisely. When i graduated from college i was 21 years old and i was just completely in love with the life and the mind and ideas and i didnt want to choose and i wanted to do everything and i said, applied to graduate school, law school did two years of graduate school took my orals and it was sort of a frenzied pace it was beautiful, it was amazing for me. I loved it. I learned so much and every day i was being nurtured by all of these generations of people who came before me and helped me understand the world. We want to play a little bit of music, a little bit of video. This is from 1999 [singing] of course this is jesse norman singing at the rosa parks congressional goldmedal ceremony in 1999. What is that song . That song is lift every voice and sing the song that was known as the neoNational Anthem and the black National Anthem after the 1970s. It is a song that i describe as black americas most precious song. Just that clip a rosa parks who of course is an alabama woman and jesse norman who is recently departed as incredibly moving. You have written a biography. Of the song may we favor stand is the name of the book. May we forever stand a they are author and composer they were brothers who were born in jacksonville florida, renaissance men and of course back in the day they were called race men, people who sought every achievement they had as being in service of the race. Their mothers family had been enslaved with bahamian and their families family had been enslaved in virginia but yes, of that generation that emerged from slavery with all the hopes and dreams and operations that were quickly dashed with the end of reconstruction. What was the reception in 1900 when the song was written . What was extraordinary is that the song caught allen like wildfire. It was almost immediately embraced. One of the things i try to detail in the book the United States did have not have a National Anthem at this moment. Even early on people referring to it as an anthem. The johnson brothers were both educators at the time of the composition and they left florida and moved up to new york to work on aballie as songwriters in part because there had been a terrible fire in the city. They actually werent there in florida as the song caught on. It caught on the cross, schoolchildren passed it on, black club women circulated it, they reprinted it it began to be printed in the back of hymnals. It was sort of an anthem of the communities making they did not describe as an anthem they did not intended as an anthem but black communities throughout the south said this is our anthem. If we continued playing that video we would have sent then president clinton. Who knows all three verses. Singing. Its one of his distinctions i think he may be the only u. S. President who never knew all three verses of lift every voice is. From your book may we forever stand hiphop uttered its farewell to the black National Anthem. Where you going here . One of the things, talk about this in my first book, there are something that happens in the 70s and 80s which is a transformation both of some norms and black social and political life to have to do with the kind of Civic Engagement and associational life and it also is connected to the industrialization. And there is a piece where i quote the reverend Joseph Lowery on this where he says rest in peace that black people were once the moral conscience of the nation, hiphop is absolute refusal of that position. It is bold, its not formal, its profane and insistent and not and unwilling to perform a particular kind of pop as a reveling in outlaw which is a commonplace in american culture. But its a different kind of public presence for africanamericans. That departure i think was significant but i what ive also talked about in the book is that the song keeps coming back. There have been various moments where it seemed like it was going to teeter out completely, it keeps coming back. Even though the kind of institutions, the kind of communities in which it was song on weekly or daily basis dont exist in the same way and black communities. What did you learn about the song in researching this book . I will say the biggest surprise, so much of what i read about is about how it was ensconced in institutional life. In various kinds organizations. It was so exciting to see the Graduation Program at like dressmakers academy where they sing the song or every day when Dizzy Gillespie talks about the world throughout South Carolina seeing the song of the porch of the school looking out on cotton fields. But what surprised me and was so beautiful was how many educators used it as a tool. So i encountered all these curriculum in which the vocabulary lessons that the song becomes a basis of their history lessons there are plays pantomimes in school and so it really has so many functions and to see the way that the teachers so many black teachers and segregated schools and underfunded schools took seriously the task of repairing young people, not just one more for the future but to become warriors for justice was so moving. You share your views on this in the book and i want to read that very quickly, you write, i like many other people find a singing lift every voice and saying alongside other people of conscious to be one bulwark against the pessimism that threatens to do defended every turn but when i look around the room and see so many closed mouth eyes focused on the page nervous gestures i am reminded not to be deceived about the moment in which we live grasping somewhat randomly into traditions and archives and yet in desperate need of rebuilding tradition or building a new. Right. One of the things that emerged for me as part of the book, i talk a lot in the early chapters about it associational life. Taking this from lexus