Particularly black boys in the United States at this moment, but its also filled with my desire for them to live a life of beauty and joy and excellence and self regard and in the extraordinary tradition that we have to draw from. Host where did you come up with the idea . Guest ive written that letter is privately but my editor said is this something you would be interested in doing and i talk about my children all the time and post about them on social media and initially i think what we both had in mind is something that was a bitad lighthearted but then when i started to reflect on what it would mean to try to tell a story to them at up to my expectations but also my warnings and the depth of my love and a story for them and the world it became something more sober and i reached into the archives that i had in my mind of the work that for me to death and tried to have a conversation with with the past and present for their futures. Host it reads as if it flowed out of you. Thats probably notca the case t guest thank you. It certainly is the book that came outk most quickly and then added a sort of flow out of me. My previous work was the lofoundation for it and i wrote most of it while we were in japan where i was working foran the summer so there was a way in which th that provided a space f contemplation and retreat that allowed it to flow forth but its also the case of the conversations in the book of the conversations we have all the time and so to craft those conversations and that message is close to time, but there is something that just sort of flowed forth and it does take some of the Emotional Energy i think of this task which is kind of breathless and beautiful and exciting. Childrens lives it is just like that. Host where did you come up with the title flex guest its so interesting because as many people guess, theres the statement i need to breathe there is also a reference to the city that i was born in, birmingham alabama had the worst air quality in the nation a year that i was born and i was thinking of the prevalence of asthma and environmental racism and the way that it makes it very hard to breathe actually and then i was thinking about the kind of holding ones breath and anxiety around the threat of violence moments of Racial Injustice and also in part because of a team of age in a art form with an extraordinary skill of rappers that i noticed to say all of those words requires a management of the breath. So i want them to breathe of course in the sense of taking in what they need to survive and flourishd but also managing thr breath, navigating it did the difficult moments which is what it means to get out and succeed. It is a powerful metaphorho for me. Host fear, fly, fortune. What does this mean . Guest the fear part, and i should say that that structure comes both from Richard Wrights native son between the world and me and there is a modification that i will talk about. The fear part in some ways i think its selfevident, the fear of the ravages of racism whether that be the kind of harrowing incidents is that we have been seeing on video for several years and throughout American History of the killing of unarmed black people often by Police Officers without any process or just cause, the most minor of infractions or none at all. So theres that part of the fear and the fear atlarge, through the ways in which inequality can limit your opportunities and also get inyo your head. Those kind of fears are without question ever present and part of the task of parenting for me is to attempt to navigate around this with the fear of recognition that tomorrow really isnt promised big so you have to both attempt to navigate but you also cannot be completely overwhelmed by the fear otherwise you wont live if you have to deal with the reality, the tragedy and disaster are possible. And then it is in some ways an indication of Toni Morrison and you know, as opposed to the flight for a native son is the moment where the protagonist is running away from the wall because hes committed a murder that is pumped by his terror of being lynched essentially, but i thought about flight in the sense of actually taking flight in life, so to not, sort of an extension of the idea was being defined by the fear of how to take flight and that is a direct reference to the song of solomon and the idea of sliding if you give up the stuff that weighs you down as she says and then the fortune for me was a way of talking about the abundance that they had that isnt about the material fortune or inheritance in the way that we tend to describe it, but actually the fortune of a tradition of an ancestry of resilience, of incredible beauty, creativity even in the face of constraint and so, you know, i talk about everything from you know, our ancestors who worked the land to the mastery their repetition of a single composition over and over which functions to me as a way of thinking about how to navigate this that we have a set of notes that we can say is navigating the term over and over again so thats sort of the foundation of the structure. Host what we know about freeman . Guest this is a hard question to answer because [inaudible] in some ways the most important part is that they are fully and absolutely human, all of the complexity, and i say it that way because so oftenen i think black children in particular are not granted that recognition, so i can talk about how they are distinctive. Hes a brilliant athlete, incredibly sophisticated at understanding humanan relations and a beautiful writer. I can talk about freeman as composing extraordinary music and an amazingly gifted artist and they are both really good friends and all these things, that i sometimesut hesitate because these things are true about them but i dont want it to sound as though i am 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 if the children are inadequate and dont have much to offer, which i think that disproportionately. Fullstop just on black children but black boys in particular so they are really human at all children are. Host what do they think about the fact that you wrote a letter exposing them to the w world . Guest while, this far they are okay with it but i also understand that might change over time as they are 13 and 16, they are in a pretty intense stage of development, and each of them. I did give them veto power over the content of the book, so i allowed him to say if there were stories they didnt want in the buck for details i hope maybe they will let me tell later in but maybe not. But with respect to the idea of sort of being on a book tour and the book getting public attention, that isnt particularly interesting to me and i think that is a good thing. I am not in our domestic life a public figure, you know, and thats part of the daytoday of our lives really isnt on display and that is the most important piece for them is the relationship. Host you write that racism is in every step and every breath that we take. Guest it really is. When you start to deconstruct it in a detailed fashion and you see everything from how homes are constructed. Who has Bank Accounts and who doesnt. Walking along the street, whose body elicits the clinching of the purse, where are their bookstores in the communities, what do the schools look like, what is the quality of the air we breathe quite . It is so pervasive and as uncomfortable as the conversations are for people, we just cannot function as a Decent Society without talking about it because we are in the thick of it all the time. We put the words are white people irredeemable. You took a little issue with that. I want to read what prompted this question and we will give you a chance to talk about this a little bit. Here is a confession. Recently i found your white people are irredeemable and again i have to issue a caveat with a sensitive kno the sensitt mean individuals we find that the persistence of the possibility. Of course a Single Person can tell but i worry what people are irredeemable and it scares me. Whats with the complete dissembling of the kingdom of identity look like and how would the pulse of the surface of what we all shatter, could we put something together again . T dont know im losing some of my inability to without the larger context so often sentences like that trigger a defensiveness that becomes impossible to engage in so this is the sort of difficulty of social media all the time its not unique and ive experienced it with those that ive wrote a. E if you they hear white peoples individuals as opposed to whiteness. It would be a different relationship to the identity of im not talking about an individual, but certainly someone that is embraced by a white man or someone who thinks that so many figures like take for example john brown or box elder they are some of the most precious people in the world and its important to me to not have a formulation that removes them from the struggle that i am engaged in a. One more question before we move ont on to some of your othr books. Mothering black boys in america is a special calling to. Guest in some they are difficult but maybe not necessarily helpful about the challenges black boys face in this world whethert it is mass incarceration, inequality, High School Graduation rates, college attendance, unemployment, although sorallthose sort of th. I think about it differently. I think about it wanting to raise my children who are identified as black boys got in a way doesnt limit their imagination and sense of possibility. It allows them to understand the fact of racial inequality and thinking they are in superior because they are relatively privileged. And also it keeps them away from seeking patriarchy or dominance in the society that values those things highly so even they are more elusive for black men to attain it is a society that values that support if the task is also raising them for me to not tell you that but the characters and sense of complexity and other people around them so all of that is a special calling because the lessons of what it means our acrosstheboardrd and then oftn times not so good unless you capture both of those things with a story that is more accurate and more loving and gives them a greater capacity to be fully human. Host in the last 19 minutes, everything weve talked about are these the type of things that you teach at princeton . Guest not really which is interesting. It is a departure for me and the spirit with which i teach. Certainly i teach the work of Toni Morrison and Richard Wright but i tend to think much more fact driven as opposed to the emotional but the dj is self is a kind of calling thats important to bring to that the values and justice even though we are supposed to be somewhat dispassionate. How does one get a phd and jd from harvard at the same time . Guest i i was just completely in love with the idea is that i didnt want to choose. I wanted to do everything. Graduate school, law school, graduate school it was sort of a frenzy every day i was being nurtured by these gyrations of people that came before me and helped me understand the world. Host we want tod. Play a little bit of music and video from 1999. Jesse norman singing at the rosa parks congressional Gold Medal Ceremony in 1999. What is that song . Guest lift every voice and sing, basalt known as the Negro National anthem and black National Anthem after the 1970s. And it is a song that i describe as black americas most precious song. That clip is incredibly moving. Youve written a biography of the song. They were brothers born in Jacksonville Florida and of course as back in the day they were closebrace then, people who follow every achievements as being ind service of the race. Johnson became the first secretarygeneral of the naacp and the first. One of the signature accomplishments. Host and they were firstgeneration freemen born in the 1870s . Guest their mothers family yes as that generation that emerged in with the hopes and dreams and aspirations host what was the reception when the song was written . Guest what was extraordinary is the song caught on with wildfire and was embraced as an anthem and i try to detail this in the book the United States di to do the natil anthem atd the moment even untl early on people were only referring to it asmo an anthem. The johnson brothers were educators at the time and they left florida. They actually were not there as the song caught on a. It was circulated and was printed in the back of seminol. They didnt intend it necessarily as an anthem if we continue to play that video we would have seen then president clinton. Guest one of the distinctions he may be the only postcode from your book made me forever stand. Hiphop uttered its way to the National Anthem. Guest one of the things i talk about in my first bug is there is something that happens in the 70s and 80s which is a transformation both of the norms that have to do with the specific engagement and also connected to the deindustrialization and then there is a piece where i quote the reverend Joseph Lowery on this where he said black people were once the moral conscious of the nation. Tipoff is absolute refusal to that notion, so it is bold, not formal, its profane and unwilling to perform. Its a kind of ruffling which is a commonplace in American Culture but its a different kind of. So that departure was significant that i talk about in the book is that sun keeps coming back so thereve beenbo various moments it seemed like it was going to peter out completely. It keeps coming back even though the kind of institutions and utmmunities on which it was song on a weekly or daily basis dont exist in the same way as the communities. Host what did you learn about the song and researching about . Guest the biggest surprise, so much of what i write about is how in the institutional life in the various organizations it was so exciting to see the Graduation Program like the dressmakers academacademy where they see thg every day and she talks about the world singing on the porch of a school looking out on cotton fields but what surprised me and was so beautiful this how many educators used it as a tool so i encountered these curriculum in which the vocabulary lesson is the song becomes the basis of whether our history lessons played so it had so many function. To seeay the way they took the task of preparing people to become warriors for justice was so moving. Host you set your views on this in the book and i want to read that very quickly. I like many other people finding singing alongside people of other conscience to be one against the pessimism that threatens to descend at every turn but when i look around the room and see so many closed mouths and nervous gestures i am reminded not to be deceived about the moment in which we live grasping somewhat randomly into the traditions and archives yet in desperate need of rebuilding and of building a n new. I talk and a lot of early chapters about associational life and taking this from alexis de tocqueville. It was so robust and explicitly political in the context of jim crow. Acrosstheboard that is americans in general but that is precisely what was necessary. And its necessary to solve social problems you have to be a member of the fabric of the Community Working together with his mutual dependence and trust so there is a way in which eric emotional and sentimental moments but its for creating an emotional bond in the service of Community Center community itself is ultimately what was mostpo important, more than whether we think that particular song is a kind of virtual and a kind of commitment that made it so powerful. That is what we need to reembrace. Host author and princeton professor, imani perry is our guest on in depth. Once a month we invite an offer to talk about his or her body of work and to take your calls as well. We have reached that point in the program we will put the lines of the people see them in a minute. 202 7488200 in east and central time zones, 7488201 for those in the mountain and pacific time zone. If you cant get through on the phone lines and would prefer to send a text, you can send a text message to 202 7488003, and we both leave that one up throughout the program so that you get the correct number 202 7488003. You can also contact us on social media. Just remember booktv. And our email address is booktv at cspan. Org so all sorts of ways to get through and we will get to those in just a few minutes. Imani perry is the author of five books, six books. What is the first, politics and poetics which came out in 04. More beautiful and more terrible the embrace of transcendence of racial inequality in the u. S. 2011. Next on gender integration kidnapping 2018 as well as maybe forever stand, the black National Anthem and looking for lorraine, the wife also came out in 2018 and thats three books. And breath is the most recent which just came out this year. You have mentioned a couple of times but we will get to the title in just a minute. E. Can you draw a direct line from Langston Hughes to be the smallest . Guest absolutely. In so many ways, both of them took the beauty of the vernacular language and crafted it and made decisions to tell stories that were planted and often had a political content and designated deeply. There are different kinds of political subjects like being an overtly activist organizer, but their relationship to black language and the desire to understand that as a foundation for the production of art absolutely directly connected. Host guest part of what i talk about it in public is of course the process by which it became the most popular form of music and in the country had an audience that expanded on the initial audience and produced a great deal of wealth in the hiphop but theres something i talked about because there was from the very beginning and elucidation of the postindustrial life in urban centers in the United States was like in all of its complexity. It is an exploration. Host you used the term mc. What does that mean . Guest if the word for a wrapper thats more organic to hiphop. Initially it comes from master ceremony which is pretty commonplace and then other