Little bit about who you are just in case. You grow up how do your parents get to new jersey . Just for my father is 82yearsold, born in 1937 in longview texas and raised in galveston under segregation under jim crow. War on poverty i and the initiative and he met my mother where he was heading up the program and she was fresh out of college and she is the daughter of evangelical christians and certainly opposed to interracial marriage in the 1960s and 70s. He was really unhappy and moved to oregon and Washington State and vendor. By the time i was born, my father was running sat preparation. He was tutoring students who come to the house with subjects in math and science thats how s in the family so we became kind of captive livein students. We studied with him on the weekends and evenings and during summer break and that is basically what made up the schools my father believed that it would be better there but it wasnt. He wanted to get us out of our neighborhood. We were in an informally segregated part of new jersey where there was a white side of town and a black side of town. It was a kind of silent protest. In the 1980s and 90s it came with some racial dynamics my father wanted to get us out of the way for i weaver in a cac school a couple of times over. My father is an atheist and another is a protestant and so we would sit back and read our books and it was an early experience of standing apart. Host was a very significant difference . I wasnt even aware until i got to georgetown in 1999. It wasnt until i got to graduate school i realized i had been out of the education. It sounds as if you got the best part of your education at home. What happened in the school . My mother is a protestant but she is not what people think of when they think of promoting some type of social elite. She is derived from anglosaxon but thats about as far as that goes. That was my experience they tended to be catholic. They were not collegebound. Many of them or not. They were kids in your neighborhood and school. What percentage of the kids in your school were black . Guest up until high school i was one of a handful of students i was aware i could interpret and perform as i kind of wanted to because there wasnt much. I didnt really worry about my sat prep so i ended up going to a school that was halfway black and latino. It was catholic. Host how serious . Guest im told there was a conflict leaving the school and high school girls. He invited me. I tried my luck being on the team when i was 15, 16 but at the moment they didnt have the desire to leave it. Tell us about what that means because in a way its unusual that she wabut she was your acct you call normal. Guest what was different about my family is that my father was fleeing the segregated south in many ways a texas upbringing that caused some pain and my mother was fleeing racism coming from her own father and they were searching to create their own family on their own term. We were raised outside of the context of extended family in verse so our house we were a force unto ourselves and i didnt realize how difficult that was until i became a parent and how many cousins my children have and how important it is to them so my identity was kind of always coming directly from my father but also from my mother mothers. My mother agreed we were a black household and we grew up with a white mom and a black data that it wasnt that complicated a question to us. Also the fulcrum upon which i hoisted the sense of myself. From a household that is pretty middleclass she exuded a kind of intoxicating cool that was shocking to me. Here was a girl that didnt take the sat test because no one asked her to what her to. My father took her site and try to prepare for free. I think she was one of the first but just didnt care. She exemplified that. Host and that was attractive. Guest it was very different. She was completely outside of the context that i was also trying my best to lead a double life. I didnt share the kind of home life i had in my social context at school and on the Basketball Courts. Host they didnt know that you were studying. Guest most of them didnt understand what was going on a and then i had the invitation to go to schools i didnt guest you didnt have the kind of extended family that you would have had. She made the effort to come and was my maternal grandmother. It impacted a sense of myself. Who were the other . Guest i had a best friend i called charles in the buck and his mother was puerto rican and his father black american and he was one of these kids that was extraordinary smart and popular. They saw what my father had access to through the books and saw there was the likes of mind they hadnt seen elsewhere and he was like the opposite of my High School Friends so he started coming to the house every day and helped me carry it we studied every day freshman year for our sats and that extra prep work outside of our classes. He ended up making a huge success of himself and did a little bit worse on the sat, went a little bit less of the College Study abroad at oxford. It was transformative for him. He was extraordinarily cool and people didnt know that is what he was doing. I felt like my social life depended on it. Guest so you sort of have a sense that there was a way this wasnt going to work. I felt as though i have to hide that. I have one memory of having done well on the writing exam i got a perfect score and above principle wanted to honor me and i got so afraid. Everyone in homeroom watched it and when i stepped out into the hallway i braced myself for teasing if no one even acknowledged that one way or another. It meant nothing to anybody into it to you like a ton of rx because had i had done something well on the Basketball Court or had a good pair of new tennis shoes, that would have registered much more with everybody, but it meant nothing. Host [inaudible] guest quite a few. I dont know the numbers but for example, my girlfriend got pregnant and that was it, there were those like that. Host what did the school think about this . Here you were, you and your friend is. He was concerned as well. Realizing she had gotten pregnant by a guy selling drugs in new jersey she was going to move in with him and she kind of school did me the first time. It was an awkward date i was back on break and she said whats happened to you, and i realized when i came home there was something i realized i was able to express about myself and who i really was down at georgetown that i didnt want to come out anymore, so we split. It was painful, and i realized it was kind of the best thing that could happen. Host who are you guest pretty diverse from new jersey across the hall from each other and we spent time together. All four of us, and at first i had nothing against my white dorm mates. I kind of preemptively cut myself off from having anything to do with these other students and i dont know why. I really threw myself into the segregated cafeteria breakdown of. One night i was in the dormitory having an asthma attack and i went to take a shower in the middle of the night and came back into the system on the floor was still awake and two doors down from mine invited me to have some tea listening to jazz and he was a jewish kid from brooklyn and i realized it was the first time i talked to him he was playing music i never paid attention to and there was nothing that proceeded it. None of us have read many books. My dad basically didnt have music on in the house. Started realizing my friends were much more diverse than i ever allowed myself to have in the past and i was feeling all the richer for the. Also someone that might have had a more complicated relationship then 100 rooted. He definitely a was made black and had linguistic traditions keep it on traditional clothing from time to time and from time to time they did go back and they know where they came from. They didnt have this kind of i think he had a lot of selfesteem that came from being linked to the other cultures. All of his brothers approached school bond with the kind of culture but a tenacity to become physicians and scientists and their family in one generation became successful. Talk about his sense of being rooted somewhere makes me want to step back. Given that your parents took it for granted, what did they think you should know about black history . Guest my father did his best to give me involved to read a letter from birmingham jail to really understand the traditions but he also somewhat in the way that you write about, he believes that my identity didnt begin or end with that reality so he had his life kind of saved by being a fatherless black boy in texas without anyone in his family having an education but he stumbled upon the dialogue at some point in his childhood he picked it up and tried to read it. It didnt make sense at first but he was aware there was something out there that linked him with a towering greek mind and that if you could access it he would read books by himself in th a closet with a flashlighn his family would say what are you doing you ar were going to t yourself in trouble, but very early on, aesops fables were huge for him so he would give me things and say you can see your self in many different places and identities. Host you have gone through a phase and that comes with you to college but then this experience is the first time i met black students with this background so college was where i met black americans not just immigrants and they were socially and economically more diverse than i had ever known. I began to wonder why we have such a narrow perception of this rich cultural tradition and why my father was outside of this tradition when in many ways he was exemplifying it. Host you did write a book before this and in that book you are talking about a sense of identity that had to do with how you came to change your mind about that. I am just interested in the High School Setting up these which are slightly different again. Guest i grew up believing because they can never be white but also because i just accepted their racial identity and that there are often more and less authentic ways of enacting the identity and so my first book was a comingofage memoir beginning to question the narrow phrase in the hiphop era and there were two very different experiences and i began to write up a critique of what i saw some habits i certainly participated in. For example . Guest the kind of extort narrowly ungenerous ways we interacted with the opposite sex. The way that malefemale relations were always kind of a form of getting over on the other domination of and for example that became something that i really regretted and tried to deal with in the book that extraordinary emphasis on the positions and success as opposed to the freedom and life of the mind, not to say that hiphop is a monolith where brilliant lyrics but the mainstream and the way that we modeled our identities on is a kind of view that would be offensive to someone of my dads generation actually. So the book was a rejection of that, but it wasnt a deeper questioning of the racial construct itself. That came later through more life experience. Host at that point, what you are doing is taking your being black for granted that fighting for different perception of what it is to be black. I should have done the research and looked at the reviews, but i see that there are people who didnt like that. Guest i did a lot of talks at historical collegetalkthat hd communities and surprisingly, a lot of black readers and who are not necessarily going to college or lead colleges agreed with the book. It was more in that you leave spaces the criticism came and people would say you dont understand the black experience in america but a lot of blacks came up to me and said it just designates with me. We have agency. There are bad choices that go on and presumably within the hiphop culture itself, the results of a so in a way the critique maybe even a little bit of the critique guest i should stress the book isnt about music saying jazz is better than hiphop. Its hiphop is a means of spreading and glorifying and monetizing a secular religion that impacts peoples entire lives. Host we are getting you out of georgetown, you havent traveled much yet. You are becoming a world traveler which is absolutely who you are. Lets talk about that, where you go, why, who you go with. Guest i always struggled with french requirements in school and the summer before i graduated, to finish my credits i went and studied for two months just to get the credits and what happened is i ended up falling in love with this country come just the freedom to sit at a cafe, order a glass of wine. Delicious bread. Ive never been very daring in my culinary pursuits prior to that and to taste different things. I liked it and i came back from that experience and i began dating briefly a French Exchange student and had a really intense relationship for a short amount of time, but during that time she found the i didnt know what to do. I hadnt taken the test and wanted to take a year working. She found me a job teaching english in france the next year and by the time that came around we had broken up, but i said just to let you know, i got this job, i got the interest in this country now, let me go and see whats out there and so lived in a northern town on the border of belgium it was rainy and gloomy, but i felt a freedom i never felt before. I taught english for ten hours a week. I had just enough to pay my rent and try a couple of meals and cook the rest and i sat in cafes all day reading area cliche stuff, but really bold opening things, too. I wondered to myself, you know, keeping some notebooks can i be a writer, maybe i can try this and the year came to an end and my father told me what, you need to come back home and figure out what youre going to do. So i took the tests and didnt get into the program i wanted and decided ive got to get a job. I was a paralegal for two years at a midtown Corporate Law firm and i thought maybe i would do that and go to law school. And it was absolute misery. It was terrible. I worked a 36 hour day, tuesday and left on a thursday from the office and i decided i had such bad experiences there that i decided you know, i need to try to actually be a writer. I think that is what i want to do. I need to try tha that so i weno nyu in a writing program in cultural reporting and Criticism Program in the journalism school, and i got a fellowship and it made it possible for me to go, so i approached that as though with the kind of naivete as i had come out of that with a book deal. Host the weight you just hold it, the first moment when you thought you might be a writer by vocation was sitting in cafes. Figuring out what was happening to you. That sense of freedom that you talk about, its a sort of familiar trope in the writings about europe and its talked about iits talkedabout in othes of the rising. And just realizing for the first time that not everybody is that part of the freedom . Guest dot took me more years to realize and to fully be able to articulate. I would often eat at shops and i remember walking into a shop one latenight and the man speaking to me in arabic i looked at him and he said [inaudible] speak arabic. Why didnt your parents teach you the language. He said what are your origins. My dad is from texas and my mom is from california. Where are you from coming in lysozyme black. He looks at me with incredulity and says youre not black, Michael Jordan is black. I sat there and explained to him things like this but thats the first time i realized the way i think of myself isnt necessarily exchanges where i am isnt necessarily wha what te society around me reflects back or proceeds. So that was a very diverse part of france and my phenotype looks more like the north african type there. So that was the first time i had been mistaken for what i thought i was wherit was where my idente didnt accept my own selfdefinition and it was also the first time i realized probably the most salient thing about me was my american miss. So, here you are becoming a writer, you think, getting the qualifications in acquiring and nsa or degree in journalism. Do you already know what youre going to write about . Guest dot apple. Taking a course on writing in my second three semester program. The teachers assignment was just to write anything you want to write about but take a position and argued forcefully so i was listening and really reading a lot at the time. Why is this culture that im so immersed in right now so much richer than what i thought i had access to when i was growing up so i wrote a piece those are giving bloothat wasarguing blood hiphop era is black street culture like a street identity that has a very narrow access and she read the assignment and said that this is good i think this could actually be published somewhere. The beautiful thing about going to these graduate programs is that your professor actually knows somebody. I sent it to the New York Times. It generates an enormous amount of comments and i said i would love to expand on that with about 800 words and so then my professor introduced me to be an agent and i worked on a proposal and by the time i came back to finish my degree i sold i it at auction and i was naive enough to believe that is how it worked but i approached it i knew i didnt have any family or money or things become s that come soi had to actually support myself with my writing. I approached it a as though i hd no option. I couldnt even begin freelancing. I had to have a book. Host so you have a contract an and outlines the unt with the book is about and in fact you have a published statement so you have to go somewhere and do this. So where do you go . Guest initially i went back to my apartment that i was sharing with my longterm girlfriend from college. We had a bit of time off when i was in france but from my early 20s a woman who really taught me about the complexity of identity, shes a mixed girl. Her mothers family comes from the north in italy and her fathers from nigeria and she grew up in Washington Heights around mostly dominican spoke spanish fluently and had a kind of identity what was projected and i heard as a latina identity and so she spoke japanese kanji lived in japan. She identified as black, but my fathers blackness was completely foreign to her. So, she showed me that identity is a complex thing and she didnt even consider herself as having anything to do with southern italians. She thought that was completely foreign. Host so shes living her life and you are starting to write books. Host guest we are beginning to grow apart and break up. A friend of mine allowed me to borrow his apartment in paris. I felt free again and i got like three chapters in six weeks. I felt energized and so when i came back to new york i no longer have my apartment with my girlfriend and i had this, you know, amazing situation where you pay up front for work that you will complete a year later so i just without knowing anything about it i went on a plane and went down and got an apartment for a few months and worked lik