Up next its booktv is monthly in Depth Program with author and Princeton University professor imani perry. Our books on race and africanamerican history include prophets of the hood, may we forever stand, and the recently published breathe a letter to my sons. Its a letter. Its a series of letters to my son, but of course, its also a letter to the larger world, both about, you know, the reality of the terror and anxiety and worries 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 selfregard. Much of which, i think, one finds a lessons for in an extraordinary tradition that we have to draw from. Where did you come up with the idea to write your sons a letter . Well, so, i actually have written them letters privately for years, but my editor, at beacon press said, is this something youd be interested in doing . In large part because i talk about my children all the time and i write posts about them on social media and initially, you know, my i think what we both had in mind was something that was probably a bit more lig lighthearted, but when i started to really reflect on what it would mean to try to tell a story to them about both my expectations, but also my warnings and my the depth of my love and a story for both them and for the world, then it became something more sober and i reached into the archives that i had in my mind of the work that for me did that and tried to have a conversation both with the past and the present, and for their future. It reads as if it flowed out of you. Thats probably not the case about you it reads that way. Thank you. I mean, its certainly the book that came out most quickly. I mean, it did sort of flow out of me. My previous work was a foundation for it and i wrote most of it while we were all in japan, where i was working for the summer, and so 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 as the conversations in the book are the conversations that we have all the time and so, to craft those conversations, to craft that message, of course, took time, but there is something that sort of just flowed forth. And it has to a certain extent some of the emotional energy, i think, of this task, which is kind of breathless and beautiful and exciting, i mean, during the childrens lives is just like that, so where did you come up with the title . So, its so interesting because as many people guess, theres a reference there to eric garner statement i cant breathe, but theres also a reference to one of the things i was thinking of the city was born in, birmingham, alabama had the worst air quality in the nation the year i was born and i was thinking about 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 in moments of deep anxiety around this threat of violence, moments of racial injustice, and also, in part because this connected to my first book which was on hiphop and i came of age with an art form thats largely about black control. I mean, the extraordinary skill of rappers that often goes unnoticed is that to say all of those words requires a management of the breath, right . So i want them to breathe, of course, in the sense of having taken in what they need to survive and flourish, but also, managing the breath, right . Navigating the difficult moments, which is what it means to get out some 16 bars with barely catching a breath, is that it was a powerful metaphor for me. Fear, fly, fortune. Yes. What do they mean . Well, the fear part and i should say that, you know, that structure comes both from Richard Wrights native son and between the worlds and me. Its a modification that ill talk about. The fear part, i think, in some ways is selfevident. The fear of the ravages of racism, whether that be the kind of the harrowing incidents that weve been seeing on video for several years, but have been throughout american history, right, of the killing of unarmed black people often by Police Officers without any process, without any without just cause, right, for the most minor of infractions or none at all. So theres that part of the fear. But the fear at large. You know, the ways in which inequality can limit your opportunities, but also get in your head, right . And 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 it really isnt promised every day. And so you have to both attempt to navigate, but you also cannot be completely overwelcomed by the fear. Otherwise you wont live, right . So you have to deal with the reality, the tragedy and disaster are possible. And then fly is in some ways an indication of Tony Morrison and you know, flight in native son is the moment when the p protagonist, he has committed a murder prompted by his terror of being lynched essential ly, but i thought about flight in the sense of actually taking flight in life. So sort of an extension of the idea of not being defined by the fear, but how to take flig flight, and thats from Tony Morrisons song of solomon, and if you give up the stuff that ways you down, she says. And then fortune for me was a way of talking about the abundance that they have that is not about the material fortune, its not about inheritance and the way we tend to describe it, as riches, but actually the fortune of a tradition of an ancestry of resilience. Of incredible beauty, of creativity, even in the face of constraint and so, you know, i talk about everything from, you know, our ancestors who work the lands to felonious monk and a competition that says to me how do we navigate this, how do we have the notes, we say is a metaphor for life and navigating the term over and over again. So thats sort of the foundation of the structure. What do we know about freeman and i isa . This is hard to answer in the book in some ways, theyre fully and absolutely human in all of its complexity and i say it that way because so often, i think black children in particular arent granted that recognition. So i can talk about how they are distinctive, so issa is a brilliant athlete and incredibly sophisticated at understanding human relations and a beautiful writer and i can talk about freeman is composes extraordinary music and hes an amazingly gifted artist. And theyre both really good friends and all of these things, but i sometimes hesitate because these things are true about them, but its not i dont want it to sound as they 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 and dont have much to offer, which i think and that disproportionately falls not just on black children, but on black boys in particular. So theyre really human, as all children are. What do you think about the fact that you wrote a letter to them exposing them to the world. Thus far theyre okay with it, it might change over time. Because my sons are 13 and 16. Theyre in a pretty intense stage of development, each of them. I did give them veto power over the content in the book, so i allowed them to say, if there were stories they didnt want in the book, if there were details that i hoped maybe they let me tell later in life, but maybe not. But with respect to the idea of, you know, sort of being on book tour and like the book getting public attention, thats not particularly interesting to them and i think thats a good inning. You know, these i am not in our intimate domestic life a public figure, you know. And that that part of the daytoday of our lives really isnt on display, and thats the most important piece for them, right, is the relationsh relationship. From your book, you write that racism is in every step and breath we take. Yes. It really is. I mean, you know, when you actually start to deconstruct it in a detailed fashion and you see everything from how homes are constructed, the you know, how frequently the street cleaning operations take place, who can be where, what opportunities exist, who has bank accounts, who doesnt, you know, who has stock, who doesnt. Walking along the street, you know, whose body elicits a clutching of the purse. Who gets followed in a store. Where are there book stores, in which communities. What does the School Look Like . What is the quality of the air we breathe, it is so pervasive and its part of what makes, as uncomfortable as conversations about race are for so many people, its just we cannot function as a Decent Society without talking about it because we are in the thick of it all the time. On friday, we sent out a tweet promoting your appearance here on sunday and we, in the tweet, we put the words are white people irredeemable, asks imani perry of princeton, university. You took a little issue with that. I did. So i want to read from breathe what prompted that question. Okay. Well put it on the screen as well. Thank you. Well give you a chance to talk about it 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 did not mean individuals. Individuals are the bulwark, and a Single Person can be a persons hell or a heaven, too, a friend. But i worry that white people are irredeemable and it scares me. What would the complete dissemabling of identity look like, how would the vicera pulse under a cracked open surface . I dont know, im losing some of my ability to dream a world. Yes. So given those two paragraphs. Yes. It sounds like we were rather accurate in asking that question, no . Well, let me say why the single sentence request he is hard for me because without the larger context, so often sentences like that trigger a defensiveness that becomes impossible to engage, right . So and this is the sort of the difficulty of social media all the time, right, its not unique and ive certainly experienced it even with tweets that i wrote, right . But that second sentence that is the caveat is important because people hear when you say, i wonder if white people are irredeemable, they hear all white people and they hear white people as individuals as opposed to whiteness as an identity that is clung to. So that when i go into the second paragraph where im like, well, what if we took that identity apart . Those people would not, would not sort of have a different history or body, right . 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. So, when i actually when i went into later in the first paragraph when im saying, you know, a person can individual can be a heaven, right, im not talking about individuals and individual could be heaven, certainly, both as someone who was raised by a white man or as someone who thinks of so many figures like, you know, take, for example, john brown or howard vin or bob zellner, right, who, i think are 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. So thats thats what i was thinking. 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. Yeah, thats a sentence that my mother said to me. And i think about it in a number of different ways. I mean, one, of course, is there is a of course, theres all the risks, right, 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, whether its mass incarceration or schooling, graduation rates, attendance rates and unemployment. I think about it differently. I think and all of those things are true, but i think of the simultaneo simultaneousty of wanting to raise black boys that doesnt limit their sense of imagination and the possibilities. That allows them to understand the facts of racial inequality to keep them from thinking theyre superior to some people because theyre relatively privilege visavis other black people and people generally. And 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 even more elusive for black men to attain, we have a society that values that and so part of the task is also raising them, for me, to not value that, but to value their characters and their sensitivity and their complexity and other people around them, irrespective of what walk of life they come from. So all of that is a special calling because the lessons about what it means to be a man are across the board, oft oftentimes entail things that are not so good and then the lessons of what about blackness is with a much more loving and capacity to to be fully human. In the last 19 minutes, everything weve talked about, are these things that you teach or impart at princeton . Not in so many ways this is a departure for me. And its a spirit of what i teach, i teach of Tony Morrison and Richard Wright and i send to teach for factdriven than the emotional regulisterinregis and i think of teaching as a calling and ones humanity and love to the students even though were supposed to be i guess somewhat dispassionate. How does one get a ph. D. And a jd from harvard at the same time . Unwisely. I mean, its not you know, i when i was, i think, graduated from college, i was 21 years old and i was just completely in love with the life of the mind and ideas and i didnt want to choose and i sort of wanted to do everything and i said, well, ill apply to graduate and law school and i did two years of graduate school and took my orals and first year of law school. It was sort of a frenzied pace, but it was, i mean, it was beautiful, it was amazing for me. I loved it. You know, i learned so much and every day i you know, i was being nutured 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. Lift every voice and sing that of course is Jessie Norman singing at the rosa parks congressional Gold Medal Ceremony in 1999. What is that song . That song is lift every voice and sing the song that was known as the National Anthem and the black National Anthem after the 1970s and it is a song that i describe as black americas most precious so song. Gosh, and you know, just that clip of rosa parks of course, an alabama woman and Jessie Norman recently departed is incredibly moving. Host youve written a biography. Of the song. May we forever song. And James Johnson and John Rosamond johnson. They were composers, brothers in jacksonville, florida and back in the day they were called race men, people who saw every achievement as they had as being in service of the race. James johnson the first secretarygeneral of the naacp, first man admitted to the bar in florida, really extraordinary, but, you know, one is the signature accomplishments of both of their lives was the composition of this song. And they were first generation free men, born in the 1870s . Yes, and so well, their mothers family hadnt been been enslaved bahamian and their father enslaved in virginia and they were the first generation with hopes and aspirations so quickly dashed with the end of reconstruction. What was the reception in 1900 when the song was written . So, what was extraordinary is that the song caught on like wildfire. It was almost immediately embraced as an anthem of black america and i think one of the things i try to detail this in the book is that the United States does not have a National Anthem at the moment and even so early on, people were referring to it as an anthem was a big deal. 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 tin pan alley as song writers, in part because there had been a terrible fire in the city. So they actually werent there in florida as the song caught on and it caught on across School Children passed it on, black club women circulated it, they reprinted it, it began to be printed in the back of hymnals so it was sort of an anthem of a communitys making. They did not describe it as an anthem. They didnt intend it necessarily as an anthem, but black communities throughout the south said, oh, this is our anthem. If we had continued playing that video there we would have seen then president clinton. Yes. Singing. Yes, its one of his distinctions, he might have been the only president who kn to know all three verses. And forever we stand, hiphop issues fair with el to the National Anthem. Where are you going there . One. Things i talk about in my first book. Theres something that happens in the 70s and 80s which is, you know, a transformation both of some norms in black social and political life that have to do with the kind of Civic Engagement and associational life, and its also connected to the deindustrialization and theres a piece where i quote the reverend Joseph Lowery on this where i said, may he rest in peace, that black people are the moral conscious and hiphop is the refusal of that position. Its bold, its not formal, its profane and instant and not an unwilling to perform a particular kind of politics, a kind of revelling in outlaw, which is a commonplace in american culture, but its a different kind of public presence for africanamericans. So that departure, i think, was significant, but what i also talk about in the book is that the song keeps coming back, you know, so there have been various moments where it seemed like it was just going to peter out completely. It keeps coming back, even though the kind of institutions, the kind of communities in which was sung on weekly or even daily basis, dont exist in the same way in black communities. What did you learn about the song in researching this book . That surprised you . Well, i would say the Biggest Surprise because so much of what i write