Professor imani perry, what is the structure of your newest book, brief . Guest well, there are three sections. Fear, fly and fortune. It is a letter, a series of letters to my son but its also a letter to the larger world. Both about the reality of the terror and anxiety and the worry that comes along with being the parent about black children in particular 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 finds the lesson for an extraordinary tradition which we have to draw from. Host where did you come up with the idea to write your sons a letter . Guest i have written some letters privately for years and my editor at beacon press said is this something youd be interested in doing in large part because ado talk about my children all the time and i write posts about them on social media and initially, you know, i think what we both had in mind with something that was probably bit more lighthearted but then when i started to reflect on what it would mean to tell a story to them about both my expectations but also my warnings and the depth of my love and a story for both them and for the world it became something more sober and i reached into the archive in my mind of the way it did that for me and tried to have a conversation, both with the past and the present, foror their future. It reads as if it flowed out of view and thats probably that it reads guest thank you. It certainly the book that came out most quickly andth did 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 we were working so there was a way that provided about contemplation and retreat that allowed but its also the conversations in the book and the conversations we have all the time and to craft those conversations and to craft those take message to time but there is something that slowed forth and to benefit from the emotional energy, i think, of this task which is kind of breathless and beautiful and exciting meaning stewarding childrens lives is just like that and host where did you come up with the title . Guest it is so interesting because as many people guess theres a reference to eric garners statement, i need to breathe. But there is also a reference tk about is the city i was born in alabama had one of the worst air quality in the nation the year i was born and i was thinking about the prevalence of environmental racism in the way that makes it hard to breathe , you know, i thought about the holding in ones breath of deep anxiety around thehe threat of violence moments of Racial Injustice and also in part because connected to my 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 16 bars without barely catching her breath was a powerful metaphor for me. Tweend me and there is a modification that i will talk about of unarmed black people often by police officersof without any process and without any just cause and its a most minor infraction if none at all. There is 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. Right . Those kinds of fears are without question ever present and part of the task of parenting for me is to attend to navigate around the fears with the recognition that tomorrow it really isnt promised. Pr so you have to both attempt to navigate but also cannot a be completely overwhelmed by the fear otherwise you wont live. Right . If you have to deal with the reality of tragedy and disaster are possible and then fly if in some ways an indication of Toni Morrison and you know, as opposed to a flight four in a native son is the moment when the protagonist, bigger thomas, is running away from the law because he is committed a murder that is prompted by his terror of being lynched essentially. But i thought that flight in the sense of actually taking flight in life so its an extension of the idea of not being defined by the fear but how to take flight and that is a direct reference to Toni Morrisons, song of solomon, and the idea of flying. If you give up that stuff that weighs you down, as she says. In fortune for me was a way of talking about the abundance of that that is not talking about the inheritance and weight we tend to describe it but actually the fortune of a tradition of an ancestry of resilience and of ioincredible beauty and of creativity, even in the face of constraint and so you know, i talked about everything from our ancestors who worked the land to felonious monk and his mastery and the repetition of a single compact composition over and over it which really function to me as a way of thinking about how to i navigate this and a he has this set of notes which we could say is medical for life and in navigating the terms over and over again. That is the foundation of the structure. What do we know about freem freemen . Oh gosh. This is a hard question to answer because sometimes they tell me Different Things to tell the world but in some ways the most important part is that they are fully and absolutely human in all of its complexities. I say it that way because so often, i think, black childrenty in particular arent granted that recognition. I can talk about how they are distinctive so asa is a brilliant athlete and incredible sophisticated and Human Understanding relations and a beautiful writer. I can talk about freemen is composers of extraordinary music and an amazingly gifted artist and theyre both really good friends and all of these things but sometimes i hesitate because these thingsth are true about tm but it is not i dont want to sound as though im making them exceptional because i really do that all children are 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, that disproportionately falls not on black children but on black boys in particular. So, they are really human. What a thing about the fact that youve wrote a letter to them exposing them to the world. Guest while, thus far they are okay with it but i also understand that might change over time becauseok my sons are 13, 16 and in a pretty intense stage of development each of them and i didnt give them veto power over the content of the book so allowed them to say if they were stories they do not theren the book or if were details but i hope they let me tell later in life but maybe not treated but, with respect to the idea of being on book tour in the book getting public attention that is not particularly interesting to them and i think thats a good thing. I am notn, in our intimate domestic life a public figure, you know, that part of the day today of our lives isnt on display and that is most important piece for them is the relationship. From your book you write that racism is in every step and breath we take. Guest yes, it really is. When you actually start to deconstruct it in a detailed fashion and you see everything from how homes are constructed to how frequently the street cleaning operations take place, who can be where and what opportunities exist and who has Bank Accounts and who doesnt and who has spots and who doesnt, walking along the street, who whose body elicits a clutching of the purse, who gets followed in the store, where are their bookstores . In which communities . What to the Schools Look Like and what is the quality of the air we breathe . It is so pervasive and its part of what makes, as uncomfortable as conversations are for so many people, u we cannot function asa Decent Society without talking about it because we are in the thick of it all the time. Host imani. , on friday we send out a tweet promoting your appearance here on sunday and in the tweet we put the wordsin, are white peope he redeemable ask imani. Of Princeton University . You took issue with that. Guest i did. Host i want to read from breathe what wanted that question but we will put it on the screen as well so 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 did not mean individuals, individuals are the precious bulwark against total desperationa in them we find the persistence of possibility. Of course, a Single Person can be someones help but a Single Person could be a heaven to or a friend. I worry that white people are irredeemable and it scares me. What would the complete disassembling of the kingdom of identity look like . How would the this role pulse under a cracked open service . Wouldun be all shatter or coulde put something together again . I dont know, i am losing some of my ability to dream a world. So given those two paragraphs sound like we were rather accurate asking that question, no . Guest let me say whypa this single sentence question is hard for me because without the larger context, so, often sentences like that trigger a defensiveness that becomes impossible to engage. Right . This is the difficulty of social media all the time. Me it is not unique and ive certainly experienced it even with tweets i wrote. But that second sentence that is the caveat is important because people here when you say i wonder if white people are irredeemable they hear all white people and they hear white people w w as individuals as opd to whiteness as an identity that it has clung to. When i go into the second paragraph i say what if we took this identity in parts and those people would notwh sort of havea different history or body right but it would be a different relationship to identify and i think it would potentially havee as a consequence a more humane relationship to each other so when i went into later in the third paragraph when im saying a person can individual can be a heaven, im not talking about an individual but an individual can be a heaven certainly both as someone who was raised by a mewhite man or as someone who thanks of so many figures likean pick for example john brown or bob zellner, who i think are some of the most precious people in the worlde it is important o me to not have a formulation that removes themn from my sene of the struggle that im engaged in. So, thats what i was thinking. Host one more question about breathe before we move on to some of your other books. E mothering black boys in america is a special callingng. Guest yes, thats a sentence my mother said to me and i think about it in a number of different ways. In one, of course, its all the risks, right. 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 mass incarceration or inequality in scho or High School Graduation rates, College Attendance rates, employment and all sorts of things. I think about it differently. I think about ittk and not allf those things are true but i think about the simultaneity of wanting to raise my children who are identified as black boys thatid, in a way that doesnt limit their sense of possibility and imaginations and allows them to understand the facts of racial inequality and that keeps them from to give that they are superior to people because they are relatively privileged and visavis other black people and other people generally but it also keeps them away from seeking patriarchy or dominance in this society the values of those things highly so that even though those things are more elusive to black men to attain its a society that values that and so part of the task is raising them for me to not value that, lets value their characters and their sensitivity and complexity and other people around them irrespective of what lock of life they come from. All that is a special calling because the lessons about what it means to be a man are acrosstheboard oftentimes with things that are not so good in the lessons of what blackness is is oftentimes not so good unless you counter both of those things with the story i think is more accurate but also much more loving and gives him a much greater capacity to be fully human. Host in the last 19 minutes everything we talked about are these the types of things you teach or in part at princeton . Guest not really which is interesting. In some ways its a departure for me and its a spirit with which i teach. And i certainly teach to the work of tom morrison and Richard Wright but i tend to teach much more sort of fact driven material driven as opposed to the kind of emotional register but i do think teaching itself is a kind of calling so its important to bring to that ones a sense of value and humanity and justice and love to the students even though we are supposed to be, i guess, somewhat dispassionate. Host how does one get a phd and a jd from harvard at the same time . Guest unwisely. [laughter] you know, when i was graduated from college 21 years old and i was just completely in love with the lights and the mind and ideas and i do not want to choose and i wanted too do everything and i said well, if i go to graduate school and law school and did two years of graduate school and took my orals and into my first year of law school so it was awo frenzid pace but it was beautiful and amazing for me. I loved it. I learned so muchit and every dy i was being nurtured by all of this generation of people who came before me and help me understand the world. Host we want to play a little bit of music and a little bit of video and this is from 1999. Turn to lift every boy [inaudible] host that is jesse norman singing at the rosa parks congressional Gold Medal Ceremony in 1999. What is that song . Guest that song is lift every voice and sing, the song that was known as the Negro National anthem in the black National Anthem after the 1970s. Em it is the song i described as black americas most precious song. Gosh, you know, that clip of rosa parks who, of course, is an alabama woman and jesse norman who has recently departed is incredibly moving. Host youve written a biography. Guest of the song. O host of the. Song, may we forever stand is the name of the book. James Weldon Johnson and [inaudible] guest yes, they are the author and composer. They were brothers who were born in jacksonville, florida, renaissance man and of course, back in the day they were called race men, people who saw every achievement they had as being in service of the race. James Weldon Johnson became the first secretarygeneral of the naacp and the first black man admitted to the bar in florida and its really extraordinary but you know, what is the signature accomplishment about their lives is the composer of the song. Host they were firstgeneration freemen. Guest yes, and so, well, their mothers family had been enslaved and was bahamian and their father had been enslaved in virginia but yes, of that generation and that emerge from slavery with all the hopes and dreams and aspirations that were so quickly with the end of reconstruction. Host what was the reception in 1900 when the song was written . Guest what was extraordinary is that the song caught on like wildfire and 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 did not have a National Anthem at this moment so even so early on people were referring to it as an anthem and it 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 [inaudible] alley as songwriters, in part because there had been a terrible fire in the city. They werent there in florida as the song caught on. N. It caught on lacrosse schoolchildren passed it on, blackard called women so collated it, they reprinted it, and began to be printed in the back of hymnals and so it was an anthem of a communitys making. They did not prescribe this as an anthem and did not intend it necessarily as an anthem but black communities say this is our anthem. If we had continued playing that video there we would have seen thenpresident clinton. Yes, who knows all three verses. Host singing a. Guest yes, it is one of his rsdistinctions he may be the ony u. S. President is who knew all three verses. Host from your book may be forever stand, hiphop uttered its farewell to the black National Anthem. Guest so, one of the things and i talk about this in my first book is that there are some things that happened in the 70s and 80s which is a transformation both of some norms and black social and political life to have to deal with the kind of Civic Engagement and associationme lie and its also one of big connectors of the industrialization and theres a piece where i quote the reverend Joseph Lowery on this where he says or he said may he rest in peace the black people are once the moral conscience of the nation in hiphop is the refusal of that position so it is bold and not formal and its profane and its not an unwilling to perform a particular kind of but unraveling in outlaw which is commonplace in American Culture but its a different kind of public presence for African Americans so that departure i think was a significant but what i also talk about in the book is the song keeps coming back so there have been various moments where we have seen like it will peter out completelymo and it keeps coming back even though the kind of institutions and the kinds of communities in which it was song weekly or a daily basis dont exist in the same white and black communities. Host what did you learn about the song in these books . Guest well, i will say the Biggest Surprise because so much of what i write about it is how it was ensconced in institutional life. It was so exciting to see the Graduation Program that like is a dressmakers academy where they sing the song or every day and Dizzy Gillespie talks about the world in South Carolina singing the song on the porch of the school looking out on a cotton field but w