Tonights event, discussing the latest book [inaudible] the future of america, in conversation. Tonights event is part of our ongoing Virtual Event series. Were so fortunate to be able to continue to bring authors during these difficult times. Every week we will be hosting events via zoom. Just like always, our Event Schedule will appear on our website, or you can also sign up for our email newsletter. This event will conclude with some time for your questions. If you would like to ask the speaker something, locate the q a button, wherever it may be on your display, so you can several mitt your questions. Where you can submit your questions. We will go through as many as time allows. We have included a link to our website where you can purchase a copy of the more perfect union. If you already have a book or would like to contribute in a different way, we have also included a chat a link to us. We appreciate any support you are able to extend to us at this time. Lastly, as you know, technical glitches may come up. We apologize in advance for that. If anything technical does occur, we will do our best to resolve any issues as quickly as possible. Im so pleased to introduce tonights speaker. Calvin baker is a novelist, journalist and essayist, author of four novels, including one was a finalist for a legacy award. He currently teaches at columbia universitys graduate school of the arts and has previously taughted at Yale University and [inaudible]. His nonfiction work has been featured in a variety of publications including New York Times magazine and elsewhere. Katie odonnell is a Senior Editor where she has worked with authors including [inaudible], New York Times bestselling author [inaudible] and many others. She began her publishing career at the [inaudible]. Tonight we will be discussing calvins latest book a more perfect reunion, a captivating portrait of the United States which challenges one of its [inaudible]. From the Civil Rights Movement to our present moment nationwide [inaudible]. Progress that americans have been made [inaudible]. The result is a book thats as elegantly crafted as it is timely and responsive. Its been called a rich meditative account. Were so honored to have you here tonight. Without further adieu, i want to send it over to calvin and katie. Thank you so much. Calvin, how are you doing tonight . Im well. How are you, katie . Thank you for doing this with me. Of course, of course. This is going to be great fun. Im excited to have this conversation. [inaudible]. We started working on this in 2017 . Yeah. Shes been just invaluable in the process of making it. Its been a joy. So we wanted to start with some kind of First Principles or some assumptions that we think we can make in this space because i think, you know, we have been were in this moment where were having another conversation, another National Reckoning in talking about race in america, but weve been doing that as we know for a long long time. Why dont we start lets start in the middle or lets start and make some things clear. One of the things i wanted to say is that we dont have to talk about or explain that we believe in the humanity of black americans, black people, all people of color in the u. S. We believe and we know about how Structural Racism works in this country. Theres probably some other things that you want to add to that list, calvin. We think that we know because it is the field that form us so were aware of this idea of systemic racism. I want to begin this book for people who are intelligent and dont need to be told the things that you just said, that racism is bad, but who think deeply and have some prior knowledge about race, about history, about American Culture and to avoid the repetition because the field of enlightenment is one that begins with the revolution itself, in the years leading up to the continental congress, people realized they had a race problem, and we realized that weve had a race problem again and again and again, and we are realizing it anew, and the things that were saying have all been said before, and i began the book assuming that these things that we know these things, that they are on the record, but you can go back. You can read douglas. You can read baldwin. You can read wright and so forth. And that are most things about race, but the question, how do we move forward is a more active question, and i think some of the other conversations that we want to avoid. Right. Why integration, and why that word . We talk a lot about diversity. We talk about inclusion. We talk about representation. We even talk about desegregation, but you are very clear about talking about integration, that that is our goal and you define it in a particular way. Talk to me about that. So it was an intuition, as someone who long studied africanamerican history, i intuit that integration was the real goal, and because race makes no sense, because race was a construction, so what is it . What is it that the Civil Rights Movement is really about . Integration. You go back through the record and you see thats where malcolm ends up. Thats where martin ends up. Thats where douglas ends up. In the 19th century, its been said there are two ways for these people to go, must wholly part or wholly integrate. Thats it. Then styling further and further back, theres a lawyer from a boston lawyer from the 1600s who points out and as a lot of the revolutionary thinkers that point out, we can end slavery, but how do we integrate these people . And thats where everyone was stuck. Thats where the abolitionists were stuck, because you could be one and still harbor racial feelings, negative racial stereotypes against africanamericans. You can be a liberal and still build a life for yourself that segregates you. And for me, integration was not assimilation. Right . Because that reduces or flattens the black self. Not diversity, because you can hide a lot of things in diversity. You sort of put we are in the world, people together and you say now we have diversity. It is integration. By integration i mean making available and accessible all the tools and opportunities of American Society to all its citizens. And that is what the country historically shied away from when it comes to africanamericans. When we talk about things like the new deal or the gi bill, its always but not for them, and even now, in the National Conversation people saying im willing to sacrifice for make things better for black people. We dont think of it as giving up when we talk about anyone else. When we talk of european immigrants coming here, we say there is enough for everyone. Thats what we do. We create opportunity. But when it comes to africanamericans, it is always this assumption that somehow zero sum game, that its somehow a competition. And i wanted to push past that because there are all these psychological barriers in the american mind, in the mind of all those who have been who have been colonized or who have colonized, where it comes to race. How do you move past that . Well, you have to go to the material conditions, the cultural conditions, the interlocking structures where race is that create race, and hard sights of law and economics, the soft sights, cultural and education, but the narratives that we learn and the things that we hear in private, and then our interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships, how i think about you, how you think about me, how i think about myself, how you think of yourself. [inaudible]. When we talk about things like diversity, when we talk about frames like post racial or color blind, you find that people want to move beyond it. 90 of the country supports principles of racism, but when you come down to those mechanisms that we know create greater opportunity for africanamericans, people stop. Why do they stop . I mean, this is weve been this book shows, the first half of it really delves into the history of this country and the moments at which we have stopped, and part of it i think is that we race so defines america. Its always so defined america, that we have a hard time imagining what this country is without it. So talk a little bit about that. Why do we why do we keep getting stuck . I want to correct that slightly, and in the beginning, if one goes back to one goes back to victorian england im sorry you dont have these structures of race; right . In shakespeare, there are shades of skin color. There are gradients of hair texture, but its not race in the way that we recognize it, and race is a thing that is constructed. Its constructed hand in glove with the slave state. As Frederick Douglas said anything made can be unmade. And so when you ask the question of why do we stop, youre talking why dont we unmake this . There are two essential mechanisms id argue. One of them is a real resistance on the part of american conservatives. This begins in the revolutionary period. Theres very little, and it continues through the civil war and then snaps back, and theres nothing being said in this current moment on the right that has not been said before. They are not great original thinkers. They simply use the new tools, and they pass these from generation to generation. Its true on the left as well in a different way. And because race becomes Something Like i mean i call it a belief system, Something Like a religion. Its the thing that shapes us, and in some cases, its very consciously used to create an american melting pot. We have all these people, these new immigrant groups as we did at the turn of the 20th century, coming over from europe, how do you make one people of them . And so and talking about david nassaus book, and one of the things you see happening is you give them a narrative of whiteness. How do you create a narrative of whiteness . You create these spaces, if you know the price of admission, you can go to a ballgame, gouk to a theater. You can go to a theater. The ballpark is segregated. There are no black layers there. This extends to advertisement. This is culture itself is creating it. It is giving you this narrative of races, degrading africanamericans. Whiteness as a construct exists in opposition to that which it is not. It is not black. It is not brown. It is not yellow. So going directly to the question, thats hard to let go of. If thats the narrative that shaped you, it is hard to let go of because even in ways we say, im not a racist. Someone committed some heinous crime. Lets say shot an africanamerican. Im not a racist. Two sheriffs in North Carolina talking about the need for basically a final solution, and then they say but were not racist. Right. And on the left, we say well as long as im not that, then im not racist. But you see we have these narratives of race that are constantly reinforced; right . They are reinforced every time you open a newspaper, go to the cinema. They are also told in private. And so we have a performance of race that we do in public for the benefit, right, because it is socially unacceptable to be racist. However, we have another conversation, we have other conversations in private. And you say things that i use the david chase example here when he says to his credit, he admits it, but its also completely unaware, oh, well i grew up in a family, they werent what you call white chic racist, but it was just a sense of that, you know, they want to take what you have, or theyre this, theyre that, theyre this, and everyone has grown up with that. Yeah. So i guess the question is how do we get out of this way that we have defined ourselves, you know . Weve grown up with this. We cant imagine a world beyond it. So we keep having the same conversations over and over again. How do we have a different conversation . I think you have to focus on outcomes, and one of the things that i mean one of the things i was thinking about as i was writing the book walking through new york city and looking at all these spaces that we would say are integrated, and then going a bit deeper and saying actually this is really simply a performance. Were adjacent to one another. Asking the question of every space in which we participate, how integrated is this space truly, and by that i mean to what extent a, is it representative of the peoples of this country . B, to what degree those people are free to be themselves . And to what degree do i am i looking through racial frames . But also thats an esoteric question, but you go into a restaurant, it is like why are there only one kind of group only one kind of person in this restaurant. Right. You go into an office and you look at the employee pool. You look at the distribution of those in position of power. It is like you see all of those are racially segregated spaces. And the way to move beyond that in fact to desegregate all of these spaces, thats where people stop because it means going back right . It becomes an interlocking system. I am im the manager of a company. Id like to increase my pool of africanamerican employees, but they are not coming from the university yaos i recruit from. But theyre not coming from the universities i recruit from. Well, you know, they dont have the test scores, or theyre not coming from the high schools that we recruit from, so you push it back. And you go to the high schools, and you say well, in the case of new york city, they didnt pass admissions tests to get into the most selective schools, the problem is in the middle schools. The problem is always somewhere else. In fact, it is at all these places. Right. I want to talk a little bit about how long you have been thinking about this book. You know, you were just saying you walk through the city and you think that new york city, where we both live, is a melting pot, is an integrated city, but it is anything but and that, you know, you move through spaces and that word adjacent really sticks out to me. And i know that in your fiction, youve been working through some of these questions for a long time and trying to understand what a free consciousness really means. But why this book . And how did you start feeling like this is the book i need to write . Okay. I will tell the story. In my fiction and this has been a 20yearlong project, and ive been writing about what it means to live in a multicultural Pluralist Society slash world and also what it means to inhabit a black consciousness that isnt performing itself for [inaudible] but isnt selfconscious. Meaning awareness of himself, agency of himself. What does it mean to have a fictional world in which one does . As talking to a brilliant friend who knows a lot about books, and he said to me one day, calvin, youre too far ahead of people. These are youre answering questions that problems people dont know they have. And i sat with that, and i was like whats the disconnect . And its oh, i get it. And also this frustration that i want to talk about a whole society, a whole self in my fiction, and i want to talk about the relationships and connections between america and the rest of the world. I wanted to talk right . The idea its always been a multiracial space, always, and theres always been a black presence. I cant get there until i move past race. Look at the conversation that we were having about race and just the real frustration as someone who grew up reading baldwin, grew up reading who has done a lot of research and history, that were repeating yourselves now. Right. And we may not be seeing it as well the second time, the third time, as we did in the first instance, and so were beginning to have derivative conversations, and not only that, those conversations themselves are being captured and being captured economically, so what do i mean by that . I mean it is a performance. It becomes a performance. We have talked about this a little bit. They are necessary performances in some cases. They help people. They are cathartic. You know, baldwin makes this critique in either late 1940s or early 50s, about protests, and how protests flattens the self. It is devoid of life because all youre doing is reacting against, and the self is so much more than that. I wanted to make a book that spoke to the whole self, those as much heart as mine, as much mind as consciousness, and to do that, like what does that mean . What does it mean to talk about these problems in a whole way . And i came across the quote from freud in civilizations and lets pretend that rome isnt a fiscal entity but [inaudible] one who comes into existence will ever cease to exist, meaning that were these layers of our theology. You go to your therapist, you talk about your childhood, you talk about your dreams, and like in a nation, all these things exist, right . And race is inflecting all these points. It is like okay, if im protesting against police shootings, im not talking about a whole self. Im not talking about a whole society because everything is policed. How do you move past not simply that harm to the body, but that harm to the spirit, that harm that happens every day in major and minor ways . Well, you see the only answer to that is integration. And it took a lot of digging, right . I intuited it, as a lot of people intuit it. You go back and read everything. You dig through the history, and you go through the culture, and you break down a lot of the silos a lot of the academic silos, a, so if i know history, i dont necessarily know literature, i dont necessarily know sociology, but also we compartmentalize our conversation about race. Now were going to talk about the race problem. After this were going to go watch football. Right, right. Were not going to talk about music. Were not going to talk about pop culture. Right, were not going to talk about public commons, the way our cities, towns are organized. We wont talk about these things. Were just going to talk about this abstraction called the race problem. Well learn a language. Well perform it. And hope that it takes us to where we need to go, and it never does. Right. So in investigating this, in the book, you made some really made some choices. You told us the story of someone like Ben Montgomery who i in spite of having read some not enough history but you know worked on history in this space did not know this story. I wonder if you could talk about his story and what it represents. I love the story of Ben Montgomery. One of the first blacktowns in the country black towns in the country, it comes into existence right after the civil war, and its founder is a man named Ben Montgomery who was born in a county in virginia, is sold down the river, is purchased by a