Transcripts For CSPAN2 Helena Andrews-Dyer R. Eric Thomas R

Maxine is blessing us spiritually today as if to fabulous books and who wrote a fabulous book. We are really excited to be focusing on something positive as we get closer and closer to an election part and as we get crazier and crazier locked inside of our homes. Loyalty exist to uplift. Minority voices, clear voices in our community and those we are honored your joining us tonight. Reclaiming her time, all things maxine water and the legend that is maxine. Reclaiming her time is funny. But it is also inspiring. Brings up a champion in the face of ridiculous injustice. Also, ridiculous injustice as our authors. We are honored to be joined today by Helena Andrews dyer a fulltime columnist at the Washington Post covering popular children culture in the capital, sometimes children. [laughter] i think its a misprint i think were at childrens childrens level, sorry well. [laughter] before joining the post helene it was a contribute editor at xo jane additional womens magazine founded by jane pratt. The Oprah Magazine New York Times among other national publications. Helena has appeared abcs nightline, cbs early show, cn cnn, npr and xyy and it is now getting to add loyalties to that list. [laughter] its great to have you here. Thank you. Host joining her as our eric thomas the inventor of the anti maxine meme and Senior Writer also if youre not currently subscribed to that if you are not reading that on a regular how he staying sane, highly recommend. This is escape from politics you need right now. His calm is typically the number one on any given day pretty his work is given New York Times style, travel, a mayor podcast. The Philadelphia Inquirer and philadelphia magazine. He has been featured in walpole the field of inquiry and baltimore magazine. In 2017 philadelphia magazines best issue brace also the author front of her absolute favorite books in 2020, here for how to save your soul in america. She is a memoir and essays and so much more, please pick it up if you have not. Please note as well, loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation any time during this event spirit i will boot your out of here. But we do really what you guys to chat with each other in the chats. To ask any questions of our authors. Will have a q a session at the end. But for now im turning it over to the two lovelies, they give for joining us. Everyone joined me and giving a virtual round of applause. [applause] speed. Host im so excited we are finally here. As a very quick sort of whirlwind process. Also also felt like every month feels like every week, every day feels like six years lately. Sue back but literally its just been over a year from conception to publication. Yes, yes that is very quick by book standard. That is also the wild thing. I goaded jump too far in the weeds. But yeah. We feared would talk to people about a couple different things. For instance the project. Our connection to each other started the cause of representative waters when we spoke for the post about the anti maxine meme. Guest i think i was the reliable columnist who is reading your column and they were hilarious and amazing. I have to follow this person. I dont even know how i contacted you. Maybe on facebook, who knows . [laughter] mike lets talk. Lets talk about it. That is like the maxine meme would that was your work and what you were doing. You were new to lichen journalism. New to that type of stuff. Give this long history i didnt realize it at the time i may not have even been at the agency at that point. We were under the same representation. And i was like oh you are legit you are a real person. [laughter] you are like real credits. And you have helped shape the voice of our current online media landscape. I think maybe a year or year end half later we sort of came back around. Because of our shared agency with this project. i always felt that i was always like, i dont know this is the right avenue. But the abduction, building a context with you felt right and respectful. Was it an easy yes for you . It was, absolutely, how it all came about abthey had published the notorious rbg, i guess almost 5 years before. Our editor at the time, the webinar editor at the time was looking for something similar about Maxine Waters, she felt she deserved that. Something that was rooted in the cultural moment but painted this person in full color 3d beyond the sort of meme. Rbg was the exact same thing, Maxine Waters was the perfect person for Something Like this. When my agent came to me with it, im like, this makes sense, cool, cool, by the way im seven months pregnant. They wanted it in like six months. , nobody is giving you an award for separating. Thought hard about it, can i do this. Working with you was incredible. There were so many times i was like, abpeople are like how you write this book . I only have to write half of it. So i think once when we knew we were going to work together, the fact is, i dont even think we met in person. When i interviewed you over the phone we were doing the extension of the book we talking on the phone. We werent even zooming, zoom was not a thing. We met at the offices of ralph yuan. That was the first time for me to meet you in person. Then we went to new york to meet with alessandro. I always had questions in like before i got her to publisher half abwe were just sort of a ait was so researchbased we were digging through a lot of stuff. I spent days worth of hours on various newspaper archives and looking at abit wasnt the sort of thing we needed to sit down and talk about what happens next. We sort of knew what happens next. Exactly. For us it was just we had our outline, we knew here are the headlines of her life so we know were going to touch on all these things. Obviously we work about talk about we wanted to talk about the reclaiming moment, her childhood, we took very naturally gravitated toward the subject werent necessarily subject Matter Experts on but interested in and just i remember at one point i thought i wanted to do that hiphop chapter. You and i were talking about Something Like, im numb finishing up this chapter on hiphop. We had an even talked about it. I was like, we got three weeks left i got email ll cool j, lets figure this out. [laughter] the coauthors space i think neither one of us has done it, my first book came out 2010 with a memoir i wrote on my own. It was a whole different in coffee shop a whole different time. It just worked. We just survived, we should write some more books. I agree. A little technical but because of the way that the book is laid out with the printer we couldnt use google docs. We had to write in word. I would love to keep writing books with you, i would love to do it on google docs. [laughter] so we could actually be in the same document. Beyond that, theres a a lot of files going back and forth. I felt the same way you felt about the hiphop chapter, i felt bad about some of the early life stuff where i was like, because i am not a journalist, i was like, theres a certain point where my ability to get to a source dries up and i was like i guess i will never know. [laughter] you dont have that. You are like, i got this, talking to this person, that person, you are amazing. Some people who werent too happy with me. I always felt like its funny when you are dealing with black folks of certain generations and you just need to make sure you are as respectful as possible. The fact that you and i are black and that we were raised how we were raised we know how you approach people and that was always my thing i would talk to the one, trying to understand what life was like and at high school at the time i randomly through some alumni something or other contact its a family who went to high school, he was two years ahead of her or two years behind her. That man heading on the phone for a good i dont even know, it was so long. He was telling me all the things. He answered my question 15 minutes before but i was like brother, we are going to sit and talk, not even brother, like, uncle, grandpa i would have loved to dive into that because our original plan was, go to st. Louis and right we got a lot of firstperson stuff we didnt necessarily think we are going to get a lot of research stuff. Even i cover pop culture and im usually not doing a time about their on the ground reporting. Its a lot in my head and interviews. This was a stretch for me. I dont know how you felt i definitely felt, it was a good stretch, it was a challenge for me workwise and intellectually. I felt the same way. When you talk about respect i would tell people, im writing this book they are like, of course because i written that that points five or six different articles and interviewed her a couple times for elle. My big concern was, i didnt want to write a book blames calm about her because i was like when you walk into loyalty and like give me a book about representative borders when we got the assignment there was none. So i was like, i think we both felt this, the responsibility to treat her with respect but also with the same energy she brings to the popculture conversation. That was a challenge for me and i literally had just finished second edits for here for it. And im writing a column every day, i also got commissioned to write two plays last year so i was like abi told my husband, im going to Maxine Waters college. It was really invigorating figuring out what questions i had both factual and conceptual and figured out how to find them what other things this project made me so grateful for. I am grateful but grateful and really concrete way is early black journalism. When you go back through the Los Angeles Times theres a lot of coverage of representative waters up to maybe like 92, like a little scattering in the late 80s. The afroamerican was on the Maxine Waters beat from the late 70s. Every magazine was on the Maxine Waters beat. Jet magazine. Im grateful as a black person to have this history that was not deemed important enough to paper the record. And also this style. Theres one article in the afro, there is this article in the afro the article was what they talked about at the meeting. I was like what meeting are we talking about . Like you all know what we are talking about, the meeting. Thats what they talked about. That is such a great point. Unfortunately if i put my journalism hat on we are losing the small regional papers. We are losing local journalism and diving in totally highlights the importance of that kind of work. If anyone aball. That was crazy. I think there is so much risk rich history in that section of the book if you want to go back and read all those old articles. Thats the thing. Some of it is behind paved wall obviously it costs money some of it there is a great collection of photographs of her you can only get in person at the library of congress. A lot of it, or book has hyperlinks, hotlinks, what am i talking about. It does make me wonder like one of our local journalism regional journalism, what person do we not know enough about now that will become important in the future . Its interesting, when you look at, not to bring in the president to this but regional paper, obviously he was a celebrity for a long time but new york journalism was not into him for years. Your local reporters know whats up, they know exactly who is a scoundrel and who is somebody you should be paying attention to and thats the people i read, those of the people i want covering the news around me. Absolutely. Speaking of the footnotes, google docs, this is sponsored by google docs. I went to college, we went to the same college i had a computer but i was like, dude these are the books that you use to write this paper and here is my endnotes sheet, enjoy. This was like i was a minority report. We got there it, we survived it. We did. We should probably talk a little bit about whats in the book. [laughter] we wrote different chapters and covered some of the timeouts, do you have a place like this is the place i keep going to my favorite part of the book or her legacy . I have a lot of favorite parts. Wind i would say i love the chapter about i think we call that like the making of maxine where we just talked about her growing up, especially the part that gets into her relationship with her mother who she talked about. I got a lot of early stuff about her from that, the big picture of her life and she had not a contentious relationship with her mother but her mother was the type of woman, and a lot of moms were at that time, the six grade education, she worked odd jobs, mostly relied on abthey were on and off welfare, Maxine Waters has asked described herself as like almost a ward of the state. Her mom wasnt given a lot of warm and fuzzys. She didnt have a lot of time for that. She had no filter and she taught her children not to have a filter. Closed mouth dont get fed. Basically. Knowing that she came up 6 13 children came up out of poverty in that way but and yet and still she said she looked around her neighborhood, her eight blocks in particular neighborhood she lived in, they called it martellus. She was like, but this is not for me. She always knew that she was destined for something greater or that there was something outside of all that that she could achieve. She had this inner confidence that i found so spectacular in a young person. She talked about the local Community Center and where she learned modern dance and ballet. Shes a black opera singer who happened to live sort of like not in her community but in the city and she had written an essay about her and one of her teachers and took her the opera singer into their home to show them this essay. She was exposed to so much and i think just to know all of this was swimming around in her head as she is growing up in segregation with all these brothers and sisters getting married literally right out of high school and still constantly looking for the next thing and what was going to really fulfill her. I think learning that about her which was lifechanging for me because you are never stuck you are never just a product of what someone tells you you are supposed to do or what somebody tells you you are supposed to be, you can be anything. For some people, especially for some people of her generation, that can turn into this verse affect ability politics like i did it so you should be able to do it, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Thats not hers as all. Her whole mentality is very much like ive been there, i understand it. I know that it isnt like just a good talking to. You need policy and you need a job. I understand that. Knowing that some of that is bored out of her customer base. Within something i didnt know about her and i did until i started researching about her. I love that part. I love that part too i was rereading that this morning reading it for the first time. And you talk about superhero origin stories, on one hand shes very super hero work in the other hand she was deeply human, you can see the threads and you do this is so well and writing about her, the threat that she would continue to pull throughout her life and career, starting with head start and moving through the Different Community education programs, Community Employment programs, that would always be the drum she would be trying in forming organizations to provide training and Employment Services to teaching at those organizations to advocating for funding, it was always the same thing. This realization that she was not abshe was extraordinary but not an anomaly and that if she can provide the resources for the people in her district, and people in general, that they could achieve something great as well. I love that about her. I love touching on that in the rap chapter. I think my favorite chapter, my favorite part of the book is abwe have these sections in the book called timeouts where they dont fit into abthey dont fit into larger chronology. To take a look at one aspect of her life we were like, weve got this little bit about the two bushes and the bit about clinton, lets put it all together and see what we have. She suffered no fools from any president. As i was going along doing the research i started noticing and making a note in my notebook about every time she was described. Maybe its because thats how i started out figuring out, how do i describe what im seeing here but i noticed its very different between mainstream publications and lack publications the way that the adjectives that are used to describe her. She has the nickname on teen scene and figuring out what is that mean . Another nickname which is more derisive looking specifically at words i thought was really interesting way to look at the outside, the idea of representative waters, the way that people early in her career just didnt know what to do with her, aggressive came up a lot. Not to say issues aggressive but to say its a word that get thrown at black women. I thought it was important to point out, what is the difference between describing somebody as aggressive or assertive or outspoken or dynamic . We break down all of those i find her to be abin an interview we did rko w somebody needs to write to hamilton about Maxine Waters because she as astounding a wordsmith as Alexander Hamilton or lynn man woman runningablin manuel miraab she can turn a phrase and she loved to turn of phrase. We are going to spend a couple pages talking about the words that people have put on her then we are going to talk about the words that she uses and i broke down a statement she gave to me in an interview in december 2016, just sort of off the cuff. Its astounding. Breaking it down grammatically and breaking it down in terms of syntax and sentence structure, she loves a list, which is very politician thing, she uses words like abshe describes herself shes like im determined, i asked her are you angry about the administration that is to come . She said im not angry so much as i am determined and ended up a quote we used a lot. Her words are never going to a amy words are never going to be as dynamic as her words. Nobody elses words that have been put on her are going to be our ever going to be as accurate as the words she uses to talk about herself. Breaking down her speech as text was just really exciting to me as the english major but also im like, these people are extraordinary. They know how to speak, she gets on cspan, she gives these great quotes, she gets on chris hazes show and blows his hair back. Its like that doesnt come out of nowhere. Also from a gift a lyrical gift. I