You know, i travel the world and they speak to many different audiences. Young people, middleaged, elders and what i find is that there are many young people who are very much intend with malcolm. They are very much, very attracted to his legacy and then there are some who are not. So i think its just important for all of us who are conscious, who are educated, its important that we educate the ones who are misinformed or need guidance. There are supreme magnificent illustration. Who did the illustrations . The illustrations were done done by a g4 and she is absolutely phenomenal. Beautiful, beautiful depictions of moments that were important to my father that play key roles in my fathers lied. Malcolm little boy who grew up to be. Max. Heres the cover of the book. Ilyasah shabazz, daughter of malcolm and Eddie Shabazz is the author. Up next on booktv after words with guest host professor and commentator marc lamont hill. This weeks jeff chang and his latest book who we be the colorization of america. In the book the author of cant stop wont stop examines the idea of racial progress and discusses how racist you today in an increasingly diverse america. The program is about an hour. Host jeff chang its eyes good to see you. Talk to me about this book, who we be. Why this book in my now . Guest the white . Guest the white now isnt up to me actually. We were looking at trying to get this book out in 2009 to 2010 but ended up taking longer to pray. I can go into why a little bit later but the book is about the colorization of america which is my term for looking at the demographic changes we have seen in the last half century century and a cultural sisters their accounting that. Host when you say colorization this is a term that i found baffling. What does that mean exactly . Guest its meant to capture a lot of the cultural shifts that have occurred and im really interested in looking at the way that artists have actually changed the way that we see each other and how we can live together. Its looking into the metaphor and seeing how we see race and using that as a way to ask the question how far we have progressed in last half century . Host when i hear the word colorization to suggest there was a moment where color wasnt essential and now it is that you said its more nuanced. Even in the book you talk about the way the race and color have always mattered so what does it mean for a nation to become colorize . Guest i think you know what we saw through the Civil Rights Movement was in some ways the all relative race. Race was seen largely in blackandwhite, that you had one way of being american and you could build empathy. This was the way he theorizes perhaps that folks began to understand the africanamerican struggle was through the music. You and i both come from this kind come from the sky in the background the hiphop soul funk type of background. It makes a lot of sense to me but after the Civil Rights Act passes the immigration and nationality act, that goes to the side in the visuality of seeing becomes more important in the way of understanding race. So what we see now in the u. S. As cultural desegregation. What we see in our blind spots as we have rising rates of resegregation, the gaps in wealth and income and housing homeownership and educational attainment. Its a paradox. We have cultural desegregation happening and cultural inequity increasing at the same time. Host left step back because you talk about the or relative race in how we shift from a oral to the visual. Whats at stake remake that shipped . Guest race begins by saying the book between appearance and perception of difference. Its not biological. We can agree on that. Its something thats a construct, something that we think about when we see so when you attach difference, the real difference to the systems of any quality of freedom of slavery of containment and freedom and so on and so forth thats when i start seeing the kinds of problems that the artists would dearly love talk about all the way from you know the turnofthecentury all the way up until now. He talked about invisibility and the invisible man. Now we have questions of visibility which complicates things a lot. So these are the kinds of things we are talking about now. Invisibility and im underrepresentation at the same time visibility and what it means. Host also hypervisibility. Theres a way in which certain types of colorized individuals become ubiquitous and served a dangerous notion how the world imagines rays of how the world imagines difference. How do we strike that balance between not wanting to be invisible in the public imagination but not wanting our visibility to become a social to merit and to become something that becomes more problematic . Guest thats a really different difficult question and something that i struggle with every single day. Its something that we as folks who are interested in change in racial progress think about all the time and its something we talk with her students about all the time. You know i think thats the third rail of trying to be an artist of color in this particular moment. Figure out how to negotiate between the need to be able to represent yourself and tell your story and the difficulty of dealing with the images that kind of precede you. Its a burden of representation is whether this and its no different than artists of color of that before but now the burden is changed and its maybe a lot more difficult to negotiate. Host you divide your book up into periods and when i first read it i was trying to figure out what your logic was for the divisions. He didnt abide by president ial administrations which i expected. It would be an interesting distinction between a reagan moment and the clinton moment and that obama is moment. So is overlapping and transcends partisan difference. Guest right. Host what is the underlying framework of the underlying movement or impetus for how you understand these different moments in colorization . Guest thats another question. I wanted to precede as a cultural history. Its spoken about through the eyes of the artist so its interesting that you had said that you expected it to precede the president ial administrations and i think thats a lot of histories of race have been raised and this was meant to be a different kind of thing. And so i wanted to talk about the moments of the civil rights, the peak of the Civil Rights Era to the beginning of the 80s as a period in which artists were struggling with underrepresentation with visibility. Artists like Morrie Turner who is the first africanamerican syndicated cartoonist comes out with the first comic strip that is multicultural, casts of peanut style kids and trying to imagine what a postsegregated america could look like. So after the civil rights revolution begins to dismantle the laws that have mandated segregation we still have to imagine what a postsegregated future is going to look like. Artists like Morrie Turner and artists like the spiral in your city that becomes a core group that launches protest against major receipt museums in the 60s and 70s to get into the institutions of visibility. And then we move into the 80s which becomes the heir of the cultural rise, the rise of multiculturalism as an avantgarde and then the backlash that we see coming from conservatives both cultural conservatives both liberal cultural conservatives as well as conservatives. Folks who are democrats and republicans in other words who are against the notion that there could be more than one way of understanding how to become american. Alta cultureless had a radical idea they thought america had always been made up of multiple cultures and people could have all of these different ways of living and being and that the exchange is what made america vital. This was a really threatening ideas so this is where it begins to occur. Then you see a think of the 90s, in the mid90s to now this era in which most of multiculturalism becomes a fate faith ill complete. To become something where the institutions, corporate institutions, government institutions begin to say yeah we are all multiculturalists. This is a famous line of cultural conservatives. Host you say multiculturalism has become a platitude. Not that i disagree necessarily. What could be that a cynical. How do he make sense of that because you could argue that now in 2014 multiculturalism looks different but that its still a dominant logic. Its still a sincere attempt by many people, not all people. But multiculturalism is alive and well and vibrant as farcical to democratize and color is america. Guest you could also say its been emptied of its radical meaning. This is a movement that meant to be able to foster culture and equity. The basic idea was that if we are able to have the stories represented by what people told that this would create empathy and out of empathy would calm a new consensus for Racial Justice and the society in which people could be free to be who they be. Do you know what i mean . So we havent necessarily gotten to that point yet. Host five though . So there are some who do argue that we wanted but thats not even a debate. We understand multiculturalism is america. The debates now are little different. Some people say because they won the culture wars is like obama winning the election and people not being activists anymore. You have one so we are sitting back and others are saying there are more conservative and economical pieces of machinery that are making multiculturalism or empty. Guest i think its both at the same time paid on one hand multiculturalism reset the boundaries of civility which is i think a lot of things we were arguing a students in the 80s when we are the first group of, the 80s and 90s will be the first group of kids coming out of the campuses that were part of in some instances the majority minority class. I was part of the first class at cal that was majority minority who which who knows what majority minority means anyway and we will come back to that. We at that time were like i dont want to be on campus having to deal with all these racial microaggressions is what they call it now, basically racial incidents. We called slurs on the street and you are made to feel like you dont belong in the classroom. All these different types of things are happening during the 80s and it resets the boundaries of civility. Now the language that reactionaries need to use has to be couched in multicultural terms. Pat buchanan has this amazing piece in his book about will america survive 2025 and he talks about how everybody can enjoy ethnic foods. We all like to go out and have thai food and ethiopian food and thats a good thing. Lets just keep it at that though. Youre just i like wow thats really interesting. And so multiculturalism has reset the boundaries of civility that we are at the point we cant have these conversations about the inequities and inequalities that persist in our ask the right thing. This is again our huge blind spot. The book was trying to really get at that. And on the one hand you have folks working in that culture to promote these new visions of what the u. S. Can look like. For us to get to that particular point we have to deal with these inequalities. There is a poll that came out after ferguson into questions were asked. They are interviewing blacks and interbank whites. The first question was, to the event of ferguson raise issues that ought to be discussed around rays . The second question was did the events in ferguson job too much focus and attention to the issue of race . Theres a big split. Africanamericans, blacks they overwhelmingly this raises issues that we havent talked about and maybe not a majority but theres still this feeling of well we are paying too much attention to race right now. One set of folks invitation to have the conversation is another set of focuses cue to leave the room. So we have these gaps not just in wealth and income and housing and education but also in the way we talk about race. We cant get to those questions then we are looking at a 2042 where we are all minorities. That could be much worse than we are seeing right now. Host theres that willful neglect of white americans. We dont want to think about this because it makes them uncomfortable and we really feel you resolve this in the 80s. Look there is multicultural day at school. Every february we be back asian food and indian food and brought speaking terms. We have done it and we are exhausted. What is in each of those things . Guessed i think its both happening at the same time. There were seven studies in 20 2070 2007 of the parenting styles on whether parents have a conversation with a Young Children about race. 75 of white parents did not talk to their kids, big young kids about race where his parents of kids of color, so this could be interracial or mixedrace marriages are kids as well, two to five times as many conversations about race as white parents. And then earlier this year and 2014 there was a david binder mtv poll that was done. They looked at it and they said you know how do you feel we should be thinking about race and it was interesting. Milenials the ones who were surveyed here said colorblindness was a way of looking at race but we also have to be respecting the difference so this is the legacy of the 80s. This is the legacy of the culture wars. Its contradictory. Its both sides of the culture wars. You have this notion of putting up colorblindness is a way to roll back Racial Justice policies and on the other side you have this multiculturalism that is being put out by folks who are seeming to be radical at the moment saying we should be respecting difference. But the and bolt question that really was powerful to me was, how do you feel about having a conversation with people about racial violence . We are not talking about racial inequality and discrimination. We are just talking about racial bias. Only one in five milenials felt comfortable having that conversation so we are confused. This gets sort of brought back in the regeneration and this notion of colorblindness gets brought back and it has these very disturbing effects. I think that many parents, many white parents are very good will. They say look what happened in the past. When we talked about race in the past we did it to hold people down south we just dont talk about with her kids than the kids will grow up in a society in which we will have moved beyond that. I think thats willful and its also maybe good willed but i feel like our history doesnt allow us that racial incidents. Host they would say my great grandparents are racist and my grandparents are racist and my parents, and im not racist in my kids dont even like to think about race. We just keep dying off in the kids will that will be generated. I think every generation has been called the most diverse generation so the last generation dies in the next generation comes into place that everything will magically be slow. Its magical thinking. It is magical thinking. If we just ignore inequality will go away and thats not how anything works since baby. Here we are 50 years, more than 50 years after brown v. Board after the civil rights revolution and we see segregation reaching these levels that were prebrown versus board of education even as the u. S. As diverse as dying at an astonishing rate. We are moving towards 2042 at a fast clip. Host lets unpack that inequality think because i think youre raising Something Interesting thats in the book. On the one hand there is racial bias. Theres the issue of individuals ill will toward people or individual prejudice and maybe some broader collective notions of who people are. On the other hand are also talking about a lack of Resources Health care and living. Guest culture. Host culture, right and thats my question. How does culture play do those things because people understa understand. Guest i think thats partly the work of what folks like you and me and a lot of our colleagues are doing trying to link the two together. What we say is culture change precedes political change. A lot of us who are working in this area. You have to have the imagination particularly now during this period in which politics is hamstrung and stalemated to be able to imagine changes the crucial for us to be able to move to a place where we can build very healthy movements for change. So, but getting back to the question that you are talking about here, i think its important for us to be able to foster a culture that points towards Racial Justice, that artists, creative folks and folks working in the culture should be uncovering our blind spots for us. We have to allow them to be able to do that and then we ought to be bringing those images into the culture that we are working in. And its a process. Its not the kind of thing where you kind of press a lever and then change happens. This is something that builds over time. So all of the things that are happening on twitter right now even as we are speaking all of the stuff thats happening on facebook right now, all the stuff thats happening all throughout the country in the sword of interventions that people are making they all add up to something. That might sound crazy optimistic and hopeful but you know i think it was interesting to look at the 2008 election and the explosion of street art that happened to get this obama hoped posters that shepherd. Put together and that gets out there and suddenly have this explosion of images of people wanting change. A lot of stuff is now spilling outside of the democratic agenda and Barack Obamas platform. But its images of the third world liberation front reborn. Its images of environmental injustice and images of immigrant rights. Its images of all these different types of things that the democrats and taking positions that the democrats are taking much less the republicans. At that particular point but we saw was attached to this single change this obama not as a policy but as a symbol of change are all these other folks putting up their symbols of changes well. Thats a the moment at which all of this imagination is coming forth and that allowed in a lot of respects this wave to build that resulted in barack obama selection. Im not saying that elections are going to be the endall and beall. In fact we can see what happened was in 2009 the culture wars flare up again. That the sample of obama is as a symbol of change becomes twist twisted. You have the obama joker. Host which is another thing you talk talk about in the book how that figure comes out. Unintended. The initial image was by attaching socialist but all this other stuff to it took on a life of its own. Guest the story is there is an american who is trying to learn photoshop so he takes the cover of obama from Time Magazine and joker in and just posted on his flickr account and wakes up a couple months later to find socialism has been put at the bottom of this poster and its been posted all over los angeles which is where they obama whole hope poster made its debut as well. Suddenl