Transcripts For CSPAN2 Born Bright 20161127 : vimarsana.com

CSPAN2 Born Bright November 27, 2016

Msnbc, npr, nbc and among other outlets. Mason will be joined by Vanessa Deluca, the editorinchief of essence magazine, the preeminent lifestyle magazine for africanamerican women. She oversees the content and vision of the core magazine as well as essence. Com. Si her influence extends beyond the various brand extensions including top tier events such as black women in hollywood luncheon and black women in music. Before we start with the conversation, we will have Charlene Carruthers come out and read a passage from masons memoir. Charlene is a career feminist Community Organizer and writer, an activistmemberled organization of black 1835yearolds dedicated to creating justice and freedom for all black people. She has over ten years of experience in racial justice,f e feminist and Youth Leadership development work. So please welcome Charlene Carruthers. [applause] thank you. Thank you. First, id like to thank c. Nicole mason for this amazing opportunity to share this moment with her. Born bright is amongst, as you all should know, many of her achievements. And so tonight i have thee opportunity to read a number of passages from born bright. If you have not read it, you need to read it, buy it and buy one for your friends too. Okay . And so the passages i chose deeply resonate with me, and as i shared with nicole so many, wow, that happened to me moments while reading this book. So ill get started. I did the right thing. I am the beneficiary of many of the programs that we are talking about here today. Ar i attended head start. I was involved in after school programs. I am the first person in my family to graduate from highin school, to attend college and tn receive a ph. D. By now my voice was shaking, but i could not stop. I was having, in public, the private conversation i reserved for my first generation black and latino colleagues who had also successfully navigated their way out of poverty and into the middle class and who have a deep understanding of the journey from there to here. These people in this room were strangers. Pe but i am only one person, i continued. Growing up i knew many kids in my neighborhood who were smarter and more capable than me, andan they didnt make it out. T. Many have been killed, gone to prison, are living hand to mouth or otherwise on the margins of h society. Should i blame them or the system that allows only a few of us at a time to escape . The room was pregnant with silence. I couldnt take it back. I felt like an intruder and exposed. In these types of professional settings, my personal experiences with hunger, poverty and episodic homelessness often go undetected. It is assumed that i am just like everyone else; an advocate, a policy expert or an academic. Typically, when a woman is invited to tell her story during these panels or meetings, it feels voyeuristic and slimy like a performance. Her story has a perfect, predictable arc. She was lost, then found by one of the many social Service Agencies in the city. She changed her behavior, became a better mother, and although she still struggles to make ends meet, on her way to economic prosperity. Hallelujah the end. Her story is meant to inspire, to whip up emotion and to make the people in the audience feel good about their work and themselves. It is not meant to challenge or change how we make policies or shift how poor people in our communities, our cities or the Larger Society are perceived. Be theres also a clear separation between her and the experts on the stage. They, not she, are deciding what should be done. Here i was, blurring that line. I was both the subject and the authority on the matter. I had firsthand knowledge of the messiness of poverty and the feelings the poor internalize from birth. Like the belief that our very existence is a burden on society. The collapse of this boundary made me feel made me uncomfortable. I had worked hard to disguise my beginning in life. From the decision to change my name during my first week of college to the effort of erasing words and phrases like cant and since the go [laughter] from my vocabulary. I have succeeded in creating the perfect, impenetrable middle class mask. Now it was off. The next piece is from the the chapter entitled free today. The mark of a Good Childhood is freedom. The freedom from worry, stress and burdens coupled with the freedom to explore, grow and and learn without consequence or incident. These freedoms are often denied to children living in poverty whose minds are consumed daily with thoughts of survival and questions about their next meal, safety or housing. And concerns that they may never speak aloud. My grandfathers house was a welcome respite from the chaos and unpredictability in the duplex. There were no fights, arrests or out of control women banging on our door at odd hours of the night. For the first time, my brotherrs and i had the space to be children. We played jacks, marbles and barbies and listened to new edition, Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder on my grandfathers record player in our living room. I even joined the girl scouts as a brownie. Once a week a hippielooking woman with long blond hair picked me up in a rusty flatbed truck and took me to a brownie meetings held in an old church across town. Im not sure if it was my mothers idea or mine that iot become a member, but i never quite understood what was going on or what we were supposed to be doing there. Collecting badges, making pledges, selling cookies, i just did not get it. [laughter] i was one of two black girls in the large troop and felt out of place. To make matters worse, while we played jump rope during one of the meetings, the other black girl punched me be, punched me out for not allowing her to have two times in a row. It was my first fight, and i had lost. I did not understand how she could be so angry with me. When we were the only two there who looked like us. Os in my young mind, i had already made peace with the white girls not wanting to play with me. I was different from them. My hair was spongy, not blond or stringgy. I did not live in their neighborhoods or listen to the same music. They were strange to me too. However, i could not figure her, the black one, out. Why didnt she want to be my friend . When i hopped out of the side of a truck that evening after the meeting, i decided that i had had enough and was never going back. A couple weeks prior i had suffered through a sum bler party where no Slumber Party where no one talked to me, asked me to brush their hair or offered to brush mine. My mother did not question my decision or ask why i decided to quit. The following week when the hippie honked her horn outside our home for me to come out, my mother waved her off and told her that i would not be back. And the last piece that i will read is from the chapter entitled wedding day. I was fired, she said quietly. Her neck craned out of the car door as she pulled into the driveway. She had been employed for only a few weeks and worked for a young, white lawyer in los angeles. Why, i asked. Puzzled by her announcement. He tried to hit on me, and i told him i wasnt into that, so i quit. Me and the words swirled like a small tornado in my head. It did not make sense to me. Did she really quit because she refused to have sex with her boss . Did bosses really do that . I believed her and thought he was a per or accelerate. Pervert. Later i found out the lawyers wife had called my mother a maid. I a maid. When she saw her vacuuming the office. She did not approve of his hiring such an attractive aide and demanded that she be fired, and he complied. Telling me initially that hed hit on her was her way of hiding the humiliation and powerlessness she felt for being fired so abruptly. Even in her or shame, she was adept at creating a world that was uncomplicated by theng messiness of racism, classism x in this instance, sexism. After about six months of searching for work, my mother returned to the college where she received the paralegal certificate and demanded clarification on its value. She had taken out thousands of dollars worth of Student Loans and needed them to pony up on their job guarantee. S. As reinforcement, she took along with another student, she took along with her another student who had also had a hard time finding a job. A after being brushed off by several Different College officials, the two threatened t file a complaint against the college with the Better Business bureau or whomever else they could think of in that moment. Fearing their cover would be blown, the college forgave their debt in exchange for theirth signing a nondisclosure agreement. And just like that, my mother was unemployed, was out a degree and back to square one. Thank you. [applause] and now please welcome Vanessa Deluca and c. Nicole mason. [cheers and applause] [cheers and applause] good evening, everyone. Hello, hello. Ening, e im really happy to be here. Hey, charlie. [laughter] you said you wanted to make a few thank yous. Yes. I just wanted to say thank you to my agent, marie brown. I dont know where she is, the legendary marie brown, for believing in me. There she is in the back. And my research and my story from the very start. And to thank i just wanted to give a shout out to thank my spelman students who are here, dont know where they are. Bree, kirsten, jonet. They are here somewhere and still always the smartest and brightest women in the room. So i wanted to thank them before i got started. Thats wonderful. And elena. Nicole . Yes. You know, this is really, a really, truly stunning, stunning memoir. And were going to spend the next about an hour studying it more deeply and talking about what prompted you, compelled you to tell your story. Well have a little time for q a, and then youre going to treat us to your own reading from the work. So lets jump right in. I have to tell you that this statistic that you put in the book literally stopped me in myy tracks, and that is that 47 Million People in the United States live in poverty. And not surprisingly or maybe it should be, but its not highest among blacks, latinos and female head of households. So what when you introduce the book, you say the poor girl in me wants to explain why we dont all make it out. So id love for you to talkin about, you know, why did you want to write a book that exposes so much of kind of where you came from, how you began . Because telling people that you grew up in poverty, as you mentioned as the reading just showed us, isnt easy. So what gave you the courage to do it . Well, i really wanted to tell a different story about poverty and a different story about my communities and the people who lived in them, and i think this is a narrative and we hear it all the time if you work hard enough, youll make it to the top. And Barack Obamas second inaugural speech, he pretty much says that. And even when people say that, i feel really uncomfortable because i know that thats not the truth. Because only a small portion of people who are born into poverty ever make it to the middle clasr or to the top. And so i really wanted to make an intervention and tell a story that would not only give life th the, what i know to be true, but also disrupt the damaging narratives that we see all the time circulating in popular media and culture. Did you have, like, any kind of, you know, fear or, you know, worries or concerns about kind of digging into, you know, into your story and talking about your past . So there are two things. So the first concern i had was about how the story would be interpreted. And so even early on when i did a work in progress at spelman, a black box, one of the other professors pulled me to the side and said, you know, you really need to be careful about the stereotypes and the tough that people even though you may say it will interpret it through their own lens. And so that stuck with me when t was writing, because i wanted th just be honest and tell the truth but really cognizant about how the story would be interpreted by other people. And, you know, it has, you know . Readers take what they will from the story, and some in some instances have had to push back on interviews when they interpret the story, you know . Its youre a poor girl, your mother was a teenager mother. They feel like theyve heard the story without even reading the book. And so i think that is problematic. W and the second thing that i worried about was my family and how they would read the book. I was very clear that i, with my academic training, i could tell the story that they couldnt. Even if they didnt agree with me, they couldnt the possibility of them writing another book that, you know, it aint true book [laughter] was pretty slim. So i [laughter] so in the back of my head when i was writing the book, i had to think about, well, what will my brother say, what will my mother say. Will they, you know, is it something that will hurt them. Will they say its not true. And so i really, as i was writing, was cognizant of all those things. You also said that you spent a lot of time interviewing people, kind of going back and talking to people from, you know, from your past about what they remembered or how they remembered it and that kind of helped you as you were shaping the memoir. Yeah, absolutely. So i talked to, you know, i interviewed my mom, my familyol members, my cousins, my old best friends. I went to my Old Neighborhood from, you know, when i was 5 years old. D. I went and visited the apartment complex, the first one that i remembered. And it was really jarring. And the stuff that i thought, you know, hadnt impacted me when i saw, for example, the first Apartment Building and iap saw clothing lines hanging from the, you know, from apartment to apartment, i said, wow, you know, this was our first this was my first home. I fell down those stairs on my tricycle. It was, you know, those kind of memories. And was it the way you remembered it, or you had a different vision in your head . Well, you know, i mean i say this, and i think sometimess people dont believe me, but i didnt know i was poor growing up. So that Apartment Building was amazing to me when i was growing up, you know . Its where we lived, its where all my friends were, you know . We had dance contests, and it was my, it was where i lived. And then when i went back today, i said, wow, there is nothing here, you know . There were no flowers, the paint was peeling, you know, like i said, there was clotheslines, and now its like this is where poor people live, you know . And i think even having that lens to be able to, you know, contextualize my experience growing up is one i dont think we get to hear in the popular i mean, when stories are told. Did you encounter a lot of people were till there from still there from, you know, it had been, obviously, years had gone by since you lived in your Old Neighborhood or several other neighborhoods. Did you, you know, happen to find people that well, in my neighborhood that i grew up in high school, like most of my friends there were still there, so when i go ohm 40, its d home, its like a homecoming. First of all, its pumpkin, im not nicole, i am pumpkin. So we just sit down and we, you know, play spades or to whatever were going to do. But when i went back to that first childhood home, what happened was and what i know to be true, i came there, i was snapping pictures, and people were looking at me like i was an alien, like i did not belong. And you felt that. I felt that. Thats what happens when people you dont know come into your neighborhood, you know . I and i had to say i lived here when i was 5 years old. And it was two latino women, so they started talking to each other, and then i guess it was okay, because they smiled and they were like, go ahead, you know . [laughter] and, you know, thats what happens. And i feel even that kind of dynamic where i can go into some neighborhood that i dont currently live and start snapping pictures and the people in the neighborhood dont feel empowered to say what are you doing here. And i know now in other neighborhoods where i lived that somebody will say what are you doing here, if that makes sense. It does. It makes perfect sense. You know what im talking about. Yeah. [laughter] oh, yeah. So, but back to your family. So you talked to your mom, you talked to your brother, you talked to my father, you know . My mother and father had given me the same story, different facts. Im like, i dont know, im going to have to take a middle ground here, you know . [laughter] so, and do you think thats because everybody was using their own, like you said their own eyes. They were seeing the story, so my brother when i interviewed him, i said, well, why do you think it is that mom and i had a difficult relationship . Right . So i wanted to hear what he had to say. He said, you know, because i think you thought you were smarter than her. And i was, like, that wasnt thats not my interpretation of what i thought was the problem, you know . [laughter] you know, so some of the stuff was really hard to hear and internalize. And so when i was writing, i hat to think, i said, okay, how i see it, but the information other people are giving me about the same story that i also need to include to have a more accurate telling of the story. And the thought i was really he thought i was really outspoken, so i imagined myself as being really quiet and only speaking out when necessary. [laughter] you know, how all of us imagine ourselves. Dont start nothing, there wont be nothing, but if there is something, i will bring it. [laughter] so thats kind of how i saw myself. So it must have been really i mean, with all these, because when youre telling the family story, not just your story in isolation, it must be really hard to filter out, well, what am i going to include and what am i not going to include and what makes sense and what doesnt make sense. I mean, this was quite an undertaking. How long did it take you to actually put all of these pieces together . Well, actually when i actually sat down and started writing, it at no time take long, but it took it didnt take long, but it took me about a year to come to grips with what was happening. When i first started out, it was a straight policy book because im a policy person. I was going to tell this very objective, hard facts, these are the things. And then the publisher saw one vignette where i wrote a couple lines about my family, and sheig said thats more interesting and itll be easier because its your story. It was actually super hard, and i cried literally every day writing this story. And

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