... >> Good evening. There is some light. Good evening. [APPLAUSE] This is exciting. Welcome everyone to the Emerson Cutler Majestic theater. I'm p. carl. We want to thank tonight the fresh sound foundation who funded this week's artist residency, including master classes and tonight public conversation with Claudia Rankine:. Just as a little bit of the teaser for what is to come later on, Clottey is working with ArtsEmerson on a new play. We have been working closely as she has been in this residency getting that play ready to present to you next season. Some exciting news to come. [APPLAUSE] P. Carl: it is amazing to have this crowd here tonight. We are proud to host conversations on race, resiliency. At this time in our nation it just feels more important than ever to create space in or its, academia, government to talk about who we are as America in 2017. [APPLAUSE] P. Carl: I have one bit of instructions for you. We are going to do a brief talkback after Claudia presents. If you have questions for her as it comes up, you can use the Twitter hashtag # RankineOnWhiteness. If you have a question we will be looking at them. In Boston we are proud to have a man in public -- a mayor and public servant emitted to the arts and fostering inclusion for all of our city. Boston's office of resilience and racial equity includes a focus on social and economic resilience in the city affected by historic and assistant divisions of race and class. Conversations like today helped propel mutual understanding and positive change. On behalf of my self and my colleagues, it is my pleasure to welcome our mayor, Martin J. Walsh. [APPLAUSE] Mayor Walsh: thank you. Thank you. I want to thank carl, and David and David and everyone at ArtsEmerson. I just want to say this is just such a beautiful theater. Every time you come here you just appreciate it more and more. I want to welcome you all here and thank you. Lee Pelton and ArtsEmerson have made spaces to create social change and positive change. Tonight is a wonderful example of that conversation. It is a special opportunity to host an artist like Claudia Rankine. Boston is a city with difficult history around race. We have significant racial disparities still. It is something we're working on. We have to confront our past and change our present. I was saying to Claudia, now more than ever we need to continue these conversations in our city of Boston. That is going to make a special from the rest of the country. I'm thrilled to see so many Bostonians here tonight. And one of the Bostonians -- and the wannabe Bostonians. We held a form on race after hundreds of conversations around the city of Boston which came after the fact when I was campaigning for mayor. We talked about having dialogues and addressing the issues of race to move forward. We have to kill the past. There are hard conversations. At times very difficult. But they are revealing conversations, and moving conversations. We got some predictable criticism. Why DU do you keep talking if you want change? I have learned how talk does matter. Race impacts every aspect of lives. Change needs to start in our words and our interactions every single day. The conversation drives the change in more than one way. It is first in our culture, when we speak about race. We feel better when we understand the injustices that happened to varsity. -- to our city. The next generation is more free to talk about what is impacting their lives every single day. Another way we may change is by city policy, to make strong policies to you understand the impacts. Our conversations create a lens and awareness and understanding that can lead to stronger policies and real change. We have examples. In the Boston public schools we installed world maps that show Africa and South America in their right size and place. [APPLAUSE] This is going to help our children and our young people imagine their world differently. Our substance abuse prevention study will go into how drugs affect each neighborhood in the city of Boston. There's a lot of conversation going on, we are only talking about the crisis because it is a white crisis. Drug addiction is a people crisis. We have to make sure prevention is in South Boston and everywhere in between. We have different types of trauma in our city. We need to learn more about how they are shaped our racial identity. In this conversation artists have been our guides. Our role models for the imagination. They show us -- [APPLAUSE] Thank you. That is for the artists. Not for me. They show us how to cross boundaries, to see and dream beyond what we are taught to accept. It is my honor to introduce somebody who has done that her entire career. Claudia Rankine is one of the major poets of our time. Her collections, citizens and American lyric is the only poetry book to be the New York Times bestseller in nonfiction. She has one too many awards to name. The national endowment for the arts Fellowship. [APPLAUSE] She will not be the last one because we are going to continue to keep nea alive for the next generation of artists. Claudia is now a MacArthur fellow. A foundation fellow, I should say. She is using this grant to lead a national conversation on the impact of whiteness in all arts and Coulter. Luckily for Boston she is the artist in residence at Madison College. Please welcome and give a Boston welcome to author, playwright, teacher, activist Claudia Rankine. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] [cheers and applause] Claudia: good evening. It is such an honor to be here. I want to thank Mayor Walsh for the introduction, for letting me know the correct way to address you is as Bostonians. Bostonians. I would love to thank President Pelton and David house, p. carl, for allowing me to be part of the conversation ArtsEmerson has opened in this community. It is an honor for me to be here as part of their family. I thank them for that. I am just going to dive in. The days following the election, wherever I went people behaved as if someone had died. People were stirring about their grief. It was made clear no one should look away from our new reality. I am as well as one can be was the freeze -- phrase I encountered. I heard and elevators, taxis, dinner parties or personal phone calls, until it was coming out of my own mouth. It was the best we Americans could do to signal our profound recognition of who and what we also were. Seven months earlier I, like many others worried a candidate with a white nationalist orientation would be our next president. Having just accepted a position at Yale University, I submitted a proposal for a course on the constructions of whiteness. All year I had read historians and theorists, from Matthew Frye Jacobson, to Richard dryer, on how whiteness functions. Organized events in Chronicle order, sequence, and they arise much of what we all intuitively knew. I read books on white spaces. White male rage. White depression. The role of white femininity and American culture. I studied comedy routines from Saturday Night Live. Key & Peele, Louis CK, -- sorry I am being -- >> Sorry I am being so negative. I shouldn't be. I'm a very lucky guy. I'm healthy. I'm relatively young. I'm white. Thank God for that. That is a huge leg up. I love being white. I really do. If you are not white, you are missing out. This is thoroughly good. Let me be clear. I'm not say white people are better. Being white is clearly better. Who could even argue? If it was an option I would really up every year. I will take white again. I'm going to stick with white, thank you. Here is how great it is to be white. I kid you in a Time Machine and go to any time and it would be awesome when I get there. [LAUGHTER] That is a white privilege. Black people can't -- with time machines. Anywhere between 1980I doubt want to go. -- I do not want to go. Claudia: I replayed their commercials for their take on aspirations. I wished to build a syllabus that showed not only what the culture was saying but also what we were seeing. My teaching assistants and I gathered images that reflected or complicated the arguments may -- being made by the culture about what whiteness looks like and stands for while it services and unjust and inequitable historical process working in its favor. We pored over the whiteness project. And Christian Landers' blog, the stuff White people like. [LAUGHTER] We put phrases into Google, searched like boys being boys. Pay attention who gets to be a boy. Those algorithms. To see -- we put phrases into Google search like boys being boys to see what and who the algorithms would bring forward. In the spirit of Benjamin Eleanor Adams we did Google image searches. Adams searched for the word evolution. The height of evolution was the body of a white male. Relating whiteness and humanity an association that has its roots in racial science and ethical justifications of colonialism, slavery, and genocide. ". I was not intending an exhaustive introduction to the suspect that subject of whiteness but a viewing experience that could generate discussions and mixed race class company that need not cause for the good manners of social life and excluded any form of discomfort. As their black professor, I was desperate to communicate to my students they were not in the class to help me have a better life. Fred Mouton was the music in my head. This is a quote from him. "I don't need your help, I need you to recognize that this -- is killing you too, however much more softly." But he ends the quote you stupid -- Over 100 students. Over 100 students arrived the first day. A little over two months before the presidential election for a class that could hold a quarter of that number. They were of every ethnic city, gender, sexual orientation. Some had mixed race parents. Some new their parents to be racists. Others felt guilt. All wanted us as a country to do better. I was encouraged by their presence and their desire to be in the class, indicating a level beyond pessimism, which simply breeds the fatalism that excuses and action and complicity. We began the semester with the students articulating their own understanding of how the concept of race developed in America. It is a byproduct of colonialism . Many historically minded said. One student wrote a fairytale. Once upon a time, the white people lived in the daylight, and the people of color lived at night. Then one day the whites decided they needed the time, or some more time, or all the time. I don't recall the students' exact wording but I remember the feeling in class was that she had captured a truth by calling to mind language like darky, the Enlightenment, the heart of darkness, and so on. As a talk, all of the talk of darkness lead us to key questions we would discuss that semester. Questions like why we receive others the way we do. That led us to shirley cards. How many of you know what a Shirley card is? Shirley cards are reference cards to determine exposure and color balance in film, especially for skin tones, seemed a neutral place to begin. I'm going to play a short video. ♪ >> this is a Shirley card. If you developed color film between the 1940's and 1980's the accuracy of the colors in your photos were based on this skin tone. Like Shirley was the name of the first person pictured on the cards. Surely became the name of all of the women pictured on the cards. >> Lorna Roth in Montréal. >> They were white women who wore colorful dresses. >> there are layers of chemicals stacked on each other since it's in two different colors of light . There are a series of solutions used to develop them once exposed to that light. A combination of these chemicals creates a color balance. For many decades colors that would bring out various British or brown tones were largely left out. >> the consumer market was designated in the design of film canisters was that of a lighter skin market. It turned out to be a lighter skin tone than a darker skin tone. If you are shooting people with lighter skin it looks good. With darker skin it doesn't look so good. Mixed race in the same skin -- same photo you see the problems. >> in the 1970's things started to change. >> wood furniture companies were complaining they did not render the difference between dark grain would and light grain would. Flex other companies were chocolate makers. The film could not render the difference between dark chocolate and milk chocolate. As thumb and television industries became more diverse, color balance issues became more apparent. In the 1990's a team of designers at Phillips tackled the issue head-on. Developing a camera system that used computer chips to balance lighter and darker skin tones individually. >> the first people to buy these cameras were for television, Oprah Winfrey and black enter talent -- Black entertainment television. >> the white Shirley card was brought along with the multiracial Shirley card. The Kodak campaign emphasized their films improved dynamic range. >> One of the things they said -- Claudia: looking at commercials, mostly Chinese, Thailand, some in Japanese, commercials where black men were run through the washer to reemerge clean. I will show you one or two of those. ♪ [whistling] >>[speaking foreign language] >>[speaking foreign language] >>[speaking foreign language] Claudia: I have a lot of talents but I did not make those commercials. They actually exist. The semesters'first shared text, whiteness of a different color presented Matthew Frye Jacobson's argument one of our country's earliest attempts to equate citizenship with whiteness came with naturalization act of 1790, which limited voting rights to free white Anglo-Saxon man. Given black people were still named property, this hold on self-governance was situated against others commonly understood to be white. Those were the Irish, the Jews, the polls, the Greeks. The immigration act, the Johnson Reed act of 1924 made it clear as Jacobson explained that European nests, whiteness was among the most important possession you could lay claim to. The act maintained the system based on nationality and made clear Arabs and Asians were completely barred from naturalized citizenry. In the states. They could come that they could not become naturalized citizens. Jacobson worked to help students understand how racial difference was a political and cold troll construct -- cultural construct her determined by white men in our country. It gave them a timeline for the development of the white supremacist terror group the KKK , recently re-energized by the presidential campaign. Everyone in the class was aware of the KKK, and the tenets of white supremacy. But we didn't know was that these white nationalists came into formation after the Civil War. They came in directly after. They were Confederate soldiers. In tandem with the legislative Black codes, which were intended to take rights away from newly freed blacks by keeping them out of the economy and government. On the one hand you have the activity of the KKK. Killing people, etc.. Then you had the black codes systemically at the same time. The KKK second reign of terror occurred between 1915 and 1940. In response to the immigration of Catholics. Hence the burning of crosses. According to Jacobson the expansion of their attention moved their stronghold from the South to the Midwest and the West. In some ways what happened in the Midwest and the West was as bad. You had sundown towns where black people and people of color would come into work but they were -- it was illegal to live in the towns. The terror across the Midwest, people like to think it is the South. It is not the South. It is the United States. Not until the 1950's with the beginnings of the civil rights movement did white nationalists stop fighting among themselves for the purity of their whiteness and turn their attention as socially constructive Caucasians, and this is a quote, the 20th century reconsolidation of the 19th century Slavs, Hebrews, Mediterranean's to the terror is a ship American blacks and minorities from non-European countries. Up until then, it was about white Anglo-Saxon people, and everybody else, the Irish came in. Passports were stamped. So there was this fight to keep the fear it he -- the purity of whiteness inside Europe. On the civil rights movement, forget all that. Everybody white is white. Because we can say so. It is that arbitrary in a sense. This attention was a move towards the terror is Asian of American blacks and minorities. This attention was complete in the terror occurred in the forms of shootings, lynchings, and institutionally in terms of legislative policies affecting housing, education and the justice system. The class considered the rhetoric of Make America Great Again. Not just in terms of its political aspirations towards white nationalism but in terms of the cold troll framing that was done by 19th century American photographers. I fell off my picture here. That is the book by Jacobson. Whiteness of a different color. That is the KKK. I wanted to include that picture because it is from 1925. We don't see it often. I'm going somewhere. I don't want those. The class considered the rhetoric of Make America Great Again not just in terms of its political aspiration towards Wyche -- white nationalism that it's cultural framing done by 19 20th century photographers. Images reflected a monumental scale of American landscape that supported notions of white greatness and white ownership of this country. What America means, it's greatness was coming on every front. And in the photography. Even some, though not all, he had some intimate portraits, of intern Japanese Americans dwarfed by the majestic California mountain range surrounding camps. What you are looking at, though you wouldn't know it is making America great again. Every class discussion was ghosted by the underground consideration of what it means for Americans to aspire to white dominance. The fear -- Another book that I recommend to you. It helped us think through the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object. Even as we spoke about this they asked why the student -- the syllabus didn't reflect more historic examples of individual white benevolence. Looking back I might have handled discussions touching on white abolitionists and civil rights activists differently. In the moment I was bemused the student wished me to turn my attention away from the problems of systemic white dominance to create a more palatable narrative for her. Though I was also trying to be vigilant against narrowing my gaze to the overwhelming debts contributing to black grievance I couldn't think of a good example of systemic and sustained white advocacy for blacks in a culture with the trajectory of slavery to Jim Crow, in prison. Perhaps out of desperation I pointed out we had read Thomas Jefferson's notes on the state of Virginia. As an example of a complicated advocacy for black freedom by a founding father. What's funny about Jefferson is a European, I think he was French, told Jefferson he would pay him to free his slaves. Jefferson said he didn't have enough money to free his slaves. The guy says when I die I'm going to leave you money and you can for your slaves. That is what happened. When Jefferson didn't accept the money, because he had actually -- he was a spendthrift. He would go to Europe and buy wine and paintings and books. He bought a lot of books. He mortgaged Monticello and the slaves. Up against his purchases. He couldn't afford to free them. The students used the term white privilege with an ease and frequency that suggested they had stopped integrating, interrogating how deeply its connotations shaped the white consciousness. The phrase was brought forward in 1988 by a Wesley Professor, Peggy McIntosh. Correspondence through work in women's studies. McIntosh enumerated 46 ways in which white privilege gets enacted. She would subsequently disowned the term because the word privilege makes white dominance seem a desired state. I told the students I preferred internalized dominance. D'Angelo states for the dominant group being socialized to see them I nor ties group as inferior, it conveys the dominant group is superior. The sense of superiority is often not explicit but internalized deep beneath the surface. The process causes members of the dominant group to see themselves as normal, correct, and more valuable. Thus more entitled to the resources of society. D'Angelo is also responsible for introducing the phrase white fragility, which she defines as a state in which a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable. Triggering a range of defensive moves. In white people. These reactions can and discussions or lives. -- end discussions or lives. It stems from the end ability of individual whites to understands racism encompasses structures, actions, and believes that system mise and Many. Mystifying that is the popular vote. Many were thrown into what one historian called malaise, but what I will call a national depression. What devastated us was not that a Republican won the election. This had happened many times in our lifetimes and it did not send us to bed, give us migraines, bringing tears to our eyes or any other of the physical reactions described to me or experienced by me. -- as a visual marker of separation from self identified white nationalists, despite having lived through the likes of Strom Thurmond, the Reagan years, and many other public officials and historical moments to find a racist, homophobic and xenophobia viewpoints. What was different this time was that we had voted in a bullying machine intent on rerouting the arc of history from the here therefore in constant and uneven promise of inclusion to a defensive and exclusionary stance. Angry white men, American masculinity at the end of an era . That proved especially in tactful. Kimmel interviews men who express beliefs like "we are going down thew fucking toilet. We have got a fucking nigger in the White House." What keeps the anger alive is what sociologists and political scientists call "outraged media." This rage, not surprisingly, runs parallel to the increased suicide rates for white men, as well as their increased drug use in the past year. The mortality rates have been going up for white people, in general >> Some of that cancer. Some of it suicide. Opiate use, etc.. It used to be black men held that. Only time will tell if the suicide rates would reverse within the executive branch must whose rhetoric so closely engages. It is actually tied to a sense of not receiving something they felt they were entitled to. The class viewed images of norma and norman. Two sculptures from the world fair, as determined by an obstetrician gynecologist. The naked sculptures of two white figures represented the involved and help the archetype of American citizens. These images brought the class discussions about beauty as it equates to who was valued. Painters, chapter is on the beauty ideal, and the history of white people, another book I recommend to you. The concept of human beauty as a racial trait. Some mixed race students were interested in interrogating the primacy of white feminine beauty given their mothers were white women whom they loved, truly, madly, deeply. After beginning the semester intending to focus on white femininity, these mixed race women who identified as black, all shifted their paper topics before the end of the term. Personally I wondered how they parsed the cultural understanding they would never be valued or given the benefit of the doubt as casually as their own mothers. They in the course had stumbled into critiquing the whiteness in themselves. In general the level of intrigue of white patriarchy gained state study, but what gained ambivalence was a look at white femininity, given Hillary Clinton's loss and the deep roots of misogyny that also contributed to her defeat. Reading the final papers at the end of term, I was moved by one student's description of a white female student living amongst students of color who avoided her suite mates after the election. She would slip out early and returned late, not wanting to discuss the election results. The other women who were previously considered her their friend felt abandoned in their sadness and fears, according to the writer of the essay. Strangely the suddenly displaced white student also brought to mind Jennifer Graham blend who sued an Ohio sperm bake in 2014 after she gave birth to a mixed race child. Patricia Williams, the attorney points out in the value of whiteness that due to the mistaking insemination and subsequent unplanned relationship to blackness she felt she lost access to her mobility in white spaces. Because of her proximity to blackness. Occasioned by her daughter's birth. Law professor Cheryl iharis, in whiteness as property points out whiteness and property share a common premise, a conception -- a conceptual nucleus of a right to exclude. The sperm bank took this right away from cramblen, as the election took away our tendency not to consider systemic white racism and xenophobia. The distress and feelings of isolation my students experienced made me understand the fact, the fact that this country was founded on genocide and sustained by the continued enslavement and warehousing of African-Americans was unfortunate. We wanted to believe that we were a melting pot. It was truth and fiction. Humanity is a -- as a concept had our respect. That was truth and fiction. We thought we understood our social arrangement to be ultimately tied to decency because our American rhetoric did not include whatever our history, the swearing-in of white nationalism. We could not conceive of people voting for that of our own free -- their own free will. We were not racists at our core. As even warmer Vice President Cheney pointed out, our president's ban on Muslims, and this is a quote, goes against everything we stand for and believe then. -- believe in. Despite our history of war against these same people, the banning of them from American soil is not who we are at our core. We believe in our basic humanity. While unarmed people were shot dead in the streets, we thought we were inherently good while fellow citizens in Flint, Michigan were being poisoned by their drinking water. We meant well well clear and transgender communities were targeted and denied rights. We believe in our goodness while undocumented people were rounded up and criminalized in detention centers. We were made exceptional ists while Muslim Americans were targeted by other Americans and while Native Americans were being hosed, and caged at standing rock. We believe and our gentrification our lifestyles created. We believe political correctness was addressing the specificity of injustice and to paraphrase, are passive that he gestured to the world with racism that no racists. Misogyny without misogynists. Homophobia without homophobes. Anti-Semitism without anti-Semites. Bigotry without bigots. In short, America without Americans. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] What was galling is this. The election tainted all Americans, including the dominated ones with white supremacists complicity. When the election results were declared we Americans, no matter our race, religion or gender, were outed as affiliated with white Americans wanting to hold in place our ability to call this country white. When we understood finally whatever else we are, we are also this human dignity killing machine, we took to our beds and closed our doors, and like my students suite mate, avoiding facing what we wish to see. To send would began saying we don't think Americans would like this administration. Or it is only four years. Or give them a chance. Or we believe in the democratic process. That has been working out for us. So. We don't know yet what they will do. For we lived through Reaganomics. Or, my favorite, he will be impeached. In other words -- an American fashion we began to walk back the horror. We were forced to face a November 8, 2016 when history named us all white nationalists. A blind belief in our basic goodness is what carried us here. This was Obama's belief, too, and the charisma of that message magnetized people to him. Going over my course material from the class as a reminder of what we had covered during the semester, I clicked on the link of Amy Schumer's skit from Inside Amy Schumer. ♪ >> ♪ girl at a no lie You are perfect in my eyes You don't need no lipstick You don't need no blush You have the inner natural glow Magazines say that you're wack Leave that trash on the rack Your beautiful Who cares what they think Wash that lovely face off in the sink Girl you don't need makeup You are perfect when you make up Wife that off of your face I will take you to a special place. I didn't know that your lashes were so stubby and pale. Just a little mascara and you will look female. Please listen what we are trying to say, get up one hour earlier and make yourself much earlier. Justin go outside like that. Just a little makeup, some natural looking makeup, what more do I have to say? Just put it on. Just put it on. Put it on. That's not enough, girl. Girl, I want to get real with you. I have a lot of progress in my life. I regret being high when my niece was born. Most of all, I regret not telling you to wear makeup. What is on you is hopefully, more makeup. It turned out to be just dirty linoleum. These are just metaphors, girl. But they are about your face. Girl, you need makeup. Lots and lots of makeup. You are great except your face, girl. So, don't take off your makeup. ♪ >> this skit made it clear how difficult it is, even for the 53% of white women who voted for Donald Trump, to live up to the standard images of white femininity. Thus, coupling patriarchy with the modes of dominants who have subjugated American citizens. The truth was many white women historically had joined forces with white supremacists in dominating others in their silence, as well as their actions. Light women have historically been culpable in the violence. Women like Carolyn Brian Dunn of , who admitted to lying when she claimed and it till with sold at her -- The chapter titled "light of the world" discusses how white women were lit in films to create the image of white femininity as some less jail. The use of -- as celestial. This helped support the claim that "what made white special was there nonphysical, spiritual, indeed ethereal qualities." That serial does not, however, have everything to do with being ethical. When the women's March on Washington was announced, presumably by the other 47%, it was the first time many of those women had organized as a group and identified as a community in opposition to our anatomy-grabbing president. The photographs were staggeringly beautiful, if one can see beauty in the organized will of people. Millions came together to say no to an America that was poised to say no to so many others. The beauty of these crowds all over the country and the world both elated and saddened me. Elated because these communities of strangers pointed to our potential. But I was also saddened by the nagging question of where all these white women were when black Americans were being gunned down. [APPLAUSE] Abandoned after Hurricane Katrina, subject to voter suppression, and on and on. Where had they been? The thought in the words of the a Peruvian poet hit me: I felt compelled to admonish myself for thinking about the former absence in the face of so much presence. If I was infuriated by the previous and heartless disregard, I was just as humbled by the 4.5 million gathered in solidarity against the stated agenda of the new administration. After September 11, it was written "no sum of historical justification can excuse the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but neither can we excuse our own arrogance behind the scenes of shock and disbelief, and thrown by an old script, we didn't see the planes coming because we didn't think we had to look." It seems old habits die hard. Although Donald Trump's run to power began with the birther movement, "i am starting to think he was not born here," a challenge to President Obama citizenry, many Americans will insist they didn't see his presidency coming. We might ask ourselves why we weren't looking, and now that we are here, I hear the sentiment that it is good to have the hypocrisy of the veiled white supremacist agenda of our country uncovered and out in the open. The real question of the moment is not how powerful are we? but, how powerless are we? How irredeemable are we? It is possible to create a path -- is it possible to create a path towards what has never existed, but fueled our beliefs? We are all connected. As a naturalized citizen, I am as connected to the ones who say, go back to where you came from. As I am to the ones who say, you are safe. It occurs to me now that what I should have said to my students the week after the election was that, what will be done in this administration will be done in our name. This is not the time for impotency. Civic action is suddenly synonymous with living. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] >> We are going to have a short conversation, Claudia and I are going to talk a little bit. I have some questions you sent us through twitter. I saw that "rankine: on whiteness" was trending in Boston, which was great. [APPLAUSE] >> [INAUDIBLE] >> OK, we will turn up the sound. Excellent. Claudia, thank you for being here. It is such an honor, and we have spent a lot of time together in this last year, having a lot of conversations about the things that you are writing. One of the things I wanted to ask you was that, I keep thinking of your students faces post-election, and I am looking at this incredible filled theater and a sense of urgency that I know everyone in the audience feels. We just, we are all following a non-vote today on a new health care act. So, you can feel the urgency in the audience. Knowing you, I know you felt this urgency all along. Is there a pre-urgency and a post-election urgency or is the work the same? >> I think there is a new urgency. I will continue working in the way that I have always worked. I do think, as a citizen, things have changed. I now feel irresponsible if I do not check the news in the morning. And I now understand that more will be asked of me. I am not the kind of person who usually would have gone to rallies or protests. You know, we can change. [LAUGHTER] It is one thing to buy into the myth that all of this is new. It is not new. It is not new. But, what is new is the blatant disregard for the First Amendment. There are new things. And, I think we as American citizens have to be vigilant in the ways that we should have been vigilant before. But now, we do not have a pass. >> There is a question from the audience that I'm going to read. Given the historical routes of racism in the United States, is the American experiment worth continuing? Do you think redemption is possible? In 30 words or less. [LAUGHTER] >> You know, we are here and we have brought forward another generation of people. It is our responsibility to make this thing work. And, part of making it work is to understand how it is broken. Part of understanding how it is broken is understanding that whiteness is made up of racism. That is part of it. These false conversations around "I am not racist" -- let's stop that. Let's move forward. [APPLAUSE] >> I would love to talk about that a little bit. One of the things that has been interesting about getting to know you is that we have been at many dinner parties where I watch people -- mostly I just tried to -- I watch people try to prove themselves not racist to you. It is fascinating to encounter. One of the questions we have been asking is, can a white person and a black person have an authentic conversation about race and how does that happen? [LAUGHTER] >> I feel like I'm being set up! [LAUGHTER] Well, that is the question. That is what we have been working on with the new play. How do you stage the conversation that has stalled so many times before? That is the biggest conundrum in my creative life right now. How do you make that happen? So, it is going to happen. It is going to happen. >> I just want to unpack a little bit -- a couple things that really -- and I saw as I was watching the twitter feed, this idea of internalized dominance versus white privilege. That white privilege came about in 1988 -- can you talk a little bit about internalized dominance and unpack that? >> For me, you can actually go online and watch it. Sometimes, when I am relaxing -- [LAUGHTER] I will Google Robin D'Angelo and watch her talk about internalized dominance. [LAUGHTER] You think I jest! This happens. The term is incredibly useful for me because it begins the discussion after the moment when you say "white people are racist." And not feel defensive around that. Everything in the culture has worked overtime, over time, to allow white people to feel that dominance. And no individual in these United States could have avoided it. No matter what their intentions are. There is no stepping outside the culture. And, one of the reasons I wanted to start with some of the commercials around the bleaching creams is that, for the Asian population, for the Arab population, the black population , we have all known that whiteness is the most valuable thing. Not white people, but whiteness is the most valuable thing. That is why people are using bleaching creams, you know? Like, they will go that far. That is why they are making those commercials in China and Thailand and Japan and Africa, because they are not dummies. They want the jobs. They want what whiteness affords white people. It is just the way it is. One of the things I have been thinking about -- and this is me pretending I remember what the question was. [LAUGHTER] Is how to demonstrate in a play, what it means to stand inside the notion of white dominance, and still be able to move into an ethical position. Like, that's really what would redeem whiteness, yeah? The recognition that the dominance is there. And, given that, what are we doing? [APPLAUSE] >> The other thing that you talked about inside this question was, white distress. I wondered, because it feels like such a central piece of where we are, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about your understanding of that. >> There is a piece in the Wall Street Journal -- you know, not everything is random. I have the name of the person on my hand here -- Betsy McKay. It is about the study done by two Princeton economists on the fact that white people, the mortality rate is rising. And it is rising because of an increase in opiate use and suicide. It is 26-65 years, so it is a cross the spectrum. It is usually in the category of people who do not have a college degree. And that would seem like it is pointing to economics, right? That would also mean that African-Americans in that category or Asian-Americans in that category would also be committing suicide -- but they are not. So, why are white people suddenly so depressed? They are depressed because this idea of dominance, this internalized dominance is meant to play out in their lives. And suddenly, due to many things -- outsourcing, technology -- due to many things, they do not have jobs, they do not have health insurance, they do not have a lot of things. And other people, like black people who say "we never had those things" -- but white people are like "wait, you said that those things were rights." when you have people like the guy who came to New York and stabbed that guy and people like Dylan roof going to the Bible study in shooting all of those people -- sure, that his races and. But, there is something else tied to it. It is the sense that something has gone very wrong in my life. The easy answer is, it must be the black person. The black I did it. -- the black guy did it. [INAUDIBLE] But, there is also true despair. It is a real despair. And it has to do with the sense that it was, these things were my rights as a white person. You told me I was quite, so therefore, all of these resources were mine. All of this mobility was mine. And now, I don't have it. So, I'm going to take myself out and take all of you out that way. I think that is what is going on. >> Just a final question. I would love to bring it -- just this question of the power of art. Your book "citizen" really changed the conversation about race in this country in a very deep way, as well as your writing for the New York Times. I feel like when you started writing about Serena Williams, suddenly everybody started to think she was a great tennis player. [LAUGHTER] I noticed, nobody ever mentioned Serena Williams and then you wrote a piece in the New York Times and then Serena -- everybody was like, go, Serena. I feel like your work has had such an impact in showing us the importance of art in changing the conversation that we are having this country about race. I just wonder if you can talk about, as an artist, you mentioned this -- how your sort of protecting out your life as an artist inside the frame of this conversation that you are trying to get out -- how important is it to have time to be an artist? I think about that with the funding of the national endowment for the arts and our sense that so many artists feel like, I do not have time to do art. I have to go to these other things. I am wondering how you stay connected to it. >> One of the things that is amazing about artists is that -- am I calling myself amazing? I don't know. [LAUGHTER] One of the things is you never did it for the money, you know? that was never the thing that was motivating you in the first place. I feel like we will continue to work, because whatever that drive is that brings people -- we were in a workshop in New York earlier this week around the development of the play, and at one point, I looked at this table and there were like, a dozen people around the table making a piece of art. You know, spending their time, bringing a full commitment of their imaginative professional will towards the creation of this piece. It was one of those moments I did not interrupt what was going on to share, but it made me proud. So, I think art is -- they didn't do it in the first place because they could avoid doing it. I don't know what it looks like for you. When I graduated from Williams, I went to work in a law firm. And I was sure I was going to go to law school. My parents were immigrants, I am an immigrant -- can you imagine the conversation? So, I think I'm going to be a poet. [LAUGHTER] That's what I'm thinking. [LAUGHTER] My parents would have been like, what is that? [LAUGHTER] And so, it took me something like four years to back out of that law firm. I did because I had to. There was something pushing me forward in terms of what language can do. The only reason I was interested in what language can do is because I knew it's profound effect on me. I knew how I felt as a reader. I knew what I had learned in the theater. So, you know, I think that the issue of defunding the national endowment for the arts -- it is tragic to even consider that. But, there are always two things. There is the reality of the tragedy, and then there's us, the will of the people. So, this is it. We are inside the will of the people. What I and curious to see is how far it will get us. [APPLAUSE] >> I think it goes without saying that I'm speaking on behalf of this entire audience but, I am never on amazed by your generosity. We are grateful to have you here this evening, and thank you so much, Claudia Rankine. [APPLAUSE] ♪