Join Juliet Hooker, the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence and Political Science, on an inspiring journey from Nicaragua to academic prestige. In this conversation, Juliet unfolds the connections between her roots and her fierce commitment to public service and advocacy for racial justice. As a result of her groundbreaking research, she provides a fresh perspective on multicultural citizenship in Latin America and the quest for equality across historically disenfranchised communities.
When Juliet Hooker reveals the heart of her work "Black Grief, White Grievance, The Politics of Loss," the episode takes a poignant turn. In her narrative, we confront the societal pressures on black people to transform their pain into activism, as it emerges from the embers of the Ferguson protests. Rather than thinking in terms of zero-sum outcomes, Juliet proposes a transformative shift towards systemic change. We investigate how marginalized voices can claim a piece of the American dream together with her.
As we draw the curtain on this fascinating discussion, Juliet leaves us with a reflection on her legacy as a teacher and activist. It demonstrates the importance of recognizing our youth's influence and the power of education. On Amazon and at Princeton University Press, her book awaits those eager to follow in the footsteps of past giants. Juliet's hope? As a result of sharing these stories, a new generation of advocates will emerge, equipped with the wisdom of Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells, ready for a world rich with social justice.
With 4Freedom, all your communications, internet activity, and app usage are encrypted using multiple layers of robust, military-grade encryption algorithms that surpass the standards used by the NSA.
You can start your secure account today:
https://www.4freedommobile.com?ref=bridgebuilders
Join Juliet Hooker, the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence and Political Science, on an inspiring journey from Nicaragua to academic prestige. In this conversation, Juliet unfolds the connections between her roots and her fierce commitment to public service and advocacy for racial justice. As a result of her groundbreaking research, she provides a fresh perspective on multicultural citizenship in Latin America and the quest for equality across historically disenfranchised communities.
When Juliet Hooker reveals the heart of her work "Black Grief, White Grievance, The Politics of Loss," the episode takes a poignant turn. In her narrative, we confront the societal pressures on black people to transform their pain into activism, as it emerges from the embers of the Ferguson protests. Rather than thinking in terms of zero-sum outcomes, Juliet proposes a transformative shift towards systemic change. We investigate how marginalized voices can claim a piece of the American dream together with her.
As we draw the curtain on this fascinating discussion, Juliet leaves us with a reflection on her legacy as a teacher and activist. It demonstrates the importance of recognizing our youth's influence and the power of education. On Amazon and at Princeton University Press, her book awaits those eager to follow in the footsteps of past giants. Juliet's hope? As a result of sharing these stories, a new generation of advocates will emerge, equipped with the wisdom of Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells, ready for a world rich with social justice.
With 4Freedom, all your communications, internet activity, and app usage are encrypted using multiple layers of robust, military-grade encryption algorithms that surpass the standards used by the NSA.
You can start your secure account today:
https://www.4freedommobile.com?ref=bridgebuilders
My guest today is Juliet Hooker. Juliet is the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence and Political Science. She is a political theorist specializing in racial justice, black political thought, latin American political thought, democratic theory and contemporary political theory. She also was written on racism and Afro-descent indigenous politics in Latin America. Before coming to Brown, she was a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin.
Speaker 1:She is the author of Black Grief, white Grievance, the Politics of Loss, Theorizing Race in America, douglas Sarmiento, du Bois and Vascales, race and Politics of Solidarity, and the author of Black Indigenous Resistance in the Americas from multiculturalism to racist backlash. Professor Hooker served as co-chair of American Political Science Associations Presidential Task Force on Racial and Social Justice, social Class Inqualities in America and the Associate Director of Teresa Lonzo Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She has received full fellowships and awards from the National Endowment of Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Du Bois Institute for African-American Research at Harvard and the Advanced Research Collaboration of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Welcome, juliette, to the show. It's so good to have Dr Hooker on the show today. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2:I'm good Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:It's a pleasure to have you on, so I'd love to ask my guest a question kind of warm up a little bit, get a chance to know you. What's the best piece of advice you ever received?
Speaker 2:So this is work related advice, but when I was writing my dissertation and one of my committee members told me, don't chase after the topic that everybody is writing about or that seems to be in vogue. The thing that's going to allow you to finish a project is if you write about something that you really care about, and I think that has stood me well in terms of working on things that I feel really strongly about.
Speaker 1:We must have had the same people in our committee. I got that same advice and I'm almost done, so it has helped.
Speaker 2:Yes, it was good advice.
Speaker 1:It was because it's been a long, three-year process. If you don't like what you're writing about, you will quit. I'm always curious about people in your life who have served to be an inspiration to you. You want to give those people kind of a chance to give them a shout out and thank you for being so influential in your upbringing and your development. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:I think my family has been an enormous inspiration as well as support. In particular, I think my parents had to give me an example of public service and of really finding ways in their community to try to help people and to contribute to the community, make it a better place. That was an example of how you could be in community and that the kind of work that requires it doesn't have to be something grand. It's just sort of caring about people around you.
Speaker 1:I love that. I read your bio. It's a very impressive bio and I'm kind of curious. You want to kind of walk us through your journey and I'm also curious, as you go through that journey, tell us about lessons you learned along the way.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 2:So I grew up on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, which is a historically black and indigenous space where people really black people in particular have been treated as kind of second class citizens in the rest of the country historically, and so that was the background.
Speaker 2:And, of course, when I came to the US, it was at the end of the 1980s when the Civil War was happening in Nicaragua, and I think when I came here to the US, one of the first things that I encountered was people saying you're here and you're taking positions from Americans, that kind of anti-immigrant feeling that a lot of people had, and so that was something that I felt like I had to come to terms with and figure out how to deal with.
Speaker 2:And I think, as I continued my career, I went on to get a university degree and a PhD, and my first job was actually teaching for many years at the University of Texas at Austin. So being, I think, at a large public university was really, I think, a really good place to start my career, because I really like that public service mission that public universities have to educate the citizens of the state, even though, of course, it's like subject to all of the ways in which legislatures often try to interfere with what universities do. So there was a lot of tensions around that, but I think the mission of saying you're here to educate the citizens of the state was, I think, really inspiring.
Speaker 1:That's great To me. I'm curious, since you mentioned your PhD, what was your PhD's focus? I'm just always curious what you were writing on and doing your research on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so my PhD was looking at the way in which theories of multicultural citizenship right, the idea that you have diverse societies and that you have to make the state has to make decisions that have an impact on how people can see themselves reflected so right, there's an official language and if you have people speaking multiple languages and your language is the official language, that has an impact on you, and so it was trying to think about those kinds of debates and policies, and you know, a lot of the research that hadn't been done up to that point had focused on cases in Europe, in Canada, in the United States, and so I was looking at the ways in which people were thinking about and trying to implement those, those policies in Latin America which hadn't really been discussed as much up to that point.
Speaker 1:Interesting, so I was looking at this question. What was your, your biggest surprise in your research that you weren't expecting?
Speaker 2:Hmm, that is a really good question. I think early on in my research I think the thing that I that was surprising and for me was when I was looking at what was happening in Latin America was realizing that, even though they had both been historically discriminated against, that indigenous people actually kind of fit the model of the group that was more able to receive rights from the state than than Afro descendants in Latin America, because black people just weren't recognized as a distinct cultural group in the region and so they just didn't fit people's ideas of the kind of group that should receive recognition from from the state, and so that was one of the things that I ended up writing a lot about early on in my career.
Speaker 1:Interesting that's. That is surprising, yeah, so let's dive into your book. I'm curious to find out why you wrote the book Black Grief, white Grievance, the Politics of Loss.
Speaker 2:Yes, so I actually started writing the book in 2016, and it was in response really to watching the the uprising in Ferguson and seeing how, you know, those protests were met with such a militarized and really violent response.
Speaker 2:And then, at the same time, there were a lot of people who were criticizing the protesters, right, for not protesting in the right way, and and, and so it made me think about the grief and anger that people were feeling and the kind of limited ability that they had to express that in that moment and so, and so I started thinking about the question of you know, what do black people do with their grief, right?
Speaker 2:How do they use it or try to, you know, make sense of it, particularly politically, in politics. And then, of course, as 2016 or on, there was the presidential election and then the Trump campaign and the sort of rhetoric anti immigrant, you know, kind of misogynist, you know rhetoric that was coming from them, and then I started to think about how white grievance, the sense of resentment that was really animating that campaign, was happening at the same time as black people were literally out there protesting in the streets because they were being killed, and so it seemed to me that these are two ways in which people were mobilizing around loss some real, some perceived and that we needed to be able to think about them simultaneously, and so that's how the book came about.
Speaker 1:As you, as you talk about my Bible study came out because of the same Ferguson experience. Actually served as a pastor in that neighboring community so I kind of knew the Ferguson community. I was surprised at the outside influences that came into Ferguson and shaped some of the narrative that was going on there and it was kind of it was kind of interesting to see that and I wrote a Bible study to kind of help the church deal with same thing you're talking about, deal with how we talk about race in a Christian context. That's going to be beneficial for both sides. So I tried to act as a, as a kind of a cultural translator to translate what blacks were saying and what whites were saying and try to say here's what you're misunderstanding in the conversation.
Speaker 1:I'm curious in your work, how do you deal with the fact that the black grief is based on trauma? And you're right, there's no real avenue for that trauma and that grief to be expressed. When it is expressed, oftentimes it's met with resistance because nobody wants to feel the weight of the past issues and so it's like I don't want to deal with. That's like when someone has a loved one die and they're grieving like, yeah, I don't want to hear. That makes me feel sad. So let's move on to something else. So you're causing trauma to the other person who doesn't want to hear it either. So how do you, how does, how does your book kind of deal with that tension? Could you kind of brought up how do you deal with that tension in our country?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know, what I do in the book is really try to show that there's been at the same time that I think that is very much quite a reaction that people are like we don't want to deal.
Speaker 2:On the other hand, I think the pattern has been that there's been a reliance on black people becoming these kind of heroic activists to make racial progress after they've suffered enormous losses, and that this is how social change happens in this country, right, so you have, you know, mamie Tomewably, who has the open casket funeral for her son Emmett, and this is really an important event that galvanizes the civil rights movement.
Speaker 2:And you know, you have the movement for black lives, all of these other examples where people become activists after they've suffered these enormous losses and we call them, right, warriors or social justice warriors, you know, and that I think that you know that often obscures that people are grieving, right, that, yes, it's heroic that they're doing this kind of activism, but they're still grieving and we're not giving them space to simply to grieve, because you have to grieve in these really acceptable ways so you don't make other people uncomfortable, right, and so part of the arguments to say that we need to find other ways to think about how racial change can happen.
Speaker 2:That doesn't depend on people doing this kind of activism and having to, you know, to really do this work in a way that that can limit their ability to, you know, express their full humanity, and I think you know one of the things that's really interesting to think about is is you know the ways in which things like you know a global pandemic and you know, or something like that might actually force people to think about the fact that you can't escape loss, grief, right? Those are human experiences that we all have.
Speaker 1:So, now that you've kind of opened that door of accept the ways to agree but also accept the ways to create change, what suggestions? Because I mean, we're still struggling with that. How do we? We all want to see something different. I served in some very, very downtrodden and poor communities. I served in Detroit, michigan area. I served in inner city, st Louis, chicago area, and there were people there who were hurting and no one listened. And as I describe it, no one listened until something was on fire. And you're right, we don't want to wait until things get on fire, if you listen. But how do you help people in those situations who are dealing with poor education, with high crime, with lack of opportunity, employment? How do we begin to change the culture so that we begin to make systemic changes to their circumstances so they can actually live the American dream?
Speaker 2:So I mean that that, of course, is a huge question.
Speaker 2:I think that you know we're all trying to think about. One thing that I would say is I think we need to move as a you know, the country as a whole, beyond this kind of zero sum mentality that I think people often have, where it's, if you're doing something to pay attention to the needs of one group, that that is somehow taking away from others, right. So so it's this idea, you know. You see, when people make you know respond to things like Black Lives Matter by saying, oh, all lives matter. Well, of course all lives matter. This isn't the claim that other lives don't matter. It's saying let's look at this particular problem, right. And so I think this kind of zero sum mentality, this idea that if we pay attention to people who are suffering, that we're somehow taking something away from other people, really makes it difficult to focus on the fact that there are all kinds of people who need us to show care and concern and to try to alleviate the problems. You know that they're, that they're suffering in this country.
Speaker 1:So you're not going to give me a magic bowl to solve everything?
Speaker 2:then Sorry, out of magic bullets today.
Speaker 1:I do wonder why we can't have the conversations that. You're right. I think we really can't achieve anything if we can't have the open, honest conversation that there are people that are hurting and us not realizing that they're hurting people doesn't do the situation or us as a nation justice. So you have to book with what hope in mind? What was your goal?
Speaker 2:So I think my overall goal was that was our hope was that it would help clarify some other things that we were all seeing and experiencing but that we, you know, sometimes we see things and we notice this pattern, right, but we don't have a language sometimes to describe it or to explain it. And so one hope was that it would help people make sense of the things that they were already experiencing and reinforce that you know, this pattern that you think you're seeing is happening. And the other, I think the other goal was really to try to honor the activists who I think often we, you know, we say that we honor them, but we also expect these kinds of heroic actions without thinking about the impact on them. So it was really about saying how do we, you know, how do we honor the extraordinary activism of people while also thinking about what else can we do, rather than simply relying on their labor?
Speaker 2:You know, I think about when, you know, we have elections and we all know all the barriers that are in place for people of color to exercise their right to vote, and you'll see these news stories every election right Some 80 year old black person who stood in line for hours trying to vote and, yes, that's heroic and these people displayed enormous kind of you know, civic, you know, you know commitment. But actually that's a sign that something is wrong with our democracy if people have to do that Like that's a sign of a problem. So I think we often, you know, in these moments we say, oh, look at what this person did, rather than saying the fact that they had to do. That is a call to all of us to try to fix that issue.
Speaker 1:In the book. I read it's part of your book and I was. It was very impressed by how you tried to explain things. So are you trying to get us having a common language as your hope from your book as well?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think that it would.
Speaker 2:It would be, it would be helpful, I think, if we could see, for example, that People are mobilizing around loss and that doesn't mean that we have to say that those losses are equivalent or they're the same, right, but that there is, for example, for people who are Animated by white grievance, that there is this perception of loss.
Speaker 2:And I talk about, you know how the losses that people are Reacting to in those cases are often anticipatory losses. Right, they're these things that haven't happened, but people have this kind of you know the sphere and panic about these. You know, for example, potential demographic change, or what is it going to mean if you have more immigrants or or whatever the thing is that is driving them? And so part of it is is is hoping that, by naming right what's happening and I'm talking about about it that will be able to To identify the patterns and and to think about, for example, how you know I'm obviously not the only person to make this argument, but that every time that there's been some movement for Social change in this country, there's been resistance and backlash, and that has historically been the pattern.
Speaker 1:So so you talk about political loss. Define that for us, because I know we you tap. We have in our own mind, when we hear that, what we think of. But how do you define political loss in your book?
Speaker 2:This is a really good question, right? So of course, we've all experienced loss, right? Losses is a universal Human experience, right, we've all lost Promotion or we, you know, lost the loved one or preferred candidate or sports team didn't win, right? But those aren't necessarily political losses. What I call political losses are losses that are, for example, the result of state action or inaction. So, for example, you know there is, you know, a fire in a building and a lot of people are heard and that could have been Prevented if there had been. You know the right regulations in place, right? So that's a way in which you have a failure of the state and that leads to a loss, so that's a political loss. Or if you think about, you know, the ways in which you know state governments were involved in maintaining segregation, for example in the south, right, that's a political loss.
Speaker 2:But there are other losses that also become political because there are things that were all affected by and involved in, in, in having to to change. So, for example, you know, if you think about the 9-11, right, everybody understands that as a political loss because it was an attack by foreign actors. But if you think about the me-too movement, you know, before People mobilized and women mobilized around sexual harassment, on sexual violence. A lot of people saw that as an individual problem that Individual women were experiencing, as opposed to this larger problem that is Political, because it is happening in workplaces. It is happening, you know, in all these fears and it affects the ability of people to have equal dignity in this society.
Speaker 1:I get it. One other term you have in your book we should pop it cover is how do you define white grievance?
Speaker 2:Yes, so I talk about white grievance as.
Speaker 2:So white grievance refers to the way in which people are mobilizing in response to a perception of loss, right, so that's why I talk about anticipatory loss.
Speaker 2:Right, that there is a sense that whites as a group are being displaced from their dominant position in US politics. Right, their position as a dominant group socially, economically, politically and that this is Illegitimate. Right, because historically they have been the dominant group. So you know, you see this a you know being mobilized and, for example, when people argue that, as they did after the 2020 election, for example, that some of the results were, you know, weren't valid and they focus on Often on large urban cities, right, where you had a lot of minority populations and a lot of urban voters, because they didn't see them, as you know quote, unquote real Americans, as they are pale and used to say, and so their votes should count as much. Right, they shouldn't get to decide. So I see white grievance as a way in which you have a segment of White citizens in this country who are mobilizing in response to what they see as the displacement of their group from this dominant position in US politics and really trying to to reassert their, their dominance.
Speaker 1:So to play devil's advocate there there. There may be some Anticipatory part to that as well, but in some cases some actions have resulted in losses. So how do you? I guess, as we move forward as a people, we have to kind of understand that loss is loss, whether it's real or perceived, and it still has the same emotional, social, emotional impact on you, even physiological impact. If you feel a sense of loss, real or imagined, the internal part of you still feels that. So how do we as a nation move forward when both sides of the spectrum are feeling some sense of loss? How do we come together as a nation and say I acknowledge that you may feel this way or you may experience this and I acknowledge that you're experiencing that? How can we work together so that in the end, we both move forward?
Speaker 2:So one of the things that I'm particularly interested in the book is thinking about democracy right, and thinking about how we can live together. Inequality and part of the way that I think you can distinguish between losses that we need to pay attention to on those that we don't is to say, for example, are you pointing to something that is a legitimate loss or something that isn't right? So if you're mourning the loss of unearned advantages that were the result of the histories of white supremacy in this country, like, yes, that's a loss, but that's not necessarily a loss that you can expect the people who suffered as a result of those systems to mourn with you, right? So I think that part of what I'm saying is that I think, by recognizing that just because the loss isn't real, that doesn't mean or just because it's, it might be the loss of something that shouldn't have been, something that people had access to in the first place, that doesn't mean that it's not going to be experienced as a loss, but that doesn't mean that the answer is to then say we need to think of these things as equivalent right or requiring the same response.
Speaker 2:I mean part of what I do argue in the book is that white grievance as it's manifesting itself is this form of resentment that's leading people to say if democracy leads to outcomes that I don't agree with, then I'm willing to dispense with democracy. And I think that, from the point of view of democratic theorists which is one of the things that I am that's a problem, right, and that part of what we need to remember is that, yes, democracy is about winning, but it's also about losing, right, If somebody that it's also about accepting that sometimes you are going to lose.
Speaker 1:So I get that and it's interesting, but that also goes on both sides of the argument. All of us are gonna lose at some point. We're never gonna always get our political wishes. But in that loss we still have to figure out, as Americans, how we okay, accept the fact that we didn't get our way in this particular decision. We still have to honor the decision that happened. So how do we continue to go? Okay, I would have voted differently, and I did vote differently. I didn't get the outcome I wanted, but we're still one nation. How do we live together? I get the sense we're losing a sense of harmony I mean, we never had total harmony, because this is not utopia but we're becoming so divided that I'm not sure either side wants to accept any results that aren't the ones that are favorable. That's where I see that we're going as dangerous as a nation.
Speaker 2:So I mean, I think, you know, often, I think I have a little bit of a different perspective on this, in the sense that, you know, often people will say that the problem that we're having right now is polarization, right? So they'll say, people are so polarized, they're so, you know, wedded to their particular perspectives, that they can't come to any kind of agreement. And I think that when we talk about, you know, whether we're more divided, or you know that we were in the past, like, one thing to remember is that the issue isn't so much whether we're divided I mean, we can be, you know and often people point to the 1950s right, as a time when there was more, you know, cooperation in Congress, or you had more bipartisanship, but that was because there was agreement to preserve segregation, right, among other things. So that wasn't, you know, in that there may have been harmony, but it wasn't, you know, harmony that was accompanied by justice, by equality, by any of those things. So I think that when we think about this question of, you know, division, polarization, I think we need to remember that there can be less division, but it can mean that we're agreeing to outcomes that are really unequal and unjust, and so that the question is how do we get, you know, to a more just and equal society?
Speaker 2:And I think you know one of the. You know the history of things, like you know. You think about the civil rights movement, right, people at the time said, you know, that they were divisive, that they were, you know, causing these confrontations. People were very critical at the time. So I think when you have these moments where people are really trying to, you know, reassess right the conditions they're living in, it's often contentious, right, it's not, it's not harmonious because you have disagreements.
Speaker 1:I guess when I think of working together, I'm not necessarily thinking of harmony as much as I'm thinking of the ability for both sides to say let's bring our best self to the table and let's work out some agreement that benefits both sides, cause I think each side of our political aisle has some positives and some negatives. But when I work together to solve things in there and they're open to that I spent a time last summer doing something on policy and I it was one of those classes where like oh good Lord, policy. But I realized that we don't do policy sometimes from the perspective of how do we make sure that both sides give up something for a good policy? Both sides have to lose something, but they come together to agree that this is for the greater good, and I don't see as much of that. That's what I'm thinking about. How do we come together and find out what's for the greater good, and not so much the vessel device, I guess, is what I'm thinking.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think, one, you know.
Speaker 2:A good example of this is that often, I think, people you know use these kind of cultural issues to obscure the fact that people could all benefit from certain kinds of policies, right? So, when you think about the ways in which, right in certain states, there are projected things like Medicare expansion, which would help so many people who don't have access to healthcare, and often the ways in which these you know this is done is to say, well, if we do this, this is like a giveaway to these people that we don't wanna give things to or who are already taking too much right. And so I think part of it is being able to see how do we get away from the sense that our politics or policy preferences should be dominated by trying to get things from my group and deny other groups, you know, the things that they want, and instead say what are the ways in which we can make, you know, come together around policies that benefit everyone and that can actually, you know, improve people's lives in a really meaningful way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that I agree with. I'm curious, as you get feedback on your book what are you hearing in terms of feedback and how is your book being received?
Speaker 2:So you know it's been really great. It's been received really positively. I wasn't sure how it would be received and it's been really. You know, had a lot of really good conversations, and one of the things that I think has been really interesting to me is that you know the argument, for example, that people mobilize around loss and that this is something that leads people to, you know, to act politically in this ways, that people kind of intuitively grasp that and really kind of get that Concept, and so that has been really, really great.
Speaker 1:Good. So I love to ask this question what are you most excited about in this season of your life?
Speaker 2:So I think one of the things that we all came out of the pandemic realizing is the importance of connection right, of being able to spend time with With each other and to cultivate relationships, friends, family. So for me that's that's one of the things that I'm really Really excited to find time to do and to make that time a priority is to say you know, how can I be in community with people in really meaningful ways?
Speaker 1:So is there another book on horizon you're working on now that you finished this one? I know you started in 2016. So if you started in 2016, was there a 2018 book? You were also starting.
Speaker 2:So there might be a book. I'm not sure if it's gonna be a book yet, but I am thinking about. There was this work that I was doing when I was Working on on this book on thinking about monuments and the work that they do and how we should respond to them. So I'm doing some research and writing on those questions right now.
Speaker 1:That's great, as you think about the impact you're making with race and you have a long history of being an advocate for social justice, racial justice. What do you want your legacy to be?
Speaker 2:Ah, this is a tough question, I think you know. I hope that my work will continue to be relevant. You know Yours down the line. I hope people will read it and continue to refer to it, but I think the most concrete thing that I I want my legacy to be is is training my students. Right is being able to teach and to help people Come to realize that you know their opinions matter and that they have something to say that that is important for you know, for other people to hear that that's something that I think is really Important to me about the work that I do so.
Speaker 1:Here's your chance to give your students kind of a mini graduation message. What message of hope do you want to give to your students who are about to enter the world?
Speaker 2:So I think what I would say is that they inspire me. You know, I think when I look at young people today, I was talking to a colleague who said you know, when she started teaching, a lot of people were talking about how young people were so apathetic and they weren't involved. And I think when you look, you know, at so many movements today, you see so many young people who are, even if you disagree with what their physicians are or their activism, that they're so involved and they care so much and they have so much of a sense of you know that it's important to to really stand by their principles and be consistent with them, and I think that's really inspiring.
Speaker 1:That's great. So where can people find your book and connect with you on social media?
Speaker 2:So you can find the book. It's on Amazon and it's on the Princeton University Press website as well, and there is audio and digital versions so you can read or listen there on your preferred platform, and I'm on Formerly Twitter so you can find me there as well.
Speaker 1:Do you read the book yourself? Are you the voice of the book?
Speaker 2:No, there was a professional reader who we did the audio.
Speaker 1:Okay, I always think. Sometimes I heard an author who did his own reading, so I Was happy that there was someone else doing it.
Speaker 2:I hate this out of my voice.
Speaker 1:So join the club. Anything, I haven't asked you that I should have asked you.
Speaker 2:So I think this was great, I think, if anything, I think what I would would say is you know that one of the things that I Really and you know I think is really important in the book is is really paying attention to the stories of People who are ordinary people, who end up living these extraordinary lives and whom we can learn so much from. So one of my favorite chapters in in the book in what grief I grievances this chapter that looks at the, the Life and activism of Harriet Jacobs, who is enslaved and frees herself through this incredible story and writes a slave narrative, and then Ida B Wells, the great Journalist and anti-lynching crusader. So, yeah, so part of it is hoping that that people will will pick up the book and be inspired to learn more about you know, previous generations of activists, as well as the ones that they're more familiar with.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much taking time for my audience and sharing with us what you're working on and your hopes and dreams to Help us create a better world.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me.