[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. It started back in March 2010, a crew of real-life friends, each a scholar, teacher, activist in their own right, came together to launch a blog. Yes, a blog. It was 2010, but the Crunk Feminist Collective was no ordinary digital offering in the boy-dominated blogosphere.

This space was an intentional, unrelenting, percussive, Black feminist space that came complete with a full-on mission statement that read, in part, quote, "We will create a space of support and camaraderie for hip hop generation feminists of color, queer and straight in the academy, and without, by building a rhetorical community in which we can discuss our ideas, express our Crunk feminist selves fellowship with one another, debate and challenge one another, and support each other as we struggle together to articulate our feminist goals, ideas, visions, and dreams in a way that are both personally and professionally beneficial." Oh, yes. Clearly, these sisters had read Bell Hooks.

In 2017 the Crunks curated a selection of their blog writings into an edited volume, The Crunk Feminist Collection. The essays tackled politics, pop culture, family, community, identity, and intersectionality with the distinctive generational voice that long characterized the online writings. Now, the Crunk Feminist Collective is back. This time they're showing up as mamas and aunties and big sisters. They're inviting adolescents, teens, and young adults into the cipher as they spit analysis and advice in their latest book, Feminist Af, A Guide to Crushing Girlhood. We wanted to talk about the book, and when the Crunks roll, they roll deep. I sat down with all three authors last week.

Brittney Cooper: My name is Brittney Cooper. I'm associate professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality studies at Rutgers.

Chanel Craft Tanner: My name's Chanel Craft Tanner. I'm the director of the Center for Women at Emory University.

Susana Morris: My name is Susana Morris. I'm an associate professor of literature, media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. It's literally and figuratively a guidebook. We have a glossary, we have a bulleted list, we have playlists. You can pull out chapters and read about what it means to be a young woman of color or non-binary youth of color. How do you navigate friendships, how do you navigate dating, how do you navigate the fact that your immigrant parents have particular expectations for you, but you're living in the United States or another part of the West and you're trying to live like your other friends are that are your age.

It really is anticipating lots of the questions that young people will have and giving really practical answers that are grounded in Black feminism.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Chanel, I love this idea because I feel like I've seen two different iterations of something that didn't quite do that. There was the, it was the American Girl Doll series of going through adolescence. Not that that's not useful, that that book can be useful. Those books can be useful, The care and keeping of you kind of things. Then I've seen the scholarly academic analytic books about what exactly those intersectional navigations are, but never combined. Both understanding what they are in a scholarly and historic way, but then making it a practical advice guide for young people themselves.

Chanel Craft Tanner: Absolutely. I think so much of what we thought about with this book was what is it that we needed as girls and how can we also really practice the politics of meeting girls where they are? We give them the feminism that we all have. We're all experts in these areas. We have PhDs and we work in this area, but we also know that the young people that we meet, they may come in the door saying that they're feminists. I have a nine-year-old, she told me she was a feminist when she was six. I wasn't a feminist until I was 18, but she said she was a feminist.

They have the language, but they don't really know what to do next. What does it look like to live your feminism? How does it help you negotiate friendships in your dating life? It was really important for us to meet them where they are but also to give them that little big sister, auntie guidance along the way.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Brittney, let me point out, I don't necessarily know how to live my feminism. I know a lot about these topics like you all as a scholar, but I would be hard-pressed if you asked me how to live your feminism. I messed that up a lot. I do well sometimes, but I mess it up a lot too.

Brittney Cooper: Look, we take the position here that we don't know everything, but really, we're just trying to give people our readers, we're trying to invite them into a conversation with us. We specifically say, "We don't have this all figured out, but we just want to hold it together with you because we're all trying to figure it out." One of the funniest things that happened as we've been touring this book is that people our age are like, "Wait a minute. I still need this advice. You know what I mean?

Melissa Harris-Perry: Exactly.

Brittney Cooper: I'm like, "Maybe I do need to look at my friendships a little bit differently, or maybe I do need to be more bold in my flirting or more confident, or maybe I do need to set better boundaries." Our position is that this is just good information to have at any stage of your life, but also what kinds of girlhoods we have had. Chanel often says that we think feminism can lead to a better girlhood. What girlhoods could we have had if we had this information earlier? It just becomes our way, our love offering to young people to say, "We don't know everything, but here's some stuff we think we know that might be useful for you as you figure it out."

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. Who wants to give me a good practical guide basis for just defining feminism? Chanel, you said, at six, your little person was saying, "I'm a feminist." What did that mean either to you or to her?

Chanel Craft Tanner: She first thought feminism was a job. She was like, "I want to be a feminist when I grow up."

Melissa Harris-Perry: Hey, it kind of is.

Chanel Craft Tanner: It kind of is. I could see how her little brain would think that, because all her aunties are feminists, but they also work doing feminism and I directed a women's center, so she was aspiring to it. I said to her "It's really a viewpoint. You can be a feminist right now. It's how you live your life. It's this belief that girls and boys can do the same things." She came back the next day and was like, "Well, then if that's what it is, I am a feminist. I'm declaring it." We threw her a whole party.

We went to Olive Garden and I gave her trinkets and tools that can make it tangible for her and told her it was about friendship and gave her a friendship bracelet and a rainbow-colored football to say, "Boys and girls can do the same things." I told her, I gave her a seed and said "A part of your job now is to grow another one and a heart," and told her that at the end of the day, feminism is ultimately about love. I think that she was six and that was a language that she needed at six.

We put in our glossary in the back of the book that feminism is a social movement and a set of beliefs that aims to tear down the system of male domination known as the patriarchy. Ideally, this movement is also anti-racist and anti-elitist. That we think is a good definition for young people who are maybe just coming into feminism that in it talks about class, it talks about race. It is really looking at power. It is a way to think about your individual relationships.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I do want to be clear though, I think of myself as a feminist, but I don't have to eat at Olive Garden, do I?

Chanel Craft Tanner: No, but if your daughter gets to pick her favorite place we were all like, "Oh no, that's where you pick, but it's her party."

[laughter]

We're like, "Where would you like to go anywhere in Atlanta?" She's like, "Olive Garden."

[laughter]

That's where we went because that's where she picked.

[laughter]

No, you do not have to.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It's not a small point though. Susana, I want to come to you on this because I do think that this is a really different way to think about how a crew of Black feminists engaged in the project of what might have, and I'll come to you on this as well later, Brittney, but what might have, at other eras at other turn of the centuries, might have been thought of as an uplift project, but where the little person would not have been able to direct where we're going to eat or how we're going to engage this. I'm wondering if in this guide you're also maybe flipping something for teachers and caretakers and parents.

Susana Morris: Part of our feminist project is that we really trust young people. Chanel was bringing up earlier that young folk know a lot. They put us on the stuff often and so we're not really moving in the space of children should be seen and not heard that many of us may have been raised in that old-school way. Even folks with progressive politics oftentimes have narrow notions of what children or young people can and should do in the world, and all of a sudden, 18 and 25, they're supposed to know all this stuff. Well, how do you know stuff if you haven't been moving through the world?

We really trust young people. At the same time, we're there as folks that they can come to, and we model that for the adults reading the book. I'm child-free, but I'm an aunt. I've been an aunt since I was 13. I've had a lot of practice over the past three decades of talking to young people and sometimes being that person that you don't really want to go to your mama, but you want to come talk to me. We don't invite undermining parents or anything like that. We do invite young people to give their parents some slack. There's some conversations that we have around, say, sharing chores and girls particularly feeling burdened by having to take care of younger siblings, and things like that.

We have a whole class analysis around that. Rather than blaming your mama for having you pick up your brother after school, let's talk about how capitalism works. We don't dismiss the young person's concern out of hand. Like, "Man, you just being lazy. Get over it." We say, "Yes, it sucks that you have to tot your little brother around everywhere, but maybe y'all can go to the fair or you can take him to the arcade and you can chill with your friends while also taking care of your little brother."

The critique is for capitalism. We're not going to blame Black mamas because everybody blames Black mamas. We're also at the same token, not going to start that narrative of blaming young Black and brown women because that narrative starts early. We try to tow that line of listening to their concerns and honoring them as real, and not dismissing them while also inviting them to have a bigger picture.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: I love that, and thinking about, "I can validate your very real emotional and intellectual experiences and preferences." I'm wondering, Brittney, if you want to also weigh in on this-- The ways in which your scholarship has informed what it even means to write a girlhood guide.

Brittney Cooper: I never wanted to have an academic career that was solely about talking to academics, because all of us are working-class girls. We're all first-generation college graduates, first-generation PhDs. We wanted to do work that reaches girls that are like us and girls in our communities, and folks back home that we want to be in community with. This is certainly us saying to the academy that talking to other experts is not the place where the value of our work necessarily lies.

One of the things that we talk a lot about though, in this book, we have a chapter on code-switching. We talk to young people about the demand to perform a particular professionalism or poise or being put together when you leave the house in order to impress the powers that be. What does it mean if you do use that as a survival strategy? What does it mean to respect people who don't use that as a survival strategy? We use the language of respectability politics and we try to help young folks to understand that this comes about at a time in our history where it was dangerous to just be a Black person walking down the street.

Unfortunately, we are back in a time period where that remains true. We want young people to have the language for that, but also the agency to say, whichever creative ways you might be using to navigate the world and to navigate your circumstances are okay. It's just really important that you are clear about who you are and about the choices that you are making. Also, I think that too, what we said is people already think that Black and brown girls are problematic. That trans kids are problematic because they demand to be paid attention to and listened to and to have their issues heard. They're often seen as a problem just the moment that they walk into the room.

We say, "You know what? Cool, we're going to flip that on its head. We're going to give you the language around structures, around white supremacy, around patriarchy around why your school has such a problematic dress code." If they say, you're a problem, you're going to be a problem, but you're going to be a feminist problem. You're going to come into these spaces with the language to critique the structures of power that are being used to mistreat you and to silence you and to gaslight you. Look, and that's what we want.

We want a army of girls out here who are a whole problem.

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm wondering if any of you all have encountered in your conversations, for example, with young people or possibly with parents or caregivers, the flip of this. Not necessarily girls, femme folk, non-binary folk who are saying, "Look, I'm a feminist. I am a progressive, I'm a radical, I'm out here to change thingsm" but folks who are like, "You know what, on all that feminism, and sure Black lives matter, but what I'm trying to do is just fit in and make it through and achieve." In other words, the kids may be of progressive parents who are themselves a little bit more mainstream, we're going to call it.

Brittney Cooper: We haven't encountered these kids yet, because I think the thing that we've been doing in our conversations is just trying to name realities. Rather than saying, "You have to be this. You have to show up and have a rah-rah feminist flag." We actually also talked to the overachiever. I was the overachieving Black girl. I like to tell people you didn't catch me at a protest movement until I was 25 because I was like, "I got this scholarship to keep, I got these A's to get, and I can't be getting in no trouble."

What we say to those girls is what about the pressure? What happens when you feel like your life is falling apart and you just trying to make something happen, and it feels like no one is listening to you? Why do you think that that is going on? As Chanel frequently says, we just try to meet girls where they are. We're not trying to impose politics on people. Here's the other thing, Melissa, one of the things that I think we got to be real with young people about is you might not be trying to be about this woke life, but in a world where reproductive rights are on the verge of being stripped, they're going to be some fights that we thought wouldn't matter, that are very much going to affect people's quality of life.

Also as inappropriate aunties, it's our job to say to young people, "If you were trying to check out, unfortunately, baby, you got to tune in."

Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry: Anybody else want to weigh in on that one?

Chanel Craft Tanner: Yes. I think that there's just so much of the book to Brittney's last point. We didn't really write it in a way that needs to be read, cover to cover. I think that it's about those chapters that you can pull out and it's true. We talk about not just reproductive justice, but we talk about periods as a part of reproductive justice. I think that there are going to be-- This is a very aware generation. Even those who are not out in the streets organizing, they still know what's going on or they want to know what's going on. What we offer is a way to contextualize their lives and their world, and there's so much of the book that will do that for them.

I don't think you have to necessarily be woke like the chapter that Brittney was just talking about for the regular shmegular degular girl. We have a chapter here that's just about confidence, which all young girls need, especially at this age. We know that their confidence begins to dip in middle school. If you are a young person who feels that, that's like, "Man, I used to be so dope. I used to be able to do all the things, and now I'm shy, or I feel less sure of myself," then maybe you'll head over to the Bossing Up chapter and find something in there for you.

I think that it speaks to the mainstream girls too. Yes, my daughter for sure is who we were thinking of what will she need at 13 when you say you're a feminist at six? I think it's so much of, because we weren't feminists until Susana was, but I wasn't until 18.

Susana Morris: I was an early adopter.

Chanel Craft Tanner: So much of this was me going back to things in my childhood that maybe I didn't know were feminists then. Definitely informed like that, that idea of crew and collectivity, I first learned that growing up in the hoods of Brooklyn. I first learned that. Some of this was us reaching back and holding up those things that helped us survive our girlhoods that maybe we didn't see at the time as connected to feminism, but we know now.

Now that's a good feminist practice right there. The way our mamas and our aunties and our grandmas came together to do things that makes sense to us, and we want to make sure we lift that up. A lot of this is a reclamation too, of what feminism even is and who it belongs to by us saying, but it belongs to poor working-class girls of color too, and we've always been here and this is what it looks like for us.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Susana, I feel like I want to let you in as the early adopter here [laughter] to also just maybe speak on this moment.

Susana Morris: When I started calling myself a feminist-- I started calling myself a womanist in high school and then discovered Black feminism in college. I was by myself. I was in the library reading books, so that was my community, that was my crew, was ideas. I went to the library and read some Alice Walker and was like, "Oh, okay, this makes sense to me." I also wasn't in the streets until probably college.

I went to a women's college and we were protesting all kind of stuff. As a young person in Fort Lauderdale, Florida growing up, hyper Christian, coming into my queerness late, I didn't have the full language that I would have much later. We're thinking about all those young people who are on different journeys. Again, you don't have to be super woke. I also come from an immigrant background. My family's Jamaican and my mama was not going to let me go out in the streets. The '90s were different, but also, there was no the language around being woke or being what have you. I was just trying to get out of my house so I could get to college and make something of myself.

I very much had a striver's narrative, and I think that while young people may have a bit more language around politics than we might have had in however many years ago, this is not a book that is exclusively for the folks who've already been on TikTok watching the feminist videos or what have you. If you've never heard of the word and your auntie has bought you this book or you see it in your school library, it's for you too.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. I have two last questions. One is, so this is the Guide to Crushing Girlhood. I just want to ask about making sure you don't get crushed in girlhood. Specifically, the ways in which the text deals with questions of assault, abuse that may be coming either in peer-to-peer relationships or assault and abuse that might be coming from an adult. I'm wondering how you all thought about addressing that in the context of this text?

Susana Morris: We really addressed the question head on, with a lot of sensitivity. One of the main things we said was that, "We believe you, we see you." In a world where oftentimes Black and brown girls and young people are dismissed out of hand, are discussed as fast, as hoes, as what have you. We don't take that stance at all. We're like, "Little sister we see you, we love you, you don't deserve this, it's not your fault." We speak very explicitly to that. As someone who is a survivor of childhood violence, it was very important to me and I know important to my co-authors, that we take that unapologetic stance. That we ride for young people and that we honor their pain in particular kinds of ways.

Another thing that we do is offer some practical advice. We have resource guides in the book and just talk about what it means to be growing up. Let's say the abuse is happening in your household and it's with family members and what are some practical steps that you can take. Doesn't mean talking to a trusted person, doesn't mean staying with other folks. Like what does it look like? We're very clear that we're on the side of young people and we want them to live and to thrive and to let them know that it's not their fault.

Chanel Craft Tanner: This was one of the harder chapters to write, but one of the most important. It's called Can We Live. I think in addition to talking about sexual assault, we talk about the hard things we had to navigate as girls. My mother died when I was a girl. Brittany's father died when she was a girl.

It's also one of those chapters where we had to be very vulnerable and honest to say, "We really don't have much to give you in this other than visibility and collectivity to say we we're going to do this one together," because we're still navigating hard stuff as Black women. This was a place where you know we ended with a letter saying, "Dear Black girl, we see you and if no one else is singing a Black girl song, then we are."

Melissa Harris-Perry: Here's my last question. I'd love to hear from all three of you on this. It has just been my joy for so many years to watch you all together in digital spaces and in written spaces. I've assigned the edited volume that you all did together and now I'm excited to be able to gift this book to some of the young people in my life. I'm just wondering if in this moment, you can reflect a bit on the friendship that you have.

The ways that friendship and friendship among Black girls and Black queer folk, Black non-binary folk creates space for us to be creative, to be ourselves and maybe even speak to the challenges in sometimes how we present what friendship is. Mostly what I just want to hear you all talk about is what your friendships mean to each other?

Brittney Cooper: Let me tell you something. I love these girls and I will fight you in the street over them and over any of my girls. Melissa, you included. Crew is a essential tenet of our feminism. We really reject this white supremacist notion that's about competitiveness and ambition at the expense of the people who hold you up. We really believe that we can all be dope. We can all shine, we can all be stars. There is room for all of us to exist in our greatness and our power, but only if we help each other. Only if we gather each other and love on each other.

We really try to do that as an actual practice. We're not just performing friendship in this book. We are actual girls, we talk, we text, we're in community with each other. We have learned over 11 years of being members of the Crunk Feminist Collective together that our first responsibility in doing feminist work is to be just loving and kind to the people who are up close to us. Not simply to be just loving and kind out in the streets and at the protest with a bunch of people that you don't know and then you come home and you treat your folks who are close to you raggedy. We reject that. We really do try to love on each other.

One of the cool things about this book, we have what we call the BFF code, the Better Feminist Friendships code. It has 11 articles about respecting boundaries, being a safe space, being each other's mirrors, affirming each other. Those are some of the things we try to live by. I really love the adage that says, "If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together." We definitely got each other's backs and we're going together.

Chanel Craft Tanner: I don't have much to add. I think--

Melissa Harris-Perry: You're like, I too will fight in the streets. Does anyone want to go to the street for this fight?

Chanel Craft Tanner: No. I am quite a fighter or was in my girlhood and so a part of-- [laughter] I wasn't always a good friend. We do talk about that in the book as well. A particular fight I had over a boy. That would be an example of what not to do in feminist friendships. This particular crew working with the Crunk Feminist Collective and being a part of it in normalized collectivity for me, it showed me what is possible. How to survive really spaces that are damaging to us as Black folks.

That the answer is community and collectivity and doing it together. Writing this book was a joy. Touring and talking about this book was an even bigger joy and really bonding and with my co-authors and just getting a chance to reflect on girlhood. There were parts of it that were hard to write, but it meant so much to be able to bring that hardness, the difficulties back to the group to say, "This was a tough week right in this section."

Being able to hold each other up through that. I know a lot of young girls, I was one of them that felt like, "Oh I don't hang out with females. They catty," or whatever. I said things like that. Boy, was I wrong and I'm so happy that I was wrong. Strong friendships with women of color, with Black women have really been the thing that I look forward to in my adult life and the thing that I can point to say, "That's where my success is."

Susana Morris: Ditto, I would say my friends are the loves of my life and I hope to be an older lady living like The Golden Girls or like Frankie and Gracie [laughter] getting into trouble at Shady Pines and sitting somewhere on a porch sipping some bourbon and reminiscing about all of the stuff we got into and still are getting into. That's how I live my life and these women allow me to live that out loud. I just love them so much.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I love that your bestie futuristic dream is sitting on the porch drinking bourbon. My bestie and I have for many years talked about what we call our tea drinking life, when eventually parenting and working and all the things will slow down enough that we can sit together on the porch and drink tea, but maybe we need to update to bourbon.

Susana Morris: Just add a little bourbon to it. Just a little dash.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I think so. I think so. I just want to say thank you to all three of you for joining us and for being part of The Takeaway and our book club and for for giving us this great book that we can now give to the young people in our lives this season.

Susana Morris: Thank you, Melissa.

Chanel Craft Tanner: Thank you so much.

Brittney Cooper: Thanks for having us.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: When the world met Marley Dias, she was 11-years-old. The voracious reader was irritated when her fifth grade curriculum. Was dominated by books about in her words, "White boys and their dogs." She talked to her mom about the issue.

Marley Dias: I told her and then she said, "What are you going to do about it?" We decided to start a campaign in which Black girls are the main characters of the book.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Marley and her mom, had extraordinary success with the 1000 Black Girl Books campaign, ultimately receiving and donating to school libraries more than 13,000 books, but Marley was just getting started. During President Obama's second term, Marley was regularly involved with the White House Council on Women and Girls.

In 2016, she spent part of her summer as editor-in-chief of her own zine at L Magazine. Marley Mag even scored interviews with the likes of Senator Hillary Clinton and Filmmaker Ava DuVernay. In 2018, Marley authored her own book, Marley Dias Gets It Done: And So Can You. This year she was named the 2021 Ambassador of the NEA Read Across America. She hosted and executive produced a Netflix series.

[music]

Marley Dias: Hi, it's me, Marley Dias. Welcome to Bookmarks: Celebrating Black Voices. I Love My Hair is a celebration of Black girl beauty and the power of natural hair. The book is written by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley, and illustrated by E. B. Lewis. I Love My Hair is going to be read to us by Tiffany Haddish.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, a high school senior, Marley spent the fall submitting college applications and in fact, just yesterday she got an acceptance letter from Yale. Congrats. It's basically a miracle she had time to chat with me here on The Takeaway.

Marley Dias: I appreciate any moment to talk to you and to get out of a little bit of school.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I wanted to know if Marley wrote about her love of books on her college applications.

Marley Dias: There wasn't a lot of direct questions that I selected that were about books, but I made sure to incorporate some of the authors. I wrote about Jacqueline Woodson and I also wrote about you and our experience at l.com. Even though there wasn't a lot of direct questions about literacy and what I preferred, I wrote about education access, public policy, and why I would use my education in public policy or political science and government to help the education system. It wasn't as direct as I hoped, but I was really excited to talk about it anyway. I knew I was going to make my way into the conversation when it comes to books.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's talk about Jacqueline Woodson for a moment. I know that her writing as well as her actual person has been important to you but I'm wondering if you could also just reflect on Jacqueline Woodson as an author more broadly, why she matters to all of us.

Marley Dias: I think that Jacqueline Woodson should matter to all of us because she is truly such a strong and persistent voice in advocating for kids' ability to live freely. She wants her books to show kids examples and act kindly towards others, are themselves, appreciate others, have empathy, put community service, and take time out of their day to be strong community members and agents of change.

She's also written over 30 books that tell these stories considering so many different narratives and experiences in the process. I feel like Jacqueline Woodson truly is spiritually and morally committed to helping children develop and grow to be the best person they can be and not necessarily regardless of race, but including all races, all genders, all sexualities, all abilities, and all financial statuses and any other thing that might distinguish you from someone else.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Last night I was sitting and listening as my second grader was reading aloud to the family from a book that they're reading in her class and it's Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It's great to hear her read and she's giggling along with it and she definitely enjoys the book. At the same time, your 11 or 12-year-old self was playing in my head and I'm so tired of white boys and their dogs. It's not to say we shouldn't read books about white boys and their dogs, but I'm wondering about your taste in books and how you've seen it develop over time maybe over the past five years from middle school through high school.

Marley Dias: Well, it's really been quite interesting and I love that question. What I've never been asked it before is that I've always been on an honors track or some gifted track in my public school. When you're in middle school, even though you feel like, I'm one of the smartest kids in the school, you're left with a lot of limited options about the kind of mature topics that you can address because racism in of itself is often seen as mature. We don't talk about racial identity in books until we get to about high school, which I feel is problematic because it limits kids understanding that they are experiencing race from the time they're born.

They're not able to address it until they address this issue and address just one part of your identity until you get to high school. As I've gotten to high school, I've read so many more books like The Bluest Eye and The Great Gatsby and The Things They Carried, and Death of a Salesman, some of which have white man characters and some of which don't. That address, "maturity of race" when we should be having these conversations in middle school, in an elementary school, which is what I've always argued.

It's been fun to finally have that unlocked in my public school system that I opened the gates from being a gifted student. I get good grades and now I can talk about these things, but what really concerns me is that I'm only a part of 8% of my school that is achieving at this level and that we need to unlock conversations about racial identity, financial inequity, classism in all classrooms regardless of academic performance.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Are books a way to do that?

Marley Dias: Books are, in my opinion, the only way to do that because it allows kids to explore and discover topics to their own interpretation. Sometimes when we see things in TV and movies, we are already being told what the directors and producers, and screenwriters would like us to see and it can be difficult to take an alternate interpretation of text or visual media. When you present kids with words, they can take every single last word and find an alternate way to perceive that information, to process it, and that each of us read very differently.

Although there may be other options, I'm speaking a little bit hyperbolically, I really believe that reading presents every kid with the opportunity to learn for themselves, to use their own curiosity, perspective, and imagination to grow. That we need to make sure that all sorts of topics are covered in books because it's the one place where you'll be able to really see what a kid understands, learns, and feels about a topic or issue.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Say a few more words about the Netflix series Bookmarks and how you've been using that platform to continue to expand this message of the critical, not just about literacy, but engagement with books and reading and ideas.

Marley Dias: Bookmarks has really been my opportunity to provide resources for caregivers and educators about the ways that we can incorporate reading into classrooms that isn't just sitting down or doing a storytime. We have a 12-episode animated series or partially animated series on Netflix that features Black celebrities reading books about Black experiences from Black authors to kids around the world. We have people like Lupita Nyong'o, Tiffany Haddish, myself, Marsai Martin, Karamo Brown. It's been a really fun experience to get to executive produce and select the books and help figure out who do we want to represent this part of our Black experiences.

It's also been super fun to have Bookmarks be free regardless of you have a Netflix subscription. You can watch Bookmarks on Netflix Junior on YouTube. It presents teachers with the opportunity to show this way that we want to educate kids on Black stories in a fun, lighthearted and exciting, and beautiful manner for free. That's something that Netflix hasn't done a lot.

I feel really proud to have been a part of an experience that focuses on education equity in making sure that teachers in all schools, whether they have subscriptions to the streaming service or do not, are able to show their kids, beautiful Black people that feel so much pride in their racial identity and overall identity, sharing these other and uplifting other Black stories in the process.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Remind us why Black stories are important, not only for Black students but beyond that for all of us.

Marley Dias: Black stories are important for all of us because we need to exist as a community. There is no one, there is no individual, and that we must, as Black people, affirm our own identities by reading stories that reflect what we can do, what we wish to do, imaginations that we've never seen ourselves in worlds we don't imagine we could achieve or exist in.

It's also important for people who are not Black to read Black stories so they can learn about the experiences of others, they can grow as empathetic people, as kind people, and they can dedicate themselves to an importance of learning, to being curious, to being interested in other people's identities and experiences. I know some people really aren't, but I believe that it's a critical way to be a good person, a kind person in this world, and to be a lifelong learner, which is very important to me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. For our last question, this is a holiday book club, and a lot of folks like me, aunties and cousins and maybe big or little sisters and brothers are looking to give books as a gift on this holiday season. Any books that you would suggest and maybe across a couple of different ages?

Marley Dias: The first book for picture book I'm going to suggest is All Around Us by Xelena Gonzalez. It's Selena With an X. This book really touched me a lot. It's about a young girl walking in her garden with her grandfather and talking about how the universe's circle, our experiences are circular, and how communities exist in a circle. The book has such beautiful illustrations by Adriana M Garcia. I got to interview Ms. Gonzalez for my NEA Read Across America campaign where I'm a celebrity ambassador and I get to talk to authors about the books that they love.

I realized that I love this book so much because my great-grandmother passed away when I was 10. It really, really hurt me a lot and to this day is a super emotional topic for me. As soon as I read this book, I realized how valuable it could have been for me at that time to actually see and hear a story about grief, about death that was accessible to younger kids that share these experiences and that allowed for them to actually have the words to express pain, to express tragedy.

The next book I'm going to recommend is Strong as Fire, Fierce as Flame by Supriya Kelkar. This book is so incredible. It's a story of a young South Asian girl overcoming a time of rebellion and oppression within her community. It's about girls, it's a young girl of color. Getting to interview her was incredible because she really had to be a historian to write that book. That she had to go back and look through library files that were unseen, hear stories that she had never heard about, even within her own culture and family. She put her most and best work into telling this story.

Then my final book would be Modern HERstory by Blair Imani. Blair Imani is a close peer of mine within activism and both literacy and education work. She's an incredible content creator on Instagram, Twitter, and all sorts of social media platforms. She's also an author. On Modern HERstory, I am featured on the back cover. It's really really cute, but it tells the story of several young women and non-binary people that have created change in the world. It highlights a lot of the stories that you might not hear about in school, which is still an inherent frustration to me that we wouldn't hear about these stories in school. It's really valuable to have a book like that as a coffee table book as something that other people would see.

Then for adults, I would recommend Parent Like It Matters by my mom, Dr. Janice Johnson Dias. She is a queen. That book really provides a guide for how parents that might hear my story or feel inspired by what I've been able to do at 16 can uplift the girls in their lives to be change-makers to engage in their community, and to, not necessarily fight back, but to build communities that fight against oppression.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Thank you, Marley Dias. Shout out to her mom, Janice Johnson Dias, who she name-checked at the end.

[music].

This next conversation is with one of my very favorite living authors.

Ann Patchett: This is Ann Patchett, the author of These Precious Days, and the co-owner of Parnas Books in Nashville, Tennessee.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The author of seven novels, all of which have a home on my personal bookshelves. Patchett's latest offering is a collection of essays on themes of family, home, writing, and friendship. In the book, she reveals that this collection of essays was necessary to write because it's all key scaffolding for an essay of such profound and lasting significance to her that she said she must write a full book to put it in. That's where we begin. When I asked her about the title essay of the book, These Precious Days, and just why it's so important to her.

Ann Patchett: It's a story about my friend, Suki Raphael, who came to live with us at the very beginning of the pandemic. She was Tom Hanks' assistant. I had met her very briefly about three years ago. We had stayed lightly in touch over email. She had pancreatic cancer. She had a Whipple, she had chemo and radiation. She was pronounced cancer free. The cancer came back. She was looking for a clinical trial to get into in a hurry.

My husband Carl, is a doctor here in Nashville where we live. He got her into a trial here. She was going to come out for 10 days, and then the trial was going to start at UCLA where she lived out in Los Angeles. She came out here, and then the pandemic hit and UCLA closed down the trial, so many trials were closed. The flights were canceled, and she couldn't really travel anyway because she was so immunocompromised and she ended up staying with us. We had very very precious days, a really amazingly beautiful time.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Hearing you tell it in such a compressed summary is fascinating. Even the language, my friend, Suki, because part of what this essay and perhaps this entire collection of essays tells us is maybe our presumptions about intimacy are often exactly that, presumptions. What we think we know and who we think we know, we may not know, and in quite the ways and that intimacy might look quite different than we expect from sentimental movies or something.

Ann Patchett: I think that that's very true. Certainly in this book, there are stories about old friends of mine. There's a lot in here about my childhood best friend, Tavia, college friends, friends from all different parts of my life. My friendship with Suki was really incredible. What I realized is that when you make friends, when you're a kid, you have an enormous amount of time to waste with someone.

When you make friends as an adult, you can make very close friendships, but you don't have that same just endless amount of time to waste. I think about going to my freshman college dorm room and looking at this tiny space with two beds, and then there's another person, and thinking, we're going to sleep in the same room together. We are total strangers and then you become good friends. That's what it was like with Suki. We had breakfast and lunch and dinner together. We took all our walks together. We did everything together because we had so much time to waste.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You actually made me yearn for aspects of the pandemic, which of course makes me feel terribly guilty having both lost loved ones myself, and of course, knowing how many people we've lost as a nation and as a world, and yet it did give us that gift of time. When you write about the writers I know were kind of made for quarantine. I was like, oh, yes, I was all good with that part. Leave me alone in my house, please, for months. [laughs]

Ann Patchett: It's very hard to find the right language to talk about the pandemic because you're right, it was horrible and it's devastating, but it also forced everyone to get off the hamster wheel and to just stop running all the time in the exact same circle. I think also everyone was thinking about death. They were thinking about the people they had lost, the numbers on the nightly news, the fear of our own death. Part of that is, of course, just devastating, it's horrible.

Also, when you live in the presence of death, it gives you the opportunity to see how beautiful life is and to really appreciate it and to think if there is not limitless time, and guess what, there never is, I want to open my eyes and really see the world. That's what Suki and I had.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Death is another through line. There's an intimacy through line, there's a friendship through line, but there's also death. In fact, you start with this fear of death. It's a very uniquely specific fear of death around being a novelist. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Ann Patchett: It is a very funny but very true thing. I have a lot of novelist friends who would say the same thing. When I am in the middle of a novel, I am carrying a world of people in my head. I know that if I step out into traffic and get hit by a car, I will take the whole world in my head with me. There aren't any notes. There's no one else who can finish it. I have spent so much time with these people that I do suddenly start to really worry about death every single time I've written a novel then as soon as the novel is finished that fear goes away.

It's such a strange thing. When I write non-fiction, I don't have the same experience. That's because non-fiction is true. If I died in the middle of writing about Suki, my husband, he wouldn't finish the essay, but at least he lived it. He would know. He would know that she was there. He would know what was happening. He would tell someone else that experience would live on; Not the case with a novel.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It was important insight for me. A million years ago when I started college, I thought I was going to be a fiction writer, and then I read Morrison and was like, "Oh, no, that I can't do that." [chuckles] I had a similar insight reading that from you. This sense of, "Oh, well, I've never been inhabited by characters like that." Except actually maybe when I'm reading, sometimes I do fear my demise as a reader because I just want to know, I want to keep hanging out with them. I wonder is that something cultivated? Is that a skill or is that just the constituents of nature of being a novelist?

Ann Patchett: I think it just happens. Plus novelists spend a whole lot of time alone worrying about things and thinking about things. I got to tell you, when you just said Morrison, I thought that is the way to explain it. You think about Tony Morrison walking around with Beloved and Setha and all of those people inside of her. If something had happened to her, all of those people would have gone with her.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Ann Patchett author of the new book, These Precious Days: Essays. Thank you for joining us today.

Ann Patchett: Thank you so much. What a pleasure this has been.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.