[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line. This is the prophetic analysis offered by W.E.B. DuBois in his 1903 text, Souls of Black Folk. It's an insight born of deep understanding of history and a keen social scientific lens trained on the conditions of the moment. These same tools of historical discernment and contemporary scrutiny leads scholar, poet, and philanthropic leader Elizabeth Alexander to identify the color line as the continuing problem of the 21st century.

Elizabeth Alexander: We will sanctify your names. We will hold up your names. That's what we do and that's history too.

Melissa: Born in Harlem, raised in DC, and educated in the Ivy League, Elizabeth Alexander hails from an extraordinarily accomplished family. Her mother was a professor of African-American studies. Her father was the first African-American secretary of the US Army. Her younger brother is a law school dean, who served as senior advisor to Barack Obama's first presidential campaign. On the cold January morning when Barack Obama was inaugurated as the nation's first Black president, Elizabeth Alexander marked the moment with a recitation of her original poem, Praise Song for the Day.

Elizabeth: In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,

anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Melissa: A heady moment of optimism for January 20th, 2009 also initiated an era that regularly reminded Black America that individual excellence and personal achievement are insufficient tools for transcending the vulnerabilities and degradation of racial inequality. Eight years of a Black president and first family, of Black attorneys general and cabinet secretaries jarringly set against the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates as he stood on his own front porch, the killing of Trayvon Martin as he walked home with Skittles and iced tea, the murder of Jordan Davis as he listened to music with his friends, the killing of Renisha McBride and Eric Garner and John Crawford and Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.

[music]

Melissa: A drumbeat of Black Death streamed directly to handheld devices. These were the years when Elizabeth Alexander was raising two Black sons. It's the souls of young Black folk who occupied the center of her latest book, The Trayvon Generation. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and we begin The Takeaway today with Elizabeth Alexander, author of The Trayvon Generation. She's also president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the nation's largest funder in the arts, culture, and humanities. As a poet, Alexander began with language.

Elizabeth: Well, I truly believe that language is the way that we exchange our humanity with each other. Language is the form we come in. Language is how we communicate. Language is how we offer our identities and souls to each other. When we have seen the debasement of language over the last few years, over the last several years from the highest seats in the land, the way that violent language misnames us, the way that violent language names people of color as being subhuman in a throwback to a way that we had hoped we had moved past, I think that what that means is that in that language is the idea that we are not seen and experienced and respected as human beings.

Melissa: It's worth noting because, at first, when I read that, I thought, "Oh, yes, the adverb is dead. I can't get young people who I'm working with to say the number of things rather than the amount of things." I'm always like, "No, it's only an amount if you can pour it into a vessel of some kind." That's not what you mean. You really are talking about the way that we talk to each other.

Elizabeth: I'm talking about the way that we talk to each other, the way that we are characterized, the way that racial stereotype is back, the way that language like, "Lock her up," puts ideas into people's heads that are violent, that language are acts of violence. I think there are very serious consequences to that, which is why I think two important things. Number one, invoking W.E.B. DuBois.

I believe that we are still contending with this problem of the color line, this unresolved question of race and racism in America. I think that I look for enlightenment and want to share with others, the very, very concentrated and righteous language and history-keeping language and clear-naming language of poetry, particularly of Black poets, to say to each other in fully human terms and language, "I see you. This is who you are. This is our history and we're not going to try to cloak it."

Melissa: I have been a little grumpy about the movement to remove Confederate monuments. I certainly understand it. I get it. I think maybe as a lifetime southerner, I have been less anxious about them and have preferred to talk about putting up more monuments rather than removal. I have to say, I think yours is the first articulation that I have found much more convincing about the need to remove the harm that is being done through monuments, through art, the kind of violence that we may not even realize is happening. Would you be willing to tell a bit about the story of the portrait at Yale?

Elizabeth: Yes. At Yale, as at many institutions, there are many portraits of the founder, Elihu Yale. He was someone who was an executive at the East India Company. He is someone who, like many wealthy white Americans at a certain point in time, made his wealth at the expense of others. We're glad that there is this fine university with all of its richness that are shared not enough but shared with many different kinds of students.

As you know, I taught there for 15 years. My students were of every economic background, every race all around the world. It is actually a very diverse student body. I'm happy for all of the things that those young people learned in African American studies. There is a portrait at that. As a department chair, I one day looked up in the corporation room, the main room of the university.

I saw that what I had never noticed and what no one had ever pointed out is that this portrait of Elihu Yale had with it a chained and shackled Black boy. Now, here, I'm talking about what I remember, a chained and shackled Black boy signifying wealth, signifying property, signifying his status in society. I thought, "How could I have sat here in all of these meetings and not noticed this chained Black boy, not been disturbed by it? Why was it still there? Why weren't we talking about it?"

As it turns out when I later researched this, it was another portrait of Elihu Yale with a brown chained servant that was there. The painting I remembered with the chained Black boy was on the walls of one of the dining halls where I ate as a student in the early 1980s. I had suppressed the violence of that image as well. Similarly, in Calhoun College dining hall, stained glass windows of slaves happily picking cotton in the fields were a part of the environment until very, very, very recently.

I talk about those examples in the book because they are familiar to me and because they illustrate an idea that the poet, Adrienne Su, calls the shock of delayed comprehension and as someone who-- Chinese immigrant family growing up in Georgia in the shadow of Stone Mountain. Stone Mountain is the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world, the largest Confederate monument anywhere.

Living in its shadow, living in a place built by the clan where the clan continued to meet regularly and seeing in modern times, this looming homage to the Confederacy, which, of course, is an homage to an idea of white supremacy. I don't think that every monument should come down, but I think we need to understand that when we live in this ambiance, it teaches us something. We need to acknowledge that. We need to acknowledge that most statues of the Confederacy were put up decades and decades and decades and decades after the Civil War was ended.

We need to acknowledge that there are Robert E. Lees in places where Robert E. Lee never set foot and that this is masquerading as history. It's masquerading as a story of the victorious lost cause. The fact that these were so often put up so long after the Civil War frequently when civil rights movements were making progress in various places is something that I think we need to understand, weaponizing these false ideas of glorifying our history, instead of telling the true story that these were not the victors in the Civil War and that they are disproportionately represented all around the country.

Melissa: Which brings us to remembrance, the things that we not only don't see but then the things that we either don't take the time to remember. You write about remembrance as literal and figurative, actually putting members back on remembering. It's the core theme of these essays. What is the work of remembering as you're writing it here?

Elizabeth: Well, I find and I'm moved by remembrance in so many different forms. Coming to it from a perspective of Black culture, I know, I have experienced, I have studied, I have taught, we know that so much of our history, our memories, our lives, our objects, our ephemera, our places were destroyed, were buried, were not kept dear, were under-resourced.

I have always looked to Black poets like Lucille Clifton, like Natasha Trethewey, like so many others, to tell us the stories of our history. I have always looked to our artists to tell us, if you think about Kerry James Marshall, and here, I'm naming artists whose work I'm so honored to have in the pages of this book, who puts angel wings on the everyday Black women in living rooms who are carefully tending the space that remember Malcolm and Martin and their own lost ones in the family.

That's why I write about a scene in New Haven, where I came across a large crowd of people stopping traffic outside of a church, remembering a young person in goldenrod-colored sweatsuits, hoodies with that child's face, that child who was killed too young, that Black boy's face on their bodies to say, "We remember you. We love you." This is what we do.

Breonna Taylor's amazing, amazing remembrance in Jennifer Packer's paintings, where she says she's not telling the story of how Breonna Taylor's life ended. She is identifying with the objects in Breonna Taylor's apartment and painting them, the sofa, the fan, the radio, the man having a nap on the couch. All of the tender ways that we say, "We were here. We are here. We love you. We will never forget you. We will sanctify your names. We will hold up your names," that's what we do and that's history too.

Melissa: You briefly mentioned the death of your late husband in this book, which is, of course, the subject of your heralded text, The Light of the World. How have you done the work of remembering him, not only for your sons but for the broader community because you've done some important remembering work?

Elizabeth: Oh, thank you for asking about that. My late husband now 10 years, which is amazing to think since he left this earth very unexpectedly, was a painter, an extraordinary painter from Eritrea. He painted and painted and painted and painted, came to the United States as a refugee, did many different jobs, worked in restaurants, owned a restaurant with his brothers, made a life through cheffing but always painted, and then in our years together, turned himself full-time to that painting.

He never wanted to take it out into the marketplace. He wanted to make work with a real ferocity that, looking at his unexpected passing, seems almost prescient. He would say, "Baby, I just need to make this work. I just need to keep making this work." I'm very proud that in the years since he's passed, I've done the work of sharing his paintings and that, now, the rest of the world is catching on so that his work is in museum collections and many people are seeing it. It's being exhibited.

In fact, with my sons, we're about to go to the Venice Biennale, where he will be a featured artist, which I think would have pleased him very much. He's of a generation of Eritreans where he's a discovered ancestor for a lot of younger folks who didn't know about his work and for whom that older generation, not many of them felt they had the liberty to become artists. I feel very proud and happy about how that is moving in the world. Of course, the most important remembrance of all as you know is how he continues to live in our sons.

Melissa: Let's talk about motherhood. I picked a passage I was hoping you would read from page 71.

Elizabeth: Yes, thank you for asking for that. Let's be clear about what motherhood is. A being comes on to this earth and you are charged with keeping it alive. It dies if you do not tend it. It is as simple as that. No matter how intellectual and multicolored motherhood becomes as children grow older, the part that says, "My purpose on earth is to keep you alive," has never totally dissipated. Magical thinking on all sides.

Melissa: How is this core definition of motherhood violated or constrained for Black mothers?

Elizabeth: Well, I hear it in my head almost every day, especially with watching my sons come into adulthood. My purpose on earth is to keep you alive. That never goes away even when they become adults under fortunate circumstances. What we know about the disproportionate violence that we suffer, that our children suffer about the disproportionate likelihood of being under the control of the criminal justice system, of the disproportionate likelihood of encountering police violence, that all of those things that take our children from us tragically and too early are something that, of course, are felt most deeply and eternally by the people who love them but are also felt by the rest of us who, in the spirit of the poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, claim all of our children as ours.

Gwendolyn Brooks always reminds us that there's no such thing as other people's children that, as a civilization, we have to think that way, that as many children as we can belong to us. What I'm concerned about and what I write about is the way that young people of what I call the "Trayvon generation," these young people who have grown up experiencing this violence on their phones repeated, the way that we see these images of young Black people and grown-up Black people shot down, tortured, murdered.

We can go no further than George Floyd just to take one example of the many we have, that the anxiety that that breeds, the fear that that breeds, how do we live with that and transcend that? Because we want our children to be powerful, joyful, strong, and free. How do we accomplish that while doing what we can to keep them safe and knowing that we cannot ever know that we keep them completely safe?

Melissa: You also write that you're worried about this generation, the Trayvon generation. You write, "I'm worried about this generation of young Black people and depression." Say a bit more about that.

Elizabeth: Well, I am worried from experience with the young people. I know this book is written to our children's generation and to the generations of my students and young people, who I have seen struggling with depression and who I look at the art that is coming out of this generation. I think about Kendrick Lamar and I think about Flying Lotus and video makers like Hiro Murai and Kahlil Joseph.

I think about all of the ways that artists-- I think about Jennifer Packer's work that artists are contending with and giving form to the depression, the fear, the anxiety. I look at television shows by some of the brilliant young Black creators out there. I think about Atlanta, I think about Insecure. The issue of illness and mental health are something that are dealt with explicitly.

Before they're dealt with explicitly, we see young people who are struggling to make a way, struggling to figure it out in a way that I think is not just your run-of-the-mill, young person out of college figuring out what the next job is, but rather something more existential about what, again, it means to be powerful and free and effective in a society where they are disproportionately at risk.

Melissa: Just to end, I want to talk a little bit about your philanthropic work as well and you write in the book, in fact, it's the last sentence before you come to acknowledgments, "There is no North Star without vigorous creativity to imagine it for us and mark where it lights the way." How is the work that you're doing at Mellon part of ensuring that we have these North Stars?

Elizabeth: Well, I feel very, very, very fortunate that I have the chance to do this work because my lifetime of experiencing and believing in the power of art, the power of creativity, the power of imagination, imagination as a superpower, the power of art to vision futures that are not necessarily clearly in front of us, the power of art to show us what we've been through and how we're feeling, the power in my scholarship and in my work as a professor of critical thinking, the power of the critical thinking that comes out of African-American studies that says that you can love a place and critique a place at the same time, that history exists in simultaneous threads, that multiple experiences can co-exist and we can know them all and not feel that one has to trump another.

Those incredible tools of critical thinking in African-American studies, I do think, are the thing that enables us to understand where we are in history and how we might move forward more powerfully into the future. Being able to fund that work and being able to fund that work beyond the academy and art museums always with the question of social justice and access, so to be the nation's largest funder in prison higher education.

Because if we believe that learning and reading and studying and critical thinking will help us imagine a better future and be more empowered, then it is imperative that people who are incarcerated be offered those tools so that they too can move forward in a positive way in their lives. It seems extraordinary to be able to be doing that work, to be able to fund something like Dwayne Betts' Freedom Reads that is putting 500 book libraries in every single prison in the country, in places where there are no libraries.

I think that is the work of possibility. I think it is the work of the future. It all comes back to believing in this superpower that creativity and knowledge and learning give us to move forward. I don't think there's one North Star, but I do think that all of those tools help us light the way and help us live our lives more meaningfully and in community.

Melissa: Elizabeth Alexander, author of The Trayvon Generation, thank you for joining us.

Elizabeth: Thank you so much for this rich conversation, Melissa.

[music]

Copyright © 2022 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.