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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, and with us now is the poet, author, and president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Elizabeth Alexander. She has a deep and heartbreaking essay in The New Yorker called The Trayvon Generation about her own 20 and 22-year-old sons, and really all Black Americans around 25 years old or younger, growing up with so many videos of Black people being killed, and the effects on mental health among other things, but the essay is teeming with a mother's love, and a love for dance, and community artistic expression, and does also contain hope. This is essential reading on so many levels, in my opinion, if you can take some time from everything else.

It's also beautifully, beautifully written, as we would expect from Elizabeth Alexander. Her memoir The Light of the World was a Pulitzer Prize finalist when it came out in 2016. The Mellon Foundation of which she is president, makes grants in the arts and humanities, and has just announced this morning, a new focus on social justice, and a new program to place 500,000 books in prisons and juvenile facilities across the US. We'll get to that too. Ms. Alexander, an honor to have you today welcome to WNYC.

Elizabeth Alexander: Oh, it is an honor to be in conversation with you. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Brian Lehrer: Can I start with the part of the essay that's about you as a mother? You write, "I believed I could keep my sons alive by loving them," and you wrote, "My love was both rational and fantastical." Can you start wherever you want, and talk about the mix of feelings and limitations you were getting at about being a mother to sons in the Trayvon Generation?

Elizabeth Alexander: Yes. I say in that essay, and I had never stated it to myself so plainly, but there's that way that writing sometimes gets you to the things that you believe most dearly, that when you have a child, when you're responsible for a child, your fundamental job is to keep that living being alive. What I think we are facing is that all of the love, all of the care, all of the attention, all of the sheltering, all of the things that we do as parents sometimes still cannot protect our children from the targeted racial violence and hatred that corrodes our country.

What is particular to this generation of young people, the generation of my sons, is that they have watched these murders. They have watched these attacks over and over and over again on their cell phones. They have had to be witness to their own representative murder and violation. As a parent, how do we think about that? How do we think about what counters that? How do I think about my own experience in raising my children as being representative? Because I think that for all of us, whatever happens inside of our nuclear families has to connect us to widening circles of human beings.

We have to be responsible, I believe, not just for the children who are "ours", I'm putting that in quotation marks, but also all of the children within reach of our circles, and beyond that, and there, I'm talking about the young people who we can actually touch, though, in my case, that's young people in the neighborhood, children of friends. I was a professor from decades to all of those young people. How do we think of ourselves as adults as being responsible to a generation of young people and understanding that they are dealing with something in a particular way that we haven't quite had to deal with?

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, are you in the Trayvon Generation of Black Americans, or like Elizabeth Alexander, are you a parent of someone, or more than one someone in the Trayvon Generation? Do you think this generation is more traumatized than the last, as she writes that it appears that they are? What role do videos of police and other killings play? What role do dance and other art forms play? That's in the article too, in giving voice to the experience of the Trayvon Generation within the context of community, how does this relate to the Black Lives Matter movement, and what's happening in the streets of America this month?

646-435-7280, 646-435-7280 for Elizabeth Alexander, her article in the New Yorker, The Trayvon Generation. Dr. Alexander, you wrote that you worry about this generation of young Black people and depression, and for you as an artist and a watcher of the arts, you see it reflected in TV shows like Atlanta and Insecure. I'll just cite a little bit of what you write about that, about some of the young characters in Atlanta and Insecure, you wrote that, "You ask every young person who will listen, don't you think they're about low-grade undiagnosed depression and not Black hipster ennui?" What's the distinction you're making there between depression and ennui?

Elizabeth Alexander: Well, I think that with-- and I do think also that the arts tell us what time it is. That's the subterranean notes from the underground that let us know more profoundly what is going on in culture. I think looking at Atlanta and Insecure in particular, when Insecure came out, it was talked about as a Black hipster version of Lena Dunham's Girls.

Atlanta was also described in similar terms, these young, stylish, interesting-talking young people figuring out their lives, but I felt a very particular social sadness in these characters, in the things that were unexplained. The character of Earn, for example, and he is the lead character, and the character who's the doppelgänger of the creator of the show. There's never given an explanation for why he's underemployed, what his ill-defined relationship is with the mother of his child. We hear that he dropped out of Princeton, but we're never given that story.

In Insecure, what I think is fascinating is that Issa Rae-- I love these shows and I think these creators are quite brilliant. I would wonder similarly, they keep blowing up their lives, not achieving themselves fully. I sound a little bit like the mom who says, "Why don't you have a better job?" That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, what is the sorrow that gets in the way? Indeed, in this season of Insecure, they are dealing with mental illness on the surface in several characters, we see one character with postpartum depression, another one who turns out he disappears. We don't know why, he's dealing with bipolar disorder. There's quite a bit of surfacing of that issue.

I think that in the fiction of those shows, it corresponds with Gwendolyn Brooks' great phrase, gobbling mother eye, which I think that with very bright young people who can make you laugh and dance and are clever and have read interesting things, I'm always listening underneath that because I think, how can it not take its toll to see beautiful young Elijah McClain playing the violin for cats, to hear his language saying, "I'm an introvert," describing himself in that hyper-articulate way that we sometimes see in this generation.

It still got him murdered because somebody thought calling the police because he looked "suspicious" was a good idea.

Our children, why do they have to have all of this in their heads when what we should be wanting from them is the power and brilliance and light and intelligence to get us the hell out of this mess our society is in right now? They need space and support to do the generational work that we need them to do. I think that, at a very minimum, the power and insistence with so many young people are leading the protest is something that I follow.

Brian Lehrer: Angelique in West Babylon, you're on WNYC with Elizabeth Alexander. Hi, Angelique.

Angelique: Hi, Brian. I'm such a huge fan, and I live in Oakland now, but I'm staying with my sister in West Babylon, and I have a community group that is from actually a piano bar in Oakland. We've stayed together throughout COVID-19. Besides performing for each other, we started talking about race, and about all the things that are happening. On one of the first meetings, we talked about how there's a woman who came to our group, and she was very hurt because one of her friends said on social media that the first killing that's really affected her, and this is a middle-aged white woman who said this, that the first killing that's really affected her is George Floyd. She was just like, "I could ramble on a list of names. This is not the first."

The fact that this was the first that hurt you. I said, as somebody who's a young person, who's younger than the average age of the group that I hang out with, the first one that really tore me up with Trayvon Martin. I remember crying for weeks over that. I remember talking with my ex-boyfriend, who was white at the time, and saying, "How could he have been killed over a packet of Skittles?" He was just like, "Well, you don't know what he was doing before that," and just making excuses as to why it was justifiable. It's always stuck with me, that one. It's that first heartbreak that really sticks, so I always think of Trayvon Martin.

Brian Lehrer: Elizabeth Alexander, you want to talk to Angelique from Oakland?

Elizabeth Alexander: Yes, I do. Hi, Angelique. I'm glad to hear a couple of things in what you're saying. One is the historicizing the heartbreak. In earlier generations, it might have been seeing Emmett Till's murder, or it might have been the Rodney King beating, but I do think we have these kind of signal, as you put it, heartbreak moments that generationally define us.

What I think is so important when people say that their understanding begins with George Floyd is that we understand that this public violation of Black people, rooted in race-based hatred, and the understanding that Black people-- or trying to put forth the understanding, are not fully human, of course, goes back hundreds of years to our arrival on these shores, in the context of the slave trade, and then the segregation and lynching and violence that has followed, so George Floyd was just an inflection point.

I think you talk about meeting in a piano bar and playing music for each other. One of the things I try to get to in the article that I think is so beautiful and important is that I do think in making community and sharing culture-- I talk about dancing. What does it mean when you have bodily vulnerability? By the way, I have sons, and I'm talking about some cases that are of young Black men being murdered, but of course, I'm talking about all Black young people.

What does it mean when you have that vulnerability in society to nonetheless be fully sovereign in your body, to find joy in your body, to find joy in your community, and to share the joy that goes across time and space of coming together with music and dance? It doesn't make the horrors go away, but I see that as an insistence, a refusal to let a collective life force be extinguished.

Angelique: Yes. I'm also a public-school teacher in Oakland. I work at an [unintelligible 00:13:53]. I've radically changed my teaching over the summer to include stating every day that the reason-- because I teach mostly Black and Latino children, and I'm a light-skinned person of color, I always tell them every day, the reason that we're learning this mathematical language is so that way we can gain power, so that way our voices are heard, that way, we get seats at the table. I try to share that with my kids.

Brian Lehrer: Angelique, thank you so much.

Elizabeth Alexander: Beautiful.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue with Elizabeth Alexander in a minute.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, with Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and author of an incredible essay in the New Yorker called the Trayvon Generation, which references herself as a mother to 20 and 22-year old sons, and so much more, globally, politically, emotionally, psychologically, artistically. You have to read it. I think Jennifer in Bed-Stuy did. Jennifer, you're on NYC with Elizabeth Alexander. Hi.

Jennifer: Hi. Brian, I'm a huge fan, long-time listener, first-time caller.

Brian Lehrer: Glad you are.

Jennifer: Elizabeth, I read your article the other night, and I was just blown away. It's poetry. I sent it to my husband right away. I have a 13-year-old stepson. I'm white, and he is mixed race. He's half Black, half Japanese. I'm just so profoundly scared for the world he's growing up in, so, reading your article, it was just putting into words so much of what I feel, and things I didn't even knew I feel, so I just wanted to thank you for that.

I also completely just want to agree with you in the sense that there's so much hope in this generation as well. He is attending climate marches. We talk about race all the time. We talk about what's going on in the world. It does strike me as a generation that's so much more aware, maybe, I don't know if that's a New York City thing, but just so much more aware of the world they're growing up in.

Brian Lehrer: Dr. Alexander?

Elizabeth Alexander: Thank you. Thank you for those comments. I think that one of the things that is so challenging as a parent even outside these mortal issues of race and vulnerability is how do we teach them to be careful, aware, smart, cautious, where appropriate, at the same time that we don't want them to be governed by fear? Because I think that for our children to be governed by fear takes away their might and their bodaciousness, and their willingness to push boundaries and think of solutions that we haven't before. We can't have our children moving tentatively through life.

We can't allow the fear to domesticate our mighty children. I hear you speaking to that balance, and it's wonderful to hear about the awareness, and the marching, and the climate understanding. I think that what we have the benefit of in this generation as parents is all of the knowledge and critical tools of African-American studies, gender studies, LGBTQ studies, all of those fields of knowledge have given us ways to think and teach within our families and our communities intersectionally, so that we know that history is multifaceted, that there are simultaneous and competing versions of history. That history is not a monolith. That communities are more powerful when they are varied and diverse and can sustain real debate and context.

Brian Lehrer: I'm going to jump in.

Elizabeth Alexander: It's nothing to be afraid of. Sorry.

Brian Lehrer: That's okay. I want to jump in only to give you the last minute of the show to put on your president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation hat, and talk about these two new initiatives that the foundation just announced this morning, a new focus on social justice, and your arts and humanities grant-making in general, and the new program to place half a million books in prisons and juvenile facilities across the US. Would you like to introduce that to our listeners in under a minute?

Elizabeth Alexander: Yes. Thank you for the opportunity. It is exhilarating to be leading the Mellon Foundation now because we just moved things in a direction where all of our grant-making will be coming through a social justice lens, which is to say, explicitly contributing to a more fair and just society. I'm especially thrilled about the million-book project. Dwayne Betts, the poet, is leading it at the Yale Law School Justice Collaboratory. It will put 500 book libraries into every medium and maximum-security men's facility, all women's facility, juvenile detention centers in every state, Washington DC and Puerto Rico. These are freedom books, freedom books that are designed to help people imagine empowered lives and I couldn't be more exhilarated.

Brian Lehrer: That has to be the last word. Everybody, read Elizabeth Alexander's transcendent New Yorker essay, The Trayvon Generation. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Elizabeth Alexander: Thank you so much for this wonderful, wonderful time here. Thank you.

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Brian Lehrer: When Democratic Representative Deb Holland of New Mexico was elected in 2018, she became one of the first two Native American Congresswomen. Today, on The Takeaway, She speaks out about Coronavirus response and more. The Takeaway this afternoon at 3:00 on 93.9 FM, WNYC.

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