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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. With us now, Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, the largest foundation funder of the arts and humanities in the United States. Dr. Alexander has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist for both poetry and biography. She has taught at Columbia and Yale. At the latter, she was both a poetry professor and chair of the African American studies department. In a way, it's that same intersection that brings her back today with her new book called The Trayvon Generation. Some of you may remember Dr. Alexander was on the show in 2020 when she wrote a New Yorker magazine essay by the same title, The Trayvon Generation.

It went on to win a National Magazine Award. Now there's a book-length version that is on one level about Black Americans who had grown up in the last 25 years and another about art in our time that helps to process and make progress from traumas that are both public and private. Like the killing of Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood vigilante who followed him for no good reason and then the justice system sided with the killer. The killing of Trayvon Martin was 10 years ago now, February 26th, 2012. We just passed the 10th anniversary. I guess it's enough time to define a generation. Dr. Alexander, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Elizabeth Alexander: Thank you, Brian. I'm always happy to be talking with you.

Brian Lehrer: To start with the basics, why the Trayvon generation? Generation is a big word to hang on one victim or one killing.

Elizabeth Alexander: Well, it is. Of course in the case of Trayvon Martin, there were unjust race-based murders of young Black people before and after, to count, too many to fully absorb. What I think was emblematic about Trayvon Martin's killing interesting because it was not filmed on a cell phone, like so many of the other emblematic murders of this era. You described it very well. This was a kid who was coming home from the store with candy in his pocket. He was hunted on the basis of the body he moved in. A young Black man's body wearing what came to be the iconic hoodie which was seen to be evidence of his being a threat.

To this generation of young people around the age that Trayvon Martin would be, they have grown up with a steady diet of not only hearing about these murders but also seeing them, videotaped, seeing them over and over and over on their cell phones, seeing them when they're out of the presence of adults who love them, who are able to process it with them. If you think about the litany of names and the spectacles we've seen. 12-year-old Tamir Rice playing in front of a gazebo in a park, we see that film of his being shot in brief, brief seconds.

Take it all the way up to the moment that occasioned the essay, and that is the murder of an adult George Floyd, but something that, again, we collectively witnessed. That was filmed by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier. Imagine being 17-years-old, you've gone on a run to the corner store with your cousin, and you come upon four police officers in the act of a murder of someone, and you have the presence of mind and the unimaginable courage to film it. Darnella Frazier is a part of this generation. I think we need to listen to them, understand them, think about the trauma that they have been through, and think about their joy, their freedom, and their empowerment.

Brian Lehrer: Did you think of calling it then the George Floyd generation? Would that be another way of saying the same thing or maybe even the Black Lives Matter generation, or would those be something different?

Elizabeth Alexander: I think those would be something different because again with Trayvon, and I think we call Trayvon Martin himself by his first name Trayvon. Again, the image of a kid walking back from the store is so quotidian, so familiar, so it could be me, it could be any one of us. I think that sometimes-- and the fact that justice was not done, as you pointed out, that we lived through the spectacle of yet another trial. The idea that someone who hunted a child could be free was something that really caused a collective trauma. I think back to Emmett Till, of course. How is it that something comes to emblematize a generation?

Well, it just does. I think that with Emmett Till though, we know that there were many young Black people who were murdered, who were lynched in the south as Emmett Till was in 1955. His mother made the choice to bring his body to Chicago to have an open-casket funeral, which as we know was attended by thousands and thousands and filmed, and that it was photographed his open casket in Jet magazine, which I would argue was the swiftest technology of the time for Black people, the way in which it was so ubiquitous in Black communities and people saw that picture. It came to stand in for what people knew was happening in a widespread fashion and to galvanize folks around doing something about it.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, let's try something here. We want to invite anyone to call in who considers yourself a member of the Trayvon generation. Roughly any Black listeners born in the last 25 years, I guess, but you can be a little older too. Not all our callers have to be Black, but if you consider yourself a member of the Trayvon generation, however you want to define that for yourself, call in and say what that means to you or how else you might define your generation. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Let's say, at least keep it to people in your 20s and 30s.

If you might identify with the label that Elizabeth Alexander puts on it, the Trayvon Generation, she talked about the hoodie. Those of you who may have started paying attention to the news sometime after 2012, this is the 10th anniversary, within these last few months of the killing of Trayvon Martin, it was his hoodie that became the symbol of, "I'm just wearing a hoodie and people are discriminating me against me because of it thinking I'm a potential criminal because of it." That came from Trayvon Martin.

You might even be a member of the Trayvon generation because of the way you wear your hoodie with some pride and not even know it. 212-433-WNYC, if this sounds like you, and because of the nature of the book, and we haven't even gotten to this part yet, maybe you also want to say what kinds of art help you process the world and help you move forward as best you can. That can be visual, music, literary, any kind of art. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. Dr. Alexander, let's get into that part. There's poetry in this book, there's visual art in this book, there are references to music and music videos in this book. There's the work of many other people than yourself in this book, even though you wrote the original essay that the book is based on. What are you trying to aggregate?

Elizabeth Alexander: Well, first, also, I love the invitation you just made to folks to come join the conversation, so thank you for that. This is a book that I wanted to be a larger conversation. There is a lot in it that I write that goes far beyond the essay. There are seven other chapters there. I have woven the visual arts throughout the book in conversation because I believe that words tell us some things and images tell us other things. I wanted to create a different kind of reading or consuming, that's a little hard, but encountering, let's say, experience so that you would read and then you would come upon a work of art that is not necessarily illustrative but is in conversation with what has just been written.

You could look at the book and pick through and just look at the art on one read. You could have another read where you looked at both at the same time and paused to look and think when you came to the art. I really feel that that kind of reading experience, which in some ways mirrors my teaching over the years, for many decades, taught African American literature, but in the larger context of African American culture. I think that the arts speak to each other and I think that if you have a historical timeline, a societal context, something from the visual arts, something from the written word, something from the performing arts, it gives you a much richer and fuller understanding of the problem at hand, the subject at hand, the community at hand.

Brian Lehrer: For example, and this is radio, so it's hard to talk about visual art, but I was struck by the cover. Is it Trayvon as a younger person, younger child than the age at which he was killed?

Elizabeth Alexander: The cover is the photograph, a great photograph, by Carrie Mae Weems called Blue Black Boy, and a child, a beautiful Black child, I would say he's about perhaps eight years old, is looking very directly out at you and he is washed with blue, with the color blue. The color blue is very important in the book as in Black culture, that way in which blue has a power, blue has protective power, blue has an affective power, but blue also references the blues as a mode in Black culture where we transform the pain and the suffering and the indignities and the inequities and turn it into something musical.

We take experiences of individual sorrow and turn them into something collective by bringing them back to the audience. The blues is a way of processing what it is to be Black and alchemizing it into art. That's, I think, what's important in this image as kind of the heralding image of the book as well. I feel this is a great work of art, and I feel that you can look at this boy for a long, long time, look at him to wonder what he's thinking, look at him to love him and want to care for him, look at him and think about how in his eyes that look out what he has seen. All of that is what I find in that remarkable image.

Brian Lehrer: I said it's hard to talk about visual art on the radio, apparently not for Elizabeth Alexander. Valerie in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Valerie, thank you for calling in.

Valerie: Hi, thank you for having me. I definitely want to talk about the way that the Trayvon Martin verdict impacted me as a child. I had thought that it's very obvious that this bad thing happened. I didn't think that it was such a big deal. I was just like, "Why is it being televised? We all know that this person is going to end up going to prison." Then when it didn't happen, it was my first gut-wrenching experience with just not trusting the justice system and also feeling very scared.

Because I was old enough to recognize what this means for me as a young Black child. It definitely impacted my relationships with everyone, I feel. It just impacted my life a lot. I do want to say that it made me have some sort of disdain for activism for a while because it was just a very hurtful experience, but then it also informed my activism once I got to an age where I was able to make more sense of this and able to recognize that I do have some power and I do have a voice, and whether or not the justice system wants to silence me, I can still cry out as much as I can. Yes, thank you for fostering this conversation. It really got me thinking about how that child did impact me.

Elizabeth Alexander: Natalie, how old are you?

Brian Lehrer: Valerie, but go ahead.

Elizabeth Alexander: Valerie, excuse me. Sorry.

Valerie: I'm 25. I'm turning 26 this year.

Elizabeth Alexander: That moment, and I realized there was more that was happening then as well. 2012, Trayvon Martin is killed, 23 George Zimmerman is acquitted, and right around that same time, Ryan Coogler's film Fruitvale Station comes out. I think that that's really important too. My two sons are just a little bit younger than you, but all of that was juxtaposed. Thinking about are they too young for me to take them to see Fruitvale Station, which also has police killing of a young Black man in it as we remember, and also something that was videotaped, and that was recreated in that extraordinary film.

What I think was so powerful about it is it gave you a day in the life, everything that happens in Oscar Grant's life on a particular day leading up to his murder. I think that seeing a young Black artmaker offer something that I would say is one of the important cultural products of the Trayvon generation, alongside the real-life injustice and range of feelings that you describe, is what I think is very interesting that I hope is coming together in the book.

Brian Lehrer: To close the loop, Valerie, is there any particular work of art in any genre, music, video, whatever, that you find yourself coming back to to help process the kinds of things you've been talking about in your call?

Valerie: Yes, all of Toni Morrison's work, and also Betye Saar's work. If we're talking visual artists, I love Betye Saar. Black Girl and Window is definitely something that I go back to time and time again for some solace and to just feel seen.

Elizabeth Alexander: Have you seen my book? That's the image that closes the book, Black Girl's Window.

Valerie: Are you serious?

Elizabeth Alexander: I'm serious. Why? That's one of my favorite images. I've actually used it before on the cover of a book of poems that I have. What I see in that image is, again, think about that blue, think about that power of cobalt that's in that image, and that she's looking out, and she's paired with the boy on the cover if you think about it. These young people are looking out at the world. What are they seeing? What are they thinking? What are they taking in? What are they getting ready to say to us? I want to look at these images and say, "What do you say?"

I love that you've mentioned Toni Morrison as well because one of the arguments of the book is that I am listening to and writing to the young people who I love so very, very much. I'm giving them an offering of history, critical thinking, art, culture, the things that I think have the superpowers to get us through, but I also say that I think there is no forward progress without intergenerational connection.

Valerie: Absolutely.

Elizabeth Alexander: If we only looked to the cultural production of people in their 20s and stopped listening to Tony Morrison, we would be impoverished, we wouldn't have everything that we needed in order to move forward. I'm thrilled to hear that those are things that move you.

Brian Lehrer: Valerie, thank you so much for your call. Please call us again.

Valerie: All right, thank you.

Brian Lehrer: I have a feeling you sold at least one book there, Dr. Alexander.

Elizabeth Alexander: No, actually, we need to send her a book is what we need to do. We need to give her the prize.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, we'd love to do that.

Elizabeth Alexander: Yes. Please find out how we can do that.

Brian Lehrer: Valerie, call us back. Valerie, if you're hearing me still because I know you hung up, call us back. We'll take your address on hold, and you're going to get a copy of The Trayvon Generation by Elizabeth Alexander. What a wonderful gesture, Dr. Alexander. I hope Valerie is still hearing to call us back at 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692.

Before we take another caller, listeners, if you're just joining us, my guest is Elizabeth Alexander, who in her day job is president of the Mellon Foundation, the largest funder of arts and humanities in the United States. She has written a book called The Treyvon Generation, which is writing by herself and others, examples of visual art, some of which she was just describing, references to music and music videos, and other things like that. I know, Dr. Alexander, that you've agreed to read a poem for us that you include in the book. Would you set this up for us and do that reading?

Elizabeth Alexander: Yes. We talked about the visual art that's in the book and part of the conversation and also there are poems by some of our greats: Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks, Natasha Trethewey, Clint Smith, June Jordan. These are works that I feel are part of the way that I want to illuminate and move us forward and offer full texts for people to be able to contemplate alongside my own. Lucille Clifton appears several times in the book. All I can say is she is our seer, she is our piffy philosopher who understands and can portray in very, very few words the complexities of a world that doesn't always cherish us, but nonetheless in which we need to find our life force.

This poem is called won't you celebrate with me by Lucille Clifton. Won't you celebrate with me what I have shaped into a kind of life? I had no model, born in Babylon, both non-white and woman. What did I see to be except myself? I made it up here on this bridge between star shine and clay. My one hand holding tight my other hand. Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed. Lucille Clifton, I think that as we think about violence and trauma and the unresolved question and problem of race and racism in this country that I dearly wished would not be the inheritance for our children but it is.

Even as we talk about what are the traumatic after-effects of watching people murdered, about the refrains that we hold in our heads, "I can't breathe," and a dying George Floyd calling out for his mother, this is traumatizing knowing that people see you as dangerous instead of seeing you as a friend. As we think about all that, how do we also look to the way that we found joy and freedom, that ongoing quest to feel like a free person with agency and positivity in the world?

Brian Lehrer: Shawn in Pawling, New York, up 684, you're on WNYC. Hi, Shawn.

Shawn: Hi, thank you for taking my call. I was just pulling into my driveway and heard you discussing Tamir Rice in this conversation. That's what caused me to call. I'm a 52-year-old white man, and when I saw what happened to Tamir Rice, it broke my heart because I learned, in that moment, as I was watching, in an experiential way, just how differently the police view a 12-year-old Black boy from a 12-year-old white boy. I know that because when I was a 12-year-old white boy, I did what Tamir Rice did, the same exact BB gun with the little orange thing on the end to show that it wasn't a real gun, except that I had taken the orange thing off because I wanted it to look real.

Myself and a friend-- What I did actually was worse than what Tamir Rice did by far because what we were doing, we were in a shopping center parking lot and we were getting thrills from pointing this very real looking gun at people across the parking lot to scare the hell out of them and then have a good laugh over how scared they got. It is a terrible thing to do. I'm certainly not proud of it, but I was a bit of a juvenile delinquent when I was younger, sad to say. What happened, in my case, is that the police were called, but a plainclothes police officer showed up. He never pulled his gun. He slowly walked over to us while the gun was in our pocket. I knew he was a cop as soon as he got close because I saw the shoes, and then he took out his badge-

Brian Lehrer: The shoes.

Shawn: The shoes gave him away. He took out his badge and then-- I don't remember exactly what was said, but basically, it was a conversation and he had confiscated the gun. In the end, not only were there no charges filed, but he arranged for a patrol car to bring us home and drop us off. At which point I lied and said that-- I didn't lie at the time. My mother wasn't home, but they dropped us off and dropped me off at home, let me go with the promise that my mother would speak to the police later, and I had my older sister call and pretend to be my mother and say things like, "Oh, yes, he's grounded," and this and that.

There were no repercussions whatsoever. When I saw Tamir Rice do the same action, but pointing a gun at nobody, he was in a park by himself. There was nobody at the other end of where he was pointing it, and the police rolled up and shot him. I don't think that the cop even got out of the car before he shot him.

Brian Lehrer: You've spent the last 40 years of your life reflecting on your white privilege after that, huh?

Shawn: No, because what happened to Tamir Rice was recently and [crosstalk] I was 12, I'm 52 now. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Sure, but at least after that.

Shawn: Yes. It's important to say too I think that I don't believe that the police should be portrayed as villains. There's definitely a need for police reform. These issues are 100% real. We certainly need to address it. For me, any doubts, and I don't think I had many doubts by the time Tamir Rice was killed, honestly, but any doubts that I may have had about how differently Black people, not just boys, but the girls, too, are viewed by the police would be erased in that moment because I know that I did exactly what he did and didn't even get a slap on the wrist.

Brian Lehrer: Shawn, it's such a powerful story. Thank you very much for sharing it. Dr. Alexander, briefly to him because I want to go on to the next caller.

Elizabeth Alexander: Yes, I know. What I wanted to say is that the poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, reminds us that, and she wants us to live in a way that we don't think of other people's children, that no one is other people's children, that we are all responsible for loving and having responsibility for as many children as we can. That doesn't necessarily mean that they all come live in our homes. What that means is every child could be your child. We have to operate that way in this society, this othering that is going on where a playful child can lose his life. What you're describing is something that I want everybody to understand to account for our own histories and our own privilege and to think of every child as belonging to all of us.

Brian Lehrer: Shawn, again, thanks for your call. Dr. Alexander, I'm going to try to call an audible here. Do you happen to be free until the top of the hour because this is such a great conversation?

Elizabeth Alexander: Absolutely. I'd be happy to. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Some more really great callers waiting in line. That's great. We're going to continue with Elizabeth Alexander and more of your calls. [unintelligible 00:28:05] in Harlem, you are up next. Her book, The Trayvon Generation, right after this.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Elizabeth Alexander, author now of The Trayvon Generation. [unintelligible 00:28:29] in Harlem, you're on WNYC. Hi, [unintelligible 00:28:31].

Female Speaker 1: Hi, Brian, thank you so much. I'm so excited because I read The New Yorker article and so to get to meet you and to learn more about you on air live is just so amazing, Dr. Alexander. In terms of Trayvon Martin, one thing that I think a lot of people don't know is that it was orchestrated. I spoke to Michael Skolnik, who at the time was the editor of Global Grind, which was the publication put out by Def Jam. Michael Skolnik literally reached out to a lot of Def Jam artists, LL Cool J, Ludicrous, a lot of these artists to utilize Twitter to make Trayvon trend.

It's not an accident that because if there was no video, well, why is it that he would trend? It was because it was one of the times where it literally, like you were saying about the power of the art, that literally artists said, "No, this is enough. Let us have a much broader, larger, robust conversation about racial injustice in America," at that time, 2012. I also want to talk about Ramarley Graham that was killed three weeks before Trayvon Martin. To this day when I do diversity training, when I have events-- Brian, you know I do my comedy humor [unintelligible 00:29:50] called Black Issues Issues. When I talk about Ramarley Graham, blank faces.

They don't know who he is. He was killed by plainclothes police officers in 2012 who followed him off the street into his apartment, up the stairs, and killed him in front of his grandmother and his six-year-old cousin in the bathtub. There were no bloody bathtub protests. There were hoodies and Skittles protest. The conversation about what I talk about is a valve. To what degree are we given permission to or to not talk about these issues? I was a blogger at the time for Huffington Post, and every other blog I posted published, no problem.

When I posted one, it's bigger than Trayvon, and I talked specifically about Ramarley Graham, and I said that melanin is like a magnet attracting bullet, sometimes 41, shout out to Amadou Diallo, into the bodies of unarmed Black people. For some reason, Huffington Post was like, "No, can't publish it." It came to 2020 George Floyd for there to be this torrent. I had never seen so many Black people talking on MSNBC before that. Rachel Maddow, never. The New Yorker is pretty good, but it seemed like at that time, oh, well, now Black lives and Black issues are on the cover of Time Magazine.

What I want to talk about is the notion of the media, how the media also control the narrative as if the injustice isn't happening. I learned this term yesterday called race lighting. The way in which you downplay, mitigate, marginalized Black issues. And all of us who consume the media need to have a certain level of critical media analysis and literacy to see that, to wonder and to question, well, this is what's being said, but what is not being said?

What is the undercurrent of why certain issues get amplified and certain issues don't even make it on air? In terms of artists that I want to shout out would be Titus Kaphar. I adore him. I think he's absolutely genius in terms of the way that he depicts our founding fathers, who are also slave owners, the way that he turns the head on power and privilege and shows you, like I said before, the other story what we don't know that we don't know or don't have the courage to ask, because we really still don't want to know or tell these stories about what America has done and continues to do, because there's way more injustice happening right now as we speak than we'll ever make it on air. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much. Dr. Alexander, anything you want to say in response to [unintelligible 00:32:33]? Oh, do we still have Dr. Alexander? Did we lose her line?

Elizabeth Alexander: I'm here.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, there you go. We lost your audio for a second.

Elizabeth Alexander: Sorry.

Brian Lehrer: We have you back.

Elizabeth Alexander: Yes, I'm so glad that you mentioned Michael Skolnik, I admire him very much, and his incredible organizing and the way in which sometimes something can become an emblem in the same way that I was speaking about Emmett Till. We know that there were many other such murders, but in that case, it was the act of his mother. I think too about the parents and loved ones and so often mothers of the so many children who are murdered and what they sacrifice when they keep a memory alive. I think that, again, to the visual arts, I want to emphasize the ways in which sometimes non-literally, there are so many artists who are helping us to feel, to empathize, not in a way of saying, "Oh, I feel so sorry this happened, but empath, to feel along with, to really recognize the humanity in each other.

We can work with the tools that we have. The tools that I have where I think superpowers are to be found are art, and culture, and also, critical thinking. I do what I can. I look at something like Jennifer Parker's extraordinary painting that's included in the book it's called Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!). It's on exhibit right now at the Whitney Museum and her gorgeous, gorgeous painting exhibit. Breonna Taylor was another one where we don't have-- It's horrible to think, not that we would want it videotaped or taped images of that horror, but we did see pictures of her apartment afterwards.

Jennifer Parker, when she made this painting, she said, "In Breonna Taylor's apartment, I saw familiar objects: an iron, a certain kind of lamp, a certain kind of sofa. That was how I understood that she was a young Black woman just like me, and so my point of entry was through those objects in her home." In this book, I talk, for example, about WEB Du Bois at the turn of the century getting a letter from a white researcher who says, "Does the Negro shed tears?" He's asking Du Bois, "Seriously, do Black people cry? Are Black people capable of feeling? Are Black people human beings?"

He's asking this. In some ways I feel like we're living with variations on that question today. All I know how to do is say we are human and we are human through our art and through our history.

Brian Lehrer: Dwayne in Utah, you're on WNYC with Elizabeth Alexander. Hi, Dwayne.

Dwayne: Hi, good morning. I just had a question for Dr. Alexander. Well, not a question, but just I was wondering how she felt about my comment. I'm going to ask, there is a lot of Black-on-Black crime. What do you think that the solution is? I think we focus on police brutality, and, yes, there is police brutality, but to me there's more Black-on-Black crime than police killing. I just wanted to get your point of view and see what you thought about that. I'll take my question off there.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for your call.

Elizabeth Alexander: I think one of the important things to understand about race-based police brutality and murder is that these are people who our tax dollars pay to serve and to protect. I think that when we analyze how power works in our society, it's very, very, very important for us in analyzing any situation to say who has what power in that situation and how has it been abused? What is your gender? What is your race? What is your job? Are you armed? How are you able to exert control over the situation? Do you come into the situation in a position that has a great deal of societal authority?

I can't pull you over on the side of the road. I can't make anybody stop in the street. I think that we have to have a power analysis when we think about unjust violence, and that's just what I would leave you with to think further about the questions that you raise.

Brian Lehrer: Wilson in Bushwick, you're on WNYC with Elizabeth Alexander. Hi, Wilson.

Wilson: Hi, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. Hi, Dr. Alexander. I don't know if you remember me, but I'm Bakar Wilson. [crosstalk]

Elizabeth Alexander: Hi. I do, of course. Hello, poet. How are you poet?

Wilson: I'm well. Thank you. I'm doing well during these harsh times. It's so great to hear your voice. How are you doing?

Elizabeth Alexander: Very well. Thank you. Happy to be talking to you.

Brian Lehrer: You were a student of Dr. Alexander, is that right?

Wilson: Yes, I studied at Cave Canem. I was a fellow there for a week. I guess it was in [unintelligible 00:38:32] New York that year, I believe.

Elizabeth Alexander: That's right. The Cave Canem poetry workshop, an amazing, amazing community founded by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady, one that I've been proud to be a part of since the beginning. It is a retreat for Black poets where the whole world happens in a week. It binds us together forever.

Wilson: It really does.

Elizabeth Alexander: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: What do you want to say, Wilson, about yourself as a member of the Trayvon generation or your relationship to art within that?

Wilson: Well, I'm older than the Trayvon generation, but I do show the documentary 13TH to my students. I'm a professor for [unintelligible 00:39:16] now. If I do a unit on race, and I always show that documentary.

Brian Lehrer: That's the 13th Amendment?

Wilson: Yes. Ava DuVernay directed. The part with Trayvon always makes me cry, even though I've seen it several times. I was just wondering what is your perspective on that documentary, but also [unintelligible 00:39:56]

Elizabeth Alexander: We've lost you. Hello.

Brian Lehrer: Wait, are you not able to hear Wilson? Can you hear me, Dr. Alexander?

Elizabeth Alexander: Hi. I lost-- I don't know if I can be heard, but I can't hear anybody.

Brian Lehrer: Well, we'll try to rectify that. If you can hear us again, Wilson was asking your thoughts on the documentary, the Ava DuVernay documentary, the 13TH. The part about Trayvon Martin within that, he said always makes him cry. Do we have you back?

Elizabeth Alexander: I'm here. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, go ahead. We are going to run out of time soon so what do you want to say to Wilson?

Elizabeth Alexander: I would talk about that extraordinary documentary 13TH in the entire body of Ava DuVernay's amazing, amazing work. I think of it next to When They See Us, which is the movie that she made about the so-called Central Park Five, the Central Park exonerated. I think that she is an absolute master of using compelling documentary storytelling in a way that is accessible and unstinting to tell us the history. We have to be reminded of history. We have to be taught and retaught history over and over again. If I could wave one of my many magic wands that I wish for, it would be for the study of history for true history, real history, non-- What's the word I'm looking for? Non-propagandistic history, but history itself, to understand where we are in time, to understand where we've come from, to understand our founding documents, to understand what it means to arrive at a January 6th, and what that means about the history of the United States- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: In our last 30 seconds, does that help us toward a positive future?

Elizabeth Alexander: I think it does because I think, without historical understanding, we are really, really bereft of the ability to analyze our way forward. Without historical understanding, we might think that things are just happening to you and you and you and you, rather than things happening in historical movement. I would just finish to say that, I think it's the art and the culture that have the power to give us light and show us the way and show us each other's humanity.

Brian Lehrer: Elizabeth Alexander's new book is The Trayvon Generation. Thank you for another wonderful visit to the Brian Lehrer show.

Elizabeth Alexander: It is always wonderful. Thank you so much, Brian.

 

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