Futureface: Alex Wagner and Ta-Nehisi Coates discuss racial identity

Alex you have a grandmother and a mother who came to this country from Burma yeah and a father who has ancestry in Luxembourg but not in Lichtenstein right Lichtenstein is another small tiny country that nobody can place on a map but it's Luxembourg yeah Luxembourg can you talk about how and these are like you know the dominant poles of Judea is she described in the book he talked about how you saw yourself as a young person as a child yeah so I grew up as you mentioned the only child of a Burmese immigrant and a white American father and I never thought I didn't have a racial identity that I could speak of when I was little I just kind of thought of myself as generically American I watched Murder She Wrote and I liked Garfield and I ain't Chips Ahoy and like that was my life right and then when I was 12 I was at this diner with my dad my dad went up and but used the restroom and the line cook turned and looked at me and he said are you adopted and it was the first time in my life that I realized the way I thought of myself was not how everybody else saw me and that I thought I was generically American and of course I was the daughter of this white guy because he was my father and that's all I had ever conceived over I was 12 and and I realized that for some people I was not generically American there was no way I could be the natural-born daughter of a white American and somehow I was an outsider I had to have come from some other place and then when I was in high school Time magazine in 1993 had this cover showcasing a picture of the future face of America and it was this racially composite image of this kind of vaguely brown person this woman and I thought that's me I am the future face it's where the book title comes from and I thought that's my identity I am an avatar from the future sent to show America what you will look like in 20 years hence right and so like for my league she's almost right now which is almost right now turns out I was wrong I am NOT the face of America it looks still pretty white and and I sort of wore that mixed race nebulous identity proudly right like I would wear like one feather earring and people would say you know like what's your blood are you are you Cherokee you know like and I sort of like relish that or people would say I'm Egyptian I'm coptic egyptian or i'm hawaiian you know and like those were obviously all lies but and it was a home as far as I know it was all that's all evidence of like how lightly I wore identity right and it was also fraudulent totally fraudulent and as I've gotten older and especially once I hit my 30s I began to crave something that was more meaningful and that would ground me more firmly in a narrative about identity and that I could I wanted to find a community I wanted to know what it meant to be Burmese and I wanted to know what my Luxembourger roots were and that was kind of this jumping-off point for for this book you know there is this idea in American I think when in liberal America too that you know if everybody starts having sex with everybody you know we'll get to future face yeah all our problems are I mean everybody should have sex with everybody anyway I mean I'm certainly not objecting to everybody having sex with everybody I would never object to that I don't know that it's the strongest anti-racist measure right right but there is this kind of exotic exotic Asian exotic thank you very much you speak English better than me you know of this idea I mean even to the point of you know you know I've definitely maybe this you know it's part of being African American mixed-race people look better than more attractive that that sort of thing before you get got to the point where you said you were craving you know something deeper how'd you feel about that I mean I I'm very interested for instance in how men approached you you know I mean you're saying I'm know how mixed-race heritage is not my sparkling personality I you know I think there is there is an exotic ation right we were talking about Kanye right earlier Kanye the artist we all used to love until two days ago and or was it yesterday it's been so long those tweets have been sis it was like 80 of them yeah but that Kanye used to talk about like preferring mixed race video models right and there is a sort of like sexual ization of mixed-race heritage that I mean I don't know that I've done enough thinking to be able to answer why that is I think that I felt especially I mean and thanks to you to some degree I felt guilty that I would have imagined I could have been part of a racial history that was free of blood or plunder right like I it's crazy to me now that I was just kind of like oh I'm whatever it doesn't matter like I'm the future no no racial identity is free of blood or plunder I mean as I learned in researching the twin poles of my ancestry my father would say you know we were from this tiny town in Iowa and there were no people of color except for the lone black drycleaner which is an alarm bell should ring when a white person is like there were no people of color and it was totally cool and like we didn't think anything of it I began to sort of research like how could it why is Iowa so white and part of the reason there were no people of color in my dad's town is because the people of color who once owned the land had been driven off of it and killed off and died from diseases basically foisted upon them but never in our family history had we ever imagined that the Wagner's of lancing Iowa who arrived just a handful of years after the Winnebago Tribe was driven off the land never had we conceived of the fact that those two histories dovetailed and never had we ever even thought that we actually were given something unfairly and that that was part of the reason we were able to grow things off the land and grow big and strong and become the Wagner's of lancing Iowa we had never sensed we had never accounted for the debt and and and that has been I mean to go back to the mixed race thing I had never thought of the debt on any side of my I mean and my Burmese I'd has plenty of questionable histories to it too but the truth is that you can't just be nothing you're always a part of something and a lot of times that something is really messy I mean what interesting is things for me and I don't want to get to your search and how that search began but what I think is even our terminology mixed race has always been very very interesting to me I believe the average so there's a point towards the end where Alice goes and you know spoiler alert does the way she does you know basically you know these DNA tests yeah so I did the same thing yeah I did and it like you know different things come back from different places you know one was like you know you see when you're black how much you're white is what matters right I tested you know and we are in this post Black Power era ways like as little as possible so we came back 15 other came back 25 I go with 15 but I mean you think about that and it's like I mean if I'm being serious I mean you're talking about like my grandmother or my mother's yeah and this is basically true of the african-american population in this country they are a Creole mixed-race population and we've always known that because we had to go to family reunions and it was pretty obvious and yet we draw these lines as though there's a there's a you know a pure black I'm sure why it a pure well I think for blackness and you can speak to this more than I can there is no sense of that we don't allow a nuanced picture of black life and black blood in America right we we Barack Obama is a mixed-race person but for all intents and purposes he's our first black president we never talked about the fact that he's half white we never acknowledged that he has mixed heritage in the same way that we don't I mean black people are either black or they're not black but they're never we never conceive of black people as in fact mixed-race Americans what can I just want to push you in a little bit though just and I promise we're gonna get to your search this is what I mean I'm happy to talk about no no I this part is like really interesting me is there is no pure black in America how do we refer to something as mixed-race it's the thing that we're saying was mixed in is in fact mixed wait what so if you have a black parent white parent in this country biracial I'm a mixed-race right right but if you're black parent was never pure if you're already make students they're mixed and you're like double mixed I don't know I mean I think that there's a huge question like in Brazil they have less exactly right right it's like it's so bucketed as to be I mean there's you can overcorrect right for this right and we get back to this idea of is it better for us to have an intensely detailed classification system for race or is it better to just be like we're brown alone because where I got to in the book was the sense that like and I talked to a lot of evolutionary genealogists and the whole thing with ancestry testing is it divides us up into these racks and freight fractional racial percentages which is an like with our history of like racial percentages in America that makes me uneasy to begin with but it also makes me uneasy as I talk to these biologists and evolutionary specialists they said you know the things we are so alike first of all the idea the ancestry tests reaffirm the idea that race is somehow rooted in science and that's really problematic and it reinforces the fact that we are racially different from one another when in fact were really similar and if you look at homo homo sapiens like our destiny is to further mix and through globalization and love and romance and everybody having sex with each other like that is actually the destination of our species that's not to say that we should gloss over the real profound chasms that separate races in America today and acknowledge those and also our troubled racial history but there is a truth to the fact that like you may want to build border walls and insulate yourself on your bloodline from change and mixing there's no insurance policy you can take out against that we are destined for change we are destined to be brown mixed mix mixed mixed so the future face thing is real yeah I mean we're not gonna be alive for it but like it I mean as a species that is in fact where we're going we Americans aren't gonna be Americans for the rest of our lives look at your sons daughters sons sons daughters you know or genetic map and you know whatever how many years that is and it's gonna light up a completely different part of the world right you're so optimistic in my mind in five years they'll still be Gauchos yeah well no I'm not saying that we're all gonna bring a little classless society but I just think that we will mix more right right so you begin your search and in the book it begins with your dad and zigzags back to your mom and then comes back to your dad yeah so I want to go to your mom's side because what's interesting is you grew up in a relatively can I say leftist liberal yeah household it's interesting to me that they were still as you say that that kind of blind spot about race but we'll leave that for just a second you envisioned your your mom's side of the family as a group people who opposed the military who into in Burma people who are on the right side of justice the right side of fight what did you find when you did your research and what did that mean to you so I had been told these stories about Burma that were like these rose-tinted incredibly nostalgic recollections of frangipani blossoms and the smell of the ground after the monsoon rains and bananas at tea time and I mean I grew up with these stories and they were like poetry and I just accepted them because who didn't want to be from like Brigadoon I mean it was like this fake play I don't actually know Brigadoon I don't know what happens and that musical but I I feel like it's like a nice place to be Brigadoon and that's what Burma was it was like an imaginary mythical place and I never questioned it until I sort of thought well wait a second if Burma was so [ __ ] great why'd we leave and as I began sort of asking my grandmother for more details about life back in Burma it became clear that these kind of she would talk about people in a way and certain ethnic subpopulations in Burma in like fairly dismissive if not outright racist terms she would call Indians Indians calles and that is an it as a bigoted racist term the translation is hard but it's basically like calling someone a house negro a black man a caste man and I had never thought of that as racism cut to today where you're seeing the ethnic cleansing the genocide of Muslim majority that has roots back in Bangladesh in India and the Burmese population is looking the other way as their military government systematically rapes kills and forces out hundreds of thousands of its own citizens by virtue of the fact that they are Indian Muslims they're outsiders that don't belong and I realized my family held some of these same bigoted beliefs you know my grandmother wasn't out there engaging in ethnic cleansing but she is and was part of the Burma nationalists who believed their race to be superior and who mentally have justified the marginalization at best and the genocide at worst of other ethnic tribes that was they think of themselves as a race I mean Burma is a polyglot nation and there is absolutely a racial hierarchy the reason Burma is called Burma is because the British named it so for the Burma people they were always the most privileged they were light-skinned they were the most economically and franchised and the rest of Burma is 135 ethnic groups were hill people the Shan the Qin the kitchen they were from different parts of Burma they were not as empowered socially and economically and the poor roja were not even counted as part of the Burmese population they've always been seen as Outsiders despite the fact that they've been in Burma as early as seven eight but what we see now is the harvest of seeds that were sown decades and generations ago and in fact by some of the members of my own family I mean they believed this [ __ ] and I had never I mean I think when we especially with brown immigrants right there is a sense that the old world is the old world and we arrived here and we became Americans and then we were sort of like virtuous hard-working immigrants my mom and I talk about this a lot but that's a fallacy we left behind a lot of bad things and we were implicated in bad things that have since transpired in some of those countries and for me it was really important to have a reconciliation of that history both for my own purposes but also to better understand what was happening or what is happening in Burma today can you talk some about the roots of some of that prejudice within the context of the colonial struggle would you go into in the book with the British I yeah part of the reason there's so much tension with the Indians and the British for example is because the Indians helped the British as a British British colonized Burma the British often gave Indians top positions in the government of the colonial government and and so the Indians to some Burmese we're seen as the sort of patsies of the British on the converse the Indians often were the laboring classes in Burma I mean they were the economic they were in the economic engine room of the Burmese economy and they were often engaged in money lending to Burmese farmers during the rice boom but they also were tradesmen servants you know rickshaw pullers they Rangoon where my mom grew up was an Indian city I mean it was actually like majority Indian but I had never known that I had no idea that there was any any sort of relationship like that between the Burmese and the Indians and nor did I have any sense that as my grandmother was going to school in Rangoon and there were riots in Rangoon where hundreds of Indians were killed because of economic tensions you look at what what happened there and the patterns are nauseating when you think about what's happening here right you have outside or outside labor it's darker it's lower on the economic chain there's been their economic tensions that create a kind of break between the dominant sort of lighter-skinned society and the darker working-class and the answer is shame and marginalization and sometimes violence I mean nationalism is not unique to America xenophobia is not unique to America I just had no idea it was in my Burmese backyard and so and then you go over to your father's side of the family yeah another size that takes you I believe deep into the franco-prussian war in fact this is the sexy part of the book how did we end up in the details of I mean I love European history so it was cool to read your summarization of the French the franco-prussian war I actually didn't realize that was the moment of German unification ya know it's an important thing German unification yes it did yes it did just a few can you talk a little bit about how you ended up there and tracing your dad let me just say one thing to all you amateur genealogist in the audience one of the things that's so intoxicating about learning who your people were is because the great movements of history actually end up being plot twists in your own family story right like I had never thought of the Suez Canal like what really I didn't know anything about the Suez Canal but then when I was researching my great-grandfather's role in the crashing of the Burmese economy that's like another chapter entirely I realize the Suez the opening of the Suez Canal made it easier to transport goods and rice from Burma up to the markets of Western Europe if the Suez Canal hadn't been opened a series of chain events in Burma would not have happened we never think of those big movements of history German unification the franco-prussian war that drove my great-grandfather to America one of the things you realize is when you do genealogy or you conduct genealogy like history no longer exists in a vacuum or a dusty book it is becomes part of your own life story and that gives us I think a sense of grounding and also probably grandiosity because here I'm talking about the Suez Canal being an important part of my family history but is really interesting the reason we're talking about the franco-prussian war is because it appears my great-grandfather Henry was this patriarch this Catholic patriarch of 13 children and he was a stand-up member of society in Iowa until I started doing the research and realized not only maybe was he actually Jewish but he appeared to have been like an underworld sort of gambler height like he was involved in unsavory things during the franco-prussian war and may have been running guns or salts or you know weaponry across both enemy lines and was maybe gonna be hung for treason that did not comport with the image of mr. Stan patriarch Roman Catholic father of 13 that I had been gifted my entire life growing up so yeah I ended up in the depths the bowels of the National Archives in Luxembourg researching with like white linen gloves and super old falling apart census books the the true history of my family and what was the question no use I think you just answered we're in the franco-prussian war yes yes yes there is throughout the book this thread I don't know how else to access there is a thread of the possibility that you have Jewish ancestry and if I may infer something that's almost some Glee about the possibility that you might have Jewish Jewish I think it's awesome I think truthfully so I mean I said it's not awesome but I guess I did obviously of course like my current image it's never occurred to me that I might be Jewish so I've never had that maybe you are I think I wanted to be Jewish I wanted to be doing for a number of reasons one is this search for community and tribe right to be Jewish is to be part of the old one of the oldest tribes on earth and I think so many of my Jewish friends have such a strong connection to their Jewish ancestry is grounded them and given up them a place in a series of rituals that always seem like I don't know I cover I wanted something like that I want him to feel like I was part of I mean to forgive the pun but like a tribe of some sort and the tribe of Israelites seem like a great tribe to start with and I know it's a 92nd Street Y I I also think that I wanted to destroy my family narrative in some way if I'm being really brutally honest I think I was a little bit angry at how anodyne it was and how sort of you know thin and I wanted to complicate it I wanted to make it richer I wanted to I wanted it to defy my expectations and being Jewish for a father who claims such strong Irish Catholic roots would have been a repudiation of everything that his life had been about up until that point and it would have forced a conversation about you know where do we really find identity why have we him this and were we ashamed you know he talked about the lone Irish I think he's holed fish fishmonger in Iowa right and my dad would talk about him sort of reverentially but also dismissively he'd said I said don't you think it was hard being the only Jewish person in a town with five churches that was so overwhelmingly Christian my dad said no no no it was fine no one ever said anything of it and it was like this story that was meant to evoke the sort of largesse and the sort of evolution of his town but of course in subsequent stories it became evident that like of course this person was marginalized of course he was an outsider and when my father and I first discussed the jewelry my father was so resistant to that being a possibility that it begged further questions like why don't you want to be Jewish why does this bother you not just because it's complicates their family's story but it also places you on the outside of what you thought you were on the inside and that really bothers you so I mean those were all the reasons why I wanted to be Jewish so I have questions it's let's just what spoiler alert alex is not but let's say you had been must say you had had some you know yeah ancestry you hadn't grown up with the traditions you hadn't grown up with the culture when you had the wine you talk about the wine yeah yes they were drinking basically Manischewitz in rural Iowa in the 1920s and they spoke Yiddish you tell me if they're not Jewish and you told us though that evidently not yeah I mean well I do a lot of research it did we could not find but if you don't I mean this is like actually a really profound question about identity for me because I you know honestly as african-americans we you know we think about this a lot if all you have is the genetic tie mm-hmm but you don't have the cultural experience and I actually think you kind of get at this really early in your book where you talk about your dad you know trying to put this Catholic piece on you but you're not really of it you don't really what would that mean though like if you had the answers but you didn't have any of the experience I think that that's sort of where I come to at the end of the book which is that identity is fundamentally a construct I thought about this a lot as we were talking about Black Panther right and it was like okay here's and I would love to get your thoughts um like here's the first movie that a lot of like black people that I know black people in the media black people P Atlantic it's important because it offers an alternative identity for black people that it's constructed outside the constraints of like white slavery and white colonialism and that's really powerful and and like it dovetails with the whole roof afro-futurist movement which was just about envisioning a blackness that exists totally independently of whiteness and that to me seemed like a really powerful construct right like and it drove home this idea that we do to some degree make our own identities it's complicated because we can't ignore history right and I I never say I don't mean to suggest that in my book but I realized at the end of this that like my community the thing that I had been searching for all along was right like right here we're given a very finite on close the amount of time living on the crust of the planet earth and it is up to decide it is up to us to decide what we're gonna do at that time we don't know how many revolutions we have around the Sun we don't know where it all ends and we don't know what comes after us and I and I felt at the end of this book really freed thinking about what comes after us I knew what had come before and that informed what I wanted to do now but I felt really strongly that my life is about investing in the present and not being too too preoccupied with what is coming and to some degree not holding on too much to what happened other than being honest about who my people actually are you know you um wondering I thought weren't really a cycle point you make is even as you trace your European ancestry Asian ancestry your Burmese a necessity to be specific what you find is the extent to which your life on both sides is influenced by forces of European colonialism and more broader European violence yeah what did I mean what did that mean for you so this goes back to the franco-prussian war a chapter I know you guys are all just chomping at the bit to read more about but basically Europe and its territorial aggressions is really why I exist my joiner crowd Yeah right the franco-prussian war drove my great-grandfather to the US because maybe he was running guns or whatever and maybe it was gonna be hung for treason but basically had to come here and at the same almost the exact same time that the what I call the epic dick swinging contest that was happening between you know England and France carved up Asia and the franco-prussian war the fact that the the Germans were fooling around in Frances backyard made France more aggressive in Asia to claim some land for their own which then made as France was going you know for Indochina the British were like well we need to stake our claims in our part of Southeast Asia and decided to basically annex the rest of Burma and if the you know there is the whole what if but if the Brits had not seized all of Burma if Kingman Doan who my great-great-great grandmother worked in the court of if he had if the Burmese had kept power in the country maybe there wouldn't have been the independence movement and then military Hunta that subsequently drove my Burmese family out of the country I mean when you begin to trace all of this it does come back to the same European territorial aggressions yeah and it's a pretty common theme and I think one that maybe underappreciated do you can you talk about the very identity of Hispanics and Latinos with without having that conversation you obviously cannot know and and by the way you can't talk about it in terms of DNA testing either because these DNA tests will tell you for example your you know your your 20% Southeast Asian well what what is Southeast Asia who's drawing the lines around South Southeast Asia or your 16% Chinese well what you know what part of China are we talking about and it's largely the sort of Western demarcations Western political lines colonial boundaries you know what is Burmese when was Burmese blood considered Burmese before the PUE of Yunnan came in before the British came in at what point are we designating these bloodlines to be purely Burmese and what you realize is you do more of this research into the DNA testing is that these are arbitrary lines that follow largely in the footsteps of where white people and colonists have established them there's a I mean I know you have other conclusions about your identity it goes past this this is actually before you get to the science part but I think about a lot if you just allow me to really quickly oh my goodness nice is great I was not Jewish wow this is spoiling for you guys I didn't feel particularly Burmese and Luxembourg might as well have been Pluto but in all these places all these cities I saw glimpses of who my people might have been carved out from negative space of my family history I saw who he actually were we were storytellers revisionists Elias we built our future selves on deceit and half truth plastered all cracks with omissions as well as genuine courage and smarts and will this act of recreation we became Americans and I guess there was some kind of belonging and that pretty good and not just because I'm reading one of the things that you know is kind of you know a theme when I do is we like it's not just a search for identity feels like a search for home yeah and in a particular kind of home a noble home and noble lineage something that you know you can talk to you know brag about to your kids and as african-americans you know we are deeply connected you know to that idea of searching for a noble home why is that employee why does it matter whether your grandfather was a good guy or not I think about like Ben Affleck I found out yes next book of what not to do when you I know you have this label exactly exactly so he fires out an ancestor who he has never met and has no connection to was a slave hold and he wants this scrubbed and why do you care i I mean I I wish he had taken the opposite tack we need more white people saying you know what my great-grandfather was a slave owner like we need to own that history just like I felt like you know what we need to own the fact that we grew our peaches and dill on Winnebago land that's the American narrative part of the problem is we have this lacunae around the bet the bad stuff is just exfoliated like no I don't want to be related to a slave owned or guess what many of us are and that's part of us recognize your slaves off I mean I think the black experience is different because you come like fundamentally comes from a place of marginalization and mystery and Santa and and and and censorship in a way right like so finding those roots takes on a different tack but it's almost like records reconciliation right that's why it was important to me but what I found and I think generally the ancestor quest is almost a greedy thing as practiced in commercial ventures like DNA based ancestry testing but what I found and these were these profound moments I'm like sitting in Ashe Luxembourg I don't recommend it as a city if anybody's thinking of visiting nor do I recommend Luxembourg City I'm sorry but like I don't I was in I'm like wandering around looking for family homes and I went to a Donner kebab shop and I'm sitting there and I'm like oh thank God like I'm just like I felt I'm like oh it's like I'm back in New York I mean like the kebab shop they're brown people and it was like a relief right and that's when I realized like that's who I am I'm I'm a kid from a city I'm a kid from a place where there are people that are from all over the world that don't look like me that probably speak other languages I'm I'm I'm a person from a country filled with immigrants that's that's those are my people and it was really freeing because I think for so much of this time and in this moment particularly we're so tribal where we feel like it's all about like our you know the family tree and the sort of sacrosanct nature of the family tree and like the family is around us and it's messy and it's filled with people you don't know but maybe she'd get to know but that to me is that's that was the lesson and in that moment there's a you alluded to this ancestry.com does these commercials and it's I always thought I was Greek right that's with it's personal is Italian yeah and the person does something stereotypically attack totally you know what I mean and there's another one where there's a I guess a mixed-race yes I know ma one yes and she goes to every place and participates in all deactivate right I guess and maybe you know people who actually laugh at you right you came and si came the sinigang you know said okay I'm gonna do senegalese dance well I mean it's good to be curious around the world but this is the fundamental flaw of the like sort of proposition of these ancestry bands D&A nobody like yes maybe in theory we tell ourselves well I'm doing to find out I'm a citizen of the world but really you're doing it because you want to find out your grandfather was a Viking or I guess you know I mean you are looking to find that special thing and that's what you're gonna tell people about when you go to a dinner party and you say oh I just trace my ancestry and I found out that I'm actually a Polynesian Viking and like everyone's me like that's so crazy how that possible yeah it's like you're doing it to sort of reconcile your family history or actually even know who your people are it's like one and like the science of it is one piece of it but fundamentally this is it's like it's it's recreation and it's like I feel like we haven't thought more deeply about why we're doing this and most people aren't happily proclaiming that their nebulous every person they're holding on to one specific part of who they are and dancing around with it and by the way I did this - I got one result that said I was 14 percent Scandinavian and I was like that's why I'm so tall that's why I like like dark brown bread for breakfast and I like IKEA furniture is always been so easy for me to assemble I'm totally Norwegian and lies I was 0% Norwegian on another test but it was and in the same way they were like you're 16% Mongolia and I was like Genghis Khan what you know like you find these things and you like make little like magical stories about them like when you see that like I'm my blood is 14% Italian and you know 5% iris I guess what I worry about is again the reification of though there is in a some Italian blood that confers particular attributes which actually feels very unscientific for something that's supposed to be science yes and it also has implications to in terms of like how we see each other right I mean and this is where I go back to the idea that you know they're probably they propose themselves to be things that are gonna bring us together but what they do I think is give us an excuse to say how we're special and different from one another and that is problematic to me say nothing of like it hurt harkening back to racial phrenology like one drop rules like I just think in this moment in time it is probably not a great idea to be breaking ourselves up into racial fraction right I mean that said it feels like we're at a particular moment you know one of the things I think about you know with the election of donald rom i think one of the driving features is this loss of european or let's just call it what it is white yeah hegemony in this country which was part of white identity yes to be white meant that the president was always white like that that was you know part of and male you know you could you could certainly add to that I wonder if there's a general unease a general search for home you know that that's mirrored in your book you mean general the sense well I mean a loss of identity yeah you've been dealing with this you know for since you were a kid right but the I would argue that some of that lost not some of it a lot of that loss of identity is a feature of this moment this post 1960s moment where we had you know you talked about this in the way you know it's a salad bowl now everybody gets in oh no you can't just you know we don't have this classical cannon that says only these people write great books you know everybody's fighting it so if you're in that hegemonic position what's your identity now well and in fact there was a study that came out literally yesterday that said most Trump voters right this is controversial but most Trump voters are supporting Donald Trump not because of economic disenfranchisement but unease about the future and specifically feeling like white hegemony is coming to an end and that women and Muslims and minorities like future faces are like they're coming at them and what does that mean for their way of life so they're doubling down with someone who is a nativist and an absolutist when it comes to race and sort of like racial identity a white nationalist yes I mean I think that that totally informs this month I mean I it's hard for me to say I mean we should talk about this because like we coming off of Barack Obama or going into Donald Trump it has been I mean I started this book when Barack Obama was president and I finished it when Donald Trump was president and the story I thought I was gonna tell about America and being American changed radically right it was like okay we're moving towards this brown future no we're not we are we're in some other place and I know we differ we differ on this I do believe that trumpism and white nationalism while pervasive and hard to eradicate is fundamentally on the downslope and I feel like this moment is more the end of something than it is at the beginning of something and I and I know that no I hope you're right I really do it would be no I'm serious I'm down that and I'm not no no I'm not I'm not being kind of saying I actually hope you're right it would be a much better world if you're right yeah I mean I mean like that's a good more general endlessly optimist optimistic and I will also say I'm coming at race from a totally different and I say this in the book like being a black male right now is really different than being a mixed race lady and I think you know so I think necessarily there's gonna be a different levels of optimism about the future because of that and I don't mean to gloss over that reality either I you know this might have been in the book and I might well have missed it forgive me if I if I didn't if I did it's for that you know the crowds benefit anyway did you ever identify yourself as asian-american it says this is in the book a little bit when I was younger and I was sucking a gale god bless Gayle King for asking questions like this I was like you know Gayle I just like Garfield and Saved by the Bell and she's like so you identified with white culture and I said wait a second black people don't like Saved by the Bell and she was like Alex and it's true and I watched see whoa you didn't talk about screech there's a black girl on turtle that's right she was cute yeah she was that's my out I definitely identify I mean I think I guess I just identified more with white culture in part because Burmese culture was so far away from me like we my mom and grandmother would drag me to the Burmese new year's festival in in Washington DC in the suburbs and Burmese New Year is in April in Rangoon it's hot as hell and you throw water on each other in celebration for the new year they continued that tradition in suburban Maryland in April when it is not warm and I'd like run around avoiding young evil like preteen boys trying to throw buckets of water on me and that was like the extent of my Burmese heritage I had no connection to it meanwhile I was surrounded by white people I had a lot of white friends and as I became a professional like in especially in journalism and media it is dominated by white males and white culture and to succeed in that in that industry and I write about this book you you you your cultural identification I mean mine was was white inadvertently or advertently it wasn't until later that I even really fully I mean setting aside the hapa piece that I really got into identifying as a person of color and as a woman of color with Asian roots we talked about this that we talked abut the in the book there's a there's a real question as to whether you can just exist as myth mixed-race whether you don't have to actually pick aside I don't really know the answer to that because I think in a lot of cases you do it's really hard to be both you have to give something up my process my grief is that and I think this has happened throughout American history that the lines will just get redrawn mm-hmm you'll say we'll say hey you know in this future face future mm-hmm well all brown and we all look like Alex it'll be who has green eyes and who has brown eyes there'll be some other differentials some other yeah because the fact that matters that racism is allowed oh yeah race you know as any sort of scientific variable I do want to follow up on that question though because one of the interesting things for me is we are at this moment where and I don't want to overstate this but I think we're at a relatively high moment of asian-american visibility in pop culture there was no fresh out of the fresh-off-the-boat when I was a kid we have any Wang who blurb also has a book on with our that's right there hasn't I think this is a different moment and I just wonder if that means anything to if it would have meant anything to you as a child did you look on TV and say I don't see myself was that was that part of your experience I'm gonna I'm just gonna beg to differ with you on I mean I think you have asians and pop culture a little bit more but if we're talking about real visibility where asians are authentically seen i mean we're still the model minority it's just it's still okay to like i mean a there was someone made a [ __ ] joke yesterday and if an actual member of Congress like it's okay it's agents are seen as like okay to sort of make fun of because they're seen as you know they're higher up on the education and income ladder but if you actually look at the numbers especially for Southeast Asian right I mean we are we Vietnamese Americans Thai Americans are some of the most economically disenfranchised underinsured people in America you talk about the undock mented of like lark the fastest-growing population of undocumented in America as Asians asian-americans we don't ever talk about that and Asians in fact I think just allow themselves to be bucketed in as like the model minority so I mean I think it's good that you have shows like fresh off the boat I think it's good that we're more honestly talking about Asian family life but in far as as far as being woke to like the reality of like being Asian America I don't think we're there yet and as a kid that means something you talk about how age 12 that's that moment we first feel it like I can remember cutting on the you know the TV as a kid and saying you know I mean obviously there's the cost will get to cost me but actually who was there was The Cosby Show but in general you know you it was clear yes I know what you're actually look at girls young that's probably why I'm in the news cuz I was like that's what Asian women American like she's not actually even Asian American I don't think but there were no models for the kind of person I wanted to be there were no Asians popularly that I could sort of like look up to as role models right right so it would have been meaningful I know you have questions for me I do and I had more questions myself but I guess we can talk to you throw Cosby in and pretend it's a question from the audience yeah oh yeah I'll just act like that's on a car yeah you can't just like you really this one is run Tony Crowder yeah no so do you know obviously I'm Alex you work in we both work in media there have been a number you know of cases across the media with this meets you moment I think actually the Bill Cosby even though you know he's not journalist was actually the first really really big one and he was found guilty today on three counts and I wonder whether you expected it I wonder what your reaction is I wonder somebody who's worked in the news business and we talked about this backstage knowing all that happens you know now now that I'm you know somewhat a little bit more wet than I was before yeah I wonder what your reaction is well I think the reckoning is overdue as someone who replaced someone who faced sexual predation and harassment allegations on the circus you know I think it's really unfortunate that the catalyst for this moment had to be what it was like oh we realized that many men in positions of power are scumbags maybe we should hire women like duh like we should have hired women well before we came to some realization that certain men in the media were scumbags but I'm glad for it and I do think it's I mean I want to see the change that I want to see generally on issues of race and gender which is I don't want it to be one woman I wanted to be seven women I wanted to be a quorum because if you ask anybody the way change is truly affected is not by having one black person in the boardroom or one woman on the television program it's by having three of them or four of them or five of them and that's how you have enough of a movement to really push for change and enact it so I mean my hope is that this is the beginning I think it's great that Bill Cosby is facing justice after what he did to countless women and I think it's unfortunate that they had to wait this long sixty-one accusations on the yeah 61 okay I have more questions about that but we're gonna that was a question for the audience anyway that was a question for my honest you didn't actually you should ask you know you wanted how do you reconcile maintaining your own identity when it comes to marriage one more question it's such a good question my husband couldn't be here tonight but I'm sure he'd be chuckling in the audience and he was I think it's hard you know like I think it's hard for women to mean there first of all I just became a mom and I'm you know on a wife and like hats off to moms out there who don't work like it's you know it's it's all good I think it's hard like there is a sense I think a lot of women feel of loss of identity generally as they become partners and mothers and I think you know for me work has been a way of maintaining my identity and I think after writing this book I feel it's incumbent upon me as a woman and as a person of color and a person who fully I think has a more inclusive version of the American narrative in my head to make sure that the media that I engage in the shows that I do the stories that I cover is reflective of that I want to be honest in my personal life and also in my professional life and that's that's grounding in a way and that gives me a sort of form of workplace identity if you will one last question and I think it's a pretty good one to end on but I will remind you guys that Alex's book is available for sale in the lobby I'll be signing them these please purchase and Alex will sign as people tend to do with these things but it's Alex onyx it means something you know it's actually different thank you for the salah' my god that was not very good you're the problem is I don't ever sign it these things well that's you they're too much of a rock stone no it's because I'm kind of an [ __ ] and so much nicer than me and so I can't actually make the pitch the way I should be making the pressure like I'd never do it but alex is so cool and so gracious that she's giving up her time you guys should buy the book please buy the book okay what is the role of future face when our president wants to build a wall you talk a little bit about this at the beginning of the book yeah the role is like keep making more future faces you know and also like again this is not our destiny we shape our future every day by living in the present and be active go vote go run for office tell people you know to go vote go run for office make babies have brown babies have white babies that have like ideas about brown people like good ideas good [Applause] not bad ideas you know build build your life build your society be active try I just I'm sorry and this is our promises the last question I know yanking me off seas but I just have to ask I mean like one of the things that sticks with me I love this book I read it in one day I love this book but you know the thing that sticks with me is the fact that before and there was slavery my face was future face yeah and they just change the line they do you know what I mean and so like the scary thing for me about that is how are we reckon with the fact that like you very well could be the future let's say you very very well are the future but the racism could very well remain it's entirely true my friend but you know what like before slavery you and I wouldn't be sitting on a stage talking about this stuff and we and one of us wouldn't be a best-selling author and the other one wouldn't be on the National that's very clever and that was a real it's a good note to end on thank you guys thank you you

Channel: The 92nd Street Y, New York

Views: 12,289

Keywords: 92Y, 92nd Street Y, Alex Wagner, Ta-Nehisi Coates, racial identity, race

Id: 9kt1pGv2s7M

Length: 51min 54sec (3114 seconds)

Published: Mon May 14 2018