Katie Couric on ‘Going There’

THE NEW YORK TIMES

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pamela paul

How much does Katie Couric reveal about the world of television news in her new memoir? She’ll join us to talk about her new book, “Going There.” Is our understanding of how to combat racism in this country fundamentally flawed? John McWhorter will be here to discuss his new book, “Woke Racism.” Alexandra Alter will be here to talk about what’s going on in the publishing world. Plus, our critics will join us to talk about the books they’ve been reading and reviewing.

This is The Book Review Podcast from The New York Times. It’s October 29. I’m Pamela Paul.

Katie Couric joins us now. Her new memoir is called “Going There.” Katie, thanks for being here.

katie couric

Nice to be here, Pamela.

pamela paul

I’m going to start, actually, with that title, “Going There.” Obviously, it has a double entendre, maybe a triple entendre. But what do you mean by that, and why did you choose it for the title of this book?

katie couric

Well, I think you’re right. It might have a quadruple entendre at this point. Who knows? But I really wanted to talk about my — first of all, sort of my journey, which I hate that word because I feel like it’s so overused at this point.

But going there, I really committed myself to focusing on my career early on. I took advantage of every opportunity. I moved from Washington to Atlanta to Miami back to Washington. So part of it is perhaps geographic.

Going there, I think, to me, means taking risks, leaving NBC and the comfort of that organization and going to CBS to anchor the evening news, I think, was going there. I was rereading the book the other day. Going there was also used when I talk about an open and honest conversation about mortality or death with my husband Jay when he was so sick with stage 4 colon cancer, how I couldn’t really go there.

And of course, going there, finally, is just being honest. I am going to write an honest account of my life, and I am going to talk about things that I think are important, that may be uncomfortable, that may be admissions of my shortcomings, but that really, truly reflect what — through my lens, of course, and my point of view — what my life experiences and relationships, high points and low points, were really like.

pamela paul

I want to ask you a two-part question. On the one hand, you’ve been the subject of many people’s opinions because you are in the media and you’re on television and people know who you are. And so there’s lots of gossip and talk about you.

But at the same time, you’ve been a journalist, where you’re not supposed to have opinions and you’re supposed to stay quiet and you’re supposed to stay neutral. And so I imagine that has been a very hard thing to deal with over the years, being talked about but then you’re not really supposed to talk back.

katie couric

That’s one of the reasons, Pamela, I wrote the book. So much has been written about me. People have projected things on me. I’ve been kind of an avatar of, I think, a modern working woman, working mother. But I haven’t ever really said, hey, this was my experience.

And you may think I’m a certain way, but this is actually who I am, how I was shaped, decisions I made, challenges I faced. So I think that was one of the impetuses for writing this book, like, hey, I’m finally telling it like it is from my point of view.

pamela paul

When you were on the “Today” show and everybody had an opinion and thought that they knew exactly who you were, did part of you say to yourself, like, if only they knew that I was actually X? And what was that? What did you feel like was the Katie Couric that nobody suspected you really were?

katie couric

I actually felt, because I was — another overused word — very authentic in my job, I hate pretense. I don’t think I ever put on airs. I think people saw me in lighter moments. I think they saw my sense of humor.

They saw when I could do a hard-hitting interview. They saw when I really cared about a social issue. I was revealing a lot of myself when I talked about Jay — not nearly as much as people reveal today. I mean, I was definitely not guilty of oversharing.

So I do feel, in a sense, that people did know me. But I never really felt like, oh, I wish they knew this or that. But writing this book, I think everyone is so much more complex and multidimensional than sometimes you’re able to be on television.

You also have to be very palatable to have a mass audience. So you can’t really give your opinions. I mean, that just wasn’t done back then. I don’t think it is still today on certain shows.

But I feel like the way I conducted interviews — like the way I interviewed the governor of Wyoming about conversion therapy or asking about was this setting up an environment that was ripe for homophobia and violence against gay people in the country, and the David Duke interview, which I cite in the book — I do think there were moments where people could feel where I stood on certain issues, certainly certain moral issues.

Asking Laura Bush about abortion — most female morning anchors would not have gone there. See? There you go.

pamela paul

There we go. There’s the title.

katie couric

So I think that in the back of your mind, when you’re on television and you have a huge audience, you have to be very mindful about not offending. And even through the smallest actions or interactions, people pick up certain things about your personality. So this goes, clearly, much, much, much deeper into who I am.

I guess, for me, it was I wish people understood that I was not Katherine or Katie, that there was a lot of gray in between and that I was human.

pamela paul

Did you feel a sense of relief writing this book? Was it scary? Did it feel like, oh no, finally I get to say what was actually going on?

katie couric

You know, it’s funny. I just set out to write a really honest account of what things felt like on a deep, personal and emotional level. Now, when I write about those things, of course, part of me is like, I think they’re sort of funny — like when I’m at the kitchen table and I’m just weeping and my daughters are concerned, and the one quote, Samantha, saying, “If I listened to what every bitch in New York City said about me, I’d never leave the house,” which made me laugh because she was 10 years old and it was so wrong on so many levels.

But I think that it didn’t feel cathartic or anything. It just felt real. It felt like hey — my husband John kept saying, don’t write a book if you’re not going to be honest. And I kind of used that as my north star when I was writing this. I wanted it to be honest and true.

And Frank Rich, who I’m a big fan of, who I mention in the book, who wrote to me a beautiful letter after I interviewed David Duke, he emailed me the other day and he said, I am so glad you didn’t write some unctuous B.S. This is why I was a fan from the very beginning.

And I didn’t want to write some unctuous B.S. I’ve always been a really direct person. I think I’ve always been a really honest person, maybe at times to a fault. But I never thought about like, oh, this feels good to admit it or this is embarrassing. To me, it was like, this is what happened. This is how I felt. This is how it unfolded. And basically, this is my life.

And what I really loved about writing this book, Pamela, is it helped me kind of look at the arc of history. And it helped me revisit stories. Sometimes, as a journalist you get so subsumed by the daily moments and the daily developments that you’re reporting on that you lose sight of the big picture.

So this was an incredible opportunity for me to say, wow, look at how things have changed. Look at what things were like. Look what attitudes existed back when I graduated from college in 1979. Even looking at the Iraq war in my rear view mirror was really helpful and instructive.

pamela paul

Going back to your own story and honesty, you write about a few things that I think probably people are going to be surprised about. One is that you learned, I think as a teenager, that your mother’s family was Jewish. But it wasn’t something that was discussed.

katie couric

I was 10. Yeah.

pamela paul

It wasn’t something that was discussed or acknowledged. And I’m curious what that meant for you. Well, first tell us about how you learned that. And then what did that mean for you, then and now?

katie couric

I was at my grandmother’s 75th birthday in Atlanta. My grandmother lived in Atlanta — Nana as we called her, my mom’s mom. And we were at my uncle’s house. And we were hanging out in sort of the family room situation.

And I looked up at the bookshelf, and I saw a menorah. And I was like, wait a second. What? And I realized then that my uncle and his family were Jewish. And I thought, wow, that must mean my mom’s Jewish, even at 10.

So I remember at first it was kind of like, oh, my gosh. I think I talk about in the book the Tom Lehrer song from a show that was called “That Was the Week That Was,” which was called “National Brotherhood Week,” and the lyrics were “the Protestants hate the Catholics. The Catholics hate the Protestants.” I also think it says, “The Muslims hate the Hindus. The Hindus hate the Muslims.” And then the last line was “and everybody hates the Jews.”

And I hadn’t witnessed antisemitism, but I knew there were only two Jewish girls in my elementary school. And I knew that Jews in my community, growing up in Arlington, Virginia, were a minority. And so I remember just kind of thinking, wow, just sort of being shocked.

Now, of course, I wish that my mom had been more open about the fact that she was Jewish. I write extensively about this in the book, about my grandparents, and they were much more observant. And I don’t know whether it was my dad’s family — my paternal grandmother was a Presbyterian and a Sunday school teacher — I don’t know if this is something that my parents really agreed to do once they got married, to raise the kids as Christians — because of course, according to Hebrew law, I am Jewish.

And so I wish, as we all do when our parents die, that we had had a more fulsome conversation about it and why she was willing to sublimate her Judaism. I think it might have had to do with antisemitism at the time combined with the ultimate goal being assimilation. Who knows how many what you would call now microaggressions my mom endured growing up?

But gosh, if I could go back in time, Pamela, I would love to have a really deep conversation with not only my mom but my uncle and everyone on that side of the family.

pamela paul

You also go back and — regarding your ancestry — examine the racism in your own family. You are from a very Southern family. What was it like going public with all of that?

katie couric

It’s horrifying, obviously. And I owe a lot of this to my daughter Carrie, who, for her Stanford thesis, talked all about her family history, our family history, my dad’s side. She did a lot of original research in Montgomery, Alabama. She spent a summer in Eufaula. She interviewed the descendants of slaves.

She is, I think, really, really curious about our family, and in a good way, and also trying to square her dad’s interests and passion for Civil War re-enactments. That’s a big part of the book. So I was really inspired, honestly, by Carrie’s curiosity. The sooner all of us are able to acknowledge the past, including the past of our ancestors and our lineage, the more we’re able to move forward and to repair the damage of the society and the systems that existed.

And of course, it was horrifying and appalling, but it’s the truth. And this book is really about my telling not only the truth but my truth.

pamela paul

One of the interesting things that you do in the book as you’re writing about Jay Monahan, your first, late husband, and he’s got all these fun quirks. He plays the bugle. But he also does these Civil War re-enactments. And it’s never really clear as you’re reading along, like, well what side was he on with these Civil War re-enactments?

And then, of course, toward the end, and I think it was, again, Carrie who said, wait a minute. What exactly did Dad do during these Civil War re-enactments? What was that like to write about? And tell us what he did do.

katie couric

Jay really was fascinated by militaria in general, by all kinds of wars. He collected a lot of things militaria from the Mexican-American War. The Revolutionary War he was fascinated by. And he loved history. So all of those things, I think, contributed to his fascination for Civil War re-enactments that were kind of happening around Woodstock, Virginia, where we had bought a weekend house when we were both living in Washington, D.C.

And he went to W&L, Washington and Lee, where, I think, Lee was during his — Jay’s — era so revered as a great military strategist, et cetera, as somebody who sort of personified honor. Of course, we’ve reassessed him and reassessed so much about this period and history, importantly. And we started that conversation, I think — Jay and I did — when the Ken Burns series on the Civil War came out.

But obviously, we were never really able to finish that conversation. And it’s fascinating, to me, to see how Jay would have evolved and how he would have re-examined this hobby. And it would be so great to hear a conversation between our daughters, Ellie and Carrie, and Jay about what really drew him to this hobby.

I don’t think it was like, yes, we’re defending slavery at all. It was, I think, just the romanticism. We’ve all been, I think, brainwashed by the lost cause narrative.

I interviewed a historian once who said, “Gone With the Wind” has done more to damage our collective memory and our perceptions of the Civil War and what it really was than anything that’s ever been taught in a classroom. I think Jay was reacting to that and this idea of being out in nature, on a horse, camping out. And he was a real reverse snob. I think he loved the idea of being with people from all different backgrounds — a plumber or a dentist or an auto mechanic, the people who were gravitating to this kind of experience.

pamela paul

You write in a number of places about interviews you wish you’d handled differently at the time, whether it was Anita Hill or the riots in the wake of the Rodney King verdict in L.A. What were the common threads that run through those regrets?

katie couric

Well, I think the one that I talk about with the most regret was the interview I did with John and Elizabeth Edwards, where I came across as kind of callous and judgmental. And so I think that is the one that sticks out the most.

pamela paul

Wait, tell us about that, for those who don’t remember what that interview was.

katie couric

I was interviewing John and Elizabeth Edwards after she announced that her cancer had returned. I believe it had gone to her bones. And this was a few years after Jay died. And of all people, I should have understood the hell this family was in.

But I had read a piece in The New York Times that morning, or the day before, where there were kind of a sampling of Americans talking about their choices, about John and Elizabeth Edwards’s choices. And she was going to continue on the campaign trail. And I think you remember they had a young child. I think they might have had twins. I can’t remember.

But anyway, and so I was sort of channeling those questions about their choices and about Elizabeth’s choice to continue — as she had every right to, right? — to live out her life the way she wanted to. I think it came out as sort of, as I said, kind of judgy and critical.

And I think I was still, at that point, finding my footing at “60 Minutes” and trying to figure out when you have to be a hardass. And I think I was also, perhaps, I mean, if I look back on it now, reacting to people who were not taking me seriously as a journalist because I had come from a morning show. So I think it was the whole confluence of things that probably made me — it was just the wrong approach.

I was working with a pretty seasoned producer. I wish that I had had a relationship where we really could have talked about, like, oh, is this — let’s talk about the tone, or are these the right questions. But I didn’t get really a lifeline there.

So I just think it wasn’t me. But I think I write in the book it was maybe a bit of a reaction to people criticizing me talking to Condi Rice in a profile that was supposed to be a full profile of her life and her sort of attitudes about nation-building and foreign policy, but also about the fact that she plays the piano, and she gets up and does the elliptical every morning at 4:30 or whatever. And I asked her about her dating life.

So you know I think that again people were like, oh, please. And yet if Steve Kroft had done that same interview, I don’t think there would have been the pushback. So I think when I interviewed John and Elizabeth Edwards, there was, I think, a lot going on in my head.

And she was so nice. She wrote me a letter saying how much she understood that I was asking questions that people really wanted to know the answers to. And she could not have been more gracious and lovely. And then, of course, all that craziness happened with John Edwards. So, I mean, God. Oh brother.

pamela paul

Yes, what we don’t know at the time.

katie couric

Yeah. With Anita Hill, it was less about race and more about gender, although, obviously, with intersectionality, her story is about both. But I use those examples because I think I was where, in many cases, the country was when it came to some of these social issues. I was seeing them through a very limited lens.

I talk about covering the L.A. riots. And of course, we covered the white male victim, Reginald Denny. But we never really looked into the foundation of the anger and rage and violence which was, of course, about the police officers who beat the [expletive] out of Rodney King.

And I just think that we saw things through this antiseptic, white lens. And we’re so much more aware of that lens now. But to me, it was sort of these were a case in point. And they were a gateway that I could illustrate some of the attitudes that were prevalent at the time.

pamela paul

There’s a lot more in this book. And we’ve stayed almost entirely away from gossip, especially media gossip and TV gossip and the fact that you, like any New Yorker who is in high media circles, had your share of encounters with Trump. So there’s a lot that we didn’t talk about.

But of all the things that you write about in the book — the death of your father to the death of your first husband to a number of breakups where you got broken up with — what was the hardest thing for you to say, OK, I’ve got to write about this? Was it Matt Lauer? Was it “60 Minutes“? What was the toughest thing?

katie couric

I think probably about Matt because my feelings were so complicated, and they definitely evolved over time. I felt like I was almost doing my own therapy sessions. I did original reporting, which sounds so pretentious, but I actually revisited some people who were affected by his behavior. And it was really, really helpful.

And I talked to a lot of experts about this. I reached out to people who had written extensively about men in power. This was at the time it happened, because I was really trying to make sense of it in my head.

I talked to gender studies people. I talked to lawyers who have represented victims. I mean, it was a real mission for me and a lot of soul searching, honestly.

So that, I think, was the hardest thing. How do you write about somebody who you had a really strong professional bond? I think people misconstrue the relationships because they have these parasocial relationships on watching people on the “Today” show. And they see so much of our life unfold in a way.

They saw me lose my husband, Jay. They saw the births of my two daughters. And then this idea that we’re a family, I think, reinforces the notion that the people on the “Today” show — and I don’t know how it is now, but I can just speak to how it was then — we really enjoyed each other for two hours. And then everybody kind of went their separate ways.

We all had individual responsibilities. We all had our own work to do, our own stories that we were working on, our own family situations. But having said that, how can you deal with the duality of someone when you just know one side, and also just the recklessness?

But I also, I think, looking at these things in a retrospective way, as you read, Pamela, the culture was so different in the ‘90s and early 2000s in terms of a permissive environment. I think this holds true at all kinds of organizations and companies, not just in broadcast news, that permissive environments, I think, open the door to more serious transgressions.

And I think the culture was just so different then. It doesn’t excuse any behavior whatsoever. It’s disgusting and infuriating. But it was a very different time.

I think if you talk to people of my generation who were in work environments, the kind of things that went on, that was not my jam. I’m, like, super old-fashioned and conservative and faithful and all that stuff. But you heard a lot that people were involved with people. And I just kind of said, yuck, that’s not the way I want to operate in the world. But it was sort of all around you.

pamela paul

All right, we’re on this theme. I do have to ask you one completely superficial question because I know from your book that you watch “The Morning Show,” which is a show I really like. What’s that like? What do you think of “The Morning Show“?

katie couric

I thought it was really interesting. I think they did a lot of things really well. I laugh at stuff like Jennifer Aniston getting up and making coffee and exercising and blow drying her hair. I’m like, who does that?

Although George Stephanopoulos apparently does meditate for, like, a half hour. I could barely get out of bed and get my ass to work with, like, wet hair and completely wanting to mainline coffee.

So some of that stuff is — of course it’s a TV show. But I do think they got the kind of two sides of the Mitch character, this idea that he was beloved and yet there was this creepy side that would take advantage of someone like the character he took advantage of.

And I thought they did that really well, this very nuanced come up to my room and watch TV, and then suddenly this is happening, and the confusion and having someone who’s the king of the hill kind of pay attention to you. I just thought that was done really well. Some of it is so over the top.

pamela paul

What’s over the top?

katie couric

Like Jennifer Aniston announcing the new co-anchor — what? — at some kind of party. No, no. And I haven’t watched it for a long time. I think I watched a couple from the new season. But everything is very exaggerated. It has to be.

The thing I think I miss is the collegiality of the crew and the people on the show and the camera crews. And during that period of time, you become a very tight family for those two hours or the hour before the show is on the air. And I kind of missed the sizzly, fun banter between camera crews and the directors. And it was so fun.

And then I realized, well, the show is in a deep crisis. So that’s probably why that didn’t come through.

pamela paul

Well, reading the book is a lot of fun, I have to say. I got it, I think, on a Friday, and it was done by Sunday, which is rare.

katie couric

Wow. That’s nice.

pamela paul

I tore right through it. So congratulations again on the book. The title is “Going There” by Katie Couric. Katie, thank you so much.

katie couric

Thanks, Pamela. It’s been fun.

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pamela paul

It’s getting to be that time, which is time for the Book Review’s biggest list of the year, the 10 Best Books of 2021. If you’re a Times subscriber, you can be one of the first people to find out the list before it’s published in our live event, which will be virtual. But a live edition of this podcast, we will be recording it on the morning of November 30.

My Book Review colleagues and I will announce and discuss this year’s selections, share some of our favorites that didn’t quite make the list, and we’ll be joined by a special guest that I can’t wait to share with you. After the announcement, our editors want to hear from you. So we’ll also be holding a virtual after-party where you can talk about your favorite books published this year.

I hope you’ll join us. You can RSVP at nytimes.com/tenbestbooks. And that’s ten the word, not the number, so T-E-N bestbooks.

Tina Jordan joins us now to help celebrate the 125th birthday of the Book Review. Tina, hi.

tina jordan

Hey, Pamela. So it’s National Book Award season, and we’ve gotten a shortlist. And so we know what books are in the running. And I thought it might be fun to look back and see how we used to handle the National Book Awards.

And I was fascinated to find that basically, in what amounts to the Book Review’s gossip column, which was called “In and Out of Books,” the writers used to handicap the National Book Awards. And so I thought I’d go back to 1961, and I might put you on the spot here.

The fiction finalists were “Rabbit, Run” by John Updike, “The Light in the Piazza and Other Tales” by Elizabeth Spencer, “The Body of a Young Man” by Mildred Walker, “The Violent Bear It Away” by Flannery O’Connor, “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, “The Child Buyer” by John Hersey, “Generation Without Farewell” by Kay Boyle, and “The Waters of Kronos” by Conrad Richter.

Most of these, I must confess — well, not most, half of them — I’d never heard of. And so the little gossip item says, although you never bet on any action by an award jury — unless you’re the sole judge and lack conscience — the hotshots in the competition are this.

And basically, we said that this was a draw between “Rabbit, Run” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.” We didn’t want to pick which one, but one of those was a shoo-in. So I have to ask you, Pamela, do you think one of those books won the National Book Award that year?

pamela paul

Oh, well, you’re setting me up here. So now it’s not one of them. Who is it, Flannery O’Connor?

tina jordan

No, it’s “The Waters of Kronos” by Conrad Richter.

pamela paul

Oh, well, Conrad Richter, of course.

tina jordan

We were so certain it was one of those two books. This is the way we are to this day, of course.

pamela paul

That’s right.

tina jordan

The day before, we’ll, among ourselves, say, well, it’s going to be this or it’s going to be that.

pamela paul

Well, you’ve picked accurately the Nobel Prize winner of literature for, what, the last 14 years in a row?

tina jordan

Oh, if only.

pamela paul

We know everything. All right, Tina. Thank you.

tina jordan

Thanks, Pamela.

pamela paul

John McWhorter joins us now from Queens in New York. He is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is a columnist and newsletter writer at The New York Times on the opinion side. And his latest book is called “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” John, thanks for being here.

john mcwhorter

Thank you for having me, Pamela.

pamela paul

So let’s start with the mild-mannered title of your book. It definitely has a message. And let’s break it down word by word because I want to actually start with the word woke, which feels like it means many different things to many people, depending on who is saying it.

So for example, I just saw in my inbox this morning an email from Library Journal, which is a trade publication talking about woke books for children. And it was a recommendation list. What does that word mean? Where did it originate?

john mcwhorter

Yeah, we’re on a cusp with woke. Woke starts in Black slang — as far as we know, the ‘30s, which probably means — since that’s just when it hits the print, although technically it’s a recording — ‘20s, could have been teens. Woke means awakened to certain political realities that might not be readily obvious from daily experience. And it was used by people left of center.

It stayed Black slang for a long time. And then, for various reasons, starting in the early teens, it jumped the rails and became a mainstream word for aware of certain realities from a leftist perspective. It meant exactly, really, what politically correct meant when it was used neutrally back in the early 1980s before it then started being retooled as a slur.

And to tell you the truth, we’re at this point where you can see a list of what are called woke books for children where woke means what it meant about 10 minutes ago, i.e. 2015, just the old meaning of hip to certain sociopolitical realities of interest to people left of center.

But it’s become something of a slur, especially over the past couple of years, because a certain segment of woke people have made themselves, as we used to say, obnoxious to the rest of us, including all the rest of us left of center. So now woke is coming to be thrown at a certain kind of woke person as a slur. And it’s kind of spoiling the entire word.

pamela paul

When you talk about the history of this word, there was this meaning from the 1930s onward. And it lasted in some way, shape, or form until 2015, at which point it started to very rapidly evolve. And I guess just as a backdrop, generally speaking, is language evolving much more quickly now because of the internet, because of social media?

john mcwhorter

Well, I would say just as a very quick corrective, it’s around 2010 that the white person starts describing themselves as woke, partly because of a song by Erykah Badu that really got around. Then 2015 is when things start gradually to sour. But

these things have always happened. They happen a little faster these days because the internet makes us all one village. And so something can get worn out faster. Something can become tarnished faster. Something can become popular a little faster than it used to.

And that’s not to say that people weren’t saying the same thing with the advent of national radio. And then they said the same thing with the advent of national television. But now we’ve taken it up even more a notch.

pamela paul

All right, now we’re going to get into a phrase that is probably even more controversial than the word woke alone, which is the title of your book, “Woke Racism.” What do you mean by that phrase?

john mcwhorter

Well, I think everyone should know that I don’t mean it as rhetoric. I mean it said in a very pipe-smoking, 1950s, Disney announcer way. I think that there is a certain kind of woke person who is caught in a frame of mind where the idea is that how you show that you’re a good person is by showing that you are woke, that you’re aware, for example, that racism exists and it’s not just the n-word and people burning crosses on people’s lawns. You want to show that you’re aware of this.

But it’s narrowed to the point where a certain kind of person thinks that showing one’s awareness of that is the key, regardless of what you prescribe’s effects upon actual Black people. And so although it’s the last thing these people would suspect about themselves, they do not think of Black people as more important than their own showing that they are not racist. That is a woke racist as far as I’m concerned.

pamela paul

And is the they, the woke racist, I mean, is it mostly white people or non-Black people? Is it mostly Black people? Who is guilty of this?

john mcwhorter

I have a reputation in certain circles as being the Black person who says things Black people don’t like. And the people who I write about in this book, who I call the elect, a great many of them are Black. And they are the ones who have ideas about Blackness and what we should do about racism in this country that, once again, end up hurting Black people rather than helping them.

So there are definitely a great many Black woke racists. But to be honest, this time, when I wrote this book, the person I thought of looking over my shoulder was mostly a certain kind of white person. And so this time, it’s going to be white people who hate me just as much as Black people — not that there aren’t white people who already do.

But yeah, this is a white problem. And I think that the white woke racist ends up enabling the Black woke racist. And it’s no good for any of us.

pamela paul

Another phrase you use in the book is the third-wave antiracism. Is that the same thing as woke racism?

john mcwhorter

Yeah. First wave is getting rid of segregation. Second wave is people looking into themselves and realizing that racism is a bad thing in general. Third wave is this current cultural revolution.

pamela paul

I’m going to keep talking about some of these phrases because it is really interesting to me how certain phrases have either cropped up or evolved so much in recent years. And you are a linguist. So one of the phrases in that phrase, third-wave antiracism, is antiracism, which, until maybe five or six years ago, wasn’t a word or phrase that you heard very often. You heard someone is either racist or they’re not racist. But antiracism wasn’t quite so prevalent.

Is that Ibram Kendi’s book? Is that something else? Where did this come from? And what does it mean to say be not racist versus to be antiracist?

john mcwhorter

Antiracist is, indeed, a term with a new currency. I’m not sure I had ever used it until relatively recently. It comes with an implied dare. The idea is, are you a racist, or are you an antiracist? Because if you’re not engaging in what we call antiracism, that’s something else [INAUDIBLE]. It’s not just antiracism. What we’re calling antiracism, then you qualify as a racist. And that is a pretty manipulative thing to lob at people. I think that the people who use it that way are innocent in their way. They don’t realize that there’s any other way of looking at it.

But yeah, the new idea is that if you aren’t working against racism in the ways that certain kinds of people prescribe, then the way we used to phrase it is you’re part of the problem. But now we have a tarter way of putting it, which is that you’re not engaging in antiracism, and so you are a racist. It pushes the point. It makes things feel more urgent.

The truth is it’s interesting. It must feel good, in a way, to coin a word or to make a word more popular, give it a new meaning. Ta-Nehisi Coates, maybe about 10 years ago, had a lot to do with popularizing the term white supremacy, which is a way of saying racist and making it stick more and getting it more attention than racism does because the word has gotten worn out a bit and elicits a certain resistance. White supremacy cuts through all of that.

Antiracism — probably Ibram Kendi has the most to do with that word, partly because of the title of one of his books. And that is something else, where we’re using it in a very different way that, it scares people, frankly. The idea is, you’re not an antiracist? Well, then you know what you are. That’s where we are at this point with that word.

pamela paul

Are you arguing that woke racism has the unintended consequence of actually being racist towards Black people?

john mcwhorter

I sure am. It hurts Black people in many ways. And so for example, this isn’t something I write in the book, but to teach any Black students that somebody who has questions about racial preferences simply shouldn’t be heard is teaching them a way of dealing with controversy, a way of dealing with ambiguity, that is counterproductive to somebody’s mind developing in a useful way, that is teaching people the simplicity of the prosecutorial medieval rather than the sophistication of a person making their way in this very complex country, in this very complex modern world, just that.

But then, very briefly, for example, let’s say that you argue that the reason that more Black boys are suspended from schools than white boys for violent acts is bias, that it’s not that the Black boys are doing anything different from the white boys, it’s just that people don’t like the Black boys and so they expel or suspend them for reasons that would just get the white boys a smack on the hand.

There is data that just blows that out of the water. It is patently untrue. The Black boys are often more violent, and it’s not because they’re bad people. It’s because of factors in the past, many due to racism, that would make anybody be more violent, such as being quite poor, such as growing up without a father, such as gun culture, et cetera. All of that needs to be dealt with.

But if you listen to the literature that implies that expelling or suspending the Black boys is due to bias, then what happens is that a lot of places start being more lenient on those particular Black boys, who then end up exerting their violence in the school against other Black kids, because most of these boys go to mostly Black and Latino schools. The grade point averages in those schools go down. And frankly, people, and often even professors, get hurt.

So you talk about bias against Black boys, and you get a rise out of the room, partly because there are a lot of Bs in that phrase. But you end up hurting actual Black kids. And nobody on that side of the debate wants to talk about that. That is — and this is a rather athletic use of the word, and here it is rhetorical, but I have to be — that’s racist.

pamela paul

One of the big issues in New York City is lower Black representation in selective high schools. And some argue that testing should be eliminated in order to increase that representation. Obviously, it’s very current right now as we transition from a de Blasio administration to presumably what will be an Eric Adams administration. You write in the book that that is not the way to address this problem. Can you explain how a policy that seemingly is intended to help might, in fact, harm Black children?

john mcwhorter

Very briefly, again. So let’s say that we see this underrepresentation, and it’s about standardized tests. Now, here’s a question. How might we make it so that Black kids are better at the tests?

It’s a perfectly innocent question. Why aren’t people asking it? Why is that considered contrarian? Why does that make me a Republican to ask that question? Because nobody would have thought so in, say, 1960, ‘70, even ‘80.

The signal starts to fade by about 1990. Why can’t we make it so that the Black kids are better at the test? Nobody wants to think of it. And you know why? Because they’re racists on this question.

They can’t imagine that you could make the Black kids better at the test, and I consider that an insult to Black kids. Or they think it doesn’t matter for Black kids to be able to demonstrate their intelligence on a test of cognitive abstract ability. Why not? Frankly, these people sound like segregationists in 1895. It’s disgusting.

pamela paul

So it’s disrespecting those children by lowering expectations.

john mcwhorter

It sure is. Yeah, and that’s called antiracism. I call B.S. on that.

pamela paul

You have a catechism of contradictions in the book, this chart that illuminates some of what you see as contradictions, often directly oppositional notions that fall within the larger framework of third-wave antiracism. And some of these have kind of come up even so far. But let’s say gentrification.

john mcwhorter

Yeah, there’s a catechism, there are these directly contradictory things that the informed white person is supposed to keep in mind about race. And the fact that they cancel each other out shows that the main imperative is to show that you know racism exists, not to actually solve problems.

So for example, if white people move out of a Black neighborhood, then it’s white flight. If white people move into Black neighborhoods, then it’s called gentrification and trying to erase Blackness. Even in cases that we know of in this city, where the white people moving in pay Black people generous amounts for their houses, it’s wrong. It’s gentrification. It’s erasing Blackness. Those two things cancel each other out completely.

But if you ask, well, which one is it? White flight? Gentrification? Which one is it? Well, the person looks over your shoulder and tells you it’s complicated. But is it? It’s really just that those are two different ways of showing that you’re aware racism exists.

pamela paul

What do you make of the idea of a Black culture? And how should people who are not Black respond to that culture? I guess what I’m getting at — is there validity to the notion of cultural appropriation?

john mcwhorter

Well, I’m not always sure what people mean by Black culture. Or if I do, sometimes I worry about what they mean by it. But cultural appropriation starts as a very useful argument, that it isn’t fair for white people to ape Black cultural traits and get paid for them in a way that Black people are not.

So if you’re going to do something Black people do and sell it and get rich, where a Black person doing the same thing does not get rich or gets much less rich, sure. The classic example of that is how rock and roll was created.

But the extension of that idea is that while it’s OK for Black people to imitate white people — that’s fine — if it’s a matter of punching down — if the person in power borrows from the person who’s not in power, especially if that person is brown — then that’s wrong because you’re stealing Black people’s identity. You’re stealing what’s ours.

That’s a very athletic argument. That’s a very fragile argument. But it’s convenient because it means that when you watch white people do something almost inevitable, which is imitate Black people’s spectacular music, not to mention even things like ways of carriage and greeting and movement and certainly speech patterns, you can see white people doing that and you can say that this is racist, that white people are stealing Black people’s essence.

But of course, Black people continue to do these things, and Black people continue to do a great many things that white people don’t do. I find it a very forced argument. And the thing is you’re not going to stop cultural appropriation. It’ll never end.

And so if you want to keep riding that horse, you have a convenient way to cry racism at every second thing you see white people do. But really, isn’t it cultural appreciation, as some people are saying lately? And is there really anything so bad about it? I frankly don’t think so.

pamela paul

If woke racism is often inadvertently racist and actually aids and abets racism, does it also distract from what you might consider to be more serious problems of racism in this country?

john mcwhorter

I do. It seems to me that the people who think of themselves as crusaders on behalf of Black people, and the Black people who think of these as the good kinds of white people, tend to forget what is really involved in changing the lives of Black people who need help on the ground.

The contrast between what they talk about, what they think about, their obsessive policing of language and manners, and what people like Dr. King or Bayard Rustin or A. Philip Randolph, or frankly, even Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington — what those people did on the ground, the contrast is really grave and really dismaying. Because I think these people have lost sight of what it is to forge change, which, frankly, often isn’t as charismatic, doesn’t give you the gut-punch thrill of pushing people out of windows and chasing people out of jobs and hating on people for saying things like reverse racism.

What happened to grassroots activism? And to say we can do both is lame, because what about shunting all that energy that you put into all the cultural policing into what really changes lives? Why do both?

Because the people who were our civil rights leaders in the past weren’t doing this both. They were out on the ground trying to help people. And I think that what we have instead, too often, is a kind of charismatic kabuki.

And I worry to see a whole generation of young people of all colors being taught that that is what fighting the good fight is when there’s no evidence that all of this twerking and bumping and plieing that we’re doing now actually helps anybody’s lives. That’s the problem. How does this help? Nobody’s asking that question.

pamela paul

Let’s talk about young people and to policing of language because I’m curious what it’s like to teach in a classroom right now where you’re supposed to have discussion. And you’re a professor of linguistics. When I was in college — and this was back when politically correct was a big term in the early ‘90s — I was terrified to talk in class because it was just, it was just generally scary.

I can imagine it being even more frightening or maybe not. Maybe kids are outspoken, or maybe they’re only saying certain things. I’m just curious what it’s like for you teaching among these young people, and what do you see? Have you observed a change over the last five or 10 years in terms of what kids are willing to say or not say?

john mcwhorter

I have observed a change. And it has to be clear that I have this weird life where I comment about race issues, and I try to do that in as informed a way as I can. But what I teach is linguistics, which is this kind of wonderful but geeky field that only intersects approximately with these kinds of issues.

So in a way, I’m thankful I am not a social science professor. I don’t teach anthropology. I don’t teach poli sci. I don’t teach Black history. So I’m not really in the thick of that sort of thing the way you might think. But I have taught philosophy. I’ve even seen a sea change in the music history class that I teach, and it was actually rather abrupt.

It happened in 2013. And some years later, it became clear that everybody had noticed a change right in that exact year, in 2013. I thought, what happened?

And I did notice that in discussion, it became harder for students to speak constructively about anything interesting, frankly, because a certain kind of what we would today call woke student would shut down discussion by basically calling names to anybody who stepped outside of a certain orthodoxy.

And it’s not that that sort of thing was unheard of, say, in the ‘90s when I began teaching. There was the occasional kind of student like that. There were discussions that could be hard to have. But it got to the point in 2013 that it really did affect what kind of discussion you could foster in a class about any kind of substantive issues and where often, what you saw was students diligently checking off boxes and making sure to put things in certain ways so as not to step afoul of this certain new code.

And at first, you have this experience, and you think it’s just your one class. Then you notice it happens again. Then after a while, you start talking to other professors who are noticing the same thing.

Something happened then, and I think it had a lot to do with — some people say it’s because of helicopter parenting. I think it had a lot to do with social media becoming default. And I think that those students were the first generation who had had a phone in their hand during most of their formative, say, post-adolescent years. That must have been what made the change. But it definitely got harder.

Truth to tell, Pamela, I don’t know about now, right now, because we’ve really been off campus for a year and a half, and that kind of put a scrim curtain over everything. So I’m still getting a sense of whether anything’s changed since the beginning of 2020. But definitely, something turned upside down in 2013 and into 2014.

pamela paul

This is a short book, and it’s making a very pointed argument. It’s kind of a fierce book. And you say right up front that you have a particular audience in mind. Who are you hoping to reach, and why?

john mcwhorter

Us. And so it is not to presume, but —

pamela paul

The mainstream media? Who is us? The listeners of The Book Review Podcast.

john mcwhorter

Yes, the listeners of The Book Review Podcast at The New York Times. “Woke Racism” is not written for people who are big fans of Fox News. It’s not written for the right wing. It’s not written for card-carrying conservatives.

Now, those people are great. I completely understand. There are elements of the right wing that I really do not like right now. And I was not a fan of Donald Trump in the least.

However, I am not the kind of person who thinks that it’s automatically immoral to be conservative or to be a Republican. This book, however, is not written as fodder for the right wing to rail against the woke, because, frankly, that book wouldn’t be necessary. I kind of know what most of those people think.

This is written for people who wonder why three or four years ago, a certain contingent of the hard left started claiming that to not have their views is immoral, that there’s something wrong with you, that you need to transform how you look at the world. I think an awful lot of us are wondering what happened around that time.

And I think a lot of people like that are deeply afraid of being called a racist on social media, specifically Twitter. That’s a good thing because frankly, most Americans weren’t that afraid of being called a racist as late as, say, 1980. It’s evidence of how far we’ve come that people are so afraid of being called a racist on Twitter.

But we’ve got this cocktail, which is that you can call somebody a racist on Twitter and scare them to their socks because we have this thing called social media. And then you have a group of people who genuinely think that someone is a racist if they don’t agree with this apocalyptic, evangelical and sometimes anti-empirical view of how race and racism works.

So that means that I think most of us end up kowtowing to these people, allowing these people to have their way, allowing these people to dominate conversation because we’re petrified of them. And what made me write this book was thinking there is a reign of terror going on among thinking people in this country left of center where everybody pretends to agree with this apocalyptic, take-no-prisoners, anti-empirical, and in some ways medieval way of looking at race, because we don’t want to be called a name for disagreeing.

This book is written because I want that kind of person to realize that we have to stand up to that kind of person and just say no, I don’t accept that I’m a racist. And I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. Because if we don’t, that ideology is going to take over our intellectual, artistic and moral institutions. And one day, we’re going to look up a generation later and realize that it can’t be reversed and the only reason that it happened the way these people wanted it is because we were scared.

And so I just figure I’m not young anymore. So if somebody doesn’t like the book, one thing they can’t say is that I’m too young to have valid opinions.

pamela paul

They’ll say you’re too old to have valid opinions.

john mcwhorter

And if I gave another 10 years, I’m an old man. And so I thought since I’m 56, I’m middle-aged, but I’m still in there and vigorous. You can’t tell me that I’m old and I’m from another time, but I’m not too young to understand how life works. And last time I checked, I was Black. That person needs to write this book. And I just hope that it can help this dialogue become more constructive.

pamela paul

I just have one last question, which is to kind of flip that equation. So if the thing that white people primarily — or non-Black people — fear the most is to be thought of or accused of or to be inadvertently racist, there’s a flip side to that, which is that if someone like you — like if you were imagining the worst review of your book, the most critical review, maybe not in The New York Times, maybe on NPR, maybe somewhere else — probably one of the things would be an accusation that is sometimes made against Black people about selling out.

And there’s this idea that the media is eager to hear from Black voices who may share views that are outside of third-wave antiracism. What do you make of that kind of criticism of Black people who maybe have views outside of what you’re describing as a religion?

john mcwhorter

Well, the idea that the media is especially eating up Black thinkers who think, quote unquote “out of the proper box” is a statement with about as much correspondence to reality as saying that the sky is green. It is utter nonsense.

All you have to do is look at a mainstream media’s web page to see that, especially these days, there is a worship of Black people whose main commitment is to showing that racism is everywhere and everything. It is not that the media is particularly elevating people like me. It’s utterly and completely absurd.

But the idea that I am a sellout — the problem with that is that it implies that I, on some level, know that what I’m saying isn’t true, but I’m making a buck because I know that white people enjoy hearing me say these things. And the simple truth is, and I actually touch on this in the book, I’ve met all of the, quote unquote “sellouts.” I’ve met all of the contrarian Black thinkers at this point over the past 21 years. Not one of them is that sellout figure. I was always kind of waiting to see whether that person actually existed. No, all of them believe what they’re saying. And OK, some of them are making a buck. Some of them aren’t. But the idea that there’s this Uncle Tom figure who decides to say things that he doesn’t mean because white people like to hear it, that person just doesn’t exist.

And then we just return to the simple fact that today, white people want to be told that it’s OK to be racist? Anybody who can listen to NPR, read The New York Times, or basically just wake up in the morning, who really thinks that that’s what’s going on with white people who engage mainstream media these days, is utterly out of their minds. Somebody like me is always working against a massive wall of white people who think that I’m as much of a jerk as a lot of Black people do. It’s just not true.

So you may disagree with my views, and people are open to. And to an extent, I am open to finding out what I could do better. But the idea that I’m pointing at myself on TV and saying, look at all this fame that I might get through doing this, even though I’m saying these things that I know are kind of hokey and pushing the envelope and I’m just kind of making it all up, no, that is a fun figure to imagine.

Judas — it’s fun to imagine Judas in real life. It’s why people write plays about Judas. I’ve never met that person, and I sure as hell am not that person.

pamela paul

Well, it’s good to talk to the person that you are, John. Thank you so much for being here.

john mcwhorter

Thank you, Pamela.

pamela paul

John McWhorter is a columnist for The New York Times, a professor of linguistics at Columbia, and his latest book is called “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”

[MUSIC PLAYING] Alexandra Alter joins us now with some news from the publishing world. Hey, Alexandra.

alexandra alter

Hey, Pamela. So we’ve been talking about the difficulty that readers have had finding works by the new Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah. He’s written 10 novels, and many of them were not available in the U.S. in print when he won the Nobel Prize. And many of them remain very difficult to find for a number of reasons.

One is that he wasn’t very well known here, and so some of them had gone out of print. Also, there have been major supply chain issues, as we’ve talked about. So once he won and people are suddenly trying to buy his books, it wasn’t as easy to get them printed and stocked.

But that looks like it should be changing, if not imminently, then certainly in the next few months. There was recently a big deal that went through with Riverhead, which is an imprint of Penguin Random House. They are going to publish three of his books, including “Afterlives,” his novel that came out in the U.K. last year but wasn’t released in the U.S.

So Riverhead has the rights to “Afterlives.” And they also acquired two of his older and most important works, “By the Sea” and “Desertion.” And his agent, Peter Straus, told me that foreign rights to his books have sold in 30 territories and rising. So predictably, the Nobel set off a frenzy among publishers to nail down rights to his books.

People will have to wait till August of 2022 here to get their hands on “Afterlives.” But there are a few other books of his that are published here by Bloomsbury, for example. And they are working to restock those, and they’re expecting them later this month. So I think we’ll see a lot of his backlist popping up at the front of bookstores soon.

And I think the wonderful thing about the impact of the Nobel, particularly when it’s someone lesser known, it can really alter the course of their career and drive awareness of their work all over the world. And so I had a great conversation with Mr. Gurnah’s editor in the U.K., Alexandra Pringle. And she has worked with him for 20 years, and for 20 years has been waiting for the moment when he had his breakout book.

And she was sure it was going to be last fall with “Afterlives.” Then it didn’t sell very well. It was overlooked for the prizes. And it didn’t even come out in the U.S., unlike many of his previous books which, were published here. So she was really despondent.

And then, of course, a year later, his moment finally arrived. And she said to me, now he’s going to be published and read all over the world. He’s a master and one of Africa’s greatest living writers.

So for people who have been championing his work but not really helping him find an audience for so long, it’s quite exciting. And so I think more American readers are going to discover him as well.

pamela paul

So when can readers expect to see these books back in stores?

alexandra alter

Some of his work, including his novel “Paradise,” is already available in a lot of stores because The New Press, which publishes that, put it in a print-on-demand program. So those get printed and shipped directly to consumers from a warehouse.

Others will be available later this month. And for “Afterlives,” which is his most recent book, that’s not coming out until summer of next year.

pamela paul

All right, Alexandra. Thanks so much for being here.

alexandra alter

Thanks for having me. [MUSIC PLAYING]

pamela paul

Joining us now to talk about what they are reading and reviewing are critics Dwight Garner and Jennifer Szalai. Hey, guys.

dwight garner

Hi, Pamela.

jennifer szalai

Hi, Pamela.

pamela paul

Jen, let’s start with you. What did you review recently?

jennifer szalai

So I reviewed a book called “The End of Bias,” and it’s by a writer named Jessica Nordell. And actually, I feel like the full title of the book gives the scope of what she’s trying to do here. It’s called “The End of Bias: A Beginning: The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias, which is completely unwieldy, but I think it shows the scope that she’s trying to cover.

So the last part of it, about the science and practice of overcoming unconscious bias, it makes it sound like a standard-issue business-type sciencey book. And that is one part of it. But she is also a really reflective and capacious thinker, and she’s really trying to put this into a larger social context.

And so what she does is she looks at the ways that unconscious bias and discrimination work in the workplace and policing. She even, toward the end of the book, looks at as serious a subject as genocide. And she wants to draw a distinction between explicit, unvarnished cruelty, where people intentionally do harm, and she contrasts that with what we call implicit bias or unconscious bias, where there’s a situation where people might have a self-image of themselves as extremely tolerant and open-minded, but when it comes down to it, they actually engage in discriminatory behavior.

And so one of the things she wants to do is she wants to show how this is something that, in terms of how it’s practiced but also how it’s experienced, it’s really cumulative. So it’s something that compounds over time. And so what she did is she teamed up with a computer scientist, and she created a simulation where she injected just a tiny percentage of bias in terms of the difference between how, for example, men and women were treated. And what she found is —

pamela paul

It was, like, 3 percent, right?

jennifer szalai

It was, like, 3 percent. It was, like, a fraction. But over just a few iterations of this — you cycle through promotions, for instance — and by the end — I can’t remember how many, but it was maybe, like, seven or eight iterations — 82% of the leaders in the company were men.

So I think now people think of it, obviously, more systemically. But people often talk about it in terms of a particular comment or a meeting. And what she wants to show is that this is something that you have to look at it longitudinally. You have to look at it as something that happens over and over and over again.

And she also examines her own experience with unconscious bias, not just on the receiving end, but as somebody who herself had certain blind spots. This is a book, I think, for anybody who is interested in the ways that, for instance, how human psychology can have these outsize social effects. She really does a good job, I think, of distilling the research and also injecting her own perspective into it.

pamela paul

There was a book that came out a couple of years ago called “Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do” by Jennifer Eberhardt. And I’m curious if you read that — that was 2019 — and how this book differs from a book like that.

jennifer szalai

Eberhardt is a psychologist. And she herself is somebody who has actually done firsthand research of this stuff. So what Nordell does is she does look at Eberhardt’s research and incorporates it into this book, but Nordell herself is more of a science writer. She herself is not an actual researcher. And so she takes that, and then she pieces it together with the research that other people have done. And then — Eberhardt does this, too — but what Nordell wants to do is also look at it from the perspective of, OK, well, what does this mean about us as a human society? And is bias inevitable? Is it something that we can overcome?

Nordell does argue that there is both more hope and there’s more hopefulness in the fact that people actually are hypocritical, that they have this often high-minded idea of themselves but they behave in different ways. And she says in that hypocrisy is actually the possibility for change. But what it means is that it’s just going to take a lot more work.

pamela paul

All right. We have a theme going on this week, I think. Dwight, tell us about the book you reviewed this week.

dwight garner

I had the good luck, Pamela, to review Wil Haygood’s new book. It’s called “Colorization: 100 Years of Black Films in a White World.” I’m kind of a movie freak, and I thought I had a pretty good idea — a moderately good idea — of Black movie history. But it turns out I really didn’t.

And two things — one, Haygood is a prolific writer. He’s written biographies of a lot of people — Thurgood Marshall and Sammy Davis Jr. and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. And I was really impressed with the craftsmanship in this book. He tells it really well. He takes one story and ties into the next in a way that makes the history of Black filmmaking seem like a seamless garment in a really interesting way that — it really reads, this book.

But there were figures — for example, well, he starts out, the first chapter is called “Movie Night at Woodrow Wilson’s White House.” And you think, what is this going to be?

pamela paul

Oh, this is —

dwight garner

“Birth of a Nation.”

pamela paul

“Birth of a Nation,” yeah.

dwight garner

But you didn’t remember — at least I didn’t remember — was that Woodrow Wilson had a personal stake in this movie. It was based on a novel written by his best friend — or one of his best friends, Thomas Dixon Jr. And D.W. Griffith, who made the film, used some of Wilson’s own writing in these sort of interstitial explanatory frames. So it’s just a very interesting start.

And then he moves on to tell the story of a man who I now want to know a lot more about, Oscar Micheaux, a Black filmmaker who was a Pullman porter and a farmer who became a novelist, and then in the ‘20s and ‘30s and even ‘40s directed a lot of movies. And they played in Black-owned theaters and weren’t reviewed by white publications. Anyway, from these two stories, Haygood goes on just to tell the story writ large of Black cinema.

pamela paul

Do you remember at the end of the Spike Lee movie “Bamboozled” — which was not a perfect movie, but I think the most powerful part of it was the end sequence. This was a 2000 satire of network television’s racism and prejudice. But at the end, he does a very quick history of the portrayal of Black people in cinema. Did either of you see that?

dwight garner

I did. One thing Haygood picks up on is how Spike Lee is so aware in all of his movies — not just the present, but he’s always, always filling his movies with nods to the past, not just history but Black cinema.

pamela paul

This book sounds like a much more in-depth, expanded and complete book version of that.

dwight garner

I’ve said this before in this podcast, but one reason why nonfiction books often are better than novels is that at least in a bad nonfiction book, you can learn something. A bad novel is just a bad time. This happens to be a very good book. But it also, as I skimmed along, I just made lists of films that I want to see. And there are a lot of them.

pamela paul

Ooh, give us a list.

dwight garner

Before I do that, I also spent an afternoon just watching a lot of trailers for some of these movies. And I reminded myself — and I write this in the review — that watching trailers purposefully, like watching all the trailers from some director’s career, is really a great way to spend a bit of time if you’re just sitting there with your laptop.

There’s a pre-code movie called “Baby Face” from 1933 —

pamela paul

Oh, yeah.

dwight garner

— with Barbara Stanwyck and the Black actress Theresa Harris. The other ones I wrote down are “Home of the Brave”; “Lilies of the Field” with Sidney Poitier; “Duel at Diablo,” also with Poitier and James Garner; “Sounder,” “Cane River,” “Get On the Bus” — that’s a Spike Lee movie about the Million Man March, which I now realize I haven’t seen. So I do want to see it — and a comedy called “Love Jones,” which came out, I think, about two decades ago, which is sort of undervalued.

pamela paul

I want to hijack the podcast now and just talk about movies. Can we do that?

dwight garner

Let’s do that.

pamela paul

Tell us something that really surprised you.

dwight garner

Something that really surprised me — I don’t know. There was a great chapter on the making of “The Wiz.” Remember “The Wiz“? The Black “Wizard of Oz” —

pamela paul

Yes.

jennifer szalai

Oh, yeah.

dwight garner

Did anyone see it? I don’t think I did see it.

jennifer szalai

I saw it, but ages ago.

dwight garner

It’s funny. Do you remember at all why that film crashed and burned?

jennifer szalai

No.

dwight garner

Does anyone? Here’s what Haygood says. Haygood says that Diana Ross, who starred as Dorothy, was simply too old for the part. And I watched the trailer, and it’s so true. She’s a lovely actress, but she looks about 37. And it’s about a teenager. And somehow, the fact that she’s — just doesn’t seem like Dorothy character kind of makes the movie not resonate quite as much.

He has a great chapter on “Porgy and Bess” because the film of it, the Otto Preminger film, came out, like, 25 years after Gershwin’s opera. And by the time it came out, it was really dated and the movie was really scorned by young Black playwrights and people in Hollywood. Just to see Sidney Poitier on his knees crying for this, as Lorraine Hansberry put it, wench in a slit skirt, it just wasn’t the movie for its time. And he goes through a lot of failures as well as a lot of movies that did really well.

pamela paul

Is this the kind of book that you read through beginning to end or something you want to flip around through?

dwight garner

No, it’s beginning to end. A lot of us who work in book reviews and criticism write books of our own sometimes. And it’s funny. Just as a writer, the writer in me admired the hell out of Haygood’s — the way he’s structured this book really interested me.

It was kind of like one of those movies like “Slacker” — if we remember “Slacker,” since we’re talking about movies — in which one character meets the next character, and suddenly you’re off with the next character. The whole movie is changed entirely.

This book sort of reads that way. He takes you through one person’s life and kind of seamlessly passes the baton to another story. So you feel like he’s telling you a series of stories that nonetheless create a wide history.

pamela paul

OK, thanks, Dwight. I still want you to email me a list of movies. Let’s run down the titles of the books that you each reviewed, starting with you, Jen.

jennifer szalai

I reviewed “The End of Bias” by Jessica Nordell.

dwight garner

And I reviewed “Colorization: 100 Years of Black Films in a White World” by Wil Haygood.

pamela paul

Remember, there’s more at nytimes.com/books. And you can always write to us at books@nytimes.com. I write back — not right away, but I do. The Book Review Podcast is produced by the great Pedro Rosado from HeadStepper Media with a major assist from my colleague John Williams. Thanks for listening. For The New York Times, I’m Pamela Paul.

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