A Conversation with Sam Graham-Felsen - Season 3, Episode 3

Welcome to The Book Love Foundation Podcast! And thank you for joining us in this celebration of teaching and the joy of learning.

In this episode, Penny’s conversation with Sam Graham-Felsen, author of Green, a novel.

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Season 3 Ep 2 Show notes

Sam Graham-Felsen s debut novel Green was recently selected as one of 10 adult books with special appeal to teen readers to receive the 2019 Alex Awards by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) division of the American Library Association (ALA).

It was also recognized as a New York Times Editor s Pick, an Indie Next selection, one of Amazon s Best Books of the Month, one of Six Debuts to Watch for in 2018 by Barnes and Noble, and one of the New Yorker s Books We Loved in 2018. 

His nonfiction writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, The Nation, and elsewhere. From, 2007-2008, he worked as the chief blogger on Barack Obama s presidential campaign.

Sam is currently at work on more fiction and serves as an adjunct assistant professor of creative writing at Columbia University.

You can connect with him on Facebook or contact him through his website.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Book Love Foundation podcast. The Book Love Foundation is a non-profit 501 3(c) dedicated to putting books in the hands of teachers dedicated to nurturing the individual reading lives of their middle and high school students. If you can help us in our mission, visit booklovefoundation.org and make a donation. 100% of what you give goes to books.
– Penny

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Creators and Guests

Host

Penny Kittle

Penny is Chairman of the Book Love Foundation and is dedicated to helping students and teachers develop a passion for reading and writing. She has taught English and coached literacy in public schools for 34 years.

Guest

Sam Graham-Felsen

What is The Book Love Foundation Podcast?

Celebrate the joy of reading with the Book Love Foundation podcast. This is a show filled with information and inspiration from teachers and leaders across grade levels, states, and school systems. We interviewed authors and educators for the first five years and now turn our attention to leaders in public, private, and charter schools. Find out more at booklovefoundation.org or join our book-love-community.mn.co of 2500 educators from 28 countries. We sustain joy together, one kid and one book at a time.

Kevin Carlson 00:00
This podcast is produced for the Book Love Foundation, in partnership with the teacher learning sessions, connecting teachers with ideas, experts and each other.

Sam Graham Felsen 00:12
This is a coming of age novel, but I also think of it as a coming of awareness novel. It's kind of about his journey of understanding what it actually means to be white in America. What these terms that we hear floated around like white privilege, what that actually means in concrete terms.

Penny Kittle 00:32
Welcome to season three of the Book Love Foundation podcast. I'm Penny Kittle and I'm your host, sitting here in my house, escaping the five degree weather outside my door, and I swear to you, the snow banks in my driveway are almost eight feet high. Some winter. I got one thing to say about this tail end of winter, and that is, if you have not yet turned in your application for a Book Love Foundation grant, get to it. They are due March 15, and on that day, we will start reading and sorting through hundreds of applications from wonderful teachers, just like you who are looking to boost their classroom libraries with a grant of $2,000 which will buy you about 200 to 250 books. But one last thing about winter, it makes me long for summer, and this summer, the Book Club Foundation, summer book club is going to be incredible. I have four authors who have written terrific books that we're going to read together. Last year, we had 1200 teachers from all over the world in our book club, and I think we're going to have even more this year, so don't miss it. Watch the booklovefoundation.org website for more information. But today, on the Book Love Foundation podcast, you'll find an interview with Sam Felson Graham, whose novel Green just won an ALEX Award from the American Library Association. They honor 10 books each year that are written for adults, but have a special appeal to teenagers. Now, my interest in Green started when I read several reviews on it in major publications, and I was curious about this interracial friendship between two 6 graders. The novel focuses on a young white boy who attends an almost all black Middle School in Boston. Now, segregation, as you know, is still alive and well in this country. And according to a recent article from the American Society of sociologists, that has increased in the last 13 years by 6 million students, there are now 20 million students of color who attend racially and socio-economically isolated public schools. You might even teach in one. What I found fascinating in this book was how the white boy misses obvious signs of his own racism and the world's. Sometimes I found myself thinking that my own understanding of racism is about at a middle school level. It's humbling to watch this boy's missteps and recognize how often I still fall short. I'm reading, I'm listening, I'm learning, but I have a ways to go, and I think this novel is one way to do more of that thinking together. Our interview begins with Sam talking about growing up in Boston.

Sam Graham Felsen 03:32
I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, in a neighborhood called Jamaica Plain, which was very still is a very progressive neighborhood. When I was there, it was kind of in the early stages of gentrification. It was it had previously been more of a Irish working class neighborhood with pockets of Latino and African American and Caribbean folks. And by the time I was growing up there, sort of young urban educated professionals had started buying up cheap Victorian houses. And that's the kind of house I grew up in, a two family house and and and a lot of my close friends were the children of political activists that my parents were friends with, and so most of my friends and I went to The Boston Public Schools, which by the 1980s were overwhelmingly black and Latino. There were very few white kids left in the public schools because of massive white flight, which which started in the 1970s when the public schools were integrated through bussing. So So most white parents. Uh, took their kids out of the public school system, either sent them to parochial schools or private schools, or just left the city altogether. And but my parents, they were political activists. My friends, friends parents were political activists. So they really believed in public school and in racial justice, and they sent us to public schools that were mostly black and Latino, and we were the we were the few white kids in those schools. And it just, it was, it was something that was a life changing experience for me, to be white, to know that, you know, I was part of, obviously, the power, the dominant power group in America, and I had that awareness, particularly because, like I said, my parents were activists who raised us with strong political consciousness, but but in a school setting where You know, just being the odd person out can make you a loser, can make you feel alienated, can kind of put you on the bottom of the social pecking order. You know, that was, that was also a really challenging experience for me, and I wanted to, I just wanted to write about what it was like, because, you know, it's a relatively unique experience to be white in the United States and feel like the other. You know, most of the time, white people do not feel like the other. So I wanted to, I wanted to write about that. And for years, I kind of had a fantasy of writing a novel, but I literally had no idea how to write fiction. I had never even tried. I was I wanted to, but I was too scared. I didn't think I'd be able to do it. So I kind of just put it off and put it off. And followed a career in journalism, and I ended up working on the Obama campaign, but that kind of gave me even more of a kick to try to tell my own story, to try to, you know, share the unique experience that I had, you know, and share whatever insights I might have about race in America and and I finally, at around age 31 decided to go and get an MFA so I could learn How to write fiction. And eventually wrote this novel. And of course, it's a novel, it's fiction. Most of the scenes in this book are made up, and that required a lot of work to make up those scenes. It was hard to make up those scenes, but a lot of the details and a lot of the kind of emotions that Dave feels were things that I felt as a kid, and were certainly things that I was familiar with and went through and so, so, in a way, you know, I guess, I guess you could call it a seminoir or a semi memoir, but really it's, it's a work of fiction based on my life experiences.

Penny Kittle 08:00
Yeah, you know, it's interesting that you classify it like that, because I thought a lot about that as I was reading it. I was in sixth grade in the 70s, and the students from across town in Portland, Oregon, were bused into our K8 school. And so in the setting, kind of, you know, a generation or a decade before you experienced it, I was experiencing it from the other side. We were still the dominant group this white neighborhood, but there was a lot of tension in the city and in our school as a result of bussing and so, you know, reading this book, it was a real journey for me. I think one of the things, as I mentioned in my notes to you, my daughter worked at the Rogers Middle School in Jamaica Plain as part of City Year, straight out of Providence College, where she majored in public service, and she became really committed to urban education. She spent five years in charter schools and is now at Boston College in their urban education program, the Donovan program. But this journey of progressives to understand and try to mitigate some of the institutional racism that's a part of our culture. I think has to be in this novel that you've created, I think that it mimics, his 12 year old voice, kind of mimics the journey that many people are on to understand what they're missing, like he misses so many things that, because of our current culture, I picked up on quickly, but I knew I didn't pick up on them as a as a 12 year old. Does that make sense?

Sam Graham Felsen 09:33
Yeah. And, and, to be clear, I think Dave, in a lot of ways, was more naive than I was as a kid, and I created him that way deliberately because I wanted him to have, you know, a journey where he learns gradually throughout the book, in a way. I mean, this is a coming of age novel, The. It about a boy, you know, going through puberty, going through changes, sort of inching his way towards Bar Mitzvah age and eventually adulthood. But I also think of it as a kind of coming of coming of awareness. Novel, it's kind of about his journey of understanding what it actually means to be white in America, what? What these terms that we hear floated around like white privilege, what that actually means in concrete, in concrete terms. So, so you know, he enters the school, and like you know, most ordinary kids, his main concern is being cool, being accepted, getting a girlfriend, finding friends, and he is not cool for a variety of reasons. And one of the reasons is that he stands out a lot for the way that he dresses, the way that he talks, and just the fact that he is white and looks different from the other kids and and so early on in the book, a lot of what he experienced is just, is just resentment. He is annoyed primarily at his parents for sending him to this school. He doesn't understand why he can't be like other white kids and go to private school or go live in the suburbs where you can, you know, not be in the minority and not stand out so much. And he's not quite, he's really, he's not at all, you know, kind of sensitive to the ways in which, you know, he has all of these privileges over his black classmates, you know, that afford him real privileges and power in the world outside of the school. You know he's just, he's not, he's not at a place of maturity where he can really soak that in until he befriends a classmate of his Marlin, who's a black student who lives in the housing projects near Dave's house in Jamaica Plain. And it's when Dave and Marlon go out into, you know, the real world, when they go to a store and Marlon is questioned by the owner of the store, and Dave is not questioned by the owner of the store when, you know they're they're taking an entrance, entrance exam to the prestigious High School Boston Latin, and the proctor of the exam catches Dave copying off of Marlon and and let's it, lets it slide, which, which, you know, is not something that he would have done had he caught Marlon cheating off of Dave? You know, it's these little experiences over and over of Dave getting away with things that Marlon doesn't that kind of gradually wake Dave up to the fact that, you know, even though he thinks his life is hard, it's nothing compared to, you know the challenges and structural hurdles someone like Marlon faces, and it was hard for me to write this book. It was painful for me to write this book. It was painful for me to show Dave being so blind for so much of this book, but it felt important to me, because it felt like, you know, if I wrote a book about a kid who was just, you know, racially aware from day one and did the right thing and stood up against racism, you know, it might make me feel good. It might make me feel self righteous, but it wouldn't be very realistic. Because, you know, frankly, a lot of us, and I'm no exception to this at all, really do struggle with biases. And you know, even those of us who you know really think of ourselves as progressive and aware, have a lot of blind spots. And so it was important to me to show that in the book and and to show that, you know, waking up to racial inequalities, waking up to white privilege, isn't easy, and it's not something you know, a lot of us particularly want to do, but it's something that we have to do if we're going to get if we're really going to make progress in this country. And you know, I really think that, you know, racism is, in a way, the root of many of our biggest problems, because until we can solve racism, and we're not going to solve racism, but until we can make some progress, you know, on the racial front, we're we're going To remain divided and polarized. So much of our polarization, I think, comes back to racial polarization, and until we can solve our racial polarization, we're not going to be able to solve big problems like global warming and climate change and the public education crisis and health care and everything else. So so you know. These, these issues are important to me, and that's why I wrote a novel about it. But of course, you know, I was very aware. I don't want to, you know, hammer people over the head with propaganda. I don't want to, you know, try to slam home a message. I want to tell a story, you know, about characters who feel human and let people kind of make their own conclusions. It was a very different thing for me to write fiction than to, you know, work in politics, which I did before, and politics is all about having a strong message and trying to tell people, you know, how they should think about policies and things like that. Fiction is a very different kind of game.

Penny Kittle 15:37
I can only imagine. I've always wanted to write it, but I've always written professionally for teachers, and what I published not what I scribble in my notebook, but there's, you know, there are a couple things that I thought were really interesting about your book. And one was that I've had a number of people read it since I've been talking about it, who tell me that it's very hard for them to get through the first two chapters, three chapters, like it was for me, because David has this voice that he's, you know, as one reviewer said, cobbling together from what's nearest at hand, which are the other students. So he's appropriating their way of speaking, just like you said, because he's trying to fit in. To me, it was very 12 year old like you captured the narrator. This, this young boy trying to figure things out. But I think the rest of the book shows that you're a much different writer than that in those first few chapters where you you put that voice together. You know, how did you did you struggle with that? Were those hard to write?

Sam Graham Felsen 16:32
You know, I thought a lot about the beginning of the book, and I and I know that I risked turning some people off. You know, having Dave have such a sort of strong vernacular slang kind of voice, but it felt, it felt important to me to stick with the experiment that I had set out to to test out in this novel, which was, you know, what, what is it like for a to be the white kid at a mostly black school? What is that actually like, right? And, and the first, you know, the first phase of Dave's experience is, actually, he goes to school. He's not fitting in very well. And one of the one of the biggest faux pas that he makes is that he uses the wrong word. He says the word awesome, yeah. This is actually a detail that was taken from my from my life. I it went on my first day of sixth grade. There. Was back then we had, like, TVs in the classroom, and there was some ridiculous sort of corporate scam thing where it was supposedly educational programming, you know, for the first 15 minutes of the day. But mostly we just saw ads for video games and things like that. And and there was an ad for some video games, for some Nintendo game. And of course, my parents were, you know, progressive hippies, so they didn't let me have video games. And I saw the I saw this ad, and I said out loud, awesome. And I got such hell for saying that. I got made fun of so badly for saying the word awesome, which, back then, was just like a totally white, you know, surfer kind of word, and not a word that kids in my school used. And so, so, so I fictionalized that. In the novel, I had Dave say the word awesome, I think in the novel, he says it about the fact that the cafeteria is serving Taco Bell, seasoned tacos and but, but that was an important moment for me, because, you know, that was his first major faux pas. And, and he learns from that to, you know, to quickly adapt and and not use quote, unquote white words anymore. And, you know, and so for so much of the early stages of the book, before he develops this friendship with Marlon, which is the core of the novel, he is just desperately trying to be cool, to fit in and to stand out as little as possible. So it's kind of, you know, I understand why you know some people you know think that, you know Dave, is that his language is, you know, makes them uncomfortable, and that it that it feels like appropriation, because, of course, he is using, you know, African American Vernacular, you know, but, but really, it was, for Dave, just a like a survival strategy. It wasn't the same as, you know, a white rock musician just stealing, you know, black music to profit off of it. It was, it was a, you know, it was a situation in which Dave, you know, felt that his only way to sort of disappear into the crowd. Little bit more was to minimize his whiteness as much as possible. Then, of course, what ends up happening in the book, once he develops this friendship with Marlon is he realizes that, like around Marlon, who is black, but is very open minded and sort of uninterested in, you know, the social conventions that Dave is So, you know, sort of cowed by. He realizes that he can, that he can be just himself in front of Marlin. He can, he can, you know, be nerdy in front of them. He can use, you know, words that he might not use in front of his other classmates in front of Marlon, because, because Marlon, you know, sees Dave as an individual and as a human being. And Dave slowly realizes that, like, you know, yes, Marlins black, but he but he doesn't have to perform in front of Marlin he doesn't have to act a different way in front of Marlon. And Marlon doesn't expect him to act a different way. He can be himself. And so that's a lot of the that, that's another element of Dave's evolution in the book, is is realizing like he doesn't have to imprison himself in these rules that he thinks he must follow in order to, you know, be cool. In fact, like, the more he drops the pretense of, you know, acting quote, unquote black, the closer he can become to an actual black person to Marlon, but, but, but also, I just want to say that, you know, I I really also had a lot of fun playing with the language in the book. And, you know, Dave, Dave's language changes a little bit throughout the book. I mean, it's very, very slang heavy in the beginning, and it becomes a little bit less so, you know, as the book progresses. But, but I really enjoyed using the Dave's voice, to kind of invent new words. There are a lot of words in this book that I just invented, and some people were confused, and they were like, I had to Google a lot of these words. And don't worry, don't worry, I just made some of these words up. But, but, you know, hip hop was the was the culture of my youth. It was the music that I loved. It's the music that, still, you know, can move me to tears. It's the way that, you know, Bob Dylan was the was the guy that moves my parents to tears because I was their guy in the 60s, like early 90s, hip hop is, is the music that moves me and the language that moves me and and there's so much inventiveness and and verbal creativity in hip hop, and so much so many new coinages. And, you know, even today, like so many of the new words that are just now in the dictionary come from hip hop. And so I had, I had fun just playing with the with the American language by, you know, using these kind of hip hop idioms to create new language. And, you know, that was something that, you know, I realize is a risk, and I realize can turn some people off because of very important discussions that are happening right now about cultural appropriation. But, but it was something that you know, honestly comes from, from just a deep love for the language that I have, and probably will always have.

Penny Kittle 23:31
That's that's an interesting observation, and it really, definitely deepens my thinking about that voice. I want to go back and read it again. I am, I have to say I loved Marlon as a character. And in fact, the scene when he sings in front of that entire room, and his voice just fills the room, was just so powerful for me. I think you've painted him as this beautiful, sensitive young boy. That's an interesting contrast. I mean, I love the scenes where the two of them are just boys, you know, wrestling, or following the Celtics, of course, and and just being boys. But there's also this distinct difference between them based on, of course, the situations they come from. But I really loved him, and I thought a lot about how, I don't know if you read All American Boys, Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, that's great. Oh, it's terrific. But the authors, Jason Reynolds is black, of course, and Brendan Kiely's white, created the two characters, and their two voices work really well. And I wondered if you thought about trying to write both voices. I'm glad you didn't, but I was just curious if you thought about trying to write it that way.

Sam Graham Felsen 24:40
Yeah, you know, I did think about it, because there were so many things that I wanted to say that I couldn't in Dave's voice. And, you know, I really wanted to get into Marlon's head. You know, particularly to you. To get into his feelings about what it was like growing up with, you know, a mother struggling with mental illness. You know what it was like for him to, you know, get teased because he befriended Dave. You know what it was like for him to, you know, go to Dave's house and, you know, go to Harvard, you know, with Dave and Dave's, you know, Harvard educated mother, and be around all these privileged white people. I really, I really felt a great temptation to get into his head. And not only Marlon said, but I would have loved to have gotten into the parent. Dave's parents had heads, for example, and, you know, depicted what it was like for them to struggle with, you know, the choice that they had made to send their kid to a public school, you know, and what it was like for them when, you know, Dave had a knife pulled on him or was getting bullied on the bus, you know. So there were, there were lots of different people that I wished I could have sort of gotten into their voices and articulated, you know, their own inner thought processes. But, you know, I made, I made this choice to write the book in first person. And part of the reason I made that choice is, as I was saying earlier, I just, I really love language, and I wanted to write a very voicey novel. I wanted to write a voice driven novel. And sometimes not always, but sometimes when you're writing from the third person, you know the narrator tends to be this sort of removed, sometimes drier voice. And I wanted a very wet voice. I wanted a very like, a very distinct voice. So many of the books that I love, particularly coming of age novels, are written in the first person, and Huckleberry Finn, which is, which is probably my favorite book of all time, is written in the first person. And so, you know, I was just excited by the idea Dave like, Huckleberry is 12, you know, Huckleberry Finn is a book, you know, obviously our most famous book about an interracial friendship. And this is a book about an interracial friendship. And I'm not saying I, you know, set out to to write the, you know, 20th century version of Huck Finn, but I was inspired by by, you know, the voice experiment, and Huck Finn and and I think for me, part of what is so profound about that book is that we never get into Jim's head and we see Huck do unbelievably hurtful things to Jim, and we just have to, we just have to sort of watch Jim's reaction through Huck's eyes. There's a, there's a really powerful scene that that honestly makes me cry when I reread it, every time I reread it, where, you know, Huck plays a trick on Jim, and I can't remember the exact details, but they're, they're somehow separated off of the raft for a little while, and and, and Jim thinks that that Huck has gone missing, and Huck is, you know, just, just playing a game and messing with with Jim and and he, you know, is really taking advantage of Jim, who is in this, like, unbelievably precarious situation as a runaway slave, who, if he's caught, will, you know, most likely be sent back into slavery, or, you know, lynched. And you know, the stakes couldn't be higher for Jim. And here Huck is playing games with him, and and we just see Jim say to Huck, you know, I can't believe you did that to me. You know, I would never do that to you. All we can do as readers of that book is see it from Huck's perspective. So we get a little bit of Huck's reaction where he's just a little bit chastened and starts to feel like, wow, Jim is actually a human being, and not just, you know, a play thing, you know. And and I have, like, really devastated him with my actions, and to me, seeing, you know, Huck's gradual awareness and awakening was like, really, you know, a profound thing. And so I don't know, I'm not sure if, like, would the book? Would the book be less powerful if we could always get, you know, Jim's perspective, and, you know, delve into his inner thought process about Huck. I'm not sure if it would be less powerful, but, but it wouldn't be the same kind of book. And you know, so So for me, the experiment of writing Green was really just to show a reader what this interracial friendship is like, only from the white kids perspective, and half of the story gets lost when you write it that way. Marlins side of the story gets lost when you write it that way. But what you can gain from, I think, only seeing it from one perspective is just that, that gradual bit by bit awareness of you know, how Dave's ignorance is starting to wear on and affect Marlon and, you know? And so that was, that was the experiment that I stuck with throughout the book.

Penny Kittle 30:09
Yeah, I have two quotes from the book that I want to talk about in. The first one is the grandfather. This is what David's grandfather says, I stopped damning America and started hitting the books, and guess what? The sweat turned into a PhD. That's the grandfather, right? Cramps. That's not the American dream. I don't buy that silly phrase. I'm a mathematician, and I could care less about dreams. That's the American formula. You get what you put in, and if you end up a have not it's because you have not worked. You want to succeed. Burn up your excuse card as soon as possible. And it just struck me as I read it. Oh, my word. That's the old lie, the American dream. You know, I live here in rural New Hampshire, and I taught kids for 21 years at our high school, many of whom thought Gatsby was the most insulting book we could hand them, because their parents had struggled. Their grandparents had struggled. They come from generational poverty, and in fact, no one in their family had ever finished high school, let alone gone to college. And for them, it's such a lie because they would see like I saw my own father work hard day after day after day. He was not using an excuse card, but we tend to blame students of color and students who grew up in poverty for not overcoming the institutional systems and practices that I believe intentionally keep them down.

Sam Graham Felsen 31:29
Yeah, and you know that so that speech delivered by Dave's grandfather, who Dave lovingly and resentfully calls cramps, that that speech happens when when kramps visits Dave's class, ostensibly to talk about his experience as a holocaust refugee, but he basically decides that he doesn't want to tell the class at all about, you know, what it was like being victimized by the Nazis, and only wants to talk about how great America is, and he ends up delivering this, you know, fairly condescending speech to a room full of, you know, kids who are facing extreme structural barriers about, you know, how there's this thing called the American formula, that it really is as simple as hard work times gumption times whatever equals, you know, success in America, and you know, this is, this is something that he is saying as a Jewish American, who is, you know, who has experienced unbelievable, you know, truly, life threatening discrimination in Europe, but has been given, you know, a green light to pursue his dreams in America. And it's, it's hard for him to relate to the fact that, you know, the kids in the room that he's addressing are, you know, are facing, you know, the kind of systemic discrimination and barriers that he was facing in Europe. And he is, you know, just too blind to see that, because to him, America is so wonderful compared to Germany that, you know, it's this perfect place where, you know, dreams come true. Of course, he doesn't believe in dreams where formulas come true. But I so I set that up. First of all, I set that up as a contrast to another speech that the kids hear earlier in the book, where they visit the office of a an African American city counselor named Skip Taylor, who is a radical, Harvard educated city councilor who basically delivers the opposite message to the kids. And he says, You know, I know you came here to hear about my inspiring story, about how I, you know, made it up from poverty and got a Harvard diploma and so successful. But I'm here to tell you that that Horatio Alger American Dream story is a myth, and that, you know this, this system is set up with, you know, structural barriers to keep the vast majority of you from succeeding like I did. So you know, I want you to leave here with the message, not that you know you can make it with hard work, but I'd rather leave you here with the message that you need to change the system by banding together, becoming active in the process and overturning these structural barriers. Otherwise, we're going to continue to have a situation where, you know, one out of 10 might, you know, make it through these barriers, but the rest of us, no matter how talented we are, how hard working we are, are going to get held back, which, you know, unfortunately has been, you know, the story for so many, you know, for so many people in America who, no matter how hard they work and how honest they are, still are not making it. And, you know, so. So I wanted to show kind of a contrast of those, of those two perspectives. And there was a part of me that was even timid about writing, about writing that scene where the grandfather, know, tells the kids, you know, just to work their butts off. He he even says very insensitively, I think, you know, you can always go join the military and, and, but, but I decided I wanted to include that because, and I'm trying to figure out a way to say this without a major spoiler, because I don't want to spoil it for people who haven't yet read the book. Thank you. But, but, but there, there is some. There's something that is going on with Marlon that is not yet apparent to the readers and is not apparent to Dave, and that makes him hearing the grandfather's speech incredibly painful, you know. And so I wanted, I wanted the speech to exist there for that reason. And I will say, like, you know, there's a line in the book, in the first chapter that gave me a chuckle to write, where, where, Dave says, All we ever get is motivationally spoken to. And I have to say, like, as a kid growing up in mostly black public schools, like you get a lot of motivational speakers coming in, you know, to the school, you know, encouraging you to work your butt off, and, you know, basically telling you that, you know, that you can make it in America with, with, with hard work. So you hear that kind of stuff all the time, you know, as as a white kid, you know, it was kind of in one ear out the other. But I, you know, as I was writing this book, you know, I was thinking about, like, what it must have been like for my black and Latino classmates, who, you know, faced so much discrimination to just hear this kind of oversimplified story that if, if you didn't make it in America, it was your own fault. And how hurtful and stressful that must have been for all of those kids to think, gosh, like, if I, if I don't score well on this, on this standardized test that was, you know, probably written by white people and, you know, like and has all kinds of biases locked into this test. If I don't score well on this standardized test, no matter how hard I worked, like, if I don't score well on this like, it must indicate that that I'm a failure, rather than that the system has failed me. And, you know, it, it, I mean, it makes me really sad to think about. You know, just, just how damaging to self esteem. Those kind of messages must have actually been like for a lot of these kids, even though they were intended to, of course, boost self esteem.

Penny Kittle 37:33
You know, that reminds me. Lisa Delpit, I don't know if you've ever read her work, but she wrote other people's children and multiplication is for white people, just a really powerful, powerful writer. And she says that teachers have to be warm demanders. We expect a great deal of our students convince them of their own brilliance. To me, that's such a powerful combination, and then create this, you know, disciplined, structured environment where that can happen. And I think that that does more than any motivational speech any day convince them of their own brilliance.

Sam Graham Felsen 38:05
Yeah, absolutely, and, but, but I will also say, like, you know, one of the things that I couldn't get into in the book because, you know, again, it's written from a 12 year old's perspective. But you know, so much of the history that is kind of haunting this book is the history of segregated schools and just segregation period in America. And, you know, I did, I did research on the effects of segregation in schools, in college, actually, I wrote my college thesis about about school segregation. And, you know, and I read a lot of history books about segregation and and its effects, as I was, as I was writing green and, you know, I think, I think, you know, one of the things that we just don't talk enough about in this country is the fact that our schools are profoundly segregated. And in fact, schools in the north are more segregated than schools in the south. And you know, we had Brown versus Board of Education, which is this thing that we all celebrate. And I remember, you know, in history reading about it, and you know all of us feeling so great about this great moral triumph that, you know, the courts had overturned segregation, and yet we still have segregated schools. And I think, I think as long as we have a system that puts, you know, kids of color in schools that are separate from from white kids who, you know, not always, but, you know, often carry a lot of the privileges of of whiteness, you know, with them, and the resources that come along with that. And you know, the tax revenue that come from being in, you know, high income, you know, white neighborhoods that fund the schools like as long as we have segregated schools and. Um, you know, it's going to be, it's going to be really tough to have educational, you know, equity in in outcomes on tests, on, you know, on, on, on other measures of achievement. And it's just not, it's just desegregating schools. Is just not something that is talked about a lot, although recently, particularly the work of Nikole Hannah Jones, who's a wonderful writer and has highlighted just the failure of desegregation and the necessity of desegregating schools in order to achieve educational equity, her work has been phenomenal on this, and it's and it's become an issue that is starting to gain more traction and, and I've been, I think it's a critical one. I think that, I think that until we, until we desegregate our schools, we're going to see the same old problems, no matter how wonderful the teachers are, you know, no matter how agree much we reform curricula, etc.

Penny Kittle 41:01
Yeah, well, and I would add that it's not only desegregating, but the importance of teachers of color, and we're not keeping them in the profession. We're not inviting them into the profession enough, and so our students need a diverse body of teachers to teach them. Well, absolutely. Yeah. So I was really interested at the end of the book, David says, I will be surrounded by dudes like this for the rest of my life, white boys and white girls who grew up behind whitewashed fences, who grew up with no idea for the rest of my life, not only will I be surrounded by them, I will become one of them, the thing I hate and Can't escape a white person. But then, in an NPR interview you did on the book, you said you're heartened by the cultural fusion happening in this country. Can you talk more about that?

Sam Graham Felsen 41:50
Sure. So, so first of all that that section you read, I mean, I maybe thought about that line more than any other line in the book. I mean, to me, you know, one of the one of the criticisms of the book is that Dave doesn't learn enough, you know, that he doesn't have a big enough epiphany by the end of the book, I would say that that is as close as he gets to having an epiphany. And you may have to bleep this out, but what he actually says is, I will become one of them, the thing I hate and can't escape, not a white boy or a white bitch, but a white person, right and right? That's his. That's his moment. Finally, when you realize is like, wow, I'm, you know, I'm about to enter this elite public, mostly white public school, exam, school, Boston Latin, you know, where I'll probably end up going on to a privileged College, where I'll probably end up going on to a privileged life, where I'll mostly be surrounded by privileged white people and and finally, it dawns on him, like, okay, I get it. I'm, I'm really, actually white, you know, I really, actually have white privilege and and I don't, I don't want to acknowledge that I've spent all this time, you know, being the other and all of a sudden or thinking that I'm the other, rather, because I'm the white kid at a mostly black school. But, but really, I've never been the other all along, really, I've always been part of this dominant power group in a white supremacist country. And he starts to kind of realize that with with a fatalism, I mean, he has this fatalism that, you know, he believes in this concept called the force, and he believes, you know, to some degree, that, like you know, his friendship with Marlon is over, and you know he's probably not going to have another black friend for the rest of his life. He's probably going to end up self segregating as as most white people do, and just living in this white world and never turning back to the kind of world he lived in as a kid. And so, you know, that was a fatalism that reflected the time that this book was set in, which is the early 90s, in the wake of the Los Angeles riots. It was right before the OJ trial, which really drove our country apart on racial lines too, but it was, it was a really cynical period where it seemed like racial progress was was impossible. And like, you know, integration was, you know, a dream that had died with the Civil Rights Movement. And Dave attends this school named after Martin Luther King, which is totally segregated. So there is a kind of dark, darkness to that, to that ending. But having said all that, that line that you read before is not the last line in the book, and it's not the very end of the book. And again, I don't want to spoil, spoil the ending for people, but, but, but it ends on a Friday. Fragment of hope and a fragment of possibility, that there can be some, some reconciliation, racial reconciliation. And, you know, I, I am, I wouldn't call myself an optimist, because I'm not naive. But, you know, I'm the child of activists. You know, I, I worked on a campaign that most people who I talked to, when I signed up for that campaign in 2007 you know, thought, Oh, nice. You're going to go work for Obama. Good luck. Never going to happen, but good luck, you know. And of course, Obama went on to shock the world by winning the Iowa caucuses, a 97% white state, and end up winning the election. So, you know, I come from a tradition of radical activism that that is a hopeful tradition, you know, it's, it's, it's a tradition that believes that, you know, collective action, people working together, can can make a difference and change the world. And so, you know, I'm not, I'm not actually like a deeply cynical, fatalistic person. I do think that the challenges are unbelievably difficult, and it's going to take a really long time, and it may not happen in my lifetime or my kids lifetime, but, you know, I believe that it's possible that the country can heal around race, don't run away from talking about race. We don't have to run away from talking about race. It's really awkward, it's really painful. You can feel incredibly vulnerable to talk about it. You know, it's the third rail of conversation in America. But there's a way to talk about it with bluntness and realness and honesty, that can be productive and that can get us somewhere, and we need more talk, not less, if we're going to ever make real progress on race.

Penny Kittle 46:52
Well, thank you so much. I you know, not only do I recommend your book for independent reading and classroom libraries middle and high school, but I I think that it has a place with book clubs to really, as you said, have those conversations about race that make us vulnerable and can be awkward, but as I always say to teachers, we have to have those hard conversations in our classrooms to help kids learn how to have those conversations in their world. And you know, we're all in this to try to maximize the impact that books can have on kids lives. This foundation that I'm a part of is just trying to, you know, go into book deserts and create a flood of books that kids will want to read. And I really believe your book has things to teach. So I appreciate your time and all of your thinking.

Sam Graham Felsen 47:39
Thank you so much. It's, it's, you know, it means a lot to me that you know that the book sparked a lot of things for you, and that you believe that it has things to teach. I mean, there's nothing that would make me happier than to know that that young people are reading and debating this book. And you know, to whatever degree Dave and Marlon's story can can connect to young people and spark, you know, new conversations for them. You know that means the world to me. So thank you for helping get this book out there and for all of your work, generally, helping get get books out there in an age where, you know, sometimes it can be distracting to read books with all the social media and everything else out there, but there's no to me, there's no more powerful experience than spending a few hours, you know, with a book, delving deep. You know, nothing can give you that kind of empathic experience like reading a book.

Penny Kittle 48:40
So true, so true, the sanctuary of the reading act.

Penny Kittle 48:48
Thanks for listening today. You know, is there any more important work for an English teacher than to help students connect to books, to put books in their hands, give them a way to see themselves and to see a world larger than themselves. I think when you read Green, you have empathy for both characters as they try to navigate this country that has to deal with the systems and institutions that perpetuate racism. This is heavy lifting for all of us, but if we can't make room in our classrooms for these conversations. Where will they happen? Thank you for all you do to inspire readers to wrestle with big ideas. Let's build reading lives that last. Stay warm. Summer's coming.

Kevin Carlson 49:37
The Book Love Foundation podcast is produced for the Book Love Foundation, in partnership with the teacher learning sessions, connecting teachers with ideas, experts and each other.