valley and when she learned that the area was so polluted that several dozen families were going to need to be immediately relocated as she said to me, that's one i went to fighting. i also met -- actually her granddaddy worked at the plant of the 1930s. she was come to the plant gate and on the way home holding his hand and she wondered if that simple act contributed to the pcb body burden that she carried in her body. and in 2003, 2002 and 2003, people may have heard of this. there was an enormous settlement. folks locally took monsanto to court and won $600 billion, very successful litigation. it was an enormous victory by

any account. oprah said to me afterwards money wonk lead to our health. she said that we are left with is contaminated houses, contaminated bodies, contaminated soil with no cure. and so those were the compelling reasons that led me to want to tell this account. health studies have since shown that anniston residents, you know we all carry a little bit of pcb in our bodies around the globe. it's really a global problem that we are dealing with, global ecological problem. i was in massachusetts at a meeting. rick harper has been closed since 1983 because of pcb contamination and they are doing remediation but it won't reopen for the foreseeable future.

it's a richer source of livelihood for people in that area. this whole meeting focused on pcbs and schools. researchers are now finding places from new york city to the california coast pcbs were not only is an electrical insulating equipment, that was their manias but they are also found in building called and so high levels of pcbs were found in the school buildings and parents were trying to figure out what can we do. this is not a remote problem. it's not something back in history, something that we need to be thinking about and dealing with now. pcbs were associated with a wide range, actually 209 chemicals associated with a wide array of problems from immune

disorders to severe acne to liver disease to fx and developing children. and the international agency for research found recently declared that pcbs because of their association with melanoma are a chemical of top concern for cancer. epa rates them as a top carcinogen. so those are the compelling reasons why i chose to write this story. >> to various degrees all of you are outsiders to pcbs. you didn't necessarily live in an inner-city neighborhood and ellen you didn't live in aniston

are corrupt in this community and chris even though it was your family history there's a whole side of it the black, and sends that you had no connection with. how did you get people to open up to you? you were a stranger coming in asking questions. these are painful memories for some people or embarrassing stories. how do you establish that relationship and connection for them to open up in trust you to tell the story? >> i don't know what trust can exist in a caste society like we have today. i really don't know. i think you have to be fooling yourself to think that you can create that kind of trust when you're on the other side of that line. so i guess that would be my

short answer. people had all kinds of stories about what i was doing in the neighborhood. even when, first it was my senior thesis. it was very collaborative in a lot of ways. i wrote notes all the time and when i was roommates with mike and chuck who are the main characters in the book through college they would just look at my notes. they would be open on my laptop and they would be like oh yeah he really did get everything that has happened or you miss that thing or that's not what i said or this kind of thing. i also got a lot of help in writing particularly from reggie who is chuck's. a lot of the book is about the taylor family. a family of three brothers and their mom and grandfather and

reggie the middle son, when he was locked up. he was locked up from 11 to 26 and he would come home for a few months and then go back. he was in juvenile attempt -- detention the county jail. when he was locked up he would talk about writing all the time so his big advice to me about the book was don't make it boring. my life is interesting. my life is really interesting. don't make it a boring academic thing that people don't want to read. don't do that to me so i think anybody who reads it outside of the sociologists that is read -- readable, if it is. >> well i can say that going to foss county texas where my family's plantation was, i mean i didn't visit, to "the hill" until i was 42 years old.

and it was only slightly more difficult than interviewing a force to. i'm glad i did the picking first because it made this a lot easier. because i mean i'm a journalist. i have spent 25 years walking up to people and saying tell me your story. the fact that my last name matched the african-americans that i was reaching out to added a new and exciting difficult dimension. i think primarily because you know i will be honest with you. the african-americans who are still in false county who knew some of my cousins before they died were a lot easier to talk to then say ladainian or his brother and sister lavar and

landry because they had none quite tomlinson. they were intimately aware of where their background came from and it was something they were far more comfortable talking about than the younger generation who had moved away when they were in middle school who had never met a white tomlinson. so actually lavar in ladainian were the last two people interviewed for the book. because as they explained it o one, they didn't want to really talk about how their father was a drug addict into cup they didn't know if i was neo-confederate looking to glorify my family history and somehow justify it by claiming them as friends. and third and what i found most interesting is they didn't want to know what their ancestors had suffered. i mean levoir is like i don't want to know if your ancestors cut off my ancestors feed for

running away. i don't want to know if one of my ancestors was, or lynched or something bad happen to them. and i think on the white side of the family people don't want to know that my great-grandfather lynched people. so breaking through that just in time. it took six years of reporting and writing and reaching out and frankly sharing information with them about their families that they didn't know. and as a reporter generally i know that the most important thing i can do is to be honest about my intentions and authentic about who i am. i'm not going to roll up to their house playing rap music out of my windows because that's not what i do every day so that's not what i'm going to do outside of lavar's apartment.

i think that is how i earn that trust. >> i started interviewing for this book in 2003 while the trials, two of the major trials were still ongoing. i anticipated this. i didn't know how much people would want to talk to me. i was aware of the racial dynamics that people might not want to tell me the whole story of what had happened. i think were anticipated reticence is i found people very forthcoming because it was at a moment where people were wanting to say i don't want this to happen to any other community. if telling my story can keep this from happening anywhere else i'm happy to talk to you. i also didn't know how the book would be received. when i went to spring after it came out, not sure how local

people would respond. i guess the most satisfying comment that i received from anyone about the book was saying he told it just like it was. to me, that's really high praise. there will be things that peop people, there are always more stories to tell but i felt it was an extraordinary opportunity and privilege that people trusted me enough to share. i think they were thinking about the larger picture. they were thinking about other people to be only two places in the country to produce these chemicals. there is not going to be too many other communities that are exactly the same way but they were aware of people in false river wisconsin and people in new york state. i was just up on lake superior

with the newly identified pcb plant there, a power plant so there are local people all over the place. it's wonderful that they were willing to talk and to share and to make the story not an academic account of environmental injustice but the real personal account. >> if you haven't read any of the books yet all three books involve an incredible amount of research. the reference reference section in the back there are a lot of notes and references for that. a lot of time and commitment. i guess i learned a little bit more about the process of writing the book in the research and how long it took you. how do you keep all of this

organized over such a long time? i can imagine how you kept everything structured to be able to write the book. >> well to 31 boxes that are in my basement are still there. my husband says you know al and they don't have to have a the library of congress method of saving things. but, it was difficult because there are so many different facets to the story. it's not just personal interviews. it's for health studies. there are more than 18,000 health studies of pcbs of which i read only a small fraction. there are 7000 pages of court documents at least and so just the sheer challenge. you will see in the credits i had a lot of help from some wonderful graduate students and others who helped keep that all

organized. i was also standing on the shoulders of people who went before me in the field and all of us have done that i'm sure, people who had looked into the aspects of the story and experts and historians who were kind to share their experiences. >> for me, i didn't want to write a genealogy book and what i wanted to do was talk about race in the united states. i wanted to talk about this lack of understanding of our shared past and to shine a light on it. so in that way, two families are a vehicle to talk about something much larger. so i had two systems basically. i knew i was going to write the book chronologically so i would have one file that is the family file.

on this date this happened and these are the quotes that i gathered along the way. i mean there's a documentary film that goes with my book also called "tomlinson hill" are we equal yet to that concentrates on present-day marlin texas which is the nearest community to the family plantation. and so many of the interviews were videotaped and some are audio recorded. all of them were transcribed. all of them were used to build this chronological masterfile telling a story of these two families. on the other hand we have this american history community history files of the idea ideas to weave three things together, the two families and the greater things that were happening in society that were impacting the two families. and in that way you can see how the jim crow laws in the legislature immediately impacted benson tomlinson ladainian's

great-grandfather and his ability to go to school and his ability to have economic powers to stop sharecropping and start a new business, which he couldn't because the system was stacked against him. we can talk about the segregation of the schools and fighting desegregation of schools while my father is going to one of the nicest elementary schools in dallas and ladainian's father is going to school in a one-room sharecroppers shaq that has an outhouse and no electricity. that is how i did my structure. and it was a combination of a lot of intense archival work. sometimes driving up to marlin texas from my home in austin, it's about an hour away and seeing who i ran into on the sidewalk and the stories they wanted to tell me.

>> i'm so privileged to be on a panel with you both. to me, when i was coming into this work, the reading that i had done about the prison boom and mass incarceration with the idea that you start off free. you go to prison and you come home with a felony conviction and that automatically reduces your chances in the world. so you can't get housing. you can't get education funding. you lose your right to vote in a lot of states. you are massively discriminated against in the labor market particularly if you are african-american. so it was this idea of prison that removes people from the community, saddles people with a criminal record and returns people home. what i was seeing in this

neighborhood was this much less understood or written about policing and surveillance. in the first year and a half i was there i would search people and run people's names for warrants, conduct body searches, chase people through the streets every day just in the four block radius. 15 times in the first 18 months i saw the police punch stomp on choke young men after they had caught them. young men were living with probation parole pending court cases to what it was was this kind of counterpoint for incarceration this neighborhood side and ultimately what i came to was that this is a fugitive existence. people are worried at any moment they will go outside or just in our house and they will be beaten in the streets.

so one of the problems in terms of the notes and doing the research was everything i was writing i was worried that would put people at risk. so from the young men that i was spending most of the time with and their girlfriends one of the things the police do to roundup, they have is a rest-based quota system police in many places where what becomes an indication of a great performance for the place was how many arrests they have made. one of the things they do to round up enough people to make their stats would turn to mothers and girlfriends and sisters to provide information, kind of a creation of informants on a large scale. so i was worried that the police would find my notes, would find more reasons to arrest people and you to use the information against people because this is what they would do routinely.

also the pseudonyms that changed every couple of weeks and then all kinds of protections and i had everything on one laptop. when i was interrogated by the police or stop by the police i never told them that i was a researcher. they called me whatever names they were going to call me. i didn't say like hey i'm a ph.d. student. so there was that and then before the book came out i destroyed thousands and thousands of pages of notes because i was so worried the police or prosecutor would calm and try to use them in court. i actually just did a talk where some people from city hall in philadelphia came and i was

terrified. i really didn't know what they were going to say and their attitude was kind of like one gentleman said i don't dispute any of the facts in this book but let me tell you what we are doing to change things. so to me that was like really? the paranoia went down a little bit after that. but yeah you want to be writing about major moral issues of the day. you are writing about people who are legally precarious but don't really have a right to their own freedom in this country. it becomes very ethically challenging. >> if i could play off what you are saying because i made a commitment that i was going to treat everyone the same white, black, living, dead. some of the black common sense

to have criminal records. they got caught up in what you are talking about in waco texas, the small town of waco. >> is a continuation of everything you are writing about. equality in this country after slavery and jim crow. >> exactly. there is a correlation between the civil rights act of 1950 -- 1965 in the war on drugs and the effort to put african-americans in prison or placed them in a position where they are going to be economically inferior position where they have to do labor that we need to have done that we don't want to do ourselves. it was very hard for me because levoir is like i really wish you hadn't been there my felony conviction for assault when i beat up that guy who grabs my girlfriend inappropriately at a party. i was like well it's public record. i've got to be honest about everything that has happened and

this is an important part of the story. at least i could tell him that just about everyone in my family on the white side of the family is unhappy about what i said to them too. i'm an equal opportunity offender but it struck me and i just wanted to add that. >> you are talking about the common themes in this book and when i first saw the combination that these books were about very different topics i think there really is a common threat of violence that runs through all of them. that is the brutality of plantation slavery and its fruits. the violence of the war on crime in the war on drugs and in this book i relied on a concept from a literary scholar actually rob nixon who talks about slow violence and i think pollution

is a form of small violence. it's another way in which communities of color and low-income communities have violence done to their physical bodies. people now carry with them this kind of toxic knowledge that they have within their bodies within their blood and tissues. they have chemical exposure that has been linked on a societal scale and on a population basis with a whole variety of potential illness and they don't know how that's going to play out in their own lives. i think that is where the violence concept is a very powerful one and there's a linking threat with all of that. >> is really interesting that you talk about putting things in the book that people don't necessarily want you to put in. i think sociology and journali journalism, it will be interesting to talk about the differences but for me i didn't

want to put in anything that people didn't want in their and ie then t. identify the police officers and that they would be protected just as much as the people on the side i was on. but some people, so mike was best friends with alex who had a drug charge when he was younger and came home and worked for his dad's heating and air-conditioning repair store and was working a steady job and had a son. when i first talked to him about the book he was extremely suspicious that made and didn't want to be in it. he was basically don't know anything about this and you have no right to be writing about this. i said okay. i won't be in either field notes. we can still hang out but you won't be in the notes. that was our understanding.

years later when it was much closer to being done he called me and said i just heard i'm not in the book. [laughter] and i was like don't you remember 17 years ago, don't you remember five and half years ago we had this whole conversation he was like what do you mean? i've got so many things that can be in the book. so he's like oh my -- you are going to be on the first page i will be right there so the book opens with the story of alex. it's this night where chuck and i are shooting dice on the wall at an elementary school. mike and i go to get cheesecakes and alex walks home by foot and gets pistol whipped by a guy who mistakes him for his brother. then because he has a couple of weeks left on parole he refuses to go to the hospital because one of the major places in philadelphia where you can get

arrested so he breaks his jaw and we spent many hours in my apartment waiting for someone to come with medical expertise. he refused to go to the hospital and he was determined to finish parole. that's the opening of the book now. if this ongoing story. >> again if anyone has any questions feel free to come to the microphone and asked them at any time during the session. otherwise we will be back for questions. >> alice i don't know when this book was published but michelle alexander's book the new jim crow mass incarceration and a era of colorblindness, you know my age and skin color i was totally unaware of what you

experienced with their african-american friends. but it certainly opened my eyes to what we were totally unaware of and i look forward to reading your book. i would like to have the personal stories to go along with the statistical intellectual analysis of the book. but if anyone here in the audience has not read either alice's booker michelle alexander's book i encourage you to read it because it is eye-opening as to what is happening in a large part of a society that we as white people have no idea what's going on. thank you very much for your book and the other two authors for being here. i look forward to it also. i heard your book tomlinson hill being interviewed and it's very good.

>> after 40 years of growth we are in this exciting moment of criminal justice reform where the president and the attorney general have come out very strongly on racial disparities and incarceration have been pushing sentencing reform. california has propositioned 40 7-up in november that basically takes a lot of felony convictions and turns them into misdemeanors. ..

lucky to be in that conversation. i'm grateful to. he i want to say that. >> i wanted to ask ellen real quick, did the $600 million settlement do any good? >> well, this was in the two largest or multiple lawsuits, toxic tort lawsuits, nuisance suits against monsanto and the corporate partners. the 600 million was split between two of the major lawsuits. the lawyers had contracts that gave them 40% of that amount, which was the subject of no small consternation, and there have been demonstrations and such at the lawyers' offices in

one cases there were 18,000 plaintiffs and that meant that the individual average was $7,725 per person. that many people got more, most people got less. that is not enough to start a new mortgage for an elderly person who needs to move from their home. and so there was -- people hoped the settlement would allow this deeply driven town to unify, but the furor around the finances kept things in motion. there were other features of the settlement which were innovative. one was funding to support a health clinic, educational foundation, because pcbs are associated with neurotoxic deficits in children, where funding was to go to scholarships and education. there were some health studies that were funded at the same

time. not exactly through the same mechanism. so the researchers are back doing a longitudinal study of the folks there. so, there have been some important things that came out of the settlement, but i think one of the things you're talking about, the need for criminal justice reform. we really need reform in how we manage toxic chemicals in this country. the law that governs it, actually banned pcbs in 1976 because they were found to be so toxic. actually the ban was never really complete. the epa says that it left more than 750 million pounds of pcbs in youth, and the law that -- the toxic substance control act was ineffective to begin with and now badly out of date. so there's a big night congress

right now over how to reform that law so that we have better regulation of toxic chemicals. >> my other question is, since we have these interweaving books, what is your reaction when you hear people say that this is the greatest kin -- country in the world? i'm -- >> i wish i could remember the line for line from that hbo television show, where the journalists answers, this used to be a great country. you know, i think the problem with this idea of american exceptionalism is that we invite other countries to claim to be exceptional as well. i think history is full of

countries that thought they were exceptional, and they went off and built empires and did horrible things. i see what is happening in russia today as russian exceptionalism, what is happening in china is chinese exceptionalism and it's the direct response to this idea of american exceptionalism. so, as someone who has reported from 50 countries, i can tell you that every country can make that claim, and countries that do set themselves up to make major mistakes and overreach. i want to be very positive. the one thing that i got from my book, in doing the research, is goodness, gracious, have we come a long way. i mean, i went into the sharecropper shacks that are still standing in falls county,

texas. one of his uncles showed me how to picot ton. the cotton was coming in, and we walked a row, and he showed me this is how you pick, this is how you pull, this is why you do -- you do this one this way or that way. he is 86 years old. and he doesn't have a great life but it sure beats the one that his grandfather did, and his grandfather was born in slavery. so we have come a long way, and -- but every time we wave the flag and talk about how exceptional we are, we have to remember we have a long way to come. talking constitutions, look at the south african constitution.

you compare -- i mean, the rights that a south african is guaranteed are so much greater and wider and deeper than the rights we have in this country, the liberty we enjoy in this country. that's not to say they're living up to that promise. but at least they made a bigger promise to their people than we made to our own. so, are we great country? i'd rather not say. i'd rather us not try to be great. i think we should just concentrate on being kind. i think we should concentrate on knowing ourselves. and that's one of the reasons why i wrote my book. i don't think we know ourselves. i didn't know all these things about jim crow until i salt down to learn about it -- i sat down to learn about it. and every time i hear someone argue that we have civil rights because we passed an act in

1965, or we passed an amendment in 1865, that why i wrote the book. take a look at the differences. one family, one black, one white, same last name. both bankrupt in 1865, both dirt farmers in 1865. then see how they were treated in the last 160 years and continue to be treated differently. that's not a great country. >> hi. i'm a sociologist as well, a public sociologist, and my discipline is economic sociology so theman. one of the very interesting things is when you add the immigration -- african-american we see the rise of the latino and people say they're the new black people. so in terms of prison, yes, african-americans are not getting out of the system,

declassify -- now -- >> that's a maybe. >> maybe, right. they're trying. eric holder -- >> if we really, really push it will take ages for it to real -- >> look what they're doing in terms of criminalizing immigrants and exception now the privatization, in arizona they're building prisons for women and children while they wait to be deported. so the money -- that's why they're not fighting back, because as long as there's a financial stream coming through, and you look forward. you see kind of the latinos taking the space of the black people if we don't stay vigilant. it's going to be exactly the same. we won't have the liberties orthos things. just going to be different kind of jim crow going forward. >> sometimes i make the case there are two completely separate justice systems in the country and the one being

visited on particularly poor african-american communities is unlike that of the rest of the u.s. population in terms of policing and level of arrest and sentencing and incarceration, and i try to sketch this kind of life on the run that people are being made to lead. sometimes people raise their hand and say -- i study immigration. exactly the same. i.c.e. is doing the same thing. people are living in fear, and undocumented, the biggest growing people incarcerated. and people say it's completely different. it's hard to draw these comparisons. but i definitely think it's interesting to think about the kind of expansion of the penal system and the kind of just people being granted a diminished form of citizenship. can we agree in this country to have full citizenship for the people living in it? as a basic right. and the kind of staggered levels of citizenship for immigrants. it's very parallel.

you have people who are living as fugitives and then people in kind of partial legitimacy all the way. so, yeah. >> i think -- go ahead. >> i'm here in part because marian said i should be sure to come here you. my question has -- really can go to all three of you because i think that truth and reconciliation is long overdue, is absolutely essential. white people don't know. that's a way that white people could come to know. black people don't get a chance on the daily level to talk about things that -- not just what happened during -- all during jim crow but what happened last week to a young guy that went to

cookville and they're not very many black people in cookville, and he -- the police just sort of chased him around town, and then -- he didn't ever have to go to jail or anything, but it's just a constant. and i think that if any of you know anything about truth and reconciliation happening in this country, i'd like to know about it because i'd like to make contact with -- and each of you could comment on that matter. >> well, thank you for your comment. you're actually making me -- while you're talking, making me think of a couple of max maxims from the south african context. one about -- this question about whether white people know or not, i believe it from nelson

mandela, which is -- it's hard to awake a people -- awaken a people pretending to be asleep, and so i think this -- the kind of wilful ignorance, the wilful not knowing, is a real problem to challenge. the other is from alex, who co-chairs the truth and reconciliation committee, and he said, we vastly underestimated the legacy of apartheid. and i think that's true in this country. we're commemorating this year the 50th anniversary of the civil rights act of 1964. also commemorating in the environmental justice world the clinton executive order, the 20th anniversary of clinton's executive order on environmental justice, requiring all federal agencies not just the epa but all federal agencies to examine their actions based on whether they're going to have a disparate impact.

so those laws -- those policies and laws have made some difference. but we still have in the u.s., no statutory law about environmental injustice. the u.n. declaration on human rights is much broader, as you mentioned. many countries take into combat economic and social rights, environmental rights, for all, and so i think we need a broader conception of justice than we have yet been exercising. >> i had a question about the writing process as it were. everyone that writes has things they come across that disgust them. you guys dealt with huge expansive issues that are so much birth than yourselves. how do you get through and keep going on that train, knowing how disgusting it is along the way?

as a human being, everyone has a boundary how far they can go. >> so, there's a chapter of this book that i wrote as an article in a sociology journal, and at the american sociological review, it's called, and after i wrote the article -- it was all about -- in this book there's chapters from different perspectives in the community, and this was -- this article was from the perspective of young men dealing with warrants and court cases, and i got an e-mail from the subject line of the e-mail was, like, what's a white girl like you know about warrants in philadelphia? parenthesis, from a former warrant unit officer. and i didn't open -- at this point i had seen a level of brutality by white police in philadelphia that i was basically scared of white men who even looked like cops.

my heart would start racing. so, i just didn't open the e-mail, and my adviser was like, open the e-mail. open the e-mail. so i opened the e-mail. and it was a guy who was a former warrant officer. so in philadelphia there's many, many different units-all with federal funding, who are looking for men with low-level or high-level warrants and this a clearinghouse for different kinds of warrants and guys go out every day with names and photos of people, and round up people for arrest. and he had been a warrant unit officer and he had been -- a pitbull bit him while he was raiding a house so he had become associate adjunct professor in criminal justice in a college and gets his sociology journal in the mail. so he contacted me and i was just terrified to be on that

side of things, talking to police officers, and that was a time where my own fear and sort of visceral reaction at that point in time to police really prevented me from learning as much as i could from that side. i toured the officed and interviewed people, about i didn't go out with the cops and spend a year on that side, and i think maybe it would have been a better book if i had. but that was just a -- it was beyond what i could sort of psychologically some emotionally do. >> do you want to answer? >> well, i interviewed people on all sides of the debate. i went to monsanto and their spinoff company in st. louis, and researchers who had looked at health issue inside then 1960s and wildlife exposures. epa remediation people, community involvement people in

washington. a whole variety of people on all sides of the debate. and so it was -- i didn't encounter the kind of situation that you found. there were two chemical traumas unfolding in aniston. i focused today on the pcb fight. the other is a fight to safely dispose of part over the u.s. chemical weapons stockpile. so aniston was one of eight continental u.s. sites where u.s. chemical weapons, designed to kill people, sarin and vx and mustard agent were stored. this is a double exposure that people there were facing. and so i worked to interview people that were involved with that as well. and those interviews were

cordial but brief. >> i'm in a slightly different situation because, as a journalist, my mission is to bear witness. it is to go see things on behalf of larger society that larger society can't go see. whether that means going to the front lines in iraq, or if it means watching the exhumation of a mass grave in rwanda. these are not meant things to see. -- not pleasant things to see but if you believe that the more informed a society is, the better off that society will we be, that it will make better decisions. when i reported on the mistaken bombing of a village in

afghanistan after 9/11, and 200 people were killed by u.s. navy jets coming and bombing the village, and then when the rescuers arrived, the navy jets bombed it again to kill the rescuers. and i wrote that story, and i received hate mail. i received three envelopes envef white powder to add also drama. they were all waiting for me when i got home to nairobi. so, sometimes they don't want you to tell you -- they don't want you to tell the truth about what you saw. there are people in my family that are not happy about what i wrote in my book, even though they acknowledge it's true. they don't want to face it. but if we want to talk about i would is our prison system so messed up, if we want to talk about what is happening in ferguson in st. louis, to

understand why those things are happening, you need to understand how we got here, and that means facing up to some very uncomfortable truths. so, i spent 14 years as a war correspondent, i know disgusting. but i do assure you that it's easier to look at if you know that you have a mission to see it and to share it. there's no guarantee the world will be a better place. no guarantee anyone will ever read what you write. but you throw that dice some you have to believe in that mission. you have to bear witness. >> i'm a -- at vanderbilt in sociology so i love your book. >> thanks. >> i have a question about it. you have one chapter on wifes we wives and girlfriends, and what struck me is women are always defined in relationship to men and there wasn't a huge focus on

what the intersection of race and gender was doing to women rather -- without the relationship to men. so i wondering if you could talk about that and all the folks talk about how gender intersects with race in what you do, and also -- i'm curious about being -- in the transition to wisconsin, and so i'm curious about how the transition to madison is shaping your work, and how being in a new place is shaping your work on race and inequality. >> yes. so, i guess the way i think about gender in the book is -- it's a great question, by the way. so i think -- i don't have women just all grouped into one chapter and this is a chapter on women. there's women everywhere, talking all kinds of different roles.

so, it didn't -- i didn't think about it as like the women chapter. the point of the chapter was to -- what i had read about women and incarceration, we know that women are the largest growing -- women are shooting up very, very fast in terms of incarceration rates, which is very troubling. but they're still a very small percentage of people incarcerated compared to men. so, the way that women had been portrayed in what i had read was that women are doing the work of visiting men in prison and having to deal with men when they come home and that's really difficult, and then they're being separated from men through prison. but that was like not all the action. there's a huge effort by police to convince women to inform and also to raid houses. so, like, run former warrant

unit officer said we might be able to see every guy up on the computer screen, but when it comes down it to you always go through the girlfriend, the grandmother, because she knows where he is and what he has done. so a very deliberate effort -- reminds you when you read accounts of east germany before the fall and turning families and friends and colleagues against each other and the creation of informant. i wanted to understand what it was like for township want to protect the men in their lives and be purred by the police with eviction, loss of child custody, with raids, with violence, and also with the police presenting women with all kinds of disparaging evidence about the anyone in their lives or telling women they would be arrested for the man's crimes if they didn't turn him in. how that rips apart relationships and how women are working really hard to withstand that police pressure. this is what resistance looks like, women standing at the door and refusing to allow the police to enter a home.

so i wanted to understand how people -- especially how women are repairing their relationships and their sense of self, of being a good mother and partner after they have informed under pressure. so that kind of where the chapter was coming from. in terms of going to -- well, i should stop. thank you. >> part two question. >> gender in your book. >> well, i would say that there aren't maintenance women in my book because i follow -- lines. the tomlinson names passed down from male to male to male. so, that to me is probably most valid criticism anyone can make of my book, that at 430 payments

it's already too long. i you listen to my editor so the last thing they wanted was more. >> chris, one thing about your book, how sarah tomlinson had to take over the plantation after her husband passed away. i was asking you about this question, and also with ellen's book, that's one way that typically -- women didn't have property ownership but she had to assume that role. >> don't get me wrong, there are lots of women in the book. and they -- the whole reason tomlinson hill exists is because church -- churchill jones was an entrepreneur, and they bought land, improved it into a plantation, growing a cash crop, either sold it to someone else and then went and bought more virgin land, or went off and bought another plantation. that's why many families would have four, five, six different

plantations in different locationsment they were the mcdonald's entrepreneurs of their time. and so when churchill jones moved to texas, his wife was a tomlinson, and so she wrote to her younger brother and said, you need to move -- i've got some land for you. i set it aside. come to texas. and then jim tomlinson's wife was a stalwart and she wrote home to her brother and said, you should come to texas, too. churchill jones will sell you cheap land as well. and so to understand how all these families were connect ode you had to understand the women and how they were related. so there's certainly important. >> well, like the environmental justice movement nationally, women in aniston took major leadership roles. the foundation, the west aniston foundation that came out of one of the lawsuits is still very

much led by women, and so there were opportunities for lead leadership. nationally the environmentallity movement, doris taylor is the scholar who did the work on this but nationally the environmental justice movement is much more likely to have not just women in grassroots roles but women in leadership roles. i think it's -- over 50%, and so that is a marked contrast with some of the mainstream, mainly white environmental organizations. so women played a leading role in this fight. woman women also are uniquely affected by these chemicals. it's another part of the story i haven't talked about. the hormone disruption and role of hydrocarbons, which these chemicals are, has been talked about much more in the news, but

they can travel both through breast milk to the nursing child, or in the -- across the placenta, and so women have unique questions to face. should i have kids, shy breast-feed or what are the implications for my life of this chemical exposure? so, there's some very marked gender implications of the pcb story. >> time for a couple more questions if anyone wants to ask one. >> this is for alice and possibly chris. you had a distant relative with a felony conviction. do you feel that most of the people that you knew who were going to jail or prison were taking plea deals and waiving their constitutional rights or exercising them with jury trials? and do you feel like they understood the full

ramifications of those? >> this is a huge issue that almost no charges become jury trials. they don't even become trials. people settle with pleas and get a huge amount of pressure from prosecutors and from the public defenders to do that. so, the same was -- went for the people that i spent my 20s in with. i did see a couple of trials for really serious crimes, but possession trials, ag assault trials, possession with intent to distribute, these kind of things, were all plea deals. and also even before the plea deal, you're sitting in jail for, like, 18 months, 12 months. so, like, when chuck was -- got into a fight in the schoolyard when he was 18, he had just

turned 18, and he was making cs and bs on the basketball team, was trying really hard not to get arrested. and he got into a fight with a kid who called his mom a crack whore in the schoolyard and push his face in the snow. that became an aggravated assault charge by the school. so he spent his entire senior year sitting in adult county jail awaiting trial for this ag assault charge from a schoolyard fight. and then almost all the charges were dismissed, and he came home that summer, tried to re-enroll again as a senior and was told now you're 19, you're too old, sorry. so he became a high school dropout, and then he couldn't pay the $225 in court fees that came due after the case ended, so then he had a warrant out for his ae