Colson Whitehead
speaker
69 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Colson Whitehead’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
He reads Life magazine every week and sees the updates on the boycotts and protests and sit-ins and sees himself as a part of this new generation that's going to change America, you know, bit by bit.
The book opens in the 50s. The main action is in 63. And so he's actually lived in an era where things actually are moving slowly, slowly forward. He hitches a ride with the wrong person. It's a stolen car and gets sent to nickel. And for me, it's a way in for my experience. I've been stopped by police for no reason. I've been handcuffed and interrogated.
I think most young people of color have been stopped by police in this way. And he makes a wrong turn and he's in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I think for many people, for many people of color, we can relate to suddenly having your life being able to change at any second.
I was a junior in high school and I was with some friends. We were in a supermarket and suddenly there was a white cop saying – Put your hands behind you. He put handcuffs on me, took me out to the street, to his squad car where there was a white woman in the backseat. She'd been mugged. And I guess I was the first black person, black teenager they came across. And luckily she died.
said that I was not the person who mugged her. And I happened to just be minding my own business. And like many young people of color, if I had shifted the wrong way, reached for my wallet the wrong way, who knows what could have happened. And so that informs my idea of being in the world and how any second things can go awry. And I know I'm not alone.
in understanding that sort of menacing reality is always waiting there.
Misidentified. And if she hadn't been in the backseat, would I have spent the night in the tombs, the local New York jail? And once I'm there, who knows whether my life goes this way or that way. So that opportunity for tragedy is always there, I think, when it comes – for people – between people of color and white law enforcement and that's sort of our reality.
Sure. The kids in the black school across town get their secondhand books from the white school, which is well-funded, as usually is the case. And the white students, knowing that their school books are going to the black part of town, write epithets, F-U, the N-word, for their black neighbors to enjoy when they open up the books on the first day of school.
And Mr. Hill, Elwood's teacher, is the first person to say, mark those out. They've taken the abuse for granted for a generation, year after year. And he And Mr. Hill, who's a freedom writer, is the first person who says, you're decent people. Scratch that out and let's start – let's make these books fresh.
He's one of these very optimistic and idealistic sorts who thinks that if he wants to do it, he can do it. If you march, if you raise your voice, if you stand up, you can change the world. And if you devote your energies, you can fight back the vast machinery arrayed against you. And so he sees himself going to college.
He sees himself joining the Natalie-dressed people of SNCC and CORE, marching on Washington, doing sit-ins, desegregating all the various venues. And his one big moment before he goes off to Dozier happens in the late school year. when he protests the segregated movie theater in Tallahassee, which is a real protest. And they hand him a sign. They give him the slogans.
And the white deputies and riffraff gaze upon them. The protesters stare, raise their fists. And this is this real sort of moment of the person he can actually be. Um, he's a bit of a miracle, you know, he's an unlikely person.
And I think I was struck when I was going back, you know, reading about Martin Luther King and the early civil rights struggle, how unlikely all those people were, you know, to believe that they could, uh, beat back 200 years of, uh, systematic oppression. And they did it, um, you know, sort of action by action. And so, um, definitely I was writing, you know, Elwood seemed like a very rare sort.
Um, But he was not alone. He's part of a generation that really did change the country in an important way. Of course, we slide back a bit, but they really did pull off miraculous things.
Well, he's not there very long before he discovers that – Despite its beautiful exterior, things are quite off. He breaks up a fight between some big kids and a little kid. And his real initiation into the school is being taken to the White House. At the real Dozier School, it was called the White House. It was a utility shed on campus that they started using for beatings after a
short-lived reform. Corporal punishment was outlawed. And so they took the boys in real life to this place called the White House. And it was too great a detail to change, the name, that is. And the kids on campus at Dozier called it the ice cream factory because you came out with different bruises of every color. And so he breaks up this fight.
And nobody is really particularly concerned about who started it, who was trying to break it up. The guilty and innocent are punished equally. And that's an early lesson at Nickel Academy.
The same details came up in a lot of different accounts. To muffle the sounds of the beatings and the screams, they had this huge industrial fan. And so if you heard the fan go on on the other side of campus, you knew what was happening. And that came up a lot. The sound of the leather strap hitting the ceiling before it came down upon your back was repeated a lot.
And I talked to one man who said that when you heard the belt hit the ceiling, you knew the tense up to sort of diminish the blow. And all those tiny details have stayed with the people for decades and decades, and they can still hear it and still feel it and hear it in their very bones.
Sure. It breaks it open. And then another thing that came up a lot was The kids being beaten across the legs so much that their fibers of their genes are embedded in their skin. Not to get – I'm sorry. I'm being grisly. And then the doctor in the infirmary having to take tweezers and pluck them out. And more than one person related that detail.
Showing 21–40 of 69 · page 2 of 4
← Previous
Next →