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.
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Appearances
And so you see it's a bit of a factory, unfortunately. Yeah.
Well, there are kids in unmarked graves with blunt trauma to their skulls and gunshot pellets in their ribcages. And so how did they get there? Teenagers buried in the ground with great evidence of violence. They didn't, you know, faint immediately.
It was profitable for the state of Florida, you know, making those bricks and printing those pamphlets. In the early days, they stopped it in the mid part of the century, I believe. But they would lease out students to local businesses, local farmers. Some of the kids did end up dead under mysterious circumstances. And then eventually, you know, whatever, state investigators put a stop to it.
But that was sort of, you know, convict leasing for students. Grownups, you know, it was a big business.
You're picked up for some minor infraction, vagrancy, and then the local deputy, talking about the South and black people being sold by white deputies to mines, to farms, and in a sort of, I won't say an indentured servitude, because you're six months or a year could be up and no one would tell you and you'd be sort of stuck. In the same way that there's no place for you to run,
Once you're sort of in the system, you're embroiled and there's no place to go.
Sure. You know, one of the great things about research is that you make a decision and it starts paying off. And in terms of having Elwood be an acolyte of the civil rights movement is that I had to pick speeches and different episodes that would inspire him.
And so I had to go back to Martin Luther King's speeches and figure out which ones would fit Elwood, which ones would fit this part of the book. Yeah. Once Elwood is tested at the Nickel Academy, he has to really live up to all these things he's believed. He's heard Martin Luther King talk about loving the oppressor.
He's talking about suffering and rising above it and loving in the face of impossible odds. And it's really once he gets to Nicol that Elwood has to think, can I do this? I mean, it's sort of ridiculous, but it's sort of what we have to do. And his real sort of struggle, the longer he spends at Nicol, is having to finally put into concrete practice what he's been reading about.
And perhaps he never imagined he'd have to prove himself so thoroughly as he does at Nicol.
Yeah, I mean, the majority of the book takes place in 63 and 64 and then we follow Elwood as he grows up and gets out of the Nickel Academy and moves to New York. And we see him in the 70s and we see him in the 80s. the early part of this century. And so we see what sort of makes him as a man, and then we see the after effects of it.
How do you come back from something as traumatic as being a nickel? Who makes a whole life decades later? And who is perpetually victimized by their time there? Do you become addicted to drugs, an alcoholic. Can you find someone to love, make a family, keep a job?
It's a few months out of his life, Elwood's young life, and then he has to spend the next couple of decades finding his way in the world. And I think whether you were in a place like Dozier, if you had a family catastrophe early on, any sort of disaster you bounce back from, you reckon with it. It changes you and changes your world.
And so that's where we find Elwood in his later chapters is a man trying to find himself after this very formative few months.
I find I feel better if I don't think about it. I don't know. You know, this book comes out of, you know, feeling very desperate, feeling that, you know, in the last 60 years, we have made some toddler steps towards equality. And then, you know, we fall back. And that's been my sort of experience my whole life. We sort of make an advance and then we go back to spaces. And
You know, my parents were basically Elwood's generation. And I can't imagine my grandparents or my parents raising their kids in a racist country and then seeing what has happened in the last 50 years. We had a black president. That's crazy. And then I think they'd be not surprised about swastikas being painted on synagogues and incarceration camps full of brown people at the border. So...
I guess my new line on hope is that I don't see a lot changing in my lifetime, I think. Hopefully my kids, you know, 50 years from now will have a different idea, the same way that I have a different idea than my parents and grandparents. But right now I think we're pretty stuck, and I don't see things getting a lot better before they get worse.
Five and 14.
And she's like super woke. You know, she's like policing me on my super PC-ness, which is sort of startling. And then the younger one, you know, I have to start training early. You know, he's into cops and robbers. And so he raised an eyebrow and he'll say, you know, a police car will speed by and he'll say, there's a cop going to stop a robber. And I'll have to step in and say, or...
An innocent person driving a car that the cop thinks is too fancy for him in the wrong neighborhood. That's the sort of early tutelage you get in the Whitehead household.
Showing 41–60 of 69 · page 3 of 4
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