welcome to our panel today. these authors all commit the question of justice in different

ways. i am frank shyong a columnist with the l.a. times and i will let everyone introduce themselves so i get it correctly. >> i am nicholas david often and i come from new haven, connecticut. >> i am erica and i live in california. >> my name is ali winston and i come from new york. >> i feel like this is setting up a tender profile or something. i live in l.a.. >> i will start with erica. you wrote the book somewhere sisters. i wanted to ask you, as an introduction to the book in case not everyone here has read it, why did you want to write a book and how did the idea come about? >> my book centers on a pair of identical trends -- twins born

in vietnam separated at birth. about six years ago i became a mother to identical twins. i was studying twin science and epigenetic's. i connected with a researcher in california that is a very well-known twin researcher. she connected me with twins around the world. for a piece i was working on for the atlantic back then interested in twin science. and the story of the twins drew me to it of course. it is inherently one of those stories you might think, what happened to them? i came to find out one of the twins was raised in town in illinois not far from where i was raised. and was adopted by a white american family. the other twin was raised in vietnam. so, that started my process of

trying to found out more about the story. while i was researching the science i learned about transnational adoption and the history of that and it became another research through-line through the book. frank: i admire how the book compassionately characterizes different clashing perspectives of the adoption industry. birth family, adopting families, adoptees themselves. you talk to a pair of sisters with drastically different takes on their circumstances. i think it does the work a lot of journalism seeks to do, put groups in perspective in conversations with each other in ways that do not currently exist in the discourse. what challenges did you face

getting access to your subjects and cultivating the necessary level of candor? erika: one of the challenges is of course there are interviews in the book with birth families in vietnam. so there are language challenges there. i worked with an interpreter and traveled and was able to interview the birthmother mother in the family. the family was very open to allowing me to write their story. through this process i spent about five years getting to know everybody involved and i understood -- i came to understand more about how adoption narratives are framed historically in the u.s. and how we sort of have this understanding of adoption through popular culture. of it sort of being a fantasy or

fairytale. with a happy ending. that is how it is framed in movies, books, and films also -- often told from the perspective of adoptive parents. a lot of the literature historically is through the perspective of doctors -- of adoptive parents, same for studies done on adoptees. it was important for me to center as much as i could experiences of the adopted young woman. also, the birth families. the approach i took structurally was more complex because while i was including different perspectives, sisters, birthparents, the adoptive mother in particular i was also interweaving the history of adoption, transnational and also transracial adoption in america. and also some of the science reporting.

so it became a more complex structure but it was important to have all of that represented in the book. frank: if you read her book, i have never finished a book and exclaimed over how it is structured. but i did this one. it does brilliantly weave different narratives together to illuminate a wider picture of adoption i was not aware of. i am curious, how many here know someone who was adopted? raise your hand. that is close to 90% of everyone in here. as you will find out in erika's book you make a connection between war and the global adoption industry and american racial politics that i found really valuable, exploring these questions of nature versus nurture. you give this revealing history of race science and its applications in adoption and its origins in eugenics.

why was it important for you to connect these histories to the history of adoption and tell these stories together? erika: i teach narrative journalism at uc irvine. i have always been taught since i was at the l.a. times that narrative is driven by people and their stories and you are following people on their journeys. getting to know them over years and very in-depth sometimes. sometimes it is emotional and personal even the details you get. at the same time everybody exists within a system. our lives exist in systems. science is a system. adoption is a system. to understand where we are with understanding nature versus nurture and also our conceptions about adoption, it was really important to me to dig into that context and history and some of

the structural questions and questions of bias, frankly, that have been part of the science and also the part of the system of adoption. >> one thing i really enjoyed about the book was these kind of various fables and myths and sayings and sort of vignettes that surface in vietnamese culture and emotional thinking at the beginning of each section and chapter. i thought that was uninteresting way to deepen the emotional experience of the text. how did you decide to do that? erika: again, that was in thinking about, again, my training as a journalist, a narrative journalist. we interview so deeply we can write in third person. if you are writing fiction you news them but no somebody so well. it feels on the page like you are writing fiction but you are not. it is all recorded at every

detail has eyesores. for experiences of people in this country that i have not lived myself. i am not an adoptee, though i am asian american and was raised in the midwest and had similar shared experiences, i thought it was important to include oral history in some of this to have the voices speak unfiltered without the voice of the journalist as the narrator. i tried to include snippets of voices and vignettes letting them speak in between chapters to center voices and let voices be there and speak. i also included a lot of voices of scholars and activists and adoptees that are not necessarily part of the narrative of the family. but come part of the larger context. for me it was important to elevate those voices and talk about the history of critical

adoption studies. there is a rich history. what i am sick exploring -- what i am exploring with adoption in the book is nothing new. the scholarship has been around for decades. i was just pointing in the direction of interviewing some of the voices. it was important for me to get the voices of people that have lived experience. frank: one thing i learned from your book was connecting adoption to the aftermath of the vietnam war and the complicated myriad effects it is still having in american society. and, i really admire the way you took the books to carefully argue with history. carefully and politely. and in some cases it very forcefully argues with history. because, certain narratives were missed told and needed to be told again. so, we are right now kind of talking about the vietnam war and the unresolved tensions event and so that is a great transition to our next dr. --

author dr. kirk wallace johnson. you wrote "the fisherman and the dragon". i will attempt to summarize it. basically, there is this time of pitched warfare between vietnamese fishermen that are mostly war refugees and a texas fisherman, am i correct? kirk: yes. frank: and while they are fighting under the -- over the fishing grounds, and unfolding environmental disaster is happening that no one is paying attention to. i thought that made it unique. did i get it right? kirk: yeah. frank: tell us about your book and why you wanted to write it and how you got the idea. kirk: the book is -- in one interview somebody described it as the last battle of the vietnam war. which unexpectedly unfolds along the texas gulf coast.

after the fall of saigon we resettled hundreds of thousands of vietnamese and at the houston galveston area became the second largest community. this is in the mid-to-late 1970's. it was a time of economic despair along the gulf coast there were where there were gas lines and inflation. at first white fishermen were happy to unload crappy old boats on the refugees, playing them for suckers. what the vietnamese did was all you could hope for. they fixed the boats to cut down on cost using family members as deckhands. they would go out fishing. within a few years they became such an economic force that the whites freaked out and ran to the governor and begged for a ban on refugees. and when that failed they

brought the ku klux klan in and they started a very public and ghastly campaign to dry -- try to drive refugees from the coast. vietnamese boats were firebombed. their homes were firebombed. the klan conducted boat patrols through galveston bay and this is not the 60's or 50's. it's 1981. where these 20 armed robed klansmen marauding galveston bay with an effigy of a vietnamese refugee hanging from one of the outriggers going around in search of vietnamese to harass, basically. i did not know, answering how i found it or why i wanted to write it, i did not know anything about the story. i had never heard of it. i discovered it, strangely, the day my dad died in late 2018

from cancer spurred by his own exposure to agent orange during the war during his deployment. the day he died i was in l.a. and i said to my wife, i did not really feel right sitting around at home like that was a normal day and i felt an overwhelming urge to spend the day fishing because my dad and i fished a lot and he taught me how to fish. i threw my gear in the trunk and i drove to the kern river and along the way i had the radio going but i was not really paying attention to it until this spring sting song came on called galveston bay. i am not a big springsteen fan. i should not admit this. but he started singing a song about a young vietnamese refugee that ends up in texas trained to rebuild his life as a fisherman and all of a sudden he has klansmen hunting him down.

the whole day on the river i was mourning my dad. but this song kept popping into my head. it was such a bizarre premise. it seemed very overengineered. i do not think it was based on anything. then weeks later when i finally sat down and googled it and saw that not only had it happened, it happened at a moment of -- i mean, it was a national news story back then. cronkite was covering it. there was a huge trove of resources to work from. that kicked off a multiyear investigation to find the people that had carried this out. it meant extracting confessions from klansmen that torched the boats and all of that. i do not know if that answers your question. frank: yes, that was fascinating. do you want to keep going? kirk: well, one of the things i found really interesting about the story is it starts off with

this verdict. with vietnamese fishermen and other fishermen, billy joe. a very texas name. billy joe and who was the vietnamese fishermen? they are having this disagreement. and it billy joe ins up murdered. it is not clear whether they arrest the right vietnamese person and they deliver the verdict, essentially correct in this circumstance, that this was self-defense after a year of a year of violent harassment by this manna. but it becomes a spark plug anyway. it is -- kirk: it is an extraordinary story. because i thought it was

unrelated to the events that happened a couple years later. the killing happened in 1979 and there was basically a 17-year-old vietnamese kid just starting as a cropper. he is in this small texas town out on the water and he dropped his traps unaware there are unwritten rules of the bay and he dropped his traps too close to a white guys traps. there is no turf. people try to assert it is there water but it is not. the right -- white clabber billy joe is enraged and he gets the trap up and smashes them. the vietnamese crabbers have been harassed for years. there was a confrontation on the water where knives were brandished on both sides and over the next month each time billy joe would see this young vietnamese man, he would give

death threats. he stabbed the tires of his car. he raised a rifle at him at one point. so, he goes and buys a revolver from walmart. he is concerned about the future. one day he is out on his -- on the docks. him and his brothers are checking out a new engine for their boat and billy joe comes and cuts him across the chest with a knife. and he basically for his revolver and shoots him dead. there was an expectation amongst the white residents of texas that there would be texas justice here. that it would be a quick trial and a quick execution. it was shocking to me. in modern terms that trial happened like 60 days after the killing. he was tried in front of an

all-white jury in a very conservative part of the state. there were vietnam veterans on the jury. astonishingly, and it took me years, but i got all of them weeding out potential jurors. but he was acquitted on the grounds of lawful self-defense, that he had every right to protect himself in that moment. to some audiences, myself as well, it's kind of a redeeming moment that goes against what you thought was going to happen to the kid. but everybody knew it was a disaster in terms of tensions rising between these two camps on the coast so tsao and his brother fled texas and because the whites felt wronged by the justice system, they felt the courts did not give them what they wanted so they would get it their own way and bring the clan

in. there was this mystery for 40 years. why was the klan so interested in billy joe? it took 40 years. i was in this tiny town in texas and his widow confessed he was in the plan himself. that nexus, basically, it led to the clan coming in. then it became every small town along the texas coast. there were whispers that the ku klux klan is coming for the vietnamese. who wants to join the clan? it gave the media ship publicity and set the cycle in motion that came to a boil in galveston bay. >> it is a really gripping story. i was imagining it as a tv show the whole time i was reading it. erika: it is happening.

--frank: you have me as a viewer, congratulations. it seems like the last couple years, the last half decade or so i have seen a lot of re-examinations and retellings, or at least, different accounts of the vietnam war. i am talking about the writing of the kevin burns vietnam documentary and countless podcasts, novels, and tv are returning to this formative. -- this formative time in our nations history and your book seems to take place in a place that is itself unresolved, a product of the vietnam war's unresolved tensions. i am wondering. erika's book also deals with the vietnam war. i am wondering why is it now that we are undertaking these re-examinations? all of our panelists have written books about things that happened a longer time ago.

what does -- why do these conversations circle back into relevance? what does time due to sort of allow these conversations to flourish? kirk: that is an interesting question. for me at least i had kind of a motivation, a personal motivation. authors are always supposed to profess they have no biases. i do not try to keep that route is going. like i stand on the side of i think that our country is made stronger by admitting refugees. i spent years of my life trying to get iraqi refugees out because i served in the war and these were colleagues of mine being hunted. there are no both sides in terms of the story for me. but i can't in 2023, it is very difficult for me to engage in some of the questions beating at

the heart of the book and other books from my panelists. who gets to be an american? who gets to write the american dream? these things sound cliché. but they are really crucial. all these fishermen keep saying, i'm tired of them getting my piece of the pie. you had an issue here, all love to the texas gold coast, but the vietnamese did not dream of moving to small towns on the coastline. they would have given anything to stay at home in their own country. they are thrust here. they were adamant they did not want to go on welfare. they wanted to work their hardest to make a new life. everything we ask of newcomers to the country. it's difficult for me to get into any constructive debates

anymore about what we do at the border or with refugees fleeing current wars without hands going up immediately, was -- without her devolving into an assessment of trump or maga or all this. part of the appeal of the book for me was it is engaging the very same issues coursing through the country now, but, because it happened 40 years ago, i am finding a lot of people can take it on its own terms and not feel, is he talking about me because i voted for trump? there is a little bit of the back door. that is an attempt at an answer. frank: i will keep going with questions. next i want to turn to ali's book that he wrote with darla --

darwin von graham. "the riders come out at night" is a gripping examination of the brutal tactics of the oakland police department over the past couple decades. you talk about how the city of oakland has spent -- which i learned from your book, has spent more years under court ordered oversight than any other police department and in the country. you talk about how the city of oakland is the edge case in american law enforcement. what do you mean by that? ali: the way our country deals with police departments, school systems, prisons, hospitals that are out of control, they have a legalistic method aside from protests and elections and trying to change in the broader political schema. there is a technical term called consent creek. reforms -- consent decree.

reforms put in place by a judge. they create a reform program by which the department or hospital or whatever institution, state prison system, has to change its fundamental practices in order to rectify the problem whether it be prison overcrowding, racial redlining in school districts, be it a police department that carries out racist biased policing, excessive force muff also rests. -- force, false arrests. in the case of the oakland police department agency went under a consent degree in 2003 simultaneous and contemporary to the rampart scandal here resulting in the l.a. police department going under federal oversight. however, the case in oakland was brought by private attorneys because the federal department of justice did not act on that and as a result the consent

decree is not subject to the push on to a is in washington dc. democrats tended to push civil rights law and republicans don't. democratic administrations will be subject to pressure over time. you can have city leaders pull strings or people in the senate, the department of justice. ok, it is enough. we will put it back. in oakland because it is a third-party it is not part of government. 119 plaintiffs, all but one black man, who were falsely arrested, tortured, imprisoned, abused by a group of police officers in west oakland that does themselves the riders. a police gang, if you will. there are quite a few in los angeles, i have been told. as a result of the independence of the consent decree. unfortunately, the ways in which the police department has chosen to engage not -- to not engage

in genuine reform, it is the longest running example of police reform and what you can or cannot deal with law enforcement in this country to bring it to the standards of the constitution. >> in reading the book those familiar with the lapd would hear familiar terms, consent decree, subversion and manipulation of justice. use of force that is extralegal. it seems that a book like this could be written about pretty much every big city police department in the nation. i have read the runs written about los angeles. blue by joe dominic and official negligence. i read those last year. when i read your book it was like a repeat, almost, a re-skin

of all the characters and the names changing. but, the tactics seem so similar. i am curious, why is that? obviously, oakland's case is different and worth chronically and the work you did to assemble these facts is going to be valuable and a toehold for justice going forward. but, how is it similar and how is it exactly the same? how is it different from other cities? ali: i will do civic history in a tiny micro capsule. oakland is a city of 420,000 people on the east bay of san francisco. it is the geographic center of the bay area and a transportation hub. rhodes, railways, airport. it connects the bay area economy to the rest of the country.

it is the fifth biggest port in the country with a massive economic engine. it is one of the reasons the a's will not choose to stay. the city did not want to short-circuit its? s -- it's actual economy instead of a fake one. the east bay was industrialized have yearly -- heavily in the early 19th -- late 19th and early 20th century and that is when the police department developed in oakland to do two things. crime control, a mid 20th century invention of policing. policing subversive and subordinate populations. first mainly chinese migrants that build california, to put it bluntly. then, the chinatown in oakland

was such a substantial burgeoning chinatown that after the 1906 earthquake, first, the police department shut down the chinese population. the business is, the opium dens, the bordellos that were a big part of their revenue. after the 1906 earthquake, the san francisco police department folks would follow them to oakland to shake them down across the bay. later on, as south european and central european migrants came to oakland they brought certain brands of politics over, anarchism, communism, overlaid with trade unionism. then the police department starts cracking the heads of left-wing radicals and trade unionists. it was a big player in the palmer raids of the 1910s and 1920's. that is their initial focus. the world war ii era

industrialization opened in a way parallel through the west coast. african-americans followed the train route from the south of along the west coast all the way to seattle. to work in war industries. that is where the west coast african-american population mostly comes from. oakland to this day i think has the highest percentage of african-americans per county and presidio in california, i believe. alameda county, oakland, part thereof. so, the the police department kind of changes. first the city fathers think that oakland, these folks will go home. long story short the lapd recruits from immobilized soldiers, heavily from folks from the south. because they know how to think about african-americans the right way and as a result you have a very hard-nosed policing style directly reflected in lapd history.

lapd and oakland parallel each other in many ways. they reflect each others mentality and organizational structures. it is a most -- more smaller version, therefore, easier to study. it results in the jackbooted leasing that gives rise to the black panther party in the mid-1960's. that is the long event. the short of it is oakland does reflect the development of policing on the west coast, a paramilitary style distinct from the slave catcher origin of policing in the northeast, southeast, deep south. but at the same time, because oakland, for god knows what reason, i can never figure out what is in the water up there, does actually prefigure a lot of what happens in the country in terms of flashpoint and law enforcement pushed back to it, that is why it is such an interesting case to study.

you have the first statewide investigation in california of biased policing in 1950. the state legislature opens beatings, killings, false arrest and imprisonment of african-americans at the request of a group of communist lawyers and activists that take up the cause of the west oakland population it was being run roughshod over and then the black panther party evolves in the 1960's and that story is very well known. i will not go into it too much. but the first civilian oversight board is created in 1980 in oakland. the pendulum swing continues through the drug war and then in the -- the writers are a great example of this. a cop gang that gets they have outlasted the rampart scandal. it was made about rampart.

roughly a perez. frank: you can tell this guy just wrote a book. that was a really useful history. i noticed a lot of things about the -- origins of the police department, how police recruited from former military that came from the south, that were selected, right, for attitudes towards certain groups of people. these are historical facts that have only resurfaced the last couple years, right? so i think it's an interesting time right now. all of these books on the panel are trying to undergo a historical retelling and i think you for it. because, the pieces all fit together much better now. you mentioned the great migration. i thought it would be a good transition to nicholas's book,

"the other side of prospect." this is another book that starts off with the murder. then, you reach back hundreds of years and multiple generations to provide all the context you could give for the murder, a murder that could be easily dismissed and often is in a conservative news outlets on -- as black on black crime, a term with which you there are plenty of problems. you talked about how this is a history that was known but not quite visible. you grew up in the town you are writing about, right? nicholas: i did. the particular story, the way -- i grab in new haven. some of you may know that new haven has a reputation for being a representative american place. in the 50's it became known as the model city and later

demographers called it a typical or representative american city and there are all sorts of reasons for that. one thing that is useful for people thinking about the company looking at a city like new haven is it is a compressed version of bigger cities like this. it has many of the problems that larger places do. because it is on such a smaller scale they are perhaps more visible. i grew up in new haven. i had a single mom and i lived in a rented floor of a two family house. my dad had many struggles. he lived in another state, sometimes in the streets and my mom had lots of anxieties about money. but i grew up in a house full of books. i think there are many ways to get to know your city and illuminate the places you come from. for me, a lot of it was playing

baseball through my childhood. new -- in new haven, if you played baseball throughout your childhood and indeed until you went to college, as i did, you played baseball in every section of the city. you knew your neighborhood, the people you played with, the people you played against, the people that came to games. in a city like new haven where people generally did not leave their neighborhood, this gave me more of a way of seeing the city. in seventh grade i got to go tuition free to a private school and it meant i had to go across town and i -- as i went across town i went through a neighborhood called new hope bill, famous as an industrial community. it was named for a guy named newhall, a carriage builder and was quickly reconstituted as a city within a city because the

winchester repeating arms factory was there. during the heyday there were over 20,000 people working there. it was an enormous source of income and uplift for every american, major american immigrant wave. they came through the eastern seaboard. so newhall veil -- newhallville was first an irish neighborhood, then italian, german, then eastern european and finally around the second world war, but really in the 1950's, it became an african-american neighborhood , formed, as it always had been, by a sudden surge of people coming because there were jobs. so, i went past this factory every day on my way to school and it was easy to see the lines at the employee entrances and in the park were shorter. there were more and more empty spaces in parking lots. there was less noise. it was just conspicuously

slowing down. at that time, when i was about 15, i was laying in a baseball league in newhallville and i would stand out my position. i mentioned some of my mom's struggles. but i was playing at this point in newhallville with teammates and opponents that did not talk about these things but it was conspicuous that the struggles my mom had were nothing compared to many of the people i was playing with and that is confusing to a child. i played shortstop. i remember standing. the field was oriented in such a way that if you looked across the neighborhood right there, up a little slope, it was the towers of yale university. for any kid that grew up in new haven, gail was paradise for young people. one of the most wonderful things about the country,.

it was jarring for me, the juxtaposition. that so close where these two radically disparate experiences of childhood. it was so confusing. even now i can really remember a very formal locution that came to my head on the baseball field: why should this be? how should this be? i grow up and become a writer and there was always this question of the two new haven's and the two americas and the two connecticut's. at some point i moved back to new haven and i really wanted to understand the tension between neighborhood inequality and what effect that might have on young people, and at its most extreme, gun violence. that was what i came home to do after living most of my adult life in new york. frank: you may be the only person that was ever politicized by baseball.

nicholas: you would be surprised. frank: as a breaking news reporter i have also faced the task of trying to write about a murder given six paragraphs and 300 words. i appreciated this book because that is about a murder but provides all the context that i think most breaking news reporters wish they could provide. the historical narratives behind the crime. the family drama that puts these two men on the street together. it is really interesting. you talk about the murder then all of a sudden it is 100 years ago and you make a huge jump at the beginning of the text. why did you decide to go so far back? were you worried about losing people? how did you decide exactly where to start? nicholas: good questions. like i said, it is a

neighborhood formed by immigrant waves and i wanted to look at what happens to a place that exists because of work that is a source of uplift for over 100 years for many different kinds of americans and what happens when the work goes away. it was particularly ironic, i always thought that nobody ever locked their doors in newhallville until the gun factory came and guns came. what i have told you is not a narrative account, it is a story, so to speak. one day i received a phone call from a new haven lawyer that knew what i was doing. he told me about a client i had whose experience -- he had whose experience would speak to what he was trying to do. this was a boy who, at 16, had been accused and sent to prison for murder for killing someone in newhallville.

his lawyer said he had not done it and he had been pressured into confessing and i had no way of knowing the truth or not. but i subsequently met him and i would go to visit him in prison. i came to know his community. i was interested, if it was true this was a wrongfully accused and convicted person, i thought that it might speak to the vulnerability that happens when you grow up in neighborhood isolation and you do not have much exposure to, can we say, the more sophisticated elements of the city. so if he had grown up in a different neighborhood, and his name is bobby, it is unlikely this would have happened. what were the pressures on him? what was it like to grow up in that neighborhood? what led to this? i wanted to explain different experiences the murder victim had. he was 70 years old and grew up

in the neighborhood during a flourishing time when it was the number one neighborhood in connecticut for black ownership and his family owned a house. if you walk down their blog you could see people growing things indigenous to southern gardens like okra. people always said you just had to walk down the sidewalk and you would know who baked the best sweet potato pie or made the best pineapple upside down cake in neighborhood -- in the neighborhood. everyone was very formal. just going to the store, people wore church clothes. the murder victim was so compelling having come up in the neighborhood at a better economic times, moved up and out, and then came back because he loved his neighborhood and he would visit his fellow southerners in the neighborhood and it led to a personal tragedy. that his childhood in the neighborhood was so markedly different -- different for economic and racial regions --

reasons. things had changed so much over time and his childhood had been one childhood. then bobby's childhood was kind of different and that really struck me. both families came from south carolina, as did the family of the person that probably committed the murder. so, it was just a matter of, you know, one generation to display such radically different experiences of childhood. to this day if you come to new haven uc south carolina license plates everywhere. frank: interesting. one of the ways you make all those things clear it's by describing the birth of this scene, the street scene, outside the 24 hour convenience store called the two four. from a police perspective you hear about it as a problem area. you told it from the perspective of the community and how this area forms.

which, included a lot of drug use. but, also, kind of was serving these social purposes in the community. you characterize the ambivalence with which everyone knew them standing outside the 24. and it sort of what that meant, you know. if you want to talk on the north about that. nicholas: in an impoverished neighborhood where there aren't many spaces for young people to be, people gather in spaces that people who grew up in other ways in this country might not think is away to have fun. it was open for 24 hours on a busy corner and most of the people there were there for fun. it is where you would meet people. there was romance and music playing from car stereos. it was a lot of fun to be there and some of the people there were engaged in drug dealing or

violence. most people were not. one of the things you can think about if you are thinking about a community and thinking about tragic things that happened, thinking about how a community like that is policed. what it means to really know a community. there is no first person in this book. i thought of the community and neighborhood as the main character and i interviewed way over 500 people because i wanted this feeling of everyone describing how a neighborhood evolves and what it means to be in a place where people are not conspicuous and are not particularly, may be, they do not have the opportunity to individuate as well as they will perhaps in other parts of town, even. again, speaking to some of the things you said about policing. in new haven, it is a model city in part because it's a place where their houses -- there has

been a lot of public and civic experimenting. that is time for policing too. at the time of the murder one form of policing is not community-based. it is a distant militaristic approach. but if you really want -- policing is an information-based industry and if you want to have crimes solved you need to have people trust you sufficiently to give you information. because it is always responsive. it's a long-winded way of answering your question, but when i think about the line of people standing outside the two-four, if a police officer does not know who people are and is interested before something happens, they will not be able to distinguish people. they will not have achieved prior report. so someone, one of the rare kids on his bicycle that rides around the city and really knows the city, that is somebody with a rare ability to evoke not only

the experiences of his own childhood that other people's childhoods too. he is a really compassionate and empathetic person and you won't be able to distinguish them from the kid that is a really promising kid and loved to watch ken burns documentaries as a child but through it -- a series of terrible personal experiences including being shot at him selves -- himself slowly slips into violence. people will not talk to you a murder happens, so you are dependent on people who may have less trustworthy reasons to talk to police. frank: thank you to all our panelists. we have about 10 minutes left and i will open it up to questions from the audience. in thinking about this panel, the fights between vietnamese and texas fishermen were echoed in california's history with japanese fishermen. you know, that a pulley -- the police departments are influencing each other and

copying each other's tactics. it seems like all of these different injustices are connected by different threads. i am just grateful to our authors for making those connections. everybody, give them a hand. applause --[applause] ok, if you have a question, i want to also mention that all of the authors will be at signing area one is signing books directly after this panel. there will be volunteers directing you there. so, please raise your hand if you have a question. we have one year in the center. >> this is for kirk. i read your book.

it is also an environmental story. the tenacity of the woman struck me. can you share a little bit about that? kirk: thank you, i was just sitting here thinking about how i didn't get to talk about diane wilson. when i first started reporting the book i thought it would be an account of an unknown chapter of white supremacy in america, but for all of the discussion of this is a term for between two sides, i realized, nobody was paying attention to the turf itself. this coastline is the hub of the petrochemical industry in america. almost all are chemicals and toxic stuff is manufactured there. for the better part of the 20th century you had a chain of senators and others waving in multinational corporations to set up plants along these bays

and in the process of doing this they would impounded freshwater that used to flow into the bays and sell the freshwater to the plans and then give the lancet discharge permits to dump -- the plants discharge permits to dump the water into the bays. there were constant tinker collisions in the gulf. there were massive oil spills. one is coursing throughout the entire length of the book. it took almost one year to catch and lo and behold the fishermen go out and their nets start coming out lighter and lighter. there is a problem. because things are getting so bad economically for shrimping and crabbing, a lot of fishermen would work at the chemical plant in off-season. i open the book was an account of billy joe, the man killed pulling up a mutated crab.

he is frustrated wondering what is causing this. he suspects it is the chemical plant. but, he cannot rally any of the guys behind him to take on the true threat. it was not until diane wilson, who i think just turned 76, she was a fourth-generation shrimp or that had kind of a mystical connection to the water. but it is not lost on me that she is the one female in the whole book. the lone female shrimper able to correctly diagnose the problem that faced with an admittedly bleak livelihood of trying to yank something of value out of these days, it -- bays, it was a lot easier to point to a small number of refugees and say they are the reason why things are not going my way anymore. if we get rid of them everything

will be great again, that it to take on exxon or formosa. so, diane, her moral compass was functioning and she fought a lonely battle that is ongoing, four decades long now. she lost nearly everything. her marriage broke apart and she became a pariah in her town. she was pushed to suicide on multiple occasions and her boat was shot at because she kept taking on these plants. two years ago she made history winning the largest settlement under the clean water act against formosa, well over $50 million. everyone thinks she is a multimillion -- multimillionaire now in c drift -- seadrif, the

small town of texas. but i assure you she is living on social security and she was arrested another two or three months ago for a similar action. all the things we are talking about, the stuff gets dark and bleak. but, you know, there are stories where you find a person that is the exception to the norm that can prove to you it's not all hopeless. sometimes you have to be incredibly stubborn. there are people fighting this. i was really grateful to be able to include her story in this book. frank: back there? >> thank you all panelists. kirk, do you see parallels between the reaction of the texas fishermen against these refugees, currently in some of american foreign policy against chinese companies?

kirk: interesting. you know, to me, this is an attempt at an answer. but, the white shrimpers kept saying this had nothing to do with race. they said that sometimes as they had ku klux klan memorabilia in the room i was interviewing them in. but, they kept telling me it was all about economics. there were always whispers that communist had infiltrated the refugee program and there were secret invading. one of the only editorial points i make really clearly in the book was that, these guys were getting their assets kicked not by communists, but by capitalists. they were losing because it is a

sad thing. this was a race to the economic bottom. the vietnamese were able to thrive because they were so desperate because they were living 12 people to a trailer. they would eat the fish white people considered junk fish to cut on cost. there was nothing i would point to as the saying, how great for them, they were geeking out on existence. they were not communists. they were using the system to extract more value from the system. this is maybe a glancing answer to what you are saying, that i suspect the communist, capitalist sort of way of breaking the world into two does not always illuminate very much. frank: we have one more question over here. >> hey. hi. this is just one comment for kirk. i grew up in houston and lived

in galveston for 11 years. i am excited to read this book. there are so many resilient stories about galveston, the hurricane, juneteenth. there is all these narratives. then, there is not interrogation, i did not grow up in galveston. i lived and taught there for a long time. you focus on these resilient stories without interrogating why kids who live 20 blocks from the beach have never seen it. i know that is not the story you are telling, but all of that is connected to this lack of interrogation of, how did we get here and who gets what? like, who is an american and who gets a piece of the pie? i just want to say, i am excited to read it. frank: i think that is all the

time we've got. everybody, go meet the authors at the sign in. [applause] also have colin opportunities. dennis prager will be here later. we are pleased to be joined now by author and town hall columnist, kirk -- kurt schlichter. his book is we will be bac