Welcome to the Writer's Bone podcast, everyone, where your favorite storytellers have shared their writing journeys for 10 years and counting.
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If we all have to meet on the Writer's Bone podcast, then let it be.Let us meet on the bone.Keep writing, everyone.Enjoy the show.Hey, folks, welcome to the Writer's Bone podcast.
I'm your host, Daniel Ford, and I'm also the author of Black Coffee and Sid Sanford Lives.
Today is election day here in the United States, so if you're biting your nails or consuming copious amounts of alcohol and caffeine waiting for results, we thought you could use a healthy dose of quality journalism from a couple of Pulitzer Prize winners.
Tolu Olorunnipa and Robert Samuels, co-authors of His Name is George Floyd, One Man's Life, and The Struggle for Racial Justice, are incredibly busy covering this election cycle.
But they carved out some time to talk to us recently about their initial coverage of the murder of George Floyd and how their reporting eventually led to their book.
In addition to winning the Pulitzer for nonfiction in 2023, His Name is George Floyd also won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and it was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Book Prize, among other honors.
And there's a quote I'd like to share that seems fitting for election day.They write, we don't just tell ourselves stories in order to live.We tell ourselves stories because we get to live.
And in the living, there is always a chance to make things better.And in that chance, there is great hope. Tolu Olorunnipa is the White House Bureau Chief of the Washington Post.He joined the Post in 2019 and has covered the last three presidents.
Previously, he spent five years at Bloomberg News, where he reported on politics and policy from Washington and Florida.Olorunnipa has reported from five continents and more than 30 countries as part of the presidential press corps.
He started his career at the Miami Herald. Robert Samuels is a staff writer at The New Yorker who focuses on stories about politics, policy, and the changing American identity.
He co-authored His Name is George Floyd while he was a national enterprise reporter for The Washington Post, where he worked for nearly 12 years.
He grew up in the Bronx and is an alumnus of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, where he was editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, The Daily Northwestern. He has also worked as a staff writer at the Miami Herald.
Please enjoy our conversation with Tolu and Robert starting right now.Keep writing, everyone. And Tolu, Robert, I know you are both hardworking journalists in an election year, so thank you so much for taking some time to chat with us.Welcome.
Thanks, it's good to be here.
So before we dig into your Pulitzer Prize winning book, his name is George Floyd.Tell our listeners what brought you to journalism originally.And Tolu, do you want to lead us off here?
Yeah, I grew up in Tallahassee, Florida.My parents are both immigrants from Nigeria, and news was like a huge part of my upbringing, because that's how my parents figured out what was happening in a new society.
They had the newspaper delivered every morning, they watched 60 Minutes, they watched the local news, and it was always a big part of my upbringing.
When it came time to look at colleges and consider what I was going to be, I had no idea, but I knew that being a journalist, one, allowed me to have experiences in a lot of different places, talk to a lot of different kinds of people, and also, you know, hold powerful people to account.
I always grew up sort of admiring the tough investigative TV journalists who would like, you know, take down the big fraudster in town.And so I always sort of aspired to do that in ways big and small.
And I got a really great opportunity out of high school to work for my local newspaper and have internships every summer.
And my first job was at the Miami Herald and just covering local news, being right there locally in the community and dealing with the pulse of what makes a city or a town, you know, work and what sometimes makes it work poorly.
Being able to peel back those layers and write about it and write about the human beings that make up a society was really thrilling to me.And I've kind of
followed that pathway from local newspapers all the way up to national news and doing what I do today, covering politics.
And before I bring Robert in here, just a quick follow-up.Were you writing and reading before you made that decision to jump into a full bore in college?
Yeah, well, I was doing a lot of reading of the news and watching news.I've always been
sort of, I've always loved the idea of writing and reading and my parents would drop me off at the library for hours on end and just sort of leave me there to get lost in different worlds and so I've always had a respect for the value of language and, you know, before I
got into college, that was sort of one of the things that I knew that I was skilled in doing.And so I kind of just followed that passion and it led me to the career that I've had over the last several years.
Excellent.Okay, Robert, how about you?What was your path to writing and journalism?
So I grew up writing.I've been writing books before I knew how to write sentences.I would do illustrations of comic books and things like that until I learned how to be able to use words. Growing up, there were two things.
One, I had always wanted to write books.It had been something that I had wanted to do since I was a little boy.But I also had this really insatiable curiosity about the world.I grew up in the Bronx.
And I would love pulling out encyclopedias and reading about different places and capitals in the United States and in other places.
And it really fostered this idea that no matter what I did when I grew up, I wanted to be able to see different parts of the world, parts of the country, and be able to talk to people and learn about different cultures.It's been
And remains one of the perpetual things in my life when i was deciding on going to college i had a friend.
And I was telling her, she's actually now a writer at the New York Times Magazine, but I was telling her that I was debating about whether or not I wanted to be an English major because I wanted to write books or to do journalism because I had
this desire to see the rest of the world.She said to me, well, my dad's a journalist and my mom's a journalist, and my mom makes a lot more money than my dad. And so I'm the only fool who went into journalism for the money.
But the idea was that I'd be able to marry those interests.
I love that.Yeah, that's a tough realization where you get into it.It's like, oh, wait a minute.
This is not right.How did no one tell me about this?Everyone encouraged me.And then it was like, oh, I had to learn that on my own.Tough lesson.And you're from the Bronx.Are you a Yankees fan?Are you agnostic?
So this is the hard part because, you know, I grew up, you know, I became cognizant of baseball during that brief period where Darryl Strawberry was considered to be like the best baseball player ever.And the Yankees were a little bit terrible.
So I actually grew up as a Mets fan.The Yankees didn't start their domination until I was in middle school and didn't really care anymore. And so now, you know, I'm super happy about the Mets.
But over the years, I've sort of oscillated between alliances, allegiances.
We'll accept that.That's fine.You can stay.No big deal.What are you?I'm a Yankees fan.My dad's from New York originally and grew up loving Mickey Mantle.So that was it.But I'm also living in Boston.My wife's a Red Sox fan.Oh God! Figure that one out.
Good luck.And this is going to be a tough segue, but we're going to power through it.
As you're witnessing George Floyd's murder at the hands of police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis in May of 2020 and then reporting on it, what did you see or experience that made this different?
Was it the video itself that we had this visceral evidence of the crime?Was it the context of the
pandemic and the conflict with police that this country has been experiencing for decades and centuries that required some kind of release, especially during a Trump presidency that inflamed those conflicts even further.
What made this such a turning point that led to the reaction that followed?
That's a really great question we've grappled with for the better part of five years now. There are a lot of different ways to answer it.
One thing that I would say is in our role as journalists, we saw our newsroom, we saw other newsrooms reacting differently to this case than they had in previous instances.
Robert and I both have covered other instances of protests after police killings, all the way back to Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.
And we've seen sort of not only how there's a certain cadence of how these things happen, you know, there's coverage of the protests, there's cover coverage of the police response to coverage of the potential violence that breaks out, and then people's just sort of, you know,
put a pox on both houses and then move on and these things die down.
But in this case, we saw not only people on the streets being more diverse and more a more comprehensive slice of society, saying that they were outraged by what happened, but also seeing newsrooms decide that they weren't going to cover this the same way that they've covered past situations.
They were going to lean in on really grappling with the idea of systemic racism, grappling with the idea that what happened to George Floyd was not just a one-off incident, but it ties to greater themes of injustice within our country.
And so we were really privileged and proud to see the Washington Post decide to take that approach and really delve deep on figuring out how we could tell the story of systemic racism in America in a way that we hadn't in the past, take a strong, firm stance on the fact that systemic racism exists,
And it's not a matter of debate, whether or not it's something that needs to be dealt with or not.And so that's one of the things that we had a front row seat to how this was different from from the past.
And I think the fact that it was a video, the fact that it was watched by so many people, the fact that we were in the middle of a pandemic and a presidential campaign where everyone was really feeling a lot of anxiety about the state of the country.
All those things contributed to the change in tone in the journalism of covering not only George Floyd's death, but covering the broader themes that impacted his life.
Robert, did you want to add something?
Oh, I think the only thing I'd add is that We had the opportunity to sit with this incident in a way that we do not usually have.
The video itself was brutal and heinous, and of course it came with that really horrifying metaphor of agent of the state nonchalantly inflicting pain on a person of color. ignoring their pleas of mercy.
But because of the pandemic, because there was so little going on in our country, not only did we have to look at the brutality, but we also really got the opportunity to sit with it and think about what it meant.I think because
It was so hard to move on that allowed people to really stew and kind of try and unearth some feelings that they had within themselves about systemic racism and how it operates.
So just, you know, we're big into process on this show.So, you know, what was the process like for getting the story?You know, did you volunteer to get assigned it?You and, you know, the team that you worked with, you know, how did that come about?
I actually ran away from the story at first, you know, because I just presumed it was going to go in the way that these things traditionally go, that we do some piece that it would largely be forgettable, people would move on to the next tragedy.
And when I realized that wasn't happening in society, that people were digging into this, it really inspired me to continue.
And so, you know, this book, it originated with a series that was done at the Washington Post with Tolin, me and a handful of other reporters.And each of us had a slice with that.
And, you know, the idea was to try and look at different institutions, be it the institution of sharecropping, or housing, or education, or healthcare, or criminal justice, and try to ascertain how those interacted with the life of George Floyd.
And it just so happened that as we were doing the reporting, we got to know about who George Floyd was, and learning that he was, you know, more than a symbol that you would see on a wall or a name that you would see on Twitter.
And being able to learn about how he loved, who he loved, why he loved, all of that created this really insatiable curiosity.He was just the type of person you wanted to learn more about.So we understood like at the beginning of the project that
we could help society understand itself through writing about these institutions.
But then we realized that we would have this dual opportunity if we kept going, to not only have people understand themselves, have society understand itself, but to also have people understand who George Floyd was.
because when you really understood who George Floyd was, I think it deepened the sense of tragedy and outrage, but it also deepened our understanding of the racism that exists in our society.
you know, talk about your interview process, but I'll connect it to George Floyd himself.You know, what was he like?What kind of life did he live?And you touched on a few things, but, you know, how do you get that access?
You know, what is your interview process to get people to talk to you?And, you know, these people are grieving, they're emotional, but they also want to get their story out and his story out.You know, how do you get there with these folks?
Well, the first thing I would say is a number of people did not want to be public in their grief.They were thrust into the public spotlight.They saw this thing sort of growing so quickly that they didn't have any control over it.
They saw this movement growing so widespread and with so much, taking on so much that they really didn't have a lot of control over who their loved one was becoming this icon in this global atmosphere of racial justice protest.
And one of the things we did was we let people know that we weren't going to just publish a profile and move on, that we wanted to really get deep.
We wanted to really know who George Floyd was, learn about his family history, learn about his background, learn about his
struggles in this country and tell a broader story that was a partnership in ways, not just us asking for information and moving on, but saying that, you know, this family, these friends, these people who are part of George Floyd's life, wanted his life to and his tragic death to lead to change and lead to abandoning some of the systems of systemic racism that operate in this country.
And we as journalists, with the backing of The Washington Post, also had that mission.We also wanted to combat systemic racism and we felt that by exposing it exposing it and telling showing people who had been outraged by George Floyd's death.
showing people how he lived, showing people how he experienced some of these forms of injustice during his life, like Robert said, from the systems of healthcare to housing to criminal justice and policing.
That might also help people who are taking to the streets and active and wanting to make change to realize that there are a number of different ways you can make change that aren't necessarily just about putting up one police officer in jail.
It's about something broader.And so, We approach people with that sense of partnership with a sense that we were going to be there with a sense of, even if they weren't ready to talk right that moment that we would be willing to.
speak to them when they were ready, and a patience that not every journalist has the opportunity to have when you're under deadline pressure.
But we made the decision with our editors to not run this series right after George Floyd died, not in the weeks or months, not even the couple of months after he died, but several months after he died, this profile series ran
until we had more time, we had the willingness to give people the time to grieve, give people the space to grieve, and let them know that we were in a partnership with them to tell the story that they wanted to tell.
And we didn't push people beyond their boundaries, but we let them speak and let them do what they were comfortable with.
And we kept those conversations going on an ongoing basis in a way that people became more and more comfortable with us over time.And we asked people to introduce us to other people in George Floyd's orbit and other people in his life.
And that really helped us to get access to people who weren't talking to the media, who weren't having a public profile.We had these ambassadors and his other friends and family members who vouched for us
who opened the door to the stories that ended up becoming a big part of the book.
I would just add that when doing these processes, this was a really slow burn. And, I mean, in newspaper language it is, in book language it might have moved really fast.
But I think a lot of those times, you know, that we were with people, we weren't asking them anything.We were sitting and watching them live their lives.We were behind them as they were doing
particular thing as they were going to the store or going to trial, you know, and sometimes we'd just be in their apartments watching them embracing the silence and allowing them to grieve.
And so the first part was to let them know that we'd be here.But the second part was them to sort of feel like we're not really there. The interviews that we were doing were really trying to be an accurate reflection of their lives.
We were not trying to make things any worse for them.We wanted their lives to flow as naturally as they possibly could, even though they had two pesky reporters around them.
And you know, you do need for a story like this, you do need some institutional backing, which you guys were lucky enough to have.And I think a lot of people don't realize that, you know, journalism like this, it comes at a financial cost.
But you know, you do have to live your lives and keep the lights on in your own homes and all of that.So you've got to do that on top of all this stuff.And
If you don't have that institutional backing, then you're just writing the story with the headline, the daily thing, and then you move on as well.And I feel like a story like this needs that, needs sitting with it.
And it was that point in time where maybe even you had the time to really dig into this in a way that maybe a couple of years before you wouldn't have been able to do.
Yeah, absolutely. This also is happening in the middle of a presidential election.Robert and I were both covering the election from different vantage points.I was part of the White House team covering the Trump administration on a daily basis.
And I was, for several weeks at a time, pulled off of that daily coverage and told to take your time to help write this series.And that is something that benefited from the institutional support that we had.
organization saying that this is an important project, even in the middle of an election, we need to tell the story of this country in a way that we haven't done before.
And we're going to take one of our reporters who's normally on the campaign trail and have him focus on something different.And so that institutional backing was a huge difference maker for us in allowing us to do that kind of work.
The only other thing I'd say is that
as much as the institutional support helped, there was well-founded skepticism in certain communities and communities like the one that George Floyd grew up in that a big name from an outside media company might botch the story, might come in and try to tell us about ourselves and write a story that is not steeped in our own lived experiences.
And so we had to combat that as well.We had to let people know that Yes, other outlets sometimes cover this the wrong way, sometimes make the mistake, sometimes do parachute reporting.
We weren't doing that, and we did have to combat that and let people know that we were going to do something different from what had been the traditional big media, Bigfoot, come into town, tell everyone what their lives are like, and then leave.
we had to let people know that we were going to be different.We had to earn their trust.
And that was not easy, but that was sort of the other side of the coin of coming in from a big institution, from a national media outlet, and trying to tell the story of a small community that is not used to always getting fair coverage.
And so that was the other side of that process.
Yeah, I mean, I think I mean, it's an interesting question.
It's nice to be owned by an incredibly wealthy benefactor who would pay for things, you know, because when you start thinking about transcripts and public records and the solicitation of them, those costs add up quickly.
But, you know, I would also say to you, Daniel, that for a number of people that we spoke with, These were not folks who had very incredible, specific media diets.The difference between being from the Washington Post in D.C.
or being from the Washington Post in Washington, Indiana—I don't know if that's a real newspaper—I think was inconsequential to them.
what they knew were that we were reporters, what they knew were that we were writing stories and they had to make a choice.
Like they had to make a choice about whom they were going to trust, about the sort of access into their lives that they'd give us the privilege of having.Like they had to make that choice.
And I think the institution mattered a lot less than the approach.One of the, first things that one of George Floyd's roommates, Alvin Manago, had told me after I had knocked on his door and he wasn't answering the door.
And I had my notepad and I wrote him a note in my notepad and I stuck it under his door in his condo building.And then I knocked on his neighbor's door and put my card under his door and wrote another note saying, Hey, I'm sorry.
I know you're the neighbor to this guy.And, you know, that I went to go eat lunch and Alvin called me back and he had been home the entire time.And I came over and I asked my questions and he said to me, you know, it's interesting.
You didn't ask the question all the other reporters asked. And that made it interesting for me.You know, that made me want to tell you more of that.And I said, well, what did they ask you?
And his question is the first thing they always ask me is how did I feel when I saw the video? and you acted like you didn't even care.
Now, I mean, I kind of cared, but like, I also understood that if we're going to truly understand the life of this man, and also the way people are taking in his grief, that the most important question is not having him meet me at the point where I met George Floyd, like the most important point is to have him describe how he met George Floyd.
And I think that was a difference.
We're going to take a short break and hear from our sponsors.We'll be right back with award-winning journalist Tolu Olorunnipa and Robert Samuels after a word from our sponsors.Stick with us.
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If you're listening to the Writer's Bone podcast, and I'm Daniel Ford, enjoy the second half of our conversation with Tolu Olorunnipa and Robert Samuels, authors of the Pulitzer Prize winning His Name is George Floyd.
You know, writing a series like this is one thing, and you know, The Daily Bee, and you had this burning in the background. When did you start thinking about this in book form?And was there any additional work you had to do to flesh anything out?
What was your writing process to get it done?And then what was your process like for getting it out into the world?
Yeah, so almost immediately after we were done with the original recording, I just said, I hope someone calls and asks if we could do a book because I had just learned so much about George Floyd.
And I think I, you know, I must be honest in that I felt a little convicted by it because I also knew that if I were a child and, you know, I was walking with my parents and I saw a man who looked like George Floyd on the street, like, you know, trying to figure out his life,
the instinct that my family would have said is, you know, you see that guy, like you should ignore him and not try to be like that person, as if there was no redeeming value.
And can you imagine sort of having this belief that the only thing that redeemed you was the way that you die, right?Like his own murder, like that was the only redeeming quality of him.And
When I learned about him, I just thought, man, you know, if people understood this person more, they'd fully understand that the battle for him to breathe started long before he had ever met Derek Chauvin, right?And I thought that was valuable.
And then, you know, an agent called and asked if we were interested, and we're so thrilled that they did.
But, like, we thought originally that, you know, we might just sort of staple the stories together and add a few verbs and that would be the end of it. right?
And then we realized, oh, a newspaper series does not make a buck, you know, and I estimate perhaps 85 to 90 percent of the reporting that's in the in the book was not in the original series.
You know, it required Tolu and me waking up super early, running as hard as we can to talk to as many people as we can, embedding in the lives of George Floyd's family as they went through this trial.
When we started, we did not know Derek Chauvin would be convicted.That happened over the course of our reporting.
Looking at that, trying to secure these ancestral records to make sure that the assertions that were being made from the family were true, it was this perpetual daily slog.
I've been telling people that, you know, it probably took a year and a half for me to start feeling like myself again, because during those periods, we had essentially six months to report, finish reporting and write this tome, which meant very little sleep for both of us.
And, you know, it was, you know, it was a huge, huge task, much harder than I had anticipated.
Yeah, that deadline is giving me hives over here.Like the six months that I may not be able to recover from that.Because you're doing this additional reporting and you're in deep, but you also have to write the thing.What was that like?
Did you trade off sections?Did one focus on one chapter?Did someone else focus on another?How did that work?
Well, we thought the reporting was incredibly difficult in part because we're dealing with difficult subject matter in part because we had a lot of people we had to talk to in a short period of time or traveling across the country.
It seemed pretty exhausting.It wasn't until we started writing and editing and trading chapters and turning in chapters and getting edits back
much harder than any of the edits that we've gotten as journalists, did we realize what we were in for and how difficult it was.
And we were still trying to, you know, tie some bows on the reporting at this time as well, because we had to do a lot of things at the same time, given the shortened timeline.
And so we, you know, divided up the labor the best way we knew how, you know, we were covering the live action, the aftermath of the trial and whatnot.Robert was doing a lot of that in Minneapolis, getting to know Courtney
George Floyd's ex-girlfriend or George Floyd's girlfriend when he died.I was in Houston for a good chunk of that period and the aftermath, talking to family members, people who knew George Floyd when he was growing up.
And so some of it was natural because we're in different locations throughout the entire reporting process to know that you're going to be talking to people who are in those different locations.
But by the time we started writing and we had put together a pretty in-depth outline of chapters and the flow of the story and the flow of the book project from an early stage, we just sort of hit the ground running trying to turn in chapters and we were, you know, having these really
incessant deadlines of, you know, turning in chapters basically every couple of weeks and then getting them back with red ink all over them and having to rewrite them while also writing other chapters and trying to be true to the full arc of the story.
That's one thing that was very different for us as journalists.You know, when you write a book, you are really making a
full commitment to your reader who's going to be with you for, you know, a week, a month, maybe multiple months before they, you know, finish the entire project, and they're going to devote a lot of time to, you know, 400 plus pages of content, and you want to carry them with you, and you want the arc of the story to make sense for the reader, and so we had to be thinking about all of that as we were putting the chapters together, making sure that even though we were responsible for individual chapters separately,
we wanted the chapters to speak to each other, we wanted things to flow naturally, and so we were each other's first editor on every chapter that we did.
Before we sent our chapters to our other editor, we made sure that we gave it to one another, that we signed off on the language, that we double-checked things that we had heard from other people who were, you know, hearing similar stories or who had been a part of the same scene, but maybe from a different angle, that we cross-checked those things, we shared all of our transcripts of our interviews,
we had to be very collaborative in order to make this sound like a single voice and, you know, just being as open with one another as possible and getting on Zooms over the course of the writing, sometimes hours-long Zooms with our editors, just to hash out the story arc and what we wanted to keep in versus take out, how we wanted to
you know, frame certain scenes, how he wants to deal with certain challenges.That was a big part of the writing process.
And it was difficult, but also, you know, one of the highlights of my career to know that, you know, we work together and we work together in a way that really spoke to people in terms of the final product.
And it was something I still look back fondly on because it was a rare moment of that kind of collaboration working because there are a lot of you know, co-authored books that don't work.
Robert and I have heard a lot of stories of people who are enemies by the time they work on a book together.I read somewhere that Jimmy Carter and his wife did a book together and it was the first time they thought their marriage might not last.
And so there's a long history of things not working.And so we were both really proud to see that, you know, when we worked together and collaborated at this high level.
It just worked, and it combined the best of our skill sets and our different personalities, and we were able to work it together in a way that created a book that really landed with a lot of impact and that readers accepted the way that we intended.
I just want to say something for clarity's sake, because Tolu and I are different people.We write about different things, we have different demeanors, and it is not true in my case that I get copy back without lots of writing.
That was a familiar thing for me.
I was going to follow up on that.Like, what's that experience like we're having, you know, in your day gig?We're like, Oh yeah, this is fine.We're just going to print this as is.I don't think I've ever had that in my life.
Like if something doesn't have a lot of red marks on it, that's when I get anxious.So I'm glad you were able to experience that.
That tells you a lot about Tiler.It's a point to that.
And some of these projects, you see some of that work on the page, some of that stitching together, all of that hard work that you did.It may not all work cohesively, and the reader picks up on that.And this just had none of that.
So all of that hard work you did. just played off beautifully in this, because it didn't take away from your subject matter.I mean, that's where my focus was the entire time I was reading this.
And you two have this really illuminating and, I think, powerful conversation at the end of the book.And I don't want to step on it for our listeners who haven't read it yet.But I did want to ask, looking back,
at this whole experience, you know, reporting the story, doing those interviews, writing the book, you know, winning the freaking Pulitzer.
You know, what feelings do you have, not only about the work that you did, but also where we are in the country on issues like racial justice and the struggle to make lasting change in America?
You know, we started this conversation by talking about how I had wanted to be a writer since I was a little boy.
And to have the critical success that we have, including some nice stickers on the front and some new hardware for my home, it's beyond my capacity of imagination.There are times that I wake up and I'm still a little confused that it happened.
But what we were proud of at the end of it, what I was proud of at the end of it, when we finally handed it in, was that I thought we had turned in a work that was honest, that
did everything that we could possibly do to make sure people had a full nuanced description of George Floyd, but also had the deeper understanding of the day-to-day quotidian ways that lingering racism factors into our lives by things we do, by actions we make,
as individuals, and by things that face us.I hope that when people read it, they don't see that as an affliction on Black people or any particular race, because the white people who are also in these pages also have to make these kinds of choices.
And, you know, there's a real sense of pride that we were able to do that and a tremendous sense of gratitude for everyone who spoke to us, especially those who are very close to George Floyd, either by friendship or by blood.
You know, they really trusted and trusted us in a way That was remarkable.And, you know, we have, like, I just left with a good amount of gratitude about that.And on the other thing, on the societal question, right?
It's weird, because we dealt with people with a lot of ghosts.We had to unearth a lot of ghosts to make sense of why these people were dealing with those ghosts. And it was really hard.
And it was really hard to sort of see the moment in which we started writing this book, we started this series at The Post, in which everyone was really concerned about undoing some of these large institutional problems had whittled down to everyone either wanting to reify them,
or dismiss them and said we had gone too far, when it didn't feel like we had really gone that far at all.And all the time, I just continued coming back to this feeling that
There are so many people who we met who have dealt with so much more and have seen so much more.
You know, the conversation that's had with Jesse Jackson in the last chapter of the book, the conversations that are had with Philonise, George Floyd's brother, and the people who didn't know him who continue to protest.
And this is going to sound like the weirdest thing.I really hate saying it, but it's true.Um, when we first listened to the audio version of the book, you know, which is read masterfully by Dion Graham, who is the goat of this stuff.
Um, when I first listened to it, you don't fully realize the work is yours, right?Like it's because it's someone else reading it.But I just, the first words that came out of my mouth were just like, what a beautiful people, you know, like,
the resilience and the persistence embedded in the folks in these pages who continue going despite these institutional issues, it gave me so much hope and optimism for the future.
And I tell people all the time that, like, I left this project feeling a lot more hope for this country than I did when I came in. And that was because of the persistence and the beauty of the people who he talked to.
Tolu, I hate to tell you, or I hate to ask you to follow that, but we're in the midst of a presidential election, and you're working that beat.Do you carry a similar hope within you?
Because you're seeing some things on the other end, and this heating up of all these issues in a presidential election cycle.Is that something that you've carried from the end of the book, like Robert?
Yeah, I think in some ways you have to.
in order to do this work, in order to write the story of a man who was killed so grievously, and write the story about the country that he lived in, and do all the research, and talk to all the people, and carry all of the hardship that we carried in talking to so many people like this.
You kind of have to feel like you're doing it for a purpose.You kind of have to feel
like there is a hope the alternative is so dark that it's could be debilitating and so while you know we're realist and we know that we live in a country that has a lot of problems and a lot of dark history that makes it very difficult to see the light.
I think what Robert said about the resilience of the people that we were writing about gives you hope because they, you know, had to deal with much more hard stuff than we do as journalists just sort of writing about this.
They're living the actual lives and, you know, they give you hope because they are picking themselves up.They are going to protest.They are writing their congressmen.
They're going to the White House and trying to make change, even though, you know, they probably have every reason to give up and say this isn't worth it.
And so I do draw a lot of hope from that, even as, you know, realistically, we know that there are a lot of big obstacles that this country faces, and this country has known it's had an issue with systemic racism for generations, and it's been unwilling to really deal with it.
And so that history sometimes bumps up against the hope, but I think part of the story of the resilience of the people that we write about is that they've always allowed, sometimes against, against the sense of, you know, pragmatism.
They've believed in a hope that is against hope.They believed in a hope that is bigger than the challenges that one faces in this country.
And so I've drawn a lot of hope from talking to people like that, people who continue to pick themselves up, even though the opposite odds are stacked against them and the obstacles seem so high.And George Floyd was one of those people.
He was one of those people who, you know, had a number of reasons to give up, who had, as we write in the book, who had so many obstacles from his family history to the societal issues and the systemic issues that were sort of arrayed against him.
And he continued to, in his poems and his daily interactions with other people and the way that he had an outlook on life,
continued to push himself forward and say that he thought that the next day would be better than this day, that he would have another shot, he'd have another chance.He moved from Houston to Minneapolis to pick himself up and try to get better.
And so spending so much time with George Floyd and his spirit from the conversations and interviews that we did sort of infuses you with that level of hope that even though he faced the tragic end,
we still get to breathe and we still have the opportunity to, you know, make things better for the next generation and fix some of the problems that he faced.
And so that's sort of what drives us as reporters, as journalists, as people who wrote a book, not just to tell the story of a history and a historic moment in the country, but with a clear thesis.
we have work to do as a country to address systemic racism and to get to a better version of ourselves that doesn't lead to more George Floyds, that doesn't lead to more situations where people not only live a life where they're struggling to breathe, but also have a tragic end like George Floyd did.
And so we have presidential races, we have all kinds of things in our politics that can be the antidote to hope, but I think
reading and learning so much about the people who have every reason to be hopeless and are still hopeful, that is the antidote to hopelessness that we have the privilege of spending so much time with.Well said.
Well said by you both, actually.You know, we always end with writing advice.What is your best advice to the aspiring writer, journalist, or storyteller out there?
That's a really good question.I would say spending time with the people who aren't written about and asking them the questions that aren't being asked is the is the touching off point to telling stories that other people aren't telling.
And knowing that George Floyd was someone whose story was worth telling before he was killed is the kind of example that we've used to demonstrate the power of storytelling.George Floyd had a compelling story.
He was a compelling and interesting person.He had interesting interactions with American society that were worth documenting even before he had an interaction with a police officer that killed him. We need more of those stories.
There's a lot of storytelling that isn't unique and isn't dynamic.And these stories are living among us.They're people who sometimes get disregarded because of people judging a book by its cover.
And I'd say finding a way to talk to people who are overlooked, who don't get their story told,
will help any writer improve their craft, improve their eye for finding, you know, the kinds of details that make a book beautiful and tell the story of humanity in a beautiful way.
And so that would be my advice, really getting out there and finding stories and looking for them out in the open where they exist, but they're just being ignored because of a number of different reasons.
And, you know, telling those stories and asking those questions that aren't being asked will lead to answers that could be surprising and could lead to greater writing in the future.
If you were to like, I'm not going to flip the camera around, but like if you were like, you'd see some like books on the side that I'm like to read.
And like on my bookshelf, you would see like all the books that I feel like I need to write, like, you know, the anthologies by the writers who I admire, there are things about craft.
And I think those are so important to me that like, if you really want to be impactful, right?There aren't many new tricks under the sun, like they're embedded in the works of so many great people, you know, both living and dead.
And I think it's important to read a lot, to scrutinize a lot, to be able to read and question sentence lengths and verb choice and all of that, and also rely on the great trove of information about why people made those choices.
From a craft perspective, I think there's nothing more important than being able to look for heroes, discover those heroes, and then dismantle them to understand why they were successful and to think about what you do better.
And from a reporting standpoint, It's funny, I just did kind of my interview tips for good interviews with my students before I got on this call.
A class, we should say, Tolu and I crash for about two seconds.Yes.
Yeah, but I think the most important one is for every question, you have five more questions.For every question, five more.That comes from one of the great feature writers and editors, Jackie Brenizenski.
And that means that everything that you're thinking about has a deeper issue, and you just have to be able to dig and dig.And I think that's really important.
Well, you couldn't see it, but I had a list of questions here.But as you two were talking, I was like, you know, that journalism bug in my ear was like, oh, you should ask him this or this follow-up.And then I was like, Dan, this is a podcast.
You only have so much time.So thank you for answering the questions that we did ask here.Tolu, Robert, I mean, this is going to be an enduring piece of journalism. not just for the next couple of years, the next couple of decades, but forever.
I mean, this is one of those books where you point out and go like, that's how it's done.And that's why it matters.And that's how we can affect change in this country.So we can't thank you enough for the work that you do.Keep it up.
And anytime you want to come back, you two, the door is always open.
Thanks so much.It's really sweet to hear it.
Thank you for listening to the Writer's Bone Podcast.You can listen to past episodes on Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, and Amazon Podcasts.Really, any podcast channel known to man.You can find more literary goodness on our website, writersbone.com.
Also check out the other shows within the Writer's Bone Podcast network, such as Pop Literacy, Film Freaks Forever, As Told To, The Ghost Writing Podcast, The Shit No One Tells You About Writing, and Deliberate Freelancer.
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