On Wednesday night, students and community members gathered for the launch of Senior Writer-in-Residence Anthony Walton’s new book, “The End of Respectability: Notes of a Black American Reckoning with His Life and His Nation.” In his book, an essay collection, Walton tells a story steeped in history and autobiography about race relations in the United States, from the Civil Rights Movement to the Black Lives Matter Movement.

Joined in conversation by Professor of English Guy Mark Foster, Walton began by highlighting education as a crucial foundation toward understanding the shared history of both Black and white Americans.

“From my perspective as a Black man, we have no more urgent national business than fixing our education system,” Walton read from an essay featured in his book. “If we don’t solve this problem, we will end up with a much bigger one, a nation that is ungovernable, unable to perceive and apprehend itself and unable to function just when we need to function with more efficacy and urgency than ever before.”

Walton likened a widespread erasure of African American history to the systematic forgetting attributed to a “memory hole,” a term George Orwell coined in “1984.”

“There’s this idea that seems to be afoot at the moment, that if we just stop talking about things, then it will be as if they never happened, and it will all go away,” Walton said. “One of the things that happens, and the reason for using that [memory hole] metaphor, is that it doesn’t go away. It does kind of get shoved down into this place where it can be covered in silence, but it’s there, and it’s rumbling. It stays and lives and continues to create disruption, pain, problems and every so often it will erupt.”

Reading from an essay about the erasure of the Tulsa race massacre from American education, Walton warned how historical miseducation can reinforce white supremacist values today.

“Some white Americans who do not know about things like the Tulsa massacre are startled to learn about the emotions, preoccupations and even resentments that many Blacks carry to the present day based on this parallel yet suppressed history,” Walton read. “Consequently, they do not have the context to comprehend what is happening around them now, including Black disaffection.”

Shifting his focus toward the present, in his book, Walton discusses the nation as it undergoes a “third reconstruction,” which he describes as a historical parallel to the 19th-century post-Civil War Reconstruction Era.

“I think of our nation as currently undergoing a third reconstruction, the second being the [Dr. Martin Luther] King years, with our present activity precipitated by the murder of George Floyd,” Walton read.

In this “third reconstruction,” Walton described the potential inhibitors for intergenerational Black advancement and racial progress. He drew on the experiences of his parents, who grew up in Mississippi and moved to Illinois to escape the racism in the South.

“The dragon of racial hatred appears in each generation with a new meaning and menace of virtually the same existential threat to Black lives,” Walton read. “We stay locked in a loop, a marvelous strip of our own making, and are therefore always in a state of reconstruction. And I fear that this pattern will never end.”

Walton also expressed his hopes for the future of the nation in rectifying the prevalence of racial incidents and microaggressions characterized by white supremacist values.

“I actually have hopes that in five years, things might look a little different,” Walton said. “They might look more how I would like them to look. You know, it’s not that it isn’t going to be painful going through that, but again, if we know our history, we know there’s all kinds of times that have been really painful.”

Preston Yates ’26, a student in Walton’s poetry class, attended the book launch to support Walton and learn about his perspectives.

“I always appreciate when I’m led to be hopeful by somebody, but [when] I’m not told that being hopeful alone is enough,” Yates said. “You need to use that hope to actually act in a way to enact the change that you want to see.”

Walton reflected in his talk upon his hope to find a path forward toward reconciliation.

“I’m interested in preserving an America that allows for my father to do what he did, and I want millions of others to be able to do that,” Walton said. “It’s just not going to all be overnight. It’s not going to all be at once. And that is a tragedy, and that’s part of the tragedy of being American.”