I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Wednesday, April 6th.

With us now, Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, the largest foundation

funder of the arts and humanities in the United States.

Dr. Alexander has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist for both poetry and biography.

She has taught at Columbia and Yale.

At the latter, she was both a poetry professor and chair of the African American Studies Department.

And in a way, it's that same intersection that brings her back today with her new book called

the Trayvon Generation.

Some of you may remember Dr. Alexander is on the show in 2020 when she wrote a New Yorker

magazine essay by the same title, The Trayvon Generation.

It went on to win a National Magazine Award.

Now there's a book-length version that is on one level about black Americans who had grown up in the last 25 years

and at another about art in our time that helps to process and make progress from traumas that are both public and private,

like the killing of Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood vigilante who followed him for no good

reason, and then the justice system sided with the killer. The killing of Trayvon Martin was

10 years ago now, February 26, 2012. So we just passed the 10th anniversary. I guess it's

enough time to define a generation. Dr. Alexander, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Thank you, Brian. I'm always happy to be talking with you. And to start with the basics,

why the Trayvon Generation? Generation is a big word to hang on one victim or one killing.

Well, it is. And of course, in the case of Trayvon Martin, there were unjust race-based murders of young black people before and after too many to count, too many to fully absorb.

But what I think was emblematic about Trayvon Martin's killing, interesting because it was not

filmed on a cell phone like so many of the other emblematic murders of this era,

...