Speaker 1: This episode is sponsored by FX's Fleischman Is in Trouble,
Speaker 1: starring Jesse Eisenberg, Claire Danes, Lizzie Kaplan, and Adam Brodie.
Speaker 1: The strama tells the story of recently divorced Toby Fleischmann,
Speaker 1: who dies into the world of app based dating with
Speaker 1: the kind of success he never had in his youth.
Speaker 1: Then his ex wife disappears, leaving him with their two
Speaker 1: children and no hint of her return effectus. Fleischman Is
Speaker 1: in Trouble, streaming November seventeenth only on Hulu. Good morning, peeps,
Speaker 1: and welcome to oikate F Daily with Meet your Girl
Speaker 1: Danielle Moody recording not So Live on this Thanksgiving week
Speaker 1: from the Brooklyn Silarium. I'm really excited to bring up
Speaker 1: later in the show a guest that I have honestly
Speaker 1: been trying to get woke f for quite some time,
Speaker 1: but he had been in the midst of writing the
Speaker 1: book that we are going to talk about in just
Speaker 1: a little bit. Clint Smith is a writer at The
Speaker 1: Atlantic and he is the author of How the Word
Speaker 1: Is Past Reckoning with the history of slavery across America.
Speaker 1: And you know, I will tell you that when I
Speaker 1: finished the interview with Clint, I was really uneasy, filled
Speaker 1: with a lot of different emotions about the current state
Speaker 1: of our politics. How it is feels like I keep
Speaker 1: running these flashbacks in my head of moments in history
Speaker 1: that bubbled up, moments of rage and angst and anger
Speaker 1: and denial and frustration that all seem to be coming
Speaker 1: ahead at this moment. And he speaks a lot in
Speaker 1: our interview about the importance of narrative and how our
Speaker 1: histories are defined and what defines those histories right, And
Speaker 1: it is not necessarily, as he will say, empirical evidence,
Speaker 1: but it is stories and who those stories are passed
Speaker 1: down from and our connection to them. And as I
Speaker 1: was thinking about his book and have been thinking doing
Speaker 1: a lot more thinking, frankly, since the outrage the performed
Speaker 1: outrage by the radical right with regard to critical race theory,
Speaker 1: which is only taught at the graduate level and law
Speaker 1: school level and not in our elementary schools, I've been
Speaker 1: thinking a lot about slavery and our denial of this horrific, cruel,
Speaker 1: inhumane system that is the foundation of this country, and
Speaker 1: that our denial of its existence, of its effects that
Speaker 1: are still seen today and experience today not just through
Speaker 1: the racial wealth gap, not just through the lack of
Speaker 1: equity in our public education system, but is seen and
Speaker 1: felt in the trauma that Black people in this country
Speaker 1: and throughout the diaspora hold. In my conversation with Clint,
Speaker 1: I found myself welling up with tears. And I have
Speaker 1: no immediate connection to slavery. I can't go through my
Speaker 1: lineage as many Black people in this country and around
Speaker 1: the world can't and pinpoint to you modes of our
Speaker 1: history and thinking about how purposeful and strategic that was
Speaker 1: to deny people a connection to their past so that
Speaker 1: they have no real future. Right when we say that
Speaker 1: like the past is prologue in many ways and instances,
Speaker 1: that is absolutely true. The past informs our present and
Speaker 1: sets up our future. And without a real connection to that, right,
Speaker 1: without without a shared history that is steeped in truth,
Speaker 1: I just wonder how much further out of control our
Speaker 1: society is going to spin. You know, everything seems so urgent,
Speaker 1: so distraught, so horrendous at this moment. And you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things that Kurt will, that Clint will
Speaker 1: say in our conversation is that you know, six years
Speaker 1: before the civil war that he was studying. People did
Speaker 1: not think in that moment, oh my god, this can happen.
Speaker 1: There is a civil war that's going to be pending.
Speaker 1: And he said much in the same way that here
Speaker 1: we are in twenty twenty one, and we're coming barreling
Speaker 1: to the end of this year. And I just said
Speaker 1: the other you know, the other day to my therapist,
Speaker 1: I said, I cannot believe that it's going to be
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, Like where the fuck did the last
Speaker 1: two years ago? And I have no idea where we
Speaker 1: are headed in this country, right, like no farm grasp.
Speaker 1: And she said to me that this feeling of anxiousness
Speaker 1: that we're experiencing, and obviously we're experiencing it in a
Speaker 1: variety of different ways, comes from the lack of safety. Right,
Speaker 1: She's like, it comes from the lack of safety. She goes,
Speaker 1: think back, you know, to nine to eleven. Up until then,
Speaker 1: there had never been an attack, a terrorist attack from
Speaker 1: outside terrorists, right, foreign terrorists on American soil since Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 1: So our understanding in America is that we are fundamentally safe.
Speaker 1: Now we know and I know that there are communities
Speaker 1: in this country that have never felt fucking safe. And
Speaker 1: that's the point that I want to get to next,
Speaker 1: is that it is the foundation of safety right when
Speaker 1: we talk about our basic needs, being that we talk
Speaker 1: about food and shelter and clothing, and what that means
Speaker 1: is safety right from the elements right. And so what
Speaker 1: does it mean to have communities of people whose safety
Speaker 1: has consistently and fundamentally been challenged year after year, decade
Speaker 1: after decade, generation after generation. What does it mean to
Speaker 1: an exist in a country where you never feel safe?
Speaker 1: And that's the experience of black people in America is
Speaker 1: to never really truly feel safe, to always feel on edge,
Speaker 1: whether it is going into a store to go pick
Speaker 1: up an Iteman item, to know that you can be
Speaker 1: followed right, you can be thrown out of said store
Speaker 1: over suspicion of nothing other than being black, having the
Speaker 1: audacity to walk into a store, the threat if you
Speaker 1: were a driver, to be driving and pulled over and
Speaker 1: to either be killed right or harassed and totally and
Speaker 1: completely emotionally viciously attacked right to walking down the street right,
Speaker 1: and the idea that any white vigilante, whether they have
Speaker 1: a badge or not, can fundamentally, stop end your life
Speaker 1: off of a whim. That the way that most of
Speaker 1: us exist and the fact that we're still breathing and
Speaker 1: thriving is through happenstance, right, And we don't get to
Speaker 1: really have those conversations. We are gas lit into believing that,
Speaker 1: you know, we're fundamentally the problem. If we were to
Speaker 1: just you know, be like everybody else, then all would
Speaker 1: be well, except we're not like everybody else. We're not
Speaker 1: treated like everybody else is treated. We're not spoken to
Speaker 1: in the way that other people are spoken to. We
Speaker 1: don't have the same history, right. And so the fact
Speaker 1: that we exist in a society that is just now
Speaker 1: in the twenty first century taking down monuments to fucking
Speaker 1: Confederate soldiers, that we have more monuments in this country
Speaker 1: to honor those that try to overthrow our government as
Speaker 1: opposed to those that were fighting for the liberation right
Speaker 1: of enslaved people, tells you everything you need to know
Speaker 1: about America. And we wonder, you know, like, oh, how
Speaker 1: come these insurrectionists are not being dealt with and blah blah,
Speaker 1: because they'll get a fucking statue in a couple of years.
Speaker 1: They'll have high schools named after them, they have fucking
Speaker 1: highways named after them. And so what does it mean
Speaker 1: to continually exist in a place that doesn't want you,
Speaker 1: doesn't see you? Right? And how were we ever to
Speaker 1: move forward when we can't even agree on facts, when
Speaker 1: we can't agree on truth? Right, when our understanding of
Speaker 1: history all depends on who is teaching it to us,
Speaker 1: where we are learning it from where we are hearing it.
Speaker 1: And so I, I, you know, I really do worry
Speaker 1: as our present moment is really indicative of our past transgressions,
Speaker 1: our denial of truth, of facts of history. Right, you know,
Speaker 1: I think about the ways in which I consistently feel robbed,
Speaker 1: never truly being educated to understand, like the truth of America, right,
Speaker 1: who was trampled, who was harmed? Who fought back, as
Speaker 1: Clint will say, even knowing that they were never going
Speaker 1: to reap the benefits of their fight, of their warrior spirit,
Speaker 1: that they were just doing so in the hopes that
Speaker 1: at some point, right, at some point, there would be liberation.
Speaker 1: And even now we're only free ish. So I really
Speaker 1: hope that you all taken this conversation that I had
Speaker 1: that was for me so profound that I had so
Speaker 1: many more questions to ask, so much more that I
Speaker 1: wanted to learn, and I hope that you will tell
Speaker 1: me in the comment section below what came up for
Speaker 1: you during my conversation with Atlantic writer Clint Smith, and
Speaker 1: some of the things that you've been asking yourself right
Speaker 1: as we are moving through our world right now that
Speaker 1: is just so out of whack. How what are the
Speaker 1: questions that are coming up for you? What are you learning?
Speaker 1: What are you unlearning? I'd love to hear that in
Speaker 1: the comment section. Coming up next my interview with author,
Speaker 1: activists and staff writer at The Atlantic, Clint Smith. Folks,
Speaker 1: I'm very excited to welcome to wok A Daily for
Speaker 1: the very first time writer at The Atlantic, activist, poet
Speaker 1: and author of the new book How the Word Is Past,
Speaker 1: a reckoning with the history of Slavery across America. Clint Smith.
Speaker 1: Welcome to wok F Daily. Your book cannot be more timely,
Speaker 1: I think if you had tried to make it so,
Speaker 1: can you talk to us? One of the first questions
Speaker 1: that I have for you is, in our current political
Speaker 1: and cultural climate that is one of chaos and distress
Speaker 1: around our connection to truth and facts, how has your
Speaker 1: book been received far given that you know, it's come
Speaker 1: at a time when we are debating critical race theory,
Speaker 1: when we are debating our founding. Yeah, well, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for having me. It's it's really wonderful to
Speaker 1: be here. I mean, I've been overwhelmed by the way
Speaker 1: that my book has been received. I've not experienced the
Speaker 1: same level of pushback that I think some other texts
Speaker 1: that my book is in conversation with maybe has, maybe
Speaker 1: because I think that's for a lot of reasons that
Speaker 1: we might not have time to get into now. But
Speaker 1: but what I think is that many people are drawn
Speaker 1: to it because, as you said, it is speaking to
Speaker 1: something that is so central and present in our current
Speaker 1: political political discourse. And I always tell folks that I
Speaker 1: wrote this book for like a fifteen and sixteen, sixteen
Speaker 1: year old version of me, you know, who grew up
Speaker 1: in New Orleans, surrounded by Confederate iconography and feeling like
Speaker 1: I never had the language to understand why it was there,
Speaker 1: who grew up in a city that was always being
Speaker 1: told all the things that were wrong with it, all
Speaker 1: the you know, because of violence, because of poverty, because
Speaker 1: of the way that you know, the public housing projects
Speaker 1: represented the deterioration of the American family, and implicit within
Speaker 1: all of that was people saying all the things that
Speaker 1: they thought were wrong with black people. And I remember,
Speaker 1: and in a majority of black city, you don't necessarily
Speaker 1: have to say it, but it can be implied with
Speaker 1: the sort of language that you use. And I remember
Speaker 1: growing up in New Orleans and feeling a sense of
Speaker 1: of psychological and emotional paralysis, where like, I knew what
Speaker 1: I was hearing was wrong, but I didn't know how
Speaker 1: to say it was wrong. I didn't have the language,
Speaker 1: I didn't have the history, I didn't have the sociology,
Speaker 1: I didn't have the toolkit with which to push back
Speaker 1: against it. And part of what has happened over the
Speaker 1: course of my adult life, and I think specifically with
Speaker 1: this book, was attempting to give myself the language to
Speaker 1: understand so much of what I experienced growing up. And
Speaker 1: I hope that the book serves as an offering to
Speaker 1: those who, like me, recognize that they didn't understand the
Speaker 1: history of slavery and thus the history of this country
Speaker 1: actually in any way that was commensurate with the impact
Speaker 1: that it has had on this country. And so this
Speaker 1: book was a sort of four year journey for me
Speaker 1: in trying to answer so many of the questions and
Speaker 1: fill in so many of the gaps that existed in
Speaker 1: my own education, and hopefully bring the reader alongside with
Speaker 1: me to answer some of the questions that they might
Speaker 1: have had as well. You know, I tell my listeners
Speaker 1: often they have heard me say that, you know, I
Speaker 1: am a child of immigrants that grew up out east
Speaker 1: on Long Island in New York, in a majority white area,
Speaker 1: majority white suburb, and throughout my entire life have felt
Speaker 1: like I've had to teach myself about black history. I've
Speaker 1: had to teach myself about the truth of slavery and
Speaker 1: only being able to even scratch, not even the surface
Speaker 1: there to be able to teach myself about black revolutionaries
Speaker 1: throughout our history. Because I've said many times before that
Speaker 1: I believe that one of the greatest extensions of white
Speaker 1: supremacy is our public education system. That if you can
Speaker 1: invisibilize people to their history, to their you invisibilize them
Speaker 1: to their future right. And you know, I wonder for
Speaker 1: your fifteen and sixteen year old self, what were some
Speaker 1: of the questions that were percolating in your mind at
Speaker 1: that time that you have been able to reconcile with
Speaker 1: through the last four years of this research. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: in many ways that's tied to the origin story of
Speaker 1: the specific project, which is in twenty seventeen, I was
Speaker 1: watching the statues of the Confederate monuments come down in
Speaker 1: New Orleans and statue a PGT bow guard Jefferson Davis
Speaker 1: Robert E. Lee, And I was watching these statues come
Speaker 1: down and thinking about what did it mean that I
Speaker 1: grew up in a majority of black city in which
Speaker 1: there were so more homages to enslavers than there were
Speaker 1: to enslave people. What does it mean that to get
Speaker 1: to school I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard,
Speaker 1: To get to the grocery store, I had to go
Speaker 1: down Jefferson Davis Parkway, that my middle school was named
Speaker 1: after a leader of the Confederacy, that my parents still
Speaker 1: live on the street today, named after someone who owned
Speaker 1: over one hundred and fifty enslaved people. Because the thing is,
Speaker 1: we know that symbols and names and iconography aren't just symbols.
Speaker 1: They're reflective of the stories that people tell, and those
Speaker 1: stories shape the narratives that communities carry, and those narrative
Speaker 1: shape public policy, and public policy shapes the material conditions
Speaker 1: of people's lives. And that's not to say that taking
Speaker 1: down a sixty foot tall statue of Robert E. Lee
Speaker 1: is going to suddenly erase the racial wealthcap but it
Speaker 1: is to say that these things, these statues, these this iconography,
Speaker 1: these symbols help us understand a narrative and a story
Speaker 1: that has been created around this country. And I think
Speaker 1: looking it and then learning more about them gives us
Speaker 1: the tools with which to identify the lies that we
Speaker 1: have been told about this country, which then allows us
Speaker 1: to sort of look around and understand that the reason
Speaker 1: one community looks one way and another community looks another way,
Speaker 1: it's not simply because of the people in those communities,
Speaker 1: but because of what had been done to those communities
Speaker 1: generation after generation after generation. I think all the time
Speaker 1: about this nineteen sixty four essay by James Baldwin and
Speaker 1: Talk to Teachers, And I was a high school educator,
Speaker 1: and so this was a text that I returned to
Speaker 1: over and over again. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: he says, he says that the responsibility of the teacher
Speaker 1: and he's talking teacher here literally, but also as a
Speaker 1: sort of metonym for the largest society. He's like, the
Speaker 1: responsibility of the educator is to help the black child
Speaker 1: understand that, even though the world has told them over
Speaker 1: and over again that they are criminal, that it is
Speaker 1: in fact the society that created the conditions that that
Speaker 1: child is forced to grow up in that is truly
Speaker 1: the criminal. And for many of us, now that that's
Speaker 1: really intuitive, we're like, oh, it's clear systems, not interpersonal.
Speaker 1: But I think one that wasn't clear for me growing
Speaker 1: up because it wasn't part of our discourse in the
Speaker 1: way that it is now. And I think too, part
Speaker 1: of what I learned over the course of writing this
Speaker 1: book is that for millions and millions of people, and
Speaker 1: we see this right in our politics, that is that
Speaker 1: is still not clear. Right. There still is this myth
Speaker 1: of meritocracy that's embedded into our sense of what America
Speaker 1: is and what it represents. There is still this sense
Speaker 1: of if you work hard, you can get to what
Speaker 1: you want and nothing else should should matter. There's still
Speaker 1: this sense, and we see it in the discourse around
Speaker 1: critical race theory, This idea of people decontextualizing the quote
Speaker 1: of doctor King and talking about you know, doesn't either
Speaker 1: little children standing together holding hands, and doesn't matter what
Speaker 1: the color of the skin is. It's the content of
Speaker 1: their character. Obviously, that's paraphrasing and using that and decontextualizing
Speaker 1: it and weaponizing it in an effort to prevent people
Speaker 1: from excavating the history that explains why so much of
Speaker 1: our society looks the way that it does today, particularly
Speaker 1: with regard to racial inequality. You know, I often think, now,
Speaker 1: more so than I ever have before, think about a
Speaker 1: shared history, a shared trauma, and a shared past. Right
Speaker 1: that is supposed to be our organizing principle, right, this
Speaker 1: idea of perfecting a union, this idea that you can
Speaker 1: come here and, unlike other countries, you can imagine and
Speaker 1: in in certain cases be able to create that imagined future.
Speaker 1: But I realize now, and what is just coming to
Speaker 1: bear as we you know, release Killers onto the Street,
Speaker 1: is that we don't have a shared history, and that
Speaker 1: the frustration, the anger that I feel right now is
Speaker 1: about the fact that everything that you write about, what
Speaker 1: we are learning about, what Nicole Hannah Jones did with
Speaker 1: the sixteen nineteen project is about airing out these lies.
Speaker 1: But there are only lies to people that actually connect
Speaker 1: to truth. And so I guess the question that I
Speaker 1: have for you is, in this four year project of
Speaker 1: doing this in depth the research, how do you reconcile
Speaker 1: the truth that you were able to excavate in a
Speaker 1: society that doesn't have shared connection to truth? Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's that is the central question. And I think about
Speaker 1: a visit that I took to Blainford Cemetery in the book,
Speaker 1: And Blainford Cemetery, for those who don't know, is the
Speaker 1: one of the largest Confederate cemeteries in the country. It's
Speaker 1: in Petersburg, Virginia, and it's where the remains of thirty
Speaker 1: thousand Confederate soldiers are buried. And I went there and
Speaker 1: spent the day with the Sun's Confederate veterans, and for me,
Speaker 1: it was a really it was an unsettling time, but
Speaker 1: it was also a really clarifying time because I remember
Speaker 1: a conversation, for example, I had with this guy named Jeff,
Speaker 1: and Jeff was telling me about how his grandfather would
Speaker 1: tell him all these stories about the men who were
Speaker 1: buried in these fields and how they fought for freedom,
Speaker 1: how they fought to defend their culture, how they fought
Speaker 1: to defend the South, how they fought to defend how
Speaker 1: this had didn't have anything to do with slavery, It
Speaker 1: just had to do with protecting themselves against the war
Speaker 1: Northern aggression. And he talked about how they would come
Speaker 1: here at dusk and sit in the gazebo at the
Speaker 1: center of the cemetery and watch the deer sort of
Speaker 1: scamper through the tombstones, and they would sing the old
Speaker 1: Dixie anthem. And now Jeff talked about how he does
Speaker 1: the same thing for his grandchildren. Right, he brings his
Speaker 1: granddaughters here and they sing the Dixie anthem, and they
Speaker 1: come to these events, I mean these events that look
Speaker 1: like they're not They don't look like clan rallies. They
Speaker 1: look like family reunions, right, And they're like intimate, intergenerational
Speaker 1: family events in which these stories are passed down. And
Speaker 1: so the thing, the reason I bring this up is
Speaker 1: because for so many people, history is not about empirical evidence,
Speaker 1: primary source documents. Historical fact is it is a story
Speaker 1: that they are told, and it is a story that
Speaker 1: they tell. It is an heirloom that has passed down
Speaker 1: across generations. It's something where you know, community and lineage
Speaker 1: and family take precedence over truth. And so if I
Speaker 1: go to Jeff and I say, actually, it's quite clear
Speaker 1: that the Confederacy fought this war over slavery. All you
Speaker 1: have to do is look at the declarations of Confederate Secession,
Speaker 1: and you know it says in eighteen sixty and eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty one and all these secession conventions that the Southern
Speaker 1: states had to stay, Like Mississippi says, our position is
Speaker 1: thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material
Speaker 1: interest in the world. Right, so they are not vague
Speaker 1: about why they're seceding. Alexander Stephens, the vice President of
Speaker 1: the Confederacy, says very clearly in his Cornerstone speach in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty one, where he says, the cornerstone of the
Speaker 1: new nation we are building is the principle that black
Speaker 1: people are in fear you're to white people. It is
Speaker 1: the idea that the great Revolution, the cause of the
Speaker 1: Great revolution rupture our country is experiencing is slavery. Right,
Speaker 1: They're they're not vague about it. Again, But for Jeff,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter, because if he is to accept that information,
Speaker 1: then he would have to accept a very different story
Speaker 1: about who his grandfather is, and it would threaten to
Speaker 1: crumble and disintegrate. So much of who he understands as
Speaker 1: grandfather is, subsequently what the nature of their relationship was,
Speaker 1: and subsequently who he is. Right if so much of
Speaker 1: who you understand yourself to be as tied to a
Speaker 1: specific story of this country, and the story of this
Speaker 1: country told to you, specifically by certain people that you
Speaker 1: are tied to emotionally, people who you love. When people
Speaker 1: ask you to tell a different story about America or
Speaker 1: are a more holistic story about America, it is not
Speaker 1: just a sort of inconvenient need to reassess and re
Speaker 1: examine the history. It is an existential crisis, right. It
Speaker 1: is a wat to your sense of who you believe
Speaker 1: yourself to be in the world, who you believe your
Speaker 1: father and your mother, and your grandfather and your grandmother
Speaker 1: and your children and the community that is giving you
Speaker 1: a sense of identity and value and purpose. And that
Speaker 1: is what we see right now is like so many
Speaker 1: people whose sense of the story they told themselves is
Speaker 1: under threat. Because you have folks like Nicole you have
Speaker 1: folks like Ebra, you have folks like Keeps your Blaine,
Speaker 1: you have folks like I mean, there's so many historians
Speaker 1: and Matt Gordon read Time, Miles, you know, Vincent Brown.
Speaker 1: I mean, the list goes on and on. So many
Speaker 1: people who are creating work that is forcing our country
Speaker 1: to look at itself more honestly, which means that the
Speaker 1: story that they told themselves about themselves is no longer true.
Speaker 1: And so then what does that mean for who the
Speaker 1: story you tell about yourself? And that's a scary thing
Speaker 1: for a lot of people to accept, but to be clear,
Speaker 1: there are many people who do accept it, right, And
Speaker 1: so this gets to the origin of your question. Right,
Speaker 1: I think there's some people who don't care about empirical evidence,
Speaker 1: and I think there are some people who like very
Speaker 1: unwillingly confront the fact that their ancestors fought for the
Speaker 1: Confederacy or own slaves, and they say, my ancestors fought
Speaker 1: a war for horrific, terrible cause, or did this thing
Speaker 1: that I can't defend. But I am not defined by
Speaker 1: the decisions that my ancestors made, and I can make
Speaker 1: a different set of I can be honest about what
Speaker 1: they did and honest about what sort of life trajectory
Speaker 1: that put me on relative to someone else. But I
Speaker 1: can also make a different set of choices informed by
Speaker 1: an understanding of history that are aligned with my values,
Speaker 1: that aren't necessarily aligned with the values of people who
Speaker 1: found it necessary to subjugate others in order to create
Speaker 1: value for themselves. How do we reconcile though the reality
Speaker 1: that history informs history, the past informs are present, which
Speaker 1: will then in fact dictate our future. And if we're
Speaker 1: not coming from a space where we are in that
Speaker 1: shared understanding, when you have you know, Virginia for instance,
Speaker 1: with just you know, the recent election there, you have
Speaker 1: a man that is one election that wants to ban
Speaker 1: the writings and the teachings of Tony Morrison, that you
Speaker 1: have a state right now, we have states where we
Speaker 1: are seeing book banning and book burning re establish itself
Speaker 1: in the twenty first century things that we thought were
Speaker 1: we would never see again, right, because that was akin
Speaker 1: to the Dark Ages, Right. The Age of Enlightenment was
Speaker 1: about education and research and art and beauty, and the
Speaker 1: analysis thereof the Dark Ages was everything in opposition to that.
Speaker 1: I think that we are in the Dark Ages America
Speaker 1: has entered into the dark ages. Everything is pointing in
Speaker 1: that direction. And so the friction that we're seeing in
Speaker 1: the friction that we're living in right now. And I
Speaker 1: use that as a euphemism. I know that it's a
Speaker 1: lot graver than that. But the friction that we're experiencing
Speaker 1: right now is between those that want to know, those
Speaker 1: that those that believe right that knowledge truly is power,
Speaker 1: and then those that recognize the power of that knowledge
Speaker 1: and are trying to subvert it. And so how do you, like,
Speaker 1: I get you know, I don't I don't expect you
Speaker 1: to have like the fundamental answers to all that into
Speaker 1: all that is wrong. Um, but but your your writing
Speaker 1: is so it's so profound in the way that it
Speaker 1: is holding up a mirror, right, it is holding up
Speaker 1: a mirror, And so what does it mean to hold
Speaker 1: up a mirror to a to a society that is
Speaker 1: that whose eyes are are literally forcefully shut. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's hard, and it's the crux of where we
Speaker 1: find ourselves now, right. I Mean, it's interesting because I
Speaker 1: think all the time. Obviously, I've been a lot of
Speaker 1: time reading and thinking about the Civil War before this
Speaker 1: as I was writing this book, and it's it's interesting now,
Speaker 1: right because we if you from twenty twenty one, you
Speaker 1: look back at eighteen fifty five and you're like, man,
Speaker 1: like the Civil War is coming, right, But in eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty five, they like they didn't know, Like they couldn't
Speaker 1: have told you, like this is about to happen in
Speaker 1: six years, right or in eighteen fifty right there, you know,
Speaker 1: fugitive slave back happens. They're like, there's a lot of tension,
Speaker 1: but there's a lot of direction. People like, we'll find compromise,
Speaker 1: we'll do this. It's and I say that because you
Speaker 1: don't you know what we think the direction and trajectory
Speaker 1: of the country that we, you know, considered two thousand
Speaker 1: and twenty one might look foolish in two thousand and
Speaker 1: thirty one, or might or for some people who are like,
Speaker 1: well this is the trajectory of war on it might
Speaker 1: seem prophetic, But I do believe. So I think there
Speaker 1: are people, as I mentioned, like Jeff and members of
Speaker 1: these Sons Confederate veterans, who like live in a fundamentally
Speaker 1: different epistemological reality, right, like they are fundamentally different sets
Speaker 1: of truth and knowledge that inform how they move through
Speaker 1: the world. And I don't think any primary documents, I
Speaker 1: don't think any podcast, I don't think any book will
Speaker 1: change their mind because it is not grounded in their
Speaker 1: sense of truth is an emotional question, not like an
Speaker 1: empirical one. I do though, and I believe this. I
Speaker 1: do think that there are more people who just don't
Speaker 1: know right, And I think that that's because of an intergenerational, structural,
Speaker 1: and systemic failing of our education system. I think it's
Speaker 1: because of the success and efficacy of the Lost Cause
Speaker 1: to distort our ability to teach American history accurately. But
Speaker 1: I think, you know, I spent I visited so many
Speaker 1: of these places, and I spend time talking to so
Speaker 1: many different people, and I continue to my work with
Speaker 1: The Atlantic on this you know, same topic. And I
Speaker 1: just think that there are a lot of people who
Speaker 1: don't know so many parts of our American story that
Speaker 1: are so central to it. And but they can there
Speaker 1: are also people who can be manipulated by folks like uh,
Speaker 1: like young Can and others in Virginia, right, but if
Speaker 1: but I think that there's a there are ways to
Speaker 1: engage with people to present this information to people that
Speaker 1: allows them to hear it, and that has the potential
Speaker 1: to inform and maybe even transform how they move through
Speaker 1: the world. I think about the guides and the docents
Speaker 1: that I met on, you know, at so many of
Speaker 1: these places. And I think about a guy named David
Speaker 1: Thorson at Manicello, and and you know, in forty five minutes,
Speaker 1: he gave this sort of masterclass that conveyed the hypocrisy
Speaker 1: and contradictions and cognitive dissonance of Jefferson, Right, Jefferson who,
Speaker 1: on the one hand wrote one of the most important
Speaker 1: documents in the history of the Western world, and on
Speaker 1: the other hand enslaved over six hundred people over the
Speaker 1: course of his lifetime, including four of his own children,
Speaker 1: who wrote in one document that all men are created equal,
Speaker 1: and about another document that black people are inherently inferior
Speaker 1: to whites in both endowments of body and mind. And
Speaker 1: so David is laying all of this out, and I'm
Speaker 1: watching these two women, Donna and Grace. There's two sort
Speaker 1: of late middle aged women, white women, And as he's
Speaker 1: doing this, their faces are wilting, their mouths hang agape,
Speaker 1: and I go up to them. After the presentation, and
Speaker 1: I say, I'd love to hear how about you experience
Speaker 1: what David was saying. And I always remember Donald was like, man,
Speaker 1: he really took the shine off the guy. She was like,
Speaker 1: I had no idea, Jeffersononne Slaves, I had no idea
Speaker 1: Mona whichello was a plantation. And these are folks who
Speaker 1: bought plane tickets, rented cars, got hotel rooms, who came
Speaker 1: to this site as a sort of pilgrimage to see
Speaker 1: the home of one of our founding fathers and had
Speaker 1: no idea, genuinely no idea that he wasn't enslaver, had
Speaker 1: no idea that it was a plantation. And I think
Speaker 1: that moment was so important because I you know, I
Speaker 1: never saw them again after that. I can't speak to
Speaker 1: like if they went and like changed the way they voted,
Speaker 1: because you know, they were like, these were Fox News
Speaker 1: watching self identified Republican, older white women. But they came
Speaker 1: in and they they engaged with the person that told
Speaker 1: them the truth, but also in a way that they
Speaker 1: could hear it. Who demonstrates like so many of the
Speaker 1: gods and dosins. I think this both endedness of like
Speaker 1: extending grace and generosity which is to say, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to judge you for what you don't know when
Speaker 1: you show up here, but also demanding responsibility and accountability,
Speaker 1: which is to say that now that I'm presented this
Speaker 1: information to you, you have to sit with this and
Speaker 1: hold it and you can't run from it. And there
Speaker 1: was a struggle there because it's jarring, because these are
Speaker 1: like sixty year old women who are now having to
Speaker 1: do in real time reassess the story that they have
Speaker 1: told about this person who is so central to their
Speaker 1: understanding the founding of this country, and so having to
Speaker 1: reassess their understanding of this country. And so I say
Speaker 1: that because like they were changed by what David said
Speaker 1: to the extent that they were. I don't I don't know,
Speaker 1: but I do think it is possible for people to
Speaker 1: encounter new information and for it to transform how they
Speaker 1: understand this country. And I know it because it's it's
Speaker 1: happened to me right in a in a different way
Speaker 1: than it's happened with Donna and Grace. But like, but
Speaker 1: I've been like transformed by everything that I've learned, not
Speaker 1: just in the context of you know what I wrote
Speaker 1: about with the book, I mean I've also spent the
Speaker 1: last few years thinking more about like what has been
Speaker 1: done to indigenous people in this country, and like my
Speaker 1: understanding of Indigenous indigenousity has been fundamentally transformed, which then
Speaker 1: informs how I understand and indigeneity today, and like what
Speaker 1: contemporary Native American problems are are like. And so I
Speaker 1: do think it's possible, and I do think that there
Speaker 1: are more people open to this information than not. But
Speaker 1: the people who are even open to it can still
Speaker 1: be manipulated by, you know, an entire political party, who
Speaker 1: is who has made it there sort of almost singular
Speaker 1: political endeavor and task to create an animated a distortion
Speaker 1: and an animus that results in the sort of election
Speaker 1: that results in the sort of electoral outcomes that we
Speaker 1: saw in Virginia. I want to ask you this, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, more of a personal question than not. When
Speaker 1: I went to Monticello, I lived in the DMV area
Speaker 1: for fifteen, you know, twenty years before I moved back
Speaker 1: to New York, where I'm from and where I am
Speaker 1: right now. I went to Monticello. I went to Frederick
Speaker 1: Douglas's house, I went to Mount Vernon, and I got
Speaker 1: to tell you outside of Frederick Douglas's estate, Monticello and
Speaker 1: Mount Vernon left me with a acidic sense of rage
Speaker 1: that I had honestly was not expecting knowing. I mean,
Speaker 1: unlike you know, Donna and Grace, I was fully aware
Speaker 1: right of slavery, of who owned slaves, of the story,
Speaker 1: the narrative that was created around these quote unquote great men,
Speaker 1: but who their humanness showed them to be right. But
Speaker 1: I remember walking around those two places, Clint, and feeling
Speaker 1: like with each shining, happy white face that I saw,
Speaker 1: I literally like when I had to leave like that,
Speaker 1: like I the the amount of time that I had
Speaker 1: intended on staying right um, as a as a student
Speaker 1: of history, as as a student of politics, I couldn't.
Speaker 1: And So my question for you, which is a personal one,
Speaker 1: is what came up for you right as you are researching,
Speaker 1: but also as you're there physically with with Donna, with
Speaker 1: with the Donna and Grace's right, Like, what came up
Speaker 1: for you emotionally as you were traversing this this land
Speaker 1: that our ancestors are are were murdered, slaughtered, raped and
Speaker 1: buried on Can I ask when you visited my god,
Speaker 1: it was I want to say to twenty fifteen. I
Speaker 1: want to say that it was it was between twenty
Speaker 1: thirteen and twenty fifteen, because it was right before I
Speaker 1: left to move back to New York. Got it. Um
Speaker 1: so a couple of things, and thank you for sharing that.
Speaker 1: I write this at the end of the book. But
Speaker 1: like my visits, these places are not meant to ever
Speaker 1: be like definitive portraits of what these places are or
Speaker 1: purported to be. They are reflections of you know, sometimes
Speaker 1: single visits or a series of visits that are shaped
Speaker 1: and animated by a range of things that are like
Speaker 1: in my control and out of my control. And so
Speaker 1: you know, part of what I write about is how
Speaker 1: if I were to go but I was not a straight,
Speaker 1: Southern black CIS gendered man who was at the time
Speaker 1: a graduate school student at an Ivy League school, that
Speaker 1: either way that people interacted with me or the way
Speaker 1: that I might have experienced the place would have been different.
Speaker 1: So I say all that because I'm a student of sociology.
Speaker 1: It was trained by sociologists in graduate school, and so
Speaker 1: we're always meant to think about our positionality and how
Speaker 1: that informs the way we see are research sites in
Speaker 1: the way that our research sites and subjects interact with us.
Speaker 1: And so I think it is quite possible for you
Speaker 1: and I to both go to the same place only
Speaker 1: three years apart and have in some ways similar and
Speaker 1: all in some ways radically different experiences. I will also
Speaker 1: say that so one one's experience at Manicello also depends
Speaker 1: so much on like who, it depends on which tour
Speaker 1: you go on, It depends on who your guide is,
Speaker 1: and a whole host of variables. And like if you
Speaker 1: only go to Monicello and just go on the house tour,
Speaker 1: I think you will leave and be like that's all.
Speaker 1: That's all they're gonna say about Jefferson and slavery, Like
Speaker 1: I mean, because you know my experience on the house tour.
Speaker 1: They didn't. They mentioned it just like as an aside,
Speaker 1: and it can't be understood and as an a side,
Speaker 1: because you can't understand Jefferson as a philosopher, as a statesman,
Speaker 1: as a scientist, as a father, as anything, if you're
Speaker 1: not going to understand way that being an enslaver is
Speaker 1: deeply intertwined with all of those identities and is the
Speaker 1: identity that makes possible everything else that he does. So
Speaker 1: there's that. Emotionally, how did I feel? I mean, I
Speaker 1: think the place for me, the reason that I the
Speaker 1: conceit of this project was like visiting and being in
Speaker 1: the physical places, was that, like you feel a history
Speaker 1: in your body in a different sort of way. And
Speaker 1: I felt a sort of visceral proximity to the history
Speaker 1: in ways that are not even the best book could
Speaker 1: could create. For me. I think like I always remember
Speaker 1: it being a Monicello and thinking of and hearing stories
Speaker 1: about the families that were separated after Jefferson died to
Speaker 1: pay off his debts, and I had just my son
Speaker 1: had just been born, and he's four years old now,
Speaker 1: and so this was at the beginning of the project,
Speaker 1: and I had a moment. And I have a four
Speaker 1: year old and a two year old, and so much
Speaker 1: of what I thought about, so much of what I
Speaker 1: thought about slavery was so tied to the spectacle of
Speaker 1: cruelty and the beatings and the whippings and the the lashes,
Speaker 1: and I didn't think about family separation to the same extent,
Speaker 1: but being there and having kids and hearing these stories,
Speaker 1: I had a moment where I I kind of closed
Speaker 1: my eyes. I remembered I was like on Mulberry Row
Speaker 1: where all the where the enslaved families had lived at Manicello,
Speaker 1: and I tried to imagine. So I went to sleep
Speaker 1: in my home with my wife, with my two kids,
Speaker 1: and I woke up and my children were gone, and
Speaker 1: I had no idea where they went. I had no
Speaker 1: idea who had taken them. I had no idea if
Speaker 1: I would ever see them again. And it's like it's
Speaker 1: unimaginable to me to even go there emotionally, it's like
Speaker 1: difficult to even bring myself to that place to imagine
Speaker 1: that possibility. And I am reminded in doing so that
Speaker 1: that is the reality that, like millions and millions of
Speaker 1: people across generations lived through. That is the omnipresent threat
Speaker 1: that hung over enslaved people every second of every day
Speaker 1: of their lives. You could be separated from your partner,
Speaker 1: from your children, from your parents, from your community, from
Speaker 1: the people you love as as a and that it
Speaker 1: was wielded and weaponized as a as a tool, right
Speaker 1: like a psychological tool that was meant to prevent you
Speaker 1: more than almost more than like a beating or a hanging,
Speaker 1: which obviously did that work too. But if you you
Speaker 1: might not run away, not because you're fearful of what
Speaker 1: would happen to you, but like what if you try
Speaker 1: to run away, what are they going to do to
Speaker 1: your kids? What are they going to do to your parents?
Speaker 1: What are they going to do to your right So
Speaker 1: it's the threat of what can be done in your name,
Speaker 1: even beyond you. And so that was a lot of
Speaker 1: what was coming up for me emotionally, was like getting
Speaker 1: a deeper sense of something that we can never have
Speaker 1: a full sense of, which is like the small Quotitian
Speaker 1: realities of enslavement that make it this, you know, an
Speaker 1: institution that was insidious beyond words, And that is so
Speaker 1: much of what I was I was thinking about when
Speaker 1: I was there. Thank you so much for for for
Speaker 1: sharing that and contextualizing it, because you know, I'm always
Speaker 1: reminded of when, particularly during the Trump administration, where we
Speaker 1: were talking about the child separation policy a lot on
Speaker 1: woke af um and I was writing about it and
Speaker 1: hearing from people who would say, you know, this is
Speaker 1: not who we are, This isn't who we are as
Speaker 1: a country, This isn't who we are as a nation,
Speaker 1: and and me in my callousness because I am you know,
Speaker 1: a realist at at at heart. Um, this is all
Speaker 1: who we've ever been, right. We have been separating family,
Speaker 1: creating generational trauma since the beginning of this country, um,
Speaker 1: and and and wielding it on the most marginalized um
Speaker 1: among us. And just to listen to your thought process,
Speaker 1: like had had my eyes starting to water and my
Speaker 1: breath gets shallow because I don't even I don't have kids. Um.
Speaker 1: But the the very idea of of that force, separation,
Speaker 1: of seeing that, of having no power over it, no
Speaker 1: even power over whether you're birthing or not, it is
Speaker 1: just extraordinary. And for it to be an aside, right,
Speaker 1: for that feeling that has produced so much generational trauma
Speaker 1: to be an aside in our history and something that
Speaker 1: isn't fully examined as to the state of our current being,
Speaker 1: to me is so incredibly troubling. My last question for you, Clint,
Speaker 1: is this, what are your hopes for the current fifteen
Speaker 1: and sixteen year olds that are living in a society
Speaker 1: right now? That is about cruelty in a way that
Speaker 1: we haven't actually seen mainstream since you know, the sixties.
Speaker 1: That is about like real you know, feelings of understanding
Speaker 1: that like the laws not here for you, right that
Speaker 1: any misstep, any slight, and like you could be done,
Speaker 1: and the and the weight of that on fifteen and
Speaker 1: sixteen year olds. What do you hope for them, as
Speaker 1: they hopefully are are delving into, delving into your work,
Speaker 1: understanding who they are in the context of the society
Speaker 1: that we are right now and maybe and probably have
Speaker 1: always been, but it's becoming ever ever clearer. What are
Speaker 1: your hopes for them? Something I think about when I
Speaker 1: think about young people today, specifically young black children, when
Speaker 1: I think of myself, when I think of my children,
Speaker 1: I think of how, you know, the first enslaved people
Speaker 1: came to the British American colonies in sixteen nineteen, and
Speaker 1: slavery didn't end until eighteen sixty five with the thirteenth Amendment,
Speaker 1: And I think about how from the moment enslave people
Speaker 1: were brought to this country, they were fighting for freedom,
Speaker 1: They were fighting for liberation, They were fighting against an
Speaker 1: institution that told them that they would chattel. What that
Speaker 1: also means is that because slavery wouldn't end for another
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty years, the vast majority of people
Speaker 1: who fought for slavery, who fought for liberation from slavery,
Speaker 1: never got a chance to experience it for themselves, but
Speaker 1: they fought for it anyway because they knew that someday
Speaker 1: someone would. And I think about how our conversation, how
Speaker 1: me sitting here, how me writing this book, is only
Speaker 1: possible because of millions of people who fought for something
Speaker 1: they knew they might never see, but they fought for
Speaker 1: it anyway. And I think about what sort of responsibility
Speaker 1: that bestows upon us, what it bestows upon me, what
Speaker 1: it bestows upon my children, to attempt to build the
Speaker 1: sort of world that we all deserve to live in
Speaker 1: but might not get to live in ourselves. But we
Speaker 1: build it, and we work toward it because we know
Speaker 1: that if we do so, someday someone else will. And
Speaker 1: we're all here like chipping away at this wall, right
Speaker 1: and we don't know if the wall is six inches
Speaker 1: thick or six hundred miles thick, but we know that
Speaker 1: the more that we chip away at it, the less
Speaker 1: the people who come after us will have to chip
Speaker 1: away at. And at some point we're gonna get to
Speaker 1: the other side of that wall. And so what I
Speaker 1: want for our young people. What I want for all
Speaker 1: of us is to both recognize that our lives are
Speaker 1: only possible because of what so many people did for us,
Speaker 1: and that we can only make another world possible if
Speaker 1: we accept that we might not see it, but we
Speaker 1: do it not because we will see the fruits of
Speaker 1: our labor, but because someday someone will. Because that is
Speaker 1: what the black tradition is in this country, right, that
Speaker 1: is what our lineage is a part of. It is
Speaker 1: the selflessness of people fighting for something they might never experience,
Speaker 1: but doing it because someone did it for them. Clinton.
Speaker 1: I cannot thank you enough. I cannot thank you enough
Speaker 1: for this book, how the word has passed or reckoning
Speaker 1: with the history of slavery across America, and for taking
Speaker 1: the time today. I have waited a long time to
Speaker 1: interview you, and it was and it's definitely definitely worth
Speaker 1: the way. Thank you so much, Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: This was a pleasure. That is it for me today.
Speaker 1: Friends on woke app as always, Power to the people
Speaker 1: and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay
Speaker 1: woke as fuck.