Speaker 1: Pushing. We're excited about this conversation and want to hear
Speaker 1: more about how you came up with this idea, but
Speaker 1: also just talk about the importance of how people learn
Speaker 1: American history, do they. I'm Khalil Jibra Muhammad and I'm
Speaker 1: Ben Austin. We're two best friends, one black, one white.
Speaker 1: I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is
Speaker 1: some of my best friends are Some of my best
Speaker 1: friends are dot dot dot. In this show, we wrestle
Speaker 1: with the challenges and the absurdities of a deeply divided
Speaker 1: and unequal country. And in this episode, we're gonna unpack
Speaker 1: why we are so divided and unequal. We're gonna learn
Speaker 1: what we've all been learning in textbooks for a very
Speaker 1: long time. We're talking about teaching white supremacy. This episode
Speaker 1: has some strong language, just a fair warning, but stick around. Khalil.
Speaker 1: Here we are, man. We are in the post midterm America.
Speaker 1: We are past that election day. Yeah, man, we're supposed
Speaker 1: to be really happy about the fact that this is
Speaker 1: the first time when things didn't go so well for
Speaker 1: the party out of power. Right, you were a way
Speaker 1: out of the country, But I was watching on TV
Speaker 1: that night, and you know, it was essentially like Democrats
Speaker 1: were like high fiving one another. They were celebrating this
Speaker 1: idea that this red wave hadn't happened, right, that there
Speaker 1: wasn't the second coming of Trump. Yeah, it became a
Speaker 1: red puddle, a red puddle. It was like expecting this
Speaker 1: disaster and things turned out just to be shitty, and
Speaker 1: we're supposed to be happy about that, exactly, exactly, And
Speaker 1: the truth is that, you know, whatever we want to
Speaker 1: say about the Democratic Party being the party of democracy,
Speaker 1: now they're going to lose power. Maybe less power than
Speaker 1: they thought, but they're going to lose power. That has
Speaker 1: real consequences for that for our future, and real consequences
Speaker 1: for women's reproductive rights, real consequences for how we as
Speaker 1: a country expect to pass on, you know, what it
Speaker 1: means to have real rights in this country to our children.
Speaker 1: It's sad, but to some degree, the bones of this
Speaker 1: country seem to be rattling in such a way that
Speaker 1: we aren't that much further along than some of the
Speaker 1: history we talk about on the show, you know, and
Speaker 1: we often talk about race. Maybe that's the only thing
Speaker 1: we talk about on this show, you know, but of
Speaker 1: course it was. It permeated the entire election, right. I mean,
Speaker 1: so there was this whole idea where whether you know,
Speaker 1: there's fear mongering about crime, which was really fear mongering
Speaker 1: about race, and whether it was rejected or not, which
Speaker 1: really was much more interested in this idea of of
Speaker 1: you know, using crime as a political tool, whether it
Speaker 1: like you know, the Democrats weren't even necessarily concerned with
Speaker 1: whether it was right or wrong to run away from
Speaker 1: those issues that were embraced them. You know, in the
Speaker 1: Georgia race with Stacy Abrams running for governor, seventy two
Speaker 1: percent of white women did not vote for her. That
Speaker 1: was an exit poll, and that was after getting rid
Speaker 1: of Rov Wade. It's nuts, And I guess for me,
Speaker 1: I think that what we're going to talk about today
Speaker 1: with our guests gives us a chance to kind of
Speaker 1: go back to first principles and like figure out, like
Speaker 1: why do we keep repeating the past, why do we
Speaker 1: keep falling prey to these moments of retrenchment. Well, that
Speaker 1: gets us into today's episode, because we're about to dig
Speaker 1: into a history of text books in America and how
Speaker 1: they really teach white supremacy. How they've perpetuated this idea
Speaker 1: for well over a century. And if you're a listener
Speaker 1: right now thinking, okay, hold up, fellas, what does emitterms
Speaker 1: have to do with history touched books? That's exactly the point.
Speaker 1: They are the building blocks of our society. They are
Speaker 1: the texts that we all encounter at some point in
Speaker 1: our lives. This tell us what we owe each other
Speaker 1: as citizens of this nation. And so we get to
Speaker 1: talk to Donald Yakavone, a lifetime researcher at Harvard University's
Speaker 1: Hutchin Center for African and African American Research. He's also
Speaker 1: the author and editor of eleven books, and the book
Speaker 1: that he just wrote is called Teaching White Supremacy, America's
Speaker 1: Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity. So
Speaker 1: he wrote this book because he was researching abolition, something
Speaker 1: that he teaches about him has been studying for years.
Speaker 1: And he went into this library at Harvard to look
Speaker 1: at a couple textbooks that were taught in classes in America,
Speaker 1: and they were like thousands of them, and he started
Speaker 1: digging into them and what he ended up with was
Speaker 1: a book which is about the history of teaching white supremacy,
Speaker 1: throughout American history. It's a really smart idea because essentially
Speaker 1: it's a study of American identity, how it was formed,
Speaker 1: what it means, how it was perpetuated one century to
Speaker 1: the next. And again, I think this is a really
Speaker 1: fascinating concept, meaning to what degree do we owe our
Speaker 1: current politics to what we've all been taught in our
Speaker 1: history textbook? Yeah? And I felt like I was seeing
Speaker 1: this on TV last week and seeing it on all
Speaker 1: over the country, like what we saw in this book
Speaker 1: about how these ideas or continued to today they still
Speaker 1: define our politics and they're going to define them going forward. Absolutely. Yeah. Man,
Speaker 1: so let's talk to Donald Yacovone. Let's learn what he
Speaker 1: learned to help us all be better. Welcome Donald Yacovone
Speaker 1: to some of my best friends are It's so great
Speaker 1: to have you on. And So you went and read
Speaker 1: over two hundred American history textbooks published and taught in
Speaker 1: American schools from basically the early eighteen hundreds to the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties. Correct, and you know maybe in it just
Speaker 1: like what was your big takeaway? Like how do you
Speaker 1: sum up? Like what all that research led to? Shock? How? So? Yeah? Explain?
Speaker 1: So I thought why don't I start near the beginning,
Speaker 1: And I picked the year eighteen thirty two because that
Speaker 1: was a year after the emergence of the radical anti
Speaker 1: slavery movement and William Lloyd Garrison. In fact, throughout the
Speaker 1: pre Civil War period there was never any discussion of
Speaker 1: the anti slavery movement, no acknowledgement that it even existed.
Speaker 1: So I went and I went through the eighteen thirties,
Speaker 1: the eighteen forties, and I thought, wait a minute, what
Speaker 1: am I seeing here? There is an extraordinary emphasis upon whiteness.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not hidden, it's not assumed, it's overt
Speaker 1: and so collective we in all of these textbooks is
Speaker 1: always a white collective. We absolutely American identity is white identity, exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: unless they specifically refer to red savages, which is the
Speaker 1: usual way they refer to native inhabitants in North America.
Speaker 1: Khalil and I were in public schools in Chica Go
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties. We're reading history textbooks. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: Khalil like where we didn't go to the same middle school.
Speaker 1: He went to the same high school. And I definitely
Speaker 1: remember Frederick Douglas and I remember studying slavery. And I
Speaker 1: also remember, you know, this sort of pervading idea that
Speaker 1: you know, post civil rights when we were in school,
Speaker 1: like all the bad shit happened back then, you know,
Speaker 1: in the unenlightened past. You know, we were not part
Speaker 1: of that because we were sort of on the other
Speaker 1: end of this. Yeah. I actually thought about this in
Speaker 1: light of a conversation I had with Mark Moreale, who
Speaker 1: is the current president of the National Urban League. I
Speaker 1: was talking to him a couple months ago about actually
Speaker 1: this very topic, about the problem of how do you
Speaker 1: teach American history and light of the backlash to talking
Speaker 1: about it at all, and he kind of laughed and
Speaker 1: he said, you know, that's funny. You remind me of
Speaker 1: when I was in high school in New Orleans where
Speaker 1: he came of age, and he said, one day they
Speaker 1: were talking about the Civil War and the topic came
Speaker 1: up and it was defined as the War of Northern Aggression,
Speaker 1: and he said he was the only person in the
Speaker 1: classroom to raise his hand to say, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: that is not what the Civil War was. He felt alone,
Speaker 1: And you know, I mean I could also remember when
Speaker 1: Roots aired on television and that being sort of much
Speaker 1: more powerful and sort of talking about the enslaved experience
Speaker 1: and sort of creating dialogue, creating conversation throughout my family
Speaker 1: at school, like in classrooms even. I mean, that felt
Speaker 1: like way more momentous than what was happening in a textbook. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The kind of attention that Roots gave to the African
Speaker 1: American experience in slavery and after had never been done,
Speaker 1: nothing approaching it had ever been done. You know, I
Speaker 1: have two historians in front of me right now, and
Speaker 1: I want to ask a question about textbooks in general
Speaker 1: as like a medium for history, even as a subject
Speaker 1: for studying history. One of our producers, Lucy, heard that
Speaker 1: we were going to talk about history textbook and she
Speaker 1: was like, oh, no, they're so boring. She has sort
Speaker 1: of lists like clashback to her own high school experience.
Speaker 1: And I think about textbooks that are in classrooms and
Speaker 1: there's both sort of this ideological factor of them what's
Speaker 1: going on in the world. There's also a commercial element
Speaker 1: to it, right, Like you have publishers who are mostly
Speaker 1: in the North who are like, we want to sell
Speaker 1: as many of these as possible, and so there's that demand.
Speaker 1: And we also have fifty states and each state each
Speaker 1: basically like school district can sort of set its own curriculum,
Speaker 1: So there are thousands of school districts, and then we
Speaker 1: hear things like even about texts. You know, when they
Speaker 1: set their curriculum each year. There's such a big market
Speaker 1: for the textbooks that what they decide in their curriculum
Speaker 1: is going to shape what is actually like written in
Speaker 1: a textbook that's published in New York City. This is today.
Speaker 1: I'm saying all that to ask, like, what does it
Speaker 1: mean to study textbooks for both of you, like your historians,
Speaker 1: what do you get out of a history textbook that's
Speaker 1: taught to children in American classrooms? Well, I think for
Speaker 1: younger students it is a convenience. It is a way
Speaker 1: to encapsulate the record in a manageable signs. I think
Speaker 1: once you get to college, a textbook isn't necessarily demanded.
Speaker 1: I taught at college. I didn't always use a textbook
Speaker 1: in the introductory class. It's not essential. However, textbooks as
Speaker 1: a genre are designed not just to present the record
Speaker 1: of the past, but they inevitably encapsulate the way Americans
Speaker 1: think about themselves, their values, their aspirations, their meaning, their identity,
Speaker 1: and that was clear from over two hundred textbooks that
Speaker 1: I saw. What about the lag time different than say
Speaker 1: studying newspapers of a day or you know today like
Speaker 1: social media or television. The amount of times if you're
Speaker 1: studying textbooks and reconstruction, it's not like they're you know,
Speaker 1: the amount of time it takes to sort of that,
Speaker 1: write it, publish it, distribute it. It could take five
Speaker 1: even ten years, right, Oh, absolutely, yeah. In fact, that's
Speaker 1: why I think some of the most effective textbooks during
Speaker 1: this post Civil war period came out not in the
Speaker 1: later eighteen sixties, not even in the early eighteen seventies,
Speaker 1: but really in the eighteen eighties, even after we recognize
Speaker 1: as reconstruction had already ended. It does take a long time,
Speaker 1: and at the same time they are in competition with
Speaker 1: other textbooks that are taking a completely different interpretation of
Speaker 1: this very controversial historical period. So it's confusing. And it's
Speaker 1: added to by the fact that, certainly in the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century and the early twentieth century, as today, textbook publishers
Speaker 1: often produced one version for the northern audience and another
Speaker 1: version for the southern audience, and some of these authors
Speaker 1: were horrified at what the publishers were doing to their
Speaker 1: own textbooks. Khalil, what do you think I mean when
Speaker 1: we talk about textbooks as history. Well, I was going
Speaker 1: to say to our producer Lucy's provocation, the textbooks are boring.
Speaker 1: I mean what I think is interesting about that is
Speaker 1: I think they're meant to be boring. I mean, first
Speaker 1: of all, they reflect the consensus view of the authors,
Speaker 1: in the sense that the authors might be politically left
Speaker 1: leaning or politically right leaning, but they are meant by
Speaker 1: design to be the most anodyne interpretation of the past,
Speaker 1: at least in the way that the general public would
Speaker 1: understand them. And they are also meant in a way
Speaker 1: to do the kind of civic nationalism work that is
Speaker 1: part and parcel of what public education is all about
Speaker 1: in the first place, which is to say, to reinforce
Speaker 1: the dominant narratives of the nation to absolute Donald so
Speaker 1: eloquently describes to define American identity. And in this way,
Speaker 1: to emphasize whiteness is also to emphasize kind of the
Speaker 1: air that we're all breathing. A textbook is, by its
Speaker 1: definition then conservative in that sense. I don't mean conservative
Speaker 1: like you know, republican conservative, but like retaining yes, absolutely yes,
Speaker 1: just as social studies curriculum for the vast majority of
Speaker 1: Americans and newcomers from past to present remains primarily conservative
Speaker 1: in that it is reinforcing a dominant narrative of the
Speaker 1: nation of its core values. It is not meant to
Speaker 1: be the pretext for revolution or change. And actually, what
Speaker 1: I kind of want to pick up on this point
Speaker 1: been extended a little further for Donald because he writes
Speaker 1: extensively about someone he describes as the first professional racist.
Speaker 1: In many ways, this character in your book kind of
Speaker 1: sits right at the turning point in America between the
Speaker 1: slave past and the post slavery future, and you kind
Speaker 1: of describe the guy is like the Steve Bannon and
Speaker 1: Rupert Murdoch and Joseph Goebbels of Nazi infamy of his day,
Speaker 1: someone who has so much reach an influence that he
Speaker 1: is shaping the hearts and minds of an entire generation
Speaker 1: of Americans and maybe in that way not so conservative. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: this is John H. Van every and he's there for
Speaker 1: two reasons. One, just as Khalil has said, he's influential,
Speaker 1: he's terribly influential. But two, he is also representative, and
Speaker 1: that's what I think some people tend to miss. He's
Speaker 1: a manifestation of the culture as much as a shaper
Speaker 1: of the culture. And he also embodies and symbolizes the
Speaker 1: emphasis that I am putting on Northern responsibility for the
Speaker 1: creation and perpetuation of white supremacy. It is commonplace today
Speaker 1: for many Americans to look Southern slavery and Southern resistance
Speaker 1: to integration as the source of today's what we call racism,
Speaker 1: when in fact, I argue and the evidence is so
Speaker 1: overwhelming in any field that you can pick, whether it's religion, literature, science, education,
Speaker 1: the domination of Northern attitudes is supreme. Van every had
Speaker 1: been trained as a doctor. He was Canadian born, so
Speaker 1: you don't get any more northern than that. And he
Speaker 1: set up a small publishing empire right in the middle
Speaker 1: of Manhattan. He published several books of his own, countless
Speaker 1: pamphlets which are derivative of the books that he wrote,
Speaker 1: and two newspapers. Plus he advertised his books and his
Speaker 1: pamphlets in almost all of the America's newspapers. In one
Speaker 1: year alone, he put advertisements in fourteen hundred different American
Speaker 1: newspaper just one year. He's like Donald Trump during the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties. Yeah. Absolutely, Lincoln had read him. He was
Speaker 1: quoted on the floor of Congress, he was quoted in
Speaker 1: state legislatures and read throughout the country. And his works
Speaker 1: were republished long after his death in the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: so by the Daughters of the Confederacy. So you have
Speaker 1: Northerners influencing and telling the South essentially how to view
Speaker 1: the evilness of Abraham Lincoln and the Northern aggression against
Speaker 1: the Civil War and during the Civil War. It's astonishing
Speaker 1: about his reach. It's just amazing. I want to lean
Speaker 1: into that for just one second longer, because I think
Speaker 1: you have hit on something with van every that I
Speaker 1: think is really powerful and important, and that is that,
Speaker 1: as you say, between eighteen fifty eight and eighteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: any American who read a newspaper was likely to encounter
Speaker 1: his work, either because there was direct mention of it
Speaker 1: his own writing or these advertisements selling his books. And
Speaker 1: between eighteen sixty six and eighteen sixty seven he published
Speaker 1: first a textbook youth history of the Great Civil War
Speaker 1: in the United States, and then the next year a
Speaker 1: book called white supremacy and Negro subordination. Your point about
Speaker 1: this Canadian transplant to Manhattan, whose ambitions and reach in
Speaker 1: terms of again we could say his social media influence
Speaker 1: at that time, for the technology of that era actually
Speaker 1: helps to circulate white supremacy from north to south at
Speaker 1: a time that then will help, as you just said,
Speaker 1: give rise to movements of the Lost Cause, the Daughters
Speaker 1: of the Confederacy who were single handedly responsible for fundraising
Speaker 1: to build Confederate monuments all around the country. That is
Speaker 1: really remarkable, I think for most people and most listeners
Speaker 1: to think about the relationship of Northern publishing to the
Speaker 1: dissemination of white supremacist idea that even Southerners are learning
Speaker 1: and therefore beginning to teach to their own children and grandchildren,
Speaker 1: and the cycle just continues, absolutely, and it's so important,
Speaker 1: I think for us to understand that a current social
Speaker 1: crisis that we're undergoing, the long history of racial repression
Speaker 1: that we have experienced, is not the fault of some
Speaker 1: kind of external force. It is not the fault of
Speaker 1: slave masters long gone. This is not a sectional problem.
Speaker 1: This is a national problem, and it takes national commitment
Speaker 1: north and south to recognize all our responsibility for the
Speaker 1: creation of our modern culture. We can't foist it off
Speaker 1: on some long dead past. This is alive, this is real.
Speaker 1: We are all responsible for this, not one section. Yeah, yeah, No,
Speaker 1: I think that's powerful. So Donald, we've kind of made
Speaker 1: it seem obvious that this was a bad dude, you know,
Speaker 1: a bad ombrey in the word of Trump, in the
Speaker 1: sense that a modern listener today would say, yeah, every
Speaker 1: you know, thank god he's no longer here. But of
Speaker 1: course our point is his ideas are still here, and
Speaker 1: we haven't talked about his ideas, So let's just zero
Speaker 1: in on one. I think in particular because as I
Speaker 1: understand what he was selling, First of all, he didn't
Speaker 1: want to use the word slave to describe African Americans.
Speaker 1: That seems totally bananas, right, because no one thinks of
Speaker 1: the word slave or slavery is controversial either to white
Speaker 1: Southerners or to Northerners, who are you know, ambivalent or
Speaker 1: even hostile to black freedom. So what is this deal
Speaker 1: with him thinking that the word slave is inappropriate to
Speaker 1: describe who black people were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?
Speaker 1: Great question, van every when he used the word slave,
Speaker 1: and he explained this. He said it referred to a
Speaker 1: long past aspect of European culture, ancient European culture, only
Speaker 1: white people enslaved other people, other white people, that there
Speaker 1: was a category of subordination within European people's exactly, this
Speaker 1: is a white institution. To his mind, you can no
Speaker 1: more enslave a person of African descent than you can
Speaker 1: a cow or sheep, because he argued, just like in
Speaker 1: the rest of the animal world, you have various species
Speaker 1: of animals, And his argument was that people of African
Speaker 1: descent were humans. They were just an inferior lower form
Speaker 1: of human, a completely separate species. And this was the
Speaker 1: fate that nature and God, he argued, dictated to the nation.
Speaker 1: People of African descent were born to do the white
Speaker 1: man's labor. Those are his words. Yeah, because slaves suggest
Speaker 1: immunition of a higher position that now you've been subordinated to.
Speaker 1: But if you're already starting out as the floor of
Speaker 1: some representation of humanity, even in his most adminished form,
Speaker 1: you can't go down. You're already at the bottom, rock bottom,
Speaker 1: as they say. So one more thing on this, because
Speaker 1: I think this is where the past and the present
Speaker 1: meet in his ideas, and the reason why I think
Speaker 1: it's important for listeners not to dismiss this is like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's interesting. You know, that stuff doesn't exist anymore. But
Speaker 1: if we think about white supremacist neo Nazi replacement theory today,
Speaker 1: which is animating our politics right now, that white people
Speaker 1: will be the minority population and they will be overrun
Speaker 1: by brown and black people in the near future, that
Speaker 1: these sets of concerns today are tied to every in
Speaker 1: the sense that his point was to say that black
Speaker 1: people had actually helped make white equality possible by being
Speaker 1: a force for wealth creation and for solving the aristocratic
Speaker 1: problems of the past, because now white people would agree
Speaker 1: that they were equal and superior as long as the
Speaker 1: black person was in this inferior position. Did I get
Speaker 1: that right? You sure did. He would argue, just like
Speaker 1: Tony Morrison would later argue that you could not have
Speaker 1: democratic culture without the African presence, ironically, and if there
Speaker 1: were no people of African descent, they would have created
Speaker 1: a people to fill that role, to show white people
Speaker 1: that the difference between themselves was not so great as
Speaker 1: it was between themselves and this other quote foreign element. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's really, really, really really important. Yeah, after
Speaker 1: the break, we're going to hear from a young person
Speaker 1: who's actually trying to bring attention to the everyday racism
Speaker 1: that exists in America, especially in light of the race
Speaker 1: justice movement or Black Lives Matter movement. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: some of my best friends are so donald. There's this
Speaker 1: video that's been circulating on social media. It shows clearly
Speaker 1: that white supremacy is alive and well in the United States. Obviously,
Speaker 1: we didn't need much proof for that, but Khalil and
Speaker 1: I saw this video. I shared it with him. We
Speaker 1: watched it at the same time, and we thought it'd
Speaker 1: be kind of amazing to talk about with you. It's
Speaker 1: a video taken in what's labeled the most racist city
Speaker 1: in America, Harrison, Arkansas, the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan.
Speaker 1: And in it, there's this young white man. He's holding
Speaker 1: up a Black Lives Matter sign and he's video taking
Speaker 1: this and over the course of the video, people are
Speaker 1: stopping in their cars, one hundred percent of them are white,
Speaker 1: and they're all yelling at him. They're berating him, they're
Speaker 1: saying incredibly racist things. Let's play this video about ten minutes.
Speaker 1: I will be back. You better be fucking gone. Okay,
Speaker 1: come back. We matter. You're a white thing? Ship? Are
Speaker 1: you the Marxist? I meant domestic terrorists. Bad to Chicago
Speaker 1: or New York for COVID enough for the chips, find
Speaker 1: Jesus him? All right, all lives matter, not just black
Speaker 1: You're why what do you think Donald Well? I think
Speaker 1: you probably could have done that in Chicago as well
Speaker 1: as uh Arkansas. Yeah, it's all the evidence one needs
Speaker 1: about the problem remaining that the ideas that textbooks and
Speaker 1: Americans have absorbed for the last three hundred years remain
Speaker 1: m Yeah, it is still the case that And this
Speaker 1: is why I think the book I did is so important.
Speaker 1: It is the background for our current crisis. It is
Speaker 1: the reason why we have our current crisis, and it
Speaker 1: is the reason why people like that who identify themselves
Speaker 1: as white and is the essence of legitimacy, and that
Speaker 1: everyone else who isn't is not. That goes back three
Speaker 1: hundred years. You know. One of the things that struck me,
Speaker 1: in addition to just like this demonstration of our racism,
Speaker 1: it's being caught on video and because we have social media,
Speaker 1: can disseminate so quickly, and you can just see an
Speaker 1: example of how deeply racist the country is. But like
Speaker 1: your book, thinking about textbooks, the way that white people
Speaker 1: in white culture sort of polices itself, sort of shows
Speaker 1: what the boundaries are of behavior and teaching other white people,
Speaker 1: you know, how to stay within those bounds, like this
Speaker 1: is acceptable behavior. Khalil I sent it to you, Like,
Speaker 1: what did you think. I was like a little bit
Speaker 1: surprised at how visceral the racism was, because these are
Speaker 1: not people who are being confronted by a young man
Speaker 1: handing out a leaflet, but he's just standing there holding
Speaker 1: the sign, and in that holding the sign apparently provokes
Speaker 1: this visceral white racist rage where people are calling him everything,
Speaker 1: you know, from the N word, reminding him he's white,
Speaker 1: to calling him a communist. I mean, I guess I
Speaker 1: was in that way surprised at how little has changed
Speaker 1: over the last fifty years since the Civil Rights era
Speaker 1: in terms of these deeply ingrained notions that you actually
Speaker 1: are trader to the white race if you believe in
Speaker 1: the commitments of racial justice that purportedly the country stands for. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like what people do in the video, it wasn't just
Speaker 1: thinking something or muttering to yourself. They were moved to
Speaker 1: stop in the middle of a road, to roll down
Speaker 1: their window and to confront another person and to threaten violence.
Speaker 1: Right to threaten, in this case, to threaten white on
Speaker 1: white violence. Yeah, if you're here, you know, a couple hours,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be back and I'm gonna kill you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean I was trying to you know, Donald, you
Speaker 1: said like this could happen anywhere, It could happen in Chicago.
Speaker 1: I was trying to think of, like what the liberal
Speaker 1: equivalent would be. I could give you an example. Okay,
Speaker 1: I spent almost seven years and tell hassee Florida. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure that counts as a liberal example, Donald, but
Speaker 1: hang on. At that point, Panhandle culture was deep South. Okay,
Speaker 1: we think of Florida. Everybody thinks of southern Florida, and
Speaker 1: as everyone knows, the further south you go, the more
Speaker 1: north you are. But in Panhandle culture, this was deep South.
Speaker 1: This was South Georgia, no difference really to speak of,
Speaker 1: and I almost never heard any kind of racial remarks
Speaker 1: by white people. Nineteen ninety one, I moved to Boston, Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: and it was everywhere. Give you an example. How so see,
Speaker 1: I'll give you a perfect example. I was standing in
Speaker 1: the North End waiting to go into a restaurant and
Speaker 1: a car stopped. A black man got out and ran
Speaker 1: into a store that sold magazines and newspapers, and a
Speaker 1: guy who was standing in line next to me said,
Speaker 1: what the hell's he going in there for? He can't read?
Speaker 1: Oh wow, yeah, yeah wow, yeah. I think there's something
Speaker 1: also different. I mean hearing racist stuff. I mean, I'll
Speaker 1: give you an example. This is just my own experience.
Speaker 1: I was driving with my kids. I live on the
Speaker 1: South side of Chicago, and we were actually going through
Speaker 1: the part that's the campus of the University of Chicago,
Speaker 1: and we saw a young man in a Maga hat.
Speaker 1: And you know, this was sort of still the Trump administration,
Speaker 1: but like you know all the rage that that invokes,
Speaker 1: and my reaction was like seeing a giraffe or something.
Speaker 1: I was like, look, kids, look, I was actually excited.
Speaker 1: I was like, look, there's one Like look, there's a
Speaker 1: kid with a maga hat. And I didn't feel like
Speaker 1: there was nothing in me that was like let me,
Speaker 1: let me attack this young man, let me like put
Speaker 1: him in his place. And try to teach him something
Speaker 1: and like shake him. This would be the equivalent, I
Speaker 1: would think would be the luxury of not feeling like
Speaker 1: that's the status quo of where I live. But in
Speaker 1: this town in Arkansas, like, there was no threat from
Speaker 1: Black Lives Matter. This kid was a total anomaly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That's one of the great ironies of the moment we
Speaker 1: are in now, where a lot of white people are
Speaker 1: triggered by criticisms of structural racism and then call the
Speaker 1: people criticizing structural racism racists and call them up on
Speaker 1: the phone and threaten their lives for being the racist.
Speaker 1: Or you're getting them hate mail. You're triggered here. No, No,
Speaker 1: you're not. You're talking about your like stuff you've gotten no.
Speaker 1: But but I'm just I'm one of them. I'm sure
Speaker 1: Donald has gotten. Donald. Have you gotten hate mail for
Speaker 1: publishing this book? I got one so far. Yeah. I mean, so,
Speaker 1: what you're saying, man, is like not being triggered to
Speaker 1: violence because some trumper was wearing a MAGA hat in
Speaker 1: your presence. Demonstrate something about you and at least the
Speaker 1: subculture that you represent. Whereas for the people who we
Speaker 1: actually could objectively say are articulating racist views actually threatened
Speaker 1: violence to say that they're not racist, the ship don't
Speaker 1: make no sense. But here we are, So we are
Speaker 1: living in a moment of extreme backlash. We are living
Speaker 1: in a moment where it's not just this kind of
Speaker 1: existential political movement of white nationalists who think they have
Speaker 1: to hold onto the country because people like me are
Speaker 1: eventually going to take over. But we're also living in
Speaker 1: a moment where the backlash is legislative. It is actually
Speaker 1: doubling down on the kinds of textbook narratives, the ones
Speaker 1: that subscribe to white supremacist points of view, or at
Speaker 1: least the ones that erase the contributions of people of color,
Speaker 1: whether they are black or indigenous or Mexican Americans, as
Speaker 1: is what happened in Arizona about a decade ago, when
Speaker 1: they basically made ethnic studies like to teach Mexican American
Speaker 1: descended children that any part of their history is divisive.
Speaker 1: And it's like that video articulates, I think exactly your
Speaker 1: point that if we don't deal with these histories, we
Speaker 1: are going to continue to produce people like those in
Speaker 1: that video, and we're going to continue to have a
Speaker 1: politics of backlash and in support of structural racism. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: and I think the potential could be even worse because
Speaker 1: people of this frame of mind, who believe that they're
Speaker 1: very identities, as James Baldwin remark back in the sixties,
Speaker 1: that they're very identities, are being taken from them or threatened. Right, Okay,
Speaker 1: we'll do anything to preserve the old order. Oh Man, Donald,
Speaker 1: I am so glad you mentioned James Baldwin because I
Speaker 1: teach him in every class. And there's this particular quote
Speaker 1: from an appearance he makes on The Dick Cavett Show
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty eight, and here's a clip from it
Speaker 1: from our oldpex's film, I Am Not Your Negro. The
Speaker 1: question you gotta ask yourself, the white population of this
Speaker 1: company's got to ask itself North and South, because it's
Speaker 1: one country and one negro. There's a didence in the
Speaker 1: North in the South. There's just a difference in the
Speaker 1: way they in a way they castrate too, but that's
Speaker 1: but the fact of the castration is an American fact.
Speaker 1: If I'm not the nigga here and you invented him,
Speaker 1: you the white people invented him, and you've got to
Speaker 1: find out why and that includes electing demogogues to office
Speaker 1: who will make sure that other demogogues remained in office,
Speaker 1: and that people of the Democratic Party or people who
Speaker 1: believe in the Pledge of Allegiance where it says with
Speaker 1: liberty and justice for all, will be excluded because they
Speaker 1: are threats to the social order. Perceived as threats to
Speaker 1: the social order, we could lose our democracy within a
Speaker 1: few years. Yeah, yeah, our democracy definitely feels under threat.
Speaker 1: And how it's tied to this sense of our history
Speaker 1: is powerful, and I think we're all saying this. It's
Speaker 1: not so clear now that like better textbooks are going
Speaker 1: to save us. Yeah. Yeah, Well, this is kind of
Speaker 1: a really important point to bring up the sixteen nineteen project,
Speaker 1: because your book comes out not only after the original
Speaker 1: sixteen nineteen project of the New York Times magazine, published
Speaker 1: on the four hundredth anniversary of the landing of the
Speaker 1: first Africans who would ultimately experience the early stages of
Speaker 1: slavery in sixteen nineteen. That project comes out in August
Speaker 1: of twenty nineteen, and then a revised version in a
Speaker 1: book length that comes out just last year. So here
Speaker 1: your book comes afterwards and I'm curious. Let me shout
Speaker 1: you out though, Khalil, you're in the sixteen nineteen Project.
Speaker 1: You have a chapter in it, in both the magazine
Speaker 1: form in the book from you write about the history
Speaker 1: of sugar. Yeah, it's important to say, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. So and I guess the question is, what
Speaker 1: do you think about the sixteen nineteen project. Is it
Speaker 1: part of the solution? It is part of the solution.
Speaker 1: It isn't perfect by any means. A few things are.
Speaker 1: But when I was writing the epilogue to the book
Speaker 1: at that point two years ago, so many schools around
Speaker 1: the country had adopted the sixteen nineteen Project for use
Speaker 1: in class I found that terribly encouraging, even if there
Speaker 1: are flaws, even if the emphasis on slavery and the
Speaker 1: revolution isn't quite what was presented. However, the sixteen nineteen
Speaker 1: projects emphasis on white supremacy is absolutely vital, and as
Speaker 1: many people who can read that, the better off we
Speaker 1: will be. However, under these current conditions, I have no
Speaker 1: faith at all that what needs to be done will
Speaker 1: be done, even bike dedicated, well trained teachers. If the
Speaker 1: school system won't allow it, what do we do. I'm
Speaker 1: finding teachers who are telling me that they are being
Speaker 1: compelled to teach some repulsive images of people of African
Speaker 1: descent because they're in the textbook they're being compelled to use,
Speaker 1: and if they don't use it, they could lose their jobs.
Speaker 1: When we come back, we're going to have more conversations
Speaker 1: about what we are and are not teaching in our schools,
Speaker 1: including my own daughters. We'll be back after the break.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Some of my best friends are so Donald,
Speaker 1: Let's just say we have actual teachers who want to
Speaker 1: do the right thing, who want to engage the history
Speaker 1: of slavery in a thoughtful and productive way. And it
Speaker 1: seems to me that part of what you describe in
Speaker 1: the last page of your book are these, like many
Speaker 1: many stories of things gone terribly wrong, or you know,
Speaker 1: you sort of imply that they're all intentionally poor outcomes,
Speaker 1: or maybe I'm misreading it, but one in particular, you
Speaker 1: cite this example of New Jersey for ten years teaching
Speaker 1: slave runaway advertisements or having students do a project on that,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to tell you Donald that actually, in
Speaker 1: this instance, though this is not to say that all
Speaker 1: the other examples that you describe are not examples of
Speaker 1: bad teaching or somehow some diabolical effort to make black
Speaker 1: kids feel bad. But in this instance, the New Jersey
Speaker 1: example came directly from my school district and my daughter Justice,
Speaker 1: who is a fifth grader at the time, was given
Speaker 1: that assignment, and it made National news. Parents of fifth
Speaker 1: graders at school the New Jersey our outrage after two
Speaker 1: slavery related school assignments may have taken it too far,
Speaker 1: but here's what actually happened. So the story that National
Speaker 1: News told was that students, basically black students, were subjected
Speaker 1: to these terrible ads of black runaways on the bulletin
Speaker 1: board outside of their classroom, and it just reinforced this
Speaker 1: negative image of black people, and the black students felt bad.
Speaker 1: And it is true that some of the parents of
Speaker 1: my daughter's classmates did feel that way. They felt that
Speaker 1: their kids were being subjected to racist images of black people.
Speaker 1: But the point of the assignment, and this is why
Speaker 1: I think this is really tricky as we moved towards
Speaker 1: like what comes next in this country. What is tricky
Speaker 1: is that the teachers, after I sat down with them,
Speaker 1: I reviewed the material I actually had helped my daughter
Speaker 1: create her own runaway ad. It turns out that what
Speaker 1: they were trying to do was to show the fulls
Speaker 1: of colonial life in America, and rather than every kid
Speaker 1: pretending like everyone was just a homesteader or a pioneer
Speaker 1: or a colonist sharing in the hard work of building
Speaker 1: the nation, they found a way to say that black
Speaker 1: people were experiencing slavery, and they had prepared the material
Speaker 1: to teach them this. I told my daughter as we
Speaker 1: went on Google to look for actual runaway ads, that
Speaker 1: those ads in the eighteenth nineteenth century were the most
Speaker 1: dominant source of learning about individual black people, because they
Speaker 1: told their names, they told their characteristics, they gave them personalities,
Speaker 1: and in ways that black people are often invisible in
Speaker 1: the archives and invisible in their historical record, or only
Speaker 1: come through in a diary entry of a white enslaver
Speaker 1: describing their faithful slave, these ads served a different kind
Speaker 1: of purpose and at least documenting the presence of black
Speaker 1: people when they often were left out of the story.
Speaker 1: And so I pushed back against the criticism as a
Speaker 1: historian because I felt like it was a way to
Speaker 1: actually teach slavery rather than simply avoided a lot of
Speaker 1: people didn't agree with me, but I wanted to share
Speaker 1: that story with you because I do think it illustrates
Speaker 1: that even when people want to get this right, the
Speaker 1: stakes are really high and fraught. You know. I followed
Speaker 1: those debates and I'm listening to both of you, and
Speaker 1: I think it's such a landmine and so many, so
Speaker 1: many ways it can go wrong. And I hear you
Speaker 1: Khalil talking about New Jersey and that it also cuts
Speaker 1: both ways, is what you're saying, right, That we have
Speaker 1: to we have to find ways to teach that hard
Speaker 1: history that really looks at it, and that's gonna be
Speaker 1: fraught and difficult to do, and you know, there are
Speaker 1: lots of ways to fuck it up, but that is
Speaker 1: the space that we have to move into. Right, That's right.
Speaker 1: I mean, you have this moment in your conclusion near
Speaker 1: the end of the book that really struck me. You
Speaker 1: talk about a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center
Speaker 1: from twenty eighteen and they cite that, I'm only about
Speaker 1: eight percent of students that they interviewed could even say
Speaker 1: what the causes of the Civil War was fighting over
Speaker 1: over slavery. Yeah, But then another thing from that study
Speaker 1: really struck me that that even where slavery was part
Speaker 1: of the curriculum, nine percent of the teachers who responded
Speaker 1: said they just didn't teach it, they just skipped it over.
Speaker 1: And I had this confirmed when I deliver lectures on
Speaker 1: this subject, you know, around various schools, and I ask students, well,
Speaker 1: what did you learn about the history of slavery and
Speaker 1: race in America? The answer quote not much, unquote yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That study from the Southern Poverty Law Center is called
Speaker 1: teaching Hard History. Yes, And I love the name of
Speaker 1: that study. I mean, like this is pre backlash critical
Speaker 1: race theory imagined, you know, boogeyman stuff, and the idea
Speaker 1: that we need to confront our hard histories as well
Speaker 1: as like our soft ones that make us comfortable and
Speaker 1: don't make us feel bad. But like you know, we're
Speaker 1: we're a nation that has stains on it and we
Speaker 1: need to see those as well. And you know, that
Speaker 1: idea of like teaching hard history seems like a great
Speaker 1: lesson to take off it. Yes, And we've got to
Speaker 1: the point where as you point out, even if we
Speaker 1: have the best textbooks on the planet, if teachers won't
Speaker 1: teach it, what good is it? I just want to
Speaker 1: say again how much we appreciate you having it, having
Speaker 1: you on and you're sharing how significant this body of
Speaker 1: work is in terms of socializing white supremacy as a
Speaker 1: core value in American society. And as we have observed
Speaker 1: in this moment, this political season that we're all part of,
Speaker 1: and that video we saw of the young man holding
Speaker 1: a Black Lives Matter sign, that when you write at
Speaker 1: the end of your book that history is a mirror,
Speaker 1: you say that quote, the history we teach is the
Speaker 1: product of the culture we create, not necessarily of the
Speaker 1: actual history we made. And I thought that was a
Speaker 1: really wonderful line, Donald, and appreciate your commitment and passion
Speaker 1: for us getting our history right. Thanks for coming on
Speaker 1: the show, Oh thank you. You know, this history of
Speaker 1: the founding of this nation that continues to be debated
Speaker 1: in our country right now tells us that our history
Speaker 1: is fundamental to how we think of ourselves as a country.
Speaker 1: And until we get that history right, as I learned
Speaker 1: from Donald today, then we're going to keep reproducing one
Speaker 1: generation to the next people who have false ideas about
Speaker 1: how we arrived at the country that we are and
Speaker 1: where we have to take it. But you just said
Speaker 1: about false ideas and how they're you know, this long
Speaker 1: history of them. That's where we are right now. We're
Speaker 1: still caught up in all these false ideas that defines
Speaker 1: our politics. You know, we're not confronting these issues of race.
Speaker 1: We're not confronting how the politics affects Americans. That's what
Speaker 1: we have to solve for. Yeah, and there's no way
Speaker 1: out of this dilemma because because as much as we
Speaker 1: might hope the young people today are going to be
Speaker 1: better than than they were back in the day, that
Speaker 1: young man in Arkansas just shows us that it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: These ideas are so sticky. As Donald pointed out, that
Speaker 1: unless we change things and how we teach and socialize,
Speaker 1: they're going to be new generations of folks with the
Speaker 1: same racial hatred, the same bigoted ideas, the same backlash
Speaker 1: to the change that we need in this country. No
Speaker 1: way out, that's the new name of this podcast. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: we gotta end on a happy note. All right, now,
Speaker 1: we got this because we're we're living, we're living post
Speaker 1: mid term. Things are going to get better. We're working
Speaker 1: on this and uh right, it wasn't a red wave.
Speaker 1: It was a red puddle. Yes, yes see now we
Speaker 1: get it circle Yes, yes all right, man, I love you,
Speaker 1: I love you too. Some of My Best Friends Are
Speaker 1: is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written
Speaker 1: and hosted by me Oldibron Muhammad and my best friend
Speaker 1: Ben Austin. Gets produced by John Asante and Lucy Sullivan.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Jasmine Morris, our engineer is Amanda ka Wong,
Speaker 1: and our executive producer is Mia Lamell. At Pushkin Thanks
Speaker 1: Selita Mulad, Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carly Migliori, John Schnars,
Speaker 1: Gretta Kone and Jacob Weissberg. Our theme song, Little Lily,
Speaker 1: is by fellow chicagoan a brilliant Avery R. Young from
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