← New Books Network
New Books Network
Clint Smith, "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America" (Little, Brown and Company, 2021)
01:27:27
An interview with Clint Smith
Loading summary
Transcript52 lines
- [00:00]
Clint Smith
Hey, friends, it's Karamo, talk show host, life coach, and your next best friend. You just don't know it yet. I'm hosting a new podcast called Started on Brotherhoods. We're going around the world to explore male friendships and all the wins, challenges and bonds that are made in WhatsApp group chats. And that's exactly where you can listen to it, right in the app. It's streaming on the official WhatsApp channel. Just open the app and go to the updates tab to start listening. While you're at it, message your best friend and make sure they listen too. I'll see you there. This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and old number seven are registered trademarks. Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee. What I bought a new Blink Mini 2K smart security camera. What? I got 2K clarity, sharp enough to see every detail of home when I'm away. Plus audio like I'm in the room, not with my bestie traveling to another city. Plus easy plugins set up to install faster than skipping through podcast ads. But you'd never skip ads, right? Plus, I got all of this for just $49.99. Blink Mini 2K Mini Camera Max Performance Shop now@Amazon.com Blink.
- [01:26]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:30]
Nikazios
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to New Books in African American Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Nikazios, the host of the channel. Joining me today is Clint Smith. He's a staff writer for the Atlantic, and we'll be talking about his latest book, how the Word is A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, which is published by Little, Brown and Company. The narrative nonfiction book was a number one New York Times bestseller. It was long listed for the National Book Award. Clint Smith, welcome to the show.
- [02:11]
Clint Smith
Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
- [02:14]
Nikazios
Awesome. So I wanted to kick off this interview by by you telling a bit about yourself, but I know that you are also a poet, so I wanted to do something kind of creative. So if you would tell us a bit about yourself using the form of a haiku or whatever form you feel that you want to share right now.
- [02:41]
Clint Smith
Haiku, Richard Wright style.
- [02:42]
Nikazios
All right.
- [02:45]
Clint Smith
Oh, this will be interesting. I'm gonna try to do this on the fly. I'm gonna do it like elementary school students do it with their. Their. With their fingers.
- [02:52]
Nikazios
Okay.
- [02:56]
Clint Smith
Clint Ward Smith iii. Father, son, writer, teacher. Doing the best I can. I think we got it.
- [03:13]
Nikazios
I think we got it. That's beautiful. Writer, teacher, son. The third. Doing the best that he can. That's wonderful. And that kind of gives me Renaissance man as well.
- [03:29]
Clint Smith
That's very generous.
- [03:32]
Nikazios
So one of the questions that I ask all of my guests is, you know, when I think about conversations that we have for. And to a public, what I've come across is that there aren't enough discussions about moments of insecurity or doubt. And so I just wondered if you could tell me a time during your career where you had a moment of insecurity or doubt, but then also couple that with a moment of triumph or a moment where you just had just sheer clarity of the thing that you were supposed to do or who you are.
- [04:23]
Clint Smith
That's such a good question. I've. I've. I've not been asked that. I've. I feel like I've done hundreds of interviews and events for the last six. Six months since the book came out. But that's. That's a new one. I appreciate it. You know, it's interesting because this book, in the span of six months, has. Has already changed my life in. In really profound ways. But it's fascinating because for a long time, I was really scared to write prose. I was really scared to write things down at all. And so I come from. I entered writing largely through performance, poetry, space. It was in the 2000. Summer of 2008, I went to. I had an internship in New York City working at a publishing company. And one of my friends, woman named Mariana shepherd, she was. She was like, let's go to this place called the Nuyorican Post Cafe. And I was like, the what? A what? I was like, I never heard of the Nuyorican Post Cafe. I was like, let's go see Mission Impossible 3. Like, let's go do that instead. And she was like, shut up. Like, no, we're going to the Nuyorican. And I went. And it was one of the most remarkable experiences I've ever had in my life. And one that I look back at is very much changing the trajectory of my life, because I was a sort of struggling, disillusioned English major at this time. And I was, you know, struggling to understand and resonate with the canon and. Or the Western Literary canon and, and feeling disconnected from so much of what we were studying. And my understanding of what poetry was, was, was deeply tied to this sort.
- [06:10]
Nikazios
Of.
- [06:12]
Clint Smith
Centuries long canonized, very specific notion of what constituted as, as, as the poetic. And this space completely broke that open. And it was this room full of black and brown and indigenous and queer and disabled and immigrant people all in this room. And like they were playing. The first song they play at the beginning of the show is Belle Babe Devoe. And they play Poison. And so everybody's dancing to Poison. I'm like, what kind of poetry show is this? And. And just the poems people were sharing were just so stunning. I mean, it was. I never been so viscerally affected by art as I was that evening. I always remember there was a woman who did a poem about living with cerebral palsy. And disability wasn't something that was ever necessarily at the forefront of my consciousness, but in three minutes, the way I thought about an entire demographic of people had completely changed. And I left that room never thinking about disability the same way again. And I was like, what is this thing that is so moving, right? And what. In seeing the way that a poem existed in people's bodies, the way a poem existed in people's breath, the way, like it was an entirely the sort of full body experience. And how the poet controlled the way that we heard the language and experienced the language with their. The. The volume of their voice or the pacing of their expression, or the way that their eyes moved or their mouth moved or the way that their nose twitched. I mean, all of these small things that were just so. Made poems so dynamic. And so that's. I left that night and I was like, I don't know what this is, but I want to do it. And I went back and this was still the deaf poetry days. And so I went back to Davidson, where I was a college student, and I started watching deaf poetry obsessively. I started a poetry group on campus and I wrote a lot of bad poems for a very long time. Went down to Charlotte, North Carolina a lot that had a really robust slam poetry and spoken word scene. And that is how I sort of entered poetry. That's how I entered, you know, at least as an adult, how I began being a writer or thinking of myself as a writer. But for a long time I didn't, like, I wrote them down, but I didn't think about what the. What it looked like on the page. It was, you know, kind of just these like long blobs of, you know, paragraphs. If even a paragraph, sometimes it was just like a long stream of consciousness that, that as I wrote it, you know, as I performed it, I knew how it was meant to be performed. But if somebody else read it, they would be like, where is the. There's no comma or period or anything. And it wasn't until maybe, so that was 2008. It wasn't until maybe 2014, 2015 that I even began like writing poems to be published on, on paper in the world. And, and it's interesting, I'm, I feel like, very lucky to be part of this robust community of young poets who came out of the spoken word scene of the sort of early 2000s and, and who started rejecting the sort of dichotomy or the false dichotomy between the page and the stage. Right. And who, who recognize that, you know, being able to create work that moves people when you read it is not something that should be considered a lesser art form, as is often sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly as, as it is often taught. And so, you know, sometimes spoken word can exist lower on the literary hierarchy than more quote, unquote, traditional types of, of literature. And it was a, you know, folks like Elizabeth Acevedo, Danez Smith, Eve Ewing, Nate Marshall, Hanif Abdurraqib, Safiya El Hilo, all these folks who I, I started sort of coming up with in this space and who were like, nah, we can do, we can do that and we can expand into the different genres. And so all of that is a long way of saying when I first started being a writer, I was, I was scared to write poems that would go out into the world without me feeling like I had the control of how the audience would receive them. Because I think that performance gives you the illusion of control, whereas writing feels in some ways more vulnerable because you have no way of knowing how someone is going to experience what you've put down, because once you put it down and put it out into the world, it doesn't belong to you anymore. And then, so then I started writing poems and thinking more. You know, I went to the Callaloo Writing Workshop to work with Gregory Pardlo, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet. I went to Cave Canem and worked with a host of remarkable, incredible poets and teachers and started really, you know, it was in these spaces of people who were affirming that, you know, there was, I didn't have to choose between like performing work or writing work or pro poetry or prose. Like you could, you can do all of it. Part of the Black intellectual tradition is that you are not tied to a specific genre, but governed by your curiosities and your questions and. And the genre you write in or the medium you write in follows that. And so then I started writing essays for different outlets. I started writing essays for the New Yorker in 2016. It was freelancing a lot for them and for the Guardian and for other places. And. And really, all during that time, I was a doctoral student studying the sociology of education. And so I was. And this is during the Black Lives Matter movement, I was reading all these books about the history of race and inequality and. And putting those in conversation with the sort of manifestations of systemic racism and violence that we were seeing manifest themselves every day. And it. I was. But I was scared to do that. Like, for a while, I was scared to make the transition from performance to the page. I was scared to make the transition from poetry to prose. And each time I felt like I was entering a space, I was getting out of my lane, so to speak. Right. Like, sometimes people, like, stay in your lane. And I was like, well, I'm. I'm. You know, I'm not a. I don't write essays. Like, I'm a. I'm a poet. And even before I was, like, thinking of myself as a poet, I was like, well, I'm a spoken word artist. Like, I don't write. And so I had to sort of untether myself from the. From the limitations that I think I had imposed upon myself and asked questions about why I didn't think I could or should have access to experimenting in other forms. So I gave you a very long winded answer about that. But, But I think each time I've transitioned into a new form or genre, it has been frightening, and I've had to be pushed to. To not limit myself or think that I'm not able to write in that next form. And so it's fascinating having this book be, you know, I'm so fortunate that it's been as successful as it's been more than my wildest dreams. And people are like, man, you know, now. And now I'm a staff writer at the Atlantic, and people like journalist Clint Smith. I was like, who's a journalist? Like, when did that happen? And, yeah, so, you know, I think I just, as I mentioned, I. I'm encouraged and inspired by our. By the black intellectual tradition, which is. Is that, you know, we have folks who, who wrote poems and, and novels and essays and oral histories and. And this and that. Right. Like so many of the Literary figures we love the most, Du Bois and Hurston and Baldwin and so many just, they. They were not limited by a specific form. And I try to. I think of that and remember that when I'm scared to transition into a new space.
- [14:24]
Nikazios
I just want to follow up with that just for a second. So you mentioned that, you know, you wrote some, like, bad poems. And as you were speaking, I was one to ask what makes a poem bad? And I think about you being in that particular space and the performance poetry space and how it allows you to develop the courage to think expansively about the word and stretch beyond the limitations that we have placed on the word and prose. So just in terms of. For my own thinking and what makes a poem bad? What makes a poem. What characterizes for you, in your experience of poem bad?
- [15:15]
Clint Smith
Yeah, I think it's. I'm much more comfortable calling my own poems bad than I am calling someone else's poems bad. I think that for me, I think of writing in the same way that I think of. So I transitioned from. To writing from sports. So I played soccer my whole life, and I thought that I was going to be professional soccer player. Like, it was all from ages 6 to 18. It was all I thought about, all I cared about, what was the sort of North Star of my life. And. And I put a lot of time and effort into it. You know, practice on my own, going to camps, going to just, like, playing every second I can, watching the game every second I can. And what is true about sports is that you don't just show up to the field on game day and, like, score three goals and, you know, have three assists and. And, you know, dominate. You put in hours and hours and hours of work that no one will ever see. So that when you show up to the field, the work that you do on the field is a reflection of the work you've put in behind the scenes. And I think of writing in the same way, right. Like, I write a lot, but the. You know, I've published two books. Those two books are 1% of everything that I've ever written. Most of the stuff that I write will never be published because part of what I'm doing is, like, trying to write toward what I'm actually trying to say. And so sometimes people refer to it, and I don't know if this is just in journalism, but they refer to it as, like, clearing your throat where, like, you might write 5,000 words, but those first 4,000 words. Were you writing toward what you were actually trying to say in Those last thousand. But you don't know that until you start to sit down and do it. And so maybe it's not even that it, that it is bad necessarily, but I think I do a lot of writing that is, that is a sort of excavation, right? And a lot of writing to, to get to where I'm, to get to what I'm actually trying to say, you know, the first for this book, how the word is passed. It's. I think it ended up being 105,000 words. I mean the first, I probably wrote 30 or 40,000 words in the first year of what I thought would be the first chapter to get to that first word. Right. Like, so I mean I spent a year working on the proposal and the sample chapters and I wrote a 10,000 word chapter that I thought it was going to be and I was like, this isn't it. And then I wrote another 10,000 word chapter and I was like, no, this isn't it. And then I wrote another 10,000 word chapter. I mean this is, this is a year of my life, right? I thought, you know, I was like, I'm going to sell this book. It's going to be quick, easy, boom, boom, boom. But it took a year for me to figure out what I was actually trying to write about. And the poems are the same thing. Like I might write if I do a 30 for 30, you know, try to write a poem a day, every day, over the course of a month, 27 of those poems will be like, to my mind, not great. But I had to write those 27 to get to the three that I feel proud of. And, and I think that that's, that's like what writing is. You know, I think sometimes young people sit down and they think, you know, you know, if I don't write well the first time, then I'm not a good writer. And no, writing is, it's the same as sports. You got to put in a lot of work so that on game day, you know, what you put out into the world is a reflection of that, that practice. It's the same thing as playing an instrument. You don't just show up to the recital or show up to the concert and know how to, you know, I don't have a good musical lexicon but like know how to play a concerto or you know, know how to play like Bach or Beethoven or something or, or Dizzy Gillespie or whoever. Like it's you, you have to practice many, many hours in ways that make possible what you will do in front of, of people so, so, yeah, maybe it isn't even the frame that it is that the poems are bad, but that sometimes I think I write a lot of poems. Not sometimes. Most of the poems I write, most of. Anything I write is a way of getting to what I'm actually trying to say.
- [19:49]
Nikazios
And to your point about finding the courage to write prose, I mean, how the word is passed is simply beautiful and it's lyrical. And as I was reading it, you know, several months ago, I was quite stunned at the paradox, right, of. Of just a weighty topic, but then coupled with just eloquent writing. And you talk about how much writing you had to do to just get to three words that you like. I think about in the prologue that you have here, the first sentence, the sky above the Mississippi river stretch out like a song. I mean, just beautiful and just lyrical. And it's to that point that I want to talk about how the word is passed. So for our listeners, can you give us like, a brief synopsis of the book?
- [20:51]
Clint Smith
So how the word is passed, the sort of origin of it, is that it. In May 2017, I was watching several Confederate statues come down in my hometown in New Orleans. So statues of Robert E. Lee, PGT Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, these leaders of the Confederacy. And I was watching these statues come down and I was thinking about what did it mean that I was growing up in a majority black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people? And what are the implications of that? What does it mean that to get to school, I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard? To get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway, that my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy, that my parents still live on a street named after someone who owned 150 enslaved people? Because the thing is, we know that symbols and names and iconography aren't just symbols. They are reflective of the stories that people tell. And those stories shape the narratives that communities carry, and those narratives shape public policy, and public policy shapes the material conditions of people's lives. And so that's not to say that taking down a 60 foot tall statue of Robert E. Lee is going to suddenly erase the racial wealth gap. But it is to say that all of these things are part of an ecosystem of ideas and stories that help us understand what has happened throughout American history and helps us better understand how to make amends for the harm that has been done to different groups of people over the course of American history. And so I started thinking about, well, how is my own city? Like, how is New Orleans telling that story or failing to tell that story? You know, New Orleans is a place that, you know, as the historian Walter Johnson says, the whole city is a memorial to slavery. It is in the. The levies that enslaved people built. It is in the roads that enslaved people paved. It is in the. The homes that enslaved people constructed. It is in the cemeteries where enslaved people are buried. It's everywhere. It's just omnipresent. New Orleans was so central to the sort of larger slave slavocracy and slave ecosystem of the South. And in what ways was that story being told or being ignored? And then I started thinking about, well, how is that story being told or not told across the country? How is it being told or not told across the ocean? And I kind of went on this journey to try to get a sense of, like, how different historical sites, prisons, plantations, neighborhoods, cities. How do they tell the story of the history that their land is inextricably linked to, and how do some of them fail to do so? And how do these places reflect the complexity and the heterogeneity of the. Of public memory in this country and the way that so many of us, including myself at the beginning of this book, do not understand the history of slavery in any way that is commensurate with the actual impact and legacy that it had on this country.
- [23:45]
Nikazios
The first stop that you write about in the book is Monticello Plantation, and you have a tour guide, David Thorson, and he told you, quote, I really do believe that you can't understand the United States without going back and understanding Jefferson. So I wanted to know if you could tell us about Jefferson's central role in America, as well as his role in upholding the institution of enslavement.
- [24:19]
Clint Smith
Yeah, you know, Jefferson is such a fascinating character in the sort of history of America. And part of why I wanted to go, to go to Monticello is because I think that Jefferson in so many ways, personifies the story of America in the sense that America is a place that's provided unparalleled, unimaginable opportunities for millions of people across this country, across generations of this country, in ways that their ancestors could have just never imagined. It is also done so at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people who have been intergenerationally subjugated and oppressed. And both of those things are the story of America. It's not one on this side, one on the other side. It's that they are deeply entangled in one another. They coexist and could not exist without each other. And Jefferson, similarly, I think, embodies the cognitive dissonance of this country's history, which is, you know, he is someone who wrote one of the most important documents in the history of the Western world and is also someone who enslaved over 600 people over the course of his lifetime, including four of his own children. He wrote, you know, in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and wrote in notes on the state of Virginia that black people are inferior to whites in both endowments of body and mind. Said the slave was incapable of love. The slave was incapable of possessing or sustaining complex emotion. Wrote about Phillis Wheatley, considered to be the first published black poet in the history of the United States, first to publish a book that her work was, quote below, the dignity of criticism. It wasn't even worth engaging with because black people did not possess the intellectual or emotional acumen and capacity with which to create art. He said that love is the ostrum of the poetry and that black people are not able to transcend and move toward an emotional state in which they can understand love. He thought that black people only experience the sort of carnal pleasures, but their imaginations and their ability to understand love and the emotional texture of love was limited. And so he's like, well, we can call this something else, but we shouldn't call it poetry. Because black people don't know how to. Because black people can't experience love in the world way that we understand it. They can't create poetry. And I think about that, and I think about how that's a version of Jefferson that I was never taught. And it's interesting when you mentioned before, the way, you know, you talked about the prose of the book, and that's something that, you know, Monticello was the first chapter of the book that I was writing. And I really. I think as I was reading notes on the state of Virginia, and I write about this in this chapter, and I was thinking about this man who created, you know, so much of the social contract upon which this country would be founded, whose ideas are so central to this experiment that we're a part of that he did not believe that. That we could create art, that we could create poetry, that we were. Had the ability to be part of the American. To be part of or helped create the American poetic tradition. And I think, you know, I think of all of the black poets I know whose work was so central to and so tied to love in all of its forms. Love of people, love of place, love of community, love of lineage. And so when I was writing that chapter, I felt in some ways, like making sure that the. The prose and the craft and the poetry and the music of the language was reflective of my best, was in some ways, in and of itself, a rejection of what Jefferson espoused. Right. It's like, I'm gonna give you history, but I'm also gonna give you craft. And the creation of this craft is an explicit rejection of what Jefferson said we could not do. And what I am, what I hope to do, is only possible because of the lineage of black poets that I come from, who taught me how to pay attention to moments, to ideas, to feelings, and who. Whose work. You know, without whose. Whom's work, my work would be impossible. And so, you know, I wanted to create a piece of a book of history that in some ways felt like a novel. You know, I wanted it to exist both as history and literature. And I don't think that that can be disentangled from the fact that the first chapter of the book that I wrote was about a man who lived in a place that I spent time in. And that man, you know, explicitly suggested that we were unable to do what I was setting out to do.
- [29:39]
Nikazios
And another place that you write so clearly and so detailed as if you are an ethnographer is Angola Prison.
- [29:54]
Clint Smith
And.
- [29:57]
Nikazios
On its face, given the constellation of sites, historical landmarks that you visited, Angola Prison might be a less immediate connection to enslavement than the other sites in which you visit and travel to. And I wonder that. I know you mentioned in the book, particularly in that chapter, that over the last few years you have worked with incarcerated writers. What was your decision around, including and visiting Angola Prison and making sure we as readers understand just the sheer level of cognitive dissonance there. And I'll kind of get to that in a second. But also the inclusion of that site in the book.
- [31:01]
Clint Smith
Well, you know, for context, for folks who might not be familiar, Angola is the largest maximum security prison in the country. It is located in Louisiana. It is 18,000 acres wide, bigger than the island Manhattan. It is a place where 75% of the people held there are black men. Over 70% of them are serving life sentences. And it is a prison that is built on top of a former plantation. And what I tell folks is that if you were to go to Germany and you had the largest maximum security prison in Germany, it was built on top of a former concentration camp in which the people held there were Disproportionately Jewish. That place would rightfully be a global emblem of anti Semitism. It would be abhorrent. It would be disgusting. We would never allow a place like that to exist because it would so clearly run counter to all of our moral and ethical sensibilities. And yet here in the United States, we have the largest maximum security prison in the country. The vast majority of people are black men serving life sentences who work in fields of what was once a plantation. As many of them sentenced as children, many of them sentenced by non unanimous juries, which has since been rendered unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States. Working in these fields for pennies on the hour while someone watches over them on horseback with a gun over their shoulder. And so part of what I'm trying to understand when I go to Angola is like, what are the ways that a history of white supremacy not only enacts physical violence against people's bodies, but also collectively numbs us to certain types of violence that in a different global context would so clearly be unacceptable? And what does it mean? Not only that that place is not interested in the project of interrogating its relationship to this part of its history, but that it's a place that has a gift shop. And in the gift shop you can buy coffee mugs and shot glasses and T shirts and hoodies and baseball caps and stuffed animals dressed in prison garb. And on some of the. On the paraphernalia, like on the coffee mugs, for example, they have the silhouette of a watchtower. And above and below the watchtower, it says Angola, a gated community, as if to. To make a mockery of or belittle the experiences of the thousands of people who remain incarcerated there, the tens of thousands of people who have been incarcerated there over the course of so many decades. And you know, I was there with a guy named Norris Henderson, and Norris spent almost 30 years incarcerated in Angola and now is incredibly active in the sort of prison reform movement outside now that he's been. Been released. And we were there and we were on this bus, we were leaving after a sort of hours long tour. In the distance, we saw these two men who were working in the field, and they were sort of lifting their garden hoes into the air and digging them into the earth, lifting their spades into the air and digging them into the earth, lifting their shovels into the air and digging them into the earth. And they were being watched by someone on horseback with a rifle sort of sitting across their lap. And Norris looked at the men and he looked at his hands, and his hands have these cracks and these calluses from all his years spent working out in these fields. And he was like, clint, I can't explain to you what it felt like to work in these fields picking cotton for 7 cents an hour in the same on the same land that, for all I know, my ancestors might have picked cotton on 150, 200 years ago. And so the folks who are incarcerated and formerly incarcerated at Angola feel acutely the. The connection to that history, right? They feel it in their bodies. They experience it in their hands. And, you know, that's not to say that prison and slavery are the same thing. They are not like they are chattel. Slavery and mass incarceration are phenomenologically different entities that deserve to be interrogated in precise terms with the nuance of the differences. Like chattel slavery, as we know, you were inherently born, if your mother was enslaved, you were born into a caste system in which you were inherently enslaved. Even though there is a connection between the likelihood of someone being incarcerated and their child being incarcerated, sociologically, that is, you are not inherently incarcerated because your parent was. There are connections, but they are not the same. And that's among, you know, many differences. So. But it is, as the scholar Saidiya Hartman talks about the afterlife of slavery that shapes what our carceral landscape, and not only our carceral landscape, but what our political, social, and economic infrastructure across this country look like today. And I think it is important to take that seriously. And Angola, you know, is a place where that there's no need for metaphor because the land makes it literal. Right? Like, that place was a plantation. And what are the failures of our sort of collective public memory and public consciousness around this issue that allow that prison to exist on that land in that way or at all? Right. You know, like, would prisons, as we understand them exist in the way that they do if we collectively had a better understanding of how they are shaped by the legacy of enslavement? And that's part of the question that I set out to wrestle with.
- [36:45]
Podcast Host/Announcer
The holidays are coming up, and that means friends and family are going to be in your house. Is your house ready? I know mine wasn't. So I went to Wayfair to make sure that I had everything I needed to entertain and put these people up during the holiday season. Wayfair is the place to shop for all things you need for your home, from sofas to spatulas. And listen to this. Starting October 30th, you can shop. Wayfair's can't miss Black Friday deals all. All month long. You can get up to 70% off. Wayfair will ship your items fast and free. Now, in my case, I need to do betting. My betting was shot. So what did I do? Well, I went to Wayfair and I bought some new sheets and pillowcases. I also bought a comforter simply because I thought it was beautiful. It was very easy to order them. The price was right, shipping was free, and they came well before I needed them. So don't miss out on early Black Friday deals. Head to Wayfair.com now to shop Wayfair's Black Friday deals for up to 70% off. That's W A Y-F A I R.com sale ends December 7th.
- [37:48]
Clint Smith
Do you know why Tropicana Pure Premium Orange Juice is so delicious? It has just one ingredient. Oranges picked at peak ripeness and squeezed within 24 hours. No extras, no fuss, just pure, joyful sunshine. Perfect for slow mornings running errands or watching sports. Really, anytime you're craving a fresh squeeze flavor. Tropicana Pure Premium Orange Juice. And Doug, here we have the Limu.
- [38:17]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.
- [38:25]
Clint Smith
Fascinating.
- [38:26]
Podcast Host/Announcer
It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [38:30]
Clint Smith
Uh, limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera.
- [38:33]
Podcast Host/Announcer
They see us.
- [38:34]
Clint Smith
Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com.
- [38:39]
Nikazios
Savings.
- [38:40]
Clint Smith
Very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates excludes Massachusetts.
- [38:43]
Nikazios
Yeah, and in the chapter, there are two points that I want to just highlight. So to expand the point that you made about the gift shops, you write a look around the gift shop once more and wonder who it was attempting to serve, who was who saw the largest maximum security prison in the country as some sort of tourist destination. And then in the same chapter, you were speaking to Roger, or Roger speaks to you, and you said this, which is a really powerful point. We're the only prison, I venture to say, in America that would allow people to visit death row. The other states would never do that. They would freak out with that. And those two points, I think about the legacy of enslavement, but then also I think about the spectacle and capitalism. Capitalism to have this gift shop, but then the spectacle to see those who are on death row. I wanted to know if you have any. Any thoughts around those two particular ideas.
- [40:06]
Clint Smith
Yeah, it was. I struggled in that moment. And I write about that, you know, explicitly in the book. I mean, we were. I'd never been on Death row. I. Part of the thing that animated the entire experience at Angola, and you alluded to this before, is that I, I've worked in prisons for the past several years, like I worked in prisons when I was a graduate student in Massachusetts. And I've been working in prisons and jails, specifically D.C. jail, since I've lived in the sort of Washington D.C. metro area. And so I'm familiar. I, I would go into prisons every week, every other week, and was familiar, or thought I was familiar with the sort of landscape in the interior landscape of these institutions. But Angola is sort of an entity of its own. You know, I guess I had never been to a prison in the South. I never been to a maximum security prison, and certainly I've never been to a maximum security prison in the south with that history. And so I'd also never been on, I'd never been on death row. There were so many experiences at Angola. I had never been in an execution chamber. We saw the execution chamber. I had never been to death row. And we went to death row and we were watching. And it's set up in this sort of panopticon style where there's this sort of control system, this glass surrounded control center in the middle. And the cells are in different tiers and they stretch out kind of like almost like legs of a spider, right where like in the middle is the nucleus and the head and then the cells are these on these legs that stretch out in any direction. And you know, you're walking around and you see these people who have been condemned to die and they're. You're watching them and they're watching you and you're like, am I in invading their. The space? Like, am I. What is it? Are we, are we in the wrong? Should I acknowledge or not acknowledge? Do I want to. Am I going to be a bird? Like, am I trying to. I don't want to impose, but my presence is already an imposition. And so I wrestled with that. And I think at the end when we left, I talked about that, this with Norris and he was like, I think because you were with me, they understood that this was not, that they were not being treated as animals in a zoo, right? Like that this was Norris trying to get us to understand who these folks were. I mean, it's such an interesting thing because like Norris and, and the guy I call Roger. Roger was technically our official guide. And then Norris was kind of our unofficial guide. And so Roger would tell us something, you know, and then Norris would later sort of give us His. His take on it. And. And I mean, they. Norris is in an interesting position now because he is. He's out of prison and is in conversation with and has a relationship with many people in the Department of Corrections because I think he works very closely with them to try to make prisons a. A safer place for many of the people that he. He left behind there. Right. Like. And. And I think that's even for those of us with abolitionist beliefs and sensibilities. I think the. It is also important to take seriously, like, harm mitigation for people who aren't currently incarcerated. You know, it is important for people who are incarcerated to be safe and to have enough food to eat and to have enough time to exercise and to have the health care they need, all of these things. And then, you know, that can still exist with a sort of larger praxis that is attempting to make prisons, you know, as Angela Davis says, increasingly obsolete and to move toward that world. So it was, you know, it was tough. I just. I struggled emotionally with a lot of things and then part. But a. Part of what I think makes this book what it is, or at least I hope does, is I try to be honest about that stuff in the book. Right. It's not. I think it would be one thing if I was just saying to the reader, like, look at this, look at this, look at this, without sharing any sort of reflections about how I was feeling, you know, and how I was experiencing it, because I think that it. Both. If I'm trying to create a sort of novelistic experience and I am the supposed protagonist of the story, then I have to reveal the, you know, some level of interiority to create a sort of investment in me as the person you are on this journey with. I think also it gives the reader a chance, me saying. Me taking a step back, you know, and after showing you this, the. The red hat cell blocker, after showing you the execution chamber, after showing you death row, or after showing you the men in the fields. If I'm not also taking a step back to reflect on how these things are making me feel, then I think I'm not. I think that me doing it gives the reader permission to also step back and process how they're feeling. And that felt like an important device, so to speak, to. To make sure was. Was part of the book, to make sure that I'm not just inundating this per, you know, the reader with history and like, traumatic history and traumatic images and over and over again, but that we are taking a step back and saying like, what is this doing to my body? What is it? Like, what am I feeling when I see this place or leave this place? So I just. Yeah, I just try to be honest with that. Throughout the. Throughout the text.
- [46:10]
Nikazios
I want to talk about redemption, Clint and I want to discuss or point to an area in the book where you are talking to David Thorsten again. And he says something that I think is just profound as well. He says to you or you write. David sees it as essential that a guide be able to find the balance between telling the truth and not pushing people so much that they shut down. He told me that when you challenge people, specifically white people's conception of Jefferson, you are, in fact, challenging their conception of themselves. I've come to realize that there's a difference between history and nostalgia, and somewhere between those two is memory. He said, I think that history is the story of the past using all the available facts, and that nostalgia is a fantasy about the past using no available. Using no facts. And somewhere in between is memory, which is kind of this blend of history and a little bit of emotion. I mean, history is a kind of about what you need to know, but nostalgia is what you want to hear. And I think how just stunning this theorization is between history, memory, and nostalgia. But then I also want to think. So if he is relating this to white people, I want to follow up on a question that you asked a little bit earlier in that chapter about black people and why black people would visit Monticello? And you ask, and you pose the question, what would motivate a black family to come spend a day at a plantation if they were concerned about how the story of that land would be told and what kind of people would be standing alongside of them as it was told and who was telling it? I wonder, do you have any particular thoughts of, you know, at a plantation, what would make black people visit that particular site?
- [48:54]
Clint Smith
I think it depends on the plantation. And, you know, I think that's why I included both Monticello and the Whitney, because the Whitney is, you know, Monticello is a. A place that has, you know, as Annette Gordon Reed would say, the. The great Jefferson and Hemings historian. She would say that it is a place. It is not only a plantation, which it most certainly is. It is also the home of one of the. Our most central, if not the most central, founding father. It is the most famous plantation in the country, if not the world. You know, hundreds of thousands of people visit Angola every year. I think before the pandemic, it was almost half A million people visited Angola every year. And it is telling the story of not only slavery, but it is to tell the story of Jefferson. And so it has a. There are multiplicity of projects that it is engaged in, but it is, to my mind, it has done a better job of telling that story more recently than it has done in the past. And, you know, I've gotten so many emails and messages from people who visited Angola 10, 20, 30 years ago. And they say, like, you know, I mean, people weren't talking, like David Thorson, you know, at. At Monticello 25 years ago. People would say, like, nobody said anything about Jefferson being an enslaver. Nobody said anything about Sally Hemings. Nobody said anything about these things. We just talked about this great man in this home that he lived in. And Monticello is a place that recognizes that it. It has a responsibility to tell a story about that place. Not only is a story of. Of Jefferson, but also is a story of the enslaved families who. Who live there. Right. Is not. Monticello is not just about Jefferson. It's also about the Hemingses and the Hearns and the Fawcets and the Grangers and all of these enslaved families who again, built that land, cultivated that land, created families and memories on that land, and who, in many ways, that land belongs to more than it belongs to Jefferson. Jefferson was away in Paris and New York and D.C. and Philadelphia for these extended periods of time with his various roles with the U.S. government. And it was these families who were here and these families who that land belongs to as much as it belongs to anyone else. And so now they're doing a lot of work on getting oral histories from families, the descendants of people who were enslaved at Monticello as part of their Getting Word oral history project. And actually, the title of the book comes from a quote from one of the descendants who said, this is how the word is passed down, referring to the oral histories of people who were held and enslaved at Monticello and how their descendants. You know, there were very rarely sort of written documents outlining these experiences, but the stories of these experiences and that history was passed down through stories like an heirloom, like it is so often in the. In the black tradition. And so, you know, I think that when they are being more intentional about that, and I think when you are more intentional about centering the stories of enslaved people in ways that are acknowledged and are honest about the violence they experience, but also sort of simultaneously lift up their. Their humanity and their personhood, then you begin to get A different sort of visitor, because some people begin to feel like they are. They and their history are being seen still. You know, part of the reason that Monticello finds it difficult to keep even black docents and black guides is because it is mostly white people who visit there and who are not often. Who struggle to be interested. You know, not who struggle to be interested in. But who. Who struggle mightily to hear these things about this man that they revered and this man who. Who, again, sort of embodies their sense of the greatness of America and of America's foundings. When you tell a fuller, more honest story about him, about Jefferson, you have to tell us full and more honest story about America. And when you tell a full and more honest story about America, you have to tell a full and more honest story about yourself. And it becomes not only an inconvenience, but like an existential crisis for many people. And I think it's hard. That is an environment. I just had a friend who went to Monticello, and she was like, I couldn't do it. There were too many giddy white people who were treating it like a theme park, or too many white people who were like, did Jefferson really have slaves? Did Jefferson really. And that is a thing that people like David are trained to deal with. And even David says in the chapter, because he's like, I didn't. People often hear it in a different way coming from me, because David's a white man in his 60s versus some of his colleagues, like Nya Henderson, who was the public historian at Monticello, but who's now a PhD student in history at Princeton. You know, they. People responded very differently to him than they did to her. And so it's a struggle, I think, to get black folks to work there and to visit. But I know that they're trying to be more intentional than they ever have about making sure that it is a place that black people feel like they can come to. And so the Whitney is a place, I think, that is surrounded by a constellation of plantations in Louisiana where people continue to hold weddings and celebrations and ceremonies and where, you know, some of the slave cabins. I was talking to wedding planners down there who. Some of the slave cabins and some of these places are used as bridal suites for some of these ceremonies. And the Whitney is a place that rejects the idea that a plantation can be understood as anything other than an intergenerational site of torture and rejects the idea that we can. We should be talking about anything other than the enslaved people who were subjugated to that violence and torture. And so, again, it's this project of both naming and acknowledging and outlining the violence, but also naming and identifying and outlining the ways that the people on this plantation were not singularly defined by that violence and that they were, in fact, you know, people who were attempting to find agency in any way they could in. In the midst of what are just unfathomable circumstances. So, you know, you. The Whitney, because its mission and project is different, gets a different sort of visitor than. Than Monticello does, because you don't. You don't show up to the Whitney thinking that you're going to hear this, like, nice story about the white man who lived in the house. You. You show up with some sense of what you're gonna experience. And it's just about the sort of tenor and texture of the experience that. That makes it what it is.
- [56:32]
Nikazios
Yeah. And at the same time, this sort of reckoning is happen, happening, I. I imagine to white people viscerally. Right. Because when you meet Yvonne Holden, who's the director of operations for the whit, she says to you, quote, the number one question we get from white visitors is, I know slavery was bad. I don't mean it in this way, but were there any good slave owners? And once again, I think about this idea of redemption that at least from when. When white people are trying to reconcile or get a deeper understanding of America and America's relationship to enslavement. And through the Whitney plantation, I go back to what David said, you know, that they're rupturing their conception of themselves. And so you can't tell me that it's all bad. Is there something that is redeemable here? What were your thoughts when you heard that from Yvonne Holding?
- [57:50]
Clint Smith
I was like, why? You have the patience of. Of, like a otherworldly being to have to navigate that every day. But it's also reflective of the story that people told about slavery for the vast majority of American history. Right. Like, what most people don't understand, and this goes into the sort of historiography on slavery, is that after the Civil War and after Reconstruction especially, the Lost Cause narrative really took hold. And the way that people talked about slavery was the way John Calhoun, the late senator from South Carolina and at one point our vice president, he said that slavery was a positive good for both black and white people alike, that it was rescued black people from the savagery of Africa and that black people needed the sort of paternalistic, you know, attention and support of white enslavers or as the historian Ulrich B. Phillips says in, in the early 20th century, you know, the man who was probably the leading historian on slavery until the Civil Rights movement, you know, he said that slavery was a civilizing institution and that, you know, it gave black people religion, it gave black people culture, it gave black people stability. And that, that, that is the, this is the thing that is shaping and animating public consciousness around slavery until the Civil Rights movement. When you have people like Kenneth Stamp who write in their work about how, what the inequality that we see in America is, you know, during the Civil Rights movement is a direct outgrowth of the history of slavery and. Right. Start writing about slavery in the way that someone like Du Bois had always written about slavery. Right? Like, so, you know, white historians changed in the, during the Civil Rights movement and the way that, you know, these historians of that era began writing about it. But you have folks like Du Bois, you know, from black Reconstruction, who were like, very clear about the impact that slavery has had and continue to have. And so part of it is this. You had more historians during the Civil Rights movement now looking back and saying slavery was actually an institution that was horrific and horrendous and is inextricably linked to the past 80, 90 years of Jim Crow that we have had in this country. And you know, so what those people are saying to Yvonne is a sort of, is just regurgitating what was the narrative of slavery for, for a long time. And it's ways of people at the end, you know, ultimately the people are, are human and they, when they go to these places, whether it's Monticello or Whitney, you are hearing information, many people that runs counter to everything that you had been taught about your country. And that doesn't happen easily, right? And that doesn't happen in a singular moment. Very few people will hear new information, be like, wow, okay, well, what I thought was wrong and now I believe this. I mean, it, it's not to excuse it or justify it, but it's like, I mean, you're, you're trying to, in a, in a 60 minute tour, upend decades, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years of the stories that people have carried. And so that is jarring for a lot of people. And so they're like, wait, wait, wait a second. Well, maybe there was some good slaveholders, right? Or like Jefferson wasn't. He wasn't that bad. Like, he was really, he was really kind, he treated them well, or he fed them well, or, or, you know, the Whitney, you know, well, well, how many people were held here. It wasn't that many. Right? You people find all sorts of ways to try to mitigate the feelings of guilt and shame and embarrassment that they are experiencing in those moments. And so on some level, I get it on a base human level, but I think what these docents do and what these guides do at these different places, and part of what I try to model the book after is that there is this, there is this both endedness to them, which is to say that they extend an enormous amount of grace and generosity to the visitors. And there's no sort of like, I can't believe you didn't know this. There's no judging, there's no condescension, there's no, there's none of that. It's very much meeting people where they are and saying, it's okay if you didn't know this, but you're here now. But while there is also, while there's grace and accountability, or excuse me, while there's grace and generosity, there's also responsibility and accountability. And so they're not going to judge you for showing up and not knowing something, but once they present you with that information, there is an expectation that you're going to sit with that and that you're going to carry that and you're going to let that settle over you. And that it might necessitate that you recalibrate and reassess the stories you've been told about this country your whole life. And that might necessitate that you need to reassess the stories that people you love have told you. And that might need to reassess how you understand who you are and what your community is and your lineage is in relationship to this larger American project. And that's, you know, that's, that's a hard thing for a lot of people to do. And there's all sorts of, you know, hoops and flips and tricks that people try to try to figure out to escape it. But, but that is, you know, I try to model the book after that because it's like, look, this book was not written by somebody who began this project as an expert on the history of slavery. Like, I'm, I'm trained, you know, my PhD is in the sociology of education. I wrote a dissertation on the educational experiences of people who were sentenced to juvenile life without parole. Most of my work in graduate school was focused on the relationship between education and incarceration. And I had this other interest in public history, but I didn't pursue it in at least formal scholarly context. But there was over the course of the Black Lives Matter movement, part of what happened is I realized that I didn't understand the history of slavery in any way that was commensurate with the impact that it had on this country. And I was like, there's, I have a very sort of surface level understanding of this institution that I'm becoming even more aware is like so central to everything we see around us. Right? Like, you know, you know it intuitively. You're like, you know, you're. Because your grandparents say, like, this country was built on our backs. You know, black people built this country, slaves built this country, and you like, get it. But like, when you start digging into the literature, when you start digging into the scholarship, when you read Leslie Harris, when you read Walter Johnson, when you read Vincent Brown, when you read Annette Gordon Reed, when you read Dinah Rami Berry, when you read these folks, it's like, oh, like this is. I didn't, I didn't understand how deep this was. We had slavery in this country for 250 years. Only have not had it for a little over 150. This thing existed for a century longer than it didn't. And I think part of what this book did also was give me a sense of like our proximity to this history, you know, because it's thinking about how the scars of slavery, like there's, there's very clear sense of our physical proximity, how the scars of slavery are etched into the landscape of this country everywhere. But part of getting a sense of the physical proximity also gives you a sense of our temporal proximity, that this wasn't that long ago. I mean, I think all the time about Ruth Bonner, the woman who opened the National Museum of African American History and Culture alongside the Obama family in 2016, who sort of symbolically rang that bell and she was the daughter of an enslaved person, not the granddaughter, not the great granddaughter. This woman who opened this museum in 2016 was the daughter of someone born into chattel slavery. My grandfather's grandfather was enslaved. So when my 4 year old son sits on my grandfather's lap, I imagine my grandfather sitting on his grandfather's lap. And I'm reminded that this history we tell ourselves was a long time ago, just simply was not that long ago at all. There are people alive today who were raised by, who loved, who were in community with people who were born into bondage. And so the idea that we would suggest that that history has nothing to do with the contemporary landscape of inequality, that it has nothing to do with what our Political, social and economic infrastructure look like is revealed to be so profoundly disingenuous and, and morally disingenuous. And so I think that, you know, that that's one of the reasons why these, part of this book is like an homage to people like Yvonne, because like, they, you know, I, I hope that many people read my book, but many more people will go to Monticello or go to Whitney every year than will read any book on the history of slavery. And these places have such a unique opportunity to reach folks and engage with folks in this history in ways that the best books on this quite possibly never may or never will. And that's, I just take very seriously the work that historical sites do and can do in ways that are different than what, you know, my book can do or any, any, any of these incredible scholars books can do. But, but at the same time, and this is the beautiful thing is like these public historians and guides, their work is made possible by the work of academic historians, right? I show up to Monticello and on Nya Henderson's desk are books by David Blight, are books by Annette Gordon Reed, are books by all of these folks whose scholarship has changed the way we understand this country. And they are taking the scholarship and they are bringing it to physical places and physical landscapes and putting that literature in conversation with the space to create this really dynamic experience for visitors. And I think that it's an amazing skill, it's an amazing thing to do, to be able to distill, you know, and, you know, huge swaths of historiography into an hour long tour. It's, it's a remarkable thing.
- [69:33]
Nikazios
It really is. And to go back to your point about the proximity, proximity to enslavement, proximity to this history, I think about, you know, where you drew your inspiration for the title of your book, how the Word is Passed. And it was through the oral histories. And those oral histories were used in the tours at Monticello. And I also think about how, you know, in the, how you write about that you went to all of these landmarks and, you know, some of the best history is those in your own family. In fact, you write that I have traveled across the country and across the ocean visiting the historical sites that tell the story of how we got here. Still, each passing year, I have come acutely aware that the past not only is housed in museums, but museums, memorials, monuments, as in cemeteries, but lives in our lineage. I realize in an effort to dig into the archives that explain the histories of this country, I had forgotten that the best Primary sources are those sitting right next to us. And so here I think about the power of orality and how orality is one of the modes in which stories happen and narratives are told and retold and reshaped. Can you talk about the power and the importance of orality in shaping these narratives as well as perpetuating these particular narratives, whether they're myths or some type of history?
- [71:40]
Clint Smith
You know, if I had a magic wand, I would. If I had an educational magic wand, sometimes I do a lot of talks for teachers and, like, educational associations. And I was a former high school teacher, and sometimes people would be like, if you could change one thing in education, what would it be? And I think now my answer would be, I wish that every student. I mean, one. It would be like, give. Give people more money. That's my main one. But other than that, I wish every student had to do an oral history project and interview their grandparents or interview their elderly neighbors, interview these people in their communities, in their families, who have lived through these profound and remarkable moments in American history and who were not these lionized figures, who were not Martin Luther King, who were not Rosa Parks, who were not Frederick Douglass, who were not Harriet Tubman, who were not, you know, the list goes on and on. But who were the ordinary people who. Who made so these social movements, who often made these social movements possible, and who lived through these tumultuous times in American history? And. And, you know, I interviewed my grandparents for this book largely, and it's the epilogue of the book, largely, because I spent four years talking to strangers about, you know, their life stories and their. Their work and, you know, spending hours and hours with these people. I was like, I've never asked these questions to my own family, but I'm asking them to people that I just met and might never see again. And so I tried to bring that level of formality, intentionality to a conversation with my grandparents. And it was sparked by walking through the National Museum of African American History and Culture with them. My Grandfather, born in 1930, Jim Crow, Mississippi. My grandmother, born in 1939, Jim Crow, Florida. And we're walking through this museum, My grandmother has this refrain. She was just like, I lived it. I lived it. I lived it. And you realize that so much of the history that's documented in this museum, so much of the violence that's documented in this museum, are things that my grandparents experienced firsthand in ways that, like, I understood, but, like, never really understood and never really talked to them about. And I wanted to make space to talk to them about it. And I learned so much. I mean, I learned that my grandfather grew up in this town of a thousand people where, you know, someone had been lynched when he was 12 years old. And, like, how does that not. I can't imagine the way that that impacts you as a child. Right. Or about my grandmother being made, you know, being on buses, riding from, you know, going. Getting on a Greyhound, riding from one town in Florida to another, and being a little girl and being told that she couldn't use the bathroom inside the bus station, she had to go urinate outside. She said she felt like a dog. You know, like, you see, like we watch these, you know, Eyes on the Prize documentaries. We see it in our history books, and we know it's. But sometimes we forget how the people most proximate to us were impacted by this, or at least I forget. And it was such an important reminder. And so I, you know, I think the oral histories are so important. I'm kind of obsessed with them now. And I'm interested in, like, what oral histories look like across different, different groups of people in. In America. Like, what is. I know that the Japanese American community does a lot of oral histories around people who lived through internment camps in World War II, Native American reservations, and Native American libraries do a lot of oral histories on people who experience displacement or who were sent to. To inject these. These schools both in America and Canada. So, you know, I think that there's a lot to learn from the stories of our elders. And, and they don't have to be remarkable, extraordinary people, or rather, they don't have to be people who did what are ostensibly defined as remarkable or extraordinary things. But, but, you know, I think when we have these conversations with them, with them, that we realize that they, in fact, were and are these extraordinary people just maybe outside of the ways that we typically define it.
- [76:35]
Nikazios
You know. So as you travel through to eight different historical sites, you know, as. As you said, too, these sites of public history, and you have encountered formerly incarcerated people, workers, visitors, and really thinking about, you know, as the title of your book states, Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. Through all of that, I wonder, have you strengthened your position or clarify your position on the whole conversation around removal of statues and monuments as we think about reckoning with enslavement?
- [77:29]
Clint Smith
Yeah, I mean, I think there's two. Two ways of thinking about this. I mean, for me, the Confederate statues are easy. I mean, they should. They Confederate statues should be taken down. I mean, those, Those for me are kind of the low hanging fruit of this debate. I don't want a plaque. I don't want, you know, context. I want. I think they should be taken down. The Confederacy was a treasonous territory that raised an army predicated on maintaining and expanding the institution of slavery. And that's just what it was.
- [78:04]
Nikazios
Right.
- [78:04]
Clint Smith
They wrote it down for themselves in 1861 and they wrote all these declarations of Confederate secession. And throughout these states state like Mississippi says, our position is thoroughly aligned with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest in the world. Right. So they are not vague about why they're seceding. They're quite clear about it. You know, Alexander Stevens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, in his cornerstone speech, says very explicitly the cause of this great rupture and this great revolution is the desire of the Confederacy to perpetuate human bondage, the belief that the white man is inherently superior to, to the black man. The cornerstone of this new nation that we are building is slavery. So, you know, the idea that we would lift those, put those people up on pedestals in public places, knowing both the history of the Confederacy and the context in which they were. These statues were erected, which were happening as at moments of ostensible black progress. Right. During the civil Rights movement is when there was an explosion of these statues in early. In the early 19th century or the early 20th century, around 1910, 1912, there was an explosion of these statues and some of these statues went up in. There's a statue that was a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest that was just taken out of the state capitol of Tennessee that was put up in 1978. Nathan Bedford Forrest is the founder of the, the first leader, the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, the person who massacred black soldiers who were trying to surrender during the Civil War. I mean, you talk about somebody who personifies white supremacy and they put this up in 1978, not 1878. They put this up in 1978. You know what you're trying to do, you know what message you're trying to send when you put a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest up in a capitol in what, in almost 1980. Right. And so these statues were put up with the specific intention of sending a message about what is going to be prioritized, who is in charge, who wields the power, how that power is going to manifest itself in terms of policy. And we continue to see that today, sometimes in ways that are more subtle, but we certainly continue to see it today. So I think that, you know, they should be removed from all public, public spaces and, like, move them from the courthouse, remove them from the traffic circles, remove them from the parks. And if you want to put up. If you're a private citizen and you want to put up a statue of Robert E. Lee in your backyard, that's your business. You do what you want on your property. But in no context should these be in public spaces paid for by taxpayer dollars. It doesn't. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. With that said, I think the conversation is more complicated around people like Jefferson and people like Madison and people like Monroe and. I mean, 12 of our first 18 presidents owned enslaved people. Eight of them owned enslaved people while they were in office. I think people of good faith can have different ideas of what should be done with those statues. Right? And I think a lot of it depends. I think those are decisions that should be made on local community levels. I don't think there's any sort of broad, like, take down all the statues of Thomas Jefferson, take down all the statues of James Madison. I don't think it's that simple. And I know people who are acutely familiar with the hypocrisy and contradictions of Jefferson who don't think it should come down, like Annette Gordon Reed, the person who perhaps made us, gave us an understanding of Jefferson more robust than we've ever had. She. She, as far as I understand, she doesn't think that the statues, like statues of Jefferson should come down and has a sort of, you know, she has a very thoughtful, nuanced position on it that in no way ignores or erases what he did as an enslaver. But, you know, her perspective is one that they shouldn't come down. And she's someone who I admire and respect immensely. And, you know, it's. It's hard, but I think that the fact that the conversations are happening and the fact that we are considering more fully the totality of who these folks were, I think that that's really important. And. And I think as long as communities have a thoughtful process by which they attempt to answer these questions. You know, my hometown new. Of New Orleans is trying to answer these questions. My. I went to Benjamin Franklin High School, and I didn't even know that Benjamin Franklin, you know, used the labor of. Of an enslaved person, I think in. Maybe in his printing shop. I can't remember exactly, but. And so now they're asking, well, should we have, you know, keep the name of Ben. Ben Franklin up? And so Ben Frank, like, what does it mean if somebody, you know, held a slave and then freed that you know the story and it's so. They're all so different. Ulysses S. Grant was part of an abolitionist family and then married into a slave owning family and then gotten in slave worker. But then later in freed. Later freed that enslaved worker. Then he also led the army that, you know, led to the end of slavery. So, you know, these, there's no, like, it would be too simple and too two dimensional to say, like, anybody who ever owns slaves shouldn't have a statue, to my mind. But I also think that more broadly, like, and David Blight has talked about this, like, what if we had statues that weren't just to people? Like, what if we had statues to ideas and to aspirations and you know, we often memorialize what has come before us. But like, what if we had statues that were showing where we were trying to go. Right. More sort of abstract renderings of like, what does a statute to justice look like? What is a statute to, like a world without prisons look like? What is a, what is a monument to, you know, the, to equity looks like? I don't know. You know, I just think that there are a lot of really talented people who can give us things because part of what these things are, they, they are public reminders in public spaces of where we've been. And I think there's an argument to be made that we should also have monuments and memorials or physical structures in, in public spaces of where we're trying to go. And I'd be interested in, in seeing more of that.
- [84:56]
Nikazios
Well, your book helps us indeed answer some of those complicated questions. Clint, before we go, I just have one more question. What are you working on next?
- [85:12]
Clint Smith
Yeah, I'm so. I'm the host of a YouTube series called Crash Course Black American History. And if you just go to YouTube, look up crash Course Black American History, you'll find it. We're doing 50 episodes on different parts of, of American Black American history. And they're these sort of 10 to 12 minute videos and they are partially animated and they're meant to serve as a resource especially for, for students and teachers and trying to, you know, figure out. I'm always interested in meeting students and young people where they are and I'm always interested in trying to, trying to figure out a way to bring this history to more people and to present it in ways that complicate sort of two dimensional narratives that have often shaped how it's been taught. So we're about 25 episodes in as of the recording of this podcast and we're going to 50 episodes, so we'll be going until probably mid-2022. And that is taking up a lot of my time these days with the scripts and the recordings and the editing and all of that. So that keeps me busy. I have some big pieces I'm working on for the Atlantic in terms of next books. My next book will be a collect another collection of poetry. I think it's due out not until 2023, but it's a collection of the dad poems. So it's a. It's a very different sort of tenor than to this book. But I wrote many of these poems while I was writing this book as a sort of a respite. I have two young kids, I have a four year old and a two year old. And these are poems that are like, you know, owed to the spit up on my chest. I mean, it's kind of like a, a fun change of pace and so. So yeah, those are all kind of things I'm working on. I have sort of very beginning of ideas of what the next non fiction project might be, but I think I'm still very much in the midst of recovering, if you will, from this first one.
- [87:18]
Nikazios
Yes, yes, I understand. So from podcasting to prose to poetry, the three P's indeed. So, Clint, it was such an honor to have you on the show. Clint Smith is a staff writer for the Atlantic and his latest book is how the Word Is A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, which is published by Little, Brown and Company. Thank you so much, Clint.
- [87:51]
Clint Smith
Thank you so much.