How to Be a Better Human - How thinking critically about history shapes our future (with David Ikard)

Episode Date: November 22, 2021

Can you think of a time when you told a story and remembered it...wrong? Perhaps you forgot a small detail, like the color of someone’s shoes, or something much bigger, like where the event took place. In a personal context, that might not seem like a huge deal. But what happens when what we misrepresent are our historical narratives? David Ikard is a Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University. In this episode, he talks about the dangers of inaccurate history, shares tips on how to find work that can contextualize and bring nuance to your historical knowledge, and uncovers the real story of one of history’s most iconic figures. You can follow David’s work on Twitter @blkeducator. We want to know what you think about the podcast! Let us know your thoughts by visiting this link https://survey.prx.org/BetterHuman—and get a chance to be featured in a future episode.To learn more about "How to Be a Better Human," host Chris Duffy, or find footnotes and additional resources, please visit: go.ted.com/betterhuman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Growing up, I remember learning a pretty standard by-the-book explanation of American history, which means that now, as an adult, I'm frequently surprised to find out that the stories I thought I knew I actually had all wrong. For example, I always thought that the story of Rosa Parks

was of an older woman who decided that she'd had enough and she refused to give up her seat at the front of a bus to a white man because she was tired after a long day of work. But as today's guest, Professor David Eichert, explains in his talk at TEDx Nashville, that is not how things actually happened. Here's a clip. I am the proud father of two beautiful children. am the proud father of two beautiful children. When Elijah was in the fourth grade, he came to me, came home from school, bubbling over with excitement about what he had learned that day about African-American history. Now, I'm an African-American cultural studies professor. And so as you can imagine, African-American culture is kind of

serious around my home. So I was very proud that my son was excited about what he had learned that day in school. So I said, well, what'd you learn? He said, I learned about Rosa Parks. I said, okay, what did you learn about Rosa Parks? He said, I learned that Rosa Parks was this frail old black woman in the 1950s in Montgomery, Alabama. And she sat down on this bus and she had tired feet. And when the bus driver told her to give up her seat to a white patron, she refused because she had tired feet and it had been a long day and she was tired of oppression and she didn't give up her seat and she marched with Martin Luther King and she believed in non-violence. And I guess he must have looked at my face and saw that I was a little less than

impressed by his history lesson. And so he stopped and he's like, dad, what's wrong? What did I get wrong? I said, son, you didn't get anything wrong, but I think your teacher got a whole lot of things wrong. He said, what? I said, yes. Rosa Parks was only 42 years old. Yeah, you're shocked, right? Never heard that. Rosa Parks was only 42 years old. She had only worked six hours that day and she was a seamstress and her feet were just fine. The only thing that she was tired of was she was tired of inequality. She was tired of oppression. and my son said, well, why would my teacher, you know, tell me this thing? You know, this is confusing for me because he loved this teacher and she was a good teacher, a youngish, you know, 20-something white woman, really, really smart, pushed him. So I liked her as well, but he was confused. Why would she tell me this? He said, he said, dad, tell me more, tell me more, tell me

more about Rosa Parks. And I said, son, I'll do son, I'll do you one better. He was like, what? I said, I'm going to buy her autobiography and I'm going to let you read it yourself. That is for sure how you know your dad is a professor, when he has you reading the primary sources. But in all seriousness, listening to Dr. Eichardt correct the record about Rosa Parks, it makes me wonder what other moments from history I've been taking for granted. What are the historical details that we might be getting wrong? And why is it so important to question those narratives and get them right? Those are the questions that we're going to be diving into in this episode, right after this break. And we're back.

My name is David Eichert. I am professor of African American DAS, but studied at Vanderbilt University and the proud father of Elijah Eichert, 19, and Octavia Eichert, 15. So, Professor Eichert, thank you so much for being here. In your TEDx talk, you broke down how the story of Rosa Parks that many people learn, right, that there was this tired old woman who didn't want to give up her seat after

a long day of work, that that's actually a fiction. That's a misrepresentation of who Rosa Parks was. Right. A complete fiction. And I mean, I think in some ways it reflects on our current moment, right up to the current moment, where there are two interesting things that I'm dealing with as an academic right now that speaks to this particular dynamic of history as this kind of constructed reality, as opposed to this kind of fixed, you know, factual, empirical thing, right? Our ability to be able to delve into the intricacies and the not so flattering aspects of American genocide and violence and the ways in which we've engaged in certain forms of apartheid ourselves and oppression and what have you. and oppression and what have you. And so we're at this interesting moment in which there's a desire by one youthful part

of our population to hear the truth and deal and grapple with it. And then another part of our society, in many cases, an older aspect of our society that is terrified of what those truth will reveal and how they will impact this myth of American inclusivity and upward mobility and the American dream. So it's an interesting time to kind of have this very conversation about whitewashing

history. So starting with that, the fact that there's this whitewash narrative that has been taught for decades and continues to be taught in many places, the idea that there are students, white students, but students of all races who are pushing for more inclusive education, for more accurate education, that seems like one very concrete thing that people can be doing to try and get a more accurate understanding of history and challenge some of these myths. What are other things that listeners could do to try and challenge some of these aspects of the histories that were taught that aren't actually factual?

We really depend on the younger generations to hold our feet to the fire about what we say we want to be as a country, what we say we want to be as a global community in our best light. So I see this primarily as a country, what we say we want to be as a global community in our best light. So I see this primarily as a moment in which, you know, those old heads like myself, we're going to have to support. Sometimes it's not even about having to take a stand, but really support those younger generations of folks who are not afraid and who are trying to make this thing a reality. We like the anonymity of staying

on the sidelines of controversial issues because we don't want the stress and the strain. But what often that means is you tacitly support the status quo. So this is obviously right in your wheelhouse because, you know, so many of your books and so much of your writing is about this too, right? In Lovable Racists and Blinded by the Whites, right? You talk about and you take apart the desire on the part of many white people to avoid talking about race or to believe that we live in a post-racial America. And I think that kind of what you just said seems to hit at the heart of what you've written about in a lot of these books, that it's not necessarily that you're against it, but that by wanting

to do nothing, by feeling like the work has already been done, that is actually worse. It feels like a lot of why re-evaluating history and re-evaluating the narratives that we've been taught can be painful is because there are these truths that we cling to, the stories that we've told ourselves that we want to be true. And it can be very painful to have the rug pulled out

and to all of a sudden have to see the world, you know, to have the scales fall from your eyes. So I'm curious, in your opinion, as a historian, right, as a professional here, how do we get a sense

of an accurate history? Like what needs to be at the core of our understanding of historical events so that we know we are telling the right narratives and to avoid having that clinging on to something where the rug's going to get pulled down from under us? You know, we had began the conversation by pointing out that history is in fact a construction of perspectives that are kind of weaved together. It's socially constructed. So I think we're at a moment now where we're, and I think it's very important, that we're starting to consider like, well, what was the experience of women during the Civil War? What was the

experience of Black folks during the American Revolution? How did those folks who were Revolution? How did those folks who were on the margins, the queer folks, the trans, how did they figure into this? Because we know all of these folks were there and all of them play a role in that history. And now the challenge is to recover that. It's interesting because I hadn't ever thought of it this way before we had this conversation just now. But it's funny when sometimes something small will happen with me and my wife, and then we'll be out at a dinner with someone else

and we'll try and tell the story and I'll tell my version and she'll go, no, no, that's not what happened. And we'll both be like, no, come on. That's kind of it. We can't even agree. Exactly.

And when you think about it, right, like we're telling the story of a guy we drove past on the street who's wearing a costume. And we can't even agree on the smallest of the facts on that. When you think about how history is really the idea that there's one definitive narrative, that is something I'd never thought about before, that it's really right. Each person sees it in their own way and brings a new piece.

Absolutely. And we never can. Right. We never can fully get back to that moment where, like, because we exist as subjective beings, everything that we see is filtered through an interpretive lens, right? Whether I'm a Christian or Muslim, whether I'm straight or queer, whether I'm, like, rich or poor, all of that informs what we see and what we do not see. So maybe then I'm asking the wrong question in the first place when I'm saying, how can we get to a more accurate history?

Maybe it's like, how can we complicate the historical stories that we know? I think so. I think that's, yeah. Yes, and I think that's right. I think that, and I think that's also the scary part of it, because there is a political utility to history, right?

I mean, if you come to the South, if you spend any time in the South, you'll see hotels that are Plantation This and Plantation That and Old South and Dixie This and Dixie That. And it's a clear kind of nostalgia for the past, right, where things were so simpler and more wholesome and whatever. And in order for that narrative to be sold and celebrated and commodified, you have to sanitize all of the lynchings and all of the violence and all of the sexual assault and all of the bloodiness that came with that culture. came with that culture. And so there's a need to romanticize it, not because that had anything to do with the actual history, but because we use those notions to help us feel good about ourselves. Right? So we need them because we need that version of the past for this version of our romanticized present.

It seems like we simplify things, you know, and I say this as a white person. I think often a lot of the historical misinformation or whitewashing happens because white people are trying to avoid discomfort or acknowledging historical mistakes and present day mistakes too. But it does seem like there's a sense in which sometimes we can go one way and say like, no, it was all good back then. We don't want to hear about the problems. And then there's this other way where we say like, that person was all bad and they were just an evil person in history. And we don't see like, well, you know, there were positive changes that came out of this horrible event as well. And that's difficult, right? That's a lot harder than just being like,

they were good. They were bad, done. Let's move on. So it's not a balance to be like, oh, let's balance it here. No, the scales have been so warped. But what we really need to do, and we see this in TV, right? We see, well, we're going to get this side of the political issue and that. And we're like, but that doesn't really get us

at the truth or at least the truth of the moment, which is that this is such an imbalanced thing that we don't have to go like, hey, what about straight people's rights? Yeah. Right. That's what we learn about. Why isn't there a straight history month? We don't need that. The rest of the months are straight history. Exactly. Exactly. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's the same impulse. It's interesting because a lot of your writing and your earlier books have to do with kind of like Obama era white liberalism and this idea that we're white people wanting to believe that we're we're in this post racial era. with liberals. But when you hear people push against a movement like Black Lives Matter by saying all lives matter, right? Like it's the same thing that you're saying right now, where it's like that side is getting pushed so much. We don't need to repush that side. That is not correcting the scale, right? We're trying to fix an injustice, not just reiterate. Absolutely. There's a perfect

cartoon that illustrates this, where there's somebody with a water hose who's hosing down a house that's not on fire and then there's a house that's on fire that's not getting any water at all and the caption is all houses matter right so you're giving water to the house that's not on fire while you're watching the other one burn and i think that's exactly right you know and i think that's how we've engaged. That's how we, you know, we avoid dealing with the hard stuff, right? That's a way to deflect. That's a way to obscure. That's a way to try to get us away from what's at the core. But at the end of the day, as James Baldwin would say, the end of the day, as James Baldwin would say, that type of obfuscation also hurts white people.

That type of whitewashing also means that they're not in touch, not only with the reality of marginalized people, but with their own reality. We are going to have so much more conversation with Dr. David Eichard in just one moment, but first we're going to take a short break. We'll be right back. And we are back. So thinking in practical terms, what are some of the best resources that you found and you would recommend to parents trying to talk to their kids about this stuff, to parents trying to educate themselves,

to people who don't have kids trying to educate themselves. What are some of the resources you found that you feel like are the most helpful around this? One of the things when I was talking about in my TED Talk was that Rosa Parks, contrary to all of these prevailing myths about her, actually wrote an autobiography dispelling the very myths that were not only alive after she passed on, but were very much alive while she was alive, right? And that's why she wrote the autobiography. It's called Rosa Parks, My Story. So what I would employ parents to do is to start doing their own homework because there's a lot of resources out there that, you know, help to like demystify some of these things about the civil rights movement,

their children books about the civil rights movement, children's books about Rosa Parks, and many, you know, many other figures that oftentimes either don't get taught in school or get taught in a way that is actually twisted and misinformed. It feels like a big piece, too, that can shift things a little bit is rather than having someone else digest the information for you to look for the primary source, right? To hear Rosa Parks in her own words rather than read the book that someone else wrote about her. Yes, read Martin Luther King's letter to a Birmingham jail, but also read the letter from the white clergy that he was responding to.

Right. All of that is a simple Google click away. Right. And I, when I teach it, I try and teach both so that students can see, because, you know, you have a bunch of white clergy, you know, you have, you know, rabbis and you have Catholic priests and you have Protestant ministers of white clergy you know you have you know rabbis and you have catholic priests and you have protestant ministers who will all get together and say look martin luther king we we believe in your movement we believe all the things you're saying but we just think that if you

will just you know give it time right and let the let the system work itself out martin luther king was like when has that ever moved the needle on any type of issues of social justice? And so it's important to try to like put things in conversation. And it's important to do that work on your own. It's about like, if I don't know about how to treat you fairly,

then that's not on me, that's on you. And that's the mindset I want us to kind of move away from and to start taking ownership of educating ourselves and not putting the onus on the people who are marginalized to also do the work of teaching people how not to oppress them. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I'm hearing a couple of, I think, really important pieces here, right? One is like, listen to people in their own words. The other is be curious about what you don't know.

Be curious about yourself. And then the third one I love, which I've actually never heard someone say in these terms before, but it's like, hey, Google it. Like, you don't need to ask someone. It's out there. They've written books. There are podcasts.

There are movies. Yeah, it's out there. You can find the answer yourself. Oh, it's out there. One can find the answer yourself. Oh, it's out there. One of the things that I'm curious about is I sometimes find myself under that rock of like, what rock have I been living under? How do I not know this stuff? Right.

And, you know, there's the research to be done. Right. And there's the books to be read and there's the primary sources to listen to. Sometimes I think it can be a challenge. And I wonder if this happens to you, too, to know what questions to ask yourself. So I wonder, like when you encounter a historical story or depiction of a historical event for the first time, what do you ask yourself? What are the kind of ways in which you approach a new story? Well, I mean, that I mean, one of the things I try to I'm also someone that studies and writes about black feminism.

Yes. And so a wonderful book about this. Yeah. And so I have I cannot tell you how many times I have stuck my foot all the way up in my mouth. Oh, I I study this. I know this and whatever. And got around some black feminist scholars and, you know, spouted off thinking I knew what I was talking about and just found myself sitting down being quiet and feeling very, very dumb, but also recognizing that I had more work to do and that there's always this slippage that even when you get educated, you start believing your own, drinking your own Kool-Aid. And true social transformation requires a level of humility by those that are in need of education. And so there's always these points in which you

think, oh, I've arrived at a certain kind of thing, but you can never get to the point where you're not actually listening to those people who have that lived experience, that embodied experience, who have to live in that skin every single day and are going to have a unique purchase, a unique insight that you will never attain regardless of how much you read, how many podcasts you listen to. And so sometimes, you know, the best move is to just listen and try to absorb. And again, I think when you use your platforms and you use your energy and you use your leverage to bring attention to that, which I think a show like this is absolutely trying to do,

then that's a different type of labor than someone who is lazy and they basically want you to give them the answers without having to do any work, right? I think there's a fundamental difference in that and kind of what we're doing in terms of creating an opportunity for there to be real conversation in education. Yeah, I think it's a very important idea that none of us are above criticism or above improvement. It actually makes me think in a way that is kind of a little to the side, but I think is a relevant example is right.

As a writer, sometimes I send my writing out to people who are friends to get feedback. And you think that what you want is someone who says, this is great and that's perfect. But I have a few friends where when I send my writing to them, they say, oh, wow, I love this. And I stopped sending it to them because that's not helpful. Right. What you want is the friend who doesn't say it's all bad or all good. They say, here's the ways you can make this writing better. Yes. And I think the more that we see ourselves and, you know, I say this as a white person who I think we, especially as white people, need to view ourselves this way as like, it's not you're good or you're bad.

It's like you can be improved and you need to keep working to do the improvement. That seems like a very big shift that a lot of us need to make. And for myself, too. Yeah, I think, you know, you see this in parenting, right? I think- Yes. I want to talk about the way you parent your children, because I feel like that's a big piece of this. I mean, I think the best parents that I experience are the ones who constantly worry about being bad parents, right? Yes. You know, you see these incredible parents that are doing all this work and they're

listening to their children and they're trying to the children and are trying to engage your kids and are pushing their kids. And, you know, you go say, John, you know, you see this, you know, great father. You're like, dude, how are you doing? Man, I don't know, man. I hope I don't screw up my kids because I, you know, fusted little Johnny the other day for like not washing the dishes. And, you know, I doubt it. But that that the reason why that's so hard is that requires vulnerability in our minds. We've been taught that we're we're the parents, we're the authority figure. So if we show inconsistency or weakness, then we're going to lose the respect, the authority, respect with our children. When, in fact, what we're actually doing is modeling for them how to behave, how to be humble, how to make mistakes.

So when they go out in the world and they make a mistake, they're going to be able to come back to us and say, yo, dad, I did this and I'm ashamed of it. They're not going to be like, I'm not going to tell my dad. He never makes mistakes. And if he finds out that I flunked calculus or I skipped school or whatever, I mean, he's going to think I'm the worst person in the world. I've never thought about the concept of intellectual vulnerability before, but it feels like that's at the core of a lot of what we're talking about, the humility there. Look, so long as you recognize that the path to the intellectual understanding is about like revision. I know this now, but then I've learned something else. So now I have to revise what I thought I knew, have to revise the questions and the assumptions because now I've

learned something new and that now changes everything. So long as you stay humble to the information and you stop and you don't get the point where like, well, I invented critical race theory and therefore you can never bow down to me. So long as you remain thirsty and humble and you're always understanding that what you have say today is subject to revision, then you're actually doing real good scholarship. The moment you feel that somehow you have arrived and that everybody needs to listen to everything that you have to say or they're just uninformed, then that's when you're starting to become full of yourself and you stop being useful. What are the ways that we can shape the way that historical narratives are recorded? I'm thinking about recording family histories, writing memoirs, constructing genealogies. What are the pieces that are most useful for people to do when they're thinking about adding their own voices to history?

Well, first and foremost, I will say, based on what we know about African American history and how that history was literally kept alive by a handful of people, and how we've seen one or two people have seismic ability to change historical narrative through roads, parts of the world, for example, it means that there is no type of social historically ratio that is insurmountable, that you can, despite the way it may look, that your history or your perspective will be forever lost. Your voice does matter. Agitation does matter. Pushing back does matter. So I think what I would emphasize more so than the do this or do that is understand that whatever you do, you're not wasting your time. Jordan and Hurston, their eyes were watching God had gone out of print

in like the 1950s, about the 1960s out of print. And a group of Black feminist scholars got a hold of an old copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God. And because it was out of print, they literally had to photocopy the whole novel and spread it to the, and give it to the class in order to teach it and put it on their syllabus. Now, Their Eyes Were Watching God is considered one of the most important

American novels in American letters. Right. And those handful of women. Right. Along with Alice Walker, who wrote that very important piece on on Jordan Hurston, have now brought her back into view and put her in her rightful place at the top of the heap of American letters. And it was literally done by a handful of women who just would not let her legacy die. Right. So it's just a constant reminder that like it matters. Whatever you do, however you try to recover that, however you, whether you're writing poetry or writing your own personal history, whether you put it on Twitter, whether you put it on Facebook or Instagram,

it matters. Never give up. Always push. Always have you, you know, push for your voice to be heard. Well, I feel like I could genuinely talk to you for six more days rather than just six more minutes. But what is one idea? It could be a book, movie, piece of music, play, anything. What's one thing that has made you a better human? My children. I think it's one thing to kid yourself that you're the greatest scholar, blah, blah, blah, because you get accolades from your student

or you get accolades from your profession and you get tenure and you get, you know, these positions and everybody tells you you're great, but your, your children know you, they know you when the lights dim and when you're at home and you're in your real, you know, your real light. And I think my kids hold me accountable. They, they, they, my kids hold me accountable. They hold me to the things that I say that I am. And it's a humbling experience that makes all the stuff that we do worthwhile.

And it keeps you sharp. It keeps you hungry. And you know that it's important for you to be a good human being because there are human beings that you have had a hand in creating that are looking at you as a role model.

And I take that absolutely, crucially seriously. Well, Professor David Eckhart, thank you so much. It has been an absolute pleasure. You've given so much to think about, and I hope that people will read your books and dive even deeper into your work. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human.

Thank you so much for listening and thank you to our guest, Dr. David Eichert. On the TED side, How to Be a Better Human is brought to you by Abhimanyu Das, Daniela Balarezo, Frederica Elizabeth Yosefov, Ann Powers, and Karen Newman. From PRX Productions, our show is brought to you by Jocelyn Gonzalez, Pedro Rafael Rosado, and Sandra Lopez-Monsalve. We will be back with another episode next week, but in the meantime, please share our show with someone who you think would enjoy it. And thank you again for listening. Have a great week. Thank you.