The Daily Stoic - Author Clint Smith and the History We Decide to See

Episode Date: July 31, 2021

On today’s episode of the podcast, Ryan talks to author and poet Clint Smith about his new book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery, the struggle to remove confederate monuments throughout the Southern United States, how to make sense of the absurd lies that have been generationally passed down since slavery was abolished, and more.Clint Smith III is an American writer, poet and scholar. He is the author of Counting Descent, a 2017 poetry collection, and How the Word Is Passed which topped The New York Times Best Seller list in June 2021. Smith received a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.Other books mentioned on the show: Indian Givers: How Native Americans Transformed the WorldReach out to the Texas Historical Commission to help in the fight to remove the Confederate monument in Bastrop, Texas: thc.texas.gov/contact or email [e-mail] to the Lockhart Texas Confederate removal campaign: https://www.gofundme.com/f/remove-the-confederate-monument-in-lockhart-txThere’s only 1 day left to sign up for The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge! It will be a masterclass in leadership with the cadence and rigor of a boot camp. It is also a live course, which means all participants will join the course together and move through together at the same pace to their own version of the same goal—to be a great leader. Registration is now officially open over at dailystoic.com/leadershipchallenge. Registration will close TONIGHT, July 31st at midnight CST.LMNT is the maker of electrolyte drink mixes that help you stay active at home, work, the gym, or anywhere else. Electrolytes are a key part of a happy, healthy body. As a listener of this show, you can receive a free LMNT Sample Pack for only $5 for shipping. To claim this exclusive deal you must go to drinkLMNT.com/dailystoic. If you don’t love it, they will refund your $5 no questions asked.Beekeeper’s Naturals is the company that’s reinventing your medicine with clean, effective products that actually work. Beekeepers Naturals has great products like Propolis Spray and B.LXR. Visit beekeepersnaturals.com/STOIC or enter code “STOIC” to get 20% off your first order.Ladder makes the process of getting life insurance quick and easy. To apply, you only need a phone or laptop and a few minutes of time. Ladder’s algorithms work quickly and you’ll find out almost immediately if you’re approved. Go to ladderlife.com/stoic to see if you’re instantly approved today.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Clint Smith: Homepage, Instagram, Twitter, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal and most importantly to prepare for what the week

ahead may bring. There is only one more day to sign up for the Daily Stoke Leadership Challenge. I'm so excited. We've got a huge group of people who are lined up and ready to take this challenge with us. We're going to be talking to GMs of one of the great sports dynasties in American history. We're going to be talking to some military leaders, business leaders, entrepreneurs, people who have made it their business to study these questions of leadership. Each day you get an email from me, it's 63 emails, more than 30,000 words of all new content

that helps you take the right steps along that week's path. There's going to be three leadership Q&As with me. Again, a live office hours video session with me. Ancient wisdom for the modern leader, it's going to be a masterclass in leadership with the cadence and rigor of a bootcamp. It's also a live course which means all the participants will join the course together. We're going to move through it together with the same goal. I'm so excited about the material we've put together for you. There is seriously just one more day at midnight central time challenge closes. You can't sign up after that. And then we're all going to be in

this awesome cohort for the next nine weeks. I hope to see you there. Sign up now. Talk soon. Hey, this is Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. As you know, I've taken COVID pretty seriously, got two young kids, camp you've vaccinated, also because I can't work from home. And I felt like my sort of obligation, again, per the stoic idea of the common good was to do everything I could to not contribute to being a part of the problem. So I haven't been in front of an audience. I haven't given a talk.

I haven't gotten to go out and do what I normally do and go in on 18 months. But I did speak in front of an audience on Monday. Not a huge audience, it was about maybe 30 people. And it was about something I mentioned here on the podcast before. There is a Confederate statue about two blocks from my office here in Bastery, Texas and my bookstore, which is downstairs.

And in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder last year, finally, some momentum gathered around removing this statue, which not only should not be there, should never have been put up in the first place, even though the Civil War happened in the 1860s, the statute goes up in something like 1910, its political implications were pretty clear. And so I donated the first $10,000 to remove it. And I've been using my platform to talk about it. We raised collectively about $50,000. We pressured the city council to agree to move it.

And always going well until suddenly, the Texas Historical Commission stepped in and attempted to slow or stop the whole thing. So I went down, there was an open hearing and I went down and I talked about it and I'm gonna run my short three minute comment here for you to listen to. My name's Ryan Holiday, I'm an author, I have a small bookstore and a bath shop about two blocks from the Confederate monument in front of the County Courthouse. I also have two young children,

and I was excited to tell them that this was an example that the system working, the community rallying around and injustice and response to an injustice. We talked to our local representatives, felt like we were making progress. This was going to be removed. And then, so here we are, a year later, and there hasn't been any progress.

And when I think about the obstacles that have come up between us and the removal of the statue, I sort of stop and think, what are we talking about here? And we're talking about a monument that honors the worst thing that Americans have ever done to each other. And this specifically was a statue that went up in in 1910. I got to know Richard Overton here in Austin before he died. He was a black man, he's actually cornered in Bastard County. He was born before the statue went up to give you a sense of its actual historical recency. There were people alive until two years ago that pre-date this statute. And this is a monument to the Confederacy, the people who attempted to tear this nation apart

for the sole purpose of extending and perpetuating slavery. And this monument sits in a county that a lot of people don't know, actually voted against succession, voted against succession. And you know, this wasn't a statue put up by grieving widows or orphans. This was a statue put up three generations later. A newspaper article at the time it went up said that this was a monument celebrating

the great white-sold south, right? It was a giant middle finger to the citizens who were attempting to assert their equal rights under the Constitution under the pledge that we just, we just write together. It was not an attempt to celebrate history, but to hijack history, it's based on a lie. So I beg the historical commission to do the right thing, to help move along moving this statue, show the people that the system works. That when we come together and we talk, we actually can solve things.

We want people to be peaceful. We want them to follow the law. We want them to work together. We did that. But that's not put unnecessary obstacles between them and doing the right thing. No role famously said that you can judge a society by the statues that it puts up. I think you can also judge a society by the statues that it leaves out, that it pays public

money to maintain. And this is one of those. So please do the right thing on America and please write this from by moving the statue. Thank you. If you want to reach out to the Texas Historical Commission, I would appreciate you doing this. And not only is there one in fast drop that they're trying to remove, there is also one I got reached out to afterwards by some folks in Lockhart, Texas, which is the barbecue capital of the world.

They are raising, they need to raise about $15,000 more dollars to remove this one. If to do it by September, you can check out the GoFundMe campaign. Just search GoFundMe, remove the Confederate monument in Lockhart, Texas. There'll be a link in the show notes as well. But if you want to donate, that would be much appreciated.

I think obviously all these things should go for the reasons that I'm talking about. If you want to contact the Texas Historical Commission, you can go to THC.Texas.gov slash contact, or you can just email THC at THC.Texas.gov, tell them that you think this monument should go. I would appreciate that. And I think it does make a difference. I think people wanna be able to sort of do this in a vacuum. They wanna be able to pretend like the implications

of consequences of it aren't real, that it's just another sort of item of business, but that's not the case. As my episode today with a wonderful poet and author, Clint Smith details his book, How the Word is Past, a reckoning with the history of slavery across America, was an instant number one New York Times best seller. It is basically a travel memoir slash historical narrative through some of the most controversial and provocative and I'd say indefensible monuments or landmarks in American history. It starts out in New Orleans. It ends all the way at a slave market in history. It starts out in New Orleans. It ends all the way at a slave market in Africa.

He stops in at a Confederate cemetery. Some of the most fascinating writing that he does is about the Angola prison, a former plantation turned maximum security prison in Louisiana. When I read a piece that Clint wrote for the Atlantic, I immediately reached out, got the book. I was so excited to talk to him. He is a great writer. This is a great book.

You absolutely should read it. And I really enjoyed my conversation with him. And I'm excited to bring it to you. Check out his book, How the Word Is Past, Reckoning with the History of Slavery in America. And you can follow Clint on Instagram as well. He is at Clint Smith III, so that's Clint Smith II. Great writer, great dude.

I think you're going to like this conversation. And I encourage all of you to wrestle with history, whether you live in America, whether you live in wherever you live, whatever political affiliation you have, history is supposed to make you uncomfortable. It's supposed to challenge you. It's good that it does. That's how we grow. You can check out the book, Amazon, Anywhere Books or Sold. I'm going to start carrying it in the painted porch, so I am going to include that link in the show notes as well. And then we also talk about Jack Weatherford's book, Indian Givers, which I also enjoyed. I put in the reading list email this month,

and we're carrying in the store and people really love as well. So check out how the word has passed. Check out Indian Givers. And we also talk about Wright Thompson's incredible piece in the Atlantic about Emmett Till, all definitely worth your time. Thanks to Clint, enjoy this episode.

One of the things the pandemic has revealed to me or helped me understand history, and I think it connects to the idea in the book, but curious what you think. It was illustrative to me, we're looking at, basically, let's say it's like 20, 25% of the population is vaccine hesitant.

The vast majority of people have taken the pandemic very seriously, sacrificed in immense amount, put others well being in health above their own. And then there's clearly a percentage of the population for whom that is not just extraordinarily difficult, but sort of anathema to like whoever they are as people. It made me think looking back historically that, you know, we often look back and say the 1950s, or we look back the 1850s, or 2000 years ago, we get this sense that like everybody was on the same page, and it sort of made me realize, like, oh, actually, a small percentage of the population

can hold the rest of the country or the nation or humanity hostage and do incredible damage and sort of define everything to everyone going forward. But at the time, we're actually not much more than a faction. I mean, the South is a great example of this. Not only did not the majority of the country want to tear the Union apart to preserve slavery, but not even only a slim majority, even of the South wanted to do it. Do you know what I mean?

That the way that a faction can just grab hold of the machinery of government or culture and take it to an incredibly dark, screwed up place. Yeah, it doesn't take many. And I think it's interesting because it goes both ways in some ways, right? Where it is not the case necessarily that the vast, vast, vast majority of southerners were saying, we want to succeed from the union, we don't want to be part of the United States. We want to fight a war against these states in the north.

That is not the case. But at the same time, what is also the case on the other end is that, you know, not everybody in the north was an abolitionist, right? Very few, the actual percentage of people who thought of themselves as abolitionists was pretty small, right? And I think that, you know, even the notions of like what constitutes as abolition

in our sort of collective public consciousness today is like a very limited and sort of my opic conception of what an abolitionist was, in a sense that like I was taught that abolitionists were these people who were the opposite of the slaveholders. They were the people who worked on the Underground Railroad and fought for the emancipation of millions of enslaved people and wanted, you know, wanted all enslaved people not only to be free, but to have the same rights as they did if they were white abolitionists.

And you later learned that history is a lot more complicated than that, and that it is not that every abolitionist wanted to believe that enslaved people, formerly enslaved people, should have equal rights. It is actually that there's a wide school of abolitionists thought in which some people thought slavery was wrong, but we should send them after they're free to Haiti or Liberia or South America or you had people who believe that slavery was wrong

and black people should have equal rights, right? You have somebody like that, is Steven to believe in the sort of egalitarian in the equality of the races. And then you had somebody like Abraham Lincoln, honestly, for so much of his life who believed that slavery was wrong, but that black people weren't necessarily equipped

or in a position to continue to live in the United States after slavery ended. All of that is to say, I think, you know, sometimes we like looking at history and sort of these overgeneralized binaries with these clean demarcations that actually are not as clean as people would like them to be. Yeah, it's been interesting watching Texas and Florida and California during the pandemic. So they're both sort of finger pointing each other, like this is the Republican response,

is the Democrat response, and using the successor failures of the respective states as somehow like sort of proof that they're right or wrong. It's like people like California is a liberal state and look how many sort of COVID cases in deaths they have and it's like, yeah, like 60% of California is liberal which is a lot, but 40% of California is also a lot. Just as, you know, Texas is red state

and Florida is a red state, but there's also millions and millions and millions of people in those states that took the pandemic very seriously, even if their local governments did not. Right? So it's like, I think when you look at the Civil War or you look at an issue like slavery, it didn't neatly sort of travel along the Mason-Dixon line. There were sort of people all over the spectrum of different beliefs.

And then there was, as Lincoln says, I think in his first inaugural address, there was this percentage of the population that would rather destroy the union than maintain it. And I think that something we're wrestling with today, like generally, let's say the majority of us are on one page, that's great, but if a small minority is hell bent on getting its way or no way, and they care a lot more than you do, you are kind of at the mercy of that faction. Yeah, I mean, I think that there is throughout history,

always been something to say about people who are the loudest. And that doesn't mean that they are necessarily the majority. And kind of looting to what we were talking to, was speaking to before, is like, in some ways it goes both ways, right? Like there are people who are loud and wrong and disproportionately because of how loud

and predominant they seem, disproportionately impact the way public policy is made. But then, when it's done well, there are also people who are allowed and make thoughtful and progressive political change when they are not necessarily not reflective of the majority, not necessarily, not reflective of the majority, but that the people engaging in the sort of on the ground advocacy, so to speak, are not necessarily reflective, or let's not say reflective, but it is not that the majority of people are doing it,

which is, so let me give a concrete example. So the civil rights movement, I think we tend to look back at the civil rights movement and we assume because of the way that it's taught that like everybody was in the street, right? That like, you know, it just millions and millions of black people, millions and millions and millions of white people. But in terms of like the breakdown of how many people were directly engaged in a lot of the civil rights movement work and work for the Black freedom struggle,

it wasn't millions and millions of people. Because the reality is that many people are just living their lives because they have to go to, they have jobs and they have to pay the bills and they have to feed their kids. And so sometimes when we look back at history, we can have a distorted sense that the thing that gets the most historical attention was something that an enormous amount of people were directly engaged in at the time, but that's not necessarily always the case, you know, because throughout history, most people have just been, people trying to live their life outside of the sort of context of the greatest political struggles of the day. Yeah, I think it's because when we look back at history, we want to identify with the people

who did the right thing, who put themselves out there, who acted with courage, even though statistically, that's quite unlikely. I was writing about this recently, like the French resistance. How many people in France do you think participated in the French resistance against the Nazi occupation? 20%, 30%, it was like 4% You know, and and and that's like that's such everyone was a coward, but we always have our reasons, right? We always have our reasons why we can't get involved.

And in a way that makes the, the civil rights, it's almost strange that we tell ourselves that lie, because it undermines how truly impressive something like the civil rights movement actually was that the people who did it risked everything and they probably told themselves, hey, I'm gonna put myself out there and pretty soon, you know, there'll be millions of people behind me, but they really actually did stand alone for a very long time and then a lot of the leader of it was killed for that. It's only, you know, I was thinking about your book and monuments.

It's someone just reminded me that like, we're about to celebrate. I think the 10th, is it that, it's either the 10th or the 20th year anniversary of the Martin Luther King monument in Washington. That didn't like go up like right after he died. Like that went up like recently recently. They just finished it. That's how long one might be in standing alone. Yeah, no. It's interesting because on the other end, the story of the monuments

of so many of the Confederate monuments that we are having these conversations about now. In many ways, those didn't go up, I think for a different reason, until, you know, some of them, these were not monuments that went up right after the end of the Civil War. No. They went up in the early 20th century, in the mid-20th century around the Civil Rights Movement. And then some of them, I think about the bust of Nathan Bedford-Forest, and that was just removed from the capital of Tennessee. And that was put up in 1978. And Lincoln Bedford-Forest, he was a leader,

a general in the Confederate army. I mean, he's a psychopath, like Anne. The first grazer of the KKK. I mean, this's a psychopath, like Anne. The first grand wizard of the KKK. I mean, like this is the absurdity of it, right? That we put a bust of the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the capital of any state. 40 years ago. 40 years ago, almost 1980, you know,

and but part of what it reflects is that those the people who were putting that up know that that person personified, the sort of personified white supremacy and what it stood for, at its most abhorrent form. And I think these monuments and these busts and its iconography are put up with the specific intention

to send a message about what is valued and what is not, who is valued and who is not, what history is going to shape our public policy and what history is going to be pushed aside. No, and that's why I liked your book so much. I was actually on Monday, I spoke in front of the Texas Historical Commission. I'm part of this little group that's trying to get this Confederate monument moved off the lawn of the courthouse down the street from my office here in Basque, Texas.

And as I was explaining in front of the commission, to go to what we were just talking about, this county actually voted against the session, but somehow in 1910, somebody decided, we needed a Confederate monument. And one of the things that struck me sort of looking in, like, sort of I'm down on the floor and I'm looking up that there's sort of three rows

of these commissioners and they're to a rule, like almost all old white guys. No offense, I guess, eventually I'll be an old white guy, but it wasn't the most representative panel. But what struck me as I was sort of explain, I was, and I'm going to run the comments at the beginning of this episode, So people have already heard them. But what I was trying to say is like, this is a monument to the worst thing that Americans have ever done to each other, right? Not just slavery, which was horrendous. But then we decided we couldn't agree that it was horrendous.

So let's murder each other for five years to settle. You know, who gets to decide that question? What struck me the most, or what I was trying to express is like, like, why the fuck do you guys care about this so much? Like why, why, like, you didn't put it up? Your grandparents didn't even put it up. Like why do you care about this so much? Like what what possesses a person in 1978 to put up a monument

to like not just like a bad guy but one of the worst Americans who ever lived, I can't answer that question. I feel like your book was a journey to try to explain that, but do you have any insight as to why people care so much? Like couldn't they just not care? And like couldn't they just, it's already, like I guess what I'm saying is like, it's what are you getting out of Inserting yourself into like why are you throwing yourself in front of this monument?

Like I remember at one of the protests about the monument. I Get that there's people who don't care right there like I got better things to do It's been there for a while But there was a group of of guys that had gotten up at like six in the morning and set up lawn chairs to protect the monument, like a human shield. And it just struck me like, why do you care so much? What would possess a person to do that? Yeah, no, this is, you know, this is like one of the questions that not only the book is is wrestling with, but I think that that we've been wrestling with as a country for

the book is wrestling with, but I think that we've been wrestling with as a country for a long time and certainly over the course of the past year. So one of the places I go in the book is the Blanford Cemetery. Blanford Cemetery is one of the larger confederate cemeteries in the country. I went there for the Suns confederate veterans Memorial Day celebration. And it was, you know, I was a very conspicuous presence at this event as a black man. And, but I went because I wanted to, I genuinely wanted to understand how someone comes to believe so many things that are very clearly,

leave so many things that are very clearly empirically false, historically inaccurate and mythologized, right? Like how do you come to believe that slavery was not a central cause of the Civil War when all you have to do is look at the declarations of Confederate succession in 1861, where the states are largely saying it for themselves, where a state like Mississippi says, our position is thoroughly aligned with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest in the world. They said the quiet part out loud. Yeah, they were not vague about why they're succeeding from the Union and why this world

would be fought. You know, Alexander Stevens, the vice president of the Confederacy, said in his cornerstone speech, this infamous speech, he said at the beginning of the Confederacy, said in his cornerstone speech, this infamous speech he said at the beginning of the conflict, where he was like, slavery is the reason for this great war that we are fighting. Like, you know, it's so direct that the idea that someone would say that that

is somehow irrelevant to a conflict that ended up taking the lives of 700,000 soldiers on both sides is absurd. And yet, something that many people believe and part of what I came to realize was that, for many people, history is not about empirical evidence or primary source documents or historical fact. It is a story they've been told,

and it is a story that they tell. It is an heirloom that is passed down across generations through family, through lineage, through community. And, you know, I think about a guy I met named Jeff, who's one of the sons of Confederate veterans, and he would tell me about how he and his grandfather would sit in the gazebo at the center of the cemetery

when he was a child, and they would sit in the gazebo at the center of the cemetery when he was a child. And they would sit there at dusk and they would watch the deers, just follow them through the tombstones and chew on grass around all of these confederate flags that waved in the air. And how his grandfather would sing him songs, they would sing Dixie.

He would tell him stories about all the brave men who were buried in the cemetery who fought in the war of Northern Aggression who fought against the Yankees who were attempting to indoctrinate southerners with their way of life and impose Notions, customs and culture on them that was a threat to who they were culturally, but also a threat to an existential threat to their sense of self. And now that is a story that Jeff tells his granddaughters, and he brings them to the same serenterian, they sit in the same gazebo, and he tells this story, even though this story is not true. It's a lot. And so the thing is, if Jeff were to accept what we just talked about, right? If you know, if you were to present Jeff with the Declaration of Confederation's or Alexander Stevens cornerstone speech, or the written in amendments before the war that was intended, you know, a set of amendments that were largely attempted to assuage

Southern slaveholders and say, okay, if you don't secede, we'll put some amendments in that make it so that your enslaved property can never be taken away from you. It failed, thankfully, because the Republicans of the day were like, this is absurd, but it is another example of how slavery was the central cause and the catalyst to the Civil War. But the thing is, if Jeff is to accept that, then he would have to accept that his grandfather is a liar. And if he is to accept that his grandfather is a liar, it threatens to disintegrate so much of the foundation upon which he believed

their relationships stood on. And if he, and if that sense of his relationship to this person who he loves, who helped raise him, who was so central to his life, if that disintegrates, and if he realizes that so much of it was based on lies, then it becomes an existential crisis for Jeff, because so much of who he believes himself to be in the world, is for Jeff because so much of who he believes himself to be in the world is tied to a person who told him stories that helped animate and shape how he moved and understood himself in relationship to the world and in relationship to American history. And it would he would struggle to under give a sense of who he who he is, which isn't to say that that is an excuse at all. Because there are plenty of people who have ancestors who fought in the Confederate army.

I went to Blanford with a friend in the book who was doing his own sort of reckoning. A white friend who's realized that his ancestors had been slaveholders and that his ancestors fought in the Confederate army and and he was going to Blanford to do a sort of reckoning of his own and he is not he's not a son of Confederate veterans he is not a Confederate sympathizer he is not a neo-confeder he's somebody who's like man you know my this is a part of my family history and my family fought in a war over something that is deeply shameful and like and I think it is possible to do that, but it is hard for many people to do

because it threatens to call into question so much of who they believe themselves to be. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday,

parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking.

Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen ad-free on the Amazon music or Wondery app. Yeah, I think at the root of this, the tricky thing is identity, right? And there's a great expression, the idea of keeping your identity small. The more you identify with, basically, the stupider you are because it constrains you, it limits you. And I definitely get the idea, like, hey, my grandfather told me this story. I don't want to think that he's a liar.

The problem is identifying, right? Like, and this is something I said in my comments of the thing. I was like, look, my great-grandfather and my mother's side. And I only kind of found this out somewhat recently. For reasons, I think people understand. We try not to talk about things that are unpleasant. But I always knew my grandmother and immigrated here from Germany in the 1950s.

And it only occurred to me as I got older, like, oh, you know, how, what did your parents do, right? My great grandfather fought on the wrong side in the Second World War. My dad's father fought on the right side, but my great grandfather fought for the Germans. He was drafted like a lot of Southern soldiers. But you know, that was a very long time ago, is a horrible thing,

but does it say anything about me as a horrible thing, but it doesn't say anything about me as a person, right? I didn't benefit from this in any way. In fact, it so destroyed my family's country that they had to come here in the first place. But I think the trouble is when you find yourself identifying with these figures in the past, instead of trying to learn from them or grow from them, you know what I mean? Like it, instead of trying to learn from them or grow from them. You know what I mean? Like, it doesn't say anything about me that my great-grandfather did a bad thing.

It would say something about me if 70 years after he did a bad thing, I tried to put up a statue in his honor to celebrate in Whitewash's accomplishments. And that's what's so interesting about this war stuff, is it wasn't the grieving widows and orphans that did it. It was like two generations later for a very nefarious purpose and an almost inexcusable, even less excusable purpose, which was to actively re-disenfranchise a whole group of people.

It was basically, we were talking about people seizing government and using it against another group of people. It was basically to say, we don't give a shit what's in the 13th, 14th, 15th amendments. That don't go around here. That's what these monuments are really about. Yeah, I mean, then what we see is that to your point is that these monuments are going up in every moment where there is some potential opportunity for black mobility, right? Like we see it at the beginning of the 20th century when black people, at the beginning of the Great Migration, when Black people are moving

from the South to urban cities like Chicago, Detroit, New York, and even out West, like Los Angeles, and after World War II, you have many of the white soldiers who came back from, or excuse me, after World War I. You have many of the white soldiers who came back from our, excuse me, after World War I. You have many of the white soldiers who came back and realized that many of their jobs had been taken by black people who had come from the South up to the North and were working in many of these factories, working in many of these places. And they hated it.

They hated that the demographic makeup of these cities was changing so quickly. They hated that these men were taking their jobs. And then Black veterans similarly came back after World War I, over almost 350,000 of them. And we're like, we just fought a war for this country. And we're not going to come back and be subjected to second-class citizenship when we just risked our lives to defend the promise of this nation. And so you had this cataclysmic thing happening. And what happened is that more black people

were like, we're not gonna just be subjected to this incestent racism anymore. And then more white people were like, you're not gonna intrude upon like physically our property and our neighborhoods, but also socially, like, our sense of where we are in the American hierarchy. And it just had this, you know, enormous sort of cataclysmic effect. There was a huge sort of conflagration. We see the riots of 1919, the uprisings of 1919, throughout the country. And then around the same time, you see all these monuments go up because a lot of

white people throughout the country are very intentionally trying to send a signal to Black Americans about what is valued in this country and what this country stands for and who it is for and what better way, I guess in their mind, to do that, then to put up monuments to people who fought a war that was predicated on maintaining and expanding the worst manifestation of white supremacy or the most extreme manifestation of white supremacy, which was slavery. It's interesting too. I visited a bunch of different civil war battlefields. At the time, we had a pretty good, like, first off, if you look at the official records from the Civil War, it's called the Civil War. It's called the War of Rebellion. When you look at, there's no Confederate veterans buried at Gettysburg.

I remember being at Vicksburg and looking at the cemetery and then realizing, oh, the Confederate cemetery is like over there. Because when they set this up, the people who had just won this battle at this horrible cost, they weren't like, you know, bury me next to my brothers from down south. They were, they saw these people as the perpetrators of not just the injustice of slavery as they came to understand the war, but also the injustice of treason and... There were traders. Right. And so it's so interesting to me that we had this sense then, but as we've gotten away from it, it's like the side with the

most guilt has obviously worked the hardest to mythologize and change and distort what happened. And I think we're already seeing this right with the events of January 6th. Most people who watched it on TV see it as exactly as it is. And then there's a small percentage, not super small, but a minority of people who have a vested political and emotional motivation for presenting it as something other than what it obviously was. As a historian, as a culture, how does a society battle that?

Like how, it's like, it goes back to your point. It's like, most people just wanna go back to their normal lives. And then you've got these people motivated by cognitive dissonance and malevolence and stupidity that want to spend a lot of time litigating an event and how it gets represented culturally. How does a society fight that? How do you prevent lost cause mythology from being rooted in the consciousness?

It strikes me that after the Civil War, there was a part of the North that just finally said, like, we don't want to talk about this anymore. You can tell yourself whatever you want. And that clearly in retrospect was an enormous mistake, a costly mistake. Right. Yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right to drop parallels between so much of what we see after the end of the Civil War

and what we saw in January 6th or now continue to see about January 6th. And I brought up Alexander Stevens and his cornerstone speech before in 1861. What's fascinating is that after the war, Alexander Stevens is writing his memoirs, he's being interviewed, and people are like, man, Alexander, you wrote this cornerstone speech in which you said the cornerstone,

the new nation was the inferiority of black people and that it was built on the premise that slavery should be perpetuated indefinitely. And this was the cause of the Civil War. Like, what do you have to say for yourself? And he's like, I never said that. And they're like, what are you talking about? You said it, we were there. It's in the newspaper.

We have a record of it. He's like, no, no, no. They must have misquoted me. Like, I never said anything like that. They must be twisting and misrepresenting my words. And this was like, this was what was happening with so many people who fought for the Confederacy. At the end of the Civil War, there was this sort of 19th century gaslighting that was happening where they were telling us that what we saw and heard over the course of four years and really over the course of

250 years was not actually What we saw or what we heard and and you see this with Jefferson Davis You see this with Alexander Stevens you see this with the entirety of the lost cause you see this with the entirety of the lost cause ideological project, which is that they are trying to make it so that people think that slavery was a benevolent institution. As the historian, Ulrich B. Phillips, talks about who was one of the leading historians, the early 20th century, talked about slavery as this thing that rescued black people from the savagery of Africa, gave them Christianity, gave them civilization, gave them structure in their lives,

talked about them in paternalistic ways, as if they were these sort of a children, a childlike who needed the protection and supervision of white people. Or as the John Hale-Hoon, you know, in the 19th century, the famous or the infamous senator from South Carolina said, Slth, slavery is a positive good for both black and white people alike. And most people don't realize that that is the predominant view that most people until the

mid-20th century in this country had of what slavery was because the lost cause propaganda effort was so successful. And to this day, a 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center study showed that only 8% of US high school seniors were able to identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War, like 8%. And I would hope that over the course of, given what's happened over the past few years

that that number would be higher. But we live in a country in which there has been an intentional systemic effort over the course of decades to prevent people from thinking holistically and honestly about what is created the conditions of the society that we live in today. And when you don't understand the history when you're not taught this history, and to your point about how can we come back, this sort of strange gas lighting and lost cars propaganda, part of what you have to do is proactively teach the sort of history that will not allow us to fall into the trap of thinking that the reason one

community looks one way and another community looks another way is somehow because of the people in those communities rather than what has been done to those communities generation after generation after generation after generation because once you acutely understand the contours of American history, you can look around and understand that the reason that this country looks the way that it does is because of a series of decision decisions that have designed our society to exist and manifest itself in this way. And this country can't lie to you anymore once you're equipped with that toolkit of information. And in the process of writing this book, like that is largely what I was going to doing for myself, it was four years of trying to accumulate knowledge, information, and a toolkit with which to more effectively understand this period of American history that I understood on a sort of surface level, but didn't actually understand in any way that was commensurate with the impact that it had on this country. Yeah, isn't that kind of the irony of the moral panic

about critical race theory? It's like, history shouldn't be a political tool. It's not propaganda. And it's like, what do you think you've been taught? What do you think has been taught for the last 150 years? It has been systematically used as a political tool to not, and not even effectively, right?

It was like the education system was hijacked, could cover up the crimes and to rationalize a thing for a bunch of people that were already dead. That's what's so baffling to me about it when you talk, like, because I'll get emails from people when I talk about this stuff, peopleaffling to me about it when you talk, like, because I'll get emails from people when I talk about this stuff. People will feel so intensely about it. And it's like, look, I have studied history deeply.

I've been to the same places that you've been in the book. I've written about the Civil War. I'm fascinated with all this stuff. It doesn't make me not like America. It just makes me see America as it actually was. And actually, I think the greatest civil rights leaders, I mean, what was so brilliant about Martin Luther King, for instance, was his ability to get, and Frederick Douglass as well,

is get to the core of what actually America was about, and to use those documents and that idea, and those ideals to show how morally hypocritical we are being and try to urge people towards those ideas. So I just don't get this idea that looking at the terrible things that happened in the past, somehow diminish our prospects for a brighter future on the exact contrary. You understand what happened so you can grow and learn from it and be made better.

And then also, ideally, make restitution or adjustments to compensate for the lingering consequences of those injustices. Absolutely. And I think that part of the reason we can't even have a real conversation about restitution and about reparations is because we're not all operating with the same sort of like epistemological set of information, right? We don't occupy the same reality. We don't. We occupy two fundamentally different, if we're just sort of generalized, like two different spheres of truth and knowledge.

And obviously that has been exacerbated by the nature of our current media ecosystem, which I think amplifies the worst impulses of so many people. But it's one of those things where it is not as if there are not examples of what a more proactive and honest reckoning could look like. Germany does this, you know? And one of the places that I go in the book to make the draw that comparison, I think about

Angola prison. And so Angola is one of the places I go. And it is the largest maximum obscurity prison in the country, 18,000 acres wide, bigger than the island of Manhattan. It is a place where 75% of the people held there, black men over 70% of them are serving life sentences, and it is built on top of a former plantation. It's basically an American gulag. And so what I tell people is that if you were to go to Germany and you had the largest maximum security prison in Germany, built on top of a former concentration camp

in which the people held there were disproportionately Jewish, that place would rightfully and so clearly be a global emblem of anti-accentive. Maybe like something doesn't smell right. That just doesn't make sense. It will be absurd. It will be abhorrent. We would never allow a place like that to exist because it would run counter to all of our moral and ethical sensibilities.

It would, it's disgusting to even think about it. And yet, here in the United States, we have the largest prison in the country where the vast majority of people are black men serving life sentences, many of whom were sentenced, as children, many of whom were sentenced by non-unanimous juries, which has been rendered unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States because it existed with the specific intention to continue to convict as many black people as possible, who are working in these fields of what was once a plantation for virtually no pay,

while someone watches over them on horseback with a gun over their shoulder. And so part of what I'm exploring are 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 structural and systemic violence that in another global context would so clearly be unacceptable. And the thing that the reason that that kind of thing doesn't happen in Germany is because

that country, not perfectly, but proactively, is engaged in a process of saying, we did this thing, the Holocaust. And it was done in our name. And it is one of the most shameful, horrific things that have ever been done in human history. And it was not that long ago. There are people who are still alive today who lived through what we did, who lost people. They loved because of what we did. Millions

and millions of people. And so there are monuments, there are museums, there are one of my favorite things is they have these things called stumbling stones, which are these sort of tens of thousands of these brass bricks almost that are sort of slightly elevated off the ground. And you know, you can't go into a Nike store or restaurant or a yoga studio without encountering one of these bricks that has the name of the person who used to live in that residence, whether it's still a residence or whether it's become a commercial property. It forces you to bump into the injustices of history. All over, right? You see the name, you see the date they were taken,

you see what happened to them. And so you are regularly encountering, in as part of the everyday landscape, these reminders of what was done. And so that infiltrates itself into the sensibilities and the public consciousness of people in that country that then informs how they make decisions about how to make amends for

what has happened historically and also how to move forward and create political decisions and public policy decisions in a domestic and global context that are set on not making that same mistake again or not falling into the same level of malevolence that was once central and defining to that nation. Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here and then we'll get right back to the show, stay tuned.

Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up.

Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes, or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together, they discuss their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty. So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how

I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery. And what I would add to that, I think that's what you just said is beautifully expressed and the analogy with Angle and a concentration gap. I hadn't quite thought of, it's very, very compelling. What I would add is, this isn't just about moral penance or like washing away blood guilt, although I actually think that is important

and should be done because a culture sort of weighed down by these things is flawed. But there's a self-interest to it too. I mean, first off, you could argue, part of the reason Germany goes down that path is because the United States at the point of a gun sort of forces what they called denociification that unfortunately we didn't quite do in the South after the Civil War. But I just read this fascinating book by Jack Weatherford called Indian Givers.

It's not a great title. It was actually written in the 80s. But basically, it's a look at all of the sort of things that we got from the Native Americans, who we also, you know, if you want to talk about a Holocaust, we perpetuated a Holocaust here in America against the Aboriginal people. And what he was talking about in the book is all these things. And it really hit me because I'm from California,

and I live in the South. But race is Native Americans is more of a part of the sort of cultural conversation and history in California than race is because it wasn't a slave state. And, you know, not really part of the Civil War, but, you know, I've had a bit, clearly had a bit of a blind spot as to the severity and the, the, the horrific tragedy of what we perpetuate against Native Americans. And reading this book, it was very eye opening and inspiring and interesting. And anyways, one of the things you concludes the book with,

and I encourage everyone to read it, is he's talking about, it's not just all the things we got from Native Americans that we should be grateful for, but he says, the cautionary tale is what our racism and our fear and our sort of insatiability took from us. You know, he talks about all these things that Native Americans discovered that they brought to us all these modern medicines

at the root of this and that ways of hunting, ecological preservation. And he's like, as the last of these people die out, they are taking with them knowledge and understanding in a way of living that is lost to us forever. And that's been happening. He said, for 500 years. I think that's the other tragedy of this sort of distorted dishonest history told ourselves is that it hasn't served anyone well.

It didn't serve obviously black people well, but the perpetuation of this screwed up system and this hatred, it hasn't served America well either. And I think that's the big thing. You should look at history and you should learn from it, not just so you don't do bad things, but also it is through the mixing of cultures and perspectives that you unlock incredible

power and collaboration and creativity. No, I think that's absolutely true. And I think all of us have to just move through the world with a level of humility and recognize that there's a lot we don't know. And that like the project of our lives in so many ways is to both learn and to unlearn so much of what we've been taught, part of what I loved and tried to model the book after was the sort of generosity and graciousness of so many the public historians and tour guides and docent's who I met, who are balancing who I met, who are balancing this sense of generosity while also holding a sense of responsibility and accountability, which is to say, you know, I think about the two women that I met in

Monticello when I went to Monticello plantation, which is, as many know, the home of Thomas Jefferson, one of our founding fathers and the third president of the United States. And I was on this tour, which is a focus specifically on the history of slavery among a cello. And these two women, Donna and Grace, were on the tour. And I was kind of watching them as we were on this tour by this guy named David Thorson, who in the course of 45 minutes to an hour, had really given a master class on the sort of contradictions and hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance of Thomas Jefferson.

And also centering the story of Manichello, not only on Jefferson, but on the hundreds of enslaved people who lived there. Because the thing about Jefferson is that, you know, he wrote one of the most important documents in the history of the Western world. He also enslaved over 600 people over the course of his lifetime, including four of his own children. He wrote in one document that all men had created equal and wrote in another document that

black people learned, failure to whites in both endowments and body, in endowments of body and mind as he put it. And so how, you know, when I went to Monticello, part of what I'm trying to get a sense of is like, how do you as an institution tell them honest and fuller, more robust, intellectually rigorous story about who Jefferson was and what he stood for. And so that's what David is doing. And Donna and Grace are sitting there and their mouths are kind of a gap and they're clearly unsettled and then go up to them after.

And I was like, you know, I'd love to hear about how you experienced, you know, what you just heard. And Donna was like, man, he really took the shine off the guy. And they're like, I had no idea Jefferson owns lace. I had no idea monetary plantation. These are people who bought plane tickets, who rented cars, who were self-proclaimed history buffs. Right? And they were, they came to this site as a sort of pilgrimage to see the home of the founding father, you know, of one of the, our first presidents, and had no idea that it was the home of somebody who enslaved hundreds of human beings. And that moment was such an important reminder to me that there are so many people across this country, just millions of people who don't understand the history of slavery in any way that is commensurate

and proportionate to the impact that it had and continues to have on this country, but the thing that people like David do is that they are holding, as I said, this sort of like, I'm going to, I recognize that millions of us across generations have been failed by our educations and have not been presented with information

that helps us more fully understand this part of American history. But at the same time, you have a responsibility now that you are encountering this information to hold it and to sit uncomfortably with it and to consider what it means and to put it in conversation with the story of America and of our founding fathers that you've been taught in order to recalibrate and reconceptualize how you understand what you understand the history of this country to be.

And part of what I wanted the book to do was hold that same level of both generosity and accountability, which is to say we can't run from this information, especially in the history of this country to be. And part of what I wanted the book to do was hold that same level of both generosity and accountability, which is to say, we can't run from this information, especially when it's right in front of us. But I also recognize that in the same way that I didn't know a lot of this stuff at the beginning, many of my readers might not have known a lot of this stuff. And that's OK as long as we are using this as an opportunity

to say, I didn't know, but now I do, and I also want to know more. Like if you've been to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. I've not. It's like one of the most moving sobering things you'll ever do in your life. Like you see where this family of eight people, these two families, eight people live in this, you know, tiny attic. And it brings home the reality of the Holocaust in a way that you can't comprehend in any other way.

And I think that's the other thing that's like, when you have this whitewashed, you know, dishonest view of history, yeah, sure, it might make your plantation to her, you know, dishonest view of history. Yeah, sure, it might make your plantation tour, you know, slightly less uncomfortable, and you can have your plantation wedding at one of these venues or something and not feel bad about it.

But it also deprives you and us of other transcendence, the wrong word, but deeply moving and transformative experiences. I was just reading that the National Park Service is taking over the forks of the road site in Natchez, Mississippi, and they're building a national park sort of monument to one of the most prolific slave markets in the United States. And I think that when you wrestle with history

and you're not afraid of inditing people again who are long since dead, what it gets you is opportunities for things like that. And it's funny as controversial as it is right now, you can imagine 10 years from now, 15 years from now, that place will have been visited by millions and millions of tourists who came and learned and experienced something. So it's so funny that we're resistant to questioning

and showing things in the slightest unfavorable light, but it's really ourselves and future generations who we are depriving by doing it. We're not protecting anyone. We're actually depriving them. Like, yeah, do you know what I mean? Yeah, no, it's a huge disservice. And part of what I hope that we are moving toward

And part of what I hope that we are moving toward is a sense that like for so long in the history of this country, we have deprived people from understanding the totality of this history, in ways that have incredibly detrimental impacts on all of our lives. And part of what has happened is that we have allowed these artificially created notions that are created with the specific intention of demarcating who has power and who doesn't to give us a distorted sense of who deserves certain things and who doesn't deserve other things or why certain communities look one way and why certain communities look another way.

But I think this is related, I think all the time about, and this I think really became clear for me in the book, you were talking about what happens across generations with this. And I think about people who, you know, clearly I think about the enslaved all the time. And what I think about, and especially now that Juneteenth is a federal holiday, I've been thinking about this a lot. But the idea that, you know, if we were to think about the first inflate people coming to the United States in 1619, or what would become the United States, the British colonies that would become the US in 1619 in Virginia. You know, black people were fighting for freedom in this country from the moment they arrived on these shores, which means that the vast majority of people who fought for freedom never got a chance to see it. But that also doesn't mean that what they fought for was for nothing, right?

Because what they did was create the space for the next generation to continue fighting. And then for the next generation and for the next generation, and ultimately a moment opened up in history that led to the emancipation of black people in this country and the abolition of one of the worst things and one of the worst institutions that this country has ever had. And that is only possible because of the millions and millions of people who fought their entire lives for something that they never got a chance to see themselves. And for me, that is what all of us are called to do, right?

That like my life is only possible because of generations of people who fought for something that they knew might never see but fought for it anyway. And so what responsibility does that give me to try to fight for and build for or build toward and write toward and create toward a better world that I might never see. That my children might never see, but that someday someone will, you know, like I think that that's a responsibility that we all carry. Yes, Seneca has a great line. He says we can't choose our parents, but we can choose whose children we would like to be. And to me, that's the choice that we have when we study history, right? It doesn't matter where you're born, what race you are, you know, you could have had a long

family tree you all fought for the Confederacy, but you can choose to be related to Frederick Douglas, like you can choose to be the heir to Frederick Douglass, or an abolitionist, or a freedom fighter of any kind. We get to choose, we're not chained to the past. The past happened, but we choose whether we are going to chain ourselves to it. And that's what I meant about this sort of analogy with my grandparents. Like, am I going to choose to be the descendant of my great-grandfather who fought for the Germans? Or am I going to choose to be the grandson

of my grandfather who landed at Normandy? Right. Am I going to choose? And then on that side of the family, he's from Michigan, moves to California, never experiences, has more of the American dream. My grandmother graduated from Little Rock High School before it was desegregated.

And who's tradition am I gonna follow in? Right, what torch am I gonna carry? And it's just so strange that we willingly choose to carry the bad torch. But a lot of people choose that. It's quite surreal. Or we choose, you know what, we choose not to think about it at all. Did you read, um, did you read Wright Thompson's piece in the Atlantic about Emmett Till? I did, yeah. Oh my God. What's, first off, beautiful piece, everyone should read it.

I took two things from it. One, that Carol Bryant is still alive. Yeah. That the woman who accused Emmett Till is still walking the earth. So we think about history, you know, Faulkner talks about the past, not being the past. I mean, she's literally not dead yet. But the thing that struck me that I think is representative is the real cautionary,

is a cautionary tale of that story, is the family that owns the house and the barn where Emmett Till was murdered. The guy's like, yeah, I just choose not to think about it. Do you know what I mean? Wasn't that very striking that he could sit in his pool and not really think about what happened? I mean, it was so revealing. I mean, and it's in some ways clarifying. I mean, in the sense that like, you know, you mentioned plantation weddings.

And there was a huge part of my book, or a significant part of my book that was initially about plantation weddings and we ended up cutting it, because I didn't want the book to be overly sprawling and too massive and I wanted it to be as tight as possible. But what was interesting is that I went to a bunch of plantations where people hold weddings.

And I just wanted to understand like how how what would motivate someone to want to celebrate one of the most joyous days of their life on the site of what I can only understand as being a place of intergenerational torture and exploitation. And any Holocaust. You know exactly like what leads to that? Is it that they know and don't care? Is it that they don't know? Or is it that they know and that is, they actually kind of relish in that, you know, and that is the sort of question and I think it depends for each person. But I think it's tied to this idea of that dentist sitting in his pool and looking over

at his barn and saying that is a place that was in which this horrific thing happened that was one of the most arguably one of the most important events in 20th century American history. important events in 20th century American history, certainly in terms in the sense that the murder and lynching of Emmett Till is part of what precipitated the civil rights movement. And to look at it and be like, I'm just is, that it is so, it feels so distant for him. And I think that that distance is a microcosm of the distance that so many people in this country feel about these parts of history that they feel have nothing, they believe and have convinced themselves

that it doesn't have anything to do with them. What it actually has everything to do with them, it has everything to do with all of us. And the problem is that whether it be slavery or indigenous genocide or contemporary immigration issues or Japanese-American internment, I mean, all of these things that we should be deeply shameful of as a country. Many of us have convinced ourselves that it is somehow over there and that it has nothing to do with us. But it does because we are here and we are part of the we are part of the story that will or won't be told about these things, whether we like it or not.

about these things, whether we like it or not. Yeah, and he didn't come off as a bad person. He didn't come off as a racist or a weirdo sort of creepily into this stuff. It was just kind of a benign deliberate ignorance of the implications of a thing that was literally in his backyard. It was almost, I mean, right, it's such an amazing writer. I'm, this is why it hit us over the head, I think. But it was so symbolic that it really does wake you up a bit.

Yeah, and I just learned a lot of, I think there was a lot of reporting in that piece that I just hadn't been familiar with, you know, I don't think I, I don't actually think I knew that it had happened that so much of what happened before he was thrown into the river had happened in a barn at all. I'd never heard of the barn. Yeah, and it's just, again, it's a reminder for me that even the stories we think we know,

there's a lot that we don't. A lot that we don't know. And the thing about writing a book like this is the research was one of the, I mean, the research was the reason I wrote it. It was to provide me with information and history that was deeply important and transformative for me personally. But every new book you open provides a new level of nuance, provides a new detail, provides

a new way of thinking about something that I have spent years thinking about. And that is why the scholars and historians who do this work, who dedicate their lives to this work, whether they're academic historians or public historians, are so important because they're all way, I think about somebody like a net Gordon Reed, whose work on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. That's why they were talking about her at Monticello. You literally changed the whole conversation in this country around how we understood Thomas

Jefferson. I mean, like an exemplar of what like deep rigorous historical work can do. They, you know, I talked to people who went to Monticello 10, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And there's like, Monticello, you went to sounds very different than the one that I went to, because they were not talking about any of this before. And to me, that provides me with hope,

because people can change. Institutions can change. We can gain new information and tell different stories, tell more honest stories. And I think Manichello is a place that is always attempting to interrogate what they do or don't do with stories they tell and don't tell. And as a result, have evolved in the way

that they have told the story of Jefferson in a way that I think is really important. And I think there's a model for so many of us. And look, that change is in your self-interest, right? And another deeply reported book that I was just thinking about is the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. And then I was thinking about the Tuskegee experiments. Our failure to talk about those things,

a tone for them, address them, and learn from them. You want to talk about why certain communities are slightly more vaccine hesitant, which, you know, again, has implications for everyone, it's because we're too afraid to go deal with things. And the failure to deal with those unpleasant historical events and injustices has ongoing consequences for the future that negatively affect you and your children. Like lying about the past is not a victimless crime.

Is that what I would say? Yeah, yeah, no, I think that that's... That's absolutely true, and we feel... The future generations feel the effects of that. Yes. And it shapes again, like what are... You know, so... I think about the origin point of this book and this book was written in or began being written in 2017

When I was watching several Confederate statues come down in my hometown statues of PGD Burrugar, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee all these statues coming down in New Orleans after sort of two years of litigation and political fights and battles. I watched the Robert E. Lee statue come down in New Orleans after sort of two years of litigation and political fights and battles. I watched the Robert E. Lee statue come down in New Orleans. I was there. It was pretty moving experience. Yeah, no, it's, yeah, I wish I had been able to be there.

I watched the live stream from my home here in Maryland. And what I was thinking about was like, what does it mean that I grew up in a city in which the moral mage is toolavers than there are to enslave people a guy who never even went to New Orleans had nothing to do with New Orleans Right like I mean, you know, it's but again is a reminder that the Robert Lee was just an avatar Yes for this sort of larger message that that folks at that time were trying to send and that folks at that time were trying to send. And I thought about what it meant that I,

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 Highway that my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy that my parents still have on a street named after somebody who owned 150 enslaved people. Yeah, not Louis Armstrong, not Little Wayne Boulevard. You know, any actual heroes of that

city. And what is, what are the implications of that? Because symbols and iconography and street names are, they're not 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 as we've talked about. And you know, that's not to say that taking down a 64-tall statue of Robert E. Lee is going

to erase the racial wealth gap, but it is to say that these are all part of an ecosystem of ideas and stories that are told, that shape how we understand what has happened in American history, what has happened in this country, what has happened in this country, what has happened in our respective cities and communities. And thus what needs to be done in order to make amends for the harm that is transpired over the course of this history, to build a more just and equitable and fair world.

And so when we talk about the deception and lies that are, you know, that we've been taught or that our kids are taught, all of these things are a part of it. And like we can, you know, I think about Jeff who we talked about earlier in our conversation, like Jeff could tell a different story. Jeff, instead of telling his own granddaughters the story that his grandfather told him, he could hold his granddaughter's hands, walk through that cemetery and say, these are your ancestors. These are members of your family, and they fought a war to preserve a terrible, terrible thing.

But you are not defined by the decisions that your family has made. You can make a different set of decisions and you are not tethered to that history because that history does not singularly define you. And there are people who make that decision and we just need more people to make that decision. Yeah, I think that's another sad thing that I've realized sort of as I studied American history

and the Civil War is that where the lost cosm mythology That's another sad thing that I've realized, sort of, as I studied American history and the Civil War, is that where the lost cause mythology really deprived us of an inspiring historical narrative, came with reconstruction. The passage of the 13th, 14th, 15th amendments, the Friedman's bureaus, the immense work that we tried to do as a country to begin to address some of the wrongs of slavery before that cause was betrayed and undermined for political purposes before we abandoned it. We almost did the right? And there's no monuments to that. Instead, we celebrate Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forest. We don't study, you know, the people who we don't celebrate Fadiest Stevens, right, or the people who went down South and taught in those

schools. We don't celebrate Booker T. Washington, or we don't celebrate the people who out of the wreckage of that historical injustice tried to push us in the right direction. And to me, that's a real tragedy. And it's a lost opportunity because then we don't get to pick up where they left off.

And it's stalled us out for like a hundred years. Yeah, it absolutely did. And there's a lot of work to be done to sort of like unwege us from a lot of the BS that's been propagated over the course of centuries. And what I wanted to do with this book was equip myself with more information, more tools, a better framework, to make sense of what is happened and to be able to look at this country with clear eyes and to be able to look at it with a level of clarity that I don't think I'd had before.

And I hope that it can do that for the reader as well. It absolutely did. It's a wonderful book. To end on a positive note, I saw the picture that you posted on Instagram when you were FaceTiming with your grandparents with the news that the book had hit number one, which is an incredibly difficult accomplishment. You know, I'm just trying to be like you.

But so tell me, tell me how that went and tell me what they think of it because a lot of the history that you're talking about in the book obviously not the Civil War itself, but some of the more recent stuff, like they were alive for. When were they born? My grandfather was born in 1930, Jim Kromas-Assippi,

my grandmother was born in 1939, Jim Crow, Florida. And it was so special to be able to share that with them. I mean, it was special in many ways because they are featured in the book. The epilogue is largely about the two of them. And the trip that we took to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. And you know, one of the things that my grandfather was saying, my grandmother was saying when we talked about our visits to that museum a few years ago, she was just looking around and we were realizing how much of the history of that museum, and how much of the violence documented in that

museum is something that they experienced firsthand. My grandmother kept saying she was like, I lived it, I lived it. Yeah, that was a news, not history to her. Yeah, that was news, not history to her. Yeah, absolutely. And it also gave me a sense of a more acute sense of our proximity to that history, and that period of time. I feel like I was taught about slavery as if it was this thing, especially when I was in elementary and middle school, that it was this thing that happened in the Jurassic period, that it was dinosaurs and the Flintstones and slavery, almost as if they all happened at the same time.

Even though the school you were in in New Orleans was probably built in the Civil War. Yeah, no, for sure. Sure. The whole, as the historian Walter Johnson says, the whole city of New Orleans as a memorial to slavery. And I think about that National Museum of African American History and Culture and think about how the woman who opened that museum alongside the Obama family in 2016

was the daughter of an enslaved person, right? Not the granddaughter or the great granddaughter. She was the daughter of someone born into intergenerational chattel slavery and this someone who was alive in 2016, just recently passed away. I just did, I was doing an MPR interview and one of the people who called in at his local station

was talking about how she was raised by, this is the woman I believe in her 70s, talking about how she was raised by her great-grandfather. And she called him Pappy and her great- great grandfather was someone who was born into slavery. Right? So like there are people who are alive today who loved, who were in community with, who were raised by people born into chattel slavery in this country. And so when I speak to my grandparents and for that's part of what the that last section of the book is about, I'm reminded that this history we tell ourselves was a long time ago.

Wasn't that long ago at all? My grandfather's grandfather was enslaved. So when my four-year-old son sits on my grandfather's lap, I think about my grandfather sitting on his grandfather's lap. And it is just a really intimate reminder that in the scope of human history, you know, this thing was just yesterday. And to the end of the suggestion, any suggestion someone would have that it has nothing to do with what the contemporary landscape of inequality looks like in this country,

or what our social, economic, and political infrastructure look like and how they operate. They're being morally and intellectually disingenuous. Or worse. Or worse. more lean intellectually disingenuous. Or worse. Or worse. Clint, thank you so much. I love the book.

I'm so glad we got to talk. And I can't wait for whatever journey the next book takes you on. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. There is only one more day to sign up for the Daily Stoke Leadership Challenge. I'm so excited.

We've got a huge group of people who are lined up and ready to take this challenge with us. We're gonna be talking to GMs of one of the great sports dynasties in American history. We're gonna be talking to some military leaders, business leaders, entrepreneurs, people who have made it their business to study these questions of leadership.

Each day you get an email from me. It's 63 emails, more than 30,000 words, of all new content. That helps you take the right steps along that week's path. There's going to be three leadership Q&As with me. Again, a live office hours video session with me. Ancient wisdom for the modern leader. It's going to be a masterclass in leadership with the cadence and rigor of a bootcamp. It's also a live course which means all the participants will join the course together. We're going to move through it together.

The same goal. I'm so excited about the material we've put together for you. There is seriously just one more day at midnight central time challenge closes. You can't sign up after that and then we're all going to be in this awesome cohort for the next nine weeks. I hope to see you there. Sign up now. Talk soon. Hey, prime members. You can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with

Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.