How Textbooks Made America Not So Great

and unequal country. And in this episode, we're gonna unpack why we are so divided and unequal. We're gonna learn what we've all been learning in textbooks for a very long time. We're talking about teaching white supremacy. This episode has some strong language, just a fair warning, but stick around. Khalil. Here we are, man. We are in the post midterm America.

We are past that election day. Yeah, man, we're supposed to be really happy about the fact that this is the first time when things didn't go so well for the party out of power. Right, you were a way out of the country, But I was watching on TV that night, and you know, it was essentially like Democrats were like high fiving one another. They were celebrating this idea that this red wave hadn't happened, right, that there wasn't the second coming of Trump. Yeah, it became a

red puddle, a red puddle. It was like expecting this disaster and things turned out just to be shitty, and we're supposed to be happy about that, exactly, exactly, And the truth is that, you know, whatever we want to say about the Democratic Party being the party of democracy, now they're going to lose power. Maybe less power than

they thought, but they're going to lose power. That has real consequences for that for our future, and real consequences for women's reproductive rights, real consequences for how we as a country expect to pass on, you know, what it means to have real rights in this country to our children. It's sad, but to some degree, the bones of this country seem to be rattling in such a way that we aren't that much further along than some of the history we talk about on the show, you know, and

we often talk about race. Maybe that's the only thing we talk about on this show, you know, but of

course it was. It permeated the entire election, right. I mean, so there was this whole idea where whether you know, there's fear mongering about crime, which was really fear mongering about race, and whether it was rejected or not, which really was much more interested in this idea of of you know, using crime as a political tool, whether it like you know, the Democrats weren't even necessarily concerned with whether it was right or wrong to run away from

those issues that were embraced them. You know, in the Georgia race with Stacy Abrams running for governor, seventy two percent of white women did not vote for her. That was an exit poll, and that was after getting rid of Rov Wade. It's nuts, And I guess for me, I think that what we're going to talk about today with our guests gives us a chance to kind of go back to first principles and like figure out, like why do we keep repeating the past, why do we

keep falling prey to these moments of retrenchment. Well, that gets us into today's episode, because we're about to dig into a history of text books in America and how they really teach white supremacy. How they've perpetuated this idea for well over a century. And if you're a listener right now thinking, okay, hold up, fellas, what does emitterms have to do with history touched books? That's exactly the point.

They are the building blocks of our society. They are the texts that we all encounter at some point in our lives. This tell us what we owe each other as citizens of this nation. And so we get to talk to Donald Yakavone, a lifetime researcher at Harvard University's Hutchin Center for African and African American Research. He's also the author and editor of eleven books, and the book that he just wrote is called Teaching White Supremacy, America's

Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity. So he wrote this book because he was researching abolition, something that he teaches about him has been studying for years. And he went into this library at Harvard to look at a couple textbooks that were taught in classes in America, and they were like thousands of them, and he started digging into them and what he ended up with was a book which is about the history of teaching white supremacy,

throughout American history. It's a really smart idea because essentially it's a study of American identity, how it was formed, what it means, how it was perpetuated one century to the next. And again, I think this is a really fascinating concept, meaning to what degree do we owe our current politics to what we've all been taught in our

history textbook? Yeah? And I felt like I was seeing this on TV last week and seeing it on all over the country, like what we saw in this book about how these ideas or continued to today they still define our politics and they're going to define them going forward. Absolutely. Yeah. Man, so let's talk to Donald Yacovone. Let's learn what he learned to help us all be better. Welcome Donald Yacovone to some of my best friends are It's so great

to have you on. And So you went and read over two hundred American history textbooks published and taught in American schools from basically the early eighteen hundreds to the nineteen eighties. Correct, and you know maybe in it just like what was your big takeaway? Like how do you sum up? Like what all that research led to? Shock? How? So? Yeah? Explain?

So I thought why don't I start near the beginning, And I picked the year eighteen thirty two because that was a year after the emergence of the radical anti slavery movement and William Lloyd Garrison. In fact, throughout the pre Civil War period there was never any discussion of the anti slavery movement, no acknowledgement that it even existed. So I went and I went through the eighteen thirties, the eighteen forties, and I thought, wait a minute, what

am I seeing here? There is an extraordinary emphasis upon whiteness. I mean, it's not hidden, it's not assumed, it's overt and so collective we in all of these textbooks is always a white collective. We absolutely American identity is white identity, exactly. Yeah, unless they specifically refer to red savages, which is the usual way they refer to native inhabitants in North America. Khalil and I were in public schools in Chica Go

in the nineteen eighties. We're reading history textbooks. Yeah, and Khalil like where we didn't go to the same middle school. He went to the same high school. And I definitely remember Frederick Douglas and I remember studying slavery. And I also remember, you know, this sort of pervading idea that you know, post civil rights when we were in school, like all the bad shit happened back then, you know,

in the unenlightened past. You know, we were not part of that because we were sort of on the other end of this. Yeah. I actually thought about this in light of a conversation I had with Mark Moreale, who is the current president of the National Urban League. I was talking to him a couple months ago about actually this very topic, about the problem of how do you teach American history and light of the backlash to talking about it at all, and he kind of laughed and

he said, you know, that's funny. You remind me of when I was in high school in New Orleans where he came of age, and he said, one day they were talking about the Civil War and the topic came up and it was defined as the War of Northern Aggression, and he said he was the only person in the classroom to raise his hand to say, wait a minute,

that is not what the Civil War was. He felt alone, And you know, I mean I could also remember when Roots aired on television and that being sort of much more powerful and sort of talking about the enslaved experience and sort of creating dialogue, creating conversation throughout my family at school, like in classrooms even. I mean, that felt like way more momentous than what was happening in a textbook. Yeah. Yeah.

The kind of attention that Roots gave to the African American experience in slavery and after had never been done, nothing approaching it had ever been done. You know, I have two historians in front of me right now, and I want to ask a question about textbooks in general as like a medium for history, even as a subject for studying history. One of our producers, Lucy, heard that we were going to talk about history textbook and she

was like, oh, no, they're so boring. She has sort of lists like clashback to her own high school experience. And I think about textbooks that are in classrooms and there's both sort of this ideological factor of them what's going on in the world. There's also a commercial element to it, right, Like you have publishers who are mostly in the North who are like, we want to sell as many of these as possible, and so there's that demand.

And we also have fifty states and each state each basically like school district can sort of set its own curriculum, So there are thousands of school districts, and then we hear things like even about texts. You know, when they set their curriculum each year. There's such a big market for the textbooks that what they decide in their curriculum is going to shape what is actually like written in a textbook that's published in New York City. This is today.

I'm saying all that to ask, like, what does it mean to study textbooks for both of you, like your historians, what do you get out of a history textbook that's taught to children in American classrooms? Well, I think for younger students it is a convenience. It is a way to encapsulate the record in a manageable signs. I think once you get to college, a textbook isn't necessarily demanded. I taught at college. I didn't always use a textbook

in the introductory class. It's not essential. However, textbooks as a genre are designed not just to present the record of the past, but they inevitably encapsulate the way Americans think about themselves, their values, their aspirations, their meaning, their identity, and that was clear from over two hundred textbooks that I saw. What about the lag time different than say studying newspapers of a day or you know today like

social media or television. The amount of times if you're studying textbooks and reconstruction, it's not like they're you know, the amount of time it takes to sort of that, write it, publish it, distribute it. It could take five

even ten years, right, Oh, absolutely, yeah. In fact, that's why I think some of the most effective textbooks during this post Civil war period came out not in the later eighteen sixties, not even in the early eighteen seventies, but really in the eighteen eighties, even after we recognize as reconstruction had already ended. It does take a long time, and at the same time they are in competition with other textbooks that are taking a completely different interpretation of

this very controversial historical period. So it's confusing. And it's added to by the fact that, certainly in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, as today, textbook publishers often produced one version for the northern audience and another version for the southern audience, and some of these authors were horrified at what the publishers were doing to their own textbooks. Khalil, what do you think I mean when

we talk about textbooks as history. Well, I was going to say to our producer Lucy's provocation, the textbooks are boring. I mean what I think is interesting about that is

I think they're meant to be boring. I mean, first of all, they reflect the consensus view of the authors, in the sense that the authors might be politically left leaning or politically right leaning, but they are meant by design to be the most anodyne interpretation of the past, at least in the way that the general public would

understand them. And they are also meant in a way to do the kind of civic nationalism work that is part and parcel of what public education is all about in the first place, which is to say, to reinforce the dominant narratives of the nation to absolute Donald so eloquently describes to define American identity. And in this way, to emphasize whiteness is also to emphasize kind of the air that we're all breathing. A textbook is, by its

definition then conservative in that sense. I don't mean conservative like you know, republican conservative, but like retaining yes, absolutely yes, just as social studies curriculum for the vast majority of Americans and newcomers from past to present remains primarily conservative in that it is reinforcing a dominant narrative of the nation of its core values. It is not meant to

be the pretext for revolution or change. And actually, what I kind of want to pick up on this point been extended a little further for Donald because he writes extensively about someone he describes as the first professional racist.

In many ways, this character in your book kind of sits right at the turning point in America between the slave past and the post slavery future, and you kind of describe the guy is like the Steve Bannon and Rupert Murdoch and Joseph Goebbels of Nazi infamy of his day, someone who has so much reach an influence that he is shaping the hearts and minds of an entire generation of Americans and maybe in that way not so conservative. Yeah, Well, this is John H. Van every and he's there for

two reasons. One, just as Khalil has said, he's influential, he's terribly influential. But two, he is also representative, and that's what I think some people tend to miss. He's a manifestation of the culture as much as a shaper of the culture. And he also embodies and symbolizes the emphasis that I am putting on Northern responsibility for the

creation and perpetuation of white supremacy. It is commonplace today for many Americans to look Southern slavery and Southern resistance to integration as the source of today's what we call racism, when in fact, I argue and the evidence is so overwhelming in any field that you can pick, whether it's religion, literature, science, education, the domination of Northern attitudes is supreme. Van every had been trained as a doctor. He was Canadian born, so

you don't get any more northern than that. And he set up a small publishing empire right in the middle of Manhattan. He published several books of his own, countless pamphlets which are derivative of the books that he wrote, and two newspapers. Plus he advertised his books and his pamphlets in almost all of the America's newspapers. In one year alone, he put advertisements in fourteen hundred different American newspaper just one year. He's like Donald Trump during the

nineteen eighties. Yeah. Absolutely, Lincoln had read him. He was quoted on the floor of Congress, he was quoted in state legislatures and read throughout the country. And his works were republished long after his death in the nineteen twenties, so by the Daughters of the Confederacy. So you have Northerners influencing and telling the South essentially how to view the evilness of Abraham Lincoln and the Northern aggression against the Civil War and during the Civil War. It's astonishing

about his reach. It's just amazing. I want to lean into that for just one second longer, because I think you have hit on something with van every that I think is really powerful and important, and that is that, as you say, between eighteen fifty eight and eighteen seventy nine, any American who read a newspaper was likely to encounter his work, either because there was direct mention of it

his own writing or these advertisements selling his books. And between eighteen sixty six and eighteen sixty seven he published first a textbook youth history of the Great Civil War in the United States, and then the next year a

book called white supremacy and Negro subordination. Your point about this Canadian transplant to Manhattan, whose ambitions and reach in terms of again we could say his social media influence at that time, for the technology of that era actually helps to circulate white supremacy from north to south at a time that then will help, as you just said, give rise to movements of the Lost Cause, the Daughters of the Confederacy who were single handedly responsible for fundraising

to build Confederate monuments all around the country. That is really remarkable, I think for most people and most listeners to think about the relationship of Northern publishing to the dissemination of white supremacist idea that even Southerners are learning and therefore beginning to teach to their own children and grandchildren, and the cycle just continues, absolutely, and it's so important, I think for us to understand that a current social

crisis that we're undergoing, the long history of racial repression that we have experienced, is not the fault of some kind of external force. It is not the fault of slave masters long gone. This is not a sectional problem. This is a national problem, and it takes national commitment north and south to recognize all our responsibility for the creation of our modern culture. We can't foist it off on some long dead past. This is alive, this is real.

We are all responsible for this, not one section. Yeah, yeah, No, I think that's powerful. So Donald, we've kind of made it seem obvious that this was a bad dude, you know, a bad ombrey in the word of Trump, in the sense that a modern listener today would say, yeah, every you know, thank god he's no longer here. But of course our point is his ideas are still here, and we haven't talked about his ideas, So let's just zero

in on one. I think in particular because as I understand what he was selling, First of all, he didn't want to use the word slave to describe African Americans. That seems totally bananas, right, because no one thinks of the word slave or slavery is controversial either to white Southerners or to Northerners, who are you know, ambivalent or

even hostile to black freedom. So what is this deal with him thinking that the word slave is inappropriate to describe who black people were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Great question, van every when he used the word slave, and he explained this. He said it referred to a long past aspect of European culture, ancient European culture, only white people enslaved other people, other white people, that there was a category of subordination within European people's exactly, this

is a white institution. To his mind, you can no more enslave a person of African descent than you can a cow or sheep, because he argued, just like in the rest of the animal world, you have various species of animals, And his argument was that people of African descent were humans. They were just an inferior lower form of human, a completely separate species. And this was the fate that nature and God, he argued, dictated to the nation. People of African descent were born to do the white

man's labor. Those are his words. Yeah, because slaves suggest immunition of a higher position that now you've been subordinated to. But if you're already starting out as the floor of some representation of humanity, even in his most adminished form, you can't go down. You're already at the bottom, rock bottom,

as they say. So one more thing on this, because I think this is where the past and the present meet in his ideas, and the reason why I think it's important for listeners not to dismiss this is like, oh,

that's interesting. You know, that stuff doesn't exist anymore. But if we think about white supremacist neo Nazi replacement theory today, which is animating our politics right now, that white people will be the minority population and they will be overrun by brown and black people in the near future, that these sets of concerns today are tied to every in the sense that his point was to say that black people had actually helped make white equality possible by being

a force for wealth creation and for solving the aristocratic problems of the past, because now white people would agree that they were equal and superior as long as the black person was in this inferior position. Did I get

that right? You sure did. He would argue, just like Tony Morrison would later argue that you could not have democratic culture without the African presence, ironically, and if there were no people of African descent, they would have created a people to fill that role, to show white people that the difference between themselves was not so great as it was between themselves and this other quote foreign element. Yeah,

I think that's really, really, really really important. Yeah, after the break, we're going to hear from a young person who's actually trying to bring attention to the everyday racism that exists in America, especially in light of the race justice movement or Black Lives Matter movement. Welcome back to some of my best friends are so donald. There's this video that's been circulating on social media. It shows clearly

that white supremacy is alive and well in the United States. Obviously, we didn't need much proof for that, but Khalil and I saw this video. I shared it with him. We watched it at the same time, and we thought it'd be kind of amazing to talk about with you. It's a video taken in what's labeled the most racist city in America, Harrison, Arkansas, the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan.

And in it, there's this young white man. He's holding up a Black Lives Matter sign and he's video taking this and over the course of the video, people are stopping in their cars, one hundred percent of them are white, and they're all yelling at him. They're berating him, they're saying incredibly racist things. Let's play this video about ten minutes. I will be back. You better be fucking gone. Okay, come back. We matter. You're a white thing? Ship? Are

you the Marxist? I meant domestic terrorists. Bad to Chicago or New York for COVID enough for the chips, find Jesus him? All right, all lives matter, not just black You're why what do you think Donald Well? I think you probably could have done that in Chicago as well

as uh Arkansas. Yeah, it's all the evidence one needs about the problem remaining that the ideas that textbooks and Americans have absorbed for the last three hundred years remain m Yeah, it is still the case that And this is why I think the book I did is so important. It is the background for our current crisis. It is the reason why we have our current crisis, and it is the reason why people like that who identify themselves as white and is the essence of legitimacy, and that

everyone else who isn't is not. That goes back three hundred years. You know. One of the things that struck me, in addition to just like this demonstration of our racism, it's being caught on video and because we have social media, can disseminate so quickly, and you can just see an

example of how deeply racist the country is. But like your book, thinking about textbooks, the way that white people in white culture sort of polices itself, sort of shows what the boundaries are of behavior and teaching other white people, you know, how to stay within those bounds, like this is acceptable behavior. Khalil I sent it to you, Like,

what did you think. I was like a little bit surprised at how visceral the racism was, because these are not people who are being confronted by a young man handing out a leaflet, but he's just standing there holding the sign, and in that holding the sign apparently provokes this visceral white racist rage where people are calling him everything, you know, from the N word, reminding him he's white,

to calling him a communist. I mean, I guess I was in that way surprised at how little has changed over the last fifty years since the Civil Rights era in terms of these deeply ingrained notions that you actually are trader to the white race if you believe in the commitments of racial justice that purportedly the country stands for. Yeah, like what people do in the video, it wasn't just

thinking something or muttering to yourself. They were moved to stop in the middle of a road, to roll down their window and to confront another person and to threaten violence. Right to threaten, in this case, to threaten white on white violence. Yeah, if you're here, you know, a couple hours, I'm gonna be back and I'm gonna kill you. Yeah. I mean I was trying to you know, Donald, you said like this could happen anywhere, It could happen in Chicago.

I was trying to think of, like what the liberal equivalent would be. I could give you an example. Okay, I spent almost seven years and tell hassee Florida. I'm not sure that counts as a liberal example, Donald, but hang on. At that point, Panhandle culture was deep South. Okay, we think of Florida. Everybody thinks of southern Florida, and as everyone knows, the further south you go, the more north you are. But in Panhandle culture, this was deep South.

This was South Georgia, no difference really to speak of, and I almost never heard any kind of racial remarks by white people. Nineteen ninety one, I moved to Boston, Massachusetts, and it was everywhere. Give you an example. How so see, I'll give you a perfect example. I was standing in the North End waiting to go into a restaurant and a car stopped. A black man got out and ran into a store that sold magazines and newspapers, and a guy who was standing in line next to me said,

what the hell's he going in there for? He can't read? Oh wow, yeah, yeah wow, yeah. I think there's something also different. I mean hearing racist stuff. I mean, I'll give you an example. This is just my own experience. I was driving with my kids. I live on the South side of Chicago, and we were actually going through the part that's the campus of the University of Chicago, and we saw a young man in a Maga hat.

And you know, this was sort of still the Trump administration, but like you know all the rage that that invokes, and my reaction was like seeing a giraffe or something. I was like, look, kids, look, I was actually excited. I was like, look, there's one Like look, there's a kid with a maga hat. And I didn't feel like there was nothing in me that was like let me, let me attack this young man, let me like put him in his place. And try to teach him something

and like shake him. This would be the equivalent, I would think would be the luxury of not feeling like that's the status quo of where I live. But in this town in Arkansas, like, there was no threat from Black Lives Matter. This kid was a total anomaly. Yeah.

That's one of the great ironies of the moment we are in now, where a lot of white people are triggered by criticisms of structural racism and then call the people criticizing structural racism racists and call them up on the phone and threaten their lives for being the racist. Or you're getting them hate mail. You're triggered here. No, No, you're not. You're talking about your like stuff you've gotten no. But but I'm just I'm one of them. I'm sure

Donald has gotten. Donald. Have you gotten hate mail for publishing this book? I got one so far. Yeah. I mean, so, what you're saying, man, is like not being triggered to violence because some trumper was wearing a MAGA hat in your presence. Demonstrate something about you and at least the subculture that you represent. Whereas for the people who we actually could objectively say are articulating racist views actually threatened violence to say that they're not racist, the ship don't

make no sense. But here we are, So we are living in a moment of extreme backlash. We are living in a moment where it's not just this kind of existential political movement of white nationalists who think they have to hold onto the country because people like me are eventually going to take over. But we're also living in

a moment where the backlash is legislative. It is actually doubling down on the kinds of textbook narratives, the ones that subscribe to white supremacist points of view, or at least the ones that erase the contributions of people of color, whether they are black or indigenous or Mexican Americans, as is what happened in Arizona about a decade ago, when they basically made ethnic studies like to teach Mexican American descended children that any part of their history is divisive.

And it's like that video articulates, I think exactly your point that if we don't deal with these histories, we are going to continue to produce people like those in that video, and we're going to continue to have a politics of backlash and in support of structural racism. Absolutely, and I think the potential could be even worse because people of this frame of mind, who believe that they're very identities, as James Baldwin remark back in the sixties,

that they're very identities, are being taken from them or threatened. Right, Okay, we'll do anything to preserve the old order. Oh Man, Donald, I am so glad you mentioned James Baldwin because I teach him in every class. And there's this particular quote from an appearance he makes on The Dick Cavett Show in nineteen sixty eight, and here's a clip from it

from our oldpex's film, I Am Not Your Negro. The question you gotta ask yourself, the white population of this company's got to ask itself North and South, because it's one country and one negro. There's a didence in the North in the South. There's just a difference in the way they in a way they castrate too, but that's but the fact of the castration is an American fact.

If I'm not the nigga here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, and you've got to find out why and that includes electing demogogues to office who will make sure that other demogogues remained in office, and that people of the Democratic Party or people who believe in the Pledge of Allegiance where it says with liberty and justice for all, will be excluded because they

are threats to the social order. Perceived as threats to the social order, we could lose our democracy within a few years. Yeah, yeah, our democracy definitely feels under threat. And how it's tied to this sense of our history is powerful, and I think we're all saying this. It's not so clear now that like better textbooks are going

to save us. Yeah. Yeah, Well, this is kind of a really important point to bring up the sixteen nineteen project, because your book comes out not only after the original sixteen nineteen project of the New York Times magazine, published on the four hundredth anniversary of the landing of the first Africans who would ultimately experience the early stages of slavery in sixteen nineteen. That project comes out in August of twenty nineteen, and then a revised version in a

book length that comes out just last year. So here your book comes afterwards and I'm curious. Let me shout you out though, Khalil, you're in the sixteen nineteen Project. You have a chapter in it, in both the magazine form in the book from you write about the history of sugar. Yeah, it's important to say, you know, yeah, that's true. So and I guess the question is, what do you think about the sixteen nineteen project. Is it part of the solution? It is part of the solution.

It isn't perfect by any means. A few things are. But when I was writing the epilogue to the book at that point two years ago, so many schools around the country had adopted the sixteen nineteen Project for use in class I found that terribly encouraging, even if there are flaws, even if the emphasis on slavery and the

revolution isn't quite what was presented. However, the sixteen nineteen projects emphasis on white supremacy is absolutely vital, and as many people who can read that, the better off we will be. However, under these current conditions, I have no faith at all that what needs to be done will be done, even bike dedicated, well trained teachers. If the

school system won't allow it, what do we do. I'm finding teachers who are telling me that they are being compelled to teach some repulsive images of people of African descent because they're in the textbook they're being compelled to use, and if they don't use it, they could lose their jobs. When we come back, we're going to have more conversations about what we are and are not teaching in our schools, including my own daughters. We'll be back after the break.

Welcome back to Some of my best friends are so Donald, Let's just say we have actual teachers who want to do the right thing, who want to engage the history

of slavery in a thoughtful and productive way. And it seems to me that part of what you describe in the last page of your book are these, like many many stories of things gone terribly wrong, or you know, you sort of imply that they're all intentionally poor outcomes, or maybe I'm misreading it, but one in particular, you cite this example of New Jersey for ten years teaching slave runaway advertisements or having students do a project on that, and I wanted to tell you Donald that actually, in

this instance, though this is not to say that all the other examples that you describe are not examples of bad teaching or somehow some diabolical effort to make black kids feel bad. But in this instance, the New Jersey example came directly from my school district and my daughter Justice, who is a fifth grader at the time, was given

that assignment, and it made National news. Parents of fifth graders at school the New Jersey our outrage after two slavery related school assignments may have taken it too far, but here's what actually happened. So the story that National News told was that students, basically black students, were subjected to these terrible ads of black runaways on the bulletin board outside of their classroom, and it just reinforced this negative image of black people, and the black students felt bad.

And it is true that some of the parents of my daughter's classmates did feel that way. They felt that their kids were being subjected to racist images of black people. But the point of the assignment, and this is why I think this is really tricky as we moved towards like what comes next in this country. What is tricky is that the teachers, after I sat down with them, I reviewed the material I actually had helped my daughter

create her own runaway ad. It turns out that what they were trying to do was to show the fulls of colonial life in America, and rather than every kid pretending like everyone was just a homesteader or a pioneer or a colonist sharing in the hard work of building the nation, they found a way to say that black people were experiencing slavery, and they had prepared the material

to teach them this. I told my daughter as we went on Google to look for actual runaway ads, that those ads in the eighteenth nineteenth century were the most dominant source of learning about individual black people, because they told their names, they told their characteristics, they gave them personalities, and in ways that black people are often invisible in the archives and invisible in their historical record, or only come through in a diary entry of a white enslaver

describing their faithful slave, these ads served a different kind of purpose and at least documenting the presence of black people when they often were left out of the story. And so I pushed back against the criticism as a historian because I felt like it was a way to actually teach slavery rather than simply avoided a lot of people didn't agree with me, but I wanted to share that story with you because I do think it illustrates that even when people want to get this right, the

stakes are really high and fraught. You know. I followed those debates and I'm listening to both of you, and I think it's such a landmine and so many, so many ways it can go wrong. And I hear you Khalil talking about New Jersey and that it also cuts both ways, is what you're saying, right, That we have to we have to find ways to teach that hard history that really looks at it, and that's gonna be fraught and difficult to do, and you know, there are lots of ways to fuck it up, but that is

the space that we have to move into. Right, That's right. I mean, you have this moment in your conclusion near the end of the book that really struck me. You talk about a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center from twenty eighteen and they cite that, I'm only about eight percent of students that they interviewed could even say what the causes of the Civil War was fighting over

over slavery. Yeah, But then another thing from that study really struck me that that even where slavery was part of the curriculum, nine percent of the teachers who responded said they just didn't teach it, they just skipped it over. And I had this confirmed when I deliver lectures on this subject, you know, around various schools, and I ask students, well, what did you learn about the history of slavery and race in America? The answer quote not much, unquote yeah. Yeah.

That study from the Southern Poverty Law Center is called teaching Hard History. Yes, And I love the name of that study. I mean, like this is pre backlash critical race theory imagined, you know, boogeyman stuff, and the idea that we need to confront our hard histories as well as like our soft ones that make us comfortable and don't make us feel bad. But like you know, we're we're a nation that has stains on it and we

need to see those as well. And you know, that idea of like teaching hard history seems like a great lesson to take off it. Yes, And we've got to the point where as you point out, even if we have the best textbooks on the planet, if teachers won't teach it, what good is it? I just want to say again how much we appreciate you having it, having you on and you're sharing how significant this body of work is in terms of socializing white supremacy as a

core value in American society. And as we have observed in this moment, this political season that we're all part of, and that video we saw of the young man holding a Black Lives Matter sign, that when you write at the end of your book that history is a mirror, you say that quote, the history we teach is the product of the culture we create, not necessarily of the actual history we made. And I thought that was a really wonderful line, Donald, and appreciate your commitment and passion

for us getting our history right. Thanks for coming on the show, Oh thank you. You know, this history of the founding of this nation that continues to be debated in our country right now tells us that our history is fundamental to how we think of ourselves as a country. And until we get that history right, as I learned from Donald today, then we're going to keep reproducing one generation to the next people who have false ideas about how we arrived at the country that we are and

where we have to take it. But you just said about false ideas and how they're you know, this long history of them. That's where we are right now. We're still caught up in all these false ideas that defines our politics. You know, we're not confronting these issues of race. We're not confronting how the politics affects Americans. That's what

we have to solve for. Yeah, and there's no way out of this dilemma because because as much as we might hope the young people today are going to be better than than they were back in the day, that young man in Arkansas just shows us that it doesn't matter. These ideas are so sticky. As Donald pointed out, that unless we change things and how we teach and socialize, they're going to be new generations of folks with the same racial hatred, the same bigoted ideas, the same backlash

to the change that we need in this country. No way out, that's the new name of this podcast. No, no, no, we gotta end on a happy note. All right, now, we got this because we're we're living, we're living post mid term. Things are going to get better. We're working on this and uh right, it wasn't a red wave. It was a red puddle. Yes, yes see now we get it circle Yes, yes all right, man, I love you, I love you too. Some of My Best Friends Are

is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me Oldibron Muhammad and my best friend Ben Austin. Gets produced by John Asante and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Jasmine Morris, our engineer is Amanda ka Wong, and our executive producer is Mia Lamell. At Pushkin Thanks Selita Mulad, Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carly Migliori, John Schnars,

Gretta Kone and Jacob Weissberg. Our theme song, Little Lily, is by fellow chicagoan a brilliant Avery R. Young from his album pub You definitely want to check out his music at his website Avery R. Young dot com. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin Pods, and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.

And if you like our show, please give us a five star rating and a review and listen even if you don't like it, give it a five star rating and a review, and please tell all of your best friends about it. When my mom listens to us, you know, listens to some of my best friends are, she says, I watched you guys. She has to look at the image of us from from the show arts every time, so she every week she says, hey, I just watched

your podcast, and she literally did. She have to sit in front of the computer staring at the picture of us and imagine like the sounds coming out of our mouth. Oh, that's funny.