Free-ish

in Trouble, streaming November seventeenth only on Hulu. Good morning, peeps, and welcome to oikate F Daily with Meet your Girl Danielle Moody recording not So Live on this Thanksgiving week from the Brooklyn Silarium. I'm really excited to bring up later in the show a guest that I have honestly been trying to get woke f for quite some time, but he had been in the midst of writing the book that we are going to talk about in just

a little bit. Clint Smith is a writer at The Atlantic and he is the author of How the Word Is Past Reckoning with the history of slavery across America. And you know, I will tell you that when I finished the interview with Clint, I was really uneasy, filled with a lot of different emotions about the current state

of our politics. How it is feels like I keep running these flashbacks in my head of moments in history that bubbled up, moments of rage and angst and anger and denial and frustration that all seem to be coming ahead at this moment. And he speaks a lot in our interview about the importance of narrative and how our histories are defined and what defines those histories right, And it is not necessarily, as he will say, empirical evidence, but it is stories and who those stories are passed

down from and our connection to them. And as I was thinking about his book and have been thinking doing a lot more thinking, frankly, since the outrage the performed outrage by the radical right with regard to critical race theory, which is only taught at the graduate level and law school level and not in our elementary schools, I've been thinking a lot about slavery and our denial of this horrific, cruel, inhumane system that is the foundation of this country, and

that our denial of its existence, of its effects that are still seen today and experience today not just through the racial wealth gap, not just through the lack of equity in our public education system, but is seen and felt in the trauma that Black people in this country and throughout the diaspora hold. In my conversation with Clint, I found myself welling up with tears. And I have

no immediate connection to slavery. I can't go through my lineage as many Black people in this country and around the world can't and pinpoint to you modes of our history and thinking about how purposeful and strategic that was to deny people a connection to their past so that they have no real future. Right when we say that like the past is prologue in many ways and instances, that is absolutely true. The past informs our present and

sets up our future. And without a real connection to that, right, without without a shared history that is steeped in truth, I just wonder how much further out of control our society is going to spin. You know, everything seems so urgent, so distraught, so horrendous at this moment. And you know, one of the things that Kurt will, that Clint will say in our conversation is that you know, six years

before the civil war that he was studying. People did not think in that moment, oh my god, this can happen. There is a civil war that's going to be pending. And he said much in the same way that here we are in twenty twenty one, and we're coming barreling to the end of this year. And I just said the other you know, the other day to my therapist, I said, I cannot believe that it's going to be twenty twenty two, Like where the fuck did the last

two years ago? And I have no idea where we are headed in this country, right, like no farm grasp. And she said to me that this feeling of anxiousness that we're experiencing, and obviously we're experiencing it in a variety of different ways, comes from the lack of safety. Right, She's like, it comes from the lack of safety. She goes,

think back, you know, to nine to eleven. Up until then, there had never been an attack, a terrorist attack from outside terrorists, right, foreign terrorists on American soil since Pearl Harbor. So our understanding in America is that we are fundamentally safe. Now we know and I know that there are communities

in this country that have never felt fucking safe. And that's the point that I want to get to next, is that it is the foundation of safety right when we talk about our basic needs, being that we talk about food and shelter and clothing, and what that means is safety right from the elements right. And so what does it mean to have communities of people whose safety has consistently and fundamentally been challenged year after year, decade

after decade, generation after generation. What does it mean to an exist in a country where you never feel safe?

And that's the experience of black people in America is to never really truly feel safe, to always feel on edge, whether it is going into a store to go pick up an Iteman item, to know that you can be followed right, you can be thrown out of said store over suspicion of nothing other than being black, having the audacity to walk into a store, the threat if you were a driver, to be driving and pulled over and to either be killed right or harassed and totally and

completely emotionally viciously attacked right to walking down the street right, and the idea that any white vigilante, whether they have a badge or not, can fundamentally, stop end your life off of a whim. That the way that most of us exist and the fact that we're still breathing and thriving is through happenstance, right, And we don't get to really have those conversations. We are gas lit into believing that,

you know, we're fundamentally the problem. If we were to just you know, be like everybody else, then all would be well, except we're not like everybody else. We're not treated like everybody else is treated. We're not spoken to in the way that other people are spoken to. We

don't have the same history, right. And so the fact that we exist in a society that is just now in the twenty first century taking down monuments to fucking Confederate soldiers, that we have more monuments in this country to honor those that try to overthrow our government as opposed to those that were fighting for the liberation right of enslaved people, tells you everything you need to know

about America. And we wonder, you know, like, oh, how come these insurrectionists are not being dealt with and blah blah, because they'll get a fucking statue in a couple of years. They'll have high schools named after them, they have fucking highways named after them. And so what does it mean to continually exist in a place that doesn't want you, doesn't see you? Right? And how were we ever to move forward when we can't even agree on facts, when

we can't agree on truth? Right, when our understanding of history all depends on who is teaching it to us, where we are learning it from where we are hearing it. And so I, I, you know, I really do worry as our present moment is really indicative of our past transgressions, our denial of truth, of facts of history. Right, you know, I think about the ways in which I consistently feel robbed, never truly being educated to understand, like the truth of America, right,

who was trampled, who was harmed? Who fought back, as Clint will say, even knowing that they were never going to reap the benefits of their fight, of their warrior spirit, that they were just doing so in the hopes that at some point, right, at some point, there would be liberation.

And even now we're only free ish. So I really hope that you all taken this conversation that I had that was for me so profound that I had so many more questions to ask, so much more that I wanted to learn, and I hope that you will tell me in the comment section below what came up for you during my conversation with Atlantic writer Clint Smith, and some of the things that you've been asking yourself right as we are moving through our world right now that is just so out of whack. How what are the

questions that are coming up for you? What are you learning? What are you unlearning? I'd love to hear that in the comment section. Coming up next my interview with author, activists and staff writer at The Atlantic, Clint Smith. Folks, I'm very excited to welcome to wok A Daily for the very first time writer at The Atlantic, activist, poet and author of the new book How the Word Is Past, a reckoning with the history of Slavery across America. Clint Smith.

Welcome to wok F Daily. Your book cannot be more timely, I think if you had tried to make it so, can you talk to us? One of the first questions that I have for you is, in our current political and cultural climate that is one of chaos and distress around our connection to truth and facts, how has your book been received far given that you know, it's come at a time when we are debating critical race theory, when we are debating our founding. Yeah, well, thank you

so much for having me. It's it's really wonderful to be here. I mean, I've been overwhelmed by the way that my book has been received. I've not experienced the same level of pushback that I think some other texts that my book is in conversation with maybe has, maybe because I think that's for a lot of reasons that

we might not have time to get into now. But but what I think is that many people are drawn to it because, as you said, it is speaking to something that is so central and present in our current

political political discourse. And I always tell folks that I wrote this book for like a fifteen and sixteen, sixteen year old version of me, you know, who grew up in New Orleans, surrounded by Confederate iconography and feeling like I never had the language to understand why it was there, who grew up in a city that was always being told all the things that were wrong with it, all the you know, because of violence, because of poverty, because

of the way that you know, the public housing projects represented the deterioration of the American family, and implicit within all of that was people saying all the things that they thought were wrong with black people. And I remember, and in a majority of black city, you don't necessarily have to say it, but it can be implied with

the sort of language that you use. And I remember growing up in New Orleans and feeling a sense of of psychological and emotional paralysis, where like, I knew what I was hearing was wrong, but I didn't know how to say it was wrong. I didn't have the language, I didn't have the history, I didn't have the sociology, I didn't have the toolkit with which to push back

against it. And part of what has happened over the course of my adult life, and I think specifically with this book, was attempting to give myself the language to understand so much of what I experienced growing up. And I hope that the book serves as an offering to those who, like me, recognize that they didn't understand the history of slavery and thus the history of this country actually in any way that was commensurate with the impact

that it has had on this country. And so this book was a sort of four year journey for me in trying to answer so many of the questions and fill in so many of the gaps that existed in my own education, and hopefully bring the reader alongside with me to answer some of the questions that they might

have had as well. You know, I tell my listeners often they have heard me say that, you know, I am a child of immigrants that grew up out east on Long Island in New York, in a majority white area, majority white suburb, and throughout my entire life have felt like I've had to teach myself about black history. I've had to teach myself about the truth of slavery and only being able to even scratch, not even the surface there to be able to teach myself about black revolutionaries

throughout our history. Because I've said many times before that I believe that one of the greatest extensions of white supremacy is our public education system. That if you can invisibilize people to their history, to their you invisibilize them to their future right. And you know, I wonder for your fifteen and sixteen year old self, what were some of the questions that were percolating in your mind at that time that you have been able to reconcile with

through the last four years of this research. Yeah. So in many ways that's tied to the origin story of the specific project, which is in twenty seventeen, I was watching the statues of the Confederate monuments come down in New Orleans and statue a PGT bow guard Jefferson Davis Robert E. Lee, And I was watching these statues come down and thinking about what did it mean that I grew up in a majority of black city in which there were so more homages to enslavers than there were

to enslave people. What does it mean that to get to school I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard, To get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway, that my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy, that my parents still live on the street today, named after someone who owned over one hundred and fifty enslaved people. Because the thing is, we know that symbols and names and iconography aren't just symbols.

They're reflective of the stories that people tell, and those stories shape the narratives that communities carry, and those narrative shape public policy, and public policy shapes the material conditions of people's lives. And that's not to say that taking down a sixty foot tall statue of Robert E. Lee is going to suddenly erase the racial wealthcap but it is to say that these things, these statues, these this iconography, these symbols help us understand a narrative and a story

that has been created around this country. And I think looking it and then learning more about them gives us the tools with which to identify the lies that we have been told about this country, which then allows us to sort of look around and understand that the reason one community looks one way and another community looks another way, it's not simply because of the people in those communities, but because of what had been done to those communities

generation after generation after generation. I think all the time about this nineteen sixty four essay by James Baldwin and Talk to Teachers, And I was a high school educator, and so this was a text that I returned to over and over again. And one of the things that he says, he says that the responsibility of the teacher and he's talking teacher here literally, but also as a

sort of metonym for the largest society. He's like, the responsibility of the educator is to help the black child understand that, even though the world has told them over and over again that they are criminal, that it is in fact the society that created the conditions that that child is forced to grow up in that is truly the criminal. And for many of us, now that that's really intuitive, we're like, oh, it's clear systems, not interpersonal.

But I think one that wasn't clear for me growing up because it wasn't part of our discourse in the way that it is now. And I think too, part of what I learned over the course of writing this book is that for millions and millions of people, and we see this right in our politics, that is that is still not clear. Right. There still is this myth of meritocracy that's embedded into our sense of what America is and what it represents. There is still this sense of if you work hard, you can get to what

you want and nothing else should should matter. There's still this sense, and we see it in the discourse around critical race theory, This idea of people decontextualizing the quote of doctor King and talking about you know, doesn't either little children standing together holding hands, and doesn't matter what the color of the skin is. It's the content of

their character. Obviously, that's paraphrasing and using that and decontextualizing it and weaponizing it in an effort to prevent people from excavating the history that explains why so much of our society looks the way that it does today, particularly with regard to racial inequality. You know, I often think, now, more so than I ever have before, think about a

shared history, a shared trauma, and a shared past. Right that is supposed to be our organizing principle, right, this idea of perfecting a union, this idea that you can come here and, unlike other countries, you can imagine and in in certain cases be able to create that imagined future.

But I realize now, and what is just coming to bear as we you know, release Killers onto the Street, is that we don't have a shared history, and that the frustration, the anger that I feel right now is about the fact that everything that you write about, what we are learning about, what Nicole Hannah Jones did with the sixteen nineteen project is about airing out these lies. But there are only lies to people that actually connect

to truth. And so I guess the question that I have for you is, in this four year project of doing this in depth the research, how do you reconcile the truth that you were able to excavate in a society that doesn't have shared connection to truth? Yeah, I mean, it's that is the central question. And I think about a visit that I took to Blainford Cemetery in the book, And Blainford Cemetery, for those who don't know, is the

one of the largest Confederate cemeteries in the country. It's in Petersburg, Virginia, and it's where the remains of thirty

thousand Confederate soldiers are buried. And I went there and spent the day with the Sun's Confederate veterans, and for me, it was a really it was an unsettling time, but it was also a really clarifying time because I remember a conversation, for example, I had with this guy named Jeff, and Jeff was telling me about how his grandfather would tell him all these stories about the men who were buried in these fields and how they fought for freedom,

how they fought to defend their culture, how they fought to defend the South, how they fought to defend how this had didn't have anything to do with slavery, It just had to do with protecting themselves against the war Northern aggression. And he talked about how they would come here at dusk and sit in the gazebo at the center of the cemetery and watch the deer sort of scamper through the tombstones, and they would sing the old Dixie anthem. And now Jeff talked about how he does

the same thing for his grandchildren. Right, he brings his granddaughters here and they sing the Dixie anthem, and they come to these events, I mean these events that look like they're not They don't look like clan rallies. They look like family reunions, right, And they're like intimate, intergenerational family events in which these stories are passed down. And so the thing, the reason I bring this up is because for so many people, history is not about empirical evidence,

primary source documents. Historical fact is it is a story that they are told, and it is a story that they tell. It is an heirloom that has passed down across generations. It's something where you know, community and lineage and family take precedence over truth. And so if I go to Jeff and I say, actually, it's quite clear

that the Confederacy fought this war over slavery. All you have to do is look at the declarations of Confederate Secession, and you know it says in eighteen sixty and eighteen sixty one and all these secession conventions that the Southern states had to stay, Like Mississippi says, our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest in the world. Right, so they are not vague

about why they're seceding. Alexander Stephens, the vice President of the Confederacy, says very clearly in his Cornerstone speach in eighteen sixty one, where he says, the cornerstone of the new nation we are building is the principle that black people are in fear you're to white people. It is the idea that the great Revolution, the cause of the Great revolution rupture our country is experiencing is slavery. Right,

They're they're not vague about it. Again, But for Jeff, it doesn't matter, because if he is to accept that information, then he would have to accept a very different story about who his grandfather is, and it would threaten to crumble and disintegrate. So much of who he understands as grandfather is, subsequently what the nature of their relationship was,

and subsequently who he is. Right if so much of who you understand yourself to be as tied to a specific story of this country, and the story of this country told to you, specifically by certain people that you are tied to emotionally, people who you love. When people ask you to tell a different story about America or are a more holistic story about America, it is not just a sort of inconvenient need to reassess and re

examine the history. It is an existential crisis, right. It is a wat to your sense of who you believe yourself to be in the world, who you believe your father and your mother, and your grandfather and your grandmother and your children and the community that is giving you a sense of identity and value and purpose. And that is what we see right now is like so many people whose sense of the story they told themselves is

under threat. Because you have folks like Nicole you have folks like Ebra, you have folks like Keeps your Blaine, you have folks like I mean, there's so many historians and Matt Gordon read Time, Miles, you know, Vincent Brown. I mean, the list goes on and on. So many people who are creating work that is forcing our country to look at itself more honestly, which means that the story that they told themselves about themselves is no longer true. And so then what does that mean for who the

story you tell about yourself? And that's a scary thing for a lot of people to accept, but to be clear, there are many people who do accept it, right, And

so this gets to the origin of your question. Right, I think there's some people who don't care about empirical evidence, and I think there are some people who like very unwillingly confront the fact that their ancestors fought for the Confederacy or own slaves, and they say, my ancestors fought a war for horrific, terrible cause, or did this thing

that I can't defend. But I am not defined by the decisions that my ancestors made, and I can make a different set of I can be honest about what they did and honest about what sort of life trajectory that put me on relative to someone else. But I can also make a different set of choices informed by an understanding of history that are aligned with my values, that aren't necessarily aligned with the values of people who found it necessary to subjugate others in order to create

value for themselves. How do we reconcile though the reality that history informs history, the past informs are present, which

will then in fact dictate our future. And if we're not coming from a space where we are in that shared understanding, when you have you know, Virginia for instance, with just you know, the recent election there, you have a man that is one election that wants to ban the writings and the teachings of Tony Morrison, that you have a state right now, we have states where we are seeing book banning and book burning re establish itself in the twenty first century things that we thought were

we would never see again, right, because that was akin to the Dark Ages, Right. The Age of Enlightenment was about education and research and art and beauty, and the analysis thereof the Dark Ages was everything in opposition to that. I think that we are in the Dark Ages America has entered into the dark ages. Everything is pointing in that direction. And so the friction that we're seeing in the friction that we're living in right now. And I use that as a euphemism. I know that it's a

lot graver than that. But the friction that we're experiencing right now is between those that want to know, those that those that believe right that knowledge truly is power, and then those that recognize the power of that knowledge and are trying to subvert it. And so how do you, like, I get you know, I don't I don't expect you to have like the fundamental answers to all that into

all that is wrong. Um, but but your your writing is so it's so profound in the way that it is holding up a mirror, right, it is holding up a mirror, And so what does it mean to hold up a mirror to a to a society that is that whose eyes are are literally forcefully shut. So, yeah, it's it's hard, and it's the crux of where we find ourselves now, right. I Mean, it's interesting because I

think all the time. Obviously, I've been a lot of time reading and thinking about the Civil War before this as I was writing this book, and it's it's interesting now, right because we if you from twenty twenty one, you look back at eighteen fifty five and you're like, man, like the Civil War is coming, right, But in eighteen fifty five, they like they didn't know, Like they couldn't have told you, like this is about to happen in six years, right or in eighteen fifty right there, you know,

fugitive slave back happens. They're like, there's a lot of tension, but there's a lot of direction. People like, we'll find compromise, we'll do this. It's and I say that because you don't you know what we think the direction and trajectory of the country that we, you know, considered two thousand and twenty one might look foolish in two thousand and thirty one, or might or for some people who are like, well this is the trajectory of war on it might

seem prophetic, But I do believe. So I think there are people, as I mentioned, like Jeff and members of these Sons Confederate veterans, who like live in a fundamentally different epistemological reality, right, like they are fundamentally different sets of truth and knowledge that inform how they move through

the world. And I don't think any primary documents, I don't think any podcast, I don't think any book will change their mind because it is not grounded in their sense of truth is an emotional question, not like an empirical one. I do though, and I believe this. I do think that there are more people who just don't know right, And I think that that's because of an intergenerational, structural,

and systemic failing of our education system. I think it's because of the success and efficacy of the Lost Cause to distort our ability to teach American history accurately. But I think, you know, I spent I visited so many of these places, and I spend time talking to so many different people, and I continue to my work with The Atlantic on this you know, same topic. And I just think that there are a lot of people who don't know so many parts of our American story that

are so central to it. And but they can there are also people who can be manipulated by folks like uh, like young Can and others in Virginia, right, but if but I think that there's a there are ways to engage with people to present this information to people that allows them to hear it, and that has the potential to inform and maybe even transform how they move through the world. I think about the guides and the docents that I met on, you know, at so many of

these places. And I think about a guy named David Thorson at Manicello, and and you know, in forty five minutes, he gave this sort of masterclass that conveyed the hypocrisy and contradictions and cognitive dissonance of Jefferson, Right, Jefferson who, on the one hand wrote one of the most important documents in the history of the Western world, and on the other hand enslaved over six hundred people over the course of his lifetime, including four of his own children,

who wrote in one document that all men are created equal, and about another document that black people are inherently inferior to whites in both endowments of body and mind. And so David is laying all of this out, and I'm watching these two women, Donna and Grace. There's two sort of late middle aged women, white women, And as he's doing this, their faces are wilting, their mouths hang agape, and I go up to them. After the presentation, and I say, I'd love to hear how about you experience

what David was saying. And I always remember Donald was like, man, he really took the shine off the guy. She was like, I had no idea, Jeffersononne Slaves, I had no idea Mona whichello was a plantation. And these are folks who bought plane tickets, rented cars, got hotel rooms, who came to this site as a sort of pilgrimage to see the home of one of our founding fathers and had no idea, genuinely no idea that he wasn't enslaver, had

no idea that it was a plantation. And I think that moment was so important because I you know, I never saw them again after that. I can't speak to like if they went and like changed the way they voted, because you know, they were like, these were Fox News watching self identified Republican, older white women. But they came in and they they engaged with the person that told them the truth, but also in a way that they could hear it. Who demonstrates like so many of the

gods and dosins. I think this both endedness of like extending grace and generosity which is to say, I'm not going to judge you for what you don't know when you show up here, but also demanding responsibility and accountability, which is to say that now that I'm presented this information to you, you have to sit with this and

hold it and you can't run from it. And there was a struggle there because it's jarring, because these are like sixty year old women who are now having to do in real time reassess the story that they have told about this person who is so central to their understanding the founding of this country, and so having to reassess their understanding of this country. And so I say that because like they were changed by what David said

to the extent that they were. I don't I don't know, but I do think it is possible for people to encounter new information and for it to transform how they understand this country. And I know it because it's it's happened to me right in a in a different way

than it's happened with Donna and Grace. But like, but I've been like transformed by everything that I've learned, not just in the context of you know what I wrote about with the book, I mean I've also spent the last few years thinking more about like what has been done to indigenous people in this country, and like my understanding of Indigenous indigenousity has been fundamentally transformed, which then informs how I understand and indigeneity today, and like what

contemporary Native American problems are are like. And so I do think it's possible, and I do think that there are more people open to this information than not. But the people who are even open to it can still be manipulated by, you know, an entire political party, who is who has made it there sort of almost singular political endeavor and task to create an animated a distortion and an animus that results in the sort of election that results in the sort of electoral outcomes that we

saw in Virginia. I want to ask you this, which is, you know, more of a personal question than not. When I went to Monticello, I lived in the DMV area for fifteen, you know, twenty years before I moved back to New York, where I'm from and where I am right now. I went to Monticello. I went to Frederick Douglas's house, I went to Mount Vernon, and I got to tell you outside of Frederick Douglas's estate, Monticello and Mount Vernon left me with a acidic sense of rage

that I had honestly was not expecting knowing. I mean, unlike you know, Donna and Grace, I was fully aware right of slavery, of who owned slaves, of the story, the narrative that was created around these quote unquote great men,

but who their humanness showed them to be right. But I remember walking around those two places, Clint, and feeling like with each shining, happy white face that I saw, I literally like when I had to leave like that, like I the the amount of time that I had intended on staying right um, as a as a student of history, as as a student of politics, I couldn't.

And So my question for you, which is a personal one, is what came up for you right as you are researching, but also as you're there physically with with Donna, with with the Donna and Grace's right, Like, what came up for you emotionally as you were traversing this this land that our ancestors are are were murdered, slaughtered, raped and buried on Can I ask when you visited my god,

it was I want to say to twenty fifteen. I want to say that it was it was between twenty thirteen and twenty fifteen, because it was right before I left to move back to New York. Got it. Um so a couple of things, and thank you for sharing that. I write this at the end of the book. But like my visits, these places are not meant to ever be like definitive portraits of what these places are or

purported to be. They are reflections of you know, sometimes single visits or a series of visits that are shaped and animated by a range of things that are like

in my control and out of my control. And so you know, part of what I write about is how if I were to go but I was not a straight, Southern black CIS gendered man who was at the time a graduate school student at an Ivy League school, that either way that people interacted with me or the way that I might have experienced the place would have been different. So I say all that because I'm a student of sociology.

It was trained by sociologists in graduate school, and so we're always meant to think about our positionality and how that informs the way we see are research sites in the way that our research sites and subjects interact with us. And so I think it is quite possible for you and I to both go to the same place only three years apart and have in some ways similar and

all in some ways radically different experiences. I will also say that so one one's experience at Manicello also depends so much on like who, it depends on which tour you go on, It depends on who your guide is, and a whole host of variables. And like if you only go to Monicello and just go on the house tour, I think you will leave and be like that's all. That's all they're gonna say about Jefferson and slavery, Like I mean, because you know my experience on the house tour.

They didn't. They mentioned it just like as an aside, and it can't be understood and as an a side, because you can't understand Jefferson as a philosopher, as a statesman, as a scientist, as a father, as anything, if you're not going to understand way that being an enslaver is deeply intertwined with all of those identities and is the identity that makes possible everything else that he does. So

there's that. Emotionally, how did I feel? I mean, I think the place for me, the reason that I the conceit of this project was like visiting and being in the physical places, was that, like you feel a history in your body in a different sort of way. And I felt a sort of visceral proximity to the history in ways that are not even the best book could

could create. For me. I think like I always remember it being a Monicello and thinking of and hearing stories about the families that were separated after Jefferson died to pay off his debts, and I had just my son had just been born, and he's four years old now, and so this was at the beginning of the project,

and I had a moment. And I have a four year old and a two year old, and so much of what I thought about, so much of what I thought about slavery was so tied to the spectacle of cruelty and the beatings and the whippings and the the lashes, and I didn't think about family separation to the same extent, but being there and having kids and hearing these stories, I had a moment where I I kind of closed

my eyes. I remembered I was like on Mulberry Row where all the where the enslaved families had lived at Manicello, and I tried to imagine. So I went to sleep in my home with my wife, with my two kids, and I woke up and my children were gone, and I had no idea where they went. I had no idea who had taken them. I had no idea if I would ever see them again. And it's like it's unimaginable to me to even go there emotionally, it's like difficult to even bring myself to that place to imagine

that possibility. And I am reminded in doing so that that is the reality that, like millions and millions of people across generations lived through. That is the omnipresent threat that hung over enslaved people every second of every day

of their lives. You could be separated from your partner, from your children, from your parents, from your community, from the people you love as as a and that it was wielded and weaponized as a as a tool, right like a psychological tool that was meant to prevent you more than almost more than like a beating or a hanging,

which obviously did that work too. But if you you might not run away, not because you're fearful of what would happen to you, but like what if you try to run away, what are they going to do to your kids? What are they going to do to your parents? What are they going to do to your right So it's the threat of what can be done in your name,

even beyond you. And so that was a lot of what was coming up for me emotionally, was like getting a deeper sense of something that we can never have a full sense of, which is like the small Quotitian realities of enslavement that make it this, you know, an institution that was insidious beyond words, And that is so much of what I was I was thinking about when

I was there. Thank you so much for for for sharing that and contextualizing it, because you know, I'm always reminded of when, particularly during the Trump administration, where we were talking about the child separation policy a lot on woke af um and I was writing about it and hearing from people who would say, you know, this is not who we are, This isn't who we are as a country, This isn't who we are as a nation, and and me in my callousness because I am you know,

a realist at at at heart. Um, this is all who we've ever been, right. We have been separating family, creating generational trauma since the beginning of this country, um, and and and wielding it on the most marginalized um among us. And just to listen to your thought process, like had had my eyes starting to water and my

breath gets shallow because I don't even I don't have kids. Um. But the the very idea of of that force, separation, of seeing that, of having no power over it, no even power over whether you're birthing or not, it is just extraordinary. And for it to be an aside, right, for that feeling that has produced so much generational trauma to be an aside in our history and something that isn't fully examined as to the state of our current being,

to me is so incredibly troubling. My last question for you, Clint, is this, what are your hopes for the current fifteen and sixteen year olds that are living in a society right now? That is about cruelty in a way that we haven't actually seen mainstream since you know, the sixties. That is about like real you know, feelings of understanding that like the laws not here for you, right that any misstep, any slight, and like you could be done, and the and the weight of that on fifteen and

sixteen year olds. What do you hope for them, as they hopefully are are delving into, delving into your work, understanding who they are in the context of the society that we are right now and maybe and probably have always been, but it's becoming ever ever clearer. What are

your hopes for them? Something I think about when I think about young people today, specifically young black children, when I think of myself, when I think of my children, I think of how, you know, the first enslaved people came to the British American colonies in sixteen nineteen, and slavery didn't end until eighteen sixty five with the thirteenth Amendment, And I think about how from the moment enslave people were brought to this country, they were fighting for freedom,

They were fighting for liberation, They were fighting against an institution that told them that they would chattel. What that also means is that because slavery wouldn't end for another two hundred and fifty years, the vast majority of people who fought for slavery, who fought for liberation from slavery, never got a chance to experience it for themselves, but they fought for it anyway because they knew that someday

someone would. And I think about how our conversation, how me sitting here, how me writing this book, is only possible because of millions of people who fought for something they knew they might never see, but they fought for it anyway. And I think about what sort of responsibility that bestows upon us, what it bestows upon me, what it bestows upon my children, to attempt to build the sort of world that we all deserve to live in

but might not get to live in ourselves. But we build it, and we work toward it because we know that if we do so, someday someone else will. And we're all here like chipping away at this wall, right and we don't know if the wall is six inches thick or six hundred miles thick, but we know that the more that we chip away at it, the less the people who come after us will have to chip away at. And at some point we're gonna get to the other side of that wall. And so what I

want for our young people. What I want for all of us is to both recognize that our lives are only possible because of what so many people did for us, and that we can only make another world possible if we accept that we might not see it, but we do it not because we will see the fruits of our labor, but because someday someone will. Because that is what the black tradition is in this country, right, that

is what our lineage is a part of. It is the selflessness of people fighting for something they might never experience, but doing it because someone did it for them. Clinton. I cannot thank you enough. I cannot thank you enough for this book, how the word has passed or reckoning with the history of slavery across America, and for taking the time today. I have waited a long time to interview you, and it was and it's definitely definitely worth the way. Thank you so much, Thank you so much.

This was a pleasure. That is it for me today. Friends on woke app as always, Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.