(upbeat music) - [Narrator] And now Crosscut Festival main stage featuring a selection of curated sessions from this year's Crosscut festival.

Thank you for joining us for 400 years of black history with Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha Blain moderated by Soledad O'Brien.

We would like to thank our keynote track sponsor, BECU.

We would also like to thank our session sponsor, Alaska Airlines.

Finally, thank you to our founding sponsor the Kerry and Linda Killinger foundation.

(upbeat music) - Hey everybody, I'm Soledad O'Brien welcome to the Crosscut festival.

In their new anthology, "Four Hundred Souls" editors Ibram X. Kendi and fellow historian, Keisha N. Blain, take a look at history from a different lens, perhaps the lens we should all have been using all along one that fully includes the black experience.

It challenges our perceptions of how history is written and lets us view things in a different way.

There are 90 writers in this book, voices that include teachers and lawyers and poets and activists, and so many, many others.

I'm joined today by Ibram Kendi an author and anti-racist activist and historian of race and discriminatory policy in America.

In July of 2020, he assumed the position of director of the Center for Anti-racist Research at Boston University and by Keisha N. Blain and American historian and writer.

She's an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and president of the African-American Intellectual History Society.

It is so nice to talk to both of you.

Let's jump right in.

90, 90 writers, that sounds utterly unmanageable and sort of overwhelming.

Why don't you start for me Ibram with a look at how you chose them and then maybe you can jump in as well Keisha with the criteria what you were hoping to create by these disparate voices.

- I think we first divided 400 years into five-year increments.

And then when we started looking at these five-year periods, we started thinking about what are the defining or critical things, events, people, places that happened during this five-year period.

And so there were certain things that jumped out at us obviously the first chapter, which was written by Nicole Hannah Jones the arrival this inaugural ship in 1619 or the last chapter, which was written by Alicia Garza of course, black lives matter.

And so what we did is we tried to figure out, okay who are the writers who have been writing on these topics who are the writers who have been already guiding the nation to understand this period, or this person or this place in American history?

And we reached out to them.

- And they said, yes.

Keisha I'm curious how you thought about balancing the voices because there are so many talented writers and am sure there were so many people who'd be thrilled to be part of a project like this because it's so unusual and so rare.

What were your strategies going in and how to manage so much material?

- Yes, well one of the things that we really wanted to do was to capture the spirit of community, of course it's in our title it's a community history of African-America and that meant trying to pull as many diverse voices and perspectives as possible.

I think if we had pulled together 90 historical, I'm sorry 90 professional historians, we probably would have ended up with essays that were similar.

Certainly people would have employed similar methods might have engaged topics in similar ways.

And the beauty of bringing together people from diverse backgrounds meant that readers have a truly a remarkable experience because they're able to grapple with the history not solely through the lens of professional historians but through journalists, through creative writers and economists and political scientists and philosophers.

So, part of it was trying to make it a fun experience, I think for the readers.

And so we actually kept track.

We kept track though, how many historians we had invited, we kept track of how many clean writers journalists because we wanted to have that balance.

- Big giant spreadsheet of who's contributing to a remarkable compilation of a history that hadn't been gathered.

Early in the book, in reference to the Mayflower story of America's first arrivals.

There's a quote from W.B Du Bois and he says, "it is propaganda like this that has led men in the past to insist the history is "lies agreed upon"."

Tell me some of those lies.

Maybe Ibram you can start us off.

What are the lies that people have agreed upon that I think not just the historians or the people who talk about history, but are also, I think taught us in school as children?

- Well, where do we even begin?

I think one lie that we certainly wanted to debunk through "Four Hundred Souls" is this idea that black people are a monolith.

And so there's so much diversity within black America, among black people and we wanted to sort of demonstrate that through these 90 writers, another lie is that there's something are wrong or inferior about black people and every single writer in many ways grappled with that and pushed back against that.

And actually told the truth about the sheer humanity of black people.

- There is, oh, go ahead.

Excuse me, Keisha, forgive me.

- I was just gonna throwing a couple of other lies.

I'll just focus on one in particular and that is the lie concerning slavery.

There's a general understanding, I think today certainly that slavery as an institution was terrible but it's interesting if you go back to history textbooks the way that people have written about slavery has not actually captured how terrible it was as an institution and there are always these narratives to try to suggest that while it was probably not so bad and there were some friendly slave holders some people were really nice to enslave people and that is certainly something that I think "Four Hundred Souls" really shatters because it helps us to see that this is not an institution we could talk about lightly.

We can't forget the fact that people were treated as property.

- Ibram there was a decision made to have, like I guess you'd call them lyrical interludes in between these periods of history.

Why did you set it up that way?

What does that add?

- Well, first, I mean, when we're thinking about the writing community, especially the writing community today in black America, like America more broadly, you can't really think about the writing community without poets.

And indeed one of the things that professor Blain has said consistently is when you're reading the sections, it's almost like you're on a train headed down a sort of a path and eventually you need a break and you need to reflect and you need to reflect on the entirety of the section that you had just read and indeed those lyrical interludes, those poets, all of whom typically they read the actual essays in their section.

And every sort of section ends with a poet.

It allows the reader to actually reflect on that section, on that period of history and it allows that reader to also understand that history from a different type of perspective.

And I think those poets in those poems were just an absolute critical tape history within the book.

- Professor Blain, Molefi Kete Asante says this, that "out of the cauldron that developing under the hegemony of European several types emerged, including those that would record events interpret events, et cetera, et cetera."

Walk me through these types and tell me their significance in preserving the history of slavery and the arrival of Africans in North America because they're essential to the storytelling.

- Absolutely, I think today we often talk about what we used to, we talk about the role of historian certainly and oftentimes when we focus on historians in the professional sense, we talk about individuals who have studied, they have become professionalized.

Many of us have obtained PhDs in history, for example and we certainly do play a significant role, I think in uncovering the stories of the past in order to illuminate the present.

But one of the other I think significant contributions is the role of what we term as the griot, right, as the person who might not have necessarily had some sort of professional training.

But part of what they're able to do is to tell the history through the process of oral histories or being able to pass on stories on.

And I think that part of the history that certainly professor Molefi Asante emphasizes among others is crucial to helping us think about how history is preserved and remembered.

And we tried, I think in "Four Hundred Souls" to pull on all of these strands and all of these contributions of beyond just the formal training, but also think carefully about oral histories as one quick example.

- Hmm, yeah an important example.

There's an author who's talks about whiteness as a ledge you can only fall from, what was meant, and she's in this talking about a white man who's been beaten for having sex with a black woman not because he had defiled her or abused her but because he had tainted his whiteness.

Explain what the ledge means and talk about that ledge, if you will Ibram, where did that come from?

What moment in time was protecting racial purity not falling off that ledge at any cost focus and essential.

- Wow, yeah I mean, that's just incredible piece.

And indeed, I think one way we can understand is it's just this longstanding notion of whiteness as pure and indeed whiteness like anything that's apparently pure can be made unpure.

And the way it'd be made is unpure and in the sort of biological senses is to that one drop.

So this is the sort of idea of if you have a drop of the blood of people who are not of European descent then you suddenly are not sort of white anymore.

And I think this is Angioma who is writing on a very critical sort of case that happened in the 1630s.

And she's really comparing her personal experience as a bi-racial woman who is read and projected and treated as black and has been her whole life, despite her mother being white.

And indeed as somebody who is certainly not purely white and I think it was just an incredible piece.

And I've heard such incredible feedback from that piece in particular.

And I'm speaking, I wanna speak more about it but I don't want to like give it away because I think it's one of those early jewels in the book.

- Yeah, it's an amazing piece.

And for me as someone who's mixed race, I read it as well.

And just this idea that she didn't want to let whiteness claim her I think was the phrase that she used was fascinating.

Is that a modern phenomenon?

Has that shifted how people think about that over time?

Is that something that we just think about today?

What do you think professor Blain?

- I don't think that much has changed it's actually somewhat ironic that Angioma is writing about the 1600s but much of what she outlines can be understood in the modern context.

I think there are still, well, I think we still refer to it as a one drop rule, right?

There's this perception still that if a person is mixed race, it ultimately, if they have a black parent they are categorized as black, right.

And they're classified as such and they are treated as such.

And so I think that even though we generally think that we have progressed in our feet in our understanding of race over so many years the irony is that a lot of these ideas remain salient.

- Hmm, interesting.

Talk to me a little bit, if you will about black women's labor and professor Blain, I'll start with you and then professor Kendi I'll have you jump in on that as well.

How was the status of black women defined and valued in the mid 1600s?

And how did you see that shift and change and grow or maybe more relevantly not change and grow as time passed on?

Will you start for me, professor Blain?

- Yes, we wanted to really highlight the significance of black women's labor and particularly starting of course with the era of slavery.

And we asked historian Jennifer Morgan to write an essay that helps us see how much this history is a gendered history and meaning that one of the things she talks about in her essay is the fact that enslaved black women ultimately every so any children that they gave birth to by default became born into an institution of slavery.

And so it was about being able to trace one's classification as an enslaved person through the lineage of the mother.

And so that is how crucial we can think about slavery particularly through the experiences of black women.

And then of course, something that she talks about but also Brenda Stevenson talks about black women's labor and about the fact that when slave holders and traders were making decisions about enslaved people, there was a a high value place on black women because the idea was that they would be able to work, they would be able to work for themselves but also be able to reproduce.

And so the notion is that even in trading that women would be of high value for the future prospects and to further expand laborers on the plantation.

And so the theme of black women's labor is essential to understanding the development of slavery in the United States.

And those two examples, those two essays in particular I think help see how all of this comes together.

- It lingers for generations, doesn't it, professor Kendi?

- It does and indeed, I mean, I think if we could sort of boil it down the basic level it was conceived of this idea that to be a man is to be a worker, to be a woman at that time, just as many thing today is to be a mother and a wife but to be a black woman then was also to be a worker.

And so what happened is there was this sort of mix of sexist and racist ideas that in a way made black women not only sort of, whether you wanna conceive of them as "men" or not women.

And they were treated sort of in demeaned as such specifically as it related to white women.

And you see that still today, you still see, for instance one of the oldest tropes is black feminist historians have written about is this idea of the sort of masculine strong black woman, who's pretty much like a man.

And it sort of goes all the way back to this period that Jennifer Morgan and Brenda Stephen were writing about - Hmm, one of the poems is by Jericho Brown.

And he says this, "we'd like a list of what we lost."

And one has to imagine that would be a pretty long list.

So professor Blain what's on that list?

- Money, wealth, one of the things that I often reflect on which is mind boggling to me was the fact that before the civil war, the estimated value of enslaved people in the United States was somewhere between three and $3.5 billion.

And you think about that.

And then of course, fast forward to the present when you grapple with the realities of the racial wealth gap and you think about what it means for the same group of people who build the United States actually built the United States from the ground up and sacrificed so much for decades ends up being the same group of individuals at the bottom of the economic ladder.

And so what have we lost?

Lots of money and wealth for not only ourselves but for our children and our children's children.

And we know how much wealth matters in this country.

- Hmm, what would you put on that list after wealth?

Which I do think is right at the top.

- I mean life itself.

And I mean, even when we think of white privilege there may be no greater white privilege than life itself, whether you're talking about the gap right now in life expectancy whether you're talking about the number of black people who are killed by the police or even during the sort of era of enslavement which span the majority of 400 years, which span the majority of "Four Hundred Souls" the number of black people who lost their lives resisting pushing for the most basic human desire which was freedom or the number of people who lost their lives because they were black.

I mean, I just don't, I mean between livelihood and life itself, I mean I don't know of any to greater things we've lost.

- Yeah, absolutely.

Let's go to toward the end and talk about Alicia Garza's, what she wrote.

She presents protests over the killings of black people and America's structural inequalities as a black Renaissance in a way.

Can you explain that to me and professor Blain why don't you start for me?

- Absolutely, I would of course emphasize the fact of the significance of having Alicia Garza write this piece to talk about black lives matter.

I think there is no other movement, quite frankly certainly in our recent history that has truly transformed the American political landscape and I would even say it has transformed global politics too.

We saw that particularly over the last 12 months or so with the uprisings and the spring in the summer.

And to think about this as a Renaissance moment I think is important to signify just the vibrancy just a way that people have come together certainly people of African descent, but actually I think as we saw in the last couple months what is so powerful to write about black lives matter as a movement it's is how it has brought people together from all walks of life, from all backgrounds who are committed to social justice.

And so this is truly a moment of change.

I know of course, as historians, we know that change can often be a slow process and we know that things won't happen overnight but I do think this is a moment that we are beginning to turn the corner, so to speak and of course black lives matter has played such a fundamental role in getting us to at least talk about anti-black racism to talk about police violence and hopefully to continue making steps forward for change.

- Do you, this is a little bit like asking people if they have a favorite child.

So I recognize that going into this question but do you have an essay that is your personal favorite?

Is that a secret you'll take your graves when you've asked 90 writers to contribute?

What was the one that struck you in a certain way?

Why don't we start from your professor Blain and then we'll go to professor Kendi?

- Well, I love all of the essays and I have to say that the one that probably moved me the most and I think moved me to tears the first time that I read it was Casey Layman's essay on cotton.

And it's just something so beautiful about that essay and the way that it connects certainly to the history, but Casey was able to connect to his own personal story and to talk about growing up in Mississippi and being in his grandmother's house and the feeling of cotton and what it meant for him as a child and and to connect that to the significant role of cotton in black life and culture, particularly in the South.

And that was just an essay that since I read it the first time stayed with me and I think all the efforts are remarkable.

I'll reiterate that, but that particular essay is so moving to me.

- How about you professor Kendi?

- So I've so many favorites and I feel like I try to express a different one each time I think the piece that I'm thinking about now is I think a piece we already talked a little bit about and that's Nicole Hannah Jones opening piece.

And I think the reason why that piece really for me, was so powerful is I mean, the contrasting of the White Lion, the White Lion is the name of the ship that carried the 20 or odd enslaved Africans that arrived in August of 1619, and contrasting that ship with the Mayflower that arrived in 1620 and how she was able to articulate very clearly that we're constantly taught about the Mayflower.

And indeed it's a significant sort of important ship that should be talked about but why aren't we also talk about the White Lion and because if indeed, as she writes the Mayflower is the heralding of American freedom.

Then the White Lion is the heralding of American slavery.

- They're all amazing, amazing essays.

We are out of time, Ibram and Keisha thank you so much for this conversation.

And I cannot encourage people enough to take a look at these stories, they're truly remarkable and a big thank you of course for everyone who's joining me at the CrossCut Festival, have a great night, everybody.

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