inal sin, yet it's depiction in American history and schools remained surprisingly controversial.

Today's guest has traveled the country to document the ways in which that story is told, shining a light not just on who we were, but who we are.

He's Clint Smith this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright music) (bright music continues) Hello and welcome to a "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- This week we're joined by Clint Smith, a staff writer at "The Atlantic."

He's a bestselling author of ""How the Word Is Passed: Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America."

And he's also a poet whose new collection "Above Ground" is in bookstores now.

Clint, thank you so much for being with us today.

- It's a pleasure to be here with you both.

- You know, I mentioned this to you before we got started, but my son came home from college in December having read "How the Word Is Passed" and handed it to his mother and said, "You need to read this."

And she read it that week and then handed it to me and said, "You need to get him on the show."

So I wanna thank you personally for letting me be the hero of the household this week.

(G. Wayne and Clint laughing) - There we go.

I'm happy to do it.

- You know, for those who have not read the book yet, can you give us that 30,000' overview?

- So "How the Word Is Passed" started in 2017 when I was watching several Confederate statues come down in my hometown in New Orleans, statues of P.G.T.

Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee.

And as I was watching these statues come down, I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up than a majority Black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people.

And thinking about, well, what are the implications of that?

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?

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 150 enslaved people?

'Cause 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 narratives shape public policy and public policy shape the material conditions of people's lives.

Which isn't to say that you just take down a 60' tall statue of Robert E. Lee and you suddenly erase the racial wealth gap.

But it does help us recognize, I think, the sort of ecosystem of ideas and stories and narratives that help ground our understanding of American history and help ground our understanding of the ways that certain communities have been disproportionately intentionally harmed throughout American history.

And so I was looking around New Orleans and trying to understand, well, what are the places or the people that are telling this story honestly, what are the places that are failing to tell the story?

And what are the places that are kind of doing something in between?

And as I examined that in New Orleans, I began to think about what it looked like in different places across the country.

And so ultimately spent several years traveling the country visiting plantations, prisons, monuments, memorials, cemeteries, historical sites, homes, neighborhoods, all sorts of places to try to understand how slavery is remembered through the different places across the country.

- It's a powerful, powerful read.

I kept wondering as I was reading this, do we have a problem with history?

Do we have a problem with memory?

Is it persistent racism or just a societal indifference to what these symbols and what some of this iconography means?

Have you thought about that?

- I think that part of it is that the iconography that exists or that doesn't exist is a reflection of our engagement with the totality of the history that has shaped our current society.

And part of what has happened is that so many people's conception of themselves is deeply entangled in a story of America that is the sort of America that is the shining light on the hill, the space, the people or the history, the country upon which no aspersion should be cast, a place that is the best country that's ever existed and as a result, there should be no criticism of it.

And I think now we're in a moment where we have more people who are attempting to tell a fuller, more honest, more intellectually robust, more empirically grounded story of America.

But what that means is that the previous story of America is revealed more clearly to be inadequate or to be a set of half truths.

And that creates a crisis of identity, I think for a lot of people because their sense of self is deeply tied to a story of America that is increasingly revealed to no longer be true.

And I think the monuments in so many ways are physical manifestations of a willingness of different localities, states of a country to directly grapple or fail to grapple with the parts of this country that reflect the sort of unsavory parts of this country that people are fearful reflect shameful or unsavory parts of their own history.

- So the first place you visit is Monticello, the plantation that was owned by Thomas Jefferson, who at any one time had more than a hundred enslaved people operating the plantation.

And that point is central in your writing to understanding Jefferson and his contribution to the founding of American.

Can you unpack that for our audience?

I'm guessing we could do a whole show on just on Monticello and the symbolism and the history there, but go ahead Clint.

- Yeah, absolutely.

And one of the reasons I wanted to start with Monticello and start with Jefferson is because I think that Jefferson is in so many ways a sort of microcosm of the larger story of America in the sense that America is a place that is provided unparalleled, unimaginable opportunities for millions of people across generations in ways that their own ancestors could have simply never imagined and has also done so at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people who have been intergenerationally subjugated and oppressed.

And both of those things are the story of America.

It's not one over here and one over there.

You get to pick this one and not pick that one.

They're both deeply entangled in one another.

And I think Jefferson in so many ways embodies that cognitive dissonance or the sort of moral inconsistency of this country in the sense that he's someone who wrote one of the most important documents in the history of the Western world and also is someone who enslaved over 600 people over the course of his lifetime, including four of his own children.

He's someone who wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and then wrote in his book "Notes on the State of Virginia" that Black people are likely inferior to whites in both endowments of body and mind, said the slave was incapable of love to the same extent that white counterparts were, that the slave was incapable of possessing or sustaining complex emotion.

Talked about Phillis Wheatley, who was the sort of foremother of African American letters, the first Black woman to publish a book of poetry in the history of America and said that her work was below the dignity of criticism, that it wasn't even worth engaging with 'cause he didn't believe that Black people had the necessary intellectual or creative acumen with which to create art, with which to create beautiful things.

And so when I go to Monticello, part of what I'm trying to understand is how does an institution that is tasked with cultivating, curating, and communicating the legacy of this man who is so central to our founding, who's so central to our origin story, what version of the story of Jefferson are they telling?

Are they telling the sort of version of Jefferson that I learned growing up?

You know, again, that talked about Jefferson as a sort of person upon whom no aspersion should be cast, the beacon of light, sort of mythological figure in so many ways.

Or are we talking about him as a human who was deeply flawed and deeply complicated and complex and wrote letters espousing how horrible slavery was while also continuing to enslave people.

And so, you know, I'm always interested in how these historical sites grapple with the totality of the legacy that that land represents.

- So if Thomas Jefferson could magically appear in the year 2023, 2 questions, what would he have to say to people in America, number one, and number two, what would he make of his reputation, his legacy as we now understand it?

And you've brought to light certainly in great detail and with great power in your book.

- It's a fascinating question.

I think that he would say, I think he would defend himself by saying that the role of his generation was to build the American project and that freeing Americans from colonial rule was the task of his generation and the thing that he is most proud of sort of laying the intellectual, political and economic groundwork upon which the American project would be based.

And I think he would say, as he did say, that ending slavery, he saw it as inevitable.

He didn't think that slavery was a sustainable institution, and he sort of resigned himself at the latter stages of his life to the idea that this was something that future generations of political leaders would solve.

He's like, "My job was to build America.

Slavery is wrong.

There's no moral justification for it.

But we couldn't do that and build the American project at the same time.

This is something people in the future will fix."

And then I think he might say, "Look, it ultimately did get resolved in the end, even if, you know, I think Black people would contend that that was at the expense of generations and generations and the millions of people's lives."

And what would he say about his reputation today?

You know, what's fascinating is that Jefferson's reputation differs in so many different places, right?

The United States is a deeply diverse pluralistic country with people who carry all sort of political, ideological, and historical views.

And I think that how Jefferson is understood varies depending on who you speak to.

And so I don't think, certainly now we are telling a story of Jefferson that is accounting for the parts of his story that weren't often told when I was growing up, when so many of us were younger.

But I, you know, I think that he would say, "Look at my writing in which I said explicitly that slavery was wrong.

That there was no..." I mean, he, and that's the fascinating thing about him, he wrote about how there's no moral justification for the institution and he tried to varying degrees at times to begin the project of unraveling slavery.

And when he met pushback, he sort of threw his hands up and again, went back to what I previously said.

He was like, "Well, there's only so much I can do and this is a task for future generations."

What's interesting about Jefferson, and I think the thing to remember is that he knew slavery was wrong and wrote extensively about it and yet continued to own hundreds of enslaved people himself until the day that he died.

And so I think he really represents the idea, which is true for so many humans, that you can know something is wrong intellectually, but bringing yourself to stop participating in it when it affords you benefits, when it affords you comfort, when it is economically beneficial for you is a whole nother matter.

- You know, Clint, I am mindful of the fact that earlier in your career, you were a high school English teacher, if I have that right.

And you know, there's a huge debate going on in this country right now about how we teach American history.

The state of Florida has been in a tussle with the College Board about an AP African American studies course, which all seems wrapped up in politics.

You mentioned earlier that some of what we're talking about here sort of challenges some persons, you know, thinking about what it means to be an American and their own sense of their understanding of what America is and what it means to be an American.

You know, how do we make sense of that in 2023 that this idea that we cannot recognize the flaws and the errors of our founders and of the founding without somehow, you know, being disloyal Americans?

That just seems incongruous to me.

- I think it's unfortunate because we live in a society, we live in a country that is so complex, full of so much cognitive dissonance, full of so many things that feel morally and intellectually inconsistent with one another.

And in order to understand why we live in a country that is, you know, for all intents and purposes messy and complicated, we have to understand the way that our founding was messy and complicated and full of brilliant people who were also deeply flawed and very intelligent people who, you know, created the banking system, created the political infrastructure, created the sort of social infrastructure upon which the American project would be based in many ways that were helpful and incredibly generative and incredibly important.

And also that so many of the decisions they made in shaping that infrastructure were animated by their own biases, were animated by a desire to keep women or Black people or indigenous people or immigrants from certain parts of the world, from being part of the American project.

So my whole ethos is the both/and-edness of this country and the both/and-edness in this of our history, you don't have to throw away everything you ever learned about George Washington.

You don't have to throw away everything you've ever learned about Thomas Jefferson.

You don't have to throw away everything you learned about our founding.

What we're doing is adding texture, we're adding layers, we're adding perspectives, understanding that certain moments in history impacted different groups of people in fundamentally different ways.

And that's not an ideological project, it's an empirical one.

It's a historical one, right?

It's one that's grounded in a commitment to scholarly and intellectual rigor.

And so for me as a former English teacher, what I want is, you know, when I'm teaching my students about Jefferson or, you know, we're reading something that one of our founders wrote, I want to present as many primary source documents as I can so that my students can make the most informed decision about these people that they can, rather them presenting them with a partial set of documents or a partial set of ideas that don't allow them to make a full assessment of who these individuals were.

- So Clint, that's clearly something that more, all, teachers should do as well.

We can't have this conversation, it seems to me, without mentioning the efforts in some parts of the country and by some people to minimize the history and the legacy of white supremacy and those efforts are publicized, they're well known.

What do you make of that in 2023?

- Again, I think it does a disservice to understanding the full legacy and lineage of the country that we are a part of.

You know, white supremacy has been an omnipresent force in American politics since the American project began.

And in order to understand the way that those forces either precluded or animated or were responsible for directly creating many of the policies that have shaped what our contemporary landscape of inequality looks like, again, does a disservice to the students we're trying to teach.

An example I think of all the time is the New Deal.

And when I was a kid, I was taught about the New Deal, FDR's New Deal is this great catalyst of intergenerational wealth, one of the most important, if not the most important set of legislation in the 20th century.

This thing that lifted millions people from poverty into the middle class.

And it was that for so many people.

What's also true about the New Deal, and what I didn't learn until many years later when I read a book by Columbia historian and political scientist, Ira Katznelson called "When Affirmative Action Was White," is that the New Deal was created with the specific intention of preventing Black people from having access to the benefits that the New Deal afforded.

So Black people didn't have access to social security, minimum wage protection, housing mortgages, healthcare, many parts of the G.I.

Bill, union membership.

And that was done by saying that we were going to, allowing Dixiecrats in the South to have power over saying that farm workers and domestic workers won't have access to the benefits that this New Deal is affording, knowing very well that Black people represented the vast majority of farm workers and domestic workers in this region.

And so it was a way you give the great catalyst of intergenerational wealth over the course of a century to one group of people, and then you very intentionally don't give it to another group of people.

And then people want to act surprised generations later when there are disparate outcomes along the lines that these resources were allotted.

And I bring that up because I think it's one example of a way that sort of, that white supremacist ideology, that white supremacist politics animated our public policy in a profound way, right?

The great catalyst of wealth over the course of the century, the New Deal, prevented the vast majority of Black people in the South where the vast majority of Black people lived in the early 20th century from having access to the benefits that it afforded.

And so you can't tell an honest story of this country unless you're gonna tell an honest story about the way that white supremacist ideology animated federal, state, and local politics for generations.

- Hey, Clint, we could spend the next week and a half talking to you about this book, I think.

I do want to ask one other question though.

20 years ago, I took a trip to Germany with a group of Americans and a group of Germans, and part of that was a visit to a concentration camp.

And the Germans on that trip were, their mood shifted, obviously, as we approached the camp and I remember speaking with one of my German counterparts about that, and she relayed about how she had been visiting different concentration camps from her earliest days in school.

And part of that is an intentional reckoning for Germans about the history of their own country.

Do we do enough in the United States to reckon with our own history, our own difficult history around race and white supremacy and plantations?

- We don't do nearly enough.

No.

And I've been very interested in that question of what our process of reckoning looks like relative to Germany for some time now.

And wrote a story for "The Atlantic" a few months ago, putting in conversation the way that the United States memorializes or fails to memorialize slavery and the way that Germany memorializes the Holocaust.

And one of the biggest difference, there are many things that animate why Germany's history and engagement with history looks the way that it does relative to ours.

But one of the biggest differences, I think, is that, and one of the things that I didn't fully appreciate until I went to Germany was how few Jewish people are actually left in Germany.

You know, in Germany, Jewish people represent less than a quarter of a percent of the population.

There are more Jewish people in the city of Boston than there are in all of Germany.

And so when I spoke to Jewish historians and scholars, one of the things that they would tell me is that for so many Germans, one, most Germans don't know a Jewish person.

And Jewishness, as they put it, is a sort of historical abstraction more than an actual group of people.

It's an empty canvas upon which Germans can paint their contrition.

So it means something very different to lay down a wreath or to build a monument or to have a holiday commemorating this past when you are not actually engaging with the people who are the descendants of, and the survivors of that past of genocide and terror.

Well, that's very different than the United States where there are 44 million black people, tens of millions of us who are the descendants of enslaved people.

And so to build a monument or to lay down a wreath or create a holiday, to build up iconography, apologizing for slavery, but then to not engage in any sort of material intervention to make a specific amends for that harm feels like an empty gesture.

And also, you know, to build a monument without engaging in that sort of material repair would almost serve as a more of an indictment to the country because there would be a recognition that this harm was done, but an inability to engage in the thing that would mitigate and make amends for the harm of the past.

And so I think that's one of the reasons among many that it's more difficult for Americans to acknowledge and come to terms with and fully account for the past in the same way that is done in Germany.

- You know, Clint, I mentioned at the top of the show that you're also a poet.

And in the time we have left, we wanna spend a little time talking about your new collection of poems "Above Ground."

And you're gonna begin with a reading for us of one of the poems in the collection.

- Yes.

This is my new book "Above Ground."

A meditation on fatherhood and what it means to sort of raise children in the, you know, this sort of political and social moment.

This poem is called, "When People Say We have Made It Through Worse Before."

When people say We have made it through worse before, all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones of those who did not make it, Those who did not survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who did not live to watch the parade roll down the street.

I've grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to convey that all ends up fine in the end.

But there is no solace in rearranging language to make a different word tell the same lie.

Sometimes the moral arc of the universe does not bend in a direction that will comfort us.

Sometimes it bends in ways we don't expect and there are people who fall off in the process.

Please, dear reader, do not say that I am hopeless.

I believe there is a better future to fight for.

I simply accept the possibility that I may not live to see it.

I've grown weary of telling myself lies that I might one day begin to believe.

We are not all left standing after the war has ended.

Some of us have become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.

- That's very powerful.

Clint, you know, as I read "How the Word Is Passed" first, and then I read "Above Ground," the collection of poems, and I saw some of your family members in both, I felt like a little bit more of a personal insight into you and your thinking and even your approach to "How the Word Is Passed."

Are those works connected, besides the fact that you wrote them both, but is there an intentionality in that connection?

- Very much so.

You know, so much of what I spent the past several years thinking about was the history of chattel slavery.

And I am the descendant of enslaved people.

My children are thus the descendant of enslaved people.

And I've been thinking a lot about the way that slavery impacted families, impacted children, and you know, I will always remember staying in a cabin at Whitney Plantation, imagining what it would be like to be separated from my children.

That I put my kids to bed one night and then I woke up and to imagine that they were gone and that 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.

It's a sort of unfathomable cruelty to even begin to imagine.

And yet one that generations of enslaved people lived under every single day of their lives, that sort of omnipresent threat that you could be taken away from the people you love most.

But I also know that fatherhood for me is so much more than the fear and the violence and of our history.

It is dancing with my kids in the kitchen.

It is making french toast on Sunday mornings.

It is watching my son see a ladybug for the first time and the sort of wonder that comes with that.

So I wanted to write a book that tried to step into the expansiveness of what fatherhood has meant for me, what family has meant for me.

And think again about that idea of the both/and-edness of the experience, how parenthood is both incredible, remarkable, awe-inspiring, and incredibly humbling, fear inducing, and can be scary.

But it's but it's both of those.

- So Clint, you're obviously an amazing poet.

The poem you just read is sobering, powerful, and it really summarizes a lot of the human experience and what you just mentioned with your kids summarizes another part of existence.

Why poetry and where did you get that talent too?

I mean, it's just, it's amazing.

Why do you do poetry?

- Got about 30 seconds, Clint.

- Yeah, you know, poetry for me is the act of paying attention.

Poetry for me is the thing that allows me to be fully present in the world and to pay attention to a moment, an idea, an image, a history, and I've been writing poems since I was a little kid and have felt lucky to be able to make a life of it.

- Well, Clint, we are grateful for you and your writing the two books.

The first is "How the Word Is Passed" and the more recent collection of poetry is "Above Ground."

That's all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or at pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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