 Welcome, and thank you for joining the New America Fellows program for this webinar discussion of Clint Smith's How the Word is Past, a reckoning with the history of slavery across America and conversation with Adam Harris today. I'm Movista Yu, director of the Fellows program. For more than 20 years, New America has supported hundreds of fellows who've gone on to publish books, produce documentary films, and other deeply reported projects. We're grateful to be able to host this conversation with you today in partnership with the political reform program, as we welcome Clint Smith to New America for a timely and necessary conversation related to our reckoning with the history of slavery across America. And it's first week. The book debuted at number one in the New York Times best sellers list. So congratulations to Clint on that accomplishment. Before we start, a few housekeeping notes to keep in mind. If you have questions during the event, please submit them to the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen, and we'll pass them on to the moderator. If you need close captioning, Zoom now provides that function, and just click the CC button at the bottom of your screen to activate that feature. We encourage you also to sign up to our newsletter and events list, and you can do that on our web page at newamerica.org slash fellows. And more most importantly, copies of Clint's book, How the Word is Pass, is available at Solid State Books through a bookselling partner, Solid State Books. Before I show the conversation over to Clint and Adam, let me introduce you to them. Clint Smith is a 2020 Emerson Fellow and is a staff writer at Atlantic and author of the Poetry Collection, Counting Descent. The book won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He's received fellowships from us at New America through the Emerson Collective, the Art for Justice Fund, Cave Canham and the National Science Foundation. His writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review and Elsewhere. Born and raised in New Orleans, he received his BA in English from Davidson College and his PhD in Education from Harvard University. Adam Harris is a 2020 National Fellow with us this year and is a staff writer at Atlantic where he has covered education and national politics since 2018. He was previously a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education where he covered federal education policy and historically black colleges and universities. He's working on a book the state must provide a narrative history of racial inequality and higher education and how the government is responsible for shaping it. The book will be published this August by Echo and in front of Harper Collins. With that, I'll turn that conversation over to you, Adam. Thank you so much. And Clint, how are you? What's up, man? It's good to see you. Good to see you too. Feels like it's been forever. First, I want to say congratulations. You have written a fantastic book and I'm so excited to be able to sit with you today and sort of reflect on the process on the book and sort of this current moment in America. So actually, I want to begin kind of with the idea that our worlds are shaped by our experiences, our worlds are shaped by the literature that we consume. And I kind of want to ask what were some of your inspirations for this book? What inspired you to write this book at this moment? Yeah, I mean, the sort of origin story of the book began in 2017 when I was watching some Confederate statues come down in my hometown in New Orleans. Statues to Robert E. Lee, PGT Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, these leaders of the Confederacy. And I was watching these statues come down and was here in my home in Maryland thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. And what are the implications of that? What does it mean? 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 Highway that my middle school was named after the leader of the Confederacy that my parents still live on the street named after somebody who owned 150 enslaved people. And the thing about symbols and monuments and memorials and all of this is that they're not just symbols like symbols are reflective of the stories that we tell stories shaped the narratives that communities carry and those narratives shaped public policy and public policy those shaped the material conditions of people's lives. And so that doesn't mean that taking down a statue of Robert E. Lee is gonna erase the racial wealth gap. What it means is that these things are all part of the same sort of ecosystem of ideas and stories that help us understand what has happened to different communities and what sort of, what sort of amend what needs to be amended and repaired in order to account for what has been done to those communities. And so I was thinking about that in the context of New Orleans and then thinking about how New Orleans was remembering or misremembering its relationship to slavery and then sort of just broadened it out and started thinking more broadly about how different places across this country and across the ocean talked about their relationship to this history and ultimately wanted to create a piece of work that served as a sort of a quilt like a patchwork of memories like a patchwork of places that represent the different iterations and gradations along the spectrum of memory that shape how people understand and remember or misremember what slavery was. So from a practical level, that's how it began. And I think the inspiration was that I'd spent, you know, I worked on this book for four years but over the last several years have been deeply engaged in the scholarship of slavery. Books like an Echo and Reads that makes this a Monticello, Diner and Newberry, The Price for Their Primal Flesh, David Blight, Prophet of Freedom, Race and Reunion, Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul, the list goes on and on. And these scholars, their work has just really transformed how I understood what slavery was and how it impacted our contemporary landscape of inequality. And I was thinking, well, what would it look like to put that history in conversation with the sort of physical landscape that it is depicting? And what could I, as someone with a background as a poet and someone with trained as a scholar but also as a journalist, like how can I bring the different parts of these different genres and mediums that I'm a part of and put them in conversation with one another to create an almost sort of multi-layered sensory experience for the reader, almost like a cinematic experience like what does it feel like to be on that land in that place? What does it look like, smell like, taste like? Who are the people who are telling that story? What are their backgrounds? To what extent can we render them three dimensional in the same way that you would in a novel? And so, yeah, I really wanted to bring the sort of the eye of like a poet or novelist and the research of these historians and just bring it together to create something that I thought that might be able to be a helpful contribution to this really amazing body of work that already exists. And we've talked about this before, but just how difficult it is to synthesize and that kind of wealth of information. You said you worked on this for four years, you've really been engrossed in this literature of slavery, you've visited these sites, but how difficult it is to kind of to do that, right? To turn it into something that reads kind of novelistically. Like, can you just talk about the process of synthesizing? Synthesizing that wide amount of information, but then also still making it right approachable. Yeah, I mean, I think I wanted to again create, just bring like a human and emotional texture to this history, to really ground the reader, to give the reader like a sense of intimacy, because part of what the book is trying to do is ground us in our physical proximity to this landscape, right? That this, I mean, this book was written about eight different places, nine, if you include the prologue, but it could have been written about 100,008, right? Like it could have been as the story of slavery is etched into the landscape of this country and scarred into the landscape of this country everywhere. And I wanted to convey our physical proximity and also our temporal proximity. I think going to these places helps you understand how recent this history was and that this history we tell ourselves was a long time ago wasn't in fact that long ago at all. And in terms of process, I mean, I would go. So part of what's interesting about writing this sort of book is that you, and I think you probably experienced this in your own way. I think with any sort of nonfiction writer, you like begin with what you think the book is gonna be and you like write your proposal and then ultimately you look back and you're like, oh, that was cute because the book ends up going in a completely different direction. And so I had a list of places that I thought I was gonna go and I went to some of them. But the thing is you have no idea what you're gonna, even in the places that, so for example, I really wanted to go to Monticello, but I had no idea of what I would encounter when I went to Monticello. And part of what I described in the book is how, this book is not a definitive account of any of these places. What it is is a portrait of a single experience or a single set of experiences from one person and the way I experienced that place is animated by my background and my identity and my sensibilities and the people who I met on that day in that place. Like Monticello is, that chapter is what it is because I meet these two women, Donna and Grace, who, you know, they're like, I meet them after this tour and they're like, I had no idea Jefferson on slaves. I had no idea Monticello was a plantation. How different would it have been if I had gone and had a different tour guide than the person that I had? And so part of it is you don't know how you're gonna experience it when you get there. And then the other, you know, a different example of that is like I never planned on going to a Confederate cemetery or spending the day with the Sons of Confederate Veterans. It was going to a Confederate, a Civil War battlefield and where somebody suggested that I go visit a Confederate cemetery where I saw a flyer for the Sons of Confederate Veterans Memorial Day celebration that ultimately led me in that direction. And so you like don't really know what direction the story will take you in this kind of project until you do it. And I just wanted, so I would go to the place and then I would interview the people and I would come back and I would try to write as much. The first thing I would write is like the exposition or the sort of sensory experience. I would try to write down as much of that as I could because it was still fresh, right? Like, what did it look like? Smell like feel like those sensory details. And then the, and then it almost, I almost did most of the research after going to the place and because I didn't know, because what the book is doing is putting the history in conversation with the places I see and the conversations I have. So I almost didn't know which history, I'd read some, but like a lot of the historical research was done after the fact because I was searching for history that directly addressed some of the things that I was hearing and seeing and experiencing. And to synthesize it, I mean, you have an editor. I mean, that's like what it was for me. I think we cut like 50,000 words from this book. We cut a lot. There's so much, I mean, there's so much to say, but I just wanted to, yeah, just try to like put them all in conversation and create this like constellation of genres that brings together again, the poetic, the journalistic, the historic or historical and just tells the story of slavery. It serves as an entry point for folks into this history who possibly might not have encountered it before. Yeah, you know, one of the things that I've always found really interesting about this book, I had a chance to read it and then over the last week, I've listened to it on my runs. You all should listen to the audiobook if you haven't, Clint does a fantastic job reading it. But just how much of a reckoning with how we reckon this book is, and in one part in particular struck me very early, I think it's the first chapter on Monticello when you're driving to Monticello and you turn off into another plantation thinking it's Monticello. Just how much it's sort of etched in this history. And you mentioned that it reminded you that Jefferson was not singular in his sort of moral inconsistencies. Can you talk about that? Like after visiting all of these places, understanding how deeply rooted slavery is into the foundations of the society and knowing that these folks who have been lionized as singular in another regard, right? Others are often lionized as singular and they're intellected in their vision for the country. I'm knowing that they're not singular in those moral inconsistencies and that by telling the truth about that history, it's not to discount this other part of their person. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I went to Monticello and I think I did this in all of these places to an extent, but like I said before, I could have gone to so many different places for this book, but Monticello I think was interesting because I think it was able to capture a theme that is reflective of other places, as you mentioned, right? So like I could have written the chapter on George Washington and Mount Vernon. I could have written the chapter on James Madison and Mount Pylir. And that's just Virginia, right? Like I mean, 12 of our first 18 presidents owned enslaved people. And so there are many places that I could have gone to think about the dissonance and the sort of moral and ethical inconsistency of so many of our earliest presidents and founding fathers and the way that they live their lives and the people that they held in bondage. But I thought that going to one place would allow me to capture some of the sort of thematic pieces that I would have found in others in the same way that like I could have gone to multiple prisons throughout the South. But I thought that Angola would embody a lot of what I would try to capture if I had done Parchment Prison in Mississippi or a prison in Alabama or a prison, prisons that carry as the scholars to the apartment talks about the afterlife of slavery, like in that landscape and in that infrastructure. And so, you know, these Jefferson was not, he is a singular figure in the role that he played in helping to cultivate and make possible this experiment in democracy, this American project. But part of what I talk about in the chapter is that he is not at all singular in the context of the moral inconsistency with which he lived his life. I mean, there were enslavers throughout Virginia and the Carolina, I mean, everywhere throughout the South, throughout the North who recognized that what they were doing was wrong and did it anyway, right? I mean, like Jefferson is so fascinating because he at various points in his life, he's like, this is, he's like slavery is an abomination. And it's like pretty terrible that we do this. And then has, you know, owns over 600 people over the course of his lifetime, including four of his own children that he has by Sally Hemings, you know, a four decades long relationship to the extent that an enslave or having children with an enslaved woman under his control, it can even be called a relationship. But that is reflective of a much larger phenomenon that happened at plantations throughout the South. So a part of what I try to do in any of these places is capture some of the sensibilities that would be evident at other places, at other Confederate cemeteries, at other prisons, at other plantations. You know, I did New York City as the chapter to sort of capture the idea that slavery was not just something that happened in the South. But I could have done it, I could have done a chapter on Boston. I could have done a chapter on New Haven, Connecticut. I could, I mean, Providence, Rhode Island, the list goes on and on. But I also like didn't want the physical book to be too big. Cause like I know what it's like to see a book even by a writer that I love and admire and to like see it on the shelf and you're like, it's just gonna be tough. Not yet, not yet, not yet. And I didn't want people to be like intimidated by like the physical object of the book. And so, you know, instead of making it a 600, 600 or 700 page book, it's a, you know, 295 page book. And I think that that mattered to me too. Yeah. You mentioned Angola and I remember I was deep into a run and I was listening to it the other day and it gave me a visceral reaction. And I can only imagine what going to Angola was like for you can just talk a little bit about, you know, not to give too much of the book away, but talk about that, what that reckoning looked like at Angola and how that compares to other, you know, say, let's just put two in conversation, right? Angola and Whitney, how those reckonings stack up to each other? Yeah, I mean, first off, that's like such a mix of endorphins happening in your system with like going on a run and listening to Angola, the Angola chapter. Angola is for context for those who might not be familiar Angola is the largest maximum security prison in the country. It's 18,000 acres wide bigger than the island of Manhattan. It is a place where 75% of people held there are black men. Over 70% of them are serving life sentences and it is built on a former plantation. And the thing that I've been telling people is that if you were to go to Germany and you had the largest maximum security prison in Germany and it was built on top of a former concentration camp in which the people held there were disproportionately Jewish, that place would rightfully be a global emblem of anti-Semitism. It will be abhorrent, it will be disgusting. We would never allow a place like that to exist because it was so clearly run counter to all of our moral and ethical sensibilities. And yet here in the United States we have the largest maximum security prison in the country in which the vast majority of people are black men serving life sentences, many of whom were sentenced as children, many of whom were sentenced by non-unanimous juries which has since been rendered unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States who go out into fields and work for virtually no pay while someone watches over them on horseback with a gun over their shoulder. And so part of what I'm exploring when I go to Angola is like what are the ways that a history of white supremacy not only enacts physical violence against people's bodies but also collectively numb us to certain types of violence that in another global context would so clearly and wildly be unacceptable. And not only what does it mean that that place is not discussing or talking about its relationship to slavery which in my visit I did not find any evidence of it doing so and even when I pushed the person who was leading our tour, I was like, well, can we talk a little bit about the prison's relationship to slavery? He was like, there's some bad things that have happened here and we can't do anything about that. So we got to focus on the future. We got to move past it. We can't do anything about the past. That was reflective of the sort of, that is reflective I think of a sensibility that a lot of places carry that are unwilling to grapple with their history. But not only is it doing that but it has a gift shop. And in that gift shop, there are the shot glasses and baseball caps and sweatshirts and coffee mugs with the silhouette of a watchtower with the words Angola, a gated community written on a coffee mug that's sitting alongside a stuffed dog like a child's toy that has prison clothes that it's wearing. So what are the ways? Like it's not only that it's not at all interested in interrogating or excavating its own relationship to this horrific history but that it's almost making a mockery of the people who continue, the thousands of people who continue to live in that prison, in those cages on that land with that history. So sometimes people ask me like, what was the most surprising part of the book? And I think generally I was surprised by my capacity to be surprised which I was surprised often. But Angola was like, specifically was really unique in how haunting it was. And I think to your point with the, to put it in conversation with the Whitney, I went there with Norris Henderson who's somebody, I went to the Angola with Norris Henderson who's somebody who was incarcerated at Angola for almost 30 years. And now it does a lot of sort of prison reform work in New Orleans and across Louisiana. It's actually one of the leaders of the ballot initiative that passed a few years ago that made non-unanimous juries unconstitutional or illegal rather in the state of Louisiana. And I think that he talks about how sometimes he will bring people to Angola and then also bring them to the Whitney to understand, again, like to invoke city of heart, and then like how the afterlife of slavery has shaped our contemporary prison landscape. And it's not to say that prisons are slavery. I think they are two phenomenologically distinct entities that should be interrogated on their own terms. Like slavery is something in which your children and progeny are born into as chattel in an intergenerational context, which I think is like very unique to that set of circumstances. And that is not the case for prison even though there is obviously a relationship between one's likelihood of being incarcerated if you're a parent or somebody in your family was, but they're different, right? And so I'm not here to say that they are the same thing, but I'm here to say that clearly the landscape and infrastructure and sensibilities of this place are profoundly shaped by that history. And going to both back to back allows you to sort of see the ways that they are in conversation with each other. One thing that I thought a lot about reading your book was this idea of narrative control. People wanting to consume the part of the narrative that they're interested in. You saw it in Monticello where you have a different experience of Jefferson kind of going on the slavery tour rather than the general tour. You were kind of talking to the Confederate reenactor where you're saying, this is my family's heritage and this is my family's legacy. There's like that distinct tiny trying to remember we'll call that part of it. We are in a national moment, right? Where there is an attempt at sort of narrative control in terms of what students can be taught in history classes and things like that. I guess, how does the way that America has reckoned as you examined in this book, how does that kind of dovetail with this current iteration in state legislatures with trying to control the narrative about America? And I also want to, before you answer that, I wanna remind our viewers that you can ask questions using the Q and A function. But just, how do you understand those two things in conversation, Angel? Yeah, I mean, I think in part of that we're experiencing a sort of gaslighting now. I mean, I think we have in our political context in different ways for the last five years, but even in this, there is an attempt to tell people that what they are seeing or what they are watching or what happened didn't actually happen. And I think there was a 19th century iteration of that. When we think of the lost cause, like that is what the lost cause was. If you think about Alexander Stevens, the vice president of the Confederacy in his 1861 cornerstone speech, he said that in essence that slavery is the cornerstone upon which this new nation will be built. It is built upon the principle of African inferiority and efforts to continue enslavement in perpetuity. And then in 1865, after the civil war was over, people were coming up to him as he was writing his memoirs and asking him like, well, what do you have to say about this? I mean, like you made this speech and that like pretty clearly laid out what the Confederate project was. How do you account for that now? Like how do you imagine reconciliation moving forward after you said those things? And he's like, I never said that. And they're like, but we were there. We saw you, it's in the papers. And he's like, no, no, no, you must be mistaken. I never said anything. The reporters must have misquoted because I never said anything like that. And I mean, it's the same thing that we see today. It is an effort to tell us that what happened is not what happened, that what we are seeing is not what we saw. And the success of the lost cause has profoundly muddied the water of how we understand slavery in this country. I mean, it wasn't until the mid 20th century that the slave, this our collective understanding and the sort of public consciousness around slavery began to change, right? Cause in the 19th century, it was shaped by the lost cause, which is saying that slavery wasn't even that bad. There were plenty of benevolent slave owners too. Like slavery wasn't even that bad. And it also wasn't the cause of the civil war, right? It was the war of Northern aggression. It was state rights. It was economics, taxes, tariffs. And that all the people who were fighting for the Confederacy were fighting simply for their community and to benefit and to protect their loved ones rather than to uphold this egregious institution. And so I think that is what the lost cause is attempting to do. And in the words of John C. Calhoun, who's the late senator from South Carolina, he's like, it is a positive good for both black and white people alike. And that idea was continued to be propagated by historian Aldrich B. Phillips in the early 20th century who talked about slavery and the plantation as a civilizing institution, that it's rescued black people from the savagery of Africa and gave them Christianity and gave them civilization. And again, it wasn't until the civil rights movement when you had historians like Kenneth E. Stam, or Kenneth Stam who helped us recalibrate our understanding of the history of slavery and so that we were more effectively able to understand that slavery was the origin point of the black, white inequality that we would go on to see throughout the 19th century, 20th century and even into the 21st century. So, and now we are in this moment. And I think, I've been talking a lot about Juneteenth because you can never plan what moment your book is gonna arrive in. And so for this book to come out when there's all this conversation about critical race theory and Juneteenth, you know, I describe it as a sort of marathon of cognitive dissonance that is reflective of the black experience in this country more broadly when you have Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday at the same time as people across, there's a state sanctioned effort to prevent young people from learning the very history and context from which Juneteenth emerges. And so it is a sort of interesting and strange moment for the book to arrive in the world. And I think that the people who are attempting to prevent this history from being taught are acutely aware that the more people who know this history, the more they begin to question so much of the mythology of the American experiment. The more they question the myth of meritocracy begins to shatter the idea that the reason this country looks the way that it does is due simply to people's hard work or lack thereof, that is decimated because it's not true. And I think there is so much agency and freedom and liberation in gaining this information. I know there has been for me over the course of my adult life, like filling in these gaps that I experienced as a kid, or the gaps that I had as a kid to more effectively help me understand the way that this country has lied to me on a range of different factors. Yeah. And before we move to Q and A, I just wanted to ask about, you mentioned kind of how, why are we trying to shape what students are taught? You also talk a lot in the book about the things that you were not taught in school. And then as a teacher, you were a teacher before you went to graduate school. I guess, how do you hope young people can engage with this book? What do you hope that young folks can take away from this book? Yeah, I mean, I alluded to it a little bit before, but I think all the time about this 1963 speech that became an essay published in 1964 by James Baldwin called, Talk to Teachers. And in it, one of the things that he says is that, Black children are told over and over again by this country that they are criminal. But the role of the teacher, and he's saying teacher here literally because he's speaking to a group of educators, but also as a sort of metonym or standard for the larger society. He's like the role of the teachers to help that child understand that even though the world tells them over and over again that they are criminal, it is in fact the society and the history that created the conditions that that child is forced to grow up in, that created the social circumstances and economic circumstances and political circumstances of that child's life that is in fact criminal. And you have to sort of turn it on its head. And for some of us that's very intuitive, but I think we can under-appreciate the extent to which there are so many young people of all races moving through the world with a sense of, with an understanding that's like the reason this community looks that way and the reason that community looks that way is because of the people in those communities and not because of what has been done to those communities are done for or been done for those communities generation after generation after generation. So I think centering history and policy and helping ground people in a deeper understanding of what this was is really important because I know what was really important for me. And I mentioned this before, but like also just helping, hoping that the reader is grounded in our temporal proximity to this period of time. Cause the way I learned about slavery in elementary school and I alluded to this in the book is that it was something that happened in like the Jurassic age, that it was like the dinosaurs and the Flintstones and slavery, right? That they all like coexisted at the same time. And I think all the time about how the woman who opened the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016 alongside the Obama family was the daughter of an enslaved person, right? Not the granddaughter, not the great granddaughter. She was the daughter of someone who had been born into intergenerational chattel bondage. My grandfather's grandfather was enslaved. So when I think about my four year old son sitting on my grandfather's lap, I imagine my grandfather sitting on his grandfather's lap. And it is yet another reminder that this history that we've somehow been convinced was a long time ago was not that long ago at all. And so the idea that that institution would have nothing to do with what the contemporary landscape of inequality looks like with what our social, economic, and political infrastructure look like is profoundly morally and intellectually disingenuous. And I hope that this book can help with being in the physical places and creating that sense of sensory intimacy, if you will, that it can help remind us that this history was not actually that long ago and has to be understood as something that shaped and continues to shape what our society looks like. And so I wrote the sort of book that I would have wanted to teach my students when I was a high school teacher. The sort of book that I would have wanted to read when I was a high school student. A sort of book that would have given me the language and the history and the toolkit part of it to more effectively make sense of everything that I was seeing around me. Yeah, absolutely. So I wanna bring the audience into this conversation and we have a question from Reggie Simmons who says, how did you prepare yourself mentally for going to multiple plantations and a Confederate cemetery? I'm scared to go simply because I feel like it would be a really difficult, really difficult emotionally, but I feel like necessary. Was it something you had to wake up and mentally prepare for or did you just kind of hop up and get to? It's interesting because you, some places you go to when you think you're prepared for and then you get there and you realize that you're not. And so like the Whitney, I was like, okay, I'm gonna go to this place that like is telling an honest history about slavery that's like centering the lives of enslaved people because enslaved people are the center of the story. Cool, cool. I think some places like that I approached more like intellectually and I was unprepared for the emotional weight of it. So like, and some of that is animated by what was happening in my own life. So I remember being at the Whitney and standing in the field of angels which is this sort of courtyard where they have on plaques around this statue the names of thousands of enslaved children who died as children in Louisiana. And my son at that point was two years old and there's a statue of an angel holding the body of a deceased, presumably enslaved child. And it was, I was like unprepared for the emotional impact that that space would have on me in ways that I don't think you can ever prepare for really. And then I go to a place like the Blandford cemetery and spend the day with the son's Confederate veterans. And I mean, I was a conspicuous presence as you can imagine. And my wife would only let me go if I took my wife friend, Billy. So I was like, Billy, you gotta come with me to see the Confederates. And he was like, what? And that, I mean, that experience was haunting. I mean, I'm probably on some like Neo Confederate message reports somewhere because I was, people were like pulling out their phones and like recording me or taking photos or clearly in an effort to sort of intimidate me. But you just don't know what you're gonna get until you go there. So I think I tried to like take care of myself throughout the process. And, you know, part of the reason it took four years instead of 18 months is because, I mean, mostly because I have small children. And so like me going to these places often was like, when can I get my parents or my in-laws to come stay with us for a day or two? And I think you just, I just tried to go there and be fully present. And I think the writing and the type of book that I was writing allowed me to process a lot of that in the writing itself, right? Like I wasn't going to this with any pretense of it being a sort of dispassionate objective endeavor. Like my emotional sensibilities are what shape how I write it. And a lot of that I'm processing in these pages. We have a question from Sarah Jackson, fellow American fellow. She says, thanks for this great book, Clint. Can you share what the most surprising or valuable question about the book you've been getting on tour is? The most surprising or valuable question. That's such a good question. It's like a meta question. I would say the, I don't know that it's not surprising, but I think valuable is when people ask specifically about some of the public historians who I met and who were featured in the book because this book is like as much as it's many things, but it is also like an homage and it's would have been owed to these public historians who are just doing remarkable work in all of these places in Monticello, at the Whitney, at New York City, Galveston. I mean, I met so many people who are doing this like work that is not, you know, there's no, there's no accolades associated with this. There's no big prize. There's no, they are doing it because of just a deep personal commitment to honesty and to the truth at the places that are doing it well. And I want this, you know, whether it's Yvonne Holden at the Whitney, whether it's Damaris Obi in New York, whether it's David Thorson at Monticello, these are folks who my experience with them was transformative for me. And I think too about how, you know, what I mean, what a half a million people before the pandemic would go to Monticello every year. I think 100,000 people would go to the Whitney every year and those numbers were growing. And so we'll see what they look like after the pandemic. But I mean, like hundreds of thousands of people go to these places. And so in some ways, these public historians and guides have such a unique opportunity to help people who might not pick up, like, for example, where's the joint? Oh, I think it's holding, I was gonna pick up a book, but I think it's holding on my computer. For example, I think of David Blythe's Profit of Freedom, which is a biography of Frederick Douglass, which is just an extraordinary book, just extraordinary. I mean, like one of the, maybe the best biography I've ever read. It's also like 800 pages long. And so that's one of those joints where I was like, I had to like pump myself up. I was like, all right, we're about to do it. And there are a lot of people who for a lot of reasons, time, resource, you know, aren't gonna read an 800 page book on Frederick Douglass or any subject. But in a 90 minute or a 60 minute tour for somebody to be able to provide the essence of something that Annette Gordon Reed wrote or that Alicia Stanton wrote, takes such, it takes unique skill, right? These are folks who are also deeply well read. Like I went into the office of the public historian at Monticello at the time, Naya Bates, and you go in and her desk looks like the graduate school seminar, right? So they, I love this sort of symbiotic relationship between academic historians and public historians and how in somewhat they need each other and work off of each other. And so yeah, I love that this book can sort of lift up a few of those folks because these are people who deserve respect and just like who do remarkable on the ground every day work to unearth these stories and to bring them to people who in when this might be the only way they are encountering those stories and to do it with a mix of grace and generosity but also accountability. Like I'm not gonna water this down for you but I'm also gonna recognize that this might be the first time you're encountering this information and this sort of delicate balancing act is a really impressive sort of pedagogical experience. Yeah, we have another question from Julia Chaffers. I hope I pronounced that right. What advice do you have for students interested in history and journalism for turning these passions into a career? I'm in college but this can apply to younger students as well. For turning it into a career, I mean, I kind of stumbled into this. It's really interesting like with the tour and all the reviews coming in because the first line of everything is like poet and journalist, Clint Smith and like, who's a journalist? When did that happen? I mean, I've been a staff writer at the Atlantic for less than a year. And so this is, it's still new to me in some way. I mean, the majority of time I was writing this book I was a graduate student. I was getting my PhD. Also trying to write my dissertation at the same time which I don't recommend to anybody. I wouldn't, everything happens for a reason but I would not do that again. I mean, I think the path is different for everybody, right? Like your path to this work, I mean, we do very similar work in the sense that we are attempting to like put history and conversation with the current moment. And if you don't have it yet, the state must provide. Bam, if you haven't read that joint then you need to order it ASAP. Also order it from solid state books. I was prepared, I was glad that moment happened because I was like, when was I gonna do it? There you go. And really a fantastic, fantastic book. But like, we're both trying to put history and conversation with the current moment to try to help make sense of it. But like, your path to this looked different than mine. So I went to graduate school and I spent six years in a PhD program and love academia in so many ways. And I'm only able to do what I am because of those six years of being in the academy. And also didn't think that that was the path for me, at least not at this time in my life. And so journalism allowed me to take the best of what I learned through academic scholarship and to put it in, again, sort of put it in conversation with what was happening around in the world today and just to be able to write to a more general audience that I might have had to write to in academia. With that said, obviously there are many amazing scholars who write for general audiences and scholarly audiences and everything. But I think for me that it just became clear probably about halfway through my program that I wanted to do something different. And so I think in terms of advice, I would, I think just always be clear on what you want your path to be. Even when you don't know what it is. And I said, what I mean when I say that is that I think it would have been very easy for me to be so caught up in the inertia of academia. And just like, especially at a place like Harvard there's like a very specific set of, there can be a specific set of expectations about what scholarly success looks like or what success as a graduate student looks like. And I think you just have to be intentional about finding mentors, finding a community who is going to help you cultivate your own niche, your own role and sort of make that experience what it was. And I knew I wanted graduate school to be a time period where I gained a toolkit with which to more effectively make sense of the, you know, to more effectively work on behalf of communities that I care about and to make sense of the world in order to communicate those things. And so, you know, that's why I also teach like Crash, the YouTube series, Crash Course Black American History which is like this 10 minute, these 10 minute videos outlining black history. Cause, you know, even there might be people who don't want to read my 295 page book but who will watch an animated version of me in a 10 minute video, you know, on YouTube. And I'm really about like meeting people where they are and thinking that like scholarship and this information can manifest itself in a host of different ways. And that's why, you know, that's why it's so great The New America, you know is supporting filmmakers and supporting podcasts and supporting authors and supporting, you know there's so many different ways to get these ideas out into the world, especially now. So yeah, I think, you know that's the long-winded way of saying be open, be flexible, find your people who are going to support you and do not allow the inertia of any industry or space to put you on a path that doesn't feel right for you. Yeah. So we have a question from Matt Teechi who says, are there any particular moments or experiences that came out of working on this book that will always stick with you? Whether they made it in the book or not? Yeah, I mean, the, what this book did in ways that I will always be grateful for, even beyond like even if this book had never been published is that it made me sit down with my grandparents in a way and ask that and have a conversation with them in a way that I had not had before. You know, my grandfather's 90 years old, my grandmother's 82, 81, 82 now. And the epilogue is centered on a series of conversations that I had with them after we all went to the National Museum of African American History and Culture together. And we were walking through this museum and I had this moment where I realized that so much of the violence and history that was documented in this museum, my grandparents had experienced firsthand. And I write this in the book, but like I had spent years at that point, like deeply engaged in the scholarship and deep in having conversations and interviewing all these strangers about their, you know, how they think about slavery, how they think about history. And I had this moment where I was like, I've never been nearly as intentional as I'm being with these people I'll never see again with my own family. And so I am inspired by the Federal Writers Project. I sat down and interviewed my grandfather and interviewed my grandmother and it was just really, you're just bringing that level of intentionality to my conversations with them and recording it and like having it on record was just really powerful because, you know, for a lot of us when we see our grandparents it's like during Thanksgiving and there's like, you know, and if you're like me, my children are like throwing macaroni at each other across the table. And so there's not really a time to like tell me how like Jim Crow apartheid shaped the fabric of your life. And so I really loved that I was able to do that and I will carry those conversations with me forever. And in that I was able to, you know, it's my remaining grandparents are my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandmother. And that they were both able to read the book and I like read the chapter allowed to both of them that they're in. And I have a, I posted on like social media but when I called them, I got FaceTime them after the book was the number one on the New York Times bestseller list. And to be able to share those moments with them, I mean, you don't, I didn't know words for it. It's, I feel very lucky to have been able to hear their stories and to, you know, try to do right by them through this book. Yeah, absolutely. And one of the, you know, when you were talking about kind of that, that how you infuse the book with poetry kind of that, that refrain of my grandfather's grandfather wasn't slain. It was just incredibly powerful. So yeah, I encourage anyone of you, if there's one chapter that you absolutely read, read that epilogue, it's really fantastic. We have a question from Marissa Martinez. It says, while reflecting on so much history in the past in the book, what thoughts about black futures came up in your research writing or editing process? Great question. I mean, I'm interested in the way that we conceive of memorials and like we'll conceive of monuments moving forward. And David Blight, the historian that Yale I mentioned, wrote the Frederick Douglass biography. He's mentioned like, what would it mean to have monuments to not only to like what has happened, but like what we want to happen? Like what would it mean to have monuments to ideas and to aspirations that not only are, cause part of the roles that the role that memorials serve is to help ground us in a sense of what has happened before us, but we don't have a lot of monuments that help to serve as like a north star that help orient us and help as much as these, a memorial to Frederick Douglass helps remind us of where we've been, can we create monuments to guide us towards where we're going? And so I'm interested in like a reconception and a recalibration of what monuments are and can be to what extent can they contribute again to ideas and aspirations and also like collections of individuals rather than sort of singular figures. Cause even a, you know, I admire Frederick Douglass probably more than any American in history. And like, I also don't know how helpful it is to have more monuments to singular figures generally. I mean, like, cause that's not, that's not how social change has ever happened. It has always been collections of individuals. One of the monuments I love the most is the, here in DC, it's the monument outside of the African-American Civil War Museum that's really, it's not even out, it's like a block away and it's right by the metro station, but it is a monument that is pays tribute to the almost 200,000 people, 200,000 Black people who served in the Union Army. And the monument, it has like all of the names of these people as well as a statue of like different soldiers who were in the Navy, who were in the Army. On the back end, there's a woman and children to represent the people who, cause like they were also part of the war effort, right? Like there was women in these camps who were cooking and taking care of the children and cleaning. And so, and I'm like, that's how movements work. That's how change happens. It's like groups of people. And so I hope that moving forward, we can create monuments that reflect, not, don't pay tribute just to singular figures, but to groups of people and to people who, to groups of people who might not always get the sort of recognition that they deserve. Yeah. So our last question comes from Ruben Miller, also a fellow fellow. Oh my God. Yeah. Let me, let me double up. Bam. Right here. Thank God. Yeah. Both of these. Absolutely. He asked, he said, you mentioned that we are in a strange time for your beautiful book to land. I wonder what you make of the public's embrace of the book, number one times bestseller, while such a large part of the country clings to its sense of racial innocence. Yeah. I mean, again, you have not read Halfway Home. Absolutely do it. So good. Unlike any book on mass incarceration I've ever read. And I mean, I think that what we're seeing now is a direct response to what is a shift in public consciousness and a shift in sensibilities that have happened over the past several years. I mean, I think in the same way that civil rights movement transformed this country's understanding of the origins of inequality, transformed this country's understanding of the manifestations of inequality and really served as a catalyst for like an entire, like the history profession, like profoundly changed as a result of that period of time. You have plenty of historians. Again, folks like David Blythe, folks like so many who will say that like that period of coming of age as a historian during the civil rights movement shifted the way that they understood what civil rights or what history could be. And I think there are so many scholars, journalists, sociologists, artists, like that period of time was trajectory shifting for so many people and shaped the type of work the scholarship, the art, the journalism that would be created after that. I think similarly, like people tend to focus on what like legislation has or has not been passed as a result of Black Lives Matter movement. But there's political change with like a big P and then there's political change with like a little P which is to what I think of as the social and cultural shifts that a movement serves as catalyst to. And so, the nature of our conversation around the white supremacy and racism all of these things is in a fundamentally different place right now than it was several years ago. I mean, I think if you would ask somebody in 2013, like what is redlining? They'd have been like, is that makeup? Like is that a type of lipstick? Is that like something new that Rihanna came out with? And now more people have a much more sophisticated understanding of the manifestations of racism not as an interpersonal phenomenon, simply but as a historic one, as a systemic one, as a structural one. And I think there you have people who see this shift happening, who see the ways that we are more able to accurately identify the way that racism has animated and shaped the entire, again, social, political and economic infrastructure of this country. But there is an effort to prevent young people from learning the very things that have been so transformative to so many, that have made us more effectively able to identify why our country looks the way that it does today. And that is existential for some people, because if they lose that, if they lose the ability to lie about why this country looks the way that it does, then their sense of themselves, their resources, their wealth, their power will be compromised. And more people will realize that it is built on mythology. So I think these things that are happening in state legislatures are a direct pushback to so much of what Black Lives Matter over the past several years and then sort of supercharged after George Floyd has created, which is not everywhere, but in many places, a different landscape of discussion around how racism manifests itself in our country. Absolutely. Well, Clint, thank you so much for engaging in this conversation. And you have not yet picked up how the word is passed. It's just a fantastic book and congratulations on all of its success and its continued success. And to our audience, thank you so much for joining us and we look forward to seeing you at the next event. Thanks, everybody. Appreciate you, Adam.