Daina Ramey Berry, Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at UC Santa Barbara

Daina Ramey Berry, Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at UC Santa Barbara, thoughtfully discusses the history of enslaved people in our country and meaningful educational methods for our young people.

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Welcome back to What's at Risk.I'm Mike Christian. Well, hello everyone.
We're here with doctor Dinah Raymie Berry, the Dean of Humanities and Fine
Arts at the University of California,Santa Barbara. She's a scholar of the
enslaved and Black women's history and theaward winning author and editor of six books,

(00:23):
including the recent of Black Women's Historyof the United States. Professor Barry
completed her bachelor's, masters and PhDin African American Studies in US History at
the University of California at Los Angeles. Doctor Barry, thank you for joining
us. Thank you so much forhaving me. Yeah, it's really a
pleasure to have you on the show. Maybe a great place to start would

(00:45):
be for you to talk a littlebit about your background and your path in
life and how you got to thepoint that you're at today. Well,
I was the child of two universityprofessors, and I did not ever imagine
that I would become a professor myselfbecause I want to do everything that my
parents weren't doing. I grew upin a small college town in northern California,

(01:06):
Davis, where the UC Davis isthe campus there. My father was
a professor there, and my motherwas a dean of business at California State
University, Sacramento. So grew upin this small college town. Most of
my friends parents were professors as well. Was an athlete. I ran track
and I played soccer in high school. And then I went off to UCLA
for undergrad and I was majoring ineconomics until my final quarter before graduation,

(01:33):
I took some history classes and decidedthat I wanted to change my major and
extend my graduation the whole year.My parents weren't that excited about that,
but I ended up becoming a historian, and then I stayed on for my
master's and my PhD. And Igraduated nineteen ninety eight. And I've been
teaching and working as a university professorfor over twenty five years, or about

(01:56):
twenty five years, and then inthe last few years I've gone into universe
administration. When I left UCLA asa student, I was a faculty member
at Arizona State, Michigan State,and the University of Texas at Austin.
And it was at that last schoolUT that I served as a department chair
of the history department, and alsoI had previously served as the associate dean
of the graduate school. Is thatall just kidding? So you brought it

(02:23):
up, So I'm going to askyou. Because I grew up in California,
I am a UCLA fan, SoI've been a lifelong UCLA fan,
which has been a life of mostlybeing disappointed in my sports teams except for
basketball. But you ran track forUCLA on a team that included Jackie Joyner,
Kersey, Gil divers Flow, Joe. I must have just been an
amazing experience. And how first off, how did you manage to do it

(02:46):
with the intense academic load that youhave? And then secondly, how did
that experience shape your future and thethings that you're doing today. I'm sure
it must have had some impact.Absolutely. One of the things I say
is that sports are what really shapedme in terms of how I organized myself.
It gave me the discipline and thefocus that I need in the administrative

(03:07):
job that I currently have. Beingan administration is really intense, and so
we're sports and I was a sprinter, so that's even more intense. It
was amazing being at Uscilia. Iwas one of four walk ons, and
in high school I was fifteenth inthe state in the one hundred meters,
which was like really good for California. But when I arrived at ECLA,
I was competing with women that werenumber one in the world. And so

(03:30):
I tell people my experience there workingwith Bobby Cursey. Jackie Joinner, Cursey's
husband was our coach. My experiencethere was about grit and about hard work
and about how you have to justreally work hard in order to stay on
the team. And I was theperson that ran the rounds of the relays
so that the a team like GaelDevers could run and their legs were fine

(03:53):
for the finals. But I wasa jumper as well. I did the
long jump, in the triple jump, and it was a great experience.
Jackie Jo Flow, Jo Valery Briscoe, Hooks, and a number of other
top Olympic athletes were training with Bobby. They weren't they were done with school,
they weren't in school at the sametime, but they were the elite
athletes and they were training on thetrack. We did the same workouts they
did, So they would run thefirst round, then our a squad would

(04:15):
run x and then I would runin that third group and it was an
amazing experience. Yeah, I'll betand that you're at a very high level
with that group of athletes for sure. Just change the focus for a second
here and go back to what promptedyour keen interest and really your academic focus
on the enslaved. So. Ihad two experiences at UCLA right before I

(04:41):
graduated and before I switched to historymajor. I was taking an intro to
African American history class. It wasa visiting professor. I had to these
two experiences. One was a positiveexperience and one was negative. And I
share this because we can be catapultedinto our career paths by both positive and
negative experiences. It doesn't always haveto the straight path. So the negative

(05:01):
experience was this professor was using racialslurs on a daily basis in the classroom
with the examples he was citing,and I was really uncomfortable with that,
and I wrote a letter in Wetook our midterm, and I wrote in
the midterm that I had been offendedby the examples that every single day he
was using, you know, racialslurs, And I just said, are
there not other examples that you canuse to you know, spread out your

(05:27):
work with primary sources, and Igot what I received. I received what
I call academic detention. He askedme to come and see him every Wednesday,
and I got a D on theexam. And it was in those
conversations where he shared with me whyhe became a historian and why history is
about interpretation of the record. Andit was in those conversations that I realized

(05:50):
I wanted to become an historian andthat I wanted to interpret history and I
wanted to share how I saw itwith the world. And I also then
went and talked to the chair theHistory department, and the chair said,
we have the scholar coming. She'san expert in the history of slavery,
which you seem to be a littlebit interested in. Why don't you take
her class? And it was mylast class before graduation. And the scholar

(06:13):
was doctor Brenda Elaine Stephenson, whobecame my dissertation advisor prolific scholar. And
when I took that class, Iread a book by a scholar by the
name of Deborah Gray White who wascurrently at Rutgers University. She wrote a
book called Arn't I A Women?And It's about enslaved women. It was
the first book that had been writtenabout enslave women, and I saw women
like me two hundred years before thehistory, and it was really fascinating read.

(06:38):
So that class and that book,and those two experiences, one positive
and one negative, encouraged me toapply for graduate school, and I wanted
to go on and become a professorand write books and focus on the lives
of the enslaved as people, notas objects, because I thought so much
of the literature focus on enslaved peopleas objects in a space, as opposed

(07:00):
to a person that has humanity andfeelings and has a thought about how they're
experiencing enslavement. And that's really whatit drives the work that I do and
how I write. I try tothink about it from the perspective of the
enslaved, and I also try tomake sure I quote them. I find
as many way as I can toput their voices into the text. And
I think that's the thing this mostcompelling. How do you find the individual

(07:25):
stories. I know you're a researcher, so you're probably wired to be able
to do that, but some ofthe stories are very compelling and they're personal.
That's what makes it so real.So how do you what's your process
for doing that? So I learnedthis from Brenda Stevenson, and that is
really spending as much time in thearchives looking through a variety of primary documents,

(07:46):
but then reading those documents over andover and over again. There are
plantation journals eighty plus pages that I'veread before and read them, you know,
weekly, same journal, weekly,read the records, and sometimes after
the fifth or sixth read, Ifound enslave people that I didn't see that
we're in this record. You know, Marcy has her twins today, or

(08:09):
sorry, wouldn't have been Marcy likesomebody like Miley, or you know a
name and a name that might havebeen common for enslaved women gave birth to
twins, and then four months lateryou might see twins died, just a
passing reference that I might not haveseen when I was reading this big ledger
book. So that's one way,and also to look to see where enslaved

(08:31):
people because of the way that archiveswere constructed in the past. It's changing
now, but they were not necessarilyconstructed looking for enslaved people. The records
that we found in the archives areoften the records of those that enslave them.
They're enslavers. And so I alwaystold my graduate students that I've trained,
I said, you know, you'llspend more time in records of the
enslavers to look for and find theenslaved, and they're there. And how

(08:52):
do you get those little tidbits ornuances of personality that you that you can
incorporate into the story, or isthat you tell. One of the things
I say is historians are often detectives, So we're piecing together like shards of
evidence. And I might know alittle bit about one enslaved person from a
diary entry, and that I mightknow something about them from another enslaved person

(09:16):
who might have had a published narrative. For instance, Frederick Douglass has three
autobiographies, and in his autobiographies hetalks about other enslaved people. So there
are really wonderful nuggets and stories withinnarratives that people often overlook because they might
be reading Frederick Douglas's autobiography to readabout Frederick Douglas's life. But there are

(09:37):
other people and enslaved people and stories, and those are the stories that I
try to write about, those onesthat are sort of buried in there that
maybe someone might have overlooked or nothave seen in reading the text. Now,
the history of slavery in our countryis obviously emotional and most often misunderstood
subject. We're still experiencing the repercussionsof it today. You wrote it article

(10:00):
for the Washington Post about the misrepresentationsand misperceptions that we all have about slavery,
all of us have that. Canyou mention to some of those in
what the impact of that is onthose of us today to really understand and
maybe even turn a little bit aboutour understanding of slavery. I'm glad you

(10:20):
asked about that particular article because sincethen I've been I'm now writing a book
about the myths of slavery that willbe out next year to be compressed and
really excited because I've been toying withmyths for a while because every time I've
spoken about the institution, I havequestions, and people are often worried about,
well, I have a question.It might seem like a dumb question,

(10:41):
and I always say there's no suchthing, and they'll have made assumptions
about the institution. They'll make assumptionsthat are completely unfounded in the historical record,
and so I've felt like writing abook about some of the most common
myths would be a great way todebunk and also an opportunity to educate,
both in a way that's sort ofnon threatening but also very inclusive. So

(11:05):
one of the myths that we findis that people will say in slave people
preferred to work in the house.They wanted to work in the plantation house
because it was a better environment.It wasn't they didn't have to deal with
the weather, And they think thatthe house slaves, as they term or
enslave people that worked in the housewere that was the preferred workspace, and

(11:26):
it really wasn't. It wasn't.Because you were on call twenty four hours
a day. You were scrutinized ina way because you're in a smaller setting.
So if you didn't set the tableright, or if you didn't fold
the napkin properly, or the fooddidn't taste the way that the people you
were serving expected it to, thenyou were at risk of being punished.

(11:48):
Those that worked in the fields,however, could work in a space where
they were also being monitored, butfrom afar. Somebody was sitting on a
horseback or walking nearby. They wouldhave, you know, chunks of time
where they weren't being supervised, likeover their shoulders. And also some people
preferred to work in the fields becausethey were physically able to work out there.

(12:09):
They could work in the fields withpeople that they were close to,
and that helped them survive the institutionof slavery. It gave them the emotional
support. That makes a lot ofsense. What's the reaction of people,
readers or just people that you talkto about these these misconceptions and when you
bring something like that to light,which is very logical and very well presented,

(12:31):
how's the reaction. The reaction hasbeen sort of surprised. They'll say,
well, I don't understand. Theywant to know the origin of why
they learned the history a certain way, why did we make these assumptions.
And so the book that I'm workingon, I'm sort of going back to,
like, this is the myth,this is where it came from.
Let me debunk it, and let'stalk about what we do what we do

(12:52):
with this new information, right,And that's sort of the structure of each
of the chapters. They're real small. This is a very easy sort of
I want to call it a costtable book, but it's something that will
be easily read, and it's writtenfor a lay audience. So one of
the things that I think is importantabout debunking myths is that it helps us
create a common understanding. One ofmy dream would be if we had a

(13:15):
national syllabus during I don't know ifit was in the last ten fifteen years.
There's been actually last like five orten years scholars have been doing on
social media, you know, theCharleston syllabus or whatever. You know.
They had all these syllabi that theywere creating about different political moments or things
that have happened in history and contemporaryhistory, and some of it is to
provide a context. I would lovefor the United States to read like the

(13:39):
same common books, you know,on Let's say we'd choose a topic.
Let's say every year it's a differentsubject, but let's say we're going to
do a reading on or six monthson slavery. And if we did a
common reading, and I'd have atough time deciding which books or articles to
select. But I do think oneway to address this challenge of misinformation is
to make sure we're reading the mostcutting edge accurate historical records from trained historians.

(14:05):
And it feels like that that presentationof accurate history and more just from
a factual perspective, maybe take someof the emotion out of the topic.
Yes, yeah, debolutely it does. Because I came from Texas before I
came here, and there was alot of controversy over history, and we've
had across time, we've had historywars about what should be taught, which

(14:28):
shouldn't be taught in different ages andso forth. And one of the things
I think works in these conversations thatI enjoy participating in is to say,
Okay, we're talking about the AmericanRevolution, Let's look at documents from that
time period. Let's look at documentsthat tell us about that. Or we're
looking at the Secession when you knowthe eleven States seceded from the Union.

(14:50):
Let's look at the first constitutions orthe secession documents. So instead of saying,
let's see what historians think about it, let's read the documents and come
up with from our our own perspectivesof how you want to respond to that
or how you interpret that. Forsure, now you've received grants from the
Spencer Foundation and Humanities Texas to workwith k through twelve educators on teaching the

(15:13):
history of slavery to American youth.What is the approach? Is it this
similar approach when you actually do that, Have you actually worked with teachers to
modify the way they teach the historyof slavery. Yes, I've been working
with teachers my entire career. Thatwas something that I've always been committed to.
As a graduate student, I usedto go do talks in classrooms and

(15:35):
I even train my PhD students towork with K through twelve educators and go
into the schools. So a coupleof things that I do depending on the
age group, and I share thisall the time, is I think it's
important to have students engage history.And sometimes we're talking about moments that were
one hundred and fifty two hundred yearsago. They can't even students can't relate.

(15:56):
But one way to do it isto bring examples from people either that
live in the same community of them, so you might have an example of
something that happened in their town,or in their city, or in their
state that gives them a little bitof a connection. I also try to
bring examples into the classroom of childrentheir same age. So if I'm talking
about slavery and I also use adifferent terminology, I use different language.

(16:18):
I make sure that it's age appropriate, and that can be subjective. But
I'm not going to come in thereand use historical jargon to teach five year
olds which about slavery. And Ihave to tell you, some of the
best conversations I've had about my scholarshiphas been with children. They are curious,
they ask amazing questions, and theyare open minded in ways that I

(16:41):
find as we age, we becomea little more close minded. The following
are excerpts written by David Blight froma report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Teaching hard History. Only eight percentof high school seniors can identify slave
as a central cause of the CivilWar. Slavery is not an aberration in

(17:04):
American history. It is at theheart of our history, a main event,
a central foundational story. Slavery isalso ancient. It has existed in
all cultures and in all times.Slavery has much to do with the making
of the United States. This canand should be told as a story about

(17:26):
human nature generally and about this placein time. Specifically, Americans were not
and are not inherently racist or slaveholding. We have a history that made our
circumstances, as it also at timesunmade them. And slaved Americans were by
no means only the brutalized victims oftwo and a half centuries of oppression.

(17:51):
They were a people of many cultureswho survived, created, imagined, and
built their worlds. The point isnot to teach American history as a chronicle
of shame and oppression. Far fromit. The point is to tell American
history as a story of real humanbeings, of power, of vast economic

(18:11):
and geographical expansion, of great achievements, as well as great dispossession, of
human brutality and human reform. Changedoes not roll in on the wheels of
inevitability, wrote Martin Luther King Junior. Change comes because we make it come.

(18:40):
We have a lot of fake news, and we have a lot of
unreliable sources of information that get kidsin particular get and they get it in
a variety of different ways social media, TikTok, and everything else. How
would you suggest using our school systemsor maybe other ways to just be able
to negate that on some level andget back to just the facts, the

(19:03):
way that you presented all the timeon emotionally, this is what it is.
Come to your own conclusions, butthis is what it is. Can
we use the school systems to dothat? You think we can? I've
actually been trying to do that fora while and I have created with the
colleague two colleagues of mine from theUniversity of Texas, we created a fifth
grade social studies curriculum that's online.That was one way that we and we

(19:26):
it's available to anyone that wants touse it. So when I've done these
workshops all over the country, wewant to help students learn. But one
way to work with the schools,and we work with a few schools when
we were in Texas, But Ithink one way to work with schools is
to encourage them to accept, youknow, the most cutting edge, up
to date curriculum. And I've seenplaces where they want specific people taught and

(19:52):
other people not to be included.And I think that's hard is when we're
drawing the line and like, ifthose decisions aren't made by academics, or
academics aren't contributing to those conversations,then that's where we lose the importance of
the historical record. Maybe it's agood time for you to tell our listeners

(20:14):
about your most recent book, whichis a Black women's history of the United
States, and just tell us alittle bit about how that came about,
you know, maybe some relevant aspectsof it. So I co authored that
book with doctor Calli Nicole Gross,who was a scholar at Emory University,
and we were at the time bothat u T Austin, and we were
approached by Beacon Press to update again. There have been a few books that

(20:38):
have been written sort of collective historiesof African American women. Had been about
ten years since the last one hadbeen published, A Shining Thread of Hope
DARLINGE. Clark Hine had written andso we wanted to update that and look
at some more and bring it forwards. We brought it from you know,
Africa up until the year two thousandand you know, the book came out

(20:59):
and we spoke about it. Itcovers you know, every time period and
what we structured around stories. Soevery chapter opens with the story of either
a young girl, African American girlor an African girl, and then or
someone that was older, an adultand We tried to find stories that opened
up the time period that we werewriting about. And when we first drafted

(21:19):
the book, we were very fortunatethat a team of scholars did a workshop
with us and we gave them arough cut of the book. It was
very rough. Some chapters were justoutlines and others were complete chapters, and
they gave us feedback. We talkedthrough it and it was probably one of
my most enriching academic experience with colleagues. Some were more junior to me,
some were more senior to me,and they gave us feedback on the book

(21:41):
and wrote we wrote it because weinitially submitted a draft that had stories of
black women that people probably never heardof, and we were really proud to
find these women and these young girls, and they said, this is great,
great information. It's all new,but there's no place where people can
connect because they can't ink these storieswithout connecting them to people that they might

(22:03):
have heard of. So, whowere Rosa Parks contemporaries. You're talking about
Cloudak Colvin. But if people don'tknow who CLADEK. Colvin is and they
don't know that she came before RosaParks, they're not going to be able
to engage this book the way youall wanted to. So we had to
go back and add in all kindsof famous women and stories, and the
book did really well. It's stilldoing well. I know the reviews were
really good. I read some ofthe reviews, so that's terrific. Congratulations

(22:26):
on that. So I'll ask youthis show is called What's at Risk?
And you know we're living in avery perilous and fragile time in the world.
For sure, what do you thinkare a couple of the major risks
we face? And then I'll alsobalance that out with what do you think
the opportunity for us in that riskis. I think the one risk that

(22:48):
I'm seeing, the major risks thatI'm seeing is that we are becoming more
divided and we're not We're not speakingto each other with the level of respect
that I would want to see.That bothers me and it worries me because
I'm a very sort of collective andinclusive person. I think the risk is
if we we need to respect ourdifferences and learn from them. You know,

(23:10):
there are there are there are somany things about what makes our country
such a really unique place. Butif we fight against each other, then
we're losing the strength of the communitythat we created in the United States here.
So that's what's at risk. That'swhat's at risk. And the second
part of your question was what's theopportunity and the risk? I always try

(23:30):
to balance it out, you know, because everybody can talk about all the
things that are wrong. That's allwe generally hear is that, But where's
the opportunity? What things go incycles, and usually when you get to
a low point, you start toclimb back out of it. But I
also like to hear people's perspective onwhere the opportunities are for us. I
think the opportunity for me, itsort of ties into the risk. The

(23:52):
opportunity is for us to come together, for us to think of ourselves as
a collective whole, so when oneship rises, we all rise. I
think that's a really important opportunity forus to learn about our diversity and embrace
it and celebrate it in ways thatwe don't have to run from our differences,
but if anything, thrive off ofour differences and see them as strengths.

(24:12):
And I think that's an opportunity thatwe have and a lot of us
are doing that, and I thinkit's wonderful, and I just hope to
see more collective action and more collectivecommunity. I would love to see our
country become and continue in spaces wherewe already are this community that we are,
we think about ourselves in a morecommunal way, and that we support

(24:33):
one another in that way as well. And I think there's a great desire.
It's beneath the surface, but Ithink when you get to these times,
then people really do long for somesort of community and some sort of
connection, which we've lost on manylevels. Yes, absolutely, Well,
last question, what's next for you? You're possibly one of the most prolific

(24:56):
people I've ever talked to. Ican't imagine. I'm sure you've got a
long list of what's next. Maybejust give us the top five? Okay,
top five? Well, you know, I wanted to go. I
wanted to compete in master's track andfield. That's something that's on my bucket
list I have. I had aninjury ten years ago and I wasn't able
to do it, So maybe that'llbe on my list. We'll see.

(25:17):
I haven't been able to figure outwhat race I want to do. I'd
like to do the Hunter, butI'm just not fast enough anymore. So
that's one thing on my bucket list. But what's next is them finishing the
Myths book. Finishing that up.It's due in January, so it'll be
out next year. And then I'malso doing a biography on Anna Murray Douglas,
Frederick Douglas's first wife, so I'mvery excited. I've never written a
biography and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.So I'm going to be doing some research

(25:41):
over the summer. I get onemonth of research in my administrative role,
so I'm looking forward to traveling andgoing to the places where she and Frederick
Douglass lived and to tell that story. My last thing is is i have
a teenage son that's applied for college, and I'll feel very accomplished if he
starts school in the fall. I'mvery excited about that as a parent,

(26:02):
well with you as a mother,I can't imagine he's not going to start
school in the fall. A doctor, Diana raymy Berry, thank you so
much. This was really illuminating andI so appreciate you taking the time to
talk with us tonight. Thank youso much for having me it's been my
pleasure. A big thank you toour producer, Ken Carberry of Chart Productions.

(26:38):
What's on your mind? Send usyour thoughts, comments and questions to
What's at Risk at gmail dot com. That's one word, What's at Risk
at gmail dot com. Thank you, epect to the comp